Preaching in/and the Borderlands. Группа авторов
politically placed in the hatred of Republicans and awkwardness of Democrats, religiously placed in old forms of Catholicism, Pentecostal naiveté, and folk mythic beliefs, and psychologically located at the borderline of feelings between madness and lunacy.
4.That the nationalist rhetoric in the United States pivots away from brownness to construct a reality of pan-criminalization for all racialized brown bodied people. Today in the US, to be brown bodied is to be a Muslim-Hindu-Christian-immigrant-mexican-central-american-terriorist-rapist-low-skilled-poor-drug-dealer-illegal-dependent-animal.
5.Our people, immigrants, undocumented, have become the fake news of the content of the president “emergency declaration”!
We see churches and Christian institutions trying hard to learn how to deal with us but at the end, we are always at the tail end of respect, processes of decision, abilities, gifts to offer. The amount of solidarity offered, with important exceptions, is proportional to its expendable resources, guilt and not knowing.
The people at the border are for many, an unfortunate calamity. The distancing from these immigrants at the borders reflects the ongoing distance between white churches and the Latinxs communities. For many institutions, this immigrant disaster is mostly an occasion for a robust declaration against its situation and nothing else. What is always at stake is fear, self-protection, and self-interest. This situation is derivative of the discourse around blacks and whites in this country where other minorities have a hard time pinching in in some more fundamental ways. White supremacy continues to hold on to power, hide its brutalities in administrative legalities, business proper, law and order, state theology and political paraphernalia. All of this done in the name of Jesus!
The hidden perversity of the pleasure of seeing the pain of the children behind cages ripped away from their parents is beyond words. The system of immigration is indeed broken in its fullness when the government does not know how to get the kids back to their parents, when little children have to go to court to respond to judges about the conditions of their immigration status when all that they want is to play with toys and call for their mamas y papas.
Maddening! Whoever is not getting mad with these series of dreadful events are not paying attention, are not seriously taking the position of those parents living in unspeakable pain. We must take their side for their children are our children! So, we must return them to their parents and not to put them up for adoption! It is as if my precious children were in jail and I am rendered completely powerless to do anything. It is as if my kids have been taken away from me and I do not even know where to start to get them back. The situation of loss is such that at a certain point one might even start to imagine that their kids would be better off dead or with somebody else who will take care of them. If our hearts don’t drop to the floor when we see a child estranged from her mama because she hasn’t seen her for months and then seeing pure panic in the face of this mother, we are definitely not paying attention. Our hearts have already been covered by numbness, by privilege, the Spirit of God has left us and the gospel lost its place in our life. “Woe to those who plan iniquity, to those who plot evil on their beds! At morning’s light they carry it out because it is in their power to do it.” (Micah 2:1). Moreover, I think we Latinxs need a new translation for the Psalm 139. One that goes this way:
1 O God, you have searched us and known us well.
2 You know when we cross the desert and when we swim through the Rio Grande;
you discern our fears from far away.
3 You search out the path of our people, the immigrants,
in the desert, you find all of the shoes, toothbrushes, underwear, crucifixes,
and the blood of our people.
in prisons, you find our children alone, completely lost, and parents with a hole so
great in their hearts that they are swallowed by grief.
You are acquainted with all our desperation.
4 Even before a word is on our tongue, or a tear is shed
O God, you know us so completely. You know we are lost for words here.
5 like the heat of the desert and the cold water of Rio Grande you surround us.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for us;
we believe in you so much, you wouldn’t believe it.
7 Where can we go to find your Spirit?
we go to El Norte fleeing from hunger, violence and devastations,
where can we find the security of your presence?
8 If we knock at the doors of churches, we never know if we will be welcomed or they
will call La Migra;
if we try to go to Christian seminaries you will not be there.
For they are afraid of their statues and only concerned with their deep thoughts and research.
9 If we take the wings of the morning,
and go fight on the streets for our people,
they will come with the police and their laws and put us in jail
10 We wished your hand could lead us,
protect us, and hold us fast. But we have nothing.
11 For if we say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around us become night’,
12 Darkness we are;
We are the night that shines as the day,
We are darkness to the world
and to You too.”
Our time can be defined as a time of white supremacy dominion, millionaires and billionaires as political representatives, global regulation by hydro/agri-business, and brutal state control grounded on an endless state of exception that sanctions all forms of violence, the reality of the Empire is translated into a) a myriad of fears wrapped up in patriotism and religious certainties; b) the sooner death of the earth and c) a constant war on women, the poor, indigenous, black and brown bodies.
During such a time as this, when our borderlands are a sign of death, we raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands. When violence separates ninos y ninas de sus mamas y papas, we raise our voices together and hold each other hands. When border crossers are turned into unlawful people who are then prosecuted and have to plead guilty when they are NOT guilty of anything, we raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands. When violence forcibly injects psychotropic in our children as we hear reports from New Orleans of a 9-year-old boy who was kept in a children concentration camp and tried to run away. When a boy is then sent to the Shiloh Treatment Center in Texas and the doctor creates a narrative that says he needs psychotropic medication so he is drugged and tamed. His mother has no idea what is happening to her son. We raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands
When violence kidnaps our children in the midst of the night to be trafficked as we could see it in a video done by New York One TV in New York city, both cases were denounced by Democracy Now! We raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands.
This is the United States of America today! This is American fascism through bio-power and necro-politics fully lived at the borderland in the bodies of brown people! For we are not only the people who live in the borderland, we are the borderland. Thus friends, I must say, we have to place our personal suffering in perspective when we are dealing with this much bigger threat to our lives. We need empathy for our own people. We need to take a step further them, which can be a step away from where we are right now.
I pray to Jesus who said to not be alarmed . . . But in my prayer, I say Jesus, how can we not be alarmed? They are coming in the night; they are coming in the morning. How do we not go mad with all this? Here are some things for us to remember as we go through these times:
First, We Are the Ones Who We Have Been Waiting For