Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders

3. Attributes of a Mestizo Democracy

Attributes of a Mestizo Democracy •          Attributes of a Mestizo Democracy Anzaldúa’s and Elizondo’s depictions of mestizaje provide the basis for realizing a unity-in-diversity that culminates neither in assimilation nor separatism. In this chapter, I put forward and discuss the following attributes of a mestizo democracy that I find embedded in the works of Latino theologians and scholars: • an engagement of reality as both/and, not either/or; • the permeability of borders in contrast to the inelasticity of frontiers; • the political countercultural implications of popular religion; • an affective, aesthetic rendering of rationality and epistemology; • a relational as opposed to a possessive rendering of morality and community; • the transformation of relations of domination into relations of empowerment; • the engendering of hope in the struggle for justice for all peoples. To develop each attribute at length, I draw specifically upon the work of María PilarAquinoVargas,Ana María Díaz-Stevens,Allan Figueroa Deck, Virgil Elizondo, Orlando Espín, Ismael García, Sixto García, Roberto Goizueta, Justo González, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Ana María Pineda, Harold Recinos, Jeanette Rodriguez, Fernando Segovia, Samuel Soliván-Román, Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, and Eldín Villafañe, in addition to other scholars  • MestizajeasPoliticalTheory writing in this rapidly expanding discipline. In particular my exegesis emphasizes ,on the one hand,the process and manner of inclusion (the affective dimensions) and, on the other hand, the realization of just political, social, and economic arrangements (the effective dimensions) of this alternative politics.Engaging the above seven normative attributes in combination will suggest why a mestizo democracy is crucial for realizing an inclusive and just politics of crossing borders. The Primacy of the Latino Experience as Both/And, not Either/Or Even though Latino theology is indebted to the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez and other Latin America liberation theologians over the past four decades, mestizaje as either theology or political theory is not just a northward projection of liberation theology. In contemporary political theory, philosophy ,and theology informed by cultural hermeneutics,being sensitive to the particularities of context, place, and situation is very important. Both Anzaldúa and Elizondo, as shown in the previous chapter, capture the experience of being caught between worlds: being neither Mexican nor U.S. American, yet simultaneously both/and. As also reviewed in the previous chapter,the attraction of the Chicano movement toVasconcelos’s notion of la raza cósmica is provoked by this predicament of being situated in a nexus of cultures. As suggested by the title of Fernando Segovia’s essay, Latinos find themselves between “Two Places and No Place on Which to Stand.”1 Thus, a mestizo democracy is a challenge to frameworks that squeeze the multicultural reality of the United States into either a European American orientation, on the one hand, or a Latin American framework, on the other.2 Instead, Goizueta suggests we engage in a“critical appropriation”of these diverse theological traditions in the light of Latino experience: “Such a task requires that we approach and critique traditional theological sources and methods, whether European or Latin American, from the perspective of U.S. Hispanics in order to be able to articulate the significance of that perspective for the life of our communities, the church, and society.”3 Taking Goizueta’s insight a step further, my critique of both Bellah’s and Geyer’s articulation of community in the first chapter is not that their emphasis on cultivating heartfelt mores is unimportant to the health of U.S. democracy, but rather that their renderings of these mores and values are too exclusively rooted in the European American experience. In a country increasingly characterized by the vital contributions of African Ameri- Attributes of a Mestizo Democracy •  cans,AsianAmericans,Latinos,and NativeAmericans—and as dealing with the ‘other’ becomes, increasingly, a daily experience—our core community values need to be rooted in the concrete experience of simultaneously engaging multiple traditions, a long-standing reality for Latinos. Displacing the Frontier with the Border The Latino experience with crossing borders, both literal and figurative, is vital for dealing with multiculturalism in a constructive fashion.As Segovia suggests, the Latino experience is“a radical sense of mixture and otherness, mezcolanza and otredad, both unsettling and liberating at the same time.”4 Moreover,this radical dynamic ensues not only when Latinos mix with other U.S. cultural groups, but also when Latino groups...