Gendering Immigration

This article was originally published in Engage, a resource of the Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary.

The face of immigration at the U.S. southern border is becoming increasingly Central American – and increasingly gendered. Though poverty and lack of economic opportunity are factors for migration from the entire region, these immigrants are primarily concerned with survival – as women facing brutal and widespread gendered violence, and as mothers sending their children and teens to escape extreme violence, murder, or recruitment by gangs and drug trafficking rings.^[1] And if migration has become gendered in terms of the compounded burdens on women, so also must our theological response become gendered.

In her book From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology, Argentinian feminist theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid critiques the Church and traditional forms of theology for destroying “the sacrality of daily life” of indigenous women:

Latin American women are concerned with structures of economic and religious power, and their discourse of discrimination and oppression. Economic oppression is violent, poverty is violent. The mutilation of the God who is female into maleness is violent, and the exclusion of women from religious ministry, to which Latin American women are so accustomed in their original traditions, is very, very violent.^[2]

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^[1] Saskia Sassen, “Three Emergent Migrations: An Epochal Change,” Sur International Journal on Human Rights, English ed.; São Paulo, 13 no. 23 (July 2016): 31, https://search-proquest-com.du.idm.oclc.org/docview/1857447376?accountid=14608. 

^[2]Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology: Readings on Poverty, Sexual Identity, and God (London: SCM Press, 2004), 20, 24.