I recall the day my mother realised that my Spanish was sounding ‘broken’. I was 12. She already knew that my English wasn’t up to par – I was useless as a family translator. But hearing me struggle with a simple polysyllabic Spanish word let her know that we had arrived at a moment of crisis. She laughed out loud and through the laughter, asked: ‘So, no English, no Spanish… y ahora qué? ¿El silencio?’ Although she asked it jokingly, the question ‘So what happens now?’ was deeply worrying. That night, I practised my English with a real sense of urgency because, in my mind, I felt that she was on to something: if I couldn’t properly speak English or Spanish – what then?
It was a terrifying feeling to realise that I was losing a grip on my Spanish while not yet having a grip on my English. I felt like I was letting everyone down: my parents, who would surely hate it if I stopped speaking Spanish, and my teachers, who understood that my future very much depended on me speaking English, and speaking it properly. I was caught in the middle of two conflicting sets of demands, and it felt like they were squeezing me to death.
I was too young, of course, to understand that this was never going to happen: I wouldn’t just fall silent (into el silencio) from an inability to speak perfect English or perfect Spanish. I would either speak English with some kind of accent, or I would speak the broken Spanish I heard white people speak at the grocery store. But I would speak. Almost four decades after my mother asked me ‘y ahora qué?’, my Spanish is still broken, and my English is still accented.
I would come to find myself in similar moments of in-betweenness throughout my life. In fact, I’ve realised that my identity as a Mexican American, as a philosopher, as a father, as a human being, is defined by in-betweenness, by being always in the middle, or in-between commitments, obligations, identities and expectations. I’ve also learned that my being-torn-between obligations, or worlds, is not a struggle unique to me. Indeed, Mexican and Latinx philosophers have a word for it: nepantla.
The term ‘nepantla’ appears in Spanish accounts of the conquest and colonisation of Mexico and was recorded for the first time by Andrés de Olmos (1485-1571) in his Arte de la lengua Mexicana (‘The Art of the Mexican Language’) from 1547. It later reappears in a popular dictionary compiled by the Franciscan Friar Alonso de Molina (1513-79) in 1571. Molina gives us a sense of the centrality of the term in the Nahuatl language. We find it in words signifying ‘the centre of the earth’ (tlalli nepantla), ‘messenger’ (nepantla quiza titlantli), ‘divide into two’ (nepantla tequi, nitla), ‘noon’ (nepantla Tonatiuh), and ‘between extremes’ (nepantlatli), to name a few.
The everyday use of the term is documented by the Dominican Friar Diego Durán’s (1537-88) History of the Indies of New Spain from 1581. Frustrated at an anonymous Indigenous man who does something contrary to colonial and Catholic expectations, Durán angrily asks him why he’s done it. Taking his time to respond, the Indigenous man calmly replies: ‘Padré, don’t stress yourself out, we are still nepantla.’ Durán is frustrated by this response and sets out to find the meaning of ‘nepantla’. It only adds to Durán’s exasperation to find out that what the Indigenous man meant in saying ‘we are still nepantla’ was that he couldn’t do as expected or instructed by the colonial/Catholic order because he was not yet what the Spanish wanted him to be. He was still in-between the old ways and the new, in the middle of conflicting sets of obligations, indeterminate as to his identity, and still on the way.
Almost 400 years later, the Mexican philosopher Emilio Uranga (1921-88) appropriated the term in his Analysis of Mexican Being (1952). He calls it the ‘central category of [a Mexican] ontology’, given the modern Mexican’s existence as in-between two opposing histories, the Spanish and the Indigenous. The Latina feminist philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) also later used the term in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) to signal a borderland existence ‘in-between’ being Mexican and being American.
To be nepantla is to be in the middle, in-between, or neutral (uncommitted). If you are nepantla, you are hard to pin down. The definition of nepantla is itself also hard to pin down, but we can try:
Nepantla is the ‘in between’ of temporalities, worlds, processes, paradigm shifts. With Anzaldúa, we can talk about being neither American nor Mexican but existing in the liminal spaces, or ‘borderlands’. Or we can talk about finding ourselves in-between temporalities, as in-between a past that is no longer available and a strange and uncertain future that seems always, and permanently, out of reach.
Nepantla is ‘always being on the way’, in transit, in the middle of a process. In a certain sense, this describes all human beings. Our very existence can be seen as a transit between life and death. We don’t really know where we come from or where we are going, and so we exist in a permanent state of in-betweenness.
Nepantla defies the Western tradition by insisting on movement, as opposed to stability
And nepantla is neutrality, a letting-go, or a standing on the margins, observing the unfolding of the world, history and life without making a firm commitment. This could be due to a choice we’ve made regarding demands upon us or to the fact that, somehow, our power has been stripped from us, making us spectators or non-participants. Yet, in affirming our neutrality, we regain power over circumstances that may demand our attention or action – we say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ because we are ‘still nepantla’.
A seductive aspect about the term is that, as Uranga says, ‘it does not borrow from the Western tradition.’ In fact, nepantla defies the Western tradition by insisting on transition, movement and suspension as ontological and existential realities, as opposed to certainty, stability and substance. This is strategically important, especially if we seek to confront colonial prejudices and conceptualisations. In this way, colonial and imperialistic degradations of Mexicans or Latinx peoples rooted in racist notions of purity and integrity are met with a concept that insists on contingency, indeterminateness and mestizaje (racial mixing) as the defining characteristics of human life.
In other words, the introduction of nepantla as a philosophical concept represents a moment of separation between Mexican philosophy and the Western tradition that up to a certain point the former sought to imitate. With this concept, it forgoes imitation in favour of originality; its introduction, furthermore, represents the intervention, interruption and imposition of a genuinely ‘American’ philosophical category on the Western tradition, a category that emerges from the precolonial Indigenous experience yet is applicable to other experiences. Uranga writes: ‘We thus have before us, in all its purity, the central category of our ontology, autochthonous, one that does not borrow from the Western tradition, satisfying our desire to be originalists.’
Being in nepantla can be terrifying. It is terrifying because, as nepantla, you find yourself as if uprooted from a previous way of life and placed in a liminal, ungrounded state of waiting for what’s to come. I felt this when I realised that I was losing part of my identity as a Spanish speaker and that my future as another kind of speaker was uncertain.
But what I then read as terror also pointed to nepantla as a kind of freedom. Nepantla also refers to ‘neutrality’. By ‘neutrality’ we mean that in nepantla you are morally, politically or socially uncommitted, unbounded by an obligation or an allegiance to authority figures, places or things, like the Indigenous man in Durán’s story. You will experience an uncanny sense of freedom. As a first-gen college student, I soon realised that I was free to pursue my future in multiple directions.
These middle-grounds can be oppressive if we really don’t know where to go
If for no other reason, it is beneficial to affirm your nepantla, to declare yourself in a permanent state of transition (from the past to the future, birth and death, innocence and guilt), heading to an unknown ‘yet’, suspended in the middle of a paradigm shift, the final phase of which is beyond your comprehension.
Our nepantla can express itself in unexpected ways. We are neither liberal nor conservative, but something in-between; we are neither rich nor poor, but something in the middle; we are neither for nor against the newest political position, but neutral. And these middle-grounds can be oppressive if we really don’t know where to go, or they can be liberating if we recognise our in-betweenness or neutrality as an opportunity to act without being bound to expectations or pre-set obligations.
This last point suggests that it is one thing to be nepantla and another to affirm oneself as nepantla or in nepantla. Ultimately, affirmation is key. In a time when social pressures demand strong political commitments, our in-betweenness becomes a space of freedom, choice, and personal growth where we can choose to commit ourselves to projects or ideas that matter to us despite outside pressures or expectations. But, because we are still nepantla, and we recognise ourselves as such, we are free to abandon those projects or ideas if they become oppressive or harmful, to change our minds, and to grow in unexpected directions. Nepantla is freedom.
