Areas of Interest

Since the mid-1980s my main area of theological and ethical interest and research has been the religious practices and understandings of Latinas in the USA who struggle for liberation.  Providing a platform for their voices is one of the main goals of Mujerista Theology, the theological enterprise at which I have been working and which is an integral part of Hispanic/Latino theology in the USA.  Another goal is to impact religious understandings and practices and theologies, that is, to urge churches as well as the academy to pay attention to and take into consideration the religious wealth of Latina and Latino culture.  I continue to work as an ethicist with understandings of morality that place sociality, relationality, and responsibility to others at the center of ethics/moral theology. 

During the last three years I have worked on six main themes:

• lo cotidiano, the everyday of grassroot Latinas, the role that it plays in their understanding of reality, their ethical evaluations and their struggle for justice;
• the creation of a liberative narrative by grass root Latinas and the role this plays in the development and enablement of their moral agency;
• justice as a process that starts with the voices of the oppressed;
• mestizaje/mulatez (our condition as a people of mixed bloods and cultures) not only as a descriptive category of our reality but also as a moral choice;
• a re-conceptualization of “differences” and “diversity” and their role in identity, identity politics, hybridity and post-colonial discourse;
• justice as a reconciliatory praxis of care and tenderness.

I continue to work on issues of a liberative theo-ethical method.  Convinced that grassroot
people are admirably capable of explaining their religious understandings and practices, I remain convinced of the ethical and theological importance of their voices.  I continue to believe that our work as activist-theologians has to offer not only “new” answers to “old” questions but that we also have to ask new questions that arise from the everyday of our people.  The answers to these “new” questions necessarily cannot be found in what tradition has handed down but rather in the fresh presence of the divine among us.

My work in Cuba in the late 1990s and early 2000 has increased my awareness of the centrality of reconciliation to a true understanding of justice.  I am working on an understanding of reconciliation that focuses not on the past but in the future, not in dealing with what has been—though undoubtedly it is necessary to do so in order to heal—but in discovering, together with those from whom we have been apart, how to build a common future. 

I am at present writing a book that has as a working title, Justicia: A Reconciliatiory Praxis of Care and Tenderness.