Valley of the Shadow

I'm headed to South Texas to do a little research. Thanks to my uncle's genealogical studies, I know my great-grandfather, Homer Brotzman, came to the Rio Grande Valley from Wisconsin and bought land near Rio Hondo, Texas in 1916: 80 acres for $200 an acre. But I wonder, who did he buy it from? What is the story of that land?

History is not my strong suit or my primary interest, but I have been reading a lot of it so that I can better understand who I am, as a person and as a theologian shaped by origins in a particular place, in a particular web of relationships and stories.

Like most places, the Rio Grande Valley has its pretty storytellers, who pick and choose sanitized, attractive versions of events. These stories typically render the American Indians as savages and marauders, the Texas Rangers as heros, and the ranchers as cowboy entrepreneurs. We are talking about Texas, after all.

But we are not only talking about Texas. Before this land was Texas, before there was a border to divide peoples and inspire the now-so-trendy Borderlands studies, there was simply a broad delta plain, inhabited by indigenous peoples, expelled and exterminated by Spanish colonizers, who themselves experienced the turmoil of revolutions on both sides of the border. The politics painted the Valley's colonists first as Spanish citizens, then Mexican citizens, then Texan citizens, then United States citizens. And between the displacements and the politics and the turmoil, thousands of people were killed. That passive voice hides a lot. We have to remember that the phrase "thousands of people were killed" means thousands of people were doing the killing. Spaniards and American Indians ... Tejanos and Anglos ... what does this history mean to me? There has been a hard price paid for this land, over and over; where does my story connect? What does the history of the borderlands have to do with theology? What does a white-authored borderlands theology look like?

History is bloody, and complicated, and still pulsing, just like human life below the skin. It's hard to read, to realize the horror. It hurts to let this information pass through me into the writing of the dissertation. My best beloved M. reminded me that according to the Psalmist we pass through the valley of the shadow of death -- we don't get stuck in it -- and she's right; but I couldn't help thinking "the Valley and its shadows of death are passing through me ...."

And yet, this reading, and this writing, feel like the very least I can do.

So, I will get on a plane today. Fly down the curving coastline. Remember the peoples, human beings, each one. Try to find out who great-grandpa Homer bought the land from ... and whose it was before that. My uncle's genealogy runs back to Samuel Brotzman in Civil War times, with a little information about how the Brotzmans got from Germany to Pennsylvania to Wisconsin to Rio Hondo; but what about the genealogy of the land?

I am wondering what difference it makes that God said "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants." (Leviticus 25:23)

We are all aliens. The land is God's. These two Scriptural truths don't quite make the same headlines as some other texts in Leviticus. What difference will they make to me and mine?