“I have been teaching the Bible since I was fifteen years old.” So began the personal essay to both my application for theological school thirty-five years ago and that for graduate school over thirty years ago. This sentence reflected a couple of matters that I would like to point out at the outset of this study.

First, at an early age in the Latino/a Pentecostal church in which I grew up, a love for the Bible was instilled, including a sense of its authority, guidance, and literary beauty, but also of its challenges, abuses, and confusion about interpretation for our...

I am not a Latino biblical scholar. I am a biblical scholar who happens to be Latino. I make this distinction for a number of subtle but significant reasons. While my upbringing as a Mexican American Pentecostal Protestant rendered me intimately acquainted with the Bible, my secularist stance has an even larger influence on the topics and approaches I use in biblical scholarship. In fact, I would say that my experience with a chronic illness (Wegener’s Granulomatosis) explains more of my publications as a biblical scholar than my Latino identity (Avalos 1995, 1999, 2007).

However, in this chapter I will...

The run-up to the 2008 presidential election evoked a great deal of reflection in the U.S. media about the state of race relations in the country. That Barack Obama was eventually victorious suggested to many that the country had now entered a “post-race” era. Even though some problems still lingered, some reasoned that the election of America’s first African American president represented a critical step forward, an epochal hinge leading inexorably toward the decimation of the specter of racism. At least, this was one perspective.

A few months prior to the November election, Jorge Ramos, a news anchor at Univision,...

Not until I kept teaching the Gospel of Luke in light of its overall purpose did I notice to what extent Mary’s Magnificat was similar to Jesus’ own call and primary message. What I discovered is that Mary, as his mother, affected Jesus’ message by reinforcing God’s concern for the oppressed. Why is this significant?

Two reasons come readily to mind. The first has to do with certain not-always-stated beliefs that women do not affect the world of thought. For example, Thomas De Quincey writes: “Woman, sister, there are some things which you do not execute as well as your...

In this essay I am attempting a self-definition, which has proven to be a much more difficult task than I ever expected. Perhaps it is because my reluctant metamorphosis to USian¹ Latino is still unfinished, or perhaps because every attempt at self-definition is an attempt to capture just a moment of our continuous identity flow. As Fernando Segovia has stated, “The concept of Latin(o/a)ness … is neither self-evident nor determinate—self-contained and unchanging; readily accessible to and intelligible by all; bearing the same force throughout, regardless of historical situation or social-cultural formation. It is rather a construct” (2009, 199). Segovia...

Within the American guild of biblical scholars, Latina/o biblical interpretation is commonly described as an “emerging hermeneutics.” Conversely, this description suggests that the interpretation of the Bible by Latina/o scholars is new and, in turn, insignificant to the history of the biblical tradition in North America. Indeed, the Latina/o cultural archive reminds us that the history of biblical interpretation in the American hemisphere points back to the centuries after 1492 and the colonial enterprise of the Spanish Empire.

Almost a hundred years before the publication of theBay State Psalm Book(1640) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Juan de Zumárraga, the first...

The termchallengesin the title of this essay has a number of possible references, some of which are very personal. I was in graduate school working diligently to understand the Acts of the Apostles in the context of rhetorical training and education in the larger Greco-Roman world when I encountered an essay by Fernando Segovia (1995a) in which he critiques the methods that were at the very core of what had, up to that point, been my introduction to biblical and early Christian studies. My reaction was twofold.

On the one hand, the notion that the social location of...

What does it mean to be a Latino/a biblical critic is the question we have been asked to ponder in this project. Such a question is wide open, inviting the biblical critic to respond to it from any number of angles. From my perspective, the essence of what constitutes being a Latina biblical critic demands to be answered at a personal level: it is who I am that, in turn, defines me academically as a scholar of Hebrew Bible studies. In order to answer this question, therefore, I shall address the two identities, the two contexts, that shape who I...

One mild December evening, while I was still pursuing a Master of Arts degree, I sat with my elder brother Jorge and my father (also Jorge) around my father’s kitchen table. His kitchen table sits in the same home my parents owned when I was born, a home located in a suburb of San José, Costa Rica. On this particular evening, I was recovering from surgery, sipping water weakly through a straw, when my brother decided it was time to confront my father about a pressing family matter. My brother pointed out that he was now a father who had...

What does it mean to do Latino/a biblical studies? In this essay I shall attempt to address this question not by examining a history of the scholarship in the field, but by critically examining the meaning and implication of the three designations in question—Latino/a, biblical, and studies. It is not my intention here to merely define these terms. Rather, this is meant to be a discussion about how these three interlocking components interact to form the basis for how I see myself doing Latino/a biblical studies.

Latino/a biblical studies, like many other approaches based on ideological and/or contextual frameworks,...

It is impossible to speak in terms of initial explorations in Latino/a hermeneutics, given the number of authors who have been at work on this task over the course of the last twenty to thirty years. The following come readily to mind: Justo González, inMañana Theology(1990); Virgilio Elizondo onmestizaje, inGalilean Journey(1983); Fernando F. Segovia, inDecolonizing Biblical Studies(2000); Ada María Isasi-Díaz onmujeristatheology, inEn la lucha(1993); and Miguel De La Torre and Edwin David Aponte, inHandbook of Latino/a Theologies(2006)—to name but a few. However, the task of fashioning...

This essay emerged as a subsequent study on the question addressed to the inaugural panel of the Latino/a and Latin American Biblical Hermeneutics program unit at the 2008 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).¹ This question lies behind my title: What does it mean to be (in my case) aLatinabiblical critic? This question is perhaps one of the most challenging—and necessary—identity questions that all biblical scholars (substituting, as appropriate, their own ethnic self-designation in place ofLatina) should ask about themselves at some point in their professional careers. My brief response to the...

As I reflect on framing a question concerning the problematics, objectives, and strategies of Latino/a biblical hermeneutics, my thoughts drift immediately to the consideration of the need for such a conversation at all. How have we come to this place where the reality is that such a unique hermeneutical barrio exists? It brings to mind my questioning of the academy that I/we negotiate where departments of Latin American studies, Chicano/a studies, African American studies, Asian American studies, women’s studies, and so on, subsist. Do not all of these departments in some way contribute to the larger umbrella fields and discourses...

The short answer to the question “How did you get to be a Latino biblical scholar?” is simple: I am a person of Mexican descent living in the United States with the last name Sandoval,andI earned a PhD in Hebrew Bible. A genuine answer is, however, significantly more complex. It has to do, at least, with what it means in the early twenty-first century to be Latino(a) in the United States (can one really be “Latino” anywhere else?), what it means to be a biblical scholar and to do biblical scholarship, and, of course, exactly what being a...

This famous poem by Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti is a call to recognize that there is a geopolitical southern hemispheric reality that the North tends to ignore and that needs to be brought to its attention. Much to the chagrin of the North, says Benedetti, the South also exists. I would like to use this image in order to throw some light on the goal of this project, which is to bring together in dialogue Latino/a and Latin American biblical scholars who face the challenge of interpreting the Bible from their particular placements and optics in society and culture. In...

Latino/a biblical criticism has from the beginning raised the question of critical task: the identity and role of the critic. This problematic it has pursued in recurrent fashion through the years, with greater intensity in recent times. Such focalization may be viewed as the result of various intersecting factors, social as well as cultural: the striking rise in population numbers within the country; the widening presence of points of origin from Latin America and the Caribbean; and the growing sophistication in matters of method and theory within the field of studies. With exploding demographics, multiplying backgrounds, and expanding discourses, the...

This collection of essays on the question of what makes Latino/a biblical interpretation “Latino/a” raises a central and intriguing issue for critics and readers alike: Is identity a matter of being and/or practice? Is the “Latino/a-ness” of an interpretation defined by the personal identity (howsoever defined) of the interpreter? Or is it a matter of how Latino/a biblical interpretation is practiced—that is, are there certain principles, sources, methods (reading strategies), or aims that make some biblical interpretations Latino/a and others not? In this concluding reflection it is not my intention to define Latino/a biblical interpretation in a rigid way,...