Ethics, Theology, and Mestizaje

This chapter examines the historical usage of the category of mestizaje by scholars, arguing that it continues to be a useful theological category, because it elucidates the divine dismantling of structures of racialized, cultural, and religious power. Mestizaje constitutes an ethical praxis and ethos unwilling to succumb to easy recipes of “inclusion,” “unity,” and “hospitality.” The concept of mestizaje remains useful as it is used to celebrate and wrestle with complex and fluid multicultural, multilingual, and multinational history and ancestral lines for which it is a cipher. The crucial insight gleaned from mestizaje is its open-endedness; it thrives on diversity and heterogeneity while subverting false notions of purity, homogeneity, unity, and whiteness. Mestizaje is an attempt to actively reject social, cultural, and economic structures of discrimination, racism, and marginalization. This chapter argues that it also rejects intellectual frames which undermine the rich cultural, contextual, and experiential component of lived faith experiences as part of human activity and struggles for justice.