Teaching Borderlands

Arte De Lagrimas

In current US society, the political discourse has directed the national gaze southward to the US borderlands—stretching from the Puerto Rican archipelago to the El Muro en la Playa in Tijuana, Mexico. The central concern is that much of this southbound discourse has led to increased racial stigmatization and criminalization of brown bodied Latinx people across this border-scape territory (which includes both sea and land). Hence, for this project, we aim to visit four ATS member schools across the United States to engage in strategically planned and programmatic conversations with faculty, administrators, and students about the history, ethics, theology, and hermeneutics of the US borderlands from a diverse Latinx perspective. The central goal is not only to offer a counter story of the borderlands but ultimately to foster a life-giving vision of Latinidad for each host school’s educational ecology.

Episodes

  1. 11/02/2020

    Dr. Teresa Delgado

    This weeks guest is Dr. Teresa Delgado.   Teresa Delgado is Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program and Professor and Chairperson of the Religious Studies Department at Iona College (New Rochelle, NY). She received her doctorate from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, under the guidance of the trailblazing womanist theologian Dr. Delores S. Williams. She has published on topics ranging from diversity in higher education, transformational pedagogies, constructive theology and ethics, and justice for racially, ethnically and sexually minoritized persons, including her essays, “Metaphor for Teaching: Good Teaching is Like Good Sex,” (Teaching Theology and Religion, 18.3 July 2015) and “Beyond Procreativity: Heterosexuals Queering Marriage,” in Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms (NYU Press, 2014). Dr. Delgado’s book, A Puerto Rican Decolonial Theology: Prophesy Freedom, was published in September 2017 (Palgrave Macmillan); her most recent essay, “For the Beauty of the World: The Moral Imaginary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s World House,” co-authored with Dr. Victor Anderson (Vanderbilt University) is included in Reclaiming the Great World House in the 21st Century: Cross-Disciplinary Explorations of the Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Vicki L. Crawford and Lewis V. Baldwin, eds. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2019). Her poetry, “Summer Solstice,” will be included in the collection Third and Fourth Wave Catholic Women Writers: The Future of Unruly Women in the Catholic Church (Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe, eds. New York: SUNY Press, forthcoming 2020). Addressing the need for greater diversity, equity and inclusion in theological education, Dr. Delgado mentors doctoral students of color in theology and religion to nurture their success in the academy, church and world. A Senior Fellow of the Ford Foundation, she has served on the board of the Hispanic Theological Initiative; as well as a member of the mentoring consortium of the Forum for Theological Exploration; and the advisory committee of the Wabash Center for Teaching & Learning in Theology and Religion. Dr. Delgado has just concluded her second term as President of the Board of WESPAC (Westchester People’s Action Coalition), a leading force of social justice activism in Westchester County, and currently serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of Colgate University. She lives in Mount Vernon, NY with her husband, Pascal Kabemba (with whom she celebrated 31 years of marriage this year) and their four beautiful children.   You can find out more about this series at artedelagrimas.org.

    42 min
  2. 10/19/2020

    Rev. Dr. Daisy L. Machado

    This weeks guest is the Rev. Dr. Daisy L. Machado. Daisy L. Machado serves as the Executive Director of the Hispanic Summer Program, a unique program of theological education founded in 1989,  and is Professor of American Religious History at Union Theological Seminary​​​​​​​. Dr. Machado, a native of Cuba, came to New York City when she was three years old.  She has also served as academic dean of Lexington Theological Seminary (Lexington, KY) and Union Theological Seminary, the first Latina to hold this position in both institutions. Dr. Machado was also the first director of the Hispanic Theological Initiative when it opened its doors in 1996.  Dr. Machado has lectured in many seminaries and conferences both in the United States and abroad. She is the  author of several published works related to borderlands history and theology. Her latest publication is Borderland Religion: Ambiguous Practices of Difference and Hope an anthology published in 2019 which she co-edited with Dr. Trygve Wyller (Norway) and Dr. Bryan Turner (Australia) containing essays by a group of international scholars​​​​​​​. In this anthology she also has an essay titled “Santa Muerte: A Transgressing Saint Transgresses Borders”.  In addition, Dr. Machado has also authored other book chapters on the borderlands, among them:  the chapter “History and Latino Identity: Mapping A Past That Leads to Our Future” in the book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theology;  “Borderlife and the Religious Imagination” in the anthology  Religion and Politics;  and “The Southern U.S. Border: Immigration, the Historical Imagination, and Globalization” in Rethinking Economic Globalization.  She is also co-editor of the volume, A Reader in Critical Latina Feminist Theology which contains her essay “The Unamed Woman: Justice, Feminists, and the Unamed Woman”. Her first monograph on the issue of the borderlands was  Of Borders and Margins: Hispanic Disciples in Texas, 1888-1945.   You can find out more about this series at artedelagrimas.org.

    43 min

About

In current US society, the political discourse has directed the national gaze southward to the US borderlands—stretching from the Puerto Rican archipelago to the El Muro en la Playa in Tijuana, Mexico. The central concern is that much of this southbound discourse has led to increased racial stigmatization and criminalization of brown bodied Latinx people across this border-scape territory (which includes both sea and land). Hence, for this project, we aim to visit four ATS member schools across the United States to engage in strategically planned and programmatic conversations with faculty, administrators, and students about the history, ethics, theology, and hermeneutics of the US borderlands from a diverse Latinx perspective. The central goal is not only to offer a counter story of the borderlands but ultimately to foster a life-giving vision of Latinidad for each host school’s educational ecology.