The Core Assumption
Meaning lives in the text read from the starting point of poverty, migration, and marginalization, in the daily struggle where the community actually hears it.
The Four Assumptions
- Where meaning lives
- Meaning lives in the text read from the starting point of poverty, migration, and marginalization: lo cotidiano, the daily life and struggle of the community, is where the text is heard and where its truth is tested.
- What the text is
- The text is the book of a people formed by exile, conquest, and journey, whose stories of displacement and divine accompaniment answer the migrant's experience with unusual directness.
- Who may interpret
- The authorized interpreter is the community in la lucha, with its popular Bible reading, its abuelas' wisdom, and its mestizaje identity, in critical conversation with its trained scholars.
- What counts as a good reading
- A reading is adequate when it sustains the community's dignity and struggle, honors its popular religiosity instead of correcting it from above, and refuses both assimilation and despair.
Genealogy
This method arose in the 20th c period (Latin American roots in liberation theology from the 1960s; a distinct United States Latino hermeneutics formed in the 1980s and 1990s).
Key proponents: Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Fernando F. Segovia, Justo L. González, Miguel A. De La Torre.
Key texts: En la lucha: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology by Ada María Isasi-Díaz; Reading the Bible as Hispanic Christians: Toward a Hispanic Biblical Hermeneutics by Justo L. González; Decolonizing Biblical Studies by Fernando F. Segovia.
The Procedure
These are the same steps The Workshop will walk you through.
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Begin in lo cotidiano
Describe the community's daily life as it is actually lived: work, migration status, family separation, remittances, worship, and food, before turning to the text.
Why this step matters: Isasi-Díaz established daily life as the locus of theology: the reading begins where women and men struggle to make life possible.
How to do it: Gather the description from the community's own telling, in Spanish and English as they are actually mixed, and record la lucha in concrete terms.
What goes wrong here: Beginning with the ethnic label rather than with the lived day.
You record: The community's daily life and struggle. Done well when: The description contains the community's own vocabulary for its situation.
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Read the text as a migrant book
Trace the passage's own movements: exile, journey, sojourning, return, and God's presence outside the homeland, and set them beside the community's movements.
Why this step matters: The Bible's people are repeatedly displaced, and reading with migrants discloses how central displacement is to the whole canon.
How to do it: Attend to the text's border crossings and mixed families, and note where the community's experience corrects sentimental readings of them.
What goes wrong here: Turning every migration text into a direct endorsement of one modern immigration policy, which the texts cannot bear alone.
You record: The passage's migrations and the community's. Done well when: Parallels and differences between the text's displacements and the present ones are both recorded.
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Honor popular reading and popular religion
Document how the community already reads this text and practices this faith: processions, home altars, feast days, and family readings, and treat them as interpretation.
Why this step matters: Popular religiosity is this tradition's archive: the people's theology carried in practice when books and clergy were scarce or foreign.
How to do it: Describe the practices from inside before evaluating them, and let practitioners explain their own meanings.
What goes wrong here: Correcting popular practice by academic standards before understanding what it carries.
You record: The community's existing interpretation in practice. Done well when: At least one practice is interpreted by its own practitioners in the record.
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Discern in the in-between
State the reading's position in the mestizaje, the in-between of cultures, languages, and nations, and what fidelity looks like from there.
Why this step matters: Segovia's diaspora analysis and the theology of mestizaje make the in-between a place of knowledge rather than a deficiency to be cured by assimilation.
How to do it: Name what the reading refuses from both the dominant culture and any romanticized homeland, and what it builds in the space between.
What goes wrong here: Treating hybridity as a slogan while the reading in fact chooses one side silently.
You record: A reading from the in-between. Done well when: The reading's refusals and constructions on both sides of the border are stated.
Inputs Required
- The community's daily life described in its own words
- Its popular readings and religious practices, documented from inside
- The passage's own histories of migration and displacement
Outputs Produced
- A reading grounded in lo cotidiano and la lucha
- An account of the community's popular interpretation as theology
- A discernment of faithful life in the in-between of cultures
Quality Criteria
Under this method, a good reading is one that meets these tests:
- Daily life, not ethnicity in the abstract, is the documented starting point
- Popular religiosity is interpreted by its practitioners before it is evaluated
- Migration parallels are drawn with their differences intact
Common Errors
- Collapsing Latin American and United States Latino situations into one context
- Romanticizing poverty as though deprivation itself were a virtue
- Letting the scholar's Spanish, or lack of it, go unexamined as a hermeneutical fact
Strengths
- It gave theological form to the experience of tens of millions of migrants and their children
- Its category of lo cotidiano grounded theology in daily life more concretely than most contextual methods
- It preserved and honored popular Catholic and Pentecostal practice as theological knowledge
Weaknesses and Critics
- The diversity gathered under Latino, national, racial, generational, and denominational, strains any single hermeneutic
- Its North American academic form can drift from the base communities it invokes
- The in-between can be celebrated so generally that specific injustices, such as immigration enforcement, blur into atmosphere
Miguel A. De La Torre (internal critique): De La Torre pressed the tradition from within to move from a hermeneutics of identity to an ethics of concrete action, warning that Latino theology can settle into celebrating mestizaje and lo cotidiano while the structures producing migration and poverty continue untouched, and that readings must be judged by whether they confront those structures. (The Politics of Jesús: A Hispanic Political Theology (2015) and De La Torre's essays on Latina/o hermeneutics)
Justo L. González (internal caution): González cautioned Hispanic interpreters, as one of their founders, against two mirror errors: reading the Bible as though Hispanic experience were not a real lens, and reading it as though the lens relieved the interpreter of the church's whole tradition and the text's own historical discipline. (Santa Biblia: The Bible through Hispanic Eyes (1996))
Internal Schools
Mujerista hermeneutics: This school, founded by Ada María Isasi-Díaz, centers Latina women's daily struggle and names their liberation, in community, as the criterion by which readings and theologies are judged.
Segovia's diaspora school: This school theorizes the flesh-and-blood reader in diaspora, joining hermeneutics to postcolonial analysis of empire and migration at the level of method.
Latin American liberation reading: This school descends directly from the base communities and the liberation tradition, reading from the continent's poverty with social analysis at the center, and stands in creative tension with the diaspora schools to its north.
Exemplar Readings
The Galilean Jesus Read from the Margins (The Gospels' Galilee in González's Hispanic reading): González's reading notices that the gospel begins not in the capital but in marginalized, mixed Galilee of the nations, and reads Jesus's own provincial, borderland identity as the church's warrant for taking Hispanic marginality as a place where God characteristically speaks.
Hagar Read in La Lucha (Genesis 16 and 21 in mujerista reading): Isasi-Díaz's tradition reads Hagar with Latina women who know surrogacy, domestic labor, and expulsion, and draws from her wilderness survival a theology of God's accompaniment that neither romanticizes her suffering nor abandons her to it.
What This Method Cannot Do
This method cannot unify its own constituency, since the Cuban exile, the Mexican migrant, the Puerto Rican citizen, and the Central American asylum seeker bring different histories to the same text, and it must let their readings argue. It also cannot convert its readings into immigration policy by itself, because the texts authorize dignity and accompaniment more directly than they specify statutes.
Site Stance
The site has not yet assigned its stance on this method. The stance assignments wait on the named reviewers, the same naming the Christian Assessment verdicts wait on. The method stands here in full in the meantime: a stance discloses the site's judgment, and it never filters what a reader may read or run. The stance values and their criteria stand on the criteria page.
Run This Method in the Workshop
Open this method on the bench →
Across the Site
This method belongs to the Contextual and Advocacy Hermeneutics family. Its sources stand in the References register; its family stands among the site's tools; the positions it produces can be compared in the Diptych.
Primary Sources
- En la lucha: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology by Ada María Isasi-Díaz (1993)
- Santa Biblia: The Bible through Hispanic Eyes by Justo L. González (1996)
Secondary Sources
- Decolonizing Biblical Studies by Fernando F. Segovia (2000)
- The Politics of Jesús by Miguel A. De La Torre (2015)