Month: September 2020

This week we initiated discussions about bodies in motion, based on the articles assigned and on videos we partially watched in class. We considered bodies that moved between Chicago and the DF, and back, to join the First-or-Second Tepeyac from the other in the case of the Guadalupanas; to move into the woods, into smoke, or into the waters in order to be infused with the spirit of María Lionza; or to dwell in the back-and-forth motion of interorality, between verbal and non-verbal, between the scriptural and the performative, and between land and the waters of the ocean, to bring an offer to Yemayá, perhaps with Oshún, Oya, and other deities from the Lucumí-Yoruba pantheons.

On Wednesday, we also embarked ourselves in a different kind of motion, that of the comparative methods. We initiatied a discussion about the complexities of good comparativism (apples and oranges, well compared), and started the comparative chart of all the female figures we have so far discussed.

For this week’s blog reflection, choose one thread of religious / spiritual meaning from one of the deities we studied and discussed this week, and one from previous weeks, and offer a comparative reading of them. Comparative reading 101: you shall not offer a tit-for-tat journey. Namely, you shall not seek to find ALL analogous traits; some of the best comparative work dwells in, and analyzes, contrasts and differences, to find links hidden below such disparities.

Please, post your reflection by Saturday at 8PM at the latest, so you can shift your focus to the readings and questions for next week. Good weekend, everybody!

This week we discussed the many ways in which three female figures are associated with fertility, race, religion, gender, motherhood, marriage, nature / earth, more-than-human entities and environments: La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Oshún, and Pachamana.

Today we wondered how these female figures represent not only icons to be adored from without, but how they may be or are, indeed, present in our surroundings, in our lives, even when we do not invoke them or name them. We also discuss how, in their being of love, they represent the matter of ancestry or precursors.

Write a blogpost in which you meditate on how reading, discussing, and learning about and from Cachita, Oshún, and Pachamana help you answer the questions a) where is the more-than-human in my life? and b) who are or where are my precursors? You do not have to answer these questions (life quests, after all), but write up a comment on how these readings and ideas we discussed this week help you seek some answers in thinking about those question.

Try to post your blog entry by Saturday at 8 PM. Happy dwelling, thinking, writing with these three fabulous womanly figures!

This week we discussed the ways in which blood corresponds with honor, and how these are intertwined with religion–in particular, with Christianity–capital, gender, state, and race. We considered how these correspondences change, or not, in history, and how they are integral in particular to the formation of the Vampire States of Spain and the United States.

Choose one of these points of correspondence and comment how it helps you articulate a clearer vision of strength, purity, and the body to better understand Latinas and religion. Try to post your blog entry by Sunday at noon.

This week we began to tease out elements of of ‘the body’ in the title of our course. On Monday we engaged questions of sinfulness, Christianity, relationality, race, imperialism, colonialism, and coloniality to ‘flesh bodies’ with Mayra Rivera. On Wednesday we read two very different pieces by Padilla and Barreto that added questions about submission, family, self-negation (or abnegation), ethnicity, history, gender, and comunidades de fé, among others. The story of the Guadalupe (which we shall return to when we discuss migration and the diasporic communities of Guadalupanas in the US and México) illustrated the complex network of angles and perspectives that must be engaged to grasp the purity and strength of Latinas in Religion.

With this in mind, write a reflection on which of these issues, questions, and stories inspired a better understanding of ‘the body’ of Latinas in religion.

Try to post your reflection by Saturday at 8PM, remembering that this is a suggested deadline, so you can then pass the page and move on to the next set of questions we’ll contemplate next week.