Professor Mayra Rivera talks about coloniality and race, environmental catastrophe, and transforming the way we see the world.
Welcome to Faculty Focus, a special podcast series from Harvard Divinity School, where we speak with HDS professors about their courses and research interests. I’m Jonathan Beasley.
Today’s guest is Mayra Rivera, who is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies here at Harvard Divinity School. Professor Rivera works at the intersections between continental philosophy of religion, literature, and theories of coloniality, race and gender—with particular attention to Caribbean postcolonial thought. She is also the president of the American Academy of Religion.
Thanks for listening and joining us today. Let’s jump right into the interview.
Jonathan Beasley: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is something that some people who know you might not even know about you. And that is that you have a bachelor's degree not in religious studies, not in history, not in philosophy, but in chemical engineering.
Mayra Rivera: Yes, I do.
JB: And then you went on to get an MTS. How did that happen? How did you realize that you wanted to pursue theological studies and become a scholar of religion and not an engineer?
MR: That's a very funny story because I always, growing up, wanted to be a chemical engineer. And I actually worked as a chemical engineer and liked the work. But there was another side of me that was interested in the humanities. I've always loved literature. And I also grew up with a sense of deep theological conversations I had with my mother, with my family. And I took those for granted.
So after I graduated from college and I was working as an engineer, I started to miss some of that. And I was, at the time, editing a newsletter for a church that published theological articles. And I started to have a lot of questions. And I keep asking the pastor at that moment theological questions. And he says casually, like, I think you should go and take classes at the seminary. And I did.
I started taking classes quite casually, thinking, I'll work and take a couple of classes here and there just for interest. But once I started the program, I realized that's what I really wanted to be doing. So that's when I moved to the U.S. and started graduate studies. So it wasn't so much a decision to leave engineering as much as a decision to pursue this line of questioning, if you will.
JB: Sticking with that just for a second, when you told your pastor, for example, that you were going to do that and you were starting to do that, what was his reaction?
MR: Excitement. And some of the faculty, who were visiting faculty in Puerto Rico at that moment, knew—were actually based in the United States—so they gave me information. And they helped me through the process, connected me with an organization that's called the Hispanic Theological Initiative, which was incredibly helpful for me to navigate that transition to the United States and the context and even to help me understand better what it meant to be a Latina in the United States.
JB: And then so let's fast forward to now, your time here at Harvard and at HDS, and I want to turn quickly to your teaching, and specifically the course that you're teaching this semester is on Sylvia Wynter, the Caribbean theorist of coloniality—Am I saying that correctly?
MR: Yes.
JB: I feel like I don't say that enough in my everyday life—and race, who I found out is very nearly 100 years old.
MR: Yes.
JB: Correct? Which is absolutely fascinating. So could you talk a little bit more about who she is? And what sparked your interest in teaching this class?
MR: She's a scholar that I've known about forever. And I have been reading her for a long time. She's an interesting scholar because she combines things that we think as separate. She was a playwright. She wrote a novel. She was a literary critic based in the Caribbean, engaged with the questions that came with the anti-colonial movement and post-independent questions in the Caribbean itself.
And then she moves to the U.S., to Stanford, and engaging issues of race from the perspective of the US then. And so she's a far-reaching scholar theorist who's interested both in understanding how colonialism, race, and religion have shaped our ways of thinking about the world, our ways of thinking primarily about what it means to be human, and she's also interested in, how do we learn to challenge and transform our ways of thinking about what it means to be human.
So these are—she tackles big questions, right? But aalways with a sensibility to the struggles of the Caribbean context that combines the histories of colonialism, the legacies of colonialism, which is why we call it coloniality. It's more about the legacy of colonialism, slavery, environmental destruction, and all of that. So I feel it's a very capacious theorist that I wanted to explore with students in detail.
JB: That's fascinating. And you just mentioned environmental destruction, which actually I was looking at two other courses that you teach. They are “Coloniality, Race, and Environmental Catastrophe,” and then “Coloniality, Race, and Religion: Theoretical Approaches.” I know this is a broad question, but what are you covering in those courses? And what are you hoping that students take away from those courses as well?
MR: So the class on “Coloniality, Race, and Environmental Catastrophe,” we take a step back to think about how contemporary issues of environmental catastrophe relate to older catastrophes, particularly the catastrophes produced by colonialism and slavery. So we analyze something that we often just forget, which is these patterns of colonialism and slavery had incredible marks on the Earth, totally transformed landscapes, transformed ways of being.
But it also transformed the ways we understand the world. So the class combines both thinking about environmental catastrophe in the present but also connecting it to the older histories of catastrophe. And I love that class because students have the opportunity to develop research projects in which they investigate the history of environmental human catastrophe in a place of their choice.
So very often, it gives us an opportunity to hear about students' family histories or histories of places they lived in. And we all learn so much from that class. And it also has that impact of being a very meaningful research project when one learns about a place that's part of one's own individual history.
JB: Allowing it to be more personal, bringing that into the class and the work.
MR: Absolutely. And also foregrounding—that these questions of what's happening to the planet are questions that also affect us in more intimate ways. So they're global patterns of devastation, but they're also very intimate patterns of loss. So we want to have room to explore that.
The other class is an exploration of how religion, colonialism, and race have shaped each other. And so we take different case studies from different points of history, beginning with Spain and the expulsion of the Moors and the conversion of the Jews in Spain and analyze the language that you use in relation to these communities as a very clear example of the ways in which some types of discourses we now associate with race emerge in a context of religious wars and take other examples, like the conquest of the Americas, the displacement of Indigenous people, and look at how religion, race, and colonialism shape each other and how even what we understand by the term religion and what we understand by the term race are shaped by this conjunction in this moment in history.
JB: I want to take that class. But speaking of students, who are the students who are taking these classes? And what are the fields that they're interested in going into and their passions?
MR: So one of the things I really like, both about the classes I teach and about HDS more broadly, is just the diversity of students. We have students from different regions of the world, different family histories, but also different paths from the students who want to continue studying, to do PhD work, to students who want to go into activism, into publishing, into writing. So it also makes the classroom a very rich experience because students necessarily approach the materials and their own projects in very different ways.
JB: I want to also talk a little bit more about your engagement with students. And what is that like on a daily basis? I know that you're obviously teaching classes. What other kinds of ways are you engaged with students?
MR: One of the things I enjoy doing is to help students understand their own projects. So one of the ways in which I engage students is helping them through their thesis, which is one of those processes in which students are writing to find out what their key questions are that will sum up their experience at HDS.
And that usually requires regular meetings throughout an entire year that they're writing. And other than that, it's usually related to courses, so how students are thinking about their projects, what kind of research materials they need, et cetera.
JB: Let’s take very short break before we rejoin Professor Rivera for the second half of our conversation. If you enjoy what you’re hearing, I encourage you to subscribe to Harvard Divinity School wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re interested in learning more about Professor Rivera and her work, or you want to know more about HDS, our faculty, students, and degree programs, check us out on our website or follow us on social media @HarvardDivinity.
Now, let’s get back to my conversation with Professor Mayra Rivera.
JB: Staying on the sort of student experience just for a little bit longer, what do you think perspective students who have not been in the classroom yet—what would you say to them in terms of what they can expect from the courses, from the academic rigor when they come here?
MR: I think one of the gifts of HDS is also one of the challenges, which is students have a lot of freedom to explore what they want to explore. And that means that students need to seek out how to put together the resources they need for their path.
So it's very important for incoming students to be in conversation with the faculty they want to be working with from early on so that they establish those relationships and they know who to ask what because there's an enormous diversity of resources, both HDS but also the university, and students can find almost anything if they are willing to seek it out.
JB: Seek it out, yeah—digging a bit. I want to mention that you are the president of the American Academy of Religion. How did that come about? And what are your responsibilities in that position?
MR: I've been part of the American Academy of Religion since I was a graduate student. And I've served in many different capacities, from program units to committees, et cetera. And a few years ago, I was invited to run for president. That requires an election of the body of members. And I was elected as president three years ago. It's a three-year term in which we begin as vice president and president-elect, and this is the year I'm president.
JB: Is this your final year then?
MR: Yes.
JB: OK.
MR: And it's an amazing experience because we get to see the overall of the guild that is the study of religion. Normally, we hang out close to our people, who are studying things that are similar to ours. But being president of the American Academy of Religion means thinking about, who are our members more broadly? And we've also been facing a pandemic that also meant that we had to think about who we are and what we need to provide our members.
At this point, the pandemic for the AAR, as for any other organization, revealed some weaknesses in our systems. But for us, it became an opportunity to think into the future. How do we make this organization more inclusive, which has been the emphasis of this year. I also have the opportunity to define the theme for the year.
And the theme has been religion and catastrophe—very much close to my area of research. But I also get to invite people I want to hear from. And I'm really excited about—Our annual meeting is in November. And we are getting ready for that. I'm really excited about those conversations.
JB: Sticking to some of your areas of research interest, your bio says that you are currently working on a project that explores the relationships between coloniality and climate change through Caribbean thought. Can you give us an inside look into how that's coming along?
MR: Yes. So the motivation for this project was trying to wrestle with the environmental futures of Puerto Rico—which is the island that I'm from—and in the face of climate change, in particular, after Hurricane Maria devastated the island. And I wanted to think about how a place like Puerto Rico can influence or what say does it have in the ways in which we approach questions of environmentalism.
And one of the main questions I had is, how do we deal with this problem that is worldwide, its planetary scope, without erasing the particularities of places and the communities that are entangled with those places? And in the case of the Caribbean, that means wrestling with the history of colonialism and of slavery and the ongoing economic devastation—how those impact the vulnerability of the region for climate change.
But my project is more about, what if we were standing on the shore in Puerto Rico? And from there, imagine what climate change is and what we should do about it. So I'm thinking about questions of, how do we think about time? How do we think about place? How do we think about what it means to be human?
JB: I believe you’ve been at Harvard and HDS for 12 years now. How have you changed? How has perhaps some of your scholarship even changed?
MR: I think the time here has given me the opportunity to focus more on my scholarship as nurtured by Caribbean thought. It's always been there but more muted in the past. And I think being here and engaging scholars here and elsewhere has given me the opportunity to think about it more deeply, in terms of how those intellectual ties influence my work, but also how those affective ties influence my work, how those relationships shape my work, and even how my styles of writing are so marked by the writers that I've read and that who have accompanied me through the process.
I think it's also been interesting and transformative to be in an environment in which we study religion without assuming that Christianity is the main religion or the de facto religion we're talking about—so diversity not only in our curriculum, but also especially in the classroom has also shaped the ways I think.
And the students who I've been in conversation with—students recently—who are from the Pacific Islands, and that has prompted me to think a lot about how the experience of the Caribbean connects with Pacific Islands, but also what I would like to learn in order to teach our students. So, it really is an ongoing transformation, in relation to the people.
JB: Yeah, that's so fascinating, so interesting, and something that I wouldn't have thought of before. But I'm so glad that you talked about that and mentioned that. So thank you for sharing so much with us today. And thank you for your time, Professor Rivera.
MR: Thank you. My pleasure.
JB: My thanks to Professor Rivera for giving us an inside look at her teaching and research interests. This is the third interview in our Faculty Focus podcast series. Don’t forget to subscribe to Harvard Divinity School if you haven’t already so that you never miss a future episode. And visit us on our website or follow us on social media if you’re interested in learning more about HDS, our faculty, and the student experience.
Until next time…
Listen to additional episodes of Faculty Focus here: