Building Bridges, Not Walls

Scholar and author of political science and religious studies, Dr. Burke currently teaches at Trinity University, and is the author of Building Bridges, Not Walls: Nourishing Divers Cultures in Faith and Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders.  Dr. Burke’s presentation will touch on the following themes:

• Why assuming that recent Latino immigrants will assimilate to the U.S. in the same fashion as their 19th-century European predecessors is a major mistake
• Why the U.S. Southwest is a critical borderlands, where the east-west Euro-American migration met and meets the south-north migration of Latino Americans from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean
• How these migrations represent different intellectual histories, one arising from the blending of Spanish Catholic, African, and indigenous traditions and the other from Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and African strains
• How the experience of cultural interaction in the Southwest can provide the basis of a constructive response to nativism, parochialism, and ethnocentrism