an alternative cosmovision:

Working-Class Mayan Mexicanas labor perspective

Marlene Ferreras

April 14, 2022

I am honored to be invited to participate in this panel and to engage with the newly published book, Faith, Class and Labor (2021). The co-editors, Jin Young Choi and Joerg Rieger bring together an international group of historians, theologians, biblical scholars, activists, and organizers to discuss the relationship of faith and labor among the Abrahamic religious traditions. The book is magnetically eclectic combining theory and practice in a tragically neglected topic in religion and theology. Reading these chapters resonated both with my lived experience and helped me to understand with greater depth the importance of much of the work many of its authors have dedicated their lives and scholarship to.

In keeping with a feminist and practical theological approach, I first want to note my epistemological assumption that knowledge is situated and gained through communal and mutually beneficial relationship. Yet while power imbalances can be minimized, they cannot be eliminated. Consequently, I want to offer a response to the book by privileging the voices of working-class Latinas as a starting point for theological inquiry. I found points of connection throughout the book with the practical theological research I do on the lived experiences and theologies of working-class Maya mexicanas employed on the assembly-line of a multinational corporation in Yucatán, México. In my view, a point that needs emphasizing is a bottom up faith that challenges capitalism and renders the apparatus inoperable, which is not based on texts. I will first comment on the authority of religious texts, before turning to the issue of the emerging faith of workers.

In communities where the Bible is an authoritative source, theological change is necessary for social-economic structural change to occur. Jin Young Choi’s interpretation of the widow’s offering is necessary because it provides the belief necessary for faith by placing the text in its proper historical context so the reader can see how Mark uses this story to underscore Jesus’ retelling as a subversive act. I agree that in order for my communities in southern California to see the precarity of the lives of working-class Latinas employed on the assembly lines of multinational corporations in México, texts are important. Yet, in the pueblo women do not use scripture as a resource. In this respect, the praxis of Contextual Bible Study does not have the same traction on the ground in this location as it might have in other contexts identified in the book.

The impetus for women’s practices of resistance among this community of working-class Maya mexicanas lies in an alternative cosmovision, that arises from Mesoamerican spirituality and not the Christian sacred text, despite the presence of a Catholic church in the pueblo. Kwok Pui-Lan makes a good point when she refers to Lin Manhong’s assertion that confronting and challenging the corruption and greed in social economic structures can be accomplished by drawing on the Confucian ethical resources, Buddhism, and Christian Liberation Theologies (37). The combination of images and practices I recognized in the pueblo as “Christian” were steeped in decolonial practices and informed by traditions beyond that of Abrahamic traditions.

The precarious conditions of working-class Maya mexicanas resemble the experiences of necropolitical labor Keun-Joo Christine Pae describes in her analysis of soldiering and military prostitution. She writes, “necropolitical labor should be understood as the extraction of labor from both the body and the spirit of those who are condemned to death. Namely, alienation of one’s body from the spirit is inevitable in necropolitical labor” (151). Similarly, young, poor, brown women through the process of working in multinational factories, gradually lose the very qualities—the psychospiritual, physical, and mental capabilities—that made them attractive to their employers in the first place. The dehumanization to which women are subjected in multinational corporation assembly lines, obscures women’s humanity and the connections they share with the land and their people. Women are temporarily valuable for production until they suffer physical injuries from the stress-filled repetitive work. Both kinds of injury, physical and psycho-spiritual, together tend to lead first to the eventual depreciation of her value and then to her dismissal and replacement. Pae rightly identifies this as “the gnosticizing tendency in Christianity” á la Susan Thistlethwaite and yet, despite this “living death” there is an emerging faith arising from “laboring animals” who resist the evils of the apparatus.

Villarmea is correct to note the sociological dimension of transcendence in the Employer-Employee Relationship. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Agamben, Villarmea explains the neoliberal apparatus that produces subjects and subjectivities. The chapter’s focus is on the sovereign power that has the ability to decide who does or does not fall in the EmRel and consequently who lives or dies. Among working-class Latinas in a pueblo in México the sovereign power is made concrete in the practice of multinational company managers asking the women to sign a blank piece of paper during the hiring process. There is common knowledge among the women that this blank paper is the paper on which their employer will provide the verbiage above her signature explaining why she is “resigning” from her job, when in reality she is being fired (without cause or grievance process) and replaced by another worker who is often younger and more efficient. As Villarmea notes, “this is the material operation of transcendence” that creates conditions and de-subjectivized subjects. In the case of Maya mexicanas, there is no workers union and efforts to organize are quickly disciplined. However, women describe their daily negotiation of present circumstances in order to open up possibilities of conservation, survival, and human flourishing.

Inoperative potentiality is an aspect of the apparatus that Villarmea did not touch on but I think underscores the agency of workers who in the absence of a union practice solidarity and a deep spirituality that is life affirming. Agamben, influenced by Foucault’s understanding of power, draws on Aristotle’s concept of potentiality. For Aristotle, potentiality is not only about having the capacity to be but also to not be. Agamben develops his political philosophy of inoperativity in conversation with Aristotle’s potentiality to discuss freedom and how subjects can enhance their freedom by rendering the apparatus, in this case neoliberal capitalism, as inoperative.

A concrete example of this emerged in field research in the Yucatán. Women working on the assembly line of a multinational corporation express the importance of building relationships with other women in the factory. The connection a woman shares the woman who inspects and grants workers’ pay for pieces completed in a textile company is particularly significant. One woman told me she and the woman who inspects the products for imperfections share a good relationship. The “goodness” is based on both women protecting each other’s interests and earning pay for work they are not completing. When an article of clothing arrives at a department store in southern California with imperfect stitching it is placed in a discount bin at the back of store where a single parent mother struggling to cloth her children can purchase clothing at a discounted price and the profit expected from the product is lost. Admittedly, this practice will not dismantle capitalism but consider the emancipatory practice of faith that renders the apparatus inoperable (even if only for a moment) and provides wages and life for women on both sides of the border. I understand this practice among workers as perhaps ritual and/or ethical practice, certainly there is a deep spirituality that is life-giving. Additional qualitative research regarding working-class communities’ experiences and resiliencies in the face of hegemonic neoliberal capitalism and its ethos would enrich the discussion in the book. Moreover, sharing stories that make visible transnational connections between the working-class in public hearings, such as the ones described by Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger’s chapter might have the potential to foment an insurrection of non-violent inoperativity among workers (even if only for a moment) and that brings me much hope for a more just future.

I agree with Joerg Rieger that discussions of power relations and labor can help us resist dominant systems such as capitalism and religion. As a practical theologian, a feminist, first born daughter of Cuban refugees and assembly-line factory workers in the US, and an adoptive mother of a Chinese daughter, I grateful for the important contributions this book makes in the investigation of matters of capitalism and labor in the field of theology.

Marlene Mayra Ferreras is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at La Sierra University. Marelene is the daughter of a single parent Cuban refugee mother. Born and raised in southern California, Marlene was a pastor for 14 years in the Seventh-day Adventist denomination and was ordained by the Pacific Union Conference in October 2012. Her academic interests are at the intersection of social science and theology. Marlene's research studies the identity and eschatology of indigenous female maquila workers in Yucatan, Mexico. She is interested in the strategies women use to resist systems of violence and oppression for the purpose of providing spiritual care that assists women in identifying and developing preferred futures.

Reading Beyond the Middle Class Bible

Steed Davidson

14 April 2022

The intersection of faith and class seems like a classic work from the 1960s inspired by Liberation Theology and its selective use of Marxist analysis. The addition of labor to this pair truly brings this work into the twenty-first century where terms like “working poor” and “gig economy” point to the precarity of labor. In a year like 2021 where corporate anxieties amplify a mislabeled “labor shortage” and the COVID pandemic exposes for greater scrutiny the exploitation of cheap labor by companies operating out of developed countries, a theological discussion on labor seems necessary. In part, as both Chin Ming Stephen Lim and Karl James Villarmea indicates in their respective essays, middle class populations remain ignorant of the forces that continue to erode their earnings and too willingly support policies that negatively impact the working classes. Sadly, this book reflects the reality that faith, exercised as theological reflection, is mostly a middle-class activity that requires the knowledge of labor to generate anything that can resemble meaningful action.

In this brief response, I confine my remarks to the section of the book on the Bible in order to make salient observations on how the Bible functions in the intersection of these three main categories. Presumably, the Bible serves as a critical aspect for theological reflection with the anticipation that it both describes an original state of goodness and can generate the required action to restore that purer state. This confidence lies behind the programmatic introduction from Joerg Rieger as well as in Gerald West and Sithembiso Zwane. West and Zwane narrate the work of the Ujamaa Center and its signature activity of Contextual Biblical Study. Suffice it to say, this book takes a sectoral look at labor rather than capital as a factor of production but nonetheless understands labor in its contribution to capitalism in general.

Liberation theology and later Marxist biblical criticism developed by the likes of Norman Gottwald, David Jobling, Neil Elliot, and more recently Roland Boer draw attention to the material conditions that stand behind biblical texts. Material analysis requires the type of historical reconstruction that Jin Young Choi provides in her essay where she explores the realities of a temple economy set within Roman imperial occupation. In Choi’s attempt to avoid “suffocating the gospel of the poor” or “idealizing the poor” in the character of the widow, she locates patriarchy as a third partner in the structured domination of Galilean peasants. Since empire, temple, and patriarchy operate in concert, consciously or unconsciously, Choi’s analysis thickens the plight of this widow and avoids the all too simplified discussion of whether the text is deconstructively resistant. She demonstrates the commitment to historicism that is the small “h” history à la Fredric Jameson. To read the Bible intersectionally requires a critical relationship with the heroic myths of the Bible and liberation in order to fully expose the modes of production of texts in the ancient world and their consumptions among middle-class religious folk in the places where action will make a difference to the material conditions of people. Choi’s pivot to the precarity of modern labor allows the widow to declare a gospel of the present-day poor woman. Would that we could see more than glimpses of the global poor woman and the abstract forces that produce her. Historicism that reads the Bible intersectionally has to also be prepared narrate a historicism of our times that accounts for the role of the Bible.

Attention to current realities and how these enable the Bible to have a relevant place in contemporary life seems like an apt descriptor of the work of the Ujamaa Center. West prefers reading practices that hand the power over to readers regardless of their training in Biblical Studies. “Ordinary readers” in West’s conception transcend class divisions and perhaps run the range of faith commitments. West does an artful job of trans-textual and trans-sectoral reading of two normally unrelated passages. His reading highlights useful connections that are worthy of serious considerations. Among these are his exploration of the way private property works in the Naboth passage. Without a full examination of private property in a tributary mode of production, West demonstrates some of the economic functions of private property in a capitalist economy. The chapter’s focus lands more upon the labor of the woman or perhaps elite women since Naboth and his wife are property owners with lands adjacent to the palace. Notably, the complex issue of redistribution of land in southern Africa does not emerge in this reading. This gap raises for me the necessity for critical analyses of neoliberal capitalism to heighten the reading of biblical texts if only to be attentive to the broader economic realities that mark our times so that they can uncover the interlocking features of neoliberal capitalism constructions for readers.

The third essay in the Bible section hones in on migrant labor as a stark reality of a globalized environment. Lim’s conversation between Ruth and Esperanza opens several layers of labor exploitation that take place in the intimacy of middle-class homes. For Lim this is about domestic labor. However, that exploitation also occurs in the intimacies of six continents in the manufacture of goods by cheap labor for consumption in middle class homes. Labor exploitation in forms that evade the surveillance of regulators, already complicit with corporate profits, read Ruth as a romantic tale. The hermeneutical decision to tie Ruth to Esperanza, to force the genealogy of readings cited from Gale Yee and others, risks present day class conflicts. Yee’s work represents the type of reading willing to expose conflict easily hidden in biblical texts by centuries of imperialism. Travel lies at the heart of Ruth. The book, though, hides the journeys and the details of these migrants – distance, time, the toll on the body, dangers – in ways that make migration either invisible or romantic to contemporary readers. Esperanza helps Lim to highlight easily ignored sexual exploitation of labor whether that be sex trafficking or the expectations that immigrants will reproduce in sufficient numbers to shore up a welfare state. Class heightened biblical readings can expose uncomfortable and indecent conversations about whose body is truly exploited.

The revolutionary features of utopianism lie behind this book. Faith and sacred texts, theological reflection, ethics and solidarity combine to generate aspirations towards the ideal of a different world. The essays in this book understand the reality of our world but I wonder whether this includes the bourgeois compromises of modern religion. In their plea for more revolutionary praxis through intersectional and global cooperation whether the Bible, traditionally understood, serves a useful role seems in doubt. Facing the limits of utopic thought in these writings form a critical step in generating a different faith framework that can be seen as revolutionary. Revolutionary utopianism needs to equip communities to dream of new worlds unencumbered by the structures of the present. In our times that looks like the unsettling of the middle-class Bible.

Steed Davidson is Dean of the Faculty and Vice President of Academic Affairs; Professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament at McCormick Theological Seminary. Davidson is the author of Empire and Exile: Postcolonial Readings of Selected Texts of the Book of Jeremiah, as well as Writing/Reading the Bible in Postcolonial Perspective, and a co-editor of Islands, Islanders and the Bible: RumiNations. He is currently co-authoring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: A Guide for the Perplexed and co-editing Prophetic Otherness, both of which should be completed in 2019. He has authored various essays that explore the Hebrew Bible from postcolonial, gendered, and several critical perspectives.

Remembering Her Labor

Jin Young Choi

14 April 2022

The topics of economy, labor, and class are scarcely discussed in theological and religious discourse. This is also the case in biblical studies. In the Society of Biblical Literature, there are a few program units whose titles contain “economy” or “economic.” Still, they are concerned only with the economy of antiquity and in the ancient texts, not relating to contemporary issues. While the institutions of the academy, higher education, and religion, within which we produce and disseminate knowledge, constitute a sector of the neoliberal economy, it is challenging for most of us to recognize how our work operates in this system. While I have come to realize the ways my identity and intellectual labor are racialized and necessarily intersectional, I cannot deny my complicity in maintaining the capitalist systems that generate structured inequality and injustices. Such recognition pushes me to side with those “who have little power over their work conditions” and to connect to activisms and movements for social-economic change.

Many of the contributors to our book, Faith, Class, and Labor, show how religion and labor are interrelated. For example, historians and theologians, like Kwok Pui-lan and Juan Floyd-Thomas, illustrate complex relationships between religious institutions, Marxism, and struggles against structural racism and poverty or for social transformation. The framework of faith and theological reflection may be insufficient when it remains a “middle-class activity.”

In their responses to the book, Marlene M. Ferreras and Steed Vernyl Davidson encourage us to continue engaging the intersections of class, race, and gender and to further our discussion beyond Christian sources and the bourgeois accommodation of religion.

I concur with Ferreras’ point on the limitation of the Christian sacred text and contextual biblical hermeneutics as a source of bringing structural change. I believe that the materialist and economic analysis of sacred scriptures should be extended to engaging indigenous and other faith traditions. Still, biblical criticism attending to historical realities, particularly the struggles of the poor, can critique the roles of the Bible and its interpretations in promoting the interests of the empire and its elites in both the ancient and the present.

My reading of the poor widow in Mark 12 in the book attempts to reveal the exploitive economic and patriarchal systems and invisibility of the poor and their labor in the text. The task does not aim at an “objective” historical reconstruction but, as Davidson observes, it is to historicize the global poor woman to “fully expose meaningful genealogies for action.” At the same time, following Fredric Jameson, “our contact with the past will always pass through the imaginary and its ideologies.” (The Ideologies of Theory, 152). This is what biblical critics, Gerald West, Chin Ming Stephen Lim, and I do in our essays, not to affirm the authority of the sacred text but to bring life to working-class people and the marginalized through intersectional, intertextual, and transtextual readings based on the construction of an imaginary past.

In her earlier review of our book, Kerry Danner pointedly articulates the significance of remembering as activated in Jesus’ remembering of the poor widow. This remembering ensures the widow’s presence in the people’s collective memory. The act of remembrance also invites us not to forget “the laborer, whether underpaid and near powerless in their formal work for wages or invisible in their care work.” Unwaged labor should also be addressed beyond the workplace or labor market. That is why women’s participation in the labor force and economy is an issue of reproductive justice, including reproductive health care access. It is an important part of my argument to show that while the multitudes (such as peasants and day workers) who are exploited by the political economic systems are present in the Gospel narrative, there is no way to illustrate the plight of the poor widow having only two lepta, signifying unrecognized labor of the women for survival and reproduction.

Ferreras’ concept of “deep spirituality” shows us a space where working-class Latinas share and finds connections among them in the interstices of capitalism’s tyrannical desire to maximize its interests by alienating the workers. In response to Lim’s reading of intimacy of domestic labor in Ruth and Esperanza, Davidson comments on the “intimacies of six continents in the manufacture of goods by cheap labor for middle-class consumption.” My work historicizing the biblical text mainly evokes memories of colonial oppression, economic exploitation, and war violence and shows “glimpses of the global poor woman.” Contributors like Keun-joo Chirstine Pae and Kwok Pui Lan make transnational connections between soldiering and prostitution in situations of war, or between US workers and Chinese workers exploited by the global capitalist class. Sifiso Mpofu demonstrates that the economic marginalization of Black people as a social process is the universal phenomenon of global systemic racism resulting from slavery and colonialism.

As neoliberal capitalism facilitates the flow of capital, production, and labor across national borders, we will need to consider developing a global systemic analysis, as Fernando Segovia suggests. Some of our contributors discuss issues regarding migrant workers. The phenomenon of labor migration has been expedited due to the climate crisis. As utopianism paradoxically points to no place (ou+topos) or beyond all history, I do not think revolutionary utopianism or praxis is useless if one sees the utopian impulse in our work. However, we refuse the utopianism feeding upon the “bourgeois compromises of modern religion,” including the Bible and its interpretation. Our intellectual labor and activism will attend particularly to the agency of subalterns in the Global South—those who are fragmented by the systems of global capitalism and are without access to its benefits. While such a task sounds enormous for theologians, biblical scholars, and local activists to undertake, we need to extend “deep solidarity,” which Joerg Rieger and Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger explore, in our collective endeavors seeking to promote justice at the global level.

Jin Young Choi is the Baptist Missionary Training School Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. Choi is the author of Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and coeditor of the volumes such as Minoritized Women Reading Race and Ethnicity: Intersectional Approaches to Constructed Identity and Early Christian Texts (Lexington Books, 2020) and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (Pickwick Publications, 2020).

Solidarity Forever

Joerg Rieger

14 April 2022

My colleague Jin Young Choi and I have been blessed with a group of excellent reviewers and respondents to our co-edited volume Faith, Class, and Labor: An Intersectional Approach in a Global Context (Cascade 2020). In an earlier conversation, Kerry Danner, Rosetta Ross, and Aaron Stauffer shared reflections, and now Marlene Ferreras and Steed Vernyl Davidson have added their engagements of the book, expanding the conversation.

To recap, the book is an effort to deal with class and labor in international, transdisciplinary, trans-textual, transactional, translational, and transgressive fashion, recognizing that these topics are still rarely addressed in the context of higher education. This is true also for the study of religion and theology, which is why studying faith, class, and labor means to be covering new ground. And, it might be argued, this is a topic whose time has come if it is true that work is essential and that there are essential workers, as all of us were forced to rediscover during the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, none of us would even exist without labor, in particular the reproductive labor of women, starting with gestational labor, and the reproductive labor of nonhuman nature, without which there would be no living bodies, no air to breathe, and no food to eat.

Based on these insights, in a forthcoming book I am arguing that productive and reproductive labor is a significant part of what theologian Paul Tillich has called the “ultimate concern.” In Tillich’s words, “Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us” (Systematic Theology, 1:14). While Tillich did not make the connection to labor, the topic can no longer ignored if we truly want to engage being and not-being today as scholars of religion and theology.

Ferreras’ and Davidson’s contributions pick up the matter in their own ways. Davidson directs our view to “the material conditions that stand behind biblical texts,” linked with the material conditions of today’s working people, particularly women in the global economy. With this, he responds to Jin Young Choi’s interpretation of the poor widow in Mark 12, emphasizing the complexity of the text. This text struggles, it seems, just as we do, in coming to terms with the reality of those doubly and triply exploited and oppressed. Davidson also picks up on the existential struggles of the domestic labor mostly performed by women, as investigated in Chin Ming Stephen Lim’s chapter on the biblical book of Ruth and the exploitation experienced by Filipina domestic worker Esperanza. Davidson follows Lim’s exploration of labor exploitation, which in this case includes sexual exploitation as well, which is often ignored.

To be sure, the focus on labor in Faith, Class, and Labor is to deepen our understanding of the challenges of labor. Labor is indeed, many of the contributors would agree, a matter of life and death. However, many of us would add that labor is also where resistance forms and where working people (which are always the majority of the population, never merely scattered minorities) can build power from within the systems of capitalism, and where they can eventually contribute to the formation of new relationships and a new world.

Davidson classifies this as “utopian,” a term which has potential but also its limits. “Utopic thought” that “equips communities of new worlds unencumbered by the structures of the present” (Davidson) has its merits, but does not quite get at what this volume is about. At stake is not primarily something that lies beyond the present and this world, but something that emerges from within its pressures, imperfectly but also very powerfully. This is where work and labor play a role that is often overlooked, embodied for instance in the labor movement that once brought us protections at work especially for women, the eight-hour workday, the end of child labor, benefits and social security, and so on. Moreover, labor is the premier place of intersectionality, where the working majority is both exploited but also asserts itself in all of its racial, ethnic, gendered, and sexual diversity.

Ferreras, in her engagement, grasps some of this emergence from within because it resonates with her lived experience and her study of the lives of working-class Mayan women in Mexico’s Yucatán, who work on the assembly lines of a transnational corporation. Revolution and resistance in this context are not primarily based on religious texts or ideas emerging seemingly out of nowhere. In the pueblos of these Maya mexicanas, scripture is not used as a resource, unlike in many other communities discussed in Faith, Class, and Labor. In the Yucatán, Ferreras argues, alternatives and the roots of resistance are tied to cosmovisions arising from Mesoamerican spiritualities in the context of labor struggles.

Despite these differences, what is most important is “an emerging faith arising from [working people] who resist the evils of the apparatus.” Resistance, with possibly revolutionary consequences, is rooted not primarily in the realm of ideas but in “the agency of workers who in the absence of a union practice solidarity and a deep spirituality that is life affirming” (Ferreras). This matters for how we envision the religious inspiration that emerges here. Ferreras is right that such phenomena need more study, and I would add that the study of religion and theology as a whole would be reshaped if it took such faith as it arises under pressure more seriously. In addition, imagine what such insights could do for revitalizing our own ways of practicing religion and faith.

In her response to Davidson and Ferreras, Jin Young Choi ends with the notion of solidarity. Conversations about labor and work remind us that at a time when 99 percent of us have to work for a living, the exploitation of labor ultimately benefits the few rather than the many, despite the complexities involved. The potential for solidarity emerges not based on wishful thinking or hopeful dreams but is based on a realization that the current arrangements in which we live do not fully benefit most of humanity, nor do they benefit the planet.

This realization does two things: First, it limits the ability of the few to divide and conquer the many, which currently happens with the help of constructs like gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion. And second, it allows for relations of deep solidarity that not only respect the differences of the working majority along these lines but make use of them as constructive and productive parts of transformation, so that the contributions of global women discussed in various chapters of Faith, Class, and Labor matter more than we ever realized. For people of faith, everything changes when they begin to observe God at work there.

Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Affiliate Faculty, Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, and the Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program.