Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico Border

A Borderland Hermeneutic

Gregory L. Cuéllar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000026467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Intolerancia religiosa, persecución y conflicto

This book focuses on the themes of border violence; racial criminalization; competing hermeneutics of the sacred; and State-sponsored modes of desacralizing black and brown-bodied people, all in the context of the US-Mexico borderlands. It provides a much-needed substantive response to the State's use of sacrilization to justify its acts of violence and offers new ways of theologizing the acceptance of the "other" in its place.

As a counter-hermeneutic of the sacred, the ultimate objective of the book is to offer an alternative epistemological, theoretical and practical framework that resacralizes the other. Rejecting the State-driven agenda of othering border-crossers, it follows Gloria Anzaldúa's healing move to the Sacred Other and creates a new hermeneutic of the sacred at the borderlands. One that resacralizes those deemed by the State as the non-sacred human other anywhere in the world.

This is an important and topical book that addresses one of the key issues of our time. As such, it will be of keen interest to any scholar of Religious Studies and Liberation Theology as well as religion's interaction with migration, race and contemporary politics.

1 Introduction

Operating at the intersections of social bodies and ways of knowing is a plurality of hermeneutical regimes of the sacred. Not only do different regimes of hermeneutical approaches align themselves with particular social milieus, but they also give rise to varying economies of truth-making. Since the rise of the modern period, the reigning hermeneutical strategy in the Western world has designated the dispassionate eye of a disembodied interpreter as the master mode for understanding reality and human existence. As persuasive as this mode has been for Westerners, the sway of the sacred represents an equally influential optic for interpreting the meaning of life. For Western elite power structures, the high level of public authority ascribed to the sacred has attracted steady investments as a way to reproduce their power. For elite power structures to seize control of the sacred, they require a web of synchronized logics and an endless reservoir of economic wealth. With the will to conquer as its prerequisite, elite power turns to credentialing processes, modes of professionalization, institutions (state and religious), publishing markets, mass media outlets, and a network of agents like archivists, policing personnel, humanitarians, clergy, health care providers, lawyers, and educators. Here, the sacred loses its otherworldliness to become the exclusive world in which elite power is reproduced. By controlling the sacred, elite power moves to define the public meaning of the sacred and hence shape social reality. Here the intrinsic otherness associated with the realms of the sacred offer elite power not only harnessable public authority but also an othering weapon against certain people. Integral to this book is the latter benefit that comes to elite power from its investments in the sacred. The weaponization of the sacred in the form of an adverse othering mechanism is defined here as desacralizing power. In essence, this weaponizing dynamic entails the sacred being used to extract or deny that which is intrinsically sacred in all human beings. As revealed in this book’s title, the clearest example of this form of desacralizing power can be seen operating against migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees at the US-Mexico border.

In the US-Mexico borderlands, the desacralizing power of the wealthy elite takes the form of bordering practices that insist on negating black- and brown-bodied people from any sacred worth. Although bordering in the US-Mexico borderlands registers on the social domain, its currency can be traced to elite power’s investment in the sacred, which is an index point that has eluded social scientific analysis. As an agent of elite power, the sacred—specifically the sort with high public authority—defines what is familiar, alike, and yet separate. The separating function is a particular concern here in that it points to the sacred as a violent othering force used primarily against people. By designating certain people as the nonsacred other (hence the lowercase “o”), this othering force erupts as an eradicating agent onto their spaces, ways of knowing, and archives. In the US-Mexico borderlands, this desacralizing scheme can be seen most clearly in the names elite power gives to black- and brown-bodied migrant border crossers—“illegal immigrant,” “criminal alien,” “drug dealer,” “gang member,” “Mexican rapist,” or “Muslim terrorist.” In this way, turning to elite power’s investment in the sacred offers a fuller assessment of the length its othering ambitions are aiming to go. Here, my notion of the sacred refers less to a particular religious tradition than to the public elevation of a belief system or an economy of truth-making to a divine status. In a general sense, the sacred involves a consensus of thought and yet its specific attachment to a divine realm renders such thought an impenetrable social force. Though presented in this book in the singular form, I understand the sacred as referring to economies of truth-making and currencies of public authority that have the capacity to exonerate violent social actions of elite power. In this way, the sacred can take many forms—monuments, institutions, social practices, spatial arrangements, and people—and yet together have the capacity to defend, justify, exonerate, and legitimate the most gruesome and tortuous acts of state-sanctioned violence. Hence, the aim here is not to define the sacred in a prescriptive sense, but rather to show investments in notions of the sacred either as a legitimating force for elite power or a source of empowerment for the subjugated Other. Of primary concern in the former domain is how elite power has harnessed the sacred to legitimate bordering practices at the US-Mexico border that not only render migrants, asylum seekers, and refuges socially dispossessed, but even more devastatingly allow for their total eradication.

In view of the demographic that elite power is targeting in the border region, its wielding of the sacred seeks to effect various forms of material change—an aim contingent to concentrated wealth—through sacralized acts of violence that range from militarized border security to migrant family separations to mass incarceration to mass deportation. Through investments in the sacred, conventions like public good and public safety are given a sacral character, not so much in keeping with ethics but as a way to legitimate acts of violence against those deemed the nonsacred human other.¹ The boundaries of this sacralized violence are coterminous with the public currency of the sacred in which elite power has invested. Among the reaped benefits for elite power is the growing intensity of its sacralized violence against its designated human other, as in the current expansion of the immigration detention industrial complex.²

Currently in the US-Mexico borderlands, the sacred of white American evangelical Christianity has proven to be a worthwhile domain of investment for political elites—yielding high concentrations of sacralized violence against black- and brown-bodied people. Under the control of colonizing power, this evangelical version of the sacred offers a theology that sacralizes government structures while also demonizing those who oppose them regardless of their governing nature.³ Hence, the contours drawn here of the sacred seek to alert the skeptical scientific critic—particularly those indifferent to all things transcendental, spiritual, religious, or metaphysical—as well as the humanitarian critic to an urgent nodal point that, if left unexamined, can have devastating social consequences. Central to this book is the sacred that elite political power enlists to sacralize the violence it performs against its designated human other in the US-Mexico borderlands. This follows first the existence of the sacred as an authoritative domain of truth-making for many in US society; for without this, elite power has little incentive to invest in it. In view of elite power’s twofold mission, its reproduction and the eradication of its designated nonsacred human other, this book also offers an intervening hermeneutic of the sacred that invests in ways of knowing that come from the people targeted for eradication in the US-Mexico borderlands. These are not only the racially criminalized people in the border region, but more pertinent here, they are those casted as a threat to what elite power has deemed sacred, such as public safety, heritage, citizenship, national sovereignty, state archives, and the Western scientific gaze. With the threat set at the level of the sacred, the actions taken to defend elite power are also understood as sacred and as such opens the way for eradicating forms of violence.

Under elite power’s current version of the sacred, those targeted for eradication in the US-Mexico borderland are the black- and brown-bodied migrant border crossers who carry what Aviva Chomsky describes as “the border with them.”⁴ For the State, the border represents a key investment in the sacred, for it sustains the sacral character of citizenship, sovereignty, public good, heritage, and archive. Sacralized as a symbol of sovereignty, the State moves to sacralize all border security activities, such that they constitute a sacred duty. This sets up border crossings by non-citizens as an affront to the State’s sacred apparatus, and as such they are seen to incarnate trespass—transgression—contravention.

Terms like “security,” “sacrifice,” and “safety” are amply deployed within the political discourse to sustain the sanctity of the border within the public sphere. With renewed sanctity, border crossers continue to warrant eradicating forms of violence by the State. Here their transgression of the sacred border leads not just to their racial criminalization but more importantly to their desacralization, which is a process that intensifies the offense as to require the total eradication of migrant border crossers. Much like political discourse, this eradicating violence also reinforces the sanctity of the border for elite power, thereby ensuring the permanency of this form of violence at the US-Mexico border. Although xenophobic mentalities and racializing logics contribute in part to this violence, its longevity in the border region stems largely from the legitimating power of the State’s sacred apparatus.

In the US-Mexico borderlands, the border also points to the conquest of social bodies and as such constitutes an abiding postcolonial wound. As expressed in the post-1848 Texas-Mexican saying (dicho): “we didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”⁵ Here, the border coincides not just with Anglo-American imperialism but also with the investments made in the sacred that in turn became the catalyst for conquest. Under the same racially criminalizing logic that targets contemporary migrant border crossers, those “border-crossed” (conquered Mexican nationals of what is now the US Southwest) also incarnate the border—marking instead their colonization and generational postcolonial trauma. Among the investments in the sacred that elite power made to sacralize Anglo-American imperialism was a Reformed Protestant idea of Manifest Destiny.⁶ As expressed by John Louis O’Sullivan, the originator of this sacralized imperialist doctrine:

Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union … for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.⁷

When traced to the sacred, Anglo-American imperialism registers as a desacralizing power that legitimized the conquest of Mexico’s northern territories and rendered infinite the postcolonial wound of those initially conquered and their offspring. The version of the sacred that O’Sullivan offered elite power was uniquely suited for the most veracious desires of the Anglo-American male imaginary. Drawing on the Calvinistic theological concept of “Providence,” the Protestant God has made manifest—through their civilizational achievements and monuments of progress—the divinely sanctioned destiny of Anglo-Americans to rule the Western hemisphere.⁸ As O’Sullivan puts it, “The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its [California] borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting-house.”⁹ Different from the currency of non-theologically based ideologies, the sacred offers empire-building regimes an authoritative economy of truth-making that commands an entrancing permanence. For the conquered, Manifest Destiny made permanent a vandalizing and insatiable wound that withers all sense of human worth, squashes out ancestral memory, and deprives us of the fundamental right that all earthlings have—which is the right to exist. Yet for the conquerors, the sacred that underwrote Manifest Destiny created an efficacious framework through which Anglo-American notions of racial superiority and imperial ambitions could be aligned with divine will. In O’Sullivan’s view, this “manifest design of Providence” was “the inevitable fulfillment of the general law which is rolling our population westward.”¹⁰ In a quite calculated way, the investments made in Manifest Destiny instantiated long-term material domination for Anglo-Americans through the sacralization of their heritage and racial type as well as their acts of violence against the non-Anglo other. When tracing the sacred within the unfolding of Anglo-American imperialism, violence assumes a sacral character, while at the same time the non-Anglo other is desacralized. With each act of violence, the sacred that underpins it increases in authority, which in turn allows for the repetition of violence and, by extension, the reproduction of Anglo...