Since its inception, decolonial scholarship has always been intentionally interdisciplinary, refusing to conform to the dichotomous and hierarchical logics of the Western academy. So it is with special appreciation that we receive Annmarie Caño’s response to Re-membering the Reign of God. As a scholar of psychology and former administrator in higher education, Caño brings a unique perspective to our theological project and the ecclesial praxis of the CEBs, focusing on the nature of decolonial scholarship, personal transformation, and liberative leadership. Her essay coalesces around a series of challenging questions, the full scope of which exceed the bounds of this venue. We see three main themes emerging from her various lines of inquiry and we will do our best to humbly address each of them in conversation with our own reflections on the nature of academic scholarship and the (im?)possibilities of decoloniality in higher education.

The first theme that we’d like to lift up from Caño’s essay emerges from questions that she raises about the nature of decolonial scholarship. Stating that our project “breaks the rules” of traditional scholarship by recognizing the people of the CEBs as “the agentic subjects that they have always been,” Caño wonders how other scholars might similarly “break the rules.” One difficulty in responding to this question lies in our own ambivalence around the extent to which we have actually broken the rules of traditional theological scholarship. On the one hand, yes, we have centered, listened to, and learned from the voices, experiences, and narratives of marginal ecclesial communities that have been invisibilized by the colonial power structures of the church and academy. Part I of the book, especially with its unique format patterned after the sacred texts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, certainly breaks the mold of “traditional scholarship.” On the other hand, as much as we have tried to avoid this, the rules of the academy have still placed us as scholars in the position of “authority” on the coloniality/decoloniality of the Salvadoran church, the CEBs, their theological reflection, and their ecclesial praxis. The constraints of time and the exigencies of the tenure clock, graduate program requirements, and daily life prevented us from taking the time and care that might have allowed for even greater delinking from the academic rules of coloniality through more sustained and direct dialogue with members of the CEBs as we prepared our manuscript. The rules of the academy also required that we engage other, more academically “legitimate” primary and scholarly sources, such as the Roman Catholic ecclesial tradition (e.g., Vatican documents and Canon Law) and the “cutting edge” work of interdisciplinary decolonial scholars whose work may contain great insights about coloniality/decoloniality, but which is also full of convoluted arguments, opaque jargon, and theoretical abstractions that are not always grounded in the lived reality of everyday people on the underside of modernity/coloniality.

While we do see some value in engaging these sources (having written tens of thousands of words that do so!), we also wonder how far scholarly transgression is allowed to go within the bounds of the academy. Is there room in Catholic theology for critical reflection that does not require at least some elements of conversation with such a thoroughly colonial tradition? Is academic theology simply a much smaller part of Catholic traditioning than theologians might want to admit, i.e., are the knowledge ways and sources of academic theology too limited to speak for the entirety of Catholic faith and belief? Is there room in the humanities or social sciences more broadly to center marginalized voices and experiences without finding ways to “fit” them into whatever theoretical mold might be en vogue at the moment? Again, it’s not that we haven’t learned a great deal from placing the CEBs in conversation with decolonial scholarship, but we do feel some discomfort around patting ourselves on the back for “breaking the rules.” This discomfort is furthered by the relative security that we as white North American scholars have had in our professional trajectories. While Liz was untenured and Laurel was applying for doctoral programs when we embarked on this project in 2017, the unconventional nature of our partnership and transgressive nature of our theological method were mitigated by our white privilege. There is a tendency in the academy for white scholars to receive praise and professional favor for “breaking the rules,” whereas scholars of color might have their scholarly legitimacy questioned for doing so. Again, these misgivings are by no means intended to call into question our entire project—we stand by our work! However, we do want to avoid any easy slippage into unambiguous self-satisfaction. So in response to Caño’s question about our advice for scholars similarly wishing to break the rules, our first thought is to never neglect a healthy dose of self-critique. We’re not suggesting that we all bury ourselves in guilt or that we practice intellectual self-flagellation. But we do think that all academics should constantly engage in a realistic reckoning with what’s actually possible in the academy, the distance between what appears on the published page and what is actually la realidad of marginalized communities, along with the limited and fallible (im)possibilities of decoloniality within the institutions that were designed to serve the perpetuation of coloniality in the world today. Caño also points to this need for self-critique in her emphasis on the ongoing nature of conversion and the role that examination of conscience plays in delinking from coloniality and all that stands in the way of love’s embodiment in the world.

Our misgivings about providing decolonial scholarly advice, therefore, are not unrelated to Caño’s questions around conversion and the sustainability of decolonial witness. She asks specifically about how the process of conversion plays out among members of the CEBs, particularly with regards to those members of the communities who “fall away.” While Caño rightly notes that Salvadoran CEBs have experienced membership decline in recent decades, it is not necessarily the case that folks who no longer participate in the ecclesial life of the CEBs are no longer animated by the process of decolonial conscientization and conversion that brought them to the CEBs in the first place. The CEBs are by no means the only site of decolonial witness afoot in El Salvador today and faith communities in general are no longer at the heart of social movements in El Salvador (or anywhere in the world at this point!). For example, in our response to Rufus Burnett, we highlight the work of Afrodescendientes Organizados Salvadoreños (AFROOS), which is a network of Salvadorans who are reclaiming their identity, culture, and dignity as Afro-descendant. Former CEB members may be involved in these other community-based forms of resistance to oppression or reclamation of human dignity and ancestral heritage. We don’t have data on whether former CEB members are actively involved in other decolonizing activities or not. Our point here is simply that the CEBs represent just a small fraction of decolonial praxis in El Salvador and that ongoing conversion may mean shifting the locus and/or focus of one’s energies from a Christian community to other modes of delinking and embodying alternative worlds. While the sustainability of decolonial commitment might be questionable for any given person (in the CEBs or elsewhere), and while decolonial movements may ebb and flow over time, decolonial witness has been a constant thread woven throughout the past 500+ years of coloniality in Latin America and beyond. The sustainability of decoloniality is rooted not in sustainable membership in any given community or organization, but rather in the yearning for freedom and dignity that is located deep within the human spirit across time and space.

The final question from Caño’s essay that we’d like to address has to do with our own experience of transformation in relation to this scholarly project. She concludes with this query: “How has engaging in this scholarship for an-other world together and with the CEBs transformed the authors themselves? How might scholars build communities in which there is the spaciousness and safety to experience the prophetic: emotions, critical reflection, and transformation?” Caño’s second question here is directly related to the first, for it is only in and through community that human transformation takes place. Long before the formal scholarship that went into this project, it was the CEBs that transformed both of us by welcoming us into their spacious, loving, and prophetic communities at deeply formative times in our lives. Furthermore, our own small community of two—as friends, colleagues, and co-authors—has been transformative in its own right. Whereas scholarly pursuits in the humanities are traditionally individualistic and can often encourage emotional distancing from one’s interlocutors, our shared work was deeply relational, dialogical, and even emotional. We shared a relational orientation to the CEBs and to our own work together that made this project profoundly personal. We arrived at lines of critical argumentation in conversation with one another and bounced them off of our friends and colleagues in El Salvador. We felt many of the highs and lows of scholarly enthusiasm and dejection together, and sometimes we relied on one or the other of us to pick up the slack and rally our forces in the face of fatigue, COVID chaos, family struggles, and other looming academic deadlines. Our experience throughout this process points to the need for mutuality and shared vulnerability as human beings first, not just as scholars, if we are going to build communities where there is “spaciousness and safety to experience the prophetic.” Higher education makes building such communities challenging, given the nature of the tenure system, cultures of competition and productivity, administrative ambitions and burdens, and the day-to-day circus of just keeping up with teaching, grading, committee work, conferences, etc. Annmarie’s own work in liberative academic leadership, therefore, is needed now more than ever as a guidepost for carving out such spaces in the midst of institutions that were not designed for interdependence, let alone shared vulnerability. Her inclusion of emotion and transformation in her question to us points directly to the kind of communities that we all need to flourish, to care for ourselves and one another well, and to do our best work as scholars. We are not just minds who engage in critical reflection. We are whole persons for whom emotions and transformative processes are constantly swirling inside and around us, with the potential to permeate our work in ways that open up our imaginations to the possibilities and presence of an-other world already in our midst.

Neto Valiente has been such an important thought partner, teacher, and colleague for us, especially during the development of what has become Re-membering. Though he amicably holds liberation and decolonial approaches to theology together in this response, we admire his devotion to the first generation of Latin American liberation theologians—Gutiérrez, Ellacu, Sobrino, the Boffs—and his insistence that our field do justice to their proposals. It is easy to critique the theological reflection of twentieth-century Catholic priests trained in Europe, but Valiente holds vigil against overlooking them too briefly in the turn to more contemporary discourse.

As he rightly observes, “you can find numerous contemporary proponents of feminist, queer, Indigenous and Afro-descendant theologies who acknowledge the important legacy of the first generation of Latin American liberation theologians even though their lens would prove insufficient.” We want to emphasize this point and state it in a couple different ways. Whereas many survey courses of contemporary systematic theology might end with Gutiérrez, Sobrino, or the Boff brothers, these authors are the starting point for many decolonial, queer, and interreligious approaches. Put another way, the irruption of liberation theology into theological method broadly is one of the hinges that opens the field toward possibilities of reflection on experiences of Spirit that can move past the impasse of, on the one hand, fidelity to the histories of doctrinal formulations and, on the other, the vital needs of Creation.

Que conste: This isn’t to say that these theologians made it possible for damnés and pobres to resist coloniality and oppression. Resistance to and survival of the colonial project has been evident since the beginning in, for example, armed opposition to European military might, religious and cultural syncretism, and the artesanía of our continent that tells stories beyond colonial forms. What liberation theology did was to delink a first, vital node of Christianity’s attachment to coloniality. Liberation theology changed theologians to be able to see Spirit at work beyond normative Christian religiocentrism.

Where we also agree with Valiente—and what we would also like to emphasize in his response—is that liberation theology, as hinge, does not lay every brick on the path forward. These clerical, male voices do still control the conversation (particularly in Salvadoran Catholic theology) and the lack of translations of contemporary Latin American theologians and practitioners gives the impression that the subcontinent’s articulation of liberation theology stalled out in the 1980s amid Vatican Instructions and Notifications. This is why the story needs to be stretched. While the path from liberation to decoloniality that we trace out in the book is largely continuous—as we understand the CEBs’ own processes to be—it’s a necessary methodological splintering that reflects something closer to real about matrices of oppression and spiderwebs of resistance.

A different path forward from first generation Latin American liberation theology could be an oppression olympics: if material poverty isn’t the singular, once-and-for-all key to unlocking the victoria final, as history has shown, then maybe gender is the fundamental oppression, or race, or sexuality, or ability, or, or, or. This approach caricatures and commodifies different theological epistemologies—presenting them as monolithic and valuing them in direct relationship to their suffering—and pits them against each other, searching for the pure perspective of the ultimate victim, one whose body receives the sin of the world and can save us from it, almost gnostically, with the right knowledge, or Pelagianly, with the perfect ethic.

Instead, we see the decolonial critique as one that holds real difference in tension instead of pitting difference against itself in a zero-sum game. For decolonial theological reflections, there can be no chasing purity, no claims to a victoria final, no glory at the cost of another. Rather, part of what we find to be essential in the decolonial approach is the preservation of particularity, instead of its obliteration or hierarchization. As decolonial feminist María Lugones says, in her critique of both hegemonic feminisms and decolonial scholarship that ignores patriarchy, “I understand the indifference to violence against women in our communities as an indifference to profound social transformations to communal structures and, as such, totally relevant to the rejection of colonial imposition.”1 For Lugones, it’s not that resisting patriarchy is more urgent than resisting colonial market structures; it’s that if we don’t grasp these two dynamics as intertwined and mutually informing, our understanding and resistance is meaningfully off, at the cost of life.

To move past the first generation of Latin American liberation theologians, then, is a vital task. It is to accept that the horizons within which they saw-judged-acted fell short of reality: Their grasp of culture, especially Afro-descendancy and Indigeneity; of women, gender and sexuality; of family and more-than-human creation; of embodiment and subjectivity itself remained “mired in the muck” of Eurocentric colonial imposition. When we seek to expand those horizons, then, our reflections change meaningfully—it’s not the same theology. And yet, we maintain, it’s not discontinuous.

If anything, the good news we wanted to pass along in this book is that the work is still underway (if a tree screams in Spanish as it falls among scholars of theology, does it make a sound?). The legacy of Latin American liberation theology is irreducible to its shortcomings, and we are grateful for Valiente’s warm acogida of the book’s methodological proposal.

—

Speaking of shortcomings, a postscript: we are sorry to report, in a necessary appendix to the Letters from the Hierarchy in Part I of the book that, indeed, the enduringly colonial structures of the Catholic church are once again ascendant in El Salvador. Our and Valiente’s ecclesiological optimism is not for the faint of heart. As we write this response in month 28 of President Nayib Bukele’s resoundingly popular “state of ‘exception,'” the Salvadoran hierarchy has not spoken out against the imprisonment of tens of thousands of the country’s citizens; the death of hundreds of detainees in overcrowded prisons; the lack of due process, the restriction of civil rights, and militarization of domestic territory; or the arrest and mistreatment of minors by the police and the army.

One of the country’s CEBs, on the other hand, weeks after the state of exception was implemented in March 2022, responded to the mass arrest of non-gang members in their community. Thirteen families gathered in their worship space to tell what had happened to their sons, brothers, and partners, and accompanying these families has become this CEB’s central ministry. They’ve worked with journalists, local human rights groups, international actors, and other communities to demand the release of their family members and end the state of exception. It’s difficult to communicate just how much this pastoral response to the crisis was not inevitable; the Bukele administration continues to arrest its opponents and target dissenters, and it has taken a tremendous amount of courage for these families and pastoral leaders to take this public-facing stand.

We share this update in order to temper the temptation to tie up the story of competing Salvadoran ecclesiologies on too naively hopeful of a note. To say that “an ‘other’ church is truly possible” shouldn’t assume its inevitability or function to endlessly postpone a reckoning, as Valiente points out at the end of his response. We also can’t comment on this book in 2024 without accounting for the sweeping changes that have transformed Salvadoran politics in the years since this manuscript was completed. A book is necessarily a calcification; a fossil as soon as it is printed, and we remember that the CEBs’ story is a living text.

Judith Gruber’s response to Re-membering has challenged us to look back at this book almost topographically, thinking about the project as a whole. We understand her primary concern to be that the theology we read out of the CEBs’ own expression is not sufficiently ambiguous to achieve decolonial effect and in fact reinscribes totalizing concepts of salvation and transcendence that disallow for historical, multiple, and even contradictory flashes of liberation to emerge. She identifies this as a “deductive approach,” in that we, and sometimes CEB members, take the terms of Christian theology as prior categories for interpreting the CEBs’ ecclesial praxis. This approach does a disservice to decolonial scholarship, in that we are simply replacing the totalizing, colonial articulation of Christianity with another gloss—one that we deem to be “correct”—that functions in a similarly ahistorical and exclusive way.

We would like to offer a clarification about our research and methods for writing this book before thinking through Gruber’s central critique more directly. At several points in her response, Gruber describes the project as an “ethnographic reconstruction” or a “theological ethnography,” drawing on “ethnographic data.” We were surprised to hear the work described this way, since we did not conduct any original qualitative research for this book, and we do not understand it to be an ethnographic project. As we say in the introduction, “[. . .] this book is not a historical, sociological, anthropological, or ethnographic study of the CEBs. Rather, it is an attempt at decolonial theological reflection on the reign of God and the church of lxs pobres in conversation with the base communities as our principal source of theological wisdom” (16). We understand the CEBs to be making explicitly theological claims, a conscious and systematic reflection on their own experience. Our role, then, is not primarily to document and make meaning of the CEBs’ lived religion, but rather to evaluate their own explicit theological claims in comparison to both broader Catholic tradition and decolonial theory. This is why Part I stands apart from our own analysis: we needed to first translate and present how the CEBs’ own theological reflection has developed before engaging it as text.

That being said, upon reflection, we realize that there is a significant amount of what might be considered subjective or qualitative analysis—even “ethnography”—happening under the radar in traditional scholarship on, say, canonical primary texts like the Summa theologica or Theological Investigations. When introducing Thomas Aquinas, for one, scholars contextualize his work by recalling signs of his times: the growth of European cathedral schools and universities, the emergence of the urban middle class and the mendicant orders, and the recovery of Aristotle from the Muslim world mediated by the religio-political violence of the Crusades. This historical and ecclesial context is necessary to appreciate Aquinas’s contribution to Christian theology—the novelty of his method, the conversations to which he contributed, and the ways that his work challenged and provoked other theological and doctrinal impulses of his time.

Is this contextualizing work ethnographic? Certainly not in the sense of real-time participant observation or recorded interviews with the Angelic Doctor and his contemporaries, but how much of our field’s representation of the lived religion and medieval culture that influenced Aquinas’s theology is a subjective result of contemporary scholars’ own interests, agenda, and personal stake in Christian tradition? Good historical theologians do, in a sense, live with their author’s times and places; they become inculturated to medieval Paris, or fourth-century Cappadocia, or first-century Corinth (admittedly, without ever really inhabiting those times as a subject who is unaware of nuclear proliferation or feminism). But we can’t claim to interpret the past objectively just because it can’t speak back.

Similarly, Rahner scholars’ eyes glimmer with something close to friendship when they tease about his convoluted sentences being easier to read in the original German. Even more to the point, Louis Roberts’s “Introduction” to The Achievement of Karl Rahner reads as if composed from field notes dutifully recorded after a long day of participant observation at Innsbruck: “Karl Rahner is a nervous man. When he lectures, he paces up and down the platform or traverses the length of a side wall. His eyes seem to peer beyond his listeners, and they squint a little bit through his glasses. He had the habit of playing with the long green drapes on the windows of his lecture hall . . . While talking he may stop and stare several seconds at light patterns formed by the sun streaming through a windowpane. He cannot be motionless for any length of time.” Then, too, the attempt at meaning-making: “This constant activity perhaps overflows from the constant cerebration of this theologian [. . .].”1

Is Roberts’s causal link between Rahner’s intellectual activity and his restlessness true? Might another observer attribute playing with the long, green drapes, for example, to stimming or compulsion? Is his restlessness a sign of anxiety? Did Rahner receive bad news from a family member or a mistress on the day of this observation that has him in a heightened state? Or does Rahner’s reputation and status limit the possibilities of Roberts’s meaning making? Is Roberts painting too rosy a picture of his subject in an effort to further legitimate and reify Rahner’s theological work? Why didn’t he ask Rahner directly instead of making such assumptions?

If theological scholarship on Aquinas and Rahner is subject to such interrogation, then perhaps we shouldn’t claim our exception; Gruber is likely correct that Re-membering is ethnographic. We did not conduct interviews, produce and analyze field notes of participant observation, hold focus groups, or conduct surveys. We did, however, make translation choices while working with interdisciplinary sources about twentieth-century El Salvador, including previously published qualitative projects and theologically relevant works produced by individuals and collectives that belong to the CEBs: pedagogical pamphlets, song lyrics, community histories, museum exhibits, press releases, letters, homilies, reflections, and poems. We ordered and edited these translations, excised selections from larger works that we thought represented inflection moments in the CEBs’ own self-understanding or theological expression, and typeset them in Part I of the book to suggest revelatory significance. We then took off our translating and editing hats and put on our theological reflection hats to read these translated texts and other similar sources as inputs for our own reflective work comparing the CEBs’ expressions of Christianity to possibilities for decolonizing the tradition. Perhaps most significantly, we produced this work in relationship and conversation with the subjects of these texts. There is a big Liz-and-Laurel filter on this book.

This reflection puts a fine point on a question for further discussion: what theology isn’t ethnographic?

Musings on ethnography are relevant preamble to Gruber’s main critique: that the theology either emerging from or explicitly articulated in the “texts” presented in Part I of the book uses Christian language to draw the bounds of what might be considered relevant praxis and then calls this praxis “decolonial” despite reinscribing coercively singular and ahistorical meanings. Gruber cites Sarah Pinnock’s observation that some twentieth-century scholars are keen to “purify” theology from complicity in coloniality by seeking an “authentic” or correct form of Christianity and demonstrating its abysmal difference from colonial articulations. We are reminded, too, of Joseph Drexler-Dreis’s similar critique of a “conversion as decoloniality” type of theologies that assert that “a wrong form of Christian theology has contributed to coloniality and it is theologians’ task to offer a correct theology.”2

What we see in the CEBs’ own theological reflection is that traditional Christian categories, like el reino de Dios, can be a helpful (but by no means exclusive) source, in the Salvadoran CEBs’ diverse and particular local and historical contexts, for delinking from the different nodes of control of the colonial matrix of power that they experience. It is precisely in their engagement with the Christian tradition that they find a path beyond even (or maybe especially) the enduring ecclesiastical and religious controls of coloniality. Our interest in demonstrating this is not to justify holding Christianity beyond reproach, but rather to learn how to better do decoloniality: at least in the case of the Salvadoran CEBs, terms and practices rooted in Christian tradition function meaningfully to oppose coloniality in the CEBs’ contexts and move toward alternative realities.

Gruber’s example of such a reified category is Re-membering‘s account of the “reign of God,” which she sees as ahistorical/deductive, binary/dialectical, and utopian/transcendent—carving out “a pure space of the sacred, in which those who are considered as saved participate—and from which, conversely, the damned are excluded.” Evidence for this comes from Chapter One of Part II, where in the wake of describing Ignacio Ellacuría’s understanding of the church of the poor as historical sacrament of the reign of God, we quote a conference presentation by Tere, a member of an urban CEB, on the relationship of the CEBs to the broader Church and, ultimately, the reign of God. She says, in full,

To speak of the church of los pobres is to speak of a church without structures of power; it is to speak from the place of the last and the least, of those who don’t count, of the marginalized and excluded by the market system. To speak of the church of los pobres is to detach ourselves from power structures and go back to the option for los pobres in accordance with the gospel of Jesús. In the CEBs we try and we want to follow the example of the first Christian communities, where we all see each other as equals and we all share the same utopia of the reign of God among us (204).

It is right for Gruber to bristle at this paragraph. Really, “we all share the same utopia”?? Is there just one utopia, and how is it enforced? Does Tere’s community’s abstract idea of utopia really account for all of the liberatory needs of all creatures everywhere? Were Jesus or the first Christian communities able to articulate such a vision, from their own cultural or historical particularities? Can we even get back to what they really meant or proposed?

The answers to these questions are, of course, no. And taken in context of the rest of the book, Tere’s particular formulations are the exception to the rule—an ambiguous attempt to articulate something hoped-for that is not yet fully available. In reality, Tere’s own community lives out their commitment to the reign of God in concrete, historical, immediate actions. They practice mutual-aid food distribution in their urban neighborhood. They are also one of the CEBs in the country that most actively interrogates colonial controls of gender and sexuality in response to their children’s and friends’ own self-expression. It’s worth noting, too, that at the same symposium where Tere presented her ideas about the reign of God, the group of CEB leaders of which she was part affirmed that the work of the church of lxs pobres, outside of the normative structures of colonial power, does not seek to damn anyone to exclusion:

[. . .] the reign of God is a gift of grace, not a reward for those who strive to merit its blessings. María Elena points this out, arguing that it is not as if the organized struggles of the CEBs and of other grassroots movements for justice are carried out for the sake of themselves or their families and communities alone. To the contrary, the CEBs take their cues from their martyrs, who struggled for the sake of justice and peace for the whole Salvadoran people and for future generations. Chamba, a grassroots musician and community leader from the Bajo Lempa, stresses this point with an example, indicating that if the CEBs win in their collective struggles against the privatization of water, or for food sovereignty, the results would be for the good of the whole community and the whole country—for everyone! (200)

That is, the CEBs know that the dialectical, us-versus-them approach is a false dichotomy. They do not oppose the privatization of water or promote food sovereignty or confront their own internalized heterosexism when their children come out as queer in order to be in the right or to earn salvation. They say yes to their own concrete, historical praxes that resist coloniality in imperfect and partial ways because they believe that all creatures, radically including themselves, are beloved and deserve life abundant.

There is something, however, that seems worth preserving and grappling with in Tere’s vision for an alternative church and her fidelity to the “reign of God.” Tere is aware that different CEBs live out their concrete commitment to this shared hope differently in each local context and that non-Christian communities and movements are partners and accomplices in resisting “the market system” and “power structures.” What we hear her saying, then, isn’t a positive statement about what the “reign of God” is that is exclusively identified with her community’s praxis and abstracted from history, but rather an apophatic approximation of if it doesn’t resist or delink from coloniality, it doesn’t point toward the reign of God: a criterion that guides her community’s own discernment and action.

We see that naming this outside non-space allows Tere and her community to say yes when they perceive light shining through a crack in coloniality, however fleeting and intermittent. It’s a foothold, a material grip, a moment to point to that says these other worlds are already here among us. Upon reviewing the book in light of Gruber’s critique, there are some moments when the temptation to positivism or romanticism takes the upper hand. The sources themselves tend to tell their own stories from a hermeneutic of hope, and our rendering intends to give their gloss a chance; there are also constant reminders to undo our own meanings and interpretations (see the almost thirty pages before Tere’s quote). But this back and forth between deconstruction and constructive reinterpretation is the reality of these communities who are some of the only voices in the country denouncing, for example, the Bukele regime’s now fifteen-month state of “exception.”

This dispute points to a tension felt in the larger field of decolonial thought and praxis: how to vigilantly denounce and deconstruct colonial power, including our own impulses to hold onto something familiar, without stripping ourselves of resources for resistance and survival that our ancestors, martyrs, and friends have passed on to us. In the case of the CEBs, the Christian tradition is an ambiguous inheritance, as we have tried to describe in the book. What we are experimenting with here is how to parse out the delinking and the memoria histórica that respond to two sides of the ambiguity coin.

Ultimately, we suspect that the trick lies in the spacetime between “sacrament” and “utopia.” We affirm the CEBs as a sacrament of the reign of God, not as a utopian society rosily viewed from an academic perch. A sacrament points to a veiled reality, hinting at its impending presence, holding out hope for its revelation. It’s a sign, one that really does make present and active that which cannot be directly accessed in space-time, at least not yet. A sacrament that forever forestalls the reality to which it points is, as CEB members have said about some eucharistic celebrations in other (explicitly ethnographic) projects “anti-reino, vacía. Sin sentido.“3 Similarly anti-reino, we would add, is an unwillingness to recognize where life has spiraled up against all odds, holding open an-other possible future.

“The Government states that the Salvadoran population is not composed of groups with different racial characteristics and that, consequently, it cannot be maintained that there is discrimination based on race in the country. It is obvious that there is no black population in El Salvador, since it is the only country in Central America that does not have a coastline on the Caribbean Sea.”

—Statement of the Salvadoran Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 20051

“Si las poblaciones indígenas han sido invisibilizadas, nosotros que somos Afros hemos sido negados.” [If indigenous populations have been invisibilized, we who are Afros have been negated.]

—Wendy Morales, member of AFROOS2

“There is no black population in El Salvador.” Such is the prevailing racial mythology in El Salvador that exemplifies the ontological erasure located at the heart of anti-blackness, even as darker-skinned Salvadorans are faced with colorism and the stigma of being seen as and derogatorily called negro, prieto, and even mico (monkey).3 Whereas colonial and post-colonial state census categories once included a variety of nomenclatures for Afro-descendant peoples in El Salvador (albeit on the lower to lowest rungs of the racial hierarchy), state recognition of Afro-descendancy and self-identification as Afro-descendant nearly disappeared in the twentieth century. From colonial enslavement to twentieth-century erasure, racial oppression and the negation of blackness in El Salvador “led to many [darker-skinned] people seeking ways to whiten their skin and escape racial discrimination.”4 While similar trends are also evident in the trajectory of indigenous identities, with the term indio carrying nearly equal measure of derision, indigeneity was never fully negated in El Salvador. The same “colorblind” invisibilization of indigenous peoples as a racially distinct population was presented in the 2005 report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination by the Salvadoran Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, the report also echoed the popular sensibility that Salvadoran culture and identity are inflected with a deep sense of indigenous heritage, given that “El Salvador’s society was one in which the traditions, legends and customs recalling its indigenous past had survived, along with indigenous crafts and dances.”5 On the other hand, African heritage, whether biological and/or cultural, has been presumed to be non-existent. Not even the myth of multicultural mestizaje has held space for Afro-descendancy. As Wendy Morales of the Association of Organized Afro-descendants of El Salvador (AFROOS) states in the second epigraph above, “If indigenous populations have been invisibilized, we who are Afros have been negated.”6 This reality of cultural, biological, and ontological negation in Salvadoran society lends great credence to Jared Sexton’s statement that “Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space.”7 The Salvadoran people, even in the church of lxs pobres, are therefore woefully out of “touch” with their country’s history and contemporary realities of blackness and anti-blackness.

We are grateful for the invitation that Rufus Burnett has graciously issued to us as authors and to the CEBs as ecclesial communities, to get in “touch” with and embrace the gifts and challenges posed by black studies to the decolonial praxis of solidarity—both amongst the “dysselected” and between the dysselected and those who benefit from coloniality. A similar challenge issues forth from the enfleshed re-existence and practical wisdom embodied in the elders of African descent in El Salvador and young people of AFROOS, who seek to visibilize, accompany, and defend the human rights of the Afro-descendant population in Salvadoran society. As white North American theologians, these scholarly and practical challenges behoove us to reassess the coloniality of power both in the context of El Salvador, a place to which we have committed our hearts and minds, and in the context of the United States, where we live and work and teach theology. Burnett’s essay sets forth a scholarly and existential challenge that we will need to incorporate into our research trajectories and personal commitments for years to come. Given the limits of our own expertise and the scope of this response, we humbly set forth the following inconclusive reflections on two points that Burnett’s essay challenges us to rethink: the (im)possibilities of solidarity and the plasticity of human existence. The category of touch, which he highlights so beautifully in his essay, will carry through both of these points.

First, Burnett sets forth, primarily via Jared Sexton, the challenge that Afro-pessimism poses to solidarity amongst the dysselected, let alone between the dysselected and those of us who benefit from coloniality and anti-blackness. Burnett’s articulation of the Afro-pessimist argument posits the exceptionalism of racial slavery and anti-blackness as a) foundationally constitutive of the world and the human as we know them and b) disanalogous with other forms of oppression. As Burnett puts it, the abandonment and dereliction of blackness has “no analog within the hierarchy of the dysselected. Instead, racial slavery and thus anti-blackness is interpreted as a ground and means by which a hierarchy of the dysselected is made possible.” In this view, it is proximity to or distance from blackness that constitutes the structural dynamics of how dysselection impacts the ontological status and material fate of any given community or individual. The fundamental divide that must be overcome in order to unsettle the hierarchies, then, is not between whites and oppressed communities of color but between blacks and all non-blacks, including non-black people of color who oppose and abandon blackness. Our introductory reflections on the negation of blackness in the predominantly mestizo country of El Salvador lend some credence to this thesis.

Sexton’s work advocates a maximal theorization of (anti-black) racial slavery as the universally constitutive foundation of the modern world—a timeless and “interminable captivity” of past, present, and future. At the same time, Sexton names such timelessness as the basis for black life, for “freedom from the strictures of historical being as progress. That freedom, suffered in the form of enjoyment, or joy, is the real movement of movements, the free base. Get with it or succumb to the forces of mitigation that would change the world through a baseless coalition of a thousand tiny causes.”8 In comparison, Sylvia Wynter names blackness as the bottom rung or constitutive foundation of dysselection in the modern world, but she finds linkages between the “thousand tiny causes” of all those who are dysselected throughout time and space by the anti-black constitution of the human as the True Christian Self, as rational Man₁ of the Enlightenment, or as self-sufficient breadwinner Man₂ of neoliberal capitalism. Reading Burnett, Sexton, and Wynter in tandem with the CEBs’ own ecclesial praxis and theological reflection raises some critical questions that we will carry with us as we ponder the (im?)possibilities of decolonial solidarity: Does the foundational nature of anti-blackness and the universal singularity of anti-black racial slavery preclude recognizing and resisting other constitutive forces at work in the historical development and contemporary realities of modernity/coloniality? Can the excess of black death and the “free base” of black life not find “touch” points of connection, intimacy, or solidarity with other forms of death, resistance, struggle, and re-existence that have constituted the modern world?

Burnett’s reference to the work of Justin Leroy is illustrative here, as Leroy argues that anti-black racial slavery and settler colonialism were and are mutually constitutive of the violence of modernity and that social movements for black and indigenous lives have found and continue to find such touchpoints necessary and fruitful for resistance and their expressions of freedom. Furthermore, decolonial feminist and queer scholarship can help us to think through this question in terms of the co-constitutive ways in which racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism coalesce to produce the violence of modernity/coloniality. Other scholars in black theology have pointed to the constitutive nature of anti-Semitism in the early evolution of racialization and ecowomanists have elucidated the co-constitutive connections between ideologies that negate the earth, the earthiness of human flesh, and the flesh of women, black people, and especially black women. Is it possible to maintain the singularity and universality of anti-blackness as foundational/constitutive of modernity/coloniality and discern the ways in which such complex and multiple forces have also constituted modernity/coloniality—perhaps not similarly or analogously, or even equally, but mutually? If the answer to this is yes, if the violence of modernity/coloniality has been mutually constituted by the violent touchpoints of interlocking material and ontological forms of oppression, then it must be resisted mutually, through touchpoints of mutuality, reciprocity, and solidarity amongst the dysselected.

Burnett’s second point lies in the connection that he draws between Anita Landaverde’s expression of the CEBs’ refusal to be masa (dough) in the hands of the Roman Catholic church hierarchy and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s analysis of plasticity in black life. In Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Jackson analyzes Enlightenment thought “not as black ‘exclusion’ or ‘denied humanity’ but rather as the violent imposition and appropriation—inclusion and recognition—of black(ened) humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very humanity.”9 Animality is one form violently imposed on blackness that Jackson cites, but she posits that “the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter . . . a form where form shall not hold: potentially ‘everything and nothing’ at the register of ontology.”10 Landaverde seems to be making a similar critique of how ecclesial power operates on lxs pobres—by violently molding them into whatever form best serves the perpetuation of ecclesial, ontological, and material domination. The categories of sight and touch that Burnett plays with in his essay are illustrative here—colonial power views the colonized as whatever that power wants and needs them to be and it violently manipulates the meaning of their humanity (and/or ecclesiality) according to those purposes. Jackson points out that blackness is produced as both subhuman and superhuman at the same time, just as “the poor” are both debased and romanticized by the church in one breath. Such is the violence of touch (both metaphorical and material) guided by colonial sight. With such plasticization in mind, Jackson argues against assimilation to and inclusion within the mold of universal humanity (or, following Wynter, Man). Landaverde and the CEBs similarly argue against assimilation to and inclusion within the mold of the institutional church. Burnett points out that Jackson frames this argument in terms of “an antiblack/black difference rather than a colonial difference,” and we wonder what this distinction means for the linkages that can be made between these categories of difference? What are the touchpoints and intimacies between such experiences of plasticity and what are the distances between them?

Sylvia Wynter insists that the struggle of our time will be between “the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves.”11 Embedded in this statement is a recognition that the well-being of the human species as a whole (and we would add the planet itself) depends on unsettling an understanding and a way of being human that prizes rational mastery, self-sufficiency, invulnerability, and unbridled individual liberty. This Western bourgeois conception of the human, of Man, has destroyed billions of lives and lifeworlds and has brought our planet to the brink of uninhabitability for our species. The CEBs have taught us, as theologians and as human beings, that there is another way to be human, indeed that there are other ways of being human (plural). Wynter and other voices from black studies that Burnett brings to our attention help us to understand how the overrepresentation of Man, and thus the multiple violences of modernity/coloniality, don’t merely include but rest on the constitutive foundation of anti-blackness. If we cannot get in touch with the excess of this, with the negation of blackness and its reclamation in movements like AFROOS, then perhaps Sexton is right that we are doomed to a “baseless coalition of a thousand tiny causes.”12 While these thousand tiny causes may brush up against one another, they will fail to touch the deeper wounds of modernity/coloniality and thus fail to fundamentally unsettle the species- and planet-destroying overrepresentation of Man. The violent vacuum-like glance of the “eye man” depends on our refusal of intimacy with these wounds, on our gazing at or turning away from them and the truths that they reveal.

—

In light of these reflections, we turn once more to the Salvadoran CEBs’ contingent, ambiguous stories of the hope that is in them. It’s true that the story buttressed by the first epigraph, that “it is obvious that there is no black population in El Salvador,” still exercises a certain amount of unexamined givenness in both the general society that is the CEBs’ context and within their own conversations and priorities. And the “but/and” that’s coming here is hearsay, unpublished, undocumented, narrative, nothing more than a brush of fingertips: grassroots theater is emerging as a site of encounter between the CEBs and Salvadoran Afro-descendancy—and of discovery that these are not two separate categories.

Las 3 Prietas Teatro is a theater collective founded by three graduates from CENAR, the national school for the arts. One meaning of the word prieto/a is dark-skinned or black, and the name of the collective is a reclamation of the pejorative uses of the term. The troupe performs original pieces with a focus on memoria histórica and travels to rural communities to put on puppet making, storytelling, living statue, clowning, and other artistic workshops with youth and children. This past year, two members of the collective participated in Bendita Mezcla, a pastoral formation process for youth from the CEBs and other, sometimes faith-based, social movements throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. In July, they joined other CEB members from El Salvador at a retreat/workshop for community leaders in Panamá, organized by the Bendita Mezcla team.

Theoretically, it might be difficult for a group like Las 3 Prietas to find welcome among church folk, or for church folk to open themselves to learning from artists like Las 3 Prietas. But both groups—we need each other. One member of Las 3 Prietas is the niece of Bl. Rutilio Grande, and she’s looking for ways to bring spirituality into her work with youth in Aguilares. Another just started taking theology classes because she wants to find a way to speak about faith in her own life beyond the frameworks she was given. And in pursuit of this, they’ve befriended some of the CEB leaders that feature heavily in Re-membering. And while the CEBs can offer an alternative kind of faith expression to the group, Las 3 Prietas stretch the CEBs’ horizons, too: they bring their own feminisms, queerness, artistic expression, Indigeneity, and Afro-descendancy as a resource for the communities they visit and perform for. They’ve brought their traveling workshops to several of the communities mentioned in the book, and they’ve performed at anniversaries of massacres and martyrs.

At the workshop in Panama, with CEB leaders from all over the region, hosted by the local parish, Las 3 Prietas performed a piece called “iyulu ne siwat” (Nawat, corazón de mujer) in the packed parish church. Based on interviews with a collective of elderly Indigenous women and reflections on the performers’ own life stories and experiences, “iyulu ne siwat” offers a window into the lives of three lifelong friends who live in a rural community. One wants to leave, to escape the memories of her dead son whose name she cannot abide hearing, to find what lies beyond her horizon. Another, the protective grandma of the group, travels to sell her homemade wares—candles, embroidery, and pine needle baskets—in town. The third, traumatized by memories of an ambush, a rushing river, a massacre, does not remember anything about her life before the trauma and relies on the other two to remind her who she is.

The Afro-descendancy of this third character, Candelaria, abides in the artist who gives her life. In conversation with Anma after the performance, she shares that she has found her own Blackness by inhabiting her own womanhood outside of given frameworks, in an assumed political posture against domination and violence, and in the process of unlearning so much coercive self-denial that dominant educational systems and society at large impose. Anma brings her own biography to Candelaria, who survives the annihilation of her people by forgetting who she is.

In a soliloquy as she bathes and prepares for bed one night, Candelaria laments her amnesia. In a slip, hair unwrapped, sponging water from a hollowed gourd, in conversation with a photo of her forgotten mother, she rails against the theft of her past, against the chasm between the histories her friends tell her and her own ability to recall them. She is shouting, crying—

Zoom out, take note: in a packed parish church at midday, in front of the altar.

Somewhere in her cries, a thread emerges. She’s looking at an old photo of elementary school classmates and . . . begins to speak to them. As if she knows them. She tells them about the water rushing down the river, sweeping away her neighbors, her family. Slowly, and then quickly, all at once, she remembers death, survival, herself. She hugs the image of her mother, she rushes to her friends to tell them, yes, really, it’s me, I remember. Her traumatized childlike affect is gone, she shines through. They embrace.

The three actors leave the scene down the aisles of the church, singing softly in Nawat. From the pews, from the floor, from the crowds standing in the back, women reach out to touch them as they pass. They leave the story on the altar, they unwalk so many processions up the aisle, their eyes gleam as they emerge into the sun.

This mutual turning-to between the CEBs and feminist troubadours that name and center their Afro-descendancy is reason for hope that there still exists the possibility—not an inevitability—of solidarity among the dysselected, though it admittedly doesn’t appear with the precision or purity of a theoretical ideal. Las 3 Prietas’ prietud, their prieta-ness, is indistinguishable from their “iyulu ne siwat,” from their queerness, from their dedication to youth and children in communities far from artistic centers in San Salvador. And so to be touched by their expression is to be touched by Salvadoran Afro-descendancy—to negate it increasingly comes to be to negate something deep and alive about the CEBs. For Las 3 Prietas, too, their story is now marked by friendship with this restless ecclesial folk who invited them to their altar, who reach out to brush fingertips as they leave the church.

That is, for us, a provisional response to the question of Afro-descendancy for the Salvadoran CEBs lies in attending to moments when these worlds’ fingertips brush, when the boundaries blur. What we can offer is a story about an embrace, a photo of kids in the Bajo Lempa learning to speak as “living statues,” of girls in Cacaopera making puppets instead of tortillas. We can walk to a be-muraled monument to the massacre at La Quesera where, forty-two years later, a Jesus community looked to queer, Black women to re-member the earth with their bodies. We can keep our ears open to the whispers that emerge from the corners of these territories to keep professing other possible worlds-in-process.