Reading notes from Aquino interpreted eco-theologically

The following is something I realized when reading Jorge Aquino on the subject of Mestizaje in Latino/a Theology. Mestizaje, roughly understood, is the history of exploitation, conquest, and suffering experienced by Hispanics and mixed race at the hands of Eurocentric colonialism. The problem was originally framed in the context of race, but I find this ultimately too anthropocentric. Here is what I mean by that.

“I propose grounding our “mestizo” theologizing in an understanding that race is a long-historical ideological apparatus fomented to create and discipline subaltern labor in the modern capitalist world-system. The only way theology can confront this risk – which may not finally be superable, either in scholarly practice or in activism – is to frontally critique capitalism as a system of exploiting and destroying racialized bodies” (Aquino, page 285).

The thought occurs that capitalism as it exists today thrives off the exploitation of all that is not recipient of the fruits of such exploitation. Only a few benefit from the suffering of billions. Who are the billions? They are those who are not denizens of the center. They are all those who can be identified as 'other.' Race, class, species, it does not matter. The oppressed whose suffering affords the center luxury are racial and ethnic minorities, working classes, cattle, laboratory animals, ecosystems.

This is not to equate the human oppressed with the non-human oppressed in any pejorative or degrading sense. And why should it be interpreted as degrading of a human being to equate her to an animal? Both are God's creatures, expressions of life, beauty and creativity, and both bear the Imago Dei. Creatures are never "better" or "worse than," only different.

No, it is merely to point out that to those in the center, whose greed is laced with ignorance and indifference to the other, there is no difference between the human oppressed and the non-human oppressed: the migrant worker, the racial minority, the poor, they are all seen as another kind of animal, one too complicated and perceptive to be enslaved in the same way a cow or a pig might. Human oppressed are allowed to benefit, however slightly and pitifully, from the spoils of modern capitalism's plundering because they have a voice that an anthropocentric worldview recognizes. They must be enslaved differently than cattle and by much more sophisticated means. The non-human oppressed have no voice recognized by the center's anthropocentrism, but they are exploited all the same.

To borrow Aquino's words, capitalism is a system of exploitation and destroying peripheral bodies, bodies that are barred from the center, whether they are human or otherwise. Different race, different ethnicity, different species, these distinctions are irrelevant, so long as these can each be made subservient to the system, that its misguided attempt at sating human greed might be perpetuated just a little longer. Theologically speaking, this kind of capitalism is the purest form of systemic sin, as it enslaves, exploits, commodifies and cheapens all of God's creatures. Human beings are creatures too, but modern capitalism would not be viable if it considered anything sacred.