Africana Borderlands: Ways of Knowing
By Charles E. Becknell, Jr.
Assistant Professor, Africana Studies, New Mexico State University
Published in Freedom: Volume 3
Keywords
Africana Borderlands; Black church; Knowledge practices; New Mexico
Abstract
This essay examines the Black church in New Mexico’s borderlands as an essential yet largely unacknowledged site where the Africana ways of knowing are lived, carried, and enacted through practices of preaching, ritual, and communal pedagogy. Regional narratives of “tricultural harmony” have denied analytic space for Black presence, producing conditions of structural erasure that often remain unnamed. Centering Black ecclesial life in this context does more than correct an omission; it reframes how knowledge takes shape where geography itself withholds recognition. Drawing on Africana studies, Black liberation theology, and decolonial spatial thought, the essay theorizes “Africana Borderlands Ways of Knowing” as an orientation grounded in faith, memory, and place under conditions of marginality. Read in this way, New Mexico’s borderlands do not emerge as peripheral to Black diasporic life but as a terrain where Africana presence unsettles dominant borderlands narratives and reorients how knowledge is sustained amid erasure.
Digital Object Identifier
DOI: https://DOI.org/10.65373/KNDJ7585
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