One year after news broke that Yale professors were leaving the country because, in their expert analysis, the United States reached a tipping point in fascism,[1] I was on a panel on Christian nationalism in Seoul.[2] A co-panelist, a Korean scholar of church history, asked me: “How does it feel to be in your hour of suffering?”
He was observing, my interpreter explained, that our society was entering a fragile and conflictive moment—one in which the conditions for suffering are taking shape. It was a generous and cautionary remark: generous in acknowledging the weight of the moment and cautionary in reminding us how quickly circumstances can change from what feels like normal life.
Responding to my fellow panelists, I relayed a call to build staying power in thick solidarity with immigrant neighbors and comrades. This is what I meant.
The Embodied Witness of Movimiento Cosecha
My current research collaborates with Latin American migrant-led social movements in the United States—namely, Movimiento Cosecha (Harvest Movement). As is well established, migration to the United States was driven by a combination of systemic economic pressures and foreign political interventions that have been, at least in some senses, imperial. The case for the United States as imperial includes the dispossession of Native Americans and relegation of many to reservations, subordination of African Americans (for W. E. B. Du Bois, Black people looked more like colonized subjects than citizens), US economic power abroad (like the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]) destabilizing rural economies and deepening structural inequality), military interventions, and—crucially yet often unconsidered—testimony from people whose lives are shaped by it.[3]
Members testify to their own lived experience (vivencia) and to societies sculpted by the forces of imperialism, often through the lens of labor and as workers.[4] Deliberately shifting the immigrants’ rights narrative from political “deservingness” (as with “DREAMers”) to the unifying power of undocumented immigrant workers and beyond,[5] members echo the notion of the poor not as a class (as in its Marxist liberationist form) but as “the concrete man” and woman, “of that concrete people, subjected to the force of imperialism,” to harvest a definition from the publication El Pueblo: ¿Dónde Está? (The People: Where Are They?) by the “worker-priests” movement of the 1950s el Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (MSTM) that received support from some Argentine bishops.[6]
This lived history is analytically important because it specifies the power dynamics embedded in the colonial past and the imperial conditions that members conscientiously navigate; this history is essential for understanding why and how members of this particular political movement body are mobilizing here and now. Members participate to “survive” and “re-exist,” in their terms—that is, to move from death into life. In our account, this uprising from social death—a condition theorized with the support of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and behind him Orlando Patterson[7]—is made possible through participation in the becoming political movement body.
This dynamic unfolded when migrants enduring inhumane conditions at Delaney Hall Detention Facility in New Jersey requested solidarity from Cosecha. Despite deportation risks, Cosecha published an open letter signed by nearly 300 people being detained that exposed the medical neglect, spoiled or inadequate food, and other “torturous” conditions at the facility.[8] Subsequent published letters help document indefinite detention without due process, punitive transfers (for daring to speak to their lived reality), and systemic issues.[9] Furthermore, the coordinated hunger and work strikes and vigils outside Delaney Hall have laid bare the exploitation of immigrant detainees.[10] Private corporations running the detention centers, like the GEO Group, do not just profit from but rely upon exploitation of detainees’ work “for the core activities that are essential to keeping the facilities operating,” including the most basic level of cooking, cleaning, and maintenance.[11] The letters, hunger and labor strikes, and vigils outside the detention centers have resulted in media attention and have bloomed into other hunger and labor strikes across detention facilities, including in Michigan, California, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Washington.[12]
The detainees and Cosecha defined this collective action as solidarity—a concept Pope Francis frames “as a spontaneous reaction by those who recognize that the social function of property and the universal destination of goods are realities which come before private property” in Catholic social teaching (Evangelii gaudium, 189). He goes on to assert that “the option for the poor is primarily a theological category rather than a cultural, sociological, political or philosophical one” (Evangelii gaudium, 198). In praxis, Cosecha modeled a theological option for the poor, one in which the poor opt for the poor, wherein the socially dead organize and rise together.
Building a Movement through Re-membering
This popular movement builds through re-membering, a mode of articulation drawn from and contributing to Latin American theology and political thought.[13] This form of mobilizing links together parts—members, fragments, and remnants—without glossing over difference or conflict (what Pope Francis calls “abstraccionismo espiritualista”[14] and by investing in means-end harmony (thus avoiding Francis’s “methodological functionalism”[15]. As a part of this logic, the movement body is not shy about asking the question: Which side are you on? It is a polarizing question. For theological audiences, its intensity stems from the Christian affirmation that God was crucified and dead and arose. It shares the force of current liberation theology’s conviction that the ascent from death to life is possible here and now, to borrow Emilce Cuda’s description of the “Theology of the People.”[16]
As years of intercultural dialogue as research method and praxis with Cosecha have taught me,[17] the question includes (but certainly is not exhausted by) an invitation to participate in building “spiritual mettle” (el temple de ánimo) for resistance and creative, transformative responses for intervention of this uprising political movement body in this US context with its colonial past and amid imperial conditions.[18] This means articulating a plurality of ways of knowing, being, and doing that make it possible to overcome death-dealing imperial ways of knowing, being, and doing in order to re-member and find re-existence. For theological audiences, this is an eschatological affirmation that in its embodied form confronts despair of death by demanding justice and opening new visions and possibilities for radical transformation. This is a theological and political stance that is neither liberal statist nor Marxist, yet it does sit between them in its invitation to solidarity that is an anti-imperial political and theological intervention into this particular reality. This spiritual mettle that we cultivate in building a movement body to intervene in a particular situation is staying power for solidarity.
Given the double edge of liberal recognition that Judith Butler diagnoses in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (with Athena Athanasiou),[19] political struggle cannot merely seek inclusion within existing, exclusionary legal structures. Performatively unsettling and reshaping the normative terms of recognition itself—beyond liberalism and Marxism—is precisely what mixed (and dynamic) legal-status, migrant-led, decentralized movements are doing as they become un pueblo and build poder popular to support members’ re-existence and to transform material circumstances. The movement builds capacity for vision and participation by drawing on culture as a dynamic practice, as what members do to overcome despair and death.[20]
¿Dónde Está el Pueblo?
Readers of this forum will recognize that participants are generating a political movement body that intervenes in a recent turn in political theology, to which Pope Francis has contributed significantly, asking what makes the cohesive identity of un pueblo possible. The book I am writing with Cosecha, tentatively titled Mobilizing the Dead: Migrant-led Movements Re-member the Crucified Body, offers a textured narrative response to that question. The movement therefore offers a concrete, embodied response to the question Cuda posed in the subtitle of her 2013 article, “Teología y Política En El Discurso Del Papa Francisco: ¿Dónde Está El Pueblo?,” (Where is the people?), inspired by the above-mentioned publication by the movement of priests. In it, Cuda describes the theologian Rafael Tello’s theological and political categories. According to the text, “the oppressed will be the people . . . to the extent that the oppressors lose currency and power and the number of those who share increases; then, the compañeros will be the people.”[21] Compañeros means the popular, working, and marginalized sectors. In this discourse of the teología del pueblo (theology of the people), el pueblo (the people) is a political collective, a unit,[22] composed of history’s marginalized.[23]
If the collective agent of el pueblo is the organized community of the working poor,[24] these organizing migrant workers in the United States enter into a community of conversation about el pueblo in its agentive form. The theological and political work of constructing a migrant-led political movement body capable of collective action opens new vistas for action and thought in this context, today. Here, popular migrant-led movements become both a site of resistance and a theological image of the crucified body of Christ capable of resistance and transformation and of generating hope.
Returning to my Korean co-panelist’s question: I find the answer rooted in the active construction of poder popular and specifically spiritual mettle. It is the invitation to participate in turning “an hour of suffering” amidst rising fascism into nonviolent staying power through theologies that confront imperial and ethnonationalist projects (including Christian political theologies that function as imperial and ethnonationalist projects). This is a constructive Christian theological and political response to what has been broadly defined as Christian nationalism: the opportunity to support an eschatological uprising that becomes a demand and possibility for increasing justice, while enabling re-existence.
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[1] “We Study Fascism at Yale. We’re Leaving the U.S.,” The New York Times, May 14, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/yale-canada-fascism.html.
[2] The March 19, 2026, panel was hosted by the Nehemiah Institute for Christian Studies and Mennonite Central Committee. The co-panelist posing the question was institute’s director Dr. Bae Dawk-mahn.
[3] According to historian Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States,“Empire might be hard to make out from the mainland, but from the sites of colonial rule themselves, it’s impossible to miss” (15).
[4] “Our Movement,” Movimiento Cosecha, https://www.lahuelga.com/about.
[5] Movimiento Cosecha rejects mainstream political strategies that prioritize exceptionalism (such as focusing solely on student “DREAMers” or on “good immigrants”).
[6] El Pueblo: ¿Dónde Está? (Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo, 1975), 136.
[7] Achille Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003); Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982), xiii-511.
[8] “El Grito de Nosotros,” Movimiento Cosecha, https://www.lahuelga.com/elgrito.
[9] “‘We Demand Freedom’: A Fourth Letter from Delaney Hall,” Movimiento Cosecha, accessed August 21, 2026, https://www.lahuelga.com/freedom.
[10] Democracy Now!, “They Are Not Alone Inside”: Protests Outside New Jersey ICE Jail Support Hunger Striking Detainees, 2026, 20:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B7oNrOdBVg.
[11] “Private Profiteers: How ICE Detention Center Contractors Exploit Immigrant Detainees with $1 Per Day Pay,” Public Citizen, May 13, 2026, https://www.citizen.org/article/ice-detention-center-profiteers/.
[12] Kelly Hayes, Everyone Has a Role to Play in Supporting the Strike at Delaney Hall ICE Jail, June 17, 2026, https://theappeal.org/delaney-hall-ice-jail-hunger-strike/; Haddy Gassama, “Hundreds at Delaney Hall in Hunger Strike with Detained People Across Country,” American Civil Liberties Union, June 11, 2026, https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/hundreds-at-delaney-hall-join-detained-people-across-country-in-hunger-strike-against-inhumane-conditions.
[13] While the Spanish term “articulation” or joint provides a key, the crucial referent of this intellectual trajectory is Ernesto Laclau’s discursive articulation of popular sectors’ social demands for the constructing of a people. Ernesto Laclau, “Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2006): 646–80; Ernesto Laclau, “On the Names of God,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).
[14] Emilce Cuda, “Teología y Política En El Discurso Del Papa Francisco: ¿Dónde Está El Pueblo?,” Nueva Sociedad248 (2013): 19.
[15] Cuda, “Teología y Política,” 19.
[16] “For Theology of El Pueblo,” Cuda writes, “the ascent from nothingness to being is possible here and now,” “Teología y Política,” 23.
[17] Carlos Castañeda and Janna L. Hunter-Bowman, “Immigrant-Led Social Movements Confront Global Violence and Build Peace: Dialogue as Action Research Method and Collaborative Praxis for Transformation,” Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy: The Journal of the Accord Network 6, no. 3 (2025): 174–84.
[18] “El temple de ánimo,” translated as “spiritual mettle,” is from Juan Carlos Scannone, S.J., “Pope Francis and the Theology of the People,” Theological Studies 77, no. 1 (2016): 134.
[19] Judith Butler, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, with Athena Athanasiou (Massachusetts: Polity, 2013), 89.
[20] MSTM publication defines culture as “Todo aquello que el hombre, o un pueblo, realiza para superar la muerte, optando por la vida y la libertad, sepa o no leer y escribir,” as cited by Cuda, “Teología y Política,” 20.
[21] MSTM Capital Federal: El Pueblo. ¿Dónde Está?, 74, and found in Cuda, “Teología y Política,” 16-17.
[22] Cuda, “Teología y Política,” 14, 17.
[23] Cuda, “Teología y Política,” 18.
[24] Cuda, “Teología y Política,” 14–15.