Made in the Margins: Latina/o Constructions of US Religious History

Conclusion: Theorizing and Conocimiento

169 conclusion theorizing and ConoCimiento michel-rolph Trouillot asserts that “theories of history rarely examine in detail the concrete production of specific narratives .”1 because this assessment fits perfectly with the development of U.s. religious historiography, the dominant discourses within this field have not only been able to consolidate their power but also to reproduce it, as there have not been many works examining the construction of the narratives. Traditional U.s. religious historiography has been confronted and revised, but its colonialist character is still present, mainly because the Protestant-Puritan experience has remained as the starting point of the traditional narrative. This colonialist character provokes the supremacy of a black/white paradigm and the lack of attention to issues of race, class, and gender beyond this paradigm. even when revisions open the field to new topics, themes, and new perspectives in U.s. religious history, the Anglo-American cultural framework still dominates the field. As a result, i argue that in order to engage in a historical project that seeks postcolonization of the discourse and the discipline, historians and philosophers of history need to pay attention to the construction of narratives and the ideologies behind them. The analysis of old and new approaches, themes, and topics within U.s. religious historiography provides an overview of theories and methods employed. The deconstruction of these theories and methods will then lead to the development of fresh perspectives, 1 Michel-rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (boston: beacon, 1995), 22. 170 made in the margins new considerations, methodologies, epistemologies, and even a more critical edge, all of which are needed within the field. Thus, i offer a new discursive approach to the writing of U.s. Latina/o religious history. Constructed as a counter-discourse from a subaltern perspective , U.s. Latina/o religious history will be able to challenge the colonialist aspect at the center of U.s. religious historiography. i suggest that a postcolonizing perspective to the study and writing of U.s. Latina/o religious history would develop a theoretical scaffold that would decolonize the field of U.s. religious history and locate U.s. Latina/o religious history as such a counter-discourse. Thus, in the last section of this book, i introduce two possible approaches to develop historical projects within a postcolonizing perspective. The key in both lived religion and feminist approaches is the conception of the work from a subaltern perspective without essentializing that subaltern. This means that every project needs to see itself as one of many and not as the ultimate truth on the topic. in order to be able to build this kind of project, we then need to understand theory in a different light, not from a Western colonialist perspective, and dismantle the traditional knowledges that have dominated the field. Gloria Anzaldúa points out in the preface to Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color that there is a need for theories from outside the dominant academic circles. she finds that while theory “is a set of knowledges” and “some of these knowledges have been kept from us,” people of color, and women of color in particular, need to transform the theorizing space with new methodologies and approaches and “not allow whitemen and women solely to occupy it.”2 Anzaldúa goes on further to assert: Necesitamos teorías that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries—new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods. We need theories that will point out ways to maneuver between our particular experiences and the necessity of forming our own categories and theoretical models for the 2 Gloria Anzaldúa, “haciendo Caras, Una entrada,” in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (san Francisco: Aunt Lute books, 1990), xxv. conclusion 171 patterns we uncover. We need theories that examine the implications of situations and look at what’s behind them.3 Through these new theories we confront Western epistemology and dis-cover new categories and modes of interpretation. We have to reconstruct knowledges, subaltern knowledges, in order to deconstruct traditional colonial discourses. Thus, it is important to step away from “traditional” conceptions of knowledge and reconstruct them in terms of conocimiento, which is “skeptical of reason...