1 The Spanish word alambrista comes from the stem alambre, which means “wire.” Alambrista, therefore, connotes a high-wire walker, but it also carries the same pejorative force as the label, “illegal.” For an extended discussion on the nuances of its meaning, see Cordelia Candelaria, “Tightrope Walking the Border: Alambrista and the Acrobatics of Mestizo Representation,” Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants (ed. Nicholas J. Cull and Davíd Carrasco; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004) 137–50.

2 Carrasco himself, together with Roberto Lint Sagarena, present their neologism, lococentrism, as a challenge to Western logocentrism in their recently-published, “The Religious Vision of Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands/La Frontera as a Shamanic Space,” Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture (ed. Gaston Espinosa and Mario T. Garcia; Duke University Press, 2008) 223–41. The essay offers an insightful comparison of José Cuellar and Gloria Anzaldúa, author of Borderlands/La Frontera.

3 I mean “traditional” here in the same sense that David Tracy uses the word traditional to describe the “Greco-Christian alliance” that unites Christian theology and Western or Greek logocentrism. According to Tracy, the “traditional Greco-Christian alliance on the centrality of Word-as-presence and divine self-manifestation … helped to occasion such hierarchically paired Western religious and cultural categories as spirit over letter, ideality over materiality, reason over feeling, content in written sign over form, signified over signifier, identity over difference, and self-presence in self-understanding over all ‘derivative,’ distancing forms of writing.” From that list of hierarchical pairings, I limit my description of “traditional theology” in this paper to two: “identity over difference” (purity) and “content in written sign over form” (textuality). See David Tracy, “Writing,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies (ed. Mark C. Taylor; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) 385.

4 Latino, not Latin. It should be emphasized that it is in terms of its Spanish-language referent, loco, and not the Latin locus (“place”), that I follow Carrasco and Sagarena in theorizing lococentrism. Lococentrism as used here should therefore not be confused with Edward S. Casey's coinage in, “Embracing Lococentrism: A Response to Thomas Brockelman's Critique,” in Human Studies 19 (1996). Uncannily, perhaps, an engagement with the Latin root and, equally, Casey's phenomenology of place and space, could easily contribute critiques of logocentric theology complementary to those I develop in this paper. A lococentric theology, in this case, would be a place-centered, local or contextual theology along the lines developed by Robert J. Schreiter in his classic Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1985). To my knowledge, no contextual theologian has yet seized on the concept of lococentrism—in the Latin sense—to challenge the universalistic pretensions of logocentric theology. My use of lococentrism—limited in this paper to the Spanish sense—aims to contribute to precisely such a challenge.

5 Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) 47.

6 Karsten Friis Johansen, “Logos,” in Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy (ed. Donald J. Zeyl; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997) 304–7.

7 A. Debrunner, “The Words λέγω, λόγος, μα, λαλέω in the Greek World,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (ed. Gerhard Kittle; trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; 10 vols.; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1967) 4:72.

8 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) 7.

9 Ibid., 23.

10 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (trans. Richard Howard; New York: Vintage Books, 1965).

11 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (ed. Colin Gordon; New York: Pantheon Books, 1972) 81.

12 Ibid., 82.

13 Ibid.

14 In connecting Foucault and Derrida, I should note their severe disagreement over the very question of madness. In short, Derrida critiques Foucault for failing to explicate the impossibility of analyzing madness within the logocentric bounds of philosophy. Derrida here demonstrates that his concern with the madness of philosophy goes further than Foucault's more limited concern with the philosophy of madness. Nevertheless, the two appear to share an underlying agreement on the fundamental point that I am emphasizing: opposition to pure, absolute and logocentric totalities that efface rather than promote alterity and ambiguity. For more on the debate, see Shoshana Felman, “Madness and Philosophy or Literature's Reason,” Yale French Studies 52 (1975) 206–28.

15 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) 4–5

16 Ibid., 26.

17 Ibid., 28.

18 Said, Humanism, 27.

19 Ibid., 26.

20 José B. Cuellar, “Notas en el Viento: The Musical Soundtrack of Alambrista: The Director's Cut,” Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants (ed. Nicholas J. Cull and Davíd Carrasco; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004) 178.

21 Ibid., 188–89.

22 Ibid., 190–92.

23 Virgilio Elizondo, The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet (rev. ed.; Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000) 17n. Owing in large measure to the influence of Elizondo, the concept of mestizaje is perhaps the defining feature of U.S. Hispanic (also called Latino/a) theology, distinguishing it from Latin American liberation theology with which it otherwise shares much in common. For more on the significance of the concept, see essays by Jacques Audinet, Roberto S. Goizueta and Virgilio Elizondo in “Part Three: Mestizaje and a Galilean Christology,” Beyond Borders: Writings of Virgilio Elizondo and Friends (ed. Timothy Matovina; Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2000) 141–86.

24 Elizondo, Future, 39–40.

25 Ibid., 21.

26 Ibid., 56.

27 Ibid., 77.

28 Ibid., 80.

29 Ibid., 84.

30 Virgilio Elizondo, “Mestizaje as a Locus of Theological Reflection,” Beyond Borders: Writings of Virgilio Elizondo and Friends (ed. Timothy Matovina; Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2000) 173.

31 Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996) 81.

32 Ibid.

33 The valuable textual anthology of critical and scholarly essays to which this paper refers extensively (Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants) is secondary to and derivative from the film itself.

34 Homi Bhabha, “Adagio,” Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (ed. Homi Bhabha and W.J.T. Mitchell; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 15–16.

35 My linking of logocentrism and texuality in this section may appear inappropriate given that Derrida, whom I have presented as the central opponent of logocentrism, writes extensively about the value of writing. Yet contrary to much misunderstanding, Derrida means something far more general by the term writing than mere graphical inscription on material. When Derrida promotes writing, it is not to privilege writing in the narrow sense (over orality, for example), but rather as an illustration of his opposition to transcendental signifieds. He is concerned with and critical of all structured forms of expression that reduce differentiation by means of any such metaphysical unity that somehow escapes the perpetual chain of signification. He does not appear concerned with promoting narrowly textual writing over other media of expression. For more on this, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's preface to Derrida, Of Grammatology, esp. lxviii-lxx.

36 Lawrence E. Sullivan, “Seeking an End to the Primary Text,” Beyond the Classics? Essays in Religious Studies and Liberal Education (ed. Frank E. Reynolds and Sheryl L. Burkhalter; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990) 42.

37 According to G. Kittel, “the main emphasis of the term [logos] is always on saying something” (“Word and Speech in the New Testament,” in Theological Dictionary, 4:102).

38 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1983) 119.

39 Ong argues that even the attention given in biblical studies to oral traditions treats orality primarily in terms of that which will eventually be written. Ibid., 170.

40 Sullivan, 45.

41 Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies, 49–73.

42 Sheila Greeve Davaney, “Theology and the Turn to Cultural Analysis,” in Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism (ed. Delwin Brown, Sheila Greeve Davaney and Kathryn Tanner; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 6.

43 For the significance of Our Lady of Guadalupe in U.S. Hispanic religiosity and mestizo consciousness as “neither an Indian goddess nor a European Madonna … neither Spanish nor Indian,” yet who “is both and more,” see Elizondo, Future, 57–66.

44 Cuellar, “Notas,” 194.

45 Ibid., 187.

46 Here Carrasco references the definition of religion used by historian of religions Charles H. Long. Davíd Carrasco, “Dead Walking, Making Food, and Giving Birth to Alambristas: Religious Dimensions in the Film,” Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants (ed. Nicholas J. Cull and Davíd Carrasco; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004) 204.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., 205.

49 This revaluation of alternative media is actually common to many, if not all, forms of liberation theology. See, for example, from two different contexts (North American black theology and Indian Dalit theology), James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991); and Sathianathan Clarke, Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

50 Roberto S. Goizueta, “U.S. Hispanic Popular Catholicism as Theopoetics,” Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise (ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Fernando F. Segovia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996) 261.

51 Ibid., 267.

52 Ana María Pineda, “The Oral Tradition of a People: Forjadora de rostro y corazón,” Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise (ed. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Fernando F. Segovia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996) 108–9.

53 Ibid., 115.

54 Ibid., 112–16.

55 See the first chapter, “The Wisdom of Holy Fools: A Way to the Love of Truth in Postmodernity,” Peter Phan, Being Religious Interreligiously: Asian Perspectives on Interfaith Dialogue (Maryknoll, N.Y.: 2004) 3–22.

56 1 Cor 3:19 NRSV.

57 See Phan, 14–16.

58 Roberto S. Goizueta, Caminemos Con Jesus: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995) 144.

59 Manuel J. Mejido Costoya, “The Postmodern: Liberation or Language,” Handbook of Latina/o Theologies, 276.

60 Ibid., 281.

61 Goizueta, Caminemos, 170–71.

62 Goizueta makes a similar point in his previously cited essay on theopoetics. There, he urges that theopoetics be distinguished from aestheticism. The latter is an end in itself, while the former (grounded in historical praxis) points to a God who becomes concrete in history. The stress on aesthetics thus cannot be divorced from ethics. See Goizueta, “U.S. Hispanic,” 266 (esp. n. 19).

63 In fact, as Spivak makes clear in her preface to Of Grammatology, deconstruction does not content itself with merely replacing writing (as Derrida broadly conceives this word) with speech, or logocentrism with lococentrism. Quoting Derrida, Spivak writes that “[t]o deconstruct the opposition is first … ‘to overthrow [renverser] the hierarchy.’ … But in the next phase of deconstruction, this reversal must be displaced, the winning term put under erasure.” Deconstruction aims “to reverse the resident hierarchy, only to displace it.” The opposing terms of the binary are always in flux. Meaning is located precisely in the shifting borderland between. See Spivak, lxxvi-lxxviii.

64 Indeed, the methodological assessments and ethical critiques that follow suggest a borderland mestizaje in Cuellar's stage name. He not just any loco; he is Dr. Loco, with all the implications of expertise, status, and even authority to diagnose madness that the doctoral title carries.

65 Cuellar, “Notas,” 182.

66 Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings (ed. Robert G. O'Meally; New York: The Modern Library, 2001) 100.

67 Bhabha, Location, 37–38.

68 In other aspects of the film, there is a certain cross-cultural universality to oppression. In her contribution to the Alambrista anthology, Cordelia Candelaria writes, “The film illustrates that the Mexican worker with a green card or without; the Mexican American by birth or naturalized; the border patrol whether Anglo, Chicano, or another ethnicity; and the U.S. American worker share the same immigrant and hybrid story of transmigration.” Candelaria, “Tightrope Walking,” 145.

69 Elizondo, Future, 129.

70 Ibid., 102.