Reaction Paper

Our recent immersion trip to Mexico offered an opportunity to see a new and unfamiliar culture. It also allowed us to see society from a perspective that was novel for many of us – from the bottom. This shift is not simply one of perspective but rather, potentially of epistemology – a shift not just in what we know, but how we know it. In this paper, I develop an epistemology from below and show how it links to a theology of liberation. I begin by developing a view of the world from the perspective of Aurelia, our host for our first home stay.

Aurelia’s World

Aurelia is 64 years old, but she looks older—her face is lined, her back is bent and she has only a few teeth. She lives in Ajusco, Mexico, in a neighborhood high up on the rim of the bowl that contains Mexico City. Because of this location, the streets of Ajusco are nearly vertical in places and walking anywhere is difficult. Even so, Aurelia walks everywhere (boy, does she ever!).

Aurelia has two daughters and a niece and assorted grandchildren. Nearly half of her grandchildren and great-nieces and nephews have some kind of congenital birth disorder – one of the twins shows very little emotion and is slow, a second has cerebral palsy, probably from a botched delivery, and a third has ADD. Aurelia herself is not formally employed and has no health insurance. Aurelia has never had any formal education – she works arranging flowers. Her husband left some 20 years ago – there are rumors that he lives nearby but she’s never confirmed them. Her water comes from a cistern filled weekly. There is no flush toilet. She flushes with a bucket of water and the air in the house reeks of ammonia. She heats water for her bucket showers by placing a brick wrapped in electrical wire and plugged into an outlet into a bucket of water. Her house has a dirt floor in most places and her rooms are constructed out of cinderblock, scraps of wood and corrugated metal and are basically open to the elements. My classmate John and I are spending the night with Aurelia for the first home stay and I am frankly horrified at the prospect.

If the poor are blessed as Matthew tells us in the Beatitudes, then surely Aurelia is blessed, because by most standards, Aurelia is among the world’s poor. At the same time, there are contradictions and anomalies – Aurelia has no working refrigerator, but she has a television. She has no running water, but she has electricity so that she can run her television. Soap operas are the most popular programs, perhaps because they offer a glimpse, however false, of another life. Per capita, Mexico consumes more soda pop than any other nation on earth. Modern consumer goods look strange and out of place in these Stone Age living arrangements. In some respects, life among Mexico’s poor is a caricature of everything we see as wrong with modern life among the poor – dulled by television, surrounded by cheap consumer goods, ground down by poverty, victimized both by criminals and police, fleeced by corrupt governments, masses of peasants quietly live out their mean, brutish and short lives.

And yet. And yet. There’s more to the story.

After a very restless night at Aurelia’s place, John and I awakened in a houseful of plans and buzzing activity. Today is the day that the twins would celebrate their birthday. Their birthday had actually been in December, but they waited to celebrate it until the day that John and I arrived. A coincidence? We never found out. But there was a special mass and the kids all wore tuxedos – yes, actual tuxedos – and there was a wonderful party with balloons and a chicken dish cooked on an open fire and people daring the Norte Americanos to eat jalapeno peppers, and much laughing and carrying on. And there were neighbors and distant relatives and it seemed like a few passersby, all talking at once, and music and some dancing. These folks really knew how to party. We just soaked it all in, amazed.

These people who had virtually nothing, by my standards, were willing to share everything, while we who have everything are unwilling to share anything. These people who have no education at all have wiser hearts than I did with all my advanced degrees. These people who have dirt floors are unashamed to take in strangers, while we with our carpets and waxed floors wouldn’t dream of having guests without a thorough cleaning.

I don’t want to leave the impression that “these people are so lucky to be poor” and don’t we wish we could be, too. In our conversations with her, Aurelia was frank about how difficult her life was, how limited her children’s options were, how painful it is to be poor and sick and old. No, there is no reason that people should have to live the way Aurelia does.

But, we should be aware that in our endless quest for financial independence and self-sufficiency, we push away opportunities to be interdependent and in community. Let me give an example. Young women in Mexico City, when they reach the age of 15 are thrown an enormous party, called a quinsinera, a 15^th birthday party. There is a big cake, dancing, a special mass (of course), a sound system, a light show, the works. The quinsinera can be a lot fancier than many weddings I’ve been to. As poor as Aurelia was, she had pictures of her daughter’s quinsineras – the girls beautifully dressed and full of hope.

Why would people who are so poor waste this kind of money on a celebration of a 15^th birthday? As it happens, there are godparents who underwrite each of the major expenses – there are godparents for the cake and godparents for the lighting and the band and the sound system and the dress, several for the dress. It is an honor to be chosen to be a godparent, but you can be equally sure that if you are chosen as a godparent this time, you know who you are going to choose for a godparent when your turn comes around. In this way, webs of mutual obligation and interdependence knit the community together.

What makes this community possible is a lack of self-sufficiency, a failure of independence. It is a failure that Mexican families are very proud of – one father told me that the best thing about the quinsinera was how everyone came together to make a beautiful day for his daughter.

I think that this is what Paul is talking about when he says “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” I know that when I thought about the isolation of our North American lives, about our selfishness and our fixations with money and advancement, I was ashamed. When I thought about how our North American educations make us cynical and cautious with praise or love or money, I was ashamed. When I thought about how unreal and how fractured our North American communities are, I was ashamed.

In this part of the world, the United States is seen by some as a tyrant father, addicted to pleasure and possessions, always angry, always coveting more, unpredictable and swift with violent retribution at the smallest offense. The United States has invaded Mexico and occupied her cities more than once. As one Mexican cleric put it, “God is so far away, and the US is so close.”

At the same time, this tyrant father controls access to the good life of well-paid and steady work that Mexico lacks. It must be terribly galling that Mexicans must say, “If you want to improve your life, you need to leave here and go to the U.S. We do not have what you seek.” It is no wonder that attitudes toward the US are so deeply ambivalent.

The NAFTA treaty strikes at the heart of this unequal alliance. A devil’s bargain, as it turns out, NAFTA’s legacy after 10 years is complex. To be sure, some wealth has come to Mexico, although mostly for the very small upper class that controls the export sector. Jobs, too, have come, although less than expected and poorer paying. The boost to the industrial sector has been modest, mainly because the aftermarkets and supplier chains that typically service large assembly plants (fabricating parts and providing ancillary services) have not developed. Parts to be assembled enter the factory already fabricated and the finished assemblies leave directly, back to the U.S. or wherever. None of the cars assembled in the factories is sold in Mexico, because very few people could buy them. Thus, gains in employment and economic activity are less than hoped for.

On the other hand, imported agricultural goods have devastated Mexico’s farms. Not capital intensive, not subsidized, Mexican farmers are no competition for U.S. agribusinesses, so that Mexico, to its sorrow, has become a net importer of corn. As the agricultural labor force leaves bankrupt farms for the cities, the already oppressive population burden of the larger cities increases. These cities lack the transportation, sewage, water, electric and service infrastructure to support their existing populations, but the jobless poor continue to trek to the cities, into communities like the ones we visited in Ajusco.

An Appropriate Epistemology

It is useful to reflect on what we have been offered in this immersion trip to Mexico. One thing is a view of a different culture, a “cross-cultural experience.” A second, more subtle shift is a view of society from a perspective different from the one we usually get. Our entry into this society is from below, while our perspective on our own society is more likely to be from above. Thus, our impression is that Mexico is brutal, corrupt and unjust, where we might find the US to be kindly, honest and fair. Where you stand depends on where you sit.

We see Mexico from the view of Aurelia, a view that incorporates the realities of illiteracy, poverty, hunger, illness, family disorganization and desertion and the corruption of local and national governments. These are realities that we do not generally see in the US, although they are certainly present. We do not see them, generally, because of the privileged position of our social location. Thus, not only do we see a different culture in this visit to Mexico, but we also see that culture from an unaccustomed perspective. If we were visiting the States and got the view of a young African-American mother living just a few blocks from where I live today, our impression of the US might be less benign. Alternatively, if we had seen Mexico from the point of view of upper class ethnic Europeans, our view of Mexico might be different.

The world looks different from the bottom and God is seen differently as well. The God of our privileged position in the United States is one of “fairness” and justice (in the sense of neutral application of impersonal law), assuming God’s benign love and positive regard for creation and the created. Aurelia’s God has one of intense longing (anger?rage?) for a decent life for her and her children, resentment for the indignities and struggles piled on her and the disadvantages she faces. She believes in a God who is not benignly for fairness, but specifically for her, seeing her and aiding her and those like her in their marginality and oppression.

What is happening here is not just a question of perspective – it is a question of epistemology. Mary Solberg talks about an “epistemology of the Cross” as being a way of seeing that 1) criticizes traditional social definitions of power as domination; 2) gives special place and privilege to the lived experiences of people; 3) rejects naïve notions of objectivity preferring, instead, to take on the perspective of the poor and the marginalized; and 4) understands knowledge as conferring an accountability for action. The sheer novelty of our view of Mexico offered by the immersion experience permits the possibility of considering such an epistemology of the cross.

How does an epistemology of the Cross reorganize what we saw in Mexico?

1) Power as domination. Aurelia and the other squatter communities are permitted to live the way they do because it solves a problem for the Mexican government – the government is not required to offer them the services it would offer legitimate landowners and is not forced to evict them and risk popular reaction. So, the squatters are held in a position of continuing insecurity and illegitimate occupation. The government is not their servant or their advocate (except if they leave the country to live in the US). They are effectively marginalized. But, they are citizens of Mexico and children of God and the fact that the government is content with their plight says more about the government than it does about them. A God who does not seek to liberate them is a God who cannot save them. The reality of life for Aurelia and those like her is a reality in which power as domination plays a central role.

2) Lived experience. Kim mentioned one official’s reaction to the fear that indigenous basket-makers couldn’t compete against machine-made baskets – “Well, that is what cholera is for.” The lived experience of Aurelia and the people like her has a validity that extends beyond “Well, that’s how it works.” Their lived experience cries out from the ground and demands a response that is not simply “Economics” or “NAFTA” or some other rationalization. Our news media and the information that makes its way to us do not give any priority to lived experience. Rather, we hear that NAFTA is benefiting some but not all, or that NAFTA is creating new export markets for American agriculture, or that it permits the efficient flows of capital. The lived experience of the campesinos and the squatters and the maquiladoras is of no special interest to us or to our media.

However, our theology is precisely about the cries of the poor and the lived experience of the orphan and widow, the poor and the downtrodden. The lived experience of “the least of these” has a special place in the eyes of the Kingdom.

3) Objectivity. In a similar way, our theology is not objective, in the sense of benignly offering comfort and solace to each believer equally. God is passionately supportive of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the “least of these.” A society that does not serve the needs of the poor is no society in the view of the Kingdom. Thus, when we were concerned on the trip with whether the information we received was “objective” we needed to challenge ourselves on this criterion.

This is a difficult area for me, to be truthful. I have spent a lifetime trying to uncover “objective” information. Yes, I know the postmodern critiques of objectivity, though I confess I still cannot take them seriously. My inclination is to want “objective” information about the state of the poor, so that I can know where they stand.

A bias in favor of lived experience does not argue against systematic collection of information about the state of the poor. Rather it argues in favor of self-critical, reflective and systematic methods of knowing. Methods of social history or description that rely on the most accessible or articulate voices will unself-critically reproduce the voices of the upper class, the victors of history. A bias against objectivity in this sense is a bias against the “privileged” sources of information and in favor of sources of information that subvert the current regime. This is a difficult point, but an important one. Official statistics will tend to support the current political and ideological regime. Other views of the world will be needed to discredit the current order.

4) Accountability for action. An epistemology of the Cross demands not simply the collection of information, but confers an accountability for action and for witness on the basis of that information. We discuss this in more detail in the next section, but an epistemology of the Cross is consistent with a theology of liberation in a great many ways. This theology seeks less to understand the world than to change it.

A Theology of Liberation

What understanding of God and God’s activity in the world is consistent with an epistemology of the Cross, an epistemology that privileges lived experience, critiques accepted notions of power, is subjectively in alliance with the poor and oriented to accountability and action? I have not undertaken an extensive review of liberation theology (although I now intend to), but based on Brown’s Theology in a New Key (1978) and Haight’s chapter on Liberation and Salvation in Jesus, Symbol of God (2000), I would offer the following suggestions the epistemological bases of a theology of liberation.

1. A theology of liberation would begin from the perspective of the poor. Most history is the history of the victor, and most uncritical social history is the history of the upper classes. For precisely this reason, our theology must account for the perspective of the poor. This is not to say that our theology must ignore or suppress the perspective of the upper classes – our God is a God of all the people. But, a theology that does not address the lived experience of the poor is not adequate.

2. A theology of liberation would ask the questions of the nonperson. Just as the squatters solve a problem for the Mexican government by being ignored, every society has classes of people whom it is convenient to treat as “nonpersons.” In the United States, these might be homeless people or dwellers in urban slums or migrant workers or illegal aliens. Whoever they are, our theology must begin with their questions: Who am I? What place have I in this society? How can I achieve a good life? What can I give to my children? Our theological epistemology is not objective – it seeks to offer the Kingdom to those who need it most: the last, least and lost.

3. A theology of liberation would use the tools of the social sciences as well as the tools of hermeneutics. As I argued above, a bias in favor of lived experience does not argue against systematic collection of information about the state of the poor, but rather in favor of self-critical, reflective and systematic methods of knowing. However, this opens a whole new realm of knowledge available to and necessary for the practicing theologian. This insight conforms with but goes beyond Barth’s “bible in one hand and newspaper in the other.” The theologian of liberation (and arguably any incarnational theologian) needs to be a sophisticated consumer of information about social reality, implying a more than passing familiarity with economics, sociology, history and statistics. We pastors are not well prepared for this challenge.

4. A theology of liberation would focus on conflict rather than harmony. The ruling classes will tend to see the current order as the best of all possible worlds. Neoliberal trade policies see differential preference orderings and utilities that can be rationalized and smoothly accommodated in the workings of the economy. But the reality for Aurelia is one of conflict, of insurmountable barriers, inaccessible justice and immovable privilege arrayed against her. God is to be found not in orchestrating harmony but rather in witnessing against oppression, in conflict and solidarity rather than in accommodation and agreement. A theologian of glory looks for islands of piety – a theologian of the cross observes a sea of brokenness.

5. A theology of liberation would engage through praxis rather than observation. Accountable knowledge is knowledge oriented to action rather than observation and accumulation of information. The world in a liberation theology is a world accessible only through praxis. Accountable knowledge makes us part of a community of praxis whose chief aim is the justice of the Kingdom of God. In this sense we are justified by grace – that is, we commune with God are included by God’s grace in this community that is the first fruits of the Kingdom, and operates from the vision of the Kingdom and not the world’s oppression.

Conclusion

There is a church door in the cathedral in Cuernavaca that has Matthew’s beatitudes inscribed in it. But the first beatitude, rather than saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” instead says “Blessed are they who have the spirit of the poor.” I liked this – blessed are those who have the spirit of the poor. This converts what people have considered Matthew’s loophole into an expression of solidarity, of walking together with the poor.

When we have the spirit of the poor, we know that the most reliable feature of our lives is God expressed in community. When we have the spirit of the poor, we depend on that community because we have to, and because of the promises of God, we are not disappointed. When we have the spirit of the poor, we can treat our education, our wealth, our sophistication, yes, as important parts of our biography, but also as things that may need to be overcome or at least put in their proper perspective if we are to enter into the kingdom of God. The kingdom is a place of reversal, where God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, where those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled. The kingdom is a place where Aurelia invites me into her home rather than where I invite her into mine, where I eat at her table rather than she at mine, where I learn wisdom from the unlearned because I need very much to learn what they can teach me about community and about hospitality, and where I can receive from the poor and be satisfied.

The spirit of the poor is embodied in an epistemology of the cross that criticizes worldly power, privileges lived experience, rejects objectivity in favor of solidarity with the poor and that makes us accountable for acting on what we see. This epistemology leads naturally into a theology that liberates God’s children from obedience to roles in the world’s systems of oppression in favor of inclusion in communities whose chief aim is the justice of the Kingdom. In this sense, we are “justified” by grace (that is, included in these communities of justice by the grace of God) and liberated to be children of a new creation.

References

Brown, Robert McAfee. Theology in a New Key. (1978) Philadelphia: The Westminster Press.

Haight, Roger. Jesus, Symbol of God. (2000) Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Solberg, Mary M. Compelling Knowledge: A Feminist Proposal for an Epistemology of the Cross. (1997) Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.