Dis-covering Latina/o Reality: A Question of conciencia

Through this collaboration with Elizabeth Martínez and the remarkably efficient staff of the Center for Latino Research, we have invited the readers of Diálogo into an ongoing conversation about the intersections of art, religion, culture, literature, poetry, and sacrament in Latina/o Catholicism. Many voices have contributed to this conversation. Through the two issues of volume 16, we hope that many more will accept the invitation to enter the conversation.

In introducing Diálogo 16:2, I think of certain ground-breaking works in the late twentieth century that opened up new conversations, e.g., Leopoldo Zea’s América como conciencia (1953), Virgilio Elizondo’s The Future is Mestizo (1988), Enrique Dussel’s 1492: El encubrimiento del otro (1992), Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s En la lucha (1993), and Roberto Goizueta’s Caminemos con Jesús (1995). These works remapped Latina/o reality in creative ways. They are works that forced us to look at the frontiers of what we knew or thought we knew and to reconsider where we draw the boundary lines.

Zea, for example, was a Mexican philosopher who initially worked on positivism and the perspectivalism of Ortega y Gassett. He wished to extend the Latin American philosophical legacy of Simón Bolivar and José Vasconcelos in order to forge an idiom that would bridge the divide between North and South. The language of conciencia in Zea’s 1953 work is truly fascinating and timely. This Spanish word can be translated into English as either awareness or conscience. Conciencia is a far broader category than “conscience.” If the latter signifies the primary abode of a universalizable moral imperative (as in Immanuel Kant), then the former is also a mode of consciousness and reflection that struggles with personal and cultural memory.

Zea’s dialectical view of progress is thoroughly modern, but not in the sense of the icons of European modernity such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Like Hegel, he recognizes that the struggle of opposing forces is what moves history. Unlike Hegel, he sees no resolution of this struggle into a higher conceptual synthesis. The fight for cultural memory is full of paradoxes, and the playing out of the struggle has been brutal in the history of the Americas. Zea sees conquest (conquista) and haggling (regateo) as the forces that move history. The treatment of the other as “other” (a point later taken up brilliantly by Dussel) will be violent without an authentic awareness of the historical process. Zea saw “American” (continental) culture as offering the spectacle of a patent and external desgarramiento (pain, anguish, tear). Different layers of culture had been superimposed on top of one another, starting with the colonial conquest of the indigenous cultures. Unlike European culture, which has the pretense of being a unified culture, the process of superposición does not allow for integration:

Superponer es poner sin alteración, una cosa sobre otra, aunque éstas sean distintas y contradictorias, o una cosa al lado de la otro; en cambio, asimilar es igualar, hacer de cosas distintas una sola. La superposición mantiene los conflictos proprios de lo diver-samente superpuesto, la asimilación los elimina.¹

We cannot find an easy synthesis when the layers of faith and culture are simply placed on top of one another. This process of disorientation can lead to a personality disorder in the mind of the person who fails to recognize the burden of multiple layers. Conciencia is thus a difficult process that all residents of América need to undergo.

This issue unpeels the layers of consciousness that have accumulated in our América. Adrian Bautista presents a fascinating insight into the consciousness of the borderland that is growing among Latino Catholic permanent deacons in the Midwest. Maria Clara Bingemer, one of the leading voices for feminist theology and theology of liberation in Latin America, issues a plea for a new reading of Dorothy Day, a powerful witness to faith and social action whose teenage years were spent in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. The excerpt from Theresa Delgadillo’s Spiritual Mestizaje bespeaks multiple modes...