“La vida es la lucha.”

- Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz

Editor’s note: this is the first in a two-part series exploring the Mujerista theology of Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz. Check back next week for Part 2!

Introduction

Dr. Ada María Isasi-Díaz is the mother of Mujerista theology in the United States. In this essay, my hope is to call attention to the Mujerista method, which is sometimes overlooked in introductions to theology, and even in studies of Latin American or Liberation theology. I will focus on what I consider to be one of Isasi-Díaz’ most important contributions through Mujerista theology, which is her method. I call her method un poquito de justicia: a little bit of justice. This phrase encompasses the following four elements of method within Mujerista theology: (1) incremental transformation; (2) Concientización (consciousness-raising); (3) the bridging of two contextual theologies; and (4) the Account of Justice. Taken together, these will hopefully offer a clear answer to the question: how can we do Mujerista theology? Finally, I will talk about the potential and hopes that I see for Mujerista method in the present day.

Who is Dr. Ada María Isasi-Díaz?

Dr. Ada María Isasi-Díaz was born in Havana, Cuba in 1943, where she was raised by both her parents in a Roman Catholic family who migrated into the United States in the 1960s. She became a novitiate in the Ursuline Order in Sta. Rosa, California. She left the order in 1969 before taking her final vows, and became involved in the Women’s Ordination Conference, which supported the ordination of women as Roman Catholic priests. She enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where she earned a doctorate in theology in 1990.

Isasi-Díaz’s thought owes much to important feminist theologians such us Margaret Farley, María Pilar Aquino, Angela Bauer, Elizabeth Bounds, Pam Brubaker, Teresa Chávez Sauceda, Shawn Copeland, Ivone Gebara, Chung Hyun Kyung, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Emile Townes, and Delores Williams, among many others. Isasi-Díaz worked as professor of Theology in Drew University in Madison, NJ, from 1991 until 2009. She died of cancer on May 13th, 2012.

Inspired by her own story of immigration, her work as a missionary in Peru, and her own struggle with the patriarchal system in the Roman Catholic Church, Isasi-Díaz started questioning the role of Latinas in the Church. In an interview for The Christian Century in 1989, she observed that women made up the vast majority of those working in the church but did not participate in its decision making. She said: “we do the praying, but our understanding of God to whom we pray, is ignored.” (1) She called for a radical re-orientation of church philosophy, but was never acknowledged by the Vatican. (2)

For Isasi-Díaz, these women doing the work of the church, and especially those who were in vulnerable socio-economic situations, were exercising their moral agency more profoundly than any other group of the faithful. She argued that “they did this in the small (not so small) daily choices they made: between bus fare and a 40-block walk to work, for instance; or between breakfast for oneself and one’s child. Those choices embodied immense moral power (3) and deserved to be honored in the form of greater roles for those women in their church.” (4)

Mujerista was the term coined by Isasi-Díaz to name devotion to Latinas’ liberation. (5) A Mujerista is someone who embodies a preferential option for Latina women in our struggle for liberation. Because the term was developed by a group of theologians and pastoral agents, the initial understanding of the term came from a religious perspective. Mujeristas struggle to liberate ourselves not as individuals but as members of a Hispanic (6) community. We work to build bridges among Latinas/os while denouncing sectarianism and divisive tactics. The task for Mujeristas is to gather our people’s hopes and expectations about justice and peace. (7) 

In her book Mujerista Theology Isasi-Diaz explains that because Roman Catholicism, especially in its particular Latin American inculturations, is an intrinsic part of Hispanic culture, Mujeristas believe that in Latinas (though not exclusively in them) God chooses once again to lay claim to the divine image and likeness made visible from the very beginning in women. (8) We are called to birth new women and men – Hispanic people willing to work for the good of our people, (the common good), knowing that such work requires the denunciation of all destructive sense of self-abnegation, (9) and of social, religious, economic, and political structures that effectively exclude and oppress Latinas. (10)

Mujerista Theology

Mujerista theology is born out of the need of Latinas attempting to participate in the feminist Anglo-European movement in the United States to have a language and a space to deal with the power inequalities, intersections of racism/ethnic prejudice, classism, and sexism within the academic, theological, ecclesiastical, and daily lives of grassroots Latinas. In her book, Mujerista Theology, Isasi-Díaz explains that it was a group of Latinas who lived in the United States, and who were keenly aware of how sexism, ethnic prejudice, and economic oppression subjugate Latinas, who started to use the term Mujerista theology to refer to explanations of our faith and its role in our struggle for liberation. As a liberative praxis Mujerista theology seeks to impact mainstream theologies - those which support what is normative in church and, to a large degree, society. (11) In this sense, it insists that the pretense of objectivity by mainstream theologians masks complicity with the status quo, a status quo that is oppressive for Latinas. (12) Some of the main claims of Mujerista Theology are:

1. Latinas discover and affirm the presence of God in their communities and the revelation of God in our daily lives. 

2. Mujerista theology is a platform that enables Latinas and amplifies their voices to define our preferred future (nuestro proyecto histórico). 

3. Mujerista theology assists Latinas in the process of conversion, helping us see the reality of sin in our lives. 

4. The place from which we do Mujerista theology (locus theologicus), is our mestizaje (13) and mulatez (14), our condition as racially and culturally mixed people; our condition of people from other cultures living within the USA and living between different worlds. 

5. The only source for theological enterprise in Mujerista Theology is Lo Cotidiano. (15) Lo cotidiano is understood as that which is reproduced or repeated consciously by the majority of people in the world as part of their struggles for survival and liberation. In other words, the source of knowledge and the divine for Mujerista theology is the lived experience.

1. Vitello, Paul. “Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Dissident Catholic Theologian, Dies at 69 (Published 2012).” The New York Times, 5 June 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/nyregion/ada-maria-isasi-diaz-dissident-catholic-theologian-dies-at-69.html?login=smartlock&auth=login-smartlock. Accessed 3 November 2023.

2. Vitello, Paul. “Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Dissident Catholic Theologian, Dies at 69.

3. Immense moral power refers to how heart-rending and omnipresent these moral choices are.

4. Vitello, Paul. “Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Dissident Catholic Theologian, Dies at 69”

5. Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. Mujerista theology: a theology for the twenty-first century. Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 1996. 61.

6. The author is using Hispanic and Latino interchangeably when referring to community.

7. Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. Mujerista Theology. 61

8. Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. Mujerista theology 62

9. Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. Mujerista theology 62

10. Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. En la lucha/In the Struggle: A Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology (Biblical reflections on Ministry) Fortress Press. Minneapolis, MN 1993. 91

11. Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. Mujerista theology: a theology for the twenty-first century. 62

12. Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. Mujerista theology: a theology for the twenty-first century. 70

13. Mestizo/a is the child of a Spaniard and an Indigenous woman in the 16th century in Latin America.

14. Mulato/a is the child of a white man and a black woman in the 17th century in Latin America.