Between Logocentrism and Lococentrism: Alambrista Challenges to Traditional Theology PDF

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Between Logocentrism and Lococentrism: Alambrista Challenges to Traditional Theology* Devaka Premawardhana Harvard University “Olhe, um terrorista!” yelled the construction worker as I passed. I was living in 6DOYDGRU%UD]LOZKHUHHLJKW\SHUFHQWRIWKHSRSXODWLRQLGHQWLÀHVDVVRPHWKLQJ other than...

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Between Logocentrism and Lococentrism: Alambrista Challenges to Traditional Theology Devaka Premawardhana Harvard Theological Review

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Between Logocentrism and Lococentrism: Alambrista Challenges to Traditional Theology* Devaka Premawardhana Harvard University

“Olhe, um terrorista!” yelled the construction worker as I passed. I was living in 6DOYDGRU%UD]LOZKHUHHLJKW\SHUFHQWRIWKHSRSXODWLRQLGHQWLÀHVDVVRPHWKLQJ other than white. Though not sharing the same ancestry as my neighbors, I never, as a moreno (brown-skinned person), stood out to them as different. Yet to the man who pointed me out that day, I did. He apparently had been watching the news: another round of Arab men arrested on suspicion of plotting a terror attack. It was a small moment, an aberration amidst the abundance of hospitality I was enjoying in a country not my own. Born in Sri Lanka and raised in the United States, I chose to move to Brazil mainly for personal enrichment—to study and practice liberation theology in a land regarded as one of its homes. With so varied and privileged a background, I saw myself as something of a supra-cultural globetrotter, immune to other peoples’ limitations of cultural and national identity. Whenever crossing what others referred to as borders, I rarely ceased to feel centered. Yet that day—the day I was labeled a terrorist—I suffered something of the migrant’s anguish, the de-centering humiliation that typically accompanies the border crosser. The alambrista’s anguish is far more devastating and far more regular an occurrence. “Look, an illegal!”1 In the United States, undocumented immigrants *  , ÀUVW SUHVHQWHG DQ HDUO\ GUDIW RI WKLV SDSHU LQ 2FWREHU  LQ D VHPLQDU FRXUVH WLWOHG “Borderlands,” taught by Michael Jackson and Davíd Carrasco at Harvard Divinity School. I wish to thank to them and seminar colleagues for their helpful feedback. 1 The Spanish word alambrista comes from the stem alambre, which means “wire.” Alambrista, therefore, connotes a high-wire walker, but it also carries the same pejorative force as the label, “illegal.” For an extended discussion on the nuances of its meaning, see Cordelia Candelaria, “Tightrope Walking the Border: Alambrista and the Acrobatics of Mestizo Representation,” Alambrista and the

HTR 101:3–4 (2008) 399–416

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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

from south of the U.S.-Mexico border live and die in fear of that utterance. Their experiences of hardship and exploitation are movingly portrayed in the documentary ÀOP Alambrista: The Director’s Cut. Produced by Davíd Carrasco and released in WKHGLUHFWRU·VFXWLVDPRGLÀHGUHUHOHDVHRIWKHRULJLQDOSURGXFWLRQE\ 5REHUW0...