Around the world, it is usually women who clean the holy places...attend the daily masses, teach the children, and visit shrines to pray for their families…But they are often denied the training or authority to conduct rituals for the community1.
Such is the broad state of affairs for women in religion – their religious lives are rich, but often excluded from public leadership in their communities. Many scholars have examined the specific contours of this reality in their own cultures and traditions, with theologians among them taking a further step to imagine and practice ways to change this status quo. Among Latina theologians particularly, attention begins with everyday experiences. As Xochitl Alvizo notes, centering women’s lives as sources of knowledge in this way recognizes how oppressive systems dissolve distinctions between the private and public. Therefore, women’s lives must be examined for the full breadth of their potential, including the quotidian2.
It is from this recognition that lo cotidiano, the everyday, becomes a central ethic of Latina theology. The scholar-practitioner Ada-María Isasi-Díaz was preeminent in applying this as a heremeneutic in theology and religious practice. Through an examination of her contributions, I argue here that Isasi-Díaz's scholarship and practice in popular religion has made theology, and religious leadership more broadly, accessible to Latinas through its emphasis on lo cotidiano as well as concientización. Her work with these heremeneutics lives within a broader focus among U.S. Latine theologians and ethicists on popular or living religion, the practices and perspectives that arise through peoples’ everyday piety outside of, and often in opposition to, institutionalized forms of religion. This focus emerges from an understanding of the unique role which laity have in bringing Christian religion to life, a task which cannot be solely left to the institutions of the Church. This tension creates a dialogical relationship in Latine theologizing between the work of the People and the work of the Church and how they inform one another3. Isasi-Díaz’s work, as we will see, rises from the heart of this tension.
Isasi-Díaz emigrated to the United States from Cuba with her family as a young adult in the 1960s. Soon after she entered religious leadership as a novitiate in the Ursuline Order of the Roman Catholic Church. While her time in the order was short-lived, her commitment to the liberatory study and practice of religion would be a lifelong vocation. After leaving the Ursuline Order, she joined the efforts of the Women’s Ordination Conference, a group of Roman Catholic women pushing for their inclusion through ordination in the Church’s priesthood4. It was at their gathering in 1975 where Isasi-Díaz describes both her awakening as a feminist and her realization of what liberatory religion must look like5. If it was to truly embrace women, particularly women from racial and ethnic minorities, a liberated Church could never look the same as it once had. It would have to be built around the differences inherent in the lived experiences of women, not merely a replica of the old structure where women could now enjoy a seat at the patriarchal table. Isasi-Díaz lived the whole of her adult life in a tension between fidelity to the Roman Catholic tradition and women’s living engagement with it, and the exclusionary practices of the Church as an institution.
This tension led her to the realization that women would need “to invent different ways of listening to each other, of understanding knowledge and religion and their functions,” centering “the faith of the people as the source of our theologies; not an abstract faith but the faith that sustains grassroots people in their daily living6.” This placed the ethic of lo cotidiano at the heart of her theology and an attempt to create new forms of religiosity which would liberate Latinas. For her, lo cotidiano is grounded in the immediacy of lived experience, the most fundamental places from which we understand and engage with the world. It recognizes the ways in which Latinas on the edge of society make a living and address the challenges of life in order to survive7. Given this, choosing lo cotidiano as the starting point for theologization is a way to ensure that the theological praxis will be meaningful and liberatory for the people pushed farthest to the margins. It is a lens through which to create new narratives that capture the real experiences of Latinas, narratives that center them as subjects in time and space, rather than objects of an empire’s abuse or a church’s theologizing8.
The logic of this theological turn is inductive, and approachable. It stands in contrast to the systematic theology which is traditional for the Roman Catholic Church. This theology begins from foundational premises about human and Divine nature, natural order, sin and salvation. From these points, its arguments spread out to encompass all of existence, hypothetically working down to the lives of people living on the edge through deductive, “if-then” reasoning9. But theologies such as Isasi-Díaz’s begin from the bottom up. They begin by centering experiences of struggle and survival, and the people who experience these most intimately. From this point, it works upwards and out, connecting with the lives of other people, sacred story, and ritual. It begins from the places with which people are already familiar, and makes increasingly intricate connections. Isasi-Díaz recognizes that for peoples’ liberation, they need to be able to understand that their lives are more than the truth of the creeds they believe in. They need to see and hear their own experiences in the narratives – the theologies – that fill their religious lives10. This turn from deductive theology to inductive theology helps make people the owners of their religion. For Isasi-Díaz, the authority of any practice, or canon which supports it, arises from its ability to help oppressed peoples’ way through the process of liberation11. Committed to its fundamental relevance, she envisioned this theology as a grassroots enterprise, which would best be developed through communal conversation, concientización or consciousness-raising, where people share the stories of their lives in order to develop collective theologies – a process that would ensure their relevance12.
Lo cotidiano and la concientización are two heremeneutics which shape Isasi-Díaz’s theology, but to understand them more deeply requires us to look at how her theology and these heremeneutics bear out in practice, and how they open up opportunities for religious leadership. She writes, “As a communal theological praxis, theology endeavors to enable Hispanic women to be agents of our own history, to enhance our moral agency, and to design and participate in actions that are effective ways of struggling for survival. It is within this framework that one needs to look at liturgies13.” Reflection through concientizacín and practice through liturgy form the cyclical praxis of mujerista theology. In her foundational text on the subject, she recounts how valuing the everyday and the communal shaped mujerista rituals at public gatherings.
She highlights one in particular from a gathering of Las Hermanas. While designed by two women, they consulted broadly and deeply with the event’s organizers to make the ritual’s creation as collaborative as possible14. Twenty-five women served as worship facilitators in an expression of this communal ethic. Doing so opened up participation to as many women as possible, embodying leadership as something communally practiced and bestowed, and so decentralizing power15. The components of the ritual themselves were steeped in symbols and experiences which the designers knew would be familiar to worshipers. The central altar evoked not the high altar of a Catholic Mass, but the altars filled with candles, prayer cards, and icons which would be found in many of the worshipers’ own homes. Rather than Eucharistic bread and wine, they set their altar with familiar foods for their lives’ journeys, such as bread and dates16. All of these choices express the foundations of Isasi-Díaz’s theology through ritual practice.
Isasi-Díaz’s commitment to lo cotidiano as a theological hermeneutic is perhaps her most widely recognized contribution to U.S. Latine theology and ethics. Carmen Nanko-Fernández describes how Isasi-Díaz’s work laid foundations for lo cotidiano to be a hermeneutic for analyzing power dynamics which enforce oppression, as well as one for building collective knowledge of how Latinas’ struggles for survival and liberation, “on their own terms, in their own words17.” However, an enduring critique of Isasi-Díaz’s has not been on her use of specific hermeneutics, but on the metaproject of mujerismo itself. María Pilar Aquino – herself another key theologian of lo cotidiano18 – has criticized her colleague’s employment of mujerismo on the basis that “there are no mujerista sociopolitical and ecclesial subjects or movements in the United States or in Latin America,” further citing other scholars who have criticized it as sectarian, essentialist, and ungrounded19. Alvizo further affirms that despite the wide importance of mujerismo as a theological concept, it has led to little self-identification among scholars and activists; she further contends that Isasi-Díaz does not reveal who the mujeristas with whom she collaborates are20.
What is striking about these critiques is their insistence on identity-formation as the marker of the project’s success, rooted in an expectation that it be prescriptive enough to lead to broad appropriation. But what seems clear from Isasi-Díaz’s writings, particularly on liturgy, is that mujerismo is in fact a descriptive project. In her recounting of a conference’s rituals, she describes the participants as practicing mujerismo through the work they did in building liturgies of resistance that centered Hispanic women’s experiences21. Her concern here is practice rather than identity-formation. Therefore, it may be misleading to hinge the success of this project on self-conceptualizations, rather than by considering the enduring practices which it describes. Praxis is, after all, the most fundamental element of her approach.
If any substantive criticism rooted in identity may be leveled at Isasi-Díaz and her work, it may be based in her tacit conflation of Latina experience with Roman Catholicism. This is understandable given her deep engagement with the women’s ordination movement and her own social locations. Her existence as a Roman Catholic Latina led her to experience a double disenfranchisement. On the one hand, she experienced an “invisible invisibility” as a Latina in U.S. society22, placing her life’s experiences beyond the most meager consideration of the dominant culture. Added to this, her location as a woman within the Catholic tradition bars her from full inclusion in its leadership. These experiences, and those of women like her, shaped her liturgical work. The rituals she described in Mujerista Theology were all shaped as responses to Catholic tradition. One entails a rosary prayer of protest before the day’s proceedings of a conference of Hispanic Catholics, in response to a drafted statement which neglected to call for women’s full inclusion in the church23. She and her collaborators created another ritual at a gathering of Las Hermanas, and their choices were shaped by their relationship with Catholicism. This tradition shaped everything from the way they built their altars – incorporating religious technologies such as statues and icons which would be distasteful or alienating to many Protestant Latinas – to the way they incorporated sacraments which would be evocative of but distinct from the Catholic Eucharist24. Her work centers the intersecting experiences of being a Catholic Latina, which she shared with many of her collaborators. However, this means that if her work is to be relevant beyond these intersections, it will require transposition into new social locations. For those living in adjacent locations then, practicing her theologies will require beginning from the ground up, considering their own everyday struggles in dialogue with one another, and responding to these struggles through religious practice.
How, for instance, might these principles be practiced by Unitarian Universalist Latines? What are their struggles specific to our faith, and how are they similar to but different from those encountered by Isasi-Díaz and her collaborators? These questions call to mind the work of my colleague Naomi Blackwood in our congregation. As a Mexican-American woman in our faith, I see her struggle in ways similar to but different from the ways in which Latina Catholics struggle. Women’s full inclusion in religious leadership is not as live an issue in Unitarian Universalism as it is in Roman Catholicism. On the other hand, creating worship spaces which honor their cultures and lived experiences is an ongoing concern for BIPOC members of our faith. In the context of this tension, Blackwood has worked over the last few years to create a Día de los Muertos service that draws authentically from her family’s and community’s practice of this holy day. In the 2024 service I witnessed and participated in, Blackwood’s religious leadership shaped a service full of the music, story, ritual, and material culture that honored her experiences25. While she led this effort, Blackwood leads with a collaborative ethic that brought in the gifts and insights of other Mexican-Americans inside and outside of our congregation, as well as community members from other ethnic backgrounds. Putting this in conversation with Isasi-Díaz’s methods, I also wonder how this experience could change, if Blackwood’s collaborators, as well as the worshiping body, were composed differently. Practices rising from lo cotidiano and concientización are specific to personal and communal experience; shifts in each of these variables necessitate different approaches in order to facilitate the transformation that is possible by applying these hermeneutics.
These considerations continue the spirit in which Isasi-Díaz crystallized mujerista theology: “Those of us who have come up with the term and have been the first to use it wish to encourage Hispanic women to appropriate this term, fully aware of the fact that such a process also includes adaptation26.” It is a theology with the potential to empower Latines from the bottom up and from the margins to the center. In this way, it provides a framework to broaden theological engagement, religious leadership, and power-building among Latines. Grounding reflection in lo cotidiano clarifies the sites of struggle in daily life and the opportunities to transcend them. Grounding practice in concientización puts these experiences in broader social and theological context and distributes the power of leadership. In this paper, we have examined how religious practices have been opportunities to understand these hermeneutics in practice.
Despite some scholars’ misgivings about the continued relevance of mujerismo, Isasi-Díaz’s work reminds us that it is praxis – an ongoing endeavor – that will bring us through to liberation, not just identity-building and positioning. It is collective work toward commonly identified goals, rather than wordsmithing and banner-raising, that will bring sustained transformation. This reminds us that the hermeneutical principles of mujerismo – lo cotidiano and concientización – can be applied far beyond Isasi-Díaz’s own Roman Catholic, Cuban-American experience. Latines regardless of race, nationality, or religious affiliation can apply these principles in their communities’ attempts at building liberative theologies and ethics. While the work and its fruits will look different in each context, the hermeneutics supporting it have lasting relevance. All oppressed peoples have everyday struggles which are shaped by overarching systems, and given the necessary social connections, all have the ability to come together and reflect collectively on these struggles to make theological and ethical sense of them, as well as imagine alternatives.
1. Mary Pat Fisher, Women in Religion (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Longman, 2007), 13.
2. Xochitl Alvizo, “Theologizing Latina Feminisms: Amplifying the Political intersections of Theology, Gender, and Critical Theory,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latinoax Theology, Second Edition, ed. Orlando O. Espín (Lexington, KY: John Wiley & Sons, 2023), 406.
3. Rubén Rosario-Rodríguez, “Sources and Methodologies in Latinoax Theolgoies,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latinoax Theology, Second Edition, ed. Orlando O. Espín (Lexington, KY: John Wiley & Sons, 2023), 48.
4. Yuri Rodriguez, “Un Poquito de Justicia: A Mujerista Method,” Earth & Altar, February 19, 2024, https://earthandaltarmag.com/posts/un-poquito-de-justicia-a-mujerista-method-7nrsg
5. Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Viva la Diferencia!” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 8, no. 2 (1992): 98-99.
6. Isasi-Díaz, “Lo Cotidiano: A Key Element of Mujerista Theology,” Journal of Hispanic / Latino Theology 10, no. 1 (2002), 5.
7. Ibid., 9.
8. Ibid., 11.
9. Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 31.
10. Isasi-Díaz, “Lo Cotidiano,” 11.
11. Rosario-Rodríguez, 53.
12. Yuri Rodriguez, “Un Poquito de Justicia: A Mujerista Method Part II.” Earth & Altar, February 24, 2024 https://earthandaltarmag.com/posts/un-poquito-de-justicia-a-mujerista-method
13. Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 95. https://research.ebsco.com/c/foy3qo/search/details/r2gnymzyzz?db=nlebk
14. Ibid., 85.
15. Ibid., 87.
16. Ibid., 86.
17. Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández, “Lo Cotidiano as Locus Theologicus,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latinoax Theology, Second Edition, ed. Orlando O. Espín (Lexington, KY: John Wiley & Sons, 2023), 9.
18. Ibid.
19. María Pilar Aquino, “Latina Feminist Theology: Central Features,” in A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice, ed. María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), 138.
20. Alvizo, 414.
21. Isasi-Díz, Mujerista Theology, 96.
22. Isasi-Díz, "Viva La Diferencia!" 99.
23. Isasi-Díz, Mujerista Theology, 98.
24. Ibid., 86.
25. First Universalist Church of Denver, “October 27, 2024: Dia de los Muertos, Paul Belden, Naomi Blackwood, Birch Cue,” Vimeo, First Universalist Church of Denver, October 27, 2024, https://vimeo.com/showcase/7021169/video/1023706503#t=150s
26. Quoted in Alvizo, 414.