Books
RESACRALIZING THE OTHER AT THE US-MEXICO BORDER: A BORDERLAND HERMENEUTIC
By Gregory L. Cuéllar
This book focuses on the themes of border violence, racial criminalization, competing hermeneutics of the sacred, and State-sponsored modes of desacralizing black- and brown-bodied people, all in the context of the US-Mexico borderlands. It provides a much-needed substantive response to the State’s use of sacralization to justify its acts of violence and offers new ways of theologizing the acceptance of the "other" in its place.
As a counter-hermeneutic of the sacred, the ultimate objective of the book is to offer an alternative epistemological, theoretical, and practical framework that re-sacralizes the other. Rejecting the State-driven agenda of othering border-crossers, it follows Gloria Anzaldúa’s healing move to the Sacred Other and creates a new hermeneutic of the sacred at the borderlands. One that re-sacralizes those deemed by the State as the non-sacred human other anywhere in the world.
This is an important and topical book that addresses one of the key issues of our time. As such, it will be of keen interest to any scholar of Religious Studies and Liberation Theology as well as religion’s interaction with migration, race, and contemporary politics.