Prologue

Bienvenidos a La Mesa

NATALIA KOHN, NOEMI VEGA QUIÑONES,
AND KRISTY GARZA ROBINSON

Bienvenidos a la mesa, hermanas! You are welcome to come and take a seat at our table, set for you by Jesus and the many women who’ve gone before us. Make yourself at home, take a deep breath, and experience the feeling of an incredible meal prepared just for you. May your hearts be filled with expectancy that our Lord wants to give you his shade, his peace. He wants to refresh and strengthen you like only he can do. Our prayer is that you sense the Holy Spirit directing your heart and mind as you read this book, bringing you into greater hope and vision, and most importantly, connecting you to his overwhelming love. May you feel at home with us as you sit, eat, and receive what the Holy Spirit wants to give you at the feet of the biblical women whose stories we will learn from in the pages to come.

We invite you into our lives, our stories, and the stories of other Latina women who’ve gone ahead of us and who are currently walking beside us. We also welcome you to the primary storytellers, our ancient mentors who lived long before us and will continue to live long after us. These twelve women in the Bible have become dear friends to each of us as they’ve helped mentor and form us through the years. They are spiritual leaders who we pray will add to your faith, encourage your Latina identity, and strengthen your leadership. Our hope is that you feel comfortable to wrestle with the ideas in this book—to ask questions, to begin new conversations, to be challenged by past and present women, and to experience growth in your faith and your Latina voice.

Vision For Hermanas

Hermanas emerged from a series of divine appointments, personal invitations, and mutual longing for a discipleship resource for emerging Latina leaders. In December 2015, Natalia Kohn began to dream with Orlando Crespo about a resource for Latino/as that focused on developing Latina voices. More than ten years had passed since the publication of Orlando’s seminal book Being Latino in Christ, and several leaders working with Latino young adults continually asked for resources and support in their leadership development curriculum, classes, and conferences. Natalia asked a few of her friends if they would be interested in writing a book to address the paucity in resources for Christian Latina leaders. Noemi Vega and Kristy Robinson accepted the invitation, excited to coauthor a book where multiple voices would be shown.

Our goal is that Hermanas will serve as a discipleship and leadership development resource for Latina women who desire to grow in their ethnic identity, leadership, and relationship with God. Hermanas is also for men and women who seek to walk alongside and empower emerging Latina leaders. The biblical women we encounter serve as mentors for our leadership journeys. We hope that you feel welcomed into their life with God wherever you find yourself on your own journey toward Jesus and toward understanding and embracing your own ethnic identity. It may help you to know that all three of us, at some point in our ethnic identity development, have felt and fought the lie of not being “Latina enough.” If you find yourself in a similar place, our prayer is that you would grow into the beautiful wonder and uniqueness that your heritage brings.

May you experience these twelve stories from the Bible, and our collective stories interwoven throughout, as helpful wisdom from fellow hermanas. In Hermanas you have access to twelve narratives that will empower and develop you for kingdom growth. Hermanas is the title we wanted for this book because it is a narrative of ancient and living sisters interconnected across time and place. We hope you read with eyes to see these women and our stories as precious sisters walking alongside your own journey—“for such a time as this.” The Lord has given us these biblical heroines to spur us on. The Lord has also given us one another to activate the treasures within each of us.

As you read our stories, you will notice our different writing styles and personalities shine through. Some of us choose to use Spanglish in certain places. At times we dig deeply into the biblical context and at other times we dig deeply into learning from our experiences. We intentionally wanted to write each chapter with our separate voices so that we may show that leadership is multifaceted and that every person will lead with their own voice and personality. We hope this purposeful decision welcomes more of us mujeres to the leadership table. Since each of us has written four chapters, we would like to introduce ourselves to you in our own voice. Thank you for joining our table.

Introductions and Dreams

From Natalia Kohn

Growing up, I was frequently the girl who would get the question, “What are you?” The times I heard that my skin color is “olive” and I’m “ethnically ambiguous” are more than I can count. I had a go-to answer that would fall out of my mouth effortlessly, but as I grew older in my southern Californian society my answer to “What are you?” began to come from my heart. I went from rolling my eyes at my biracial complexities to smiling with confidence stating that I am both Argentinian and Armenian.

I grew up in Pasadena, California, surrounded by a small family constantly communicating with our very large family back in Argentina. I grew up with my papi, an immigrant who only speaks Spanish, who wanted his wife and children to communicate for him when English was required, and an Americanized Armenian mother, who navigated the American system to help her children function and thrive in this country. Both these cultures are a joy and a challenge that I have been navigating and growing in for decades, and I still have more maturing to do.

It was in my college years and throughout my years on staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship that I began my ethnic journey, wrestling with what it means to be Argentine and Armenian. In these years I saw how communal our ethnic journeys are and how, as in our walks with Jesus, we cannot journey in isolation—we need one another. I grew in my Latina confidence in community, in my relationships con mis hermanas y hermanos. Being a Latina went from being a label to an identity I honor and cherish.

My hope for every reader, every hermana reading this book would be to continue to journey with Jesus in both faith and ethnicity—both being journeys that must intersect and be tied together and continuously be refined and transformed by our heavenly Father. I hope that you can identify with our cries, our stories, and our longings, and know that you are not alone. I have met too many Latina women who journey alone out of shame, fear, and isolation, having never experienced that Latina community. I pray you would journey with us—our lives, our Latina parientes, our amigas—taking steps closer to Jesus and to these biblical heroines that also needed to live out their gender and their faith in relation to others. Let’s learn together how to confidently live as Latinas leading with his love, life, and light in this world.

Our journeys as Latina women are full of stories you hopefully can relate to, connect with, and learn from. We’ve had the incredible honor of mentoring many Latina and non-Latina women alongside many Latino and non-Latino college-age students, believers from our churches, pre-believers, and non-believers who all let us into their sacred spaces with the Lord. All three of us authors would be honored to be thought of as distant mentors to you as you wrestle, process, and cultivate more with Jesus. We desire to be resources empowering and cheering you on as you go deeper in your identity, intimacy, influence, and impact. We are here alive and still learning like you; the primary mentors of this book are the twelve women of the Bible who guide and encourage all of us in our faith, our identities, and our leadership. They have become dear hermanas to us, full of rich wisdom, and the Holy Spirit has used them again and again to grow and mature us. Our prayer is that they’d become your mentors and hermanas as well.

From Kristy Garza Robinson

My whole childhood was spent growing up in Edinburg, a border city at the southern tip of Texas. I am a third-generation Mexican American. My grandparents immigrated to the United States from Mexico in the late 1940s. My parents later raised us between these two cultural worlds. I was and am very shaped and influenced by the values of the majority culture here in the United States. I also identify strongly as a Latina, with values and worldviews influenced by my family of origin. I spent my life geographically and emotionally straddling the border of the United States and Mexico, finding my home and feeling displaced in both countries and cultures. This is what it means to me to be a US Latina.

This book is about the varied experiences of many Latina women with different ethnic and leadership journeys. My desire is to see each of us learn from one another and from the biblical women whose stories we share with you. While we each have our own unique space we are taking up in the world, we also have a collective identity that I believe God is forming in all its diversity. It is beautiful, and I hope this book is a companion to the identity that is forming through all of our different voices.

From Noemi Vega Quiñones

Hola! I am the oldest of five children, a daughter of hardworking immigrant parents, Rigo and Irma, and a once-undocumented child. Born in the inner city of Guadalajara and raised in affluent central California, I had an multifaceted childhood. I grew up speaking English with my dad and Spanish with my mom. I was raised on Sunday school expectations and fun weekends, on chores after homework and family vacations in the summer that involved long drives on the road back to Mexico. Now, I live in San Antonio and serve as the Area Ministry Director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in South Texas. I spent fifteen years learning from the city of Fresno where my faith in Jesus flourished and where dreams for campus and city transformation began.

I hope that this book brings healing and empowering Holy Spirit transformation to all who read. Sitting at the feet of Mija (the bleeding woman), Rahab, Tabitha, and Mary the mother of Jesus has been a gift and a challenge. Each of these women has taught me to trust the Lord with my whole life, my whole being, and my future dreams. This book is for my hermanas who have struggled, like me, to embrace their voice and leadership. Growing up Mexican in the United States, a Latina, a brown girl, is both beautiful and painful. I recall moments when my culture was questioned and shamed and when my leadership was challenged more than my male peers. I also recall moments when my leadership was embraced and given voice. I long for our readers to experience the healing and joy that each of these biblical women bring.

I find hope that at some point in history, Mija, Rahab, Tabitha, and Mary walked among their people and influenced their communities. Some influenced directly, others indirectly, some willingly, some unknowingly, but all influenced out of their encounters with the living Lord. I read these women as a Gentile and a foreigner entering their stories, seeking to understand their experience, and sharing what I have learned with you all. While more of us are entering into places of influence and leadership and seeking to mentor one another, the need for Latina mentors in all sectors of life continues. I hope that these women serve as mentors in your leadership journey. As my mom would always say to me, “Mija, dedícale todo a Cristo porque acuérdate que todo lo puedes en Cristo que te fortalece,” Filipenses 4:13. Remember this, hermanas, that all things—all things—are possible through Christ who strengthens you, me, us, one another, and our communities.

Defining Latinas

Language is a powerful instrument used to create meaning and significance. James warns that “with the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness” (James 3:9). Latinas have been defined by the power and principality of race, by institutions that seek to study and learn about this people group, and by people in the United States seeking an alternative term for Hispanic. First, race is what sociologists call a social imaginary, a framework that people have created and sustained to separate peoples according to the color of their skin. Race is not proven scientifically, biblically, or philosophically even though it operates powerfully in our society. Race is an identifier placed on someone solely based on their physical features: skin color, eye shape, nose/mouth size, and so on. Thus, Latinas are a racialized social group that deems some of us “Latina” and others “not Latina” or makes some of us to feel “more Latina” than others just because of the color of our skin or our physical features. This idea of “more than, less than, or just right” comes from the impact of race on bodies.

Race creates an impermeable definition of peoples and does not depict the reality of cultural fluidity. One example is found within Noemi’s family. Noemi’s mom is lighter skinned than her dad. Two of their children came out lighter skinned than the other three and Noemi is the darkest one. Racially, people sometimes assume Noemi’s sister is Latina and sometimes do not. Racially, people almost always assume Noemi speaks Spanish because she looks the way they imagine a Latina to look. The truth is that Latino/as are the descendants of many people groups, including African, Asian, and European. Race privileges lighter-skinned Latinos/as and dehumanizes darker-skinned Latinos/as. Colorism exists in the Latino/a community because of race.

Race created the pain that we often hear from Latinas we have mentored who do not “look” Latina or who do not speak Spanish. Race says you are supposed to act and behave in certain ways and you are supposed to like and support certain things. To live and act outside of these norms disrupts racialization. We begin with race because we believe it is a power and principality that has to be named as one that has affected all bodies. We encourage you to walk in the freedom of being a person created by God with a unique history, family background, and current narrative that God is shaping. Let us be healed from racialization and its expectations on us and be people who disrupt the illusion of race. Let us be people who name the effects of race on our bodies.

Second, Latino is a term that refers to people from Latin American cultures and contexts, regardless of whether or not they use the Spanish language. Some may rightly contest the use of the term Latino in this book. We use Latino knowing it is limited and incomplete. The word Latino is not enough to break away from its racialization and does not entirely incorporate non-Latin speaking or mixed peoples, our ancestors who were colonized. We use Latino as an alternative to Hispanic, which refers to people of Spanish ancestry. The problem with Hispanic is similar to the problem with Latino. Both of these terms ignore the indigenous peoples that have lived in these lands for centuries. Both of these terms privilege the Spanish language over indigenous languages. They also do not capture the reality of our African ancestors that were forced into the Americas during the slave trade.

The US Census Bureau refers to all of us, the mestizos and boricuas, the chongas and the cholas, as Hispanics. At times, as a side note, the US Census Bureau has even categorized us as white. As the authors of this book, we have chosen to use the term Latina to capture our backgrounds with the intentional reminder that it is limited and must include African, Asian, and indigenous descendants. As hermanas, we hope that you feel free to identify with the term or not. Personally, I (Noemi) prefer to identify as a Mexicana US American to refer to my Mexican background and growing United States identity. We have friends that prefer to identify as Latinx, Newyorican, Chicana, AfroLatinx, and in other more specific ways. The people of God are a diverse, beautifully complex people, and we hope to make space for that rich complexity within our stories. The three of us refer to Latinas as those who identify as women who have grown up in the United States who identify with ancestry from the Americas, Africa, Asia, indigenous America, and who speak Spanish, English, an indigenous language, Spanglish, or any mix of these.

Although we speak with our backgrounds in mind, we dare not speak for all Latinas in the United States. We admit that our dialogue would have been enriched by many more voices at the authors’ table. We see this book as the beginning of rich dialogue among those of us in the United States who seek to learn from biblical women leaders. We admit we are limited in our representation: we have two Mexican American authors, one first-generation immigrant, one second-generation, and one third-generation. We have one mom in her thirties and two single women in their thirties. We have two lighter-shaded Latinas and one medium-shaded Latina. We have two women with their master’s and one woman with her bachelor’s. We are mostly from lower-to-middle socioeconomic backgrounds and mostly bilingual. Our stories would have been enriched by categories outside of our own.

This is where you may come in, dear reader. We invite you to continue the conversations that we present in each of our chapters with one another. Give of your stories to your community—they are rich and full of beauty. We seek to be women who learn from one another and who learn to share our stories with each other. We humbly present our own in the following pages.

Audience and SetUp of the Book

We each felt invited by God to write this book with the primary audience of Latinas, to help honor, strengthen, and empower them in their holistic voices, but we also welcome women from other backgrounds who want to hear stories and also wrestle with their faith and their cultural identities. We hope men will pick up this book and engage with the twelve biblical women, us three women, and the women we share with you all. May our brothers take these stories to heart with the longing to partner even more effectively with God and their sisters.

This book is not written using the order of the Bible. Instead, we write from two different themes and organize the book around them: part one, Identity and Intimacy, and part two, Influence and Impact. We believe this is a healthy order to spiritual leadership. Knowing true impact and influence in this world only comes from deep roots in our identity and intimacy with Jesus. Through studying and sitting at the feet of these twelve biblical heroines, we have also seen how their identity and intimacy with God led them to have profound impact and broad influence for his kingdom. Through the whole of the book, we also highlight these women’s unique strengths and then apply them to our varying Latina contexts. We hope you can both identify with and learn from them, from us, and from the many modern-day women we highlight through the book. Our heart is that Latinas would feel mentored in their faith and ethnic journey, experiencing how these themes build on one another to form our voice.

Exhortations as You Begin

This book holds many hopes in its pages for each of you who are reading it. We have labored in prayer before the Lord over each chapter, believing he wants to use these words to speak to you about the place you should take up in his unfolding work in the world. We believe you are valuable and a needed contributor to the announcing of God’s coming kingdom. Wherever you find yourself as you begin, we want to encourage you to hold a posture of curiosity and openness to how the Lord might want to change you and form you into who he has always intended you to become.

So read on, dear hermanas, and stay present to the Holy Spirit as you go. May this book open up new spaces in your soul, spaces that reveal possibilities of how you can uniquely offer your gifts to the good work of the kingdom of God. You have a host of biblical women in these pages who are cheering you on in the journey.