by Talon Wolter
Can intimacy and face-to-face encounters change individuals’ perspectives of others, specifically of Latinx immigrants in the United States? This week, our class delved into three chapters of Dr. Jane Juffer’s book, Intimacy Across Borders, and we held a conversation with Dr. Juffer herself. As her work makes clear, Dr. Juffer’s scholarship has been shaped by her personal experiences, bridging private and public life. This methodology nicely echoes an assertion in her work, building on work by the theorist Emmanuel Levinas, that deeply held views are most powerfully shaped (and challenged) by face-to-face encounters.
Dr. Juffer studied journalism as an undergraduate at Drake University. After graduation, she worked for a time with the Wall Street Journal, and then as an activist for Latinx migration issues along the U.S.-Mexico border. While many scholars focus on Latinx communities in urban areas, Dr. Juffer’s Intimacy Across Borders does so in rural communities in Iowa and Pennsylvania. Additionally, her work takes Latinx studies a step further by drawing out thematic similarities between social policies and community formation in the United States with those in South Africa. The strongest connections in this work focus on the shared ties to the Dutch Reformed Church and how that institution adapted to Latinx migration in the case of the United States, and to the anti-apartheid movement in the case of South Africa.
On a personal note, Dr. Juffer grew up in Orange City, Iowa, and her husband, the South African academic Dr. Grant Farred, grew up in Cape Town, under apartheid; each was heavily influenced by the Dutch Reformed Church. She begins her preface analyzing a picture of her at age five and him at age four, implicitly wondering how historical currents would bring them together. (They first met at an academic conference.) In the 1980s, Dr. Juffer participated in the anti-apartheid movement and was critical of how the Reformed Church had used scripture to assert racial superiority and validate segregation in South Africa. All of these personal aspects of her life inform her work. As she notes in her preface, when her husband’s mother in Cape Town learned that they were to be married, she remarked, “Dutch Reformed girls all over the streets of Cape Town, and you had to find one from Iowa?”
In chapter 3, Dr. Juffer examines in great detail the history of the Reformed Church denominations and her personal connection to Reformed Christianity. She describes how it shaped her childhood in northwestern Iowa, and she then investigates the origins and recent history of Amistad Cristiana, a largely Latinx congregation in Sioux Center. Its roots extend to 1995, when the local Covenant Christian Reformed Church offered services in Spanish, had a Latino pastor, and was theologically based in Anglo Reformed teachings. The church soon constructed another building, for Amistad Christiana, which developed into a hybrid blend of Anglo and Latinx Christian culture, a mix of the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church of America.
[This book] is a narrative, at times an argument, about the possibilities generated by movement and desire. … How do the encounters produced by these migrations lead to intimacies and vulnerabilities and desires that draw on the past yet also present new possibilities? … Compassion and rage. Belonging and racial profiling. People, legal and undocumented, interact intimately, face to face, creating the possibility of friendship, community, desire, animosity–all generated by the vulnerability of face-to-face contact.
Jane Juffer, Preface, Intimacy Across Borders
Dr. Juffer sets this in context of the Reformed Church itself, going all the way back to the Protestant Reformation. In the 1500s, the Reformation changed Europe. Protestants fled persecution and immigrated to Holland. In 1550, a group of exiled Dutchmen decided to form the Dutch Reformed Church. This held ties to the Dutch West India Company when it formed in 1629, and eventually many Dutch Reformists immigrated to North America and, later, southern Africa. In 1857, the Dutch Reformists in the United States changed their name to the Reformed Church of America. Between 1857 and 1882, 47 congregations left the RCA and formed the Chirstian Reformed Church, with minor differences in ideology.
By 1995, and the Covenant Christian Reformed Church began a project to hold Bible study classes for Latinx members of the community. Amistad was born. By 2004, it had gained large enough of a presence that it left CCRC and became its own church. By 2011, it became so big that it overtook the whole building. Amistad’s popularity for both Anglo and Latinx members of Sioux Center, as well as members of both reformed faiths, continues to grow to this day. Its popularity flourished such that the church started a Sunday radio program with more than 5,000 followers. While Dr. Juffer thought that, in the 1980s, the Reformed Church had yet to grapple with the moral failings of its teachings and leadership in apartheid South Africa, she felt as though the example of Amistad Cristiana is addressing these issues by supporting Latinx members, helping and educating them, rather than dismissing them as “Others.”
Dr. Juffer uses anecdotes from her personal life and those of others to help illustrate her argument, based on the theories of Emmanuel Levinas about the power of face-to-face encounters. Briefly, Levinas theorizes that meaningful encounters with another person in an intimate setting can allow for a greater understanding of one another and change how the other is perceived. The vulnerability in these encounters–especially through eye-to-eye contact–can serve as the source of an ethics of love and empathy, while it can also lead to feelings of rejection and hate.
Dr. Juffer applies this theory to the example of Maria G., an undocumented immigrant with false papers whose abusive husband caused a domestic dispute. As a result of this, Maria was detained for forgery and risked losing her 10 month old son to the system, along with the likelihood of deportation back to Guatemala. In her trial, she received three years in prison for the forgery charge, yet she needed to be out in less than a year to avoid problems with her “U” visa, which would allow her to stay in the United States with her son. Through grassroots activism and face-to-face encounters with a social worker and the sheriff , the judge agreed to reduce her sentence to 364 days, thereby averting visa problems and personal calamity.
In another personal anecdote, Dr. Juffer describes the experiences of her mother, who got to know Latinx immigrants in her town. She offered to tutor a few folks, and in the course of tutoring them in English, she began to pick up Spanish. It was through her personal experiences, face-to-face with immigrants, that her perception of them as a whole began to change, and real intimate connections were made. Dr. Juffer and her mother also took a trip to Mexico together, to visit a mother and daughter they had met previously in Iowa. During this visit, they lived and experienced Mexican culture, and Dr. Juffer witnessed her own mother’s growth through these personal connections and “well-worn path between Orange City and Aguascalientes.” When they reunited with treasured friends there, now south of the border, she writes, “This was not simply a case of reversing the position of the ‘Other,’ though I suppose there was an element of that–although if anyone was the Other, it was me, as Peggy’s friends didn’t know me. Rather, there was little sense of anyone being an Other–simply a sense of community reconstituted in the plaza of Jesus María, transported thousands of miles from the windmills of Orange City’s town square.”
In our conversation with the author, we discussed Storm Lake, racism, and the acceptance of Latinx immigrants. We came to the conclusion that Storm Lake and Sioux County have some similarities when it comes to the rise of immigrants since the 1990s, to an overall general acceptance of newcomers, and to the underlying racism that can still exist. Gillain Davis, a student in our class, told Dr. Juffer that she had learned in her interviews with Storm Lake residents that racism still exists in the schools through unevenly promoting trade school to students of color, and college for white students. Dr. Juffer told a similar story about another teacher, saying, “She said that one of my Hispanic students just got a job at the Pizza Ranch and she just thought that was some, like, huge indicator of success, and she was going to claim part of the credit for that success.” Both Gillian and Dr. Juffer touched on how subtle racism still exists in these communities and can be seen through occupational segregation.
Dr. Offenburger asked Dr. Juffer if she felt that meatpacking plants still somehow provide the old idea of the “American Dream.” Her response took me slightly by surprise. She said, “There never was a real American Dream.” At first I disagreed, but then, as I thought about it from the perspective of an immigrant worker, I came to realize she is likely right. The American Dream exists for those with the agency and opportunity to get there, but those who have obtained that dream have made it inaccessible, or at least more difficult, for others to attain. There will always be racism, immigration, and inequality. And yet we can point to real success stories in Storm Lake, of immigrants coming and making a better life for themselves despite all these challenges.
In a concluding thought, Dr. Juffer shared her optimism for the future with us. She said, “At Cornell, we have this activist group that is working to abolish immigration detention and we’ve been visiting people, immigrants who are being held at the Batavia Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, and I became particularly close” to several people and their stories. She and others assisted one person to be released while her immigration case is pending. “There are those little victories, I think, that keep me optimistic,” she said, “difficult as it was during the Trump years, because I am feeling a little better now with Biden.” Her optimism is refreshing to hear.
Talon Wolter is a junior history major with a minor in German. He enjoys early American, colonial, and Native American history.
