Borderlands/La Frontera of the Ancient Desert: Reading Space in Christian Hagiography

This panel brings together four scholars whose training is not technically in Latina/o Studies, but who bring Latina/o Studies questions, texts, and approaches to bear on their work in the broader field of “religion.” What... [ view full abstract ]

This panel brings together four scholars whose training is not technically in Latina/o Studies, but who bring Latina/o Studies questions, texts, and approaches to bear on their work in the broader field of “religion.” What happens when Latina/o Studies texts are refocused on religious discourses, histories, and fields that are not specifically Latina/o? Looking at the legacies of USA Christianity, biblical studies, late antique history, and the history of Pentecostalism, how does the integration of Latina/o studies thinkers and writers transform these other fields?

Presenter #3 Mena utilizes Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderland theories of space and identity in order to read the potentiality of desert space for Christian authors in the third- and fourth-century of the common era. Chican@ Studies prove an important resource for considering the articulation of space and subjectivity in the history of Christianity. Christian hagiographies (or Saint’s Lives) describe the space of the desert as instrumental to the formation of the saint. Likewise, it is the hybrid mestiza figure of the saint in hagiographies that gives power to the construction of the desert. Mena argues for the way the desert and the saint are literary constructs of late antique literature and each constitutive of the other. Like Anzaldúa’s new mestizas of the U.S.-Mexico borderland, these hybrid figures are both products and producers of the space they inhabit.

Panel 87