En Cristo No Hay Jodido Ni Gringo

There is a famous story that circulates in Latin America of a peasant who was learning to read in a literacy program that used the Bible as its principal text.  Such programs were common in Latin American in the 1960s and 1970s, during the heyday of liberation theology.  Reading aloud to his fellow students, this peasant came to the famous passage in the book of Galatians in which Paul declares to the Christians in Galatia: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.”  In Spanish this verse reads: “En Cristo Jesus no hay judío ni griego, ni hombre ni mujer, ni esclavo ni libre.”

When the peasant just learning to read came to this verse, though, he didn’t read, “En Cristo no hay judío ni griego …”  Instead he read out loud: “En Cristo no hay jodido ni gringo …”   because where “griego” means “Greek” – a word the peasant would have never heard of – the word “gringo” is common vernacular for “American,” that is a citizen of the United States.  And where the word “judío” means “Jew,” another uncommon word in rural Latin America, the word “jodido” is, again, very familiar.  It means “screwed,” or, really, something a little more frank than that. 

According to the peasant’s reading of this scripture, then, Paul was teaching that in Christ Jesus there is neither “gringo” nor “f****d.”

Spanish-speakers find this story funny for so many reasons they are hard to enumerate.  I once told this story from the pulpit in Calexico, and my Spanish-speaking parishioners nearly fell out of their pews laughing.  First of all the story is funny to anyone who is aware of the historic relations between Latin America and the United States.  But my parishioners were also dying of laughter because they couldn’t believe their pastor had just said the word, jodido, from the pulpit.

Even funnier was the reaction of the translator who was supposed to take what I had just said in Spanish and translate it for the English-speaking people in the congregation.

Often times we used a system of wireless headphones for simultaneous translation of the sermon.  On the Sundays I preached in English the monolingual Spanish-speakers wore the headphones.  On the Sundays I preached in Spanish the monolingual English-speakers wore the headphones.  (The majority of people in this small church were bilingual and didn’t ever wear the headphones because they didn’t need either language to be translated for them). 

That day, though, we were translating out loud.  I would preach a section of the sermon in one language and then the translator would translate what I said in the other language.  This allowed me to bounce back and forth between the two languages, telling some stories in English and others in Spanish.  For the uninitiated this may sound like chaos, but for this little congregation of predominantly bilingual people almost any system worked.

The woman who was translating that day was Rosalva, a woman who had been raised on the border in a conservative family.  A profoundly bilingual person, she simply had no idea whatsoever what to do with the word, jodido.  She could not bring herself to translate it precisely.  She knew the folks who spoke English (most of whom were reared in the proper, Anglo culture of mainline Methodism) would not have the cultural acumen to understand the layers of meaning that made the story funny to Latin Americans. They would have no idea what “that word” was doing in the middle of their sermon.  Rosalva sat there frozen, stammering, and then just stopped and burst out into laughter … which made the Spanish-speakers in the congregation laugh all the more.

Because of the brouhaha my telling of this story caused that day in worship, I never got to finish it.  The best part of the story, as far as I’m concerned, is the end.  The way the story is told in Latin America, when the campesino  declared to his compañeros in the literacy class that “In Christ Jesus there is neither jodido nor gringo,” they all nodded solemnly their understanding and assent!  After all, what could be a more profound witness to the grace and power of God than the promise that some day this historic relationship of inequality and oppression would be transformed?

Perhaps unwittingly, the man who read the scripture was doing very effective job of interpreting the word for the day.  He got the message right.