“And yet to act is not enough. Many of us are learning to sit perfectly still, to sense the presence of the Soul and commune with Her.”
―Gloria Anzaldua
A Mixed-Race Feminist in Movements for Social Justice
by Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz
I have vivid memories of celebrating the holidays with my maternal grandparents. My Jido and Sito (“grandfather” and “grandmother,” respectively in Arabic), who were raised as Muslim Arabs, celebrated Christmas rather than Ramadan. Every year, my Sito set up her Christmas tree in front of a huge bay window in their living room. It was important to her that the neighbors could see the tree from the street. Yet on Christmas day Arabic was spoken in the house, Arabic music was played, Arabic food was served and a hot and heavy poker game was always the main activity. Early on, I learned that what is publicly communicated can be very different from what is privately experienced.
Because of the racism, harassment and ostracism that my Arab grandparents faced, they developed ways to assimilate (or appear to assimilate) into their predominantly white New Hampshire community. When my mother married my Jewish father and raised me with his religion, they hoped that by presenting me to the world as a white Jewish girl, I would escape the hate they had experienced. But it did not happen that way. Instead, it took me years to untangle and understand the public/private dichotomy that had been such a part of my childhood.
My parents’ mixed-class, mixed-race and mixed-religion relationship held its own set of complex contradictions and tensions. My father comes from a working-class, Ashkenazi Jewish family. My mother comes from an upper-middle-class Lebanese family, in which—similar to other Arab families of her generation—women were not encouraged and only sometimes permitted to get an education. My mother has a high-school degree and no “marketable” job skills. When my father married her, he considered it an opportunity to marry into a higher class status. Her background as a Muslim Arab was something he essentially ignored except when it came to deciding what religious traditions my sister and I were going to be raised with. From my father’s perspective, regardless of my mother’s religious and cultural background, my sister and I were Jews—and only Jews.
My mother, who to this day carries an intense mix of pride and shame about being Arab, was eager to “marry out” of her Arabness. She thought that by marrying a white Jew, particularly in a predominantly white New Hampshire town, that she would somehow be able to escape or minimize the ongoing racism her family faced. She converted to Judaism for this reason and also because she felt that “eliminating” Arabness and Islam from the equation would make my life and my sister’s life less complex. We could all say—her included—that we were Jews. Sexism and racism (and their internalized versions) played a significant part in shaping my parents’ relationship. My father was never made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome because he had married a Muslim Arab woman. He used his white male privilege and his Zionistic point of view to solidify his legitimacy. He created the perception that he did my mother a favor by “marrying her out” of her Arabness and the strictness of her upbringing.
My mother, however, bore the brunt of other people’s prejudices. Her struggle for acceptance and refuge was especially evident in her relationship with my father’s family, who never fully accepted her. It did not matter that she converted to Judaism, was active in Hadassah or knew all of the rituals involved in preparing a Passover meal. She was frequently made to feel that she was never quite Jewish enough. My Jewish grandmother was particularly critical of my mother and communicated in subtle and not so subtle ways that she tolerated my mother’s presence because she loved her son. In turn, I felt as if there was something wrong with me and that the love that I received from my father’s family was conditional. Many years later this was proven to be true: when my parents divorced, every member of my father’s family cut off communication from my mother, my sister and me. Racism and Zionism played a significant (but not exclusive) role in their choice. My father’s family (with the exception of my Jewish grandfather, who died in the early seventies) had always been uncomfortable that my father had married an Arab woman. The divorce gave them a way out of examining their own racism and Zionism.
Today my mother realizes that her notions about marrying into whiteness and into a community that would somehow gain her greater acceptance was, to say the least, misguided. She romanticized her relationship with my father as a “symbol of peace” between Jews and Arabs, and she underestimated the impact of two very real issues: racism within the white Jewish community and the strength of anti-Semitism toward the Jewish community. At the time she did not understand that her own struggle against racism and anti-Arab sentiment was both linked to and different than anti-Semitism… Continue Reading.
Spiritual Biography
by Lisbeth Melendez Rivera
My name is Lisbeth Melendez Rivera, and I am a 56 yr. old cisgender lesbian from Puerto Rico. I was born in San Juan, PR, to a middle-class family. My father is a retired business owner, and my mother is a retired middle school history teacher. Growing up in a profoundly Catholic family as Vatican II was implemented gave me a foundation in social justice and a deep sense of responsibility for how I walked into the world. During my middle years, I first felt a call to ministry, but being catholic, the best I could aim for was to be an altar person, which was unattainable. Young women were not allowed to be altar people when I was growing up.
Here is a bit of my family history and my journey here:
My family's history in the continent now called America started at its beginning. My father's paternal side came to the "New World" on the second voyage; Jews and Moors escaping the Inquisition and the cleansing Isabel and Felipe put in place and carried out by the Catholic Church. Sometime in the next century, they went from "conversos"/crypto-Jews to full-blown Christian as their secretive lives were hard to maintain and traditions were lost. They were always outliers and became Santeros and Espiritistas in later generations. Economically they became business people and found many institutions in their hometown, from hospitals to the Rotary Club. That is to say, they came as escapees and rose to rulers. My father's maternal side history is less known. However, we know they hailed from the Basqueregion of Iberia and came to Puerto Rico as indentured servants working the sugar cane fields, where they remained for at least a century. Their religious journey is still unknown, but my grandmother and her siblings spoke avidly of their adherence to Catholicism from generations past to their times.
Similarly, my mother's paternal side was also Basque, but contrary to my father's maternal family, they came as landowners, members of the ruling class. Founders of their hometown and many of its civics institutions owned tobacco, coffee, and sugar cane farms, a house at the river's bend, and were the first gas-powered car owners in their hometown. My mother's maternal line came from deep poverty. Little is known about their origins on either side of this line, except for my great-grandmother's deep commitment to education and giving her 11 children a better life. She was a cook (a skillset I share) and cooked for the middle and upper-class families in her town who could not afford cooks and whose maids would come to pick up the food and serve as "homemade" to their bosses. I can say so much more about my family, but I will close this section with this: both my grandfathers married outside of class and race. They were both disowned at the time (even if reinstated later), and education became their currency of love. My grandparents stressed the importance of education above money and knowledge as the exchange rate by measuring progress. All of them were Catholics, and their legacy still permeates my life even if they are long gone. As you can imagine from my story so far, I was raised Catholic, upper-middle-class, and expected to be highly educated. IN light of it all, I am not sure things worked out the way my parents expected, yet here I am. So then, WHO AM I? If you ask me to label myself, I will tell you I am a 56 yr. Old LatinaButch Catholic Dyke. I know! Jarring may not be the best way to start a biographical statement, but bear with me for each of those words speaks to formative moments in my life and informs how, why, and what for I exercise my leadership and ethics.
Once I accepted who I was: a masculine-center lesbian, I was angry. Not with myself but with a Church that told me I was an abomination. It was during those Catholic college days when I left the Church. Even throughout that time, I knew I could be a better Catholic. Liberation Theology kept creeping into my life. Even as I was flirting with communism, I could not ascribe, for I could not give up the concept of God and what they meant in my life. Liberation Theology was a better fit. Liberation Theology gave me a purpose, a way to be Catholic but not be Church. It meant working for an end to oppression, knowing fully well that it was what my faith called me to do, and yet if you had asked me about this time of my life, I would tell you I had nothing to do with Church, Faith and, definitely NOT, organized religion of any kind. Let me pause here for a second to talk about high and low points in my life. Maybe add a layer of conflict to this story so far under-told. Above all of these details, I will add that I am also a survivor of about 16 years of sexual abuse at the hands of not one but several men, men who had my parents' trust and broke mine. I cannot answer typical questions teenagers would ask each other as young people, not because I do not want to but because I do not know the answers. One of the highest points in my life was telling my last abuser to STOP and mean it in ways I never had before. My lowest point continues to be a nagging feeling that by hiding my secret from his children, I allowed him to abuse them. As I sometimes observe the twists and turns of one of them, I cry quietly and have yet to muster the courage to speak to her. It is a work in progress, and I hope we will overcome and speak our truths to one another one day. Maybe they will be different, but I have a feeling they might be too close to one another. Coming to terms with who I am was to understand that I am despite all that experience, not because of it. I am much more because of what I consented to with my life against all odds.
Coming back to my story of faith, I can fast forward to 2006 when I was asked by a former supervisor, Rev. Harry Knox, to help with a publication he was working on. It was a Guide for Latinx families of LGBTQI Latin@s about reconciling Faith, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Ethnicity, and Familia. This work has helped me hone my strengths, get better around my weaknesses, and rediscover that young, curious person who knew she could understand God and how they were reflected in everyday life. I consider and describe "A la Familia" as my journey back to faith. As my former supervisor, Dr. Sharon Groves is fond of telling me, and it helped me discover my brethren, Catholics working to reform the Church and accept my LGBTQI community and me as part of their own. Who will sit with me in the pews knowing that “An ounce of mother is worth a pound of the priest?” Understanding God makes no mistakes, but we humans do. Throughout the last 11 years, I have grown as a Catholic and a Christian, and I am more curious about what the future has in store around me and my faith. My next step in that journey is to deepen my knowledge of theology, engage in a ministry of justice, and lead from behind, helping those of us who practice Christianity be better at it! I look forward to engaging others in that conversation and helping many more reconcile their faith with tasks at hand in this political/social moment when we seem adrift and removed from what calls us to God. Not separation and rejection but love and embracement. I have Rosa Manriquez tothank for that. A Catholic mother of 2 lesbians and a recently ordained Catholic Woman Priest, she has pushed me to stop denying what she sees as obvious, to consider all that can come from deeper engagement, and to challenge myself out of my comfort zone. To accomplish that, I will need to conquer my fears, lean into my ethics and get in the weeds of a matter. I will need to come down from my 30k preferred view. I also know that my strength is the capacity to envision, teach, mentor, facilitate, and engage. At fifty-six, I am a work in progress. I am still working on doing better at the details, at the logistics of it all. I will not lie; details bore me. I would instead be dreaming, BIG, and move the arch closer to justice with the help of those who like details implemented. That is my ministry; those are the basis of my ethics, which is the future of my leadership. To be better, to know more, to keep fighting.
SOUL
“A Mixed-Race Feminist in Movements for Social Justice” is a chapter originally published in Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism edited by Daisy Hernandez and Bushara Rehman in April 2002 with Seal Press.