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Captivity of Puerto Rican
Americans
"In terms of the Christian Church and its
mission within the existential reality of the Puerto Rican migrant
community in the U.S., how can be attempt to understand the
phenomena of captivity? ... The exile itself may be understood as
one of the most traumatic experiences that occurred in the history
of the people of God. It was a forced migration under Babylonian
imperial domination. Deportations to a foreign land evoked feelings
of abandonment and despair. An overall state of crisis engulfed the
political, economic, and religious life of the people. Both State
and Temple were overrun as the Empire wreaked havoc on the promises
of God's protection from the enemy. The national theology and
political hopes for freedom were devastated by the oppressive forces
of the Empire. ...(97)
The crisis of neocolonial captivity suggests that
a new faith orientation is imperative in order to break with the
history of enslavement to the powers and principalities that
dominate the structures, institutions and ideological formation of
both the religious and national community. In the Puerto Rican
migrant community, the role of the church can be no other than to
serve as a liberating agent where deep-seated idolatry has replace
authentic worship and faith in the God of history. The proclamation
of the Gospel requires a living faith that is set free to denounce
injustice at all levels of social existence, and to pronounce new
models and new meaning for ecclesial and community constrained to be
an agent of social and spiritual transformation 'to pluck up and
break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant' (Jer
1:10). Out of the exile emerges the formation of a new community
with a new heart and a new spirit. Freedom for the future irrupts
out of the chaos. This new faith orientation will attempt to break
the yoke of the death sentence that engulfs both State and Temple. A
new Exodus points the way toward a new day of integral salvation.
...(99)
In the Puerto Rican migrant community, the
prophetic role of the church to denounce the very systems and
spurious leadership that benefit from and perpetuate the state
of captivity. This new faith is oriented toward the construction of
a new social order where justice and fraternity exist." (100)
David Traverzo in Voces edited by Justo
L. Gonzalez, Abington, 1992. Traverzo is a minister of the
Reformed Church of America and a Ph.D. in Ethics from Drew U.
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