Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Several years ago I gave a visiting lecture entitled “The Sense and Nonsense of Latina/o Studies” in a class on Latina/o studies at Harvard University. The good senses of Latina/o studies were obvious - the new ethnographies, stimulating publications, degree programs, disciplinary orientations, and new critical and creative Latino voices that had been occluded for so long in the academy and society at large. But I was obliged to note that the course's Latino studies “reader” had titles with the words immigration (8 times), gender (6 times), class (5 times), Latino (10 times), and race (15 times), but not a single article had a title or topic related to religion or theology among Latinas/os. I noted that this lack of any engagement with the religious dimensions of Latino history, in this springtime of Latina/o studies, was the “nonsense” of Latina/o studies. How could a field of scholarship that emerged from the “oro del barrio,” the “fight in the fields,” the civil rights era, critical epistemologies about the “pueblo/pueblo” and which claimed new knowledge about the social realities and dignity of Latinas/os isolate itself from religious practices and realities in Latino lives? How could a field of study which worked to illuminate the “historical continuum” of various Latino cultural projects, that prided itself on being of the people, for the people and by the Latino peoples, ... log in or subscribe to read full text