During Hispanic Heritage Month, Faculty Voices talked with Mayra Rivera Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University,. She discusses what it means to be Latinx with shared cultures and history of a colonial past.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Mayra Rivera Rivera is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religious in Latinx Studies at Harvard University. She's president of the American Academy of Religion. Rivera is also writing a book that explores the relationship between colonialism, ecology, and catastrophe in Caribbean history and literature. Welcome, Mayra.
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
Thank you. Thank you for the invitation, June.
June Carolyn Erlick:
We're celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, a celebration of all things Latinx. Unfortunately, in my opinion, most of the celebration has centered around food and music. Not that I have anything against food and music. I was intrigued by the fact that back in 2019 you taught a course called Latinx Theory and Knowing. Before I ask you about that, could we talk a little bit about your own background as a Latina woman?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
Sure. I grew up in Puerto Rico, so I grew up with a sense that my political identity was Puerto Rican, very strongly. And I did not grow up with a sense of what it means to be Latinx in the United States. I grew up in a Spanish-speaking context with a lot of pride and defense of the language and the cultures.
It's not until I start my graduate studies that I move to the mainland, and I start reflecting on this question of Latinx as a political identity. In terms of a cultural identity, it was clear the commonalities between cultures that call themselves Latinx, where it gathers together people who come from the Caribbean and people who have their roots in Central America, and we find each other in the United States. And there's this rich exchange of cultural traditions and histories that constitute our culture as Latinx people.
But there's also that other part of it, which is the political identity. What has it mean to be a Latinx person in the United States? What has happened to our history in the United States? What do our bodies represent in the United States? That part of the process was something that I began to engage more deeply when I moved to the United States.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You were in graduate school?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
In graduate school.
June Carolyn Erlick:
What made you see this and not just hang out with the Puerto Ricans that you were around?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
There were a lot of Puerto Ricans in my graduate program, thankfully. But it was also a sense of a shared culture. The sense of the value and the appreciation for cultures that are linked through our ancestry in Latin America and through our cultural traditions in Latin America.
That became a natural link to find a space in this country when I first moved in. It was both about recognizing something, but it was also a lot about learning from other traditions that are gathered under Latinx.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Some people say that the idea of Latino or Latinx or Hispanic is too reductionist, that a fourth generation Mexican American actually has little in common with a newly arrived Cuban immigrant or refugee. How would you react to that?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
I would say it's a matter of commitment for me. It's a matter of understanding both the contributions of people who arrived recently in this country to the formation of this country and the formation of its traditions and its knowledge. For me, it's about recognizing the importance of those contributions. Even if is someone who's newly arrived to the United States, there's a sense of the ongoingness of the process and the value of that process, and the value of the learning that happens that way.
One of the important things to realize is how part of what the United States is, is also in relation to Latin America. It's not just that people come from Latin America to the United States and make their home here and transform the country, but it's also that the United States have always been involved in what's happening in Latin America. So that to pretend that they are completely separate is also to ignore the very history of our country.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Could you tease that out a little bit for people who may not be familiar with colonial experiences?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
Well, I grew up in Puerto Rico, as I said before, and I still call Puerto Rico home. And Puerto Rico still is a colonial territory of the United States. We are both proud of our cultural traditions that I would describe us as Latinx, but we are also part of the United States politically and culturally. And even Latin American countries who are not formally colonized by the United States, there's an incredible amount of exchange, both in terms of commercial and political power. There's a lot of exchange of knowledge.
I think these are very complex relationships. And for Latinx peoples, those relationships that are very visible, even as we live those relationships as part of the United States.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So when did this journey, like you were getting interested in these themes in college, but now you're a Latinx intellectual, a theorizer. How did that shift take place?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
My undergraduate education was in chemical engineer. I did not explore these ideas except through literature. I was always an avid reader of literature, so I felt that sense of connection to the culture through literature. But once I started my graduate studies in religion, my area of focus was colonialism, how the history of colonialism shapes religion. How colonialism is both legitimized through religion, but also how religion itself is shaped by the process of colonialism.
And the fact that I was interested in these questions at all had everything to do with the fact that I was Puerto Rican and colonialism was always front and center. I start establishing very strong relationships with scholars who are Latinx people, writing about Latinx studies in the United States. So my interest in colonial studies is connected, or I think about colonialism in that side of relation, particularly relationships with the Caribbean.
June Carolyn Erlick:
What do you think about Hispanic Heritage Month?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
I think that it gives us an opportunity. That it gives us an opportunity to highlight certain things, particularly the contribution of Latinx people in the United States, that it gives us space such as this to talk about why is it important and how it has shaped us, and why do we want to claim identities in that way? Why do we hang out with Latinx scholars?
But also why do we think it is so important to produce scholarship that is explicitly examining the Latinx experience, but also highlighting and putting at the center the knowledge production of Latinx people.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Going back to your course, how do you actually come up with the idea for this course?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
As we often begin thinking about a course, I started by gathering materials that I wanted to teach students. And then I started asking, "What's the through link? What connects all these discussions together?" And for me, what was central to the discussion of Latinx in theory is that our being and our knowledge are inherently connected. Our claim to this Latinx ways of being is also a claim to particular forms of knowledge.
I once had this conversation in a previous class with a student who has said, "Well, I really want to do more theory, but we study Latin American literature with European theory." I said, "Yeah, that's a very poignant point." And how do we just start to gather the resources we have to think about a theory that emerges from Latinx experience. That's what the class is about.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Explain to our audience who aren't necessarily in your field, what does this mean to have a Latinx theory?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
It means that we examine what are the ways of conceiving different things through the lens of Latinx students. For instance, one of the categories that I teach in the class is embodiment. So what does the Latinx history, how does it affect the way we think about embodiment? How does this histories of mixtures of race, how does the histories of living across national boundaries affect the way we think about bodies? How does the visibility of bodies work when we think of ourselves as Latinx people in the United States, for instance. Those are questions that emerge specifically if we are thinking from a particular positionality, both political but also cultural.
And the same with environmentalism. What are the traditions of Latinx thought that influence the way people approach environmentalism? What are the myths that are circulated and reinterpret it for the sake of environmental activism. What are traditions of art that influence how we approach environmentalism?
June Carolyn Erlick:
Now when you talk about traditions, are you basically looking at indigenous traditions, or what exactly are you looking at?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
I'm looking at traditions developed in the United States in communities that trace their roots to either countries in Latin America or the Caribbean. And of course, there's a multiplicity of those, but they come together in the United States and in specific communities in the United States. And develop their own traditions that are shaped by the challenges that are specific to the context of the United States, even as they are also related to our pasts in around Latin America.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So it's focused on that cauldron of intersections?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
Yes, absolutely.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Are your students all Latinx or who's interested in the course?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
I had a good number of Latinx students, but not all of them are Latinx. Some students from the Caribbean, some African American students, some white students. It just invites a diverse group of students to reflect on a number of topics, but with that specificity in mind. How do we look at it if our understanding of these things is shaped by the experiences and the knowledges of Latinx peoples?
June Carolyn Erlick:
What do you think are the challenges right now in the United States faced by Latinx peoples?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
I mean, I think there are challenges about the political force of Latinx people, and how do we think about the political impact of Latinx people in ways that take into account the differences such as class and race among Latinx people. So how do we think about a common struggle in ways that do not occlude their differences, but also that fragment in ways that weaken the political power.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You do a lot of thinking about colonialism and politics, which I think of as history, slash political sciences, and yet you have this deep passion for Latinx writers and what the writers bring to these subjects. Could you tell our listeners about that? Who are these Latinx writers, what do you like about them, and why use literature?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
You're right that literature is an important passion for me, actually. When I was growing up in Puerto Rico, a lot like so many colonized countries, the histories we learn tend to be more fictional in the sense of being idealized depictions of the relationships, of quite violent relationships.
But where I found a wealth of knowledge and wisdom about the histories of Latin America, of Puerto Rico, of the United States, was in literature. What I love about it, I'm really a humanist in that sense, that I learned from literature the human dimension of these things that we tend to think in very abstract terms. We tend to think about geopolitics as something very abstract and distant. But literature invites us to imagine situations, experiences, that we would otherwise not know. So it's an invitation to imagine experiences of others, and even our ancestral experiences.
I think my main approaches are really literary and philosophical, even though those are very grounded in these histories that are shaping our experiences, the literary dimension is very, very important.
June Carolyn Erlick:
I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that you were a chemical engineer, which feels extremely focused, and as about un-multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary as you can get.
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
Yeah, it's an interesting thing. Even as I was an engineer, literature was there all along. But a funny connection is that my first job was as an environmental engineer, which connects in very unexpected ways to my scholarship now. So even if my approach is quite different than it was when I was an engineer, I think some of the questions have interesting and unexpected connections with the work I used to do.
June Carolyn Erlick:
And you were reading all along. You were reading, what, novels, poetry?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
Novels mainly. Latin American novels in particular, Puerto Rican novels. It wasn't until I was in the United States that I started reading fiction in English and poetry in English. Took me a long time, even though I enjoy it a lot now. There's been a transformation in myself and in my literary canon, if you will, since I moved to the United States.
June Carolyn Erlick:
When does a Latinx writer become a Latinx writer, as opposed to a Latin American writer?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
That's an interesting question for a Puerto Rican. For us, we're always both. Politically, of course, it's not Latin America. Politically, it is part of the United States, but culturally it's always Latin America. But I would say that the experience of Puerto Ricans are experiences that are part of the American experience, even if it isn't recognized as such. I would call it Latinx, in as much as it illuminates a reality that is very much part of the United States.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Yeah. I was kind of annoyed and impressed by the lack of discussion of literature during Hispanic Heritage Months. Why do you think that is?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
I don't know. And perhaps it's something we could think about for future years, to try to be intentional about highlighting the contribution of some amazing writers, Latinx writers. There is an incredible amount of wisdom and beauty in their works.
As part of my work for the American Academy of Religion, I invited for our annual meeting Valeria Luiselli to give one of our plenary talks, and she is at Harvard this year I learned. It's an example of just an amazing writer who's produced significant work exploring the experience of Latinx people on both sides. Those in the United States already, and those in the process of crossing, and the relationship between those two in such beautiful writing.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Are there any other Latinx writers that you are really enjoying?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
It's hard to name some but Achy Obejas, for instance. Her novel Days of Awe takes place between Cuba and the United States. It's amazing work. The poetry of Raquel Rivera Salas, of Mayra Montero. The list is very long, but definitely worth studying.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Do you have any other Latinx courses you're dreaming about doing, or planning to do?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
One that I've been planning to do is precisely on how Latinx novels represent questions of bodies and spirits. But I think there's an important Latinx component in all of my classes I teach a class on the colonial theory, and the majority of the scholars we read are Latinx scholars. They are philosophers or literary theorists.
Many of my courses don't have Latinx in the title, but are very intentional in bringing the scholarship produced by Latinx scholars on Latinx topics to bear on the topics of my courses.
June Carolyn Erlick:
When I came to Harvard, which was in 1997, there was kind of a burgeoning of Latin American and Latinx courses, particularly one that I remember that was co-taught by Marcellas Juarez Orozco and Dora Summer.
As somebody who has been at Harvard for a while it seems to me that there are actually fewer courses that are thinking about Latinx or in some Latin theme. Would you agree with that, and why is that?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
I do agree with that, and try to think about it a lot in terms of how can we provide organizational and institutional spaces that can center the knowledge production of Latinx people. A lot of my work in ethnicity migration rights was trying to imagine how we could bring that about. But I think ultimately there needs to be a commitment from the administration and creative thinking about how to make it happen.
But I think it's so, so, so important. It is a gap in the education that we don't have a more robust set of offerings that center on the knowledge production of Latinx communities.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Yes, it's very important.
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
Yeah.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Do you have anything more to add?
Mayra Rivera Rivera:
I mean, just to thank you for this conversation. I've really enjoyed it and I hope it keeps going. And hopefully next year we'll have some new plans and hopefully something that can highlight, as you said, the contributions of Latinx writers. That would be a lot of fun. But thank you so much, June.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Thank you, Mayra. We're listening to Faculty Voices. Marya Rivera Rivera is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University. She is president of the American Academy of Religion. Rivera is currently writing a book that explores the relationship between colonialism, ecology, and catastrophe in Caribbean history and literature.