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1188 l WOMEN-CENTERED THEOLOGY power provides the freedom to create a new form of being church for numerous Latinas needing more than what the “official” Church allows or offers. In the words of Yolanda Tarango, “All of our experiences with the official church and social institutions create the urgency to say, ‘No, we have a difference perspective and we are going to give it a public voice’ ” (Interview, 1996). At the center of this perspective, at the center of the legacy of Las Hermanas, lies the critical, creative, and prophetic voices of Chicanas and Latinas. The struggle continues, and the transformation of injustices remains the ongoing challenge. SOURCES: Las Hermanas papers and privately printed texts are archived in the Center for Mexican American Studies and Research, Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio, Texas, including Carmelita Espinoza and Marı́a de Jesús Ybarra, “La Historia de Las Hermanas.” All interviews were conducted by the author and can be found in Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious-Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church (2004). The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 17.2 (Fall 2001) includes a significant article on the spirituality of Las Hermanas, also written by Medina, “Transformative Struggle : The Spirituality of Las Hermanas.” Timothy M. Matovina provides a lengthy exploration of Las Hermanas and PADRES in his essay “Representation and the Reconstruction of Power: The Rise of PADRES and Las Hermanas,” in What’s Left? Liberal American Catholics, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (1999). Ada Marı́a Isasi-Dı́az discusses mujerista rituals at Las Hermanas conferences in Mujerista Theology (1996). Ada Marı́a Dı́az-Stevens includes Las Hermanas in her lengthy essay on Latina Catholics , “Latinas and the Church,” in Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S.: Issues and Concerns, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck (1994). In this same text, Edmundo Rodrı́guez also discusses Las Hermanas in his essay “The Hispanic Community and Church Movements: Schools of Leadership.” The reference works Contemporary American Religion, ed. Wade Clark Roof (1999), Latinas in the United States: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Virginia Sánchez Korrol and Vicki L. Ruiz (2003), and In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (1995) also include entries on Las Hermanas. See also Vicki L. Ruiz, From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (1998); and Ada Marı́a Isasi-Dı́az and Yolanda Tarango, Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voices in the Church (1988). MUJERISTA THEOLOGY Ada Marı́a Isasi-Dı́az MUJERISTA THEOLOGY IS an enterprise that a group of Latinas—Cubans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans—who live in the United States have been elaborating for the last twenty years. It is a theology that has as its source the lived experience of Latinas who are discriminated against by the dominant group and culture in the United States and who, for the most part, are poor. The goal of mujerista theology is the holistic liberation of these Latinas. To name oneself is one of the most powerful acts a person can do. A name is not just a word by which one is identified, but it also provides the conceptual framework , the point of reference, the mental constructs that are used in thinking, understanding, and relating to a person, an idea, a movement. This is why a group of Latinas, keenly aware of how sexism, ethnic prejudice, and economic oppression subjugate Latinas, started to use the term mujerista to refer to themselves and to use mujerista theology to refer to the explanations of their faith and its role in their struggle for liberation. The need to have a name of their own, for inventing the term mujerista and investing it with a particular meaning , became more and more obvious over the years as Latinas attempted to participate in the feminist EuroAmerican theological enterprise and movement in the United States. Latinas became suspicious of this movement because of its inability to deal with differences, to share power equally among all those committed to it, to make it possible for Latinas to contribute to the core meanings and understandings of the movement, to pay attention to the intersection of racism/ethnic prejudice, classism, and sexism, and because of the seeming replacement of liberation as its goal with the attainment of limited benefits for some women within present structures, benefits that necessitate some groups of women and men...

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