Spirits in the material world

Rubén Martínez says surge in faith can be attributed to migration.

By Mark D. Robertson
South Coast Beacon

God is “not dead at all, but has come back from the dead,” said Journalist/Author/Professor/Poet Rubén Martínez to an audience of students, teachers, and other community members at a packed UCSB multicultural center recently. We are in the midst of what he called a widespread “resacralization” of American culture.

Part of this return to faith, he said, can be attributed to migrants — Latinos, Koreans, Palestinians, Nigerians — many of whom bring some sort of belief structure that effects the mainstream culture, even as they are affected by ours. In much his work (he has written two books and a companion to a PBS series on the subject) Martínez suggests that beneath economic impulses for globalization, there are deep religious and spiritual undercurrents that motivate and define these diasporas.

In no place, he said, are the results of spiritual and religious migration better represented than California. It is “the land of the New Age, land of Catholicism, land of Santería, land of WASPism, land of Islam, land of Native American spirituality, land of Liberation Theology —it is an amazingly diverse territory in spiritual and religious terms.” Consider Santa Cruz or Berkley. Or, as Martínez noted, the young man outside the Multicultural Center who was burning sage in a bronze chalice as some sort of obscure New Age practice.

Martínez challenged the contemporary notion of assimilation. “People always talk about immigrants coming to the United States and being assimilated. People rarely talk about the impact the immigrants have on us. We who grew up here, we who have been here two or three or four generations — we are being remade by the immigrants.”

He also offered a very compelling discourse on the “sights and sounds” that represent these ethnographic changes in the United States. He described these changes as the “ghosts” of historical and spiritual memory. The most pointed examples are the visions of the Virgin of Guadalupe; nearly everywhere there have been large concentrations of immigrants in America, people have seen the Virgin. During workers strikes, gang fighting —whenever people find themselves in political, economic, or social freefall —they have had religious visions, and the religious visions have shaped political action.

The social and spiritual struggles of migrants, Martínez added, are by no means reserved to the plight of Latinos. He recently befriended a Nigerian refugee family, struggling to keep their geography-based animistic religion, while acclimating to the concrete jungles of Chicago.

He spoke of a young baseball player from Santo Domingo, José Garcia, whose religion was a poor, Dominican’s Catholicism. Garcia found himself in a crisis when he actually made it (he now plays for the Texas Rangers) — how could he keep his working-class Catholicism when the gods of baseball were attached to huge dollar signs?

He spoke of a couple married in Bangalore, India, who moved to the Silicon Valley. The husband worked as a computer programmer at Motorola, and as they started amassing wealth, the gods of capitalism challenged the anti-materialistic gods of their Hinduism.

Regardless of the journey, Martínez concluded, it cannot be made without some sense of belief.

“Maybe all those journeys can really be seen as spiritual pilgrimages, represented physically by bodies crossing the desert and risking their lives.” To cross the Rio Grande, he said, “is a religious experience, to the extent that it seems like you’re crossing the River Jordan into Canaan. That you’re crossing over from a place where you feel persecuted…with the hope that you’ll find the land of milk and honey on the other side.” This is not to say that Texas is paradise, but is to say that the journey is prompted by belief. For migrant souls, faith becomes the journey.

Martínez’s forthcoming book is a companion to the PBS series, The New Americans. It features true migrant narratives, and considers the religious and spiritual roots of globalization.