Wonder and Exile in the New World

Conclusion

conclusion In my concluding remarks, I want to return to the beginning of my study, where I mentioned my upbringing on the border of the U.S. Southwest (Tucson, Arizona). My family has deep roots in this part of the United States, once the territory of Spain and Mexico. Previous generations of mine would cross the U.S.-Mexico border (in both directions) with regularity and without the same risk and danger that accompanies the journey today. Today’s generation of immigrants face a different border, one that is a land mine of threatening terrain and aggressive laws. With the militarization of the urban areas of the border, immigrants—at least the poorest of them— are forced to try to cross in the most remote and desolate of border territory , hence the escalating number of deaths among illegal immigrants. And still they come and see in the magnificent Saguaro cacti of these regions what European immigrants see in the Statue of Liberty—hope for tired and poor peoples. As I’ve tried to show in this study, I see the trials of today’s immigrants and refugees as echoing throughout the history of the New World. I see their journeys filled with the same risks, dangers, and dreams as pioneering explorers of the Americas. So, in meditating on the history of the New World, I have embraced literary voices—voices of the dispossessed—that would capture the hardships and possibilities of migration, that would give expression to wonder and exile. In our own age of global displacements and international diasporas, we would do well to recover and remember these voices, not for antiquarian purposes, but to inspire similar acts of love and justice. I want to believe, therefore, that my intellectual life follows in spirit, if not in desperate actuality, the desert trails of migrants. In the book before the reader, I have tried to follow this spirit of border-crossers, from mystics and prophets to poets and novelists, and tried to show how their ideas and lives illuminate the dark and indefinite spaces between disparate and contrasting propositions. David Tracy’s work has been a silent partner of this journey. His own wide-ranging engagement with the hyphens and conjunctions of philosophical and theological ideas—like the hyphen connecting mystical-prophetic traditions—appears in my own work in this book, with a focus on the border territory between wonder and exile in the New World. In light of Tracy’s concern with these border spaces, then, I began my study with mystics and prophets in order to see what they can teach us about the history of wonder and exile long before . With this theological background, we were in a better position to understand how wonder and exile can be construed as languages of dispossession. Though mystics and prophets can teach us a lot in this regard, the epoch-making discovery of the New World gives us, or so my study argues following Stephen Greenblatt , a special opportunity to understand wonder and exile.1 As a language of first encounters, wonder saturated the minds and tongues of many European conquerors and explorers when first setting foot on this peculiar New World. And then exile, too: exile flooded the age like a typhoon and left everything in ruins. Las Casas and Cabeza de Vaca were witnesses of this. Subsequent to these formative figures, I explored the transformations of wonder in the age of the Baroque. Under the impact of exile, or so my book argues, the wonders of the Baroque turned frightening and monstrous like the wonders of apocalyptic texts, like the wonders that appear in the works of avant-garde artists and the mad, or like the wonders of “magical realists.” In chapter , we saw how Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas were thoroughly familiar with the language of wonder and exile and how they arrived, through their long sojourns, at a destination that was tolerant and pluralistic for knowing firsthand the curious diversity of human beings in this wide world. Their capacity for wonder gave their theological understanding a modesty and tentativeness when they spoke of God, and their prophetic spirit a fierceness when they spoke of the indigenous people they had come to know and defend. In chapter , I introduced the tragic motifs of the Baroque and argued that “wonder” underwent a grave change that was an effect of the apocalyptic signs of the times—in particular, the withdrawal and hiddenness of God...