Monthly Archives: March 2015

Mujerista in Spirit: On Being a Latina Lapsed Catholic Researching Faith during Lent

author celebrating first communion

Sujey Vega’s First Communion Celebration. Personal files of author. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

by Sujey Vega

It is Lent and so it is that time of year when my mother pleads, “Hija, go to church this Sunday.”  For years I have tried to make my mother understand that I no longer “go to church” by choice. My repeated efforts to attend Catholic mass as an adult have yielded only unease, a sense of acting out of unfathomable obligation. What I dare not tell her, however, is how much I actually miss it. How much I wish I could believe and truly engage the Holy Spirit that she, following in the steps of my querida abuelita, so wholeheartedly embraced. Like many families from Latin America, it was the women who carried on the lived religion in my family. I remember my abuelita’s wrinkled hands moving her rose petal rosary, her thumbnail rhythmically gliding the beads that after years of use still emitted the smell of roses. Indeed, the aroma of fresh flowers continues to remind me of my own days of “ofreciendo flores” or offering flowers to the Virgin. Growing up, we attended mass every Sunday. My amá had me in catechism, I was an altar girl and took confirmation classes, even though I was confirmed in Mexico at the tender age of two (because as a Mexican Catholic I had no choice).

As a young adult, I could not personally reconcile the directives of a parish priest who barred teen girls from wearing make-up to mass or the passive reception expected of religious women toward their ministerial leader, a male priest. My mother, my abuelita, the women of the faith were the ones solely responsible for maintaining the faith at home, and yet they were hardly ever recognized by the institutional church for their commitment. Moreover, the presence of the Holy Spirit was never felt in the pews listening to yet another lecture from the pulpit. I felt spiritual presence in warm embraces, Sunday carne asadas, and the sounds of familiar alabanzas (hymns) and none of these things were ever talked about during mass. I realized now that what I was feeling was what Mujerista Theology noted as lo cotidiano, or the every day lived religion. Even though I left the organized Church, I still find light and warmth in the way people gain spiritual comfort, healing, and belonging from their faith.

Much to my mother’s surprise, I study religion and its social impact on Latino immigrant communities. Much to my own surprise, I voluntarily chose this path. I can recall the first time I felt called to voluntarily step into a church for research purposes. In 2003, Chicago was the site of national tour of the Tilma de Tepeyac religious relic, a 17th century statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe carrying a glass-encased piece of the tilma. At Our Lady of Tepeyac Parish in the Little Village neighborhood Mexican Catholics knelt down at the pews to pray for hours. As I observed their prayer I could not help but feel moved. Moved not by the presence of the relic, but the power of faith. Watching old and young, male and female pray brought me to tears. I sat there wishing I could be the Catholic my own mother wished I was.

Not long after this moment in Chicago I realized that my being agnostic does not deter from my interests in faith and Latin@ communities. I may not necessarily agree with the tenets of most organized religion, but I can appreciate the value that lived religion has on strengthening people’s lives. For the populations I study, faith provides material and emotional stability in an otherwise unstable world. This might seem crass or reductionists, but for me (a non believer) it helps to situate how religious faith serves a purpose in people’s lives. In this way, I could study faith and its role in religious communities without necessarily getting into the politics of accuracy or ranking religious beliefs.

This finessing of skepticism with appreciation has been more than valuable in my current research project on Latino Mormons. This research began in 2006 when I met Veronica, the wife of a Mormon President in a store-front rama, or Mormon branch. Here close to a dozen families gathered every Sunday to testify to their faith as Latter Day Saints. I had never met a Latino LDS member, and to be frank, did not even know such a community existed. Latino Protestants of all sorts (Baptists, Jehovah’s, and Seventh-day Adventists) were in my periphery, but Latino Mormons were completely out of my realm of possibility. Veronica invited me to her home where we bonded over her delicious pozole.  Veronica recalled the story of her crossing into the United States with her children, “fue una aventura terrible pero para ellos yo se les hice ver divertido – como que todo estaba bien… Gracias a Dios estamos aqui, que si pasamos por todo fue porque El lo quiso asi que valoremos mas las cosas, lo que tenemos, nuestro hogar, la familia” [It was a terrible adventure, but for them [her children] I made it seem entertaining, like everything would be ok. Thank God we are here, what we went through was all because He wanted us to value things, value what we have, our home, and our family].  It was women like Veronica who solidified my own interests in faith and religion as a coping mechanism for Latino immigrants. Veronica courageously faced the crossing with her children. Terrified herself, she referenced the crossing as “una aventura” an adventure to compartmentalize the fear and transform it into excitement for her children. Since then, I have continued to address the role of faith and family in Latino Mormons. Currently I am sifting through archives, conducting oral histories, and attending church events/services to understand more fully how specifically the Church of Latter Day Saints is inclusive of its Latino converts, and how Latinos have, for almost a century now, found their own spiritual belonging as Mormons.

The researcher in me wants to probe the Mormon Church’s problematic vision of a “light-skinned” God speaking to and saving indigenous communities in the Americas. I want to remain aware that the Church can be welcoming to some while extremely inhospitable to queer and gender non-conforming members. I want to point to the juxtaposition of families encouraged to grow and produce the next generation of Mormons while Latina females continuously get labeled as over-reproductive burdens on society.  I want to, and I will, but I also have to be true to the members who do feel satisfaction, who are tremendously strengthened by their faith, who remake an otherwise predominately Anglo Church in their own image. Members like Josefina who noted, “In December I turn 89 years old…and the Relief Society still fortifies me, it gives me strength so that if I have live more months, well it helps me. The Relief Society is always helping you and renews you.” These women are claiming their own way to belong, and draw strength from their Church and the Relief Society. They are moved by el espiritu, and I cannot deny them that. I cannot forget how much I was moved during the a holiday performance when I did feel something, when I almost heard my own abuelita sing “os pido posada…”. I can’t help remember the other women of the Spanish Tabernacle choir whose arms wrapped me in an embrace when they found out I wanted to do a book about their lives. The women who all surrounded me trying to take pictures and encourage my work. The 92 year old elderly woman whose wrinkled hands held onto my own and asked me “estas en el facebook” so she could keep up with my work. Every woman wanted to take a picture, tell me their conversion story, and encourage their daughters to talk to me. I can’t but account for their narratives as well. As a feminist, non-Mormon, Women and Gender Studies professor, I’ve faced questions and skepticism about my research from the Mormon women I am researching. I want to remain open to their voices rather than rush to condemnation. Perhaps what I am actually doing, what drives this work, is the search to connect to my amá and abuelita, to their faith and their willingness to assert their own roles as Mujeristas, or women who lived their faith fully in their every day. So this Easter Lenten season I will go to church, but much to my mother’s chagrin it will be for research and not spiritual reasons.

References

Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996.

Sujey Vega is on the faculty at Arizona State University and a member of the Mujeres Talk Editorial Group.

Latinas/os and Corporate Mestizaje

 

by Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and José Alamillo

En lo puro no hay futuro
la pureza está en la mezcla
en la mezcla de lo puro
que antes que puro fue mezcla.

“En lo puro no hay futuro,” Jarabe de Palo

[There is no future in that which is pure. / Purity comes from the mixing. / The mixing of that which is pure, / Because before it was pure, it was a mixture. “There is no Future in that which is Pure” Jarabe de Palo]

During the last two decades, Latinos and Latinas have achieved a modicum of recognition in U.S. mainstream culture, in part because of the marketing machine of corporate America. However, as Arlene Dávila (2001) proposed, the recognition that Latinos/as have achieved has been simultaneously and paradoxically accompanied by “a continued invisibility in US society” (3). Corporate spending and advertising directed at Latinos/as have grown at an annual average rate of more than 10 percent since 1998 and will continue to grow as census numbers reveal that Latinos now constitute the largest minority ethnic group (US Census, 2012). Given this new demographic reality suspiciously dubbed the “browning of America,” marketing officials are developing more sophisticated approaches to reach the Latino/a consumer replacing the crude and offensive images of the past that outraged Latino civil rights groups. The new images have been refined and repackaged to present Latinos/as less as a caricature and more as a seamless harmonious unified group. This contemporary construction of Latinidad by corporate America needs more critical interrogation amidst neoliberal policies and global economic forces that insist on merging the Latin American South with the Latino North to create the new (future) hybrid marketing, especially one geared toward mainstream non-Latino communities.

The process of intercultural borrowing/appropriation and racial mixture has a long, tormented history in the Americas, dating back to the European colonizations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This process has been known as syncretism, miscegenation, creolization, metis, transculturation, hybridity, and mestizaje. Because of their own colonial histories, many Latin American countries have adopted the ideology of cultural and racial mixing as a central tenet for their nation-building projects. Although some of those projects have transcended their countries of origin through the movement of immigrants, in the end, the US has never adopted or even seriously contemplated hybridity as part of its nation-formation processes.

At the same time, Chicano/a Studies scholars have critically interrogated the concept of “mestizaje” making a crucial distinction between its Mexican and Chicano nationalist configuration. In Mestizaje, Rafael Pérez-Torres argues that because of Chicana/os racialized experiences in the US context, “mestizaje” rises to the level of a counter discourse and practice that challenges dominant Chicano and American conceptions of white masculinity and heteronormative sexuality. While Pérez-Torres’ re-configures the term “mestizaje” with a critical edge, it does not prevent US advertisers and marketers from appropriating hybrid culture for economic gain.

Thus, the American marketplace has recently developed its own ideas about mestizaje and hybridity with the purpose of selling products, images, and ideologies to mainstream American audiences. These ideas are usually used in tandem with mainstream commodified constructions of Latinas/os, which are often presented as “mestiza/o” or “hybrid” constructions. This is happening at the same time that we are witnessing a major backlash against Latinos in virtue of a government-created hysteria about (Mexican/Latino) immigrants and immigration. We call this particular selling of ideas corporate mestizaje, not because we think this is a bonafide case of social or cultural syncretism, but because we want to call attention to a specific pattern where those doing advertising for US companies combine seemingly benign aspects of American and Latin American cultures in their selling of specific products (cars, food items, etc.). As an illustration, we offer the advertisement for a beer introduced by Miller Company in 2007, which used a particular kind of English-Spanish hybridity to market its new product. Though we only discuss this one example, we would like to call attention to the fact that this has been done pretty consistently during the last decade or so, as we have repeatedly witnessed the peddling of consumable “hybrid” images for the mainstream audiences.

Miller’s New Hybrid Beer

Milwaukee-based Miller Brewing. Co. has long been associated with white blue-collar America and sales have been declining for the past few decades. To reverse sagging beer sales, Miller decided to go “south of the border” to find inspiration for their new light beer called “Miller Chill” (Kesmodel, 2007). This lime and salt flavored beer was introduced in a television advertisement campaign called “Se Habla Chill” (translated as “We Speak Chill”). The “Miller Chill” beer was advertised as “an American take on the Mexican ‘chelada’” (translated as the cold one). The “chelada” emerged as a popular drink in Mexican beach resorts in the 1960s and it consists of beer, lime, salt, and ice in a salt-rimmed glass. According to one Miller spokesperson, “We call it a modern American take on a Mexican classic” (Lentini, 2007). Miller Chill was packaged in a lime green bottle with words “Inspired by a Mexican recipe with lime & salt” on the top, followed by green and silver modular Aztec-like design in the middle” with word “Chill” in bold letters, and “Chelada style” words at the bottom. One television commercial featured a close-up of the green bottle with bright colors and Latin music in the background. The Spanglish narration included such mock Spanish phrases as “Beerveza,” “It’s Muy Refreshing,” or “Viva Refreshment.” The Miller web site (www.millerchill.com) described the “hybrid” dimension of this new beer: “Refreshment takes on a whole new meaning south-of-the-border where the sun burns HOTTER and LONGER; where heat creeps into EVERYTHING from food to music to nightlife….Inspired by a Mexican recipe. Miller Chill is a unique, refreshing fusion of two cultures per 12oz serving.”

The Miller Chill advertising campaign uses the trope of “tropicalization” that refers to stereotypical Latino images, music, and characteristics that are defined as “tropical” and associated with representations of hotness, exotic, wild, and passionate peoples/things (Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman, 1997). Building upon Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism,” Frances Aparicio and Susan Chavez-Silverman (1997) argue that “tropicalization” is formulated from an Anglo dominant perspective, it homogenizes culture to construct a “mythic idea of Latinidad based on….projections of fear.” (8). The bright colors, salsa music, and tropical fruit are “tropicalizing” references associated with Miller Chill’s “Beerveza” made with an “unexpected twist” and “brewed for a new level of refreshment.” In addition, when the website pitches their new beer as “unique, refreshing fusion of two cultures” it is combining a “traditional Mexican style” recipe with low-calorie beer to construct a “happy hybridity” discourse that appeals to mainstream consumers.

The problem with this particular celebration of “hybridity” has to do with its disengagement from reality. For instance, although we could interpret the use of English and Spanish along with the specific allusions to Mexico as a step toward acknowledging the long (if torturous) relationship between that country and the US, or the crossing over boundaries of specific cultural artifacts, we must keep in mind that this type of hybridity is not meant to extend beyond the advertising campaign. That is, we could argue that immigrant behavior does the same thing creating a hybridity in defying two nation states by simply crossing the border between them. But, we would be ignoring how the nation state has continued to intervene in the lives of migrants through surveillance, legislation, militarization, arrests, detention, and deportation. Moreover, the “fusion” of American and Mexican cultures as reflected in the new Miller Chill beer campaign is less an example of hybridity (cultural, social, or political) and more an example of market forces dictating trends in beer consumption based on perceived notions about consumer preference via the appropriation of certain cultural elements. As Miller’s chief marketing officer observed, “There’s clearly a move toward Latinization if you’ve been watching the American consumer” (Kesmodel, 2007).

We must also point out, that although we see this type of marketing campaign as directed to mainstream audiences, Latinos also watch and witness how these advertisements are seeking to peddle certain cultural elements associated with them. In fact, Latinos and Latinas are not passive consumers of marketing campaigns, and have had a long tradition of organized boycotts against products and social actors that promote anti-Latino agendas. In 2006, when immigrant rights activists in Chicago discovered that Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, author of the anti-immigrant bill, HR 4437 received political contributions from Miller Beer they threatened a national boycott of Miller beer products. Almost immediately, Miller conceded to organizers’ demands and put out a one page ad in a Spanish language newspaper proclaiming their opposition to HR 4437 and pledged their “support for the Hispanic community and the rights of immigrants” (Navarette, 2006). Although Miller was more concerned about declining profits than becoming a pro-immigrant company, organizers took advantage of this political moment to fight anti-immigration legislation but also proclaim that market inclusion should translate into political inclusion.

Conclusion: The Corporate Hybrid in Perspective

Corporate America has used a Latino hybrid trope to reach mainstream audiences and consumers, but this “cultural inclusion” has meant material exclusion for the large number of Latinos and Latinas. More to the point, mainstream America seems more at ease with “south of the border” things than people, as long as these things appear in and stay confined to their television, their films, and their advertisements. Corporate Mestizaje is an insidious practice that creates and deploys commercials like those of the Miller Chill, turning them into tools to ease the insecurities and fears of mainstream culture about an impending Latinization of the United States. However, the marketing of Latinidad has not effectively addressed the underprivileged circumstances of Latinos/as. In the end, these types of commercials say nothing about Latinos and everything about mainstream U.S. culture. After all, an accessible and re-imagined mestiza Latino/a “culture” (one without the reality of Latino/a people) is definitely more titillating and certainly less frightening. Jarabe de Palo’s lyrics in the opening epigraph become an ominous means of marketing, “there’s no future in purity,” and corporate America is cashing in on that.

Works Cited

Aparicio, Frances and Susana Chavez-Silverman. Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. Hanover, CT: University Press of New England, 1997.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture.  New York: Routledge, 1994.

Colker, Ruth. Hybrid: Bisexuals, Multiracials, and other Misfits under American Law. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Dávila, Arlene. 2001. Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: University of California Press.

García Canclini, Nestor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Jarabe de Palo. 2001. “En lo puro no hay future.” De Vuelta y Vuelta. Emi Latin.

Kesmodel, David. “Miller asks, ‘Se Habla Chill?’ to keep U.S. Market Hopping; Brewer Hopes Lager With a Mexican Twist Can End Sales Slump.” Wall Street Journal. 12 Jan. 2007: B31.

Lentini, Nina. “Miller Draws Outside the Lines with New ‘Chill.” Media Post Publications. 9 Feb. 2007. 2 July, 2007. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=55265

McClain DaCosta, Kimberly.“Selling Mixedness: Marketing with Multiracial Identities.” Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the Color Blind Era. Ed. David Brunsma. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006.

Navarette, Ruben. “Immigration Issue Brews Beer.” Hispanic Trends. June 2006: 35.

Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006

US Census. 2012. “Hispanic Origin.” http://www.census.gov/population/hispanic/data/2012.html.

Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. Her research focuses on Latinos in the US, “the War on Terror,” and the representation of Latinas/os and other minorities in popular culture.  José Alamillo is a Professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Channel Islands. Dr. Alamillo’s research focuses on the ways Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans have used culture, leisure, and sports to build community and social networks to advance politically and economically in the United States. His current research project includes a transnational history of Mexican Americans in sports and the commercialization of Cinco de Mayo during the 20th century.