“Faith and Social Justice Are So Connected in My Book”: Scriptures, Scrolls, and Scribes as Technologies of Diaspora

Abstract

In the crafting and rhetoric of El Plan de Santa Barbara, Chicanx students, faculty, and staff articulated a commitment to the relationality of “scriptures,” whereby the needs and aspirations of a broader Chicanx community should always be a locus of authority higher than the text on its own. In the years after it was published, the text persisted as a central locus, a good/no place where utopian aspirations and inspirations for Chicanismo might be found and reworked. Both El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and El Plan de Santa Barbara, as with Revelation, remained powerful texts as ideas and icons from which pieces continued to be retrieved, read, reread, displayed, and performed in varying manners. Both Planes also pursued alternative relationships to scriptures, seeking out alternative sources of authority that diverged from more dominantized Protestant Euro-US practices. Because movement challenges to dominantized scripturalization left some practices of coercive authority unchecked, feminist and queer critics, often still informed by a utopian drive, not only questioned which scriptures could be scriptural, but they also came to question the nature of the relationship between people and their scriptures, advocating more ambivalent and less hierarchal interpretive practices in the process. How then, did approaches to scriptures shift after the Chicanx movement? How might scriptures be rethought as a critical category in the study of religion, especially the study of American religions, in light of the Chicanx movement?