Rose and Orlando Costas Lecture 2021 presented by the Rev. Dr. Jeanette Zaragoza-DeLeón

April 30, 2021
by Kathy Leonard Czepiel
“When we talk about history, we can fall into a dangerous pitfall,” the Rev. Dr. Jeanette Zaragoza-DeLeón told a webinar audience of more than 70 on April 17 at Andover Newton’s annual Orlando and Rose Costas Lecture, this year titled “Abolition and Interpreting: A Latinx Theological Perspective on the Amistad Trial.” That pitfall, Zaragoza-DeLeón said, is the urge to “crystallize history,” to imagine that the story that has taken hold is the only story. A translator and interpreter as well as a scholar, Zaragoza-DeLeón began her lecture by retelling the well-known and UCC-connected story of the slave ship Amistad through the lens of translation, to “give a little more color and fiber” to the history we think we know and to explore what she called its “counter-stories.”
 
The “crystallized” version of the Amistad story goes something like this: In 1839, slave hunters captured 53 Mende people from the region of Africa that is now Sierra Leone and transported them to Cuba, where they were sold to Spanish plantation owners. En route to a Cuban plantation, the Africans revolted.  They killed most of the crew and ordered those they had spared to sail them back to Africa. Instead, the crew secretly sailed north, where the ship was seized in Montauk, New York. The Mende were captured on charges of mutiny and imprisoned in New Haven. 
 
Over the next two years, a legal battle ensued that centered on the question of whether the Mende were Spanish or from Spanish territories, in which case their enslavement would be considered legal. If, on the other hand, they were determined to be Africans, they would be set free and sent home. The Connecticut abolitionist Dwight P. Janes understood from the beginning that the Mende hadn’t lived in Cuba and were Africans, Zaragoza-DeLeón told lecture attendees. Because the language barrier prevented them from telling their own story, however, they were incarcerated and unable to defend themselves. Using his privileges and those of his fellow abolitionists—Zaragoza-DeLeón named these as a U.S. passport, living in the U.S., having an education, being a Christian and speaking English—Janes and his fellow Congregationalists set out to find the Mende an interpreter and otherwise support them. 
 
In fact, 13 interpreters were ultimately employed for the trial. One was Andover Newton graduate Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, founder of the first school of the deaf in America, whose sign language succeeded in communicating with the Mende when other languages failed. The chief interpreter was an African man named James Covey, who had himself been captured and enslaved as a child but who was then living as a free man in Connecticut. As the Mendes’ primary interpreter, Covey was put “in this crossfire of racism and ethnicity in a pro-slavery society, the United States,” Zaragoza-DeLeón said. He was grilled by the prosecution on the first day of the trial in January of 1840 with the aim of impeachment; if he could be discredited, then so could his earlier translations of the Africans’ testimony. Efforts to remove him were unsuccessful.
 
Among the questions raised by this retelling of the Amistad story is that of the role of court interpreters, who are mandated by law to objectively and neutrally translate what is being said. Critical race theory calls into question whether this is possible or even desirable, Zaragoza-DeLeón said, confronting what she called “harmful fictions that obscure the normative supremacy of whiteness in America.” 
 
Also at stake, Zaragoza-DeLeón argued, is our view of history as binary, a story of oppressor and oppressed. Instead, she called for a more nuanced view that recognizes “the oppressor lives also in us, not by choice but just because we have lived inside the Empire.” Abolitionists like Janes and the many other Congregationalists who formed the Amistad Committee and supported the Mendes’ defense were deeply dedicated to the cause of freeing them and even risked their own safety to do so. They were also, at times, “complicits,” Zaragoza-DeLeón said. For example, they avoided paying bail to release the Mende because the court would have required them to pay the equivalent of the captives’ value in the slave trade, and they didn’t want to work within that system. They also believed they could “push the movement forward more” if the captives remained in jail. 
 
Offering a more current example of this “inbetween” state between oppressor and oppressed, Zaragoza-DeLeón discussed the 2019 uprising in which two million Puerto Ricans—two-thirds of the population—took to the streets to demand the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló, whose lackluster response to Hurricane Maria, weak economy and governmental corruption, including texts making “remarks against his own people,” had raised the ire of Puerto Ricans.  Zaragoza-DeLeón described the uprising as joyous, creative, full of eroticism, beautiful, and filled with righteous indignation. Following two weeks of protest, the governor stepped down.
 
Issues of translation and interpretation are also central to our understanding of church expansion, missionary activities, theological education, and liturgical practices, Zaragoza-DeLeón said. The church was present in the movement in Puerto Rico through its congregants, she said, “but the church as an institution really was silent,” yet another example of the complicit inbetween. “We need to check our internalized oppression as we check everything else in our lives, for our health and wellbeing. I think that this is the missing link in our struggles for this new century,” she told attendees.
 
The Costas Lecture honors Andover Newton’s former academic dean, Orlando Costas, who served the seminary in that role from 1984 until his untimely death in 1987, and his wife Rose, longtime assistant to the seminary’s president. In her presentation, Zaragoza-DeLeón quoted Orlando Costas, who wrote, “When one analyses the failure and victories of the church and its mission through the centuries, we are able to reinforce, discard and create new evangelistic methods for our times.”
 
Zaragoza- DeLeón was introduced by second year MDiv student Gloria Bruno, and also provided a Spanish interpreter for the talk. Following Zaragoza-DeLeón’s remarks, her doctoral dissertation advisors, Dr. Tisa Wenger and Dr. Willie Jennings, offered formal responses. When asked what could be done to expose and act against internal oppression, Zaragoza-DeLeón told the audience, “I don’t have a map yet.” But she left them with a challenge to consider: “I just think that we need to find ways in which our organizations are affected and being molded through the internalized oppression lens: our theologies, our churches… just to question, have the hermeneutic of suspicions about what we create and how internalized oppression affects us.”
 
Learn more about the Rev. Dr. Jeanette Zaragoza-DeLeón and the Rose and Orlando Costas Lecture here, and watch the lecture on the Yale Divinity School YouTube channel here: