Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research (CIQR -- "seeker")*

(E-mail memo:  March 13, 2008)

 

DATE:  April 10 (Thurs.), 2008, 4:30-6:00PM, Berger Gallery, 207 College Hall, Duquesne University.

Presenter:  Professor Ezequiel Peña, Dept. of Psychology, Duquesne University.

Bio:  Ezequiel Peña received his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his pre-doctoral internship at the Sunset Park Mental Health Center, an inner-city clinic in Brooklyn, NY that serves Latin American Immigrant and Latino American groups. His primary research interests include understanding the relationship between the interior and social lives of U.S. ethnic minority subjects, with a particular emphasis on Mexican American (Chicano) political subjectivity. In order to attain this understanding, he uses discourse analysis as his primary method.  Some of his other scholarly pursuits are the politics and history of the multicultural psychology movement and of the medicalization of cultural differences.

Title:  “Immigration, the Mexico-U.S. Border, and the Mexican American Transnational Imagination: The Social Justice Efforts of Latino Evangelicals”

Abstract:  Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes, describes the geopolitical border separating the U.S. from Mexico as a scar, an old wound in the memory of people of Mexican descent. Contemporary political controversies concerning immigration reform have served to re-agitate these wounds—yet again. Drawing from the notion of a “transnational imagination,” my talk will examine some of the effects that the perennial ruptures over U.S.-Mexico immigration have had in the inner lives and social realities of Mexican American subjects. One particular rupture in the Mexican American transnational imagination has occurred for Mexican Americans who had increasingly been gravitating towards the political and religious right. I am speaking specifically, here, of the growing numbers of Mexican American evangelicals, largely, Baptist and Pentecostal Latinas and Latinos. The Mexican American transnational imagination is privileged in the sense that the contiguity of Mexico to the U.S. readily allows for an imagined seamlessness between a U.S. present and a Mexican past…and between Mexican and Mexican American subjectivity. In addition, Mexican Americans’ claims to indigenous ancestry have engendered a discourse of land-based immigrant rights along the U.S.-Mexico border. These essentialist claims to the land have often served as a psychic trump card for Mexican Americans against the land claims promulgated by the U.S. in the imperialist doctrine of Manifest Destiny. To help illustrate the complex relationship between blood ties…and ties of a mystical and political nature, I will examine some of the social justice efforts of Mexican American and other Latino evangelicals, who—until the recent immigration rights struggles—had been increasingly closely identified with the Republican party, especially with its philosophy of moral conservativism. Within the opening created by the immigrant rights protests that Latino evangelicals mobilized—along with other clergy—against some of the most right-leaning, anti-immigrant factions of the Republican Party. Working with the notion of a transnational imagination, this talk will explore the relationship between the psychic wounds, the divided loyalties, and the lived realities of Mexican American evangelicals as it relates to nationality, immigration status, political affiliation, spirituality, and ethnicity.

All interested faculty, graduate students, and other parties are invited.