The Bible as a Homing Device: Two U.S. Latine Case Studies

Abstract

In an earlier essay, I drew on Sara Ahmed’s formulation of a “homing device” to describe U.S. Latine uses of biblical texts and traditions, as well as “scriptures” more broadly conceived. In this essay, I hope to complicate that idea a little further. I draw on ethnographic methods and share two stories of two people who came from the same generation and lived in geographic proximity in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California, but who represent important differences in Latine contexts. These two case studies, when read comparatively, demonstrate how the Bible serves as a homing device, as an object around which both people look for and make sense of ideas of “home”, but the understandings of home and the ways they relate to biblical texts and traditions remain quite distinct.

1. Introduction

I write this essay as a scholar who works and resides in the homelands of the Kumeyaay peoples, about fifteen miles north of the border between the United States and Mexico that divides Kumeyaay communities. Every moment since I have begun a broader book project on the Bible and border technologies, I have been more alarmed by the rhetoric and behavior of the right wing of the United States with regard to immigration, as President Donald J. Trump’s rhetoric has weaponized xenophobia in public discourse since at least 2015 and is now wielding unchecked power at the federal level. Yet I am also stunned by how mainstream what I once considered right-wing, anti-immigrant perspectives have become even among communities that are presumed to be more progressive. The United States is not alone in this trend, as journalist David Leonhardt’s depiction of Denmark’s politics makes clear, where Leonhardt turns to Denmark as an example of how progressives can win political power by enforcing tighter immigration restrictions. Leonhardt’s rhetoric normalizes xenophobia as Realpolitik in the United States (Leonhardt 2025).

In my broader book project, I seek to make sense of this historical turn of events as no recent accident of an unprecedented era in global migration. Even though I understand biblical texts and traditions as very much the creation of migrant and diasporic communities, I also note how readily they have been used for reifying and sanctifying borders, especially in the United States under more recent presidential administrations (Cuéllar 2020). I read the resonances between biblical texts and their historical uses under modern regimes of border building as well as transgression. Yet, as a migrant and the daughter of migrants, I begin with the approaches of “people on the move”, to use biblical scholar Jean-Pierre Ruiz’s term (Ruiz 2011), even if that includes a variety of forms of migration, such as settler colonialism, that I might personally wish to distance myself from. It is from that space that I first began to think with Sara Ahmed’s notion of the “homing device”, about which she observes,

If orientations are as much about feeling at home as they are about finding our way, then it becomes important to consider how ‘finding our way’ involves what we could call ‘homing devices.’ In a way, we learn what home means, or how we occupy space at home and as home, when we leave home… Migration could be described as a process of disorientation and reorientation: as bodies “move away” as well as “arrive”, as they reinhabit spaces… This is not to say that one has to leave home for things to be disoriented or reoriented: homes too can be ‘giddy’ places where things are not always held in place, and homes can move, as we do.

(Ahmed 2006, p. 9)

Ahmed underscores that homes can move, but that migration, by necessity, involves a disruption in orientations. When on the move, we humans often turn to certain objects to help us make sense of and manage that disruption. For many migrants, the Bible has and can serve as one such object, and I argue elsewhere that this can hardly be surprising, given how much of the history of Christian scriptures, in particular, entails their work as objects that mediate access to imagined, better homes (Hidalgo 2016). Yet, that does not mean that all uses of the Bible as a “homing device” manifest the same way or bear the same consequences. In this essay, I seek to deepen my examination of the Bible as a homing device by illuminating some of the different ways that “homing” can be sought and effected in relationship to the Bible.

To illuminate some of the ways people can use the Bible as a homing device in different modes, I reflect back on two case studies from different moments in my own research into how scriptures work as human phenomena. In this emphasis on “scriptures”, I follow patterns set by earlier generations of biblical scholars, such as Vincent L. Wimbush, who shifted their attention from what biblical texts mean to what people do with them in daily life and how that resonates with deep histories of biblical engagement (Wimbush 2008). Following the work of James W. Watts, I am less interested in explaining the Christian Bible semantically but more interested in the patterns of relationships people have with the Bible as a broader phenomenon (see, for instance, Watts 2021). I also hope to place these relationships with the Bible into a broader conversation about the role of scriptures more broadly in people’s lives, by focusing particularly on how minoritized communities have engaged scriptures as part of their survival (see, for instance, Smith 1993; Love 2012).

My emphasis on the notion of “technology” is an attempt to focus attention on the materiality of bibles as well as their work as human social constructions, as human projects and productions, a focus on what Vincent Wimbush has called the process of scripturalization (Wimbush 2012). In the context of the USA, contemporary Latine migrants necessarily respond to long and layered histories of scripturalization, which include longer hemispheric histories of the uses of the Bible in authorizing and legitimizing conquest. This foundational experience of biblical texts for many Latines is thus not an experience of crossing borders so much as what US–Mexican author and critic Gloria Anzaldúa describes as the experience of being border-crossed (Anzaldúa 1987).

Revisiting my research in Southern California over the last 20 years, I try to read these stories in relationship to each other and to a different set of questions than what I asked of each individual initially. I do so in order to share some textured grounding in daily life that shows how migrants can use the Bible to “find our way” and “learn what home means” (Ahmed 2006, p. 9). Both individuals I describe are Latines, belonging to roughly the same generation, who lived about fifteen miles apart in the first two decades of this century, and both are Protestants, which is still a minority religious identification among U.S. Latines. My own family background is Costa Rican and Catholic. In these stories, which I have edited down for this essay, home encodes a multileveled ambivalence because it has so many registers: home as in a sense of broader national belonging, home—as in Charles Long’s parlance (Long [1986] 1995, p. 151)—“an-other world” to which one belongs, and home as in the domestic sphere or one’s family life. My interlocutors use the Bible as a homing mediator among these realms.

2. Reorientations in Diaspora: The Bible and Building Better Domestic Homes

When I met Marco Alvarez almost twenty years ago, he was a pastor of a small Calvary Chapel in suburban Los Angeles, a non-denominational church that was part of a conglomeration that began in the 1960s in suburban California under the leadership of Chuck Smith. After Smith’s death in 2013, Calvary Chapel churches disaggregated and Alvarez retired.1 Through it all, Alvarez’s continual reading and rereading of the Bible helped him find and make home in a world that had unsettled him since his youth.

Alvarez was born in Cuba, but in the early 1960s, amidst a second wave of mass migration following the 1959 revolution, Marco and his wife Mirta, at the ages of 25 and 20, respectively, fled to California because they had some distant relatives there. This moment of leaving Cuba represents a fundamental break in the narrative of his life; an end to comfort in a national home. Alvarez had many privileges that helped him immigrate, especially class and education and a closer proximity to whiteness. Nevertheless, Alvarez’s own experiences were such that he cited Calvary Chapel’s explicit opposition to racism as part of what drew him in.

In our conversations, Alvarez depicted the challenges of being caught between the bureaucratic unfriendliness of two nations with generally cold political relations. Alvarez returned to Cuba throughout the early 2000s, specifically to engage in “religious/charitable” work, but he expressed concern that the US might fine him or question his loyalties and that the Cuban government could keep him from returning if they viewed his ministerial activities as politically threatening. Alvarez regularly prayed for Fidel Castro (then still alive) to find Jesus, even as Alvarez still thought of Cuba as “my country” but displayed a U.S. flag behind the pulpit.

This experience of being caught between two worlds and feeling at home in neither has been well documented in both Latine Studies and religious studies. Cuban American biblical critic Fernando F. Segovia has described how “the exile ends up living in two worlds, and no world at the same time, with a twofold voice from no-where” (Segovia 1996, p. 203). For Segovia, this experience necessitates a “construction” of “the human world, the divine otherworld, and the interchange between these two worlds” (Segovia 1996, p. 213). According to Segovia, this construction involves “ambiguity” and a feeling of being unhomed in the world. Alvarez recognized this feeling but argued that faith in Jesus “as revealed in the Bible” grants him a “strong sense of identity and being”. For Alvarez, the other-worldly home encountered through the Bible helps him resolve his experiences with this worldly displacement.

The Bible itself acts as a “language world” (Wimbush 2003), shaping the literal architecture of the church space as well as Alvarez’s imagination of the world. His wife Mirta learned English by listening to sermons focused on the King James version of the Bible. She even applied KJV English to Spanish translations of biblical texts during the women’s Bible studies in Spanish that she facilitated.

What seems to be required for this biblical homing device to function, though, is its removal from this worldly politics. Alvarez argued, as a pastor, that the whole point of teaching the Bible at all is to help people to see its non-human quality: “the Bible is not…man-centered, but it is Christ-centered, is God-centered”.2 In the first volume of Calvary Chapel’s Spanish-language magazine, Alvarez reflected on the Sermon on the Mount. He argued that Jesus shared these teachings “so that we may live as citizens of the Kingdom of heaven in a hostile and difficult world”. The language of citizenship has a broader role in evangelical Christianity, but it also had particular resonance for Alvarez, helping him imagine alternate political structures beyond the bounds of the nation-state. In his June 2018 letter to me, Alvarez adamantly underscored that he is “a citizen of heaven…born in Cuba and now living in the U.S.A., soon moving to our real and permanent dwelling that Jesus promised to all who trust in His death and resurrection”.

Nevertheless, this distinctive home in another world had a bearing on homemaking in this one. The first Sunday I attended services at Calvary Chapel, the text upon which the sermon was based was Ephesians 5, 21–33. A first encounter with this church through a text that, at least on its surface, focuses on a hierarchal and highly gendered ordering of domestic households, may also have shaped my attention to the complexities of “home” at work in Alvarez’s life and role as a pastor.

As historian of religion Sara Moslener (2015) argues, apocalyptic concerns with sexual purity, correct gender relations, and family structure have been critical facets of USA evangelical Christian discourse for a long time, intertwining with political and cultural imaginaries since at least the nineteenth century. Although Cold War apocalyptic anxieties certainly provide one contextual factor for his sermons, Alvarez’s and his congregants’ experiences as political refugees give this rhetoric a different dimension. Alvarez’s sermon on Ephesians 5, 21–33 was greatly concerned with the notion of a biblically based family home, but this home was to be a refuge from a disordered world:

And so what God created originally, and the intent of His heart, is that in marriage, family, home, is an orderly institution, there’s an order in it, where love and respect and humility and harmony and justice and holiness and grace and mercy and servanthood exists. There’s a love that reigns in this home…It doesn’t mean in any way that the wife is inferior to the husband or that the husband is superior to the wife in any way intellectually, morally, spiritually, in any way, that is not the meaning. It has nothing to do with that…God is a god of order, and every time that God creates an institution, there is an order to that institution…3

Such a family, understood in patriarchal and heteronormative terms, albeit softened ones, is the foundation for a broader USA evangelical Christian counterculture to be sure. But more specifically for Alvarez, the Christian home of order, harmony, and servanthood contrasts with a cruel and disordered world overly populated with arrogant leaders. The family home should be a sanctuary of promised love and belonging that has been denied elsewhere.

Beyond evangelical concerns with the home, Latines often confronted popular USA media denigrations of “degenerate” Latine families in the early 2000s (see Rodríguez 2010). Alvarez imagined the domestic home as more than a sanctuary from the world, but also a space that provided a superior rather than an inferior family home. The domestic household could be perceived as the one site where congregants have the power to create the space of belonging, a home they can fashion and control for themselves, where the domestic home can provide a taste of the ordered, loving, harmonious home beyond this world that can only be accessed through the mediation of biblical texts. Even though this heteropatriarchal structure continues to unhome many Latines in the USA, for Alvarez, the Bible serves as a tool for negotiating home and as a locus through which to build belonging.

3. Reorientations Amid Ongoing Displacement: The Scriptural Work of Making Home in the World

Alvarez’s relationship to the Bible has some similarities, but also some important differences with that of Lydia Lopez. Where for Alvarez, displacement drew him to a church and to encounters with the Bible through which he found an other-worldly home and sought to create an ordered domestic sanctuary from the world, Lopez and her whole family’s ongoing experiences with physical displacement and migration had already left her family’s home as the main sanctuary she knew, and she found home again when she came to recognize her familial sanctuary as a connection to the other world that can be practiced in this one.4 The Bible was one of many devices that helped mediate this realization.

I first spoke with Lopez in 2013 when working on my first book that examined scriptures in ethnic Mexican youth activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Her parents had moved from northern Mexico to southern California in the early 1900s; her father was a devout Baptist reader of the bible; and her mother had left Garfield High School in order to take up migrant farm labor with her family. This context is perhaps one of many important contrasts with Alvarez; Lopez represents a next generation of migrants and hails from a community with long historical roots in California, as California had been Mexican territory before 1848. Her family also experienced class and race differently in the USA than Alvarez.

Displacement impacted Lopez in ways that were less nationally specific and more connected to local politics. Lopez situated her childhood neighborhood of Jimtown in Whittier, a suburb of Los Angeles. She contrasted Jimtown with the east side of Whittier, from where Richard M. Nixon hailed. Jimtown was once a “labor camp” in the nineteenth century and an “immigrant barrio” by the time she lived there, but you cannot visit Jimtown today. Lopez explained that “our little barrio is now the 605 Freeway and so it’s no longer there”.

Leaving her family home to get a Bachelor’s degree, Lopez began to feel lost. In 1968, she went to a picket line protesting the arrest of ethnic Mexican students, who called themselves Chicanos, students who had been protesting for educational and civil rights. This first picket line drew her into the Chicano student movement, and her participation exposed her to church leaders from a variety of denominations fighting for justice. People on the California picket lines of 1968 or 1969 might have described Lopez as “a church lady” who was “very connected to Epiphany”, an Episcopalian church in eastern Los Angeles. But she was not raised in that church.

She narrates her time in the picket lines as a reversion narrative that brought her back to herself but also changed how she viewed religion. She came to reconnect with a sense of home because she witnessed another world made possible in this one. She came to understand her father’s faith not just in the reading of the Bible, but in the ways that he generously opened their family home to help others. She perceived her grandmother bringing soup to people on the picket lines as acts of faith. Witnessing Christian activism helped her to see how her domestic, family home, physically displaced though it had been, had seeds of another world that her family members sought to nurture out in the broader world.

Moreover, through these picket lines, Lopez found a home that brought her multiple identities together: at the Episcopalian Church of the Epiphany, amidst its celebrations of mariarchi masses with Aztec dancers and its décor of papel picado. Attending church in her cultural idiom gave her a sense of “home”, a place where she could belong to the US, Mexico, and to Christianity all at once, a sense of belonging in a place that was “special and holy”.

This sense of home that started on the picket lines was shaped and reshaped by her experience of connection to another, better world found in encounters with different scriptures. She felt compelled by a liberationist reading of traditional Christian scriptures, like Matthew 25, about serving “the least of these”. She saw such service as rooted in her other-worldly home; for example, she described how the divine world she felt in reading the Bible helped to shape her efforts in this world: “it’s also humbling when you realize that what you do, you don’t do because of yourself; that there’s the Holy Spirit, there’s God, there’s things that…you have to work on and you just can’t sit on your hands.” The Bible helped her to understand how the sorts of care and sanctuary practices of her family home had to be enacted in the broader world.

Lopez repeatedly emphasized something else to me in our conversations. She kept talking about a book: “Faith and social justice are so connected in my book so that you can’t do one without the other, according to my book”. When I asked her what this book was, I learned that this book was not biblically bound in the same way Alvarez’s was. Lopez had crafted her own scriptures, which included the Christian bible, but her book has been augmented by other writings on liberation as well. Her book also contains revelatory memories not captured in any written texts. She combines all of these sources, both the written and unwritten, and finds in them a connection to another, better world that helps in navigating this one.

4. Conclusions

Although both Lopez and Alvarez reflect quite different senses of home and relationships to the Bible as a homing device, their stories reflect how important the dynamics of displacement and homing are in shaping how they navigate the world and how and why they turn to the Bible. In revisiting these stories, I seek to move past a kind of binary that tends to villainize or romanticize migrants by focusing on assimilation or resistance, depicting subjects who cave to empire or actively work against it. People’s daily lived practices can look like both of these political orientations and neither, because all individual lives are complicated. To treat any interlocutors as fully human requires a respect for that complexity. As I rethink the Bible as a border technology in this larger project, I wanted to begin with its power as a homing technology. Alvarez and Lopez show how salient home and homing remains for those whose lives have been structured by displacement and how quests for home—whether in this world or another one—deeply shape how to know, how to make sense of daily life, and how to construct the borders of what might be possible. As Ahmed’s work on orientations underscored, we are not only shaped by objects but also by how we come to those objects and how we connect with others around them. Even as each individual seeks orientations with and through a homing device, they also come to those devices in different ways and follow those homing paths in distinct directions.