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Latinxs, the Bible, and Migration Efraín

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EDITED BY
EFRAÍN AGOSTO & JACQUELINE M. HIDALGO

Latinxs, the Bible,


and Migration

THE BIBLE AND


CULTURAL
STUDIES
The Bible and Cultural Studies

Series Editors
Hal Taussig
Union Theological Seminary
New York, NY, USA

Maia Kotrosits
Religion Department
Denison University
Granville, OH, USA
The Bible and Cultural Studies series highlights the work of established
and emerging scholars working at the intersection of the fields of biblical
studies and cultural studies. It emphasizes the importance of the Bible in
the building of cultural narratives—and thus the need to intervene in
those narratives through interpretation—as well as the importance of
situating biblical texts within originating cultural contexts. It approaches
scripture not as a self-evident category, but as the product of a larger set of
cultural processes, and offers scholarship that does not simply “use” or
“borrow” from the field of cultural studies, but actively participates in its
conversations.

More information about this series at


http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14449
Efraín Agosto • Jacqueline M. Hidalgo
Editors

Latinxs, the Bible,


and Migration
Editors
Efraín Agosto Jacqueline M. Hidalgo
New York Theological Seminary Williams College
New York, NY, USA Williamstown, MA, USA

The Bible and Cultural Studies


ISBN 978-3-319-96694-6    ISBN 978-3-319-96695-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96695-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954651

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
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Cover credit: gaiamoments / Getty Images

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents

1 Introduction: Reading the Bible and Latinx Migrations/


the Bible as Text(s) of Migration   1
Efraín Agosto and Jacqueline M. Hidalgo

2 The Bible as Homing Device Among Cubans at


Claremont’s Calvary Chapel  21
Jacqueline M. Hidalgo

3 Gendering (Im)migration in the Pentateuch’s Legal Codes:


A Reading from a Latina Perspective  43
Ahida Calderón Pilarski

4 Channeling the Biblical Exile as an Art Task for Central


American Refugee Children on the Texas–Mexico Border  67
Gregory Lee Cuéllar

5 “Out of Egypt I Called My Son”: Migration as a Male


Activity in the New Testament Gospels  89
Gilberto A. Ruiz

6 The Flight to Egypt: Toward a Protestant Mariology in


Migration 109
Nancy Elizabeth Bedford

v
vi Contents

7 Whence Migration? Babel, Pentecost, and Biblical


Imagination 133
Eric D. Barreto

8 Islands, Borders, and Migration: Reading Paul in Light


of the Crisis in Puerto Rico 149
Efraín Agosto

9 Border Crossing into the Promised Land: The


Eschatological Migration of God’s People in Revelation
2:1–3:22 171
Roberto Mata

10 Reading (Our)Selves in Migration: A Response 191


Margaret Aymer

Author Index 203

Subject Index 207
Notes on Contributors

Efraín Agosto is Professor of New Testament Studies at New York


Theological Seminary in New York City. Previously, he was Professor of New
Testament (1995–2011) and Academic Dean (2007–2011) at Hartford
Seminary. He is the author of Servant Leadership: Jesus and Paul, 2005 and
a Spanish-language commentary on 1–2 Corinthians, Corintios, 2008.
Margaret Aymer is Associate Professor of New Testament at Austin
Presbyterian Seminary. Previously, she taught at the Interdenominational
Theological Center in Atlanta. She is the author of James: Diaspora
Rhetorics of a Friend of God, 2014 and First Pure, Then Peaceable: Frederick
Douglass Reads James, 2008. She is also a co-editor of Fortress Commentary
on the Bible: The New Testament, 2014 and Islanders, Islands and the Bible:
Ruminations, 2015. In 2013, she was the Robert Jones Lecturer at Austin
Seminary, offering a discourse on the “New Testament as Migrant
Writings.”
Eric D. Barreto is an ordained Baptist minister and the Weyerhaeuser
Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.
The author of Ethnic Negotiations: The Function of Race and Ethnicity in
Acts 16, 2010, the co-author of New Proclamation Year C 2013: Easter
through Christ the King, 2013, and editor of Reading Theologically,
2014 and Thinking Theologically, 2015, he is also a regular contributor
to ONScripture.org, the Huffington Post, WorkingPreacher.org, and
EntertheBible.org.

vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Dr. theol., was born in Comodoro Rivadavia,


Argentina. She has been Georgia Harkness Professor of Theology at
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (Evanston) since 2003.
Previously, she taught theology at Instituto Universitario ISEDET and
Seminario Internacional Teológico Bautista (both in Buenos Aires). She
has written or edited 8 books and written over 70 book chapters and jour-
nal articles, which have appeared in five languages. Her latest book is
Galatians, A Theological Commentary, 2016. Her current project is on
Christology from Latin American and Latino/a perspectives.
Gregory Lee Cuéllar is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Austin
Presbyterian Seminary. Previously, he was Curator of Rare Books and
Manuscripts and the Colonial Mexican Imprint Collection at Cushing
Memorial Library and Archives at Texas A&M University. Cuéllar is
author of Voices of Marginality: Exile and Return in Second Isaiah 40–55
and the Mexican Immigrant Experience, 2008, as well as numerous journal
articles and book chapters. He has two forthcoming books titled The
British Museum and the Bible: The Indexes of Subjectivity in Modern Biblical
Criticism and Borderlands Hermeneutics: Transgressive and Traumatic
Readings of Scripture. He is also working on an art-based social action
project called Arte de Lágrimas: Refugee Artwork Project.
Jacqueline M. Hidalgo is Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies and
Religion at Williams College. The author of Revelation in Aztlán:
Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016,
this series), her research examines the power of scriptural imaginaries, nar-
ratives, and material cultures in shaping relations of race and gender in the
American West. She also studies religion, scriptures, and culture
among Latin@s in the United States more generally.
Roberto Mata is Assistant Professor of Contextual Biblical Studies at
Santa Clara University. His research explores the intersections of colonial
power, ethnicity/race, and civic rhetoric in the Book of Revelation. In his
analysis of biblical texts, Mata not only employs critical race, postco-
lonial, and borderlands theories, but also uses the current struggles
and geopolitical situations of marginalized communities in the United
States as loci of theoretical reflection. His forthcoming article, “Self-­
Deporting From Babylon? A Latino/a Borderlands Reading of Revelation
18:4,” reads the text from the location of undocumented Mexican
communities in the United States, and their current struggle against
­
“attrition through enforcement” strategies.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix

Ahida Calderón Pilarski is Associate Professor in the Theology


Department at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Her research focuses on the intersection of gender and culture/ethnicity/
race in the interpretation of the Bible. Areas that inform her analysis
include Biblical Hermeneutics, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Latina
Studies, Cultural Studies, Ethnicity, and Race. She is the co-editor of
Bread Alone: Reading the Bible Through the Eyes of the Hungry, 2014 and
Pentateuco. Introducción al Antiguo Testamento/La Biblia Hebrea en
Perspectiva Latinoamericana, 2014.
Gilberto A. Ruiz teaches at Saint Anselm College (Manchester, NH) as
Assistant Professor of Theology. His research interests include studying the
New Testament gospels in light of first- and second-century Judaism and
life in the Roman Empire, and interpreting biblical texts through analytical
approaches that foreground the experiences and identities of modern read-
ers, especially from minoritized perspectives and Latino@ perspectives in
particular. He is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Catholic
Biblical Association, and the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of
the United States, and on the topic of migration and biblical interpretation
published an article in the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology that exam-
ines the Christology of John’s Gospel in light of questions that arise from
the immigration debate in the United States (“A Migrant Being At Work:
Movement and Migration in Johannine Christology,” 2011).
List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Genesis, “El Centro de Detención,” marker and crayon, 2015,
9 × 12, Arte de Lágrimas. Gallery. Courtesy of Arte de Lágrimas:
Refugee Artwork Project 77
Fig. 4.2 Photograph of “El Centro de Detención” being made.
Courtesy of Arte de Lágrimas: Refugee Artwork Project 78
Fig. 4.3 Genesis, “Prefiero estar en mi casa,” marker and crayon, 2015,
9 × 12, Arte de Lágrimas. Gallery. Courtesy of Arte de
Lágrimas: Refugee Artwork Project 82
Fig. 4.4 Photograph of “Prefiero estar en mi casa” being made.
Courtesy of Arte de Lágrimas: Refugee Artwork Project 82

xi
CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Reading the Bible and Latinx


Migrations/the Bible as Text(s) of Migration

Efraín Agosto and Jacqueline M. Hidalgo

This book represents several years of reflection and writing on this inexo-
rable fact: Migration remains a topic of political controversy and subaltern
urgency in the United States of 2018. We currently reside under a presi-
dent who launched his campaign by attacking Mexican migrants, and
extending that attack to encompass migrants from all Latin America and
the Middle East.1 On the day we submitted this introduction, US President
Donald J. Trump stated that the United States was deporting immigrants
who “aren’t people. These are animals.”2 We share these comments to
underscore the dehumanizing perceptions that migrants encounter and
live with daily. Although it can be easy to vilify only Trump or only the
United States, antagonism to migrants has been a global problem even as
migration—impelled by war, politics, economics, and human-caused cli-
mate change—has increased dramatically. The chapters in this volume do

E. Agosto (*)
New York Theological Seminary, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: eagosto@nyts.edu
J. M. Hidalgo
Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA
e-mail: jh3@williams.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 1


E. Agosto, J. M. Hidalgo (eds.), Latinxs, the Bible, and Migration,
The Bible and Cultural Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96695-3_1
2 E. AGOSTO AND J. M. HIDALGO

not strictly grapple with our contemporary migration crises; rather we


consider the Christian Bible as a space of migrant urgency.3 Fundamentally,
we read with migrant humanity, alongside migrant perspectives, and for
the humanization of migrants in broader discourse.
The focus of this collection then is not on those whose acts of domina-
tion continue to push migrants to risk their lives in the Arizona desert or
the Mediterranean Sea. Rather, this collection plays with and around the
Bible with a focus on those persons—historical and contemporary—who
have undertaken migration as well as their descendants living in a land that
is no longer quite the land of their ancestors. We have drawn together
some Latinx biblical critics who reconsider the Bible and the people who
read it through the lens of migration, exile, and diaspora with a focus on
migrants and the children of migrants.

Who Is Latinx? Why Migration?


In order to frame this collection of chapters, a brief clarification of terms
is required.
“Migration” is the broad term for what Jean-Pierre Ruiz has called
“people on the move.”4 It has been much in the news lately, along with
the term “immigration,” because of a variety of complex issues. For
example, war and strife in Syria has compelled migrations across the
­
region, migrations which have been chronicled in the news, including
with stirring visual images of thousands of refugees risking their lives
across the Mediterranean Sea and other crossings, fleeing war, and vio-
lence. As one report put it, “The Syrian war has displaced millions who are
desperately seeking an existence free from barrel bombs and chemical
weapons. Others travel thousands of miles over land and water to escape
poverty and authoritarian governments.”5 These forced migrations from
Syria are not the only tragedies, of course; the flight and plight of Rohingya
Muslims from Myanmar after military violence against them comes to
mind, along with all too many other examples of people forced to move
because of a range of injustices.6
In the United States, “immigration” across the Southwestern border
has occupied the attention of the current presidential administration in
the most harmful of ways. Most recently, an order from US Attorney
General Jeff Sessions has called for arrests of families attempting to cross
into the United States including the separation of children from their
parents. Even though border crossings have decreased in recent years, the
INTRODUCTION: READING THE BIBLE AND LATINX MIGRATIONS… 3

anti-­immigration rhetoric of the current US president and his supporters


unduly demonizes the efforts of families from Central America in particu-
lar to escape difficult circumstances. In fact, before the actions of the
Trump administration, US policy has been to support migrant refugees
from both Syria and Central America, as a broader strategy to bring a mea-
sure of stability to these regions and in particular those affected refugees
who have “hit the road” to save their lives and those of their families.7
Indeed, even before the current Trump administration and its “build
the wall” mentality, similar proposals and other “draconian measures”
were being proposed in Congress, state houses, and local governments
across the country.8 For example, one of the failures of the pre-Trump era
Congress was to pass legislation to protect young immigrants that came
here as children, brought by their parents, who lacked proper documenta-
tion. These so-called Dreamers, the narrative about them insists, were
“American” in every sense of the term, but could be deported without
such protections. President Barack Obama enacted executive orders to
protect them, which, of course, have since been rescinded by his successor.
Still, Congress, despite various promises and attempts, has been unable to
enact legislation to permanently protect the Dreamers, and, except for
court orders, they stand in limbo.9 In short, migration and immigration
are issues of vital import and impact, especially in our contemporary politi-
cal moment in the United States. Given the complexities of political
weight that different terms carry, we have chosen to employ the terms
“migrant” and “migration” because we understand migration as a univer-
sal human activity irrespective of the definitions wielded by particular
modern nation-states or ancient regimes. The term “migrant” allows us to
think globally and in historically comparative ways, putting Puerto Rican
histories in conversation with Mexican ones, African Americans alongside
Cubans, and all of them alongside ancient communities.
This volume focuses on the import and impact of the migration of dif-
ferent Latinx populations.10 The very term “Latinx” itself is contested in
meaning and usage, coming out of a fraught history in terms of US ­politics
and naming practices, and we have let each author broadly choose their
own approach to this term.11 Whatever its fraught history, the term is gen-
erally taken to encapsulate people who trace their descent to territories
conquered by Iberia—Spain and Portugal—in the Americas during early
modernity. This term includes ethnic Mexicans who lived in Texas before
it was part of the United States as well as Brazilians. The oft-used govern-
ment term “Hispanic” includes people from Spain and the Philippines,
4 E. AGOSTO AND J. M. HIDALGO

who are not included in the understanding of “Latinx” in this volume.


Others might argue for an even more expansive sense of Latinx (see, for
example, the critical questions Margaret Aymer raises in the conclusion to
this volume), that perhaps all descendants of the Caribbean—both the
islands of the Antilles and the continental regions that border the
Caribbean Sea—also share some of the histories in relationship to Europe
and the United States that should require the incorporation under this
shared term. Recognizing a kinship among varying migration histories
from the Caribbean, we therefore asked Margaret Aymer to respond to
the volume, but our authors have mostly retained a more focused atten-
tion on particular Latinx histories and experiences that fit with dominant
definitions of “Latin American” descent. It is the methodological conten-
tion of those who work in Latina/o/x biblical studies that attention to
particularities is more important than trying to make universal summaries
that incorporate everyone. We hope that other Latinxs, however broadly
the term is construed (indeed we hope all migrants or children of migrants),
can find a way to converse with the diverse readings here.
Partially, the scope of this volume is limited simply on account of who
has training in biblical studies. There are few Latinx scholars in the United
States, so voices even from sizable Latinx communities, such as Salvadorans,
Brazilians, and Dominicans, are absent because the structures of biblical
studies as a field have not fostered much of their membership in our guild.
Latinx communities in the United States are often members of the work-
ing class, and broader structural challenges with education impact all
working class communities. Latinxs of greater European descent and
­especially Latinxs of Cuban heritage tend to belong to better educated
and better paid middle classes, and thus class is a significant and under-
studied variable in Latinx migration narratives. Moreover, women consti-
tute a remarkably low proportion of biblical scholars, and this truth holds
among Latino/as in biblical studies. Numbers on LGBT+ biblical scholars
are not available for discussion, but they also constitute a low proportion
of Latinx biblical scholars.
The absence of many critical Latinx perspectives in this volume speaks
to another challenge around the term “Latinx.” What does it mean to
delimit around a larger, almost hemispheric, ethnic label? What about the
racial and ethnic differences internal to Latin America? Here we are not
concerned only with the quite distinct histories of, for instance, Puerto
Rico and Mexico both in this hemisphere and with the United States, we
are also concerned about the distinct experiences of, for instance, Zapotec
INTRODUCTION: READING THE BIBLE AND LATINX MIGRATIONS… 5

and Afro-Mexicans. On the one hand, we must bear in mind the diverse
histories of migration that different Latinx communities have in the
United States, some dating back to the nineteenth century, with others
living in lands that were conquered as a consequence of US Manifest
Destiny and expansionary imperialism in the nineteenth century.12 On the
other hand, we must also bear in mind the histories of internal ethnic and
racial differences within distinctive Latinx cultures. Practically absent from
the broader biblical studies guild are Afro-Latinx and Asian-Latinx schol-
ars as well as Native Latinx scholars who identify primarily with an indig-
enous community rather than with belonging to a category of mestizaje.13
Also broadly absent is an attention to the increasing numbers of mixed
Latinxs—those who have one Latinx parent and one non-Latinx parent as
well as those whose parents are Latinxs of different ethnic backgrounds.
These complexities can make it difficult to know of whom we speak when
we speak of Latinxs. It also means that no one book or essay can do justice
to the full diversity of Latinx experiences with migration, or even to the
full diversity of one community’s (i.e., Cuban, etc.) experiences.
Bearing in mind the challenges of defining who falls under the umbrella
term “Latinx,” demographics vary and are ever-changing, but recent sta-
tistics indicate close to 50 million Latinxs present in the United States,
constituting almost 18% of the overall US population. Luis N. Rivera-­
Pagán, writing in 2014, reports that in 1975, the Latinx population stood
at 11 million, just over 5% of the US population.14 Thus, there has been a
major increase in the presence of Latinx populations in the last 40 years,
such that it is now the largest minoritized community in the United States.
By the year 2050, Latinxs could be 26–32% of the country’s population.
These numbers include so-called undocumented Latinxs, although the
numbers for those groups are difficult to ascertain, but it is estimated that
undocumented immigrants in the United States—who are not only
Latinx—may be anywhere between 11 and 12 million individuals.
As Rivera-Pagán points out, such statistics lend themselves to the ongo-
ing “xenophobia” that has long been evident in US history. While more
recent dimensions of such fear include even more restrictive policies and
police actions on the border, this country has historically exhibited the fear
that “open borders” could lead to “disease and criminality,” which has
consistently racialized immigration.15 Such attitudes, writes Rivera-Pagán,
result in the harsh rhetorics of “xenophobia and scapegoating of the
‘stranger in our midst.’”16 Thus, Rivera-Pagán calls for “xenophilia”
instead, in the form of “a biblical theology of migration.”17
6 E. AGOSTO AND J. M. HIDALGO

Yet others caution against a “one-size fits all” theology of migration.18


The migratory experience is just too varied and each story different. Thus,
“no single theology of migration can make sense of the whole range of
what people on the move experience.”19 Indeed by the end of his own call
for a theology of migration that reflects the consistent biblical picture of
love for the stranger (“xenophilia”), Rivera-Pagán himself concludes that
because “migration is an international problem, a salient dimension of
modern globalization,” communities of faith should respond with more
global perspectives that transcend one faith, one theology, or especially
one nation and its own borders. In addressing global issues and opportu-
nities of migration—people on the move—“the main concern is not and
should not be exclusively our national society, but the entire fractured
global order.”20
This volume does not purport to address the “entire fractured global
order,” but does recognize that Latinx migrants who come to the United
States, with or without authorized “papers,” do so for a complex set of
reasons that are in fact a function of global realities. These include US
imperialism and neo-colonial policies in their countries of origin that com-
pel their migration. So, for every person that migrates to the US border,
and through it, there are myriads of persons, including their family mem-
bers, who stay home. For example, the recent decisions of the Trump
administration to rescind the Temporary Protected Status for Hondurans,
Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians, which includes tens of thousands
of individuals, impact the efforts of longer-term US economic and diplo-
matic policy to stabilize the region. As one diplomat involved in the efforts
during the Obama administration put it, “We finally had a bipartisan con-
sensus in Congress that we needed to invest in Central America and to get
at the push factors, the root causes, of immigration. We’re going to set
back our efforts.” In the case of many of the Hondurans affected by a
rescinded T.P.S., they “won’t have places to live when they return, …
there is virtually no chance that they’ll find gainful employment.” Indeed,
“sending them back will also hurt Honduras’s already struggling econ-
omy; twenty percent of the G.D.P. there comes from remittances sent by
immigrants working in this country.”21 Thus, one set of policies, or the
lack thereof, nixes the impact of another. And so it goes in the global real-
ity represented by the phenomenon of migration, in all its dimensions—
immigration, emigration, exile, and diaspora. Imperialism and colonization,
as well as the internal struggles that often develop in relationship to these
realities and histories, are root causes of migration.
INTRODUCTION: READING THE BIBLE AND LATINX MIGRATIONS… 7

Latinx Biblical Scholars and Their Roots


and Realities

What this volume does engage most directly is the role of the Latinx bibli-
cal scholar in addressing the myriad of issues represented by the complex
dynamics of migration. Yet, there are relatively few biblical scholars of Latin
American descent in the United States and Canada, as we pointed out
above. Most of us are called upon to teach the discipline, sometimes in
traditional ways that counter our instincts (and in some cases training, espe-
cially the more recently trained scholar in biblical studies), especially if we
have to teach in theological schools in which certain expectations of biblical
training are required for aspiring religious leaders. Increasingly, however,
the dynamics of teaching biblical studies in the broader context of the
humanities and liberal arts, as well the more critical approaches to biblical
studies in theological education, afford biblical scholars who care about
these themes—of migration, imperialism, coloniality and the global, politi-
cal and economic study of religion in general and the Bible in particular—a
space in which to work. We will address the latter more specifically below.
Yet the question remains, who is addressing the issues of migration from
the perspective of the Bible, and who among them are Latinx biblical schol-
ars? In the most recent (2018) “Member Profile” of the Society of Biblical
Literature (SBL), the professional organization of Bible scholars, 206 mem-
bers self-identified as being of “Latin American descent.” Of those, only 108
are current in their membership.22 Also, it is not necessarily clear who this
number represents: those US born members who identify as Latin American
in ancestry, or Latin Americans born in South America, Central America, or
the Caribbean, but who now live and work in the United States, or interna-
tional members of SBL who reside in Latin America. Certainly, if we included
the latter group, the numbers would be much higher. However understood,
Latinx biblical scholars, given a total SBL membership of 8465, represent
3.44% of all members and 2.89% of current members. Since only 22% of all
SBL members are female, we can assume the numbers of Latinas are simi-
larly small, although the statistics of those of “Latin American descent” are
not broken down by gender.
Obviously, these are considerably small numbers, radically dispropor-
tionate to their portion of the US population and lower even than Latinx
academic proportions in most other fields in the humanities. It would be
interesting to ascertain how many see their biblical scholarship as needing
to be in dialogue with the critical issues of the current day, both nationally
8 E. AGOSTO AND J. M. HIDALGO

and globally, rather than a more historicist approach that much of biblical
scholarship was known for until the last several decades.23 Certainly, the
scholars represented in this volume could all be considered Latinxs (perhaps
not in the case of our respondent, who was born in Barbados, and raised in
the United States, but whose ancestry does hail from a Caribbean with
shared experiences under European and US imperialism), all living and
working in the United States. Two of our authors were born in Latin
America (Peru, Argentina) and came to the United States as adults. The rest
were either born in the United States or were born in Latin America but
grew up in the United States, with roots in Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, and
Puerto Rico. Their scholarship focuses on biblical texts in dialogue with the
concerns and needs of the world today, including the Latinx community.
Thus, we turn in this introduction to the broader concerns of scholarship in
religion and biblical studies in light of our theme of migration.

Religion as a Migrant Tradition


Most contemporary scholars and students of religion assume that religion
cannot be neatly disentangled from the embodied and material experiences
of daily life; as theologian Orlando Espín has argued about Christianity in
particular, religion is “a way of living, of being human” and not just some
set of pristine textual teachings or doctrines that exist in a realm com-
pletely isolated beyond this world.24 In this regard, religion cannot be sim-
ply segregated from other human social spheres and activities: labor, class,
gender, race (in our case, as Latinxs vis-à-vis dominant US culture but also
within and in relationship to Latin American racial h ­ ierarchies which are
related to but distinct from US black-white racial binaries and colorist
hierarchies). Yet religion’s capacity to speak to and/or from something
beyond this world has often been crucial to how people engage with the
world, especially in the contexts of migration in the United States.
Scholars of religion in general and of Latinx religions in particular have
considered how religions are often deeply intertwined with, shaping of,
and shaped by human migrations. Not all religions migrate in the same
ways with their practitioners, and some religious traditions are more
mobile than others. Nevertheless, religions often provide frameworks that
migrants turn to in making sense of, justifying, surviving, and thriving
amid migration. In this way, we can think of religions as among those
human social structures that are used to interpret migration, that change
with the humans who migrate, and that, because of religious traditions’
INTRODUCTION: READING THE BIBLE AND LATINX MIGRATIONS… 9

own internal power dynamics, also incorporate structures that can pro-
duce the borders people cross when migrating.
The study of religion in the United States has particularly underscored
the importance of place.25 Because the United States is a settler colonial
state, the various peoples who have migrated here or who were forcibly
brought to these shores have had to grapple with either making home or
surviving in this new land. Meanwhile Native populations were forced to
transform their religious relationships with the landscape, and settler colo-
nists forced many Native populations to migrate to regions of this conti-
nent far from their ancestral homelands.26 Even as dominant Euro-diasporic
settler colonists sacralized their homemaking processes in this hemisphere,
minoritized communities in particular have turned to religion as they
struggled to make home. Religious traditions have often supplied crucial
practices, material cultures, and mythic traditions for this space making. As
scholar of religion Thomas A. Tweed, for instance, has shown in his study
of Cuban migrant engagements with la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre,
religious symbols and material cultures drawn from the homeland of Cuba
become critical to the politics of placemaking in another nation only
90 miles away.27
Scholars of Latinx religions have shown how religious ideas and frame-
works can help Latinxs to make place especially when they can struggle to
feel at home in this world. Edwin David Aponte observes how Latinxs
engage with diverse traditions, including many traditions beyond the
Christian fold as well as traditions that blend with Christianity, in ways that
can often create safe and sacred spaces outside of institutional churches,
mosques, and synagogues. He shares the story of a Latina who found her
own private space in a basement where “she would cry out to God, pray,
spit out her frustrations and anger, asking for help, wisdom, and strength
to persevere” in the midst of daily struggles.28 As Desirée A. Martín’s work
on non-traditional saints in the borderlands has shown, migrants often
seek spaces and stories that fall beyond institutional confines because they
need a form of sanctity that reflects (as a mirror of and a mirror upon) the
ambiguities of their daily lives.29 Further, Aponte depicts how Latinxs
make sacred spaces through the stories they tell about those places, around
those places, and in those places, something that is crucial for understand-
ing the role of the Bible in migration as we discuss below.30
Although religion can fulfill a range of interpretive roles for migrant
individuals and communities, religion can provide a utopian framework
for homemaking. Several scholars have observed how often migrants turn
10 E. AGOSTO AND J. M. HIDALGO

to religious communities in the hopes of belonging and religious practices


in the hopes of making themselves and their worlds better.31 Indeed,
Jonathan Z. Smith has theorized religion in diasporic contexts as particu-
larly “utopian in the strictest sense of the word, a religion of ‘nowhere,’ of
transcendence.”32 As Fernando F. Segovia has argued about his own theo-
logical experiences under migration, exiles come to live in the porosity
between worlds where “the experience of ‘otherness’ and the sense of
‘belonging’ gradually turn into one and the same reality […] The exile
ends up living in two worlds and no world at the same time, with a twofold
voice from no-where.”33 The religious “nowhere,” particularly as it pro-
vides access to an “other world” and a better one, can become a crucial
site not only for meaning making but also for experiencing—for feeling—
the meaning of belonging.
Yet, in understanding Latinx migrant religion in particular, it is impor-
tant to underscore the histories of colonial and imperial violence that have
compelled Latinx migration, particularly for those Latinxs who hail from
indigenous and Afro-diasporic backgrounds. The violence of colonialism
has marked the religious traditions of colonizers, colonized, enslaver,
enslaved, and those in between. Tweed, in part drawing on his ethnographic
study of la Caridad in Miami, became concerned with a broader theory of
religion that addressed the tensions of transnational religious experiences,
especially when those experiences also often embodied a conflict between a
“public” Roman Catholic religion that proclaimed strict doctrinal lines
dividing Catholicism off from Afro-Cuban traditions such as Lucumí and
“domestic” practices, which often reflected a combination of multiple peo-
ple’s texts and traditions.34 In order to make sense of this conflicted and
dynamic nature of religion amidst transnational migration, Tweed offers a
theory of religion that underscores fluidity: “Religions are confluences of
organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on
human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.”35
In short, religions do many things, but they are strikingly used in mak-
ing home as well as in enabling and making sense of various “crossings”
for migrants. As Tweed argues, “Religions interpret limits and promote
crossings.”36 People use religious frameworks to make meaning, but reli-
gious practices also do work besides making meaning: they make home.
Yet, students of the Bible recognize quite clearly that religious traditions
and frameworks are themselves contested spaces; they too have power
structures that create and enforce limits (say, e.g., doctrinal teaching that
restricts Lucumí’s official impact on Cuban American Roman Catholicism),
INTRODUCTION: READING THE BIBLE AND LATINX MIGRATIONS… 11

but people live those traditions in ways that enable the crossing of those
constructed borders. Perhaps the most contested loci of Latinx Christian
traditions of crossing and dwelling is the Bible itself. The Bible, itself a
product of migration, has been the framework for interpreting limits,
making homes, and promoting crossings in crucial ways, but it has also
served as a border and boundary that incites practices of transgression,
practices that seek to challenge the Bible’s own borderlands.

The Bible and/as the Border


The Christian Bible is a collection of texts of and about migration. The
Christian religions central to this volume (Roman Catholic and Protestant)
first arrived in the New World as the migrating faiths of settler colonists
from Europe. Indeed Christian myths, practices, and religious texts, espe-
cially biblical texts such as Exodus and Revelation, provided important
fuel for the ways that Europeans justified and made sense of their place in
the New World.37 Although Europeans imposed Christianity onto Native
Americans, enslaved—and later freed—African populations, and imported,
laboring migrants from Asia in modes of attempted “cultural genocide,”38
Native, Afro-Diasporic, Asian Diasporic, and mixed race populations
throughout the Americas took up and transformed Christianity for
­themselves. For all these populations, the Bible has functioned as a “lan-
guage world,” as a “store-house of rhetorics, images, and stories,”39
though the exact nature of the relationship with biblical imagination and
authority has varied greatly within and between groups and over time.
Though this is a scholarly volume that focuses on meaning, it is impor-
tant to consider how biblical imaginations have partially been employed in
ways that are not always just about meaning, but sometimes they are about
“structures of feeling” as Raymond Williams has termed them.40 In this vein,
it is vitally important to remember that people do not just read the Bible for
making meaning, but biblical texts become embodied in buildings, images,
dances, and songs, all of which fill migrant sensory landscapes in ways that
cannot simply be distilled to the contestation of meaning that we focus upon
in this volume.41 To some extent Jacqueline M. Hidalgo’s chapter in this
volume reveals how the Bible is more than just a text of private reading
when she examines the Bible as a homing device for Cuban Americans in
California. Gregory Lee Cuéllar’s chapter investigates this issue most seri-
ously when he looks at how migrant children in Texas produce visual art in
grappling with their own experiences of exile and migration.
12 E. AGOSTO AND J. M. HIDALGO

Cuéllar’s chapter not only examines the contemporary world but also
grapples with the Hebrew Bible as an aesthetic experience of migration
and exile. His chapter in particular points to how experiences of migration
and exile shaped the historical writing and formation of biblical texts and
traditions we have inherited, and we should approach them by not only
attending to how these texts try to make meaning of exile but how biblical
texts are sensory and affective responses to migration and exile. Through
reading Cuéllar’s chapter, we are compelled to consider how migration
and imperial domination are critical matrices that form and inform biblical
texts: historical events such as the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem,
the Babylonian empire’s deportation of a population that remained incar-
cerated in Babylon only to return to ancestral homelands generations
later, and the wide-ranging Jewish diaspora who survived successive forms
of imperial domination all leave their marks on biblical material.
Most of the chapters in this volume address this issue—how we witness
migration’s impact on the historical formation and narrative inside biblical
texts; often because of a conversation with Latinx contexts of migration,
these chapters look at the formation of biblical texts and reveal how cen-
tral histories of Jewish and “Christian” migration, exile, and diaspora have
been in shaping the texts we inherit. In some ways they point to an argu-
ment Hidalgo raised in her book Revelation in Aztlán, that we understand
how scriptures can serve as “homing devices,” as texts that get produced
out of experiences with displacement and then become loci through which
and around which displaced populations seek and make “homes.”42
Through a variety of ritual practices, scriptures then also become their
own centers for varied practices of homing.
Hidalgo looked at the Book of Revelation in particular and argued for
rethinking the articulation of the new Jerusalem and the formation of
Christian canons themselves as projects of homing for displaced popula-
tions. In this volume, Hidalgo makes the case that we can see this legacy
continue in how contemporary readers turn to biblical texts in order to
make home in the world. In this volume, Efraín Agosto’s chapter particu-
larly carries forward this consideration; by reading Paul with and alongside
Puerto Rican histories of migration, Agosto demonstrates how the very act
of writing enacts survival. Writing also provides a means for migrants to
debate the meanings of their migration and the aspirations they have for
how their communities will survive and thrive in the new worlds in which
they live. Both Hidalgo’s book and Agosto’s chapter suggest that scrip-
tures as we know them may in large part exist because of diasporic subjects.
INTRODUCTION: READING THE BIBLE AND LATINX MIGRATIONS… 13

Scriptures are the products of diasporic struggles; they do not necessarily


resolve those struggles, but they provide a window onto the various strate-
gies diasporic subjects have taken up in negotiating movement, displace-
ment, and multiple belonging and unbelonging in different places.
Understanding the Bible as a homing device provides a space for think-
ing about the Bible as an object, as an imaginary, as a set of and as produc-
tive of migration-impelled experiences and feelings. Yet, it is important to
not see the Bible as a homing device that can work in only one way or that
is univocal about making home in the world. The chapters in this volume
reveal how biblical texts do not understand migration or its consequences
in only one way. Indeed, where content meaning is concerned, we might
best understand biblical texts as sites where people have wrestled with dif-
ferent responses to migration and its experiences. Roberto Mata’s chapter
wrestles with how the diasporic practices of the earliest communities
behind Revelation often engaged in a coercive rhetorical struggle against
seemingly more “accommodative” diasporic subjects. In his reading, then,
the Bible provides a model for understanding the problematic histories of
violence migrant subjects have enacted against other migrants. But other
scholars are also interested in how the Bible might provide a more gener-
ous and generative resource for migrant survival. For instance, Eric
D. Barreto’s chapter rethinks Acts and Babel, and sees in it an attempt
among early Christian communities to affirm the beauty of human differ-
ence, to live in the world after so many migrations by affirming the human-
ity of all migrants.
Here Barreto’s work is consonant with another trend in the study of
migration and the Bible among Latinxs. The scholars in this text are
invested readers of biblical texts, and they admit they read from particu-
lar contexts with particular concerns in mind. As conservative anti-­
immigration activists in the last two decades have supported the
increasingly violent militarization of the United States-Mexico border
and a consequent increased incarceration of migrants, biblical scholars
with Christian commitments have often responded by showing how the
Bible was not only produced by migrants but also affirms that settled
communities are obligated to welcome, love, and affirm the humanity of
migrants. One of the most prominent examples of this sort of work may
be found in M. Daniel Carroll R.’s Christians at the Border, and indeed
his book was an important impetus behind the initial panel discussions at
the SBL that led to this edited volume.43 Carroll wholeheartedly
acknowledges that he is “concerned about how the Bible can orient the
14 E. AGOSTO AND J. M. HIDALGO

way the broader Christian community, denominations, local churches,


and individual Christians understand their identity and role in the world
today.”44 Akin to Barreto, he turns to the notion of imago dei, that all
humans are formed in the image of the divine and argues that the Bible
affirms this humanity of migrants.45 Even as Carroll is attentive to the
diversity of human experiences discussed in the Bible, he sees both the
Christian Old and New Testaments as overwhelmingly affirming an ethic
of hospitality, and he argues that those in power are called to be hospi-
table to immigrants.
Carroll portrays the Bible as a text of migration but also as text to help
non-migrants grapple with contemporary migration; the immense diver-
sity of biblical voices can provide a source of identification and connection
for multiple sides of the migration experience. Yet, the scholars in this
volume are more concerned with reading biblical texts from, as, and along-
side migrants, and thus they do not center the ethics of hospitality as much
as they center the strategies by which migrants navigate and have navi-
gated the changed and power-laden world that confronts those in dias-
pora. One way scholars in this volume accomplish this task is by challenging
any perceived univocality within biblical texts. Ahida Calderón Pilarski and
Gilberto A. Ruiz both reveal gender as a critical category through which
migration experiences and texts about migration must be read. By starting
with Latina farmworkers and their experiences of rape, and then turning to
Torah legal traditions around the “stranger,” Calderón Pilarski challenges
the ways that Latino interpreters have tended to privilege male and mascu-
line experiences of migration depicted in the world of the text and the
world in front of the text. G. Ruiz shows how studies of the New Testament
in particular have also privileged male migration. Biblical scholars have
often focused on male characters in discussing New Testament migrations,
and he wonders what differences we might find if we were to center women
migrants in our attempts to read the New Testament. Nancy Elizabeth
Bedford in her chapter in this volume offers a feminist Protestant perspec-
tive on the travels of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to Egypt, as a paradigm
for the migrations of women across borders, especially in the Southwestern
United States. What would have happened, Bedford suggests at one point
in her argument, if Mary and her child were treated like migrant mothers
and their children are treated on the border today, including their separa-
tion! This attention to varying women’s experiences of migration in both
the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament Gospels makes some important
inroads on the theme of Bible and migration.
INTRODUCTION: READING THE BIBLE AND LATINX MIGRATIONS… 15

The sorts of interpretive moves made in this volume then perhaps find
more consonance with Jean-Pierre Ruiz’s book, Readings from the Edges.
In that book, J.P. Ruiz reads from and with contemporary Latinx migra-
tions, and he uses those histories to frame a hermeneutical approach. Not
only does he refuse to read the Bible as univocal about migration, he does
not employ only one approach in reading the Bible. Sometimes he uses
migration experiences to reread biblical texts, for example, in his chapter
on “Matthew’s Parable of the Day Laborers,” where he reads Matthew
through the experiences of undocumented day laborers in the United
States, and in so doing challenges previous interpretations. Yet he also
shares a chapter that interprets Columbus’s reading of the Apocalypse,
modeling an approach that reads the deep reception histories of the Bible.
Although not a focus of this volume, it is important to remember how
the Bible itself has been a text of domination in this hemisphere, and bibli-
cal imaginaries have not just provided sustenance to migrants. Biblical
imaginaries have been generative of the violence that has impelled much
Latinx migration, and biblical imaginaries have also been implicated in
violence within migrant communities and have structured the uneven
power dynamics experienced by women and LGBT + migrants. In this
way, J.P. Ruiz’s concluding chapter to Readings from the Edges reminds us
that sometimes the Bible too is a border that must be crossed, and thus the
scholars in this book engage in an interpretive play that transgresses the
Bible’s own borders, taking contemporary struggles in lo cotidiano as
sacred sources of wisdom.46 That said, out of a refusal to constrain the
possible thematic meanings of these chapters, we have organized the rest
of this book by following the organization of the books in the Christian
Bible to which these chapters refer, with Hidalgo’s coming first because
she refers to the “Bible” more generally and Aymer’s coming last as a
response to the collection. This book attempts to honor the diverse read-
ing strategies and concerns of the still-too-few Latinx scholars on this
topic. Thus, this volume plays amid and between all these ways of reading
the Bible with and alongside migration.

Notes
1. Donald J. Trump, “Presidential Announcement Speech,” Time, June 16,
2015. Several of the chapters in this book were presented at a conference
in New York on the eve of the 2016 Presidential election, when we were
hopeful for a result that would lead to more just actions and policies on
behalf of migrants and refugees. It was not to be.
16 E. AGOSTO AND J. M. HIDALGO

2. “Trump Compares Illegal Immigrants to ‘Animals,’” The Washington Post,


video 0:28, May 16, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/
politics/trump-compares-illegal-immigrants-to-animals/2018/05/16/3
442ddf2-5948-11e8-9889-07bcc1327f4b_video.html?utm_
term=.73da970be6ef.
3. Here we are drawing upon Vincent L. Wimbush’s arguments from “read-
ing darkness, reading scriptures,” in which he argues for “a greater sensitiv-
ity to the Bible as manifesto for the exiled, the un-homely, the marginal,
the critics and inveiglers.” See Vincent L. Wimbush, “Introduction:
Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures,” African Americans and the Bible:
Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Wimbush with the assistance of
Rosamond C. Rodman (New York: Continuum, 2000), 16.
4. Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Reading from the Edges: The Bible and People on the Move
(Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2011). See his volume also for a
broader discussion of the range of terminology.
5. Seema Jilani, “What Refugees Face on the World’s Deadliest Migration
Route,” New York Times, April 26, 2018.
6. See recent Associated Press report on efforts to resolve that refugee crisis,
as hundreds of thousands have fled to refugee camps in nearby Bangladesh:
“UN Team, in Bangladesh Vows to End Rohingya Crisis,” New York
Times, April 29, 2018.
7. On the decision to arrest and separate families on the Southwest borders,
see Miriam Jordan and Ron Nixon, “Trump Administration Threatens Jail
and Separating Children from Parents for Those Who Illegally Cross
Southwest Border,” New York Times, May 7, 2018, and Caitlin Dickerson,
“Hundreds of Immigrant Children Have Been Taken from Parents at
U.S. Border,” New York Times, April 20, 2018. In a related development,
the suspension of Temporary Protection Status for 60,000 Honduran refu-
gees, among others, many of whom had legal status in this country for
years, threatened to send them back home to volatile situations, even
though overall US policy in Central America had been trying to resolve
economic and political turmoil in Honduras before forcing such return
migration. See Jonathan Blitzer, “The Battle Inside the Trump
Administration Over T.P.S.,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2018.
8. See Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, “Xenophilia or Xenophobia: Towards a
Theology of Migration” in his Essays from the Margins (Eugene, Oregon:
Cascade Books, 2014), 88–89, in which he cites various proposed and
enacted policies, before the Trump era.
9. For an updated report on the situation of the “Dreamers” (at the time of
the writing of this chapter), see Miriam Jordon and Sonia Patel, “For
Thousands of ‘Dreamers,’ It Has Been a Wild Ride. And It’s Not Over
Yet,” New York Times, April 25, 2018.
INTRODUCTION: READING THE BIBLE AND LATINX MIGRATIONS… 17

10. In this volume, we have incorporated the increasingly accepted use of the
term “Latinx” to refer to the complex realities of the peoples, nationalities
and sexualities represented by US Latina, Latino, and transgender, non-
binary individuals, many of whose ancestors migrated to the confines of
current US borders or were already “here” when the “border crossed us,”
and many of whom are more recent immigrants. See the forthcoming essay
by Carla Roland Guzman, “Liberating Vulnerable Bodies,” Perspectivas,
Spring 2019, which makes the case for the need to adopt “Latinx” as a
term in critical and theological usage more broadly. See also Jacqueline
Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias and the Chicano
Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 25, n.5.
11. For a thorough history of the struggles to invent terms that could capture
a broader pan-ethnic minority of those descendants of lands that were
under Spanish imperial domination in the early modern Americas, see
G. Cristina Mora, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and
Media Constructed a New American (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2014).
12. For a concise and accessible summary of key Latinx migrations to the
United States, see Edwin David Aponte, ¡Santo! Varieties of Latino/a
Spirituality (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2012), 58–67. Aponte’s
broader chapter also engages with many of the problematic tensions that
adhere to the umbrella term “Latino/a” even as he ultimately advocates
for the import of thinking pan-ethnically within this label about the reli-
gion. See Aponte, 67–77.
13. For a robust discussion of the complex history of the term “mestizaje” and
how it has problematically incorporated logics that suppress and denigrate
Native and Afro-diasporic Latin Americans while erasing Asian-diasporic
Latin Americans, see Néstor Medina, Mestizaje: (Re)Mapping Race,
Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis
Books, 2009).
14. Rivera-Pagán, 86.
15. Rivera-Pagán, 87.
16. Rivera-Pagán, 89.
17. Which he details in Rivera-Pagán, 93–99, calling for, nonetheless “an ecu-
menical, international and intercultural theological perspective” (in
99–103).
18. Jean-Pierre Ruiz, citing an unpublished paper by Carmen Nanko-
Fernández (“A Hybrid God in Motion: Theological Implications of
Migrations, A Latin@ Perspective”) in his Reading from the Edges, 4.
19. Ruiz, Reading from the Edges, 5.
20. Rivera-Pagán, 101–102.
21. Blitzer, “The Battle Inside the Trump Administration Over T.P.S.”
18 E. AGOSTO AND J. M. HIDALGO

22. This information is available in the “2018 SBL Membership Report,” accessed
at https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/sblMemberProfile2018.pdf.
23. This was the argument of the Presidential address of Fernando Segovia, the
first Latinx SBL President in the 135-year history of the organization.
Segovia argued for a biblical scholar consistently in dialogue with the criti-
cal issues of the day in his address, published as “Criticism in Critical
Times: Reflections on Vision and Task,” Journal of Biblical Literature
Volume 134, No. 1(2015), 6–29.
24. Orlando O. Espín, Idol & Grace: On Traditioning and Subversive Hope
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2014), xxiv.
25. Especially the heterogeneity of “sacred” space in relationship to “profane”
space, has been a central theme for many classic theorists of “religion,”
from Émile Durkheim to Mircea Eliada.
26. See, for instance, discussion in David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal,
“Introduction,” American Sacred Space, ed. Chidester and Linenthal
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 6–10, 18, 23.
27. Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban
Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
28. Edwin David Aponte, ¡Santo! Varieties of Latino/a Spirituality (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 2012), 115.
29. Desirée A. Martín, Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and
Mexican Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2014),
15–16.
30. Aponte, 117.
31. See, for instance, arguments about Pentecostal conversions in the border-
lands found in Leah Sarat, Fire in the Canyon: Religion, Migration, and the
Mexican Dream (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 193–205.
32. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), xiv.
33. Fernando F. Segovia, “In the World but Not of It: Exile as Locus for a
Theology of the Diaspora,” Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and
Promise, ed. Ada María Isasi-Diaz and Fernando F. Segovia (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1996), 203.
34. Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 6.
35. Tweed, Crossing, 54.
36. Tweed, Crossing, 138.
37. See God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, ed.
Conrad Cherry, Revised and Updated edition (Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 1998); also Eddie Glaude, Exodus! Religion,
Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000). For an examination of the import of
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PRINSSI

Olen kuullut keskustelunne ja siitä huomaan, että olette osaksi


molemmat syypäitä prinsessan kieroon kasvatukseen.
HOVIHERRA

Ei syy ole minussa.

HOVIROUVA

Eikä minussa.

PRINSSI

Te makeilette, matelette ja imartelette imelyyttänne. Teillä on


hunajaa huulilla mutta myrkkyä mielessä!

HOVIHERRA

Oi, nöyrimmästi nöyrin palvelijanne!

HOVIROUVA

Teidän korkeutenne alamaisin palvelija!

PRINSSI

Te olette nöyriä isoisille, pöyhkeitä pienemmillenne. Te halveksitte


halpaa työtä ja kutkutatte kutistunutta laiskuuttanne. Mutta minä olen
oppinut rakastamaan työtä kuten minun tuleva korkea
kuningattareni. Minä vapautan teidät nyt velvollisuuksistanne.

HOVIHERRA ja HOVIROUVA

Me, me kii-kiitämme.

PRINSSI
Ja rangaistukseksi saa hovirouva nyt viimeisen kerran luvan
käskeä prinsessan tänne. Ja te, hoviherra, saatte viittauksestani
lukea tämän käärön sisällyksen. (Antaa käärön hoviherralle.)

HOVIROUVA

Minä menen heti. Varmaankin prinsessa ikävöi. (Aikoo mennä.)

PRINSSI

Älkää vielä menkö! Rohkenitte panna päähänne morsiuskruunun


ja luulitte taikapeilillä saavuttavanne pienet pyyteenne. Katsokaa
vielä kerran peiliin, niin näette siinä oman sisäisen irvikuvanne!

HOVIROUVA

Pitääkö minun katsoa? Minä pelkään tätä peiliä. Ei, ei, ei, minä en
katso, en katso! (Kääntää päänsä poispäin.) — Minä en tahdo
nähdä! Viekää se pois, se on paholaisen keksintö! (Purskahtaa
ynisevään itkuun ja rientää tiehensä.)

PRINSSI

Ja nyt on teidän vuoronne, hoviherra!

HOVIHERRA

Säästäkää minua prinssi! Ei, ei, minä en voi katsoa, minä en


tahdo, minä en näe, olen likinäköinen, minä olen heikko, vanha mies,
heikko, heikko.

PRINSSI
Minä arvasin tämän. Te pelkäätte itseänne.

(Kaksi keihäsmiestä tulee vasemmalta, he sytyttävät


kynttilät ja asettuvat oven kummallekin puolelle.)

HOVIHERRA

Prinssi, mitä te aiotte? Enhän minä…

PRINSSI

Sen saatte pian nähdä.

IMANDRA (tulee vasemmalta katse lattiaan luotuna)

Prinssi, te käskitte!

PRINSSI

Imandra!

IMANDRA (yhä tuijottaen lattiaan)

Tässä minä seison kuin turvaton leski.

PRINSSI

Morsioksi puettuna!

IMANDRA (katsellen pukuaan)

Minäkö morsian? Kuolema on nyt ylkäni!

PRINSSI
Kuule!

(Kuuluu morsiuspiikaisten laulua.)

Nyt morsiuspiiat laulaa käy kisaan ylkämies, ei


puutu meiltä pitoja, nyt ruusut täyttää ties!

PRINSSI

Imandra, eivät ne laula minulle! Sinä olet pettänyt minut, minun


olisi pitänyt ymmärtää, että prinsessat ovat prinssejä varten!

IMANDRA (kohottaen katseensa)

Mitä! Metsä-Matti? Luulin sinua prinssiksi. (Rientää prinssin luo.)


Sinä elät, sinä elät, et sortunut palavaan mökkiin, sinä olet
pelastunut, olet noussut tuhasta, seisot elävänä edessäni! Mikä
rajaton riemu ja onni on osakseni hullut! Mutta miksi sinä vaikenet,
miksi kaikki vaikenevat? Hoviherra, mitä tämä merkitsee?
Keihäsmiehet? Mitä on tapahtunut, puhukaa! (Prinssi antaa salaa
merkin hoviherralle, tämä astuu esille, avaa käärön ja lukee.)

HOVIHERRA

"Kuninkaallinen korkea neuvosto on tarkoin tutkittuaan tuominnut


metsänvartija Metsä-Matin teilattavaksi ja henkensä menettäneeksi,
koska hän on uskaltanut uhata hänen korkeutensa, Kaukovallan
hallitsevan prinssin korkeata ja kallista henkeä ja on siten
raskaaseen kuolemanrikokseen vikapääksi havaittu. Tämä
varoitukseksi kaikelle kansalle kuulutettakoon!"

(Keihäsmiehet sitovat prinssin kädet.)


IMANDRA

Mitä, näenkö unta, ei, tämä ei ole mahdollista!

PRINSSI

Imandra, kuulithan!

IMANDRA

Ei, ei, tämä ei saa tapahtua, te ette saa tappaa Metsä-Mattia, hän
on viaton… on tapahtunut hirveä erehdys! Hän ei saa, hän ei saa
kuolla! Kuulitteko! Hoviherra! Puhukaa hänen puolestaan prinssille!
(Heittäytyy hoviherran eteen ja syleilee hänen polviaan.) Te ette
vastaa! Minä rukoilen, minä matelen polvillani prinssin edessä,
säästäkää hänen nuori henkensä!

PRINSSI

Imandra! Säästä sanojasi! Kaikki on turhaa!

IMANDRA

Ei, ei, ei ole vielä myöhäistä! Te olette tuominnut väärin, teillä ei


ole todistuksia, te olette kuunnelleet valheellisia valoja. Voi, kavalaa
maailmaa! Peruuttakaa tuomio ja tutkikaa uudestaan! Hän on syytön,
hän on syytön! Oi, antakaa armon käydä oikeuden edellä! Voi, voi,
pitikö kaiken käydä näin! (Purskahtaa hillittömään itkuun.)

HOVIHERRA

Prinssi on omakätisesti vahvistanut tuomion.


IMANDRA (ponnahtaa pystyyn, sieppaa käärön ja repii sen
kappakiksi)

Kas, näin teen minä tyhjäksi teidän tuomionne!

HOVIHERRA

Prinsessa, mitä te teitte!

(Keihäsmiehet astuvat prinssin luokse, pihalta kuuluu torven ääni.)

IMANDRA

Ei, te ette saa viedä häntä, kuunnelkaa sisäistä luontonne lakia!


Minä suojelen häntä. Tässä seison minä, Suvikunnan ruhtinatar,
rohkenetteko astua ruumiini ylitse? Pois! Minä tahdon kuolla hänen
kanssansa! (Syleillen prinssiä.) Voi, kuinka minä nyt sinua rakastan
niinkuin voi syntyä vain kerran, elää vain kerran, kuolla vain kerran.

(Hoviherra päästää salaa prinssin siteistä.)

PRINSSI

Niin, nyt minä näen, että sinä rakastat minua! (Syleilee Imandraa,
joka luisuu hänen jalkojensa juureen.) Nouse, ihana Imandra. (Riisuu
tekotukan päästään ja näyttää peilinsiruja.)

IMANDRA

Mitä, taikapeilin sirut! Nyt suomut putoavat silmiltäni. Minä näen.


Oi, jos sinä olet kuninkaanpoika, niin älä enään koettele minua!

PRINSSI
Sinä olet koetuksen kestänyt. Tunnetko nyt minut?

IMANDRA

Tunnen, tunnen! Oi, tämä onni tuli kuin taivaasta, oi, tätä riemun
runsautta ja loppumatonta lepoa!

(Hoviväkeä, hovipoikia ja hovineitejä tulee vasemmalta,


jälessä hovirouva, joka yhtyy hoviherran seuraan, mukana
myös Otro ja Inkeri. Kaikki asettuvat kujaksi pää-oven
kummallekin puolelle.)

PRINSSI

Pannaan nyt prinsessan pieneen päähän valkea harsohuntu ja


helykruunu! (Tekee niin.) Kuuletko? (Morsiuspiikaiset tulevat kantaen
häähimmeleitä, heitellen runsaudensarvista ruusuja, tanssien tai
laulellen.)

MORSIUSPIIKAISET

Nyt morsian anna kättä ja sormet sormiin lyö, ja


helykruunus kullassa nyt tanssi koko yö!

PRINSSI (asettaen kätensä Imandran käteen)

Tule, Imandra!

IMANDRA (nipistäen prinssiä korvasta)

Mutta kuules sinä, Metsä-Matti! Entä taikapeili?

PRINSSI
Se oli vain naurupeili, minkä minä kerran ostin markkinoilta
matkoillani kaukaisilla mailla.

IMANDRA

Sinä silmänkääntäjä, uuspeili!

PRINSSI

Jokaisella on taikapeilin siru silmässään. Kuule hääsoitto kutsuu!

(Perä-ovet avautuvat selkosen selälleen, näkyy valaistu


valta-istuinsali, jonne prinssi, Imandra ja koko hääsaattue
kulkee.)

HOVIROUVA (jättäytyen jälkeen)

Hoviherra, te olette vain narrinpeili!

HOVIHERRA

Ja te juorupeili!

HOVIROUVA

Ja minä kuvastun teissä.

HOVIHERRA

Ja te minussa.

(Hoviherra ja hovirouva tekevät hullunkurisia liikkeitä.)


HOVIROUVA

Oo, oo!

HOVIHERRA

Oo, oo!

(Salista kuuluu hääsoittoa, kansa huutaa linnanpihalla: eläköön!)

Esirippu.
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