Tierras para los Desterrados: Christian Practices that Sustain the Journey
by Altagracia Pérez-Bullard
Desterrada: the word that came to mind when reflecting upon the impact of Hurricanes Irma and Maria on the people and the island of Puerto Rico in the fall of 2017. Yet this heartfelt word inspired deeper reflection as the official definition came clear. It was not just literally bereft of land, feeling the earth being ripped away, as the winds pummeled the landscape and wreaked havoc on failing infrastructure. The translation is exiled, and that brings a whole other level of depth to this reflection. This connects the forced migration of Puerto Ricans due to the inadequate deployment of federal relief resources necessary to survive/live and the displaced peoples of Latin America and around the world.
The relationship of every Puerto Rican I have ever met with the island is intense, and that is true regardless of their place of birth, or that of their parents or grandparents. I’ve learned over the years that other immigrants and their descendants share this intense love of place; place and identity are intertwined. The complex and contradictory colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico complicates matters. The land itself is the subject of much ecological investigation, housing the only tropical rain forest in the U.S. National Forest System, and although Puerto Rico has changed significantly over the decades, it is still associated with lush vegetation and beautiful vistas, as well as the fruits of imperial and colonial rule: exploitation, poverty, violence and destruction. Hurricanes Irma and Maria became the physical and psychic explosion of festering infections, unchecked injustice, neglect and abuse. The voices of Puerto Ricans post Irma and Maria echo a sad truth: “Puerto Rico will never be the same again.” Yet both the island’s greenery and its people are the very definition of resilience, finding ways to forge on, and because of their peculiar relationship with empire, truths can be made plain, and political landscapes can be shifted in ways that speak to ongoing hope and new life.
There are Christian traditions and practices that have provided healing, strength, and empowerment through prophetic witness for immigrants and their families working for justice. These spiritual tools can be brought to bear as Christians seek to welcome the stranger from Puerto Rico, Honduras or elsewhere. Most of these public practices have been ecumenical and interfaith in nature, but this essay will primarily consider Christian traditions that have grounded migrants staking a claim on their new home. I am very aware that there are many Puerto Ricans and other Latinx peoples who practice Islam, Espiritismo/Spiritualism, Santeria, Curanderismo, Buddhism and Judaism, among other traditions. These religions also have a wealth of practices, teachings and traditions that nurture freedom, health and wholeness. Faith traditions that work for immigrant justice can ground families and provide the safety of community, the comfort of the familiar, and the hope of the sacred, naming injustice and strengthening one’s faith in a Power that creates community, that supports and also transforms lived reality.
Sacred narratives have been reclaimed and recast in the work of justice. Traditional pilgrimage rituals, processions and stations of the cross where the story of struggle, loss and renewal, death and resurrection, are interpreted as hopeful narratives for people fighting for a new life, fighting for justice. Passover/Holy Week processions provide a prophetic witness as workers in Los Angeles present bitter herbs and milk and honey to hotel management who were either unfair or supportive of the living wage campaign (Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy, eds., Milkman, Bloom, Narro, ILR Press, 2010). Stations of the cross are marked along 42nd Street in New York City as places where life is devalued and violence and death are given free reign (Pax Christi, Good Friday Peace Action, 2017). Los Angeles airport workers hold a posada, where at each stop the obstacles to creating a safe home for themselves and their families are named, obstacles that could be overcome with a living wage and fair contract (CLUE-LA, Inglewood, CA, 2012).
For people of Roman Catholic descent (over 50% of Puerto Ricans still identify as Roman Catholic), the recasting of devotional practices as tools for engaging the challenges of their life can be grounding. These special actions are practiced at times of the year that have a sacred significance: Lent/Holy Week, patronal feasts, at the end of a protest/prophetic witness, or to celebrate victories. The practices enliven their struggle and affirm that it is not just the dead saints whose lives required courage in order to proclaim the good news of Christ: that an abundant and loving God cares for all of creation. Participating in communal action requires some risk, especially for workers who might be singled out as troublemakers and fired, but as a spiritual/religious activity it creates a safe place for sharing their woes and being encouraged out of their isolation.
Church buildings can be places of sanctuary for those facing deportation, and church communities can accompany migrants through the treacherous journey of seeking asylum. The presence of the Church as paperwork is navigated, appointments kept, hearings attended, as migrants fight to be reunited with their children, to be connected with family, to be provided a safe haven, also grounds them in community while they struggle with the loss and grief that comes with being desterrada. The new sanctuary movement provides a place for those who have no place to be.
Fasting and praying is another practice, a spiritual tool that can be employed in the journey of migrants and in the creation of community. Activists, community members and religious leaders bring attention to unjust conditions and insist on a response whether their focus be detention camps, prisons (especially for those in solitary confinement), or food service workers, and through these actions of solidarity, join their voices with those at most risk. Street theater serves as a parable where the grotesque and foolish nature of the oppressor is made visible through giant papier-mâché puppets, creating a spectacle that calls attention to the spectacle going on in the halls of power. Vigils for the victims of violence, their families and their communities, and of course the demonstrations and marches of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as young people organizing against gun violence—all are opportunities where the spiritual toolkit of believers can be employed to bring light in the midst of darkness. Christian communities (congregations, justice groups, denominations) are uniquely equipped to bring the calls for justice from Scripture out into the street. To heal and make whole, naming and making public the injustice and the degradation that is silently played out every day as business as usual must happen.
Individually, congregational leaders, lay and ordained, can create connections to the nerve centers of their communities: the indigenous leaders (not just the power brokers); these are the grandmothers who care for everyone, the teachers, and the bodegeros (small grocery store owners). Through this network, they can learn who has moved into their neighborhood, who needs groceries, clothing, accompaniment while registering their children in school, or pastoral counseling. This response is also grounding for families who have traveled long and hard and feel they are forever journeying towards a “new normal.” The transformative/liberative move, however, requires movement beyond the personal, to live honestly into the fact that the personal is political. It is important to support and develop these individual relationships with an eye to connecting people who are untethered to a community that can anchor and support them through the transition, can also envision with them social and political change, and can organize into a force that addresses the underlying issues that have led to the current calamities.
Religious faith leaders, who preach and teach the word, can testify to the liberating power of the resurrection: naming groups and organizations that have created change in unjust systems, and breaking the death grip of corruption, greed, violence and oppression. As proclaimers of the good news, it is essential to share these concrete victories of good over evil, of light over darkness, because people are constantly bombarded and struggling to cope with bad news. We who know that liberative power is available because we have seen it at work can share that, although there are setbacks and defeats, they do not have the last word. The challenges being faced by migrants in the US today are also the catalysts for awareness, learning, and organized action. Meeting people where they are will also mean sharing information that seems irritatingly basic: “yes, Puerto Ricans are US citizens; yes they have a rich Afro-Latinx culture, etc., yet these become opportunities to counter false narratives and to create common ground for the marginalized and their privileged allies. This common ground is place for hope to be fostered and faith encouraged. Together people can create sacred liberative spaces and restful places, offering relief for the desterradas.
*A version of this essay was presented on the April 4, 2018, panel at Union Theological Seminary, “Identity, Suffering, and Hope in Puerto Rico and Beyond: Latinx Communities Claiming Freedom,” building on the insights of Dr. Teresa Delgado’s publication A Puerto Rican Decolonial Theology: Prophesy Freedom reflecting on questions of Latinidad, empire, ecology, and liberation.
