Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy

CHAPTER 4. Hospitality: A Covenant between Mexico and Vermont

106 Hospitality A Covenant between Mexico and Vermont Known as the “City of Eternal Spring” because of its spectacular year-round weather, Cuernavaca, Mexico, is also notable for its abundant natural beauty—and for its equally abundant, but not always equally visible, local poverty. Amid the hundreds of restaurants serving prosperous Mexicans and visiting tourists, Cuernavaca also features countless children hawking gum, row after row of women selling fruit and fabric, and whole stretches of urban landscape where the sturdiest structure is made of scrap metal walls and a tarpaper roof. Through its own diversity, Cuernavaca serves as a kind of living symbol of Mexico’s own complex identity as a developing Latin American country that shares a lengthy international border with the richest country in the world. Cuernavaca’s lovely lanes and orderly zocalo, or town square, illustrate the economic advantages that accrue to Mexico from being so close to the United States. But Cuernavaca’s homeless children and hopeless peasants also illustrate how unevenly those economic advantages are distributed in Mexico, and how multidimensional Mexico’s relationship is with its colossal neighbor to the north. A mile or so up one of those lovely lanes from that tidy zocalo sits the Guadalupe Center, a place that serves as both the home of a small group of Benedictine sisters who have devoted their lives to serving Mexico’s poor and as the site of a transnational religious project that has the ambitious goal of introducing visitors, “especially from the United States and Canada,” to the reality of life and chapter 4 a covenant between mexico and vermont   107 poverty as they are actually lived in Latin America. This small group of women in Cuernavaca is part of a much larger community of Benedictine sisters called Las Misioneras Guadalupanas de Cristo Rey, centered in Mexico City. But the sisters at the Guadalupe Center in Cuernavaca are also on the front lines of a deep and longlasting transnational relationship between the Guadalupanas of Mexico and a group of Benedictine monks who live at the Weston Priory in rural Vermont. Opened in 1984 as a joint venture between the sisters of Mexico and the brothers of Vermont, the Guadalupe Center and its programs are only the most tangible and visible manifestations of a communal relationship that the sisters and brothers all refer to as their covenant, or Arco Iris de Alianza.1 Committed to“walking with each other”into an uncertain future and“accompanying”each other on a shared pathway of Benedictine spirituality and social justice, these two Benedictine communities are constantly looking for ways in which they can draw themselves closer to each other, use their relationship to inform and instruct others about the Benedictine principle of hospitality, and make a meaningful contribution to transforming relationships across the United States–Mexico border that they see as deeply damaging to the Mexican people.2 At one level the Alianza is a simple compact between two groups of people seeking support and fellowship as they live their communal lives according to the Rule of Saint Benedict . At the same time, the Alianza is also a politically charged crossborder religious affiliation that seeks to apply the principles of that Rule to modern economics, modern politics, and contemporary US foreign policy. These Benedictine brothers and sisters are quite modest in lifestyle and affect. They are anything but modest, however , in their hopes for social, economic, and political change in the United States and also especially in Latin America. The Rule As we have seen in each of the case studies included in this book, transnational religious communities have a glue that holds them together, a shared foundation that ties large groups of men and women to each other across time and geographic space. For the 108   chapter four Jesuits, it is their shared formation through the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola; for the Maryknollers, it is their shared commitment to a life of mission in solidarity with the life and suffering of the people. All of these ties, as we have seen, are powerful and meaningful. But no such glue or foundation has been more integrative or longer-lasting than that which binds Benedictines all over the world through their shared devotion and submission to the Rule of Saint Benedict. The Rule—as it is universally known—was written in the sixth century by Saint Benedict of Nursia, the founder of...