Borderlands, Liminal Spaces, and Religion: Latinx/Caribbean Perspectives on Gender, Sexuality, Violence and Identity

This paper explores the Spanish-American-Mexican Borderlands as a location, a geography but most importantly a lens through which to come to terms with the present. Our failure to take the borderlands seriously undermines the welfare of our society both in terms of what we don’t know and admit about our past, but also in terms of how people are affected by that cultural whitewashing. Rather than a specter of the past, the borderlands continue to be a dynamic space of conflict, collaboration and cultural gestation in the world today. In particular, the North American borderlands have tremendous influence on the culture, religion, and even the epistemology and rhetoric of our era while simultaneously being misrepresented and poorly understood in popular culture and everyday interactions. I will explore this directly though Spanish language (*banda*) music on the radio, and the role it plays in preserving and expressing the borderlands perspective.

The emergence of queer Latinx Faith-based voices in culture, art, and politics raises important questions about how a person can synthesize conflicting identities within oneself and harness the energy from this process to engage in liberatory action. This presentation explores the concept of liminality, which is present at the intersection of queerness, Latinidad, and faith, and how such a space can be the source of hope-filled decolonial liberatory activism. The first part will offer an overview of the intersection, the second part will explore a deep analysis of the dynamics of the liminal space, and the third part will investigate how this process aids liberation. The overall goal of this presentation is to craft an understanding of the internal, spiritual dynamics of queer Latinx Christians to better understand how they have synthesized various apparently conflicting fragments of their identity and harness this power to create a better world.

In the context of Latine ethics and liberation theologies, queering Our Lady of Guadalupe offers a critical and liberative approach to honoring the complexity of culturally Catholic and Queer Mexican lived experiences. Specifically, queering our Lady of Guadalupe creates an anti-oppressive theo-ethical framework grounded in the tenets of Latine ethics and theologies of nepantla,  lo cotidiano, el acompañamiento, and doing theology en conjunto. Expanding on these theo-ethical cornerstones, queering our Lady of Guadalupe rejects heteronormativity, homophobia, machismo, marianismo, and any social construction of gender or sexuality which functions to exclude and/or oppress those of us identifying within Queer communities or outside of the sexual/gender norm. Living in the unique tension of both the colonized and colonizer identities, I examine how nepantla as an epistemological framework is limited to a specific hybrid existence and does not apply to all Indigenous experiences. Holding this tension, I prioritize queerness as an invitation to liberative reimaginings of colonial symbols for Queer Mexican Catholics. 

This paper utilizes a mujerista interpretation of Frida Kahlo’s artwork in order to complexify mujerista images of motherhood. The first section is an analysis of the motherhood-related language that Isasi-Diaz uses in her book Mujerista Theology. The second section provides a brief biographical sketch of Frida Kahlo as we explore a set of her paintings referred to as “anti-nativity scenes” and how these anti-nativity scenes contribute to the mujerista project of liberation due to their reimagining of the role of mother, their symbolic naming of the self, and their location in lo cotidiano. The final section explores how placing the work of Frida Kahlo and Isasi-Diaz into conversation can create an expanded and empowering conception of motherhood that addresses the embodied liminality of Latina women. This gives legitimacy to the varied experiences of Latina women, liberating their real, everyday experiences from the category of the unimportant.

This presentation analyzes masculinity within a Latin American-Caribbean colonial context, exposing the enduring impact of historical gender norms on contemporary male identities. Analyzing colonial biases favoring male virility and the cultural legacy of the penis as a symbol of masculine honor, I argue these historical views continue to shape male behavior and expressions in Latin American-Caribbean cultures and contribute to gender violence and sexual abuse. This historical context sets the stage for employing Anzaldúa's Borderlands theoretical approach as a framework for rethinking masculinity and uncovering vulnerability and fragility as sources of male identity. Drawing from personal experience, I advocate for a new understanding of what it means to be a man transcending oppressive structures of colonialism and heteropatriarchy, paving the way for transformative religious practices. I aim to demonstrate how, within the Borderlands, men can transcend traditional conceptions of masculinity to foster unconventional and refreshing experiences with the divine