Celebrations of Sacrificial Citizenship and Our Lady of Guadalupe: A rhetorical appeal to Mother Mary as empowering the Latino community in the arts.

10:30am-12pm

Presenter: Alex Holguin

Session Type: Panel Discussion

Topic: Identities and intersectionality

Recording

Description

What does it mean to “be” Latino? A popular resurgence of celebrating Latinx identity appears around familiar tropes: citizenship, inclusion, and protection. The drive to become a citizen for migratory refugees, the refutation that one’s appearance marks them as an outsider to be feared, and even the Latino/Latinx debate fixate around these tropes. The act of being included, protected, and marked as safe drives Latinos ever onward towards being a part of a political reality that promises freedom and liberation from tyranny whilst maintaining a system of violent exclusion. Annual discussions about the political “nature” of Latinos voting conservatively/liberally fail to take in the diverse nature of a diverse culture. Prior to the 2016 election Latino/Hispanic persons were opting, instead and in large waves, as Indigenous persons by reconnecting with their ancestral pasts. As of 2020, Latino/Hispanic persons were choosing to forfeit their ethnic signification by identifying as White in a cultural moment that was glorifying whiteness. Celebrations of Latino performance(s) in popular media are heralded as achievements in media diversity, but the same rhetoric and systems of power (such as the ever-increasing population of separated families at the border) hold firmly against them. For migratory people (or folks labeled as such) hoping to find a house to call a home, one is reminded of a quote from the late Dr. Martin Luther King: “I fear I am integrating my people into a burning house.” For any true hope to be realized it is imperative that we revisit the cultural conversation of why one does what they do.
At a time where critical inquiries of Latino identity converge around paradoxical items, reflecting on how popular symbols set within the imaginary of

Latin culture that help bind the community towards one another can reveal different motivations for action. One such symbol that hangs prominently within the Latino imaginary is the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Considering the widespread Christian (namely Catholic) influence across the Americas, the Marian image communicates a message of hope, love, and cultural pride for Latinos everywhere. Revisiting this symbol can invite conversation regarding what it means to “be” Latino itself; drawing a metaphorical linkage between the plights of brown-skinned pregnant mothers fleeing across borders from persecution to protect life as an act of radical love would appear to be an analogy quite common to the Latino imaginary – whether it was intimately experienced or not. By contrasting one’s spiritual citizenship as a refugee filled with hope, and one’s political citizenship as an ultimate designation of what makes one whole in a country of racial terror, this presentation will offer different ways of being and belonging that do and don’t include political citizenship for imagining Latino culture that include religious spirituality, ancestral Indigeneity/African ancestral honoring, the formation and inclusion of non-political organizations, examples in media, and the careful approach to citizenship that stewards a love for ourselves and others.

Facilitator

Alex Holguin

Ph.D. Student

Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh

ajh195@pitt.edu

Alex Holguin is an Indigenous Latino (Peruvian-Incan) instructor of public speaking and argument in the department of communication at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also seeking his doctorate in communication with concentrations in psychoanalysis and Christian studies. He is also the founder of Seminar Trinity, a free virtual resource for networking and the cultivation of religious psychodynamic criticism.