Preaching in/and the Borderlands. Группа авторов
the land of Egypt.” Ruth, a Moabite woman “clings to” her mother-in-law Naomi to provide her security in old age even though she could have returned to her own people. The Good Samaritan in Luke does not leave the alien on the side of the road, nor builds walls to avoid seeing his injuries; he takes social and economic risks to attend to the alien’s needs.
According to biblical scholar Leticia Guardiola-Sáenz, “Jesús live[s] between borders, in a hybrid space which is an experience similar to that of Hispanics/Latin Americans in the postcolonial and neocolonial era. [Jesús], the border-crosser, the traveler between cities and villages, between heaven and earth, between suffering and bliss, comes to redeem the border-crosser who refuses to conform to the limits and borders of a society that has ignored her voice, her body and the borders of her identity as Other.”17 Most border-crossers today act out of desperation; Jesús, theologically speaking, acted out of solidarity with the least of these. The biblical text reminds us that although divine, Jesús became human, assuming the condition of the alienated (Ph. 2:6–8). The incarnation’s radicalness is not that the Creator of the universe became human, but rather God chose to become poor, specifically a wandering migrant. This reveals a Jesús who assumes the role of the ultra-disenfranchised. Because God incarnated Godself among the marginalized, Jesús connotes a political ethics lost on those accustomed to the privilege of citizenship within the empire, missing the significance of Jesús the “illegal.”
Did Jesús cry himself to sleep as I did? Feeling the same shame of inferiority imposed by the dominant culture? Did he have to become the family translator, as I did, between a dominant culture who looked down with distain at parents not fluent in the lingua franca, witnessing a role reversal of having to learn from children about the wider world? And of course, the shame felt by the child-translator toward those parents for appearing less-than the dominant culture who masters the language; and yet simultaneously, the tremendous fear and burden of knowing a mistranslation can lead to precarious situations as some within the dominant culture seek an opportunity to defraud the migrants. For some of us who have been the intermediates between the dominant culture and our families, discover in Jesús a savior, a liberator who knows our anxieties and frustrations. But why was Jesús physically present in Egypt? While a link between the Jesús crossing the border into Egypt, and the Jesús crossing the border into the United States exists; I rather explore why Jesús crossed borders in the first place. To answer this question is to answer why I too crossed borders. Why am I here?
On June 21, 1960, I received the government’s affidavit—a toddler, too young to understand the letter’s importance. At the time my parents and I were living in a roach- and rat-infested one-room apartment in the slums of New York City, sharing one bathroom with the other tenants on the floor. Two months earlier, we arrived in this country with a tourist visa. The letter, citing Section 242 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, notified me deportation procedures were imminent; and I should therefore “self deport” in lieu of forced expatriation. Ironically, I found myself in the country directly responsible for my original exile from my homeland. Truthfully, I would have preferred to stay and live in my own country, among my own people, rooted in my own culture. And yet, when this life comes to an end, my bones will be interned in this foreign soil, a land which never fully embraced me, regardless of the decades of contributing to its welfare. So why am I here? Why do I reside in what my intellectual mentor, José Martí called “the belly of the beast”? Contrary to popular mythology, we did not come seeking liberty or pursuing economic opportunities; we came because of sugar, rum, and tobacco (the three necessities of life). We are in this alien land as a direct result of U.S. foreign policies designed to deprive my country of origin, Cuba, of political and economic sovereignty during the first half of the twentieth century.
The reason I—and many of my fellow Latinxs—are here is a paradox conveniently ignored by politicians and absent from the current immigration debate. Rather than wrestling with the causes of immigration from south of the border, we instead batter around red herrings like anchor babies, the taking away jobs from real Americans, or seeking to unfairly use up generous social services provided by taxpayers. Or, more politically correct, we come in search of the American Dream, hoping for a better life for our families. Unfortunately, these narratives are all erroneous. We are forced to leave our homelands for the insecurity of border crossing because the United States empire—like all colonizers—created political and economic uncertainty in our countries of origins due to a foreign policy designed to secure the avarice of multinational corporations.
In an unapologetic attempt to garner votes, right-wing politicians rile against illegals, presenting the undocumented as a threat to U.S. security and a danger to everyday “real” Americans. Donald Trump best illustrates this with his campaign announcement speech where he refers to Mexicans as “bringing drugs. . . bringing crime. . . [and being] rapists.”18 Unfortunately, this type of bigoted anti-immigrant rhetoric is the norm of a current neo-nativist attitude. During the 2016 presidential elections, Republican candidates—speaking to their base—engaged in a one-upmanship of outdoing their opponents by proposing greater life-threatening intolerance to the cheers of approving crowds. All advocate weaponized drones targeting border-crossers, constructing a 2,000-mile fence stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf, and building more private prisons to accompany the entire family (including babies and children).
We should not be surprised that conservative-leaning politicians are hostile to Latinx immigration. But rather than rehash their blatant racism, I will instead focus on the problematic rhetoric normatively expressed by liberals who engage in the rhetoric of hospitality. During the 2016 democratic presidential primary debate, Martin O’Malley approached immigration by stating, “We are not a country that should send children away and send them back to certain death.” He called “hospitality to strangers” an “essential human dignity.”19 Who could argue against hospitality? After all, this virtue becomes a religious and civic duty to assist (bring salvation) to these poor unfortunate souls. It’s what Jesus would do. Hospitality is a biblical concept meaning more than just opening one’s home to the stranger and inviting them for a meal. The Hebrew Bible God consistently reminds us to remember Abram the alien, or the Hebrews’ time in Egypt as slaves; and thus, offer justice to the sojourner residing in our midst. The New Testament God reminds us how some who showed hospitality to strangers, entertained angels without realizing (Heb 13:2). The biblical terms “stranger” or “sojourner” captures the predicament of the today’s U.S. undocumented immigrant from Mexico or Central America. The term connotes the in-between space of neither being native-born nor a foreigner. As such, the alien lacks the benefits and protection ordinarily provided to those tied to land due to their birthplace. Vulnerable to those who profit from their labor, aliens derive security from the biblical mandate of hospitality. Alien’s treatment is based on three biblical presuppositions: 1) the Jews were once aliens who were oppressed by the natives of the land of Egypt (Exod 22:21); 2) God always sides and intervenes to liberate the disenfranchised (Exod 23:9); and 3) God’s covenant with Israel is contingent on all members of the community benefitting, regardless if they are Jewish or not (Deut 26:11).
The importance of the New Testament passage of José and his family seeking refuge in Egypt, is often lost on those with the privilege of citizenship. Yet for those who are or have been undocumented, they read in these verses a God actively connecting with the hopelessness of being uprooted. Responsibility toward aliens is so paramount, God incarnated God’s self as an alien fleeing the oppressive consequences of the empire of the time. Herod’s responsibility was to ensure profits, in the form of taxes, flowed to the Roman center with as little resistance as possible. Obviously, he also benefited financially, as do many Latin American elites today who sign trade agreements destructive to their compatriots. To ask why Jesús, a colonized man, was in Egypt is to ask why Latinxs today are in the United States.
Colonization during the time of Jesús brought about a push factor where his family, out of fear for their lives, fled toward Egypt; just as it pushed my own family northward due to the same reasons. The economic, political, and foreign policies of the United States caused this push factor in Latin America, specifically Central America, as people either lose their farms and livelihoods or fled in fear of the governments established in their countries through the might of Washington. Simultaneously, in the quest for cheap labor within the U.S.,