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Castañeda and Hunter-Bowman, Immigrant-led Social Movements Confront Global Violence and Build Peace…   174 

 

Immigrant-led Social Movements Confront 

Global Violence and Build Peace: Dialogue as 

Action Research Method and Collaborative 

Praxis for Transformation 
 

Carlos Castañeda and Janna L. Hunter-Bowman 
 

 
 

Immigrant-led social movements in the United States contribute to peacebuilding, catalyzing new 

Christian approaches to contest global violence and increase relational justice. This article is a 

reflective exchange on dialogue as method and praxis between two research collaborators pursuing 

this argument: a leader of the Latin American immigrant-led movement Movimiento Cosecha and an 

engaged scholar of peace studies and Christian ethics. Their conversation highlights challenges and 

opportunities in centering immigrant-led social change efforts in church ministries, vulnerability and 

power in intercultural research partnership relationships, and reshaping accountability. Key themes 

include the significance of long-term relationship-building, Indigenous knowledge systems, and 

negotiating the complexity of representation in writing rooted in collaboration. By foregrounding lived 

experience, the dialogue emphasizes the need for sustained, reciprocal engagement, and the co-

development of ethical practices. The format itself—dialogue—shares a Latin American and Latine-

inspired model for such engaged peacebuilding research and praxis.  

  

Introduction: Locating Social Movements in 

Relation to Transformative Approaches to 

Peacebuilding and the Western Christian 

Political Tradition 
Some responses to conflict around the world 

reduce violence and increase justice through efforts that 

address root causes, promote structural changes that 

shift power in society, support healing, and foster 

collaborative processes coordinating a range of actors. 

These are features of a transformative approach to 

peacebuilding (TPB), which maintains that conflict is 

normal and can be productive (Lederach 2003; 

Lederach and Appleby 2010). 
Immigrant-led social movements in the United 

States (US) are a kind of peacebuilding. Social 

movements led by Brown and Black communities 

emphasize historical inequalities rooted in longitudinal 

effects of extractive colonialism, racialized 

expropriation of various kinds, the commodification of 

human life within slavery, US imperialism, and the 

“financialization of life as ‘human capital’ in 

neoliberalism” (Lowe 2015, 197). Such prophetic truth-

telling supports efforts to build social power (or 

specifically “poder popular”), impact public decision 

making, and create new political possibilities in the shell 

of the old. Movimiento Cosecha, a nonviolent 

immigrant-led social movement, and the Movement for 

Black Lives do not consider themselves peacebuilding 

groups, but neither did key nonviolent social 

movements in Colombia, Guatemala, the Philippines, 

and South Africa that created conditions and 

momentum for peace processes that altered the 

political landscape. Furthermore, these Brown- and 

Black-led US social movements promoting justice bear 

the above-mentioned features of TPB. Meanwhile, in 

the United States today, “peacebuilding” often refers to 

bridge-building and dialogue efforts carried out by 

White groups amidst political polarization (Schirch 

2021). Given increased awareness about the 

relationship between the arrival of European refugees 

and immigrants and the genocide of Indigenous groups 

within the United States, the North Atlantic slave trade, 

the Civil War, and the legacy of these events in social 

movements led by Black, Indigenous, and people of 

color (BIPOC) communities today, peacebuilders in 



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Castañeda and Hunter-Bowman, Immigrant-led Social Movements Confront Global Violence and Build Peace…   175 

the United States need to recognize Brown- and Black-

led social movements as important contemporary 

peacebuilding strategies.
1

  

Meanwhile, in the adjacent field of political 

theology, voices from the Global South and 

communities of color in the West likewise have 

identified the dominated, the marginalized, and 

decentralized social movements as the genuine subjects 

of history—at least of change that claims to be Christian 

in inspiration—and are rethinking politics and social 

change along these lines.
2

 These theological voices 

converge with the TPB currents above to raise 

awareness about structural realities that were in plain 

sight, but were nevertheless invisible to many White 

Christian peacebuilding communities based in the 

United States. Additionally, some US Christian 

churches, affiliated institutions, and theologians are 

beginning to reckon with our entanglements in the 

horror and destruction of worlds in Latin America that 

fuel migration to the United States.
3

 A critical 

theological approach to transformative peacebuilding 

includes reckoning with legacies of violence that coexist 

with our approaches to social change and therefore pays 

special attention to questions of power. It appreciates 

immigrant-led movements for justice as collective 

peacebuilding agents with a prophetic call. 

 This essay contributes towards Christian 

responses to global violence that honor decentralized 

social movements emerging from the political margins 

of society. Such Christian responses—sometimes 

referred to as decolonial and postcolonial—also reckon 

with the limitations and problems of Christian peace 

categories shaped by a Western Christian inheritance. 

This too contributes to a more just peace.     

This collaborative initiative, based in participant 

action research (PAR) and intercultural dialogue, asks 

how people can relate to immigrants in ways that center 

immigrant lives and immigrant-led processes for justice. 

How can we move beyond helper/helped relationships 

that make one group hosts/insiders and the other group 

outsiders/guests? We think as and with members of 

Latin American immigrant-led processes about the 

                                                        
1

 Schirch (2021) indicates that peacebuilders are beginning to recognize Black- and Brown-led movements as 

important for peacebuilding. Publications in the field of peace studies tend to focus on peacemaking/building in non-

Western countries. A review of three journals in the field, The Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, the 

Journal of Peace Research, and Peace and Change, include no publications between 2021-2025 that specifically 

examine Black- and Brown-led civil resistance or social movements in the United States. Nevertheless, three articles 

indicate a shift. Renown civil resistance scholar Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham (2023, 3) 

characterize “the United States as an increasingly salient site of conflict and contention.” Ashley Bohrer (2023) 

includes a case study of the 2020 racial justice uprisings to diagnose state-backed epistemic violence.  
2

 Key texts include Gutierrez (2004), Cone (1970), Mosala (1989), Katongole (2017), and Pui-lan (2005). 
3

 See Rajendra (2014), de la Torre (2010), Campese (2008), Steck (2004), Heyer (2010), and peace theology’s third 

wave, “reckoning,” outlined in Hunter-Bowman, “What is Peace Theology? Reinhold Niebuhr’s Realism in Waves of 

Peace Theology,” in the Journal of Moral Theology (forthcoming, July 2025). 

troubling assumptions embedded in the helper/helped 

relational pattern that is at the center of traditional 

models for serving immigrants, from the church 

sanctuary movement to nongovernmental organization 

advocacy efforts. We think about what it means for 

people from outside such processes and movements—

such as Christians from dominant White cultures, 

among others—to join movements of protest that 

underscore the generative aspects of social conflict, 

transformation, and healing. We are thinking together 

about peacebuilding.  

I, Carlos Casteñeda, am from Movimiento 

Cosecha, which means Harvest Movement in Spanish. 

I, Janna Hunter-Bowman, am an engaged scholar of 

peace and theology working with Cosecha. Movimiento 

Cosecha is a national network of organizers in the 

United States. We are a decentralized movement 

fighting for dignity, respect, and permanent protection 

for the well over eleven million undocumented persons 

in the United States. Each state has its own dynamics, 

issues, challenges, and struggles. The Cosecha groups, 

called circles, in each state organize to improve the 

quality of life of their community in their context. We 

are a diverse, multi-generational movement that 

converges around fourteen principles, including 

reciprocity; nonviolence; movement linking for racial, 

gender, and economic justice; and the idea that we have 

all that we need in community. The “we” here does not 

mean exclusively our community of undocumented 

workers, though many of us are undocumented.  Our 

main goal is to center the voices of undocumented 

immigrants. We include those who inspire and aspire 

to the creation of new worlds. We seek alternatives for 

creating worlds and systems different from what we live 

in now. 

In this back and forth, we, Carlos first and then 

Janna, describe the circumstances that led us to 

Movimiento Cosecha, how the collaborative research 

initiative unfolded and is structured, and how the notion 

of “helping” misconstrues collaborative relationships in 

which knowledge is created through exchange. This 

essay does not proceed in a traditional academic 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025  

Castañeda and Hunter-Bowman, Immigrant-led Social Movements Confront Global Violence and Build Peace…   176 

format. We developed this piece in dialogue and 

choose to structure the essay accordingly with the hope 

that a conversational format will help convey how 

insight, challenge, and innovation emerge in our work 

with a kind of PAR, which we discuss in relation to 

interculturality and the “mujerista” concept of dialogue 

as method and praxis. The following is a condensed 

and edited version of a series of conversations. 

 

How We, Carlos and Janna, Arrived at 

Movimiento Cosecha and How We Met  
 

Carlos: When I left my mom in Peru and arrived in the 

US in 1994, I was living with my dad, stepmom, 

brothers, and one sister. It was a difficult, dysfunctional 

situation. My siblings and I stayed outside of the house 

as much as we could. That is to say, when I arrived in 

the US I didn’t feel like I came into any kind of 

community.  

I got involved in various youth groups, ending up 

as director of an evangelical church’s youth group. I 

started organizing with them. It was enriching for me, 

and yet I felt like the potential of this community was 

caged in those four walls. I started studying the work of 

Martin Luther King Jr. and thinking about how this 

church and many others in the United States were not 

doing what the gospel tells us to do—namely, side with 

the powerless and not the powerful. After quite a few 

years as youth director, I started to feel the need to leave 

the congregation in order to join the bigger church, the 

broader body of Christ.   

As I make this type of transition, I ask myself, “Am 

I betraying my faith by leaving this place so that I can go 

out to a bigger space that is the community?” I want to 

make this clear—by leaving a congregation, I was never 

leaving the church—neither the body of Christ, nor my 

faith, nor interest in Christianity as a force in the world. 

I ended up organizing with a nonprofit in New 

Jersey.  All the tools and skills I picked up in the church 

helped me a lot in organizing. A lot of the things I did 

outside of the congregation are things I learned within 

it, especially building community and drawing on faith 

and hope as elements that bring people together amidst 

despair, duress, and oppression. That helped me a lot.  

But things were not as beautiful as they seemed in 

the social justice nonprofit world. The way the 

nonprofit was organized tokenized Brown, Spanish-

speaking immigrants like me. The director of my 

organization—serving and organizing mostly Spanish-

speaking undocumented workers—always instructed me 

to give the opening welcome at our Thursday 7 p.m. 

community meetings. I was to employ my natural 

charisma and public speaking skills to say, “we are a 

community-centered and community-led organiza-

tion,” but I saw that the community was not pulling the 

strings; instead, the direction and ideology came from 

the top. The few times initiatives were received from the 

bottom, they got stuck on the way up and didn’t 

materialize. My supervisor, the executive directors, and 

others behind the desks, were disconnected from 

people on the ground. 

 

Janna: I recall that another Cosecha leader described 

feeling like an “organizing puppet” of the Latino 

immigrant community when working with a national 

faith-based organizing group.  

 

Carlos: I resonate with that. Also, the nonprofit 

organization was very close to the establishment. We 

worked with Democratic elected officials to draft bills, 

but always on their terms. We dared not disturb or 

deviate very much from the establishment. That shaped 

power dynamics in the organization and with the 

community. Nevertheless, I learned a lot there too. 

When I needed to transition out of the nonprofit 

organizing space for those reasons, I moved to 

Movimiento Cosecha, a decentralized movement that 

fights for dignity, respect, and permanent protection, 

where roles are flexible. For example, I didn’t have an 

executive director who was telling me to read the script 

or not to read the script, metaphorically or literally. 

In Cosecha, I was able to push forward a broader 

agenda with the community I grew up with. I joined 

Cosecha in 2017 at the beginning of a campaign in New 

Jersey that would grant all undocumented workers the 

minimum needed to drive vehicles. It took us about two 

years to win the campaign to pass the law. I want to 

point out, however, that this campaign had been going 

on for about 16 years prior to Cosecha’s participation.  

In those two years, all of us in the community 

learned so much. We also went through processes of 

unlearning many things. We do not have legal 

immigration status. We had to unlearn the idea that we 

are undeserving of full humanity, of dignity. This 

movement was led by women. The majority of 

Cosecha’s organizers are women of color taking control 

of their own lives, and their own campaigns. They had 

lived their own process of transformation.  

In a space like Cosecha we do have more flexibility 

than when working for an NGO (non-governmental 

organization), but we have challenges, like few financial 

resources. We are not connected to an establishment, 

so we have to be creative to secure resources. We also 

have to create alternatives to what other people are 

doing that has not worked to reach goals like the driver 

license issue and we have to struggle in ways that are 

transformative for participants.  

My mission has continued to expand and unfold. 

There is so much to do. That’s when we met Janna, in 

the context of working to amplify the fight and struggle 

of our communities, communities of color, migrants, 



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and workers. That support is very welcome and 

comforting.  

 

Janna: I first met you on a Zoom organizing call in 

preparation for the caminata (walk) across Indiana. You 

spoke about organizing in terms of drawing on 

memories of the ancestors to become a messianic force, 

in terms of an interruption in history, with reference to 

the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. I direct 

messaged Dara Marquez and asked—who is that? That 

was early summer 2021. Five years prior, in 2016, I met 

Dara Marquez at a meeting at the seminary in which a 

room full of church people, mostly White Mennonite, 

was organizing to protect and stand with immigrants 

through a new sanctuary movement, as churches and 

other groups were doing elsewhere in the country. Dara 

was among the dozen or maybe twenty members of the 

Latino/a immigrant community participating in the 

consultation. She interrupted the momentum of the 

conversation when she asked “Excuse me, what if what 

we want and need is not to go into your churches but 

for you to join us in the streets, would you do that?”  

At the time, I was writing about how rural 

Colombian war victims—what liberation theology calls 

“nonpersons”—become political agents that extend life 

and contribute to transformation. In what became the 

book Witnessing Peace: Becoming Agents Under 
Duress in Colombia (Hunter-Bowman 2022), I was 

arguing that much that is significant for peacebuilding 

flies under the radar of larger NGOs, state entities, and 

academics because it is accomplished through a form of 

agency that they don’t recognize. Based in life and work 

in peacebuilding and human rights in Colombia (2001-

2004; 2006-2010, followed by research), I was arguing 

that peacebuilders need to pay attention to the forms of 

power, knowledge, and processes developed by those 

most affected by the forms of violence we wish to resist 

and in which we are entangled. So often, human rights 

protection and peace plans are developed by white-

collar workers at desks in Bogotá, Washington DC, 

New York, or Brussels, far from the violence-affected 

areas and disconnected from the communities on the 

ground that develop their own context-specific but 

fragile responses. Organizations often impose pre-

formulated models of protection and transformation 

rather than attending to the critical and constructive 

voices on the ground.  

The driving question is evident in the book’s title, 

Witnessing Peace: Becoming Agents Under Duress in 
Colombia. How do those under duress—what liberation 

theology calls “nonpersons”—become agents, and not 

just agents but constructive political agents? My notion 

of “constructive” is linked to the term “duress” and its 

place in legal scholarship and Catholic moral theology, 

where it refers to constraints on autonomy that might 

lead someone to cooperate with illegal or evil acts that 

she would have extricated herself from, were it not for 

forced choices.
 

It is an analogical extension, but I am 

not talking about how people have been forced into 

entanglements with evil but rather about what people 

have been able to accomplish under duress through 

positive freedom (freedom to, a risk to take that opens 

possibilities) that is distinct from liberal notions of 

negative freedom (freedom from, or negative 

immunities). The present situation of duress that 

agents negotiate is related to a bundle of factors 

including histories of colonialism, economic 

exploitation, and racism. That is, duress is deeply 

embedded in histories of injustice. The array of 

dominant discourses—common language and thought 

from a shared knowledge collection, institutions, laws, 

decisions to enforce or not enforce laws, and moral 

concepts that together bolster and perpetuate the 

exertion of power within society—can be traced back to 

these histories but are not overdetermined by them. It 

is within these interconnections that the organization of 

power relations takes shape, is reshaped, and even 

reconfigured. The significance of violence-affected 

communities’ efforts comes into focus through 

understanding the intersecting and interlocking 

constraints that place them under duress. 

Dara’s question “Would you join us?” confronted 

me as the meeting facilitator because I realized some of 

the same dynamics might be playing out. Mostly White 

church people were offering church sanctuary to 

immigrants from Latin America. Church sanctuary is 

largely part of the White progressive church memory 

and moral imagination from the sanctuary movement 

of the 1980s. It has not led to robust structural and 

political change. Might it reproduce paternalistic power 

and reinforce racialized host/guest dynamics of power? 

That would be very awkward, given our stated wishes 

for radical solidarity. Dara’s voice was interrupting the 

logic of sanctuary with an invitation, ending with a 

question that hung in the air: would you do that? As I 

stood from my chair to respond, as the meeting 

facilitator, I visualized the significance of Dara’s 

question in terms of the directional flow of people: will 

Brown bodies enter predominantly White churches 

(sanctuary), or will White communities move into a 

predominantly Brown collective social movement in 

the streets?  

 

How the Project Unfolded 
 

Janna (continued): After that meeting, I followed up 

with Dara with the support of our mutual friend, 

organizer Jason Shenk, and from there we developed 

relationships. Dara, her father Don Alvaro Marquez, 

and others from Indiana-based immigrant groups (who 

later developed Cosecha) generously collaborated with 

my engaged pedagogies classes at the seminary where I 



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am on faculty, the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical 

Seminary (AMBS), and I began participating in 

Cosecha activities. Over the years, we supported each 

other in various ways. Cosecha continued working with 

AMBS students, and AMBS sought to provide a space 

and community of support for Cosecha Indiana. For 

example, Don Alvaro Marquez’s tragic death due to 

Covid in November of 2020—as result of exposure as 

an essential worker and reluctance to go to the hospital 

because he did not have documentation—sent the 

immigrant community and wider Elkhart community 

into shock and deep grief. The seminary was deeply 

honored to host a widely attended lantern release 

memorial service. Then in January 2021 we drew up a 

formal engaged research agreement. (See text box.) 

As I look back on the 2021 research agreement, I 

see that we have developed our praxis and 

understanding since then, even as the initiative’s North 

Star remains the same. By North Star, I mean the 

commitment to articulate an alternative to models of 

solidarity with immigrants rooted in the helper/help 

logic through answering the question, what does it mean 

to say yes to the invitation to join us. For example, we 

later identified and agreed upon final products, namely 

an academic book for use in places of formation, like 

divinity schools and seminaries, and accessible 

resources for church communities. Audience shapes 

the theory-building and writing process. Second, the 

movement/church framing lends itself to confusion that 

a caller on the community Radio Cosecha program 

identified. When you facilitated a series on the 

relationship of churches and social movements 

descriptively and aspirationally, the caller right away 

said: “Don’t get confused—we are the church!” She was 

speaking as a movement and popular process 

participant. I became clearer on the conceptual 

distinction between el pueblo as church and 

institutional church. But getting back to how things 

unfolded… 

 

Carlos: Right, after you all drew up the agreement in 

2021, we met when you tagged along for the caminata 

January 2021 Collaborative Research Agreement 

A number of Cosecha leaders in Indiana have noted that much of Cosecha’s base, as well as allies, are people of 

faith. In this context, they have identified a problem and a number of goals: 

 

Problem and Goals: 

 

Problem: Churches tend to ignore immigrants’ agency, including with movements like Cosecha. This propensity 

has contributed to various forms of disconnection, including between people and their nourishing communities. 

 

Goals:  

1. Develop resources to help churches. 

2. Recognize limitations of common approaches to immigrant communities and the troubling assumptions that 

often accompany them and explore approaches that center immigrant agency (e.g., immigrant-led 

movements). 

  

Process: Engaged Pedagogy and Research with Cosecha and JHB  

This initiative aims to address the problem and contribute toward the goal that Cosecha defined.  

In so doing, it touches on conversations in universities, seminaries, and churches including the sanctuary model, 

organizing, theories of change, and decolonization.  

 

It will reflect on what Cosecha members (and other mobilizing immigrants) are doing and teaching from 

perspectives of peace studies, theology, and biblical studies and rereads these perspectives in light of perspectives 

from Cosecha. 

   

Cosecha evaluates the success of the project, as will those who read what comes of it in the academy.  

Therefore, the initiative speaks into conversations at universities, seminaries (and other academic spaces) where 

leaders are taught how to think about immigrants. It recognizes the limitations of common approaches to immigrant 

communities, exposes troubling assumptions that often accompany them (e.g., tendency to depict immigrants one- 

dimensionally, as vulnerable, broken, needy, or objects of “our” White host church care; and uplifts approaches 

that center immigrant agency (e.g., immigrant-led movements). 

 



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(the walk across Indiana) that summer. My clear 

recollection is Dara saying, “this person would like to 

meet with you.” Dara explained to me about the 

seminary, peace studies, and peacebuilding. At that 

time, we were just going to have a conversation, maybe 

a one-time conversation. When we met in person, you 

asked me—is it okay to record? And you started asking 

me questions and listened. When you spoke, I noticed 

that you were able to understand the ideas I wanted to 

share. That helped me to feel comfortable enough to 

continue. After a second or third conversation, I said: 

“anything that uplifts our struggle, whatever can be a 

platform for our struggle is fine.” By this time, we had 

talked about this project you were cooking, and I 

agreed—if I speak with you and share with you, if this 

will help get the message, if people might read a book 

and with this project do some things differently—well, 

may it be so. I hope they read it, think about it, and do 

something with it, instead of going about their regular 

business and refusing to listen to the voices and 

attending to the agency of the people they think they 

are “helping.”  
 

The Structure of Our Collaboration:  

 

Dialogue 

 

Carlos (continued): As the process unfolded, I found 

that working together was cathartic. For example, in 

spring 2023 we developed questions for the structured 

conversations (with the Cosecha circles in different 

states). After two years of Janna’s participant learning, 

we moved into a phase of semi-structured conversations 

that explored participants’ backgrounds, reasons for 

joining immigrant-led processes, experiences with the 

processes, moral/spiritual vision, relationship with 

church spaces, and hope for the future. Going back and 

forth about different questions that we then asked in the 

conversations was cathartic, because I was able to 

express what I have been able to capture in my years of 

experience with our community. It’s not just me that I 

offer, but what my organizing has brought to me. It’s the 

significance of our traditions and the knowledge of our 

ancestors. Faith and traditions play a big role in our 

communities’ lives. Making the questions together and 

creating those spaces of conversation for our 

community members felt like we were being heard on 

a small scale. It felt liberatory; we were creating spaces 

of liberation. 

 

Janna: I’m curious what you mean by “the spaces of 

structured conversation were liberatory.” 

 

Carlos: A part of it is that I didn't feel like I was under 

conditioning supremacy that I must submit to or have 

to comply with as a minority, as people of color are 

usually told to do [or feel we have to do, and so we code 

switch], right? We are told to behave a certain way; we 

are told to fit into a certain model. We are told to live 

life in a specific way based on the force of racialized 

supremacy in social systems. You know, I remember 

not only the executive director telling me when to read 

the script but my dad telling us “You have to be like 

this. You have to behave like that. Otherwise, you're 

going to be called out.” I'm assuming he did this bona 
fide, trying to protect us from any harm or any public 

shaming, but, in reality, what he was doing was forming 

us to internalize the exceptionalism of Whiteness, of 

that system. He was telling his kids that the way you are 

now is less than others, so you need to behave in this 

way to fit in.  

When I say liberating, I am thinking back to my 

dad and saying, no I don't have to fit that way because 

we're humans, and we're free too, or at least that's what 

we want to think, how we want it to be. In our 

conversations, being able to move around without 

having to be in compliance or submit to something that 

negates who I am or my identity but rather contributing 

from it is liberating. It's the feeling, “oh, I don't have to 

justify my existence.” That's what I mean by liberating. 

 

Janna: And this whole project would not exist without 

your collaboration, Dara's collaboration, the 

participation of any others. What you are talking about 

with the creation of the questions happens through what 

we call “checking-in” and “talking regularly.” Recently 

we have talked about how it approximates what Ada 

Maria Isasi-Díaz calls dialogue, as decolonial praxis and 

method (Isasi-Díaz 2010).  

 

Carlos: Yes, that’s right.  

Summary statement of the initiative’s unfolding 

and methods: meetings with organizer and 

Quaker minister Jason Shenk to support early 

relationship and initiative development; 

immersion through participation (JHB) and 

engaged pedagogies (29 class sessions from 

2017-present); developing questions and 

carrying out structured conversations (147 in 

2022-2023); transcribing structured 
conversations and coding fieldnotes in 

MaxQDA to avoid confirmation bias; ongoing 

dialogue with collaborators Dara Marquez and 

Carlos Castañeda to come to agreements about 

processes, how we are fulfilling our agreements, 

to negotiate various kinds of developments, and 

reflect together (2021-present), and member 
checking conversations about theory building 

with interlocutors and in focus groups (2023-

present).  



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Janna: What do you think makes our dialogue possible, 

if we are indeed having one?  

Carlos: I think one of the reasons why we have a 

dialogue is because of our mutual interests. We both 

come from the church and are part of the church, and 

we care about processes led by affected groups. We 

both want to see greater understanding and 

convergence.  

And there is mutual interest on the level of 

method. This project has been enriching because we 

live in a world in which immigrant workers are always 

rushing, always working. We work ourselves to death. 

Pausing to think and reflect feels like a privilege. The 

project gives me and others in Cosecha and other 

immigrant-led processes moments to think, not only 

about struggle and resistance, but about our own lives 

through time in relationship to the organizing that we 

are doing. That has been rewarding.  

It is rewarding to think together about the 

challenges we confront. Movements are made of 

people, of human beings, who think differently and feel 

differently. One of the challenges is to not think about 

the movement as a monolith. We have really fun times 

thinking together and working together to create theory.  

Janna organizes and codes the fieldnotes and interviews 

in MaxQDA [qualitative data analysis software, to work 

against confirmation bias]. This provides another 

source for reflecting and theorizing on various topics, 

including internal pluralism.  

Second, there's some trust being built around 

mutual interests and over time. With my own agency, I 

choose trust. We or I do not do that lightly. It is through 

conversation, back and forth, and then thinking on my 

own through the different issues, as I described when 

we first met.  

Third, there’s the fourth characteristic of Isasi-

Díaz’s dialogue: you are a part of the community. Isasi-

Díaz writes, “Participants understand that in this 

process they must consider themselves and act, not as 

individuals, but as members of a community” (2010, 

48). You might not look like the community that is 

Brown, but what brings us together and builds trust 

links us into a community. 

 

Janna: Wow, thank you, Carlos. A few things here. 

First, when you say that you choose to trust, you also 

acknowledge that there is some risk involved, right? It’s 

serendipitous that you are saying this right now because 

I am just finishing an essay about how each encounter, 

effort to dialogue, and exchange carries the risk of 

injustice and misunderstanding. Yet I trust that we are 

going to go back and forth, that we are going to keep 

showing up, and that we are figuring it out as we go. 

 

Carlos: Right! 

 

Janna: Since our agreement of 2021, we have located 

our collaboration in relation to PAR. Colombian 

sociologist Fals Borda has said that the attempt in 

Colombia to create a “science of the proletariat” 

through action research was no definitive success. He 

said that action researchers were usually impatient and 

imposed principles of historical materialism to the local 

context. The guiding frames were not ideas emerging 

from the people's own experiences or conditions or 

grounded in their own lives. His self-critique led him to 

argue for a form of action research that empowers 

affected individuals to establish horizontal 

“subject/subject” relationships between researchers and 

community members that nurture transformation from 

the margins. For the self-critical Fals-Borda writing 

later, PAR becomes a part of social activism to promote 

people’s (collective) praxis (Fals-Borda 1992, 15). 

Enrique Dussel takes this subject/subject 

relationship further by naming the possibility of ethical 

knowledge creation through exchange as an alternative 

to the conquering ego, the European “I” as the 

universal standard. We pick up this challenge of 

intercultural dialogue as we invest in the risky possibility 

of a dialogue of knowledges that foregrounds voices of 

struggle, including the need to be heard/to listen, to 

foster alternatives for shared future (Dussel 2013). And 

this is where we come back to the risky or fraught part. 

There are questions about the possibilities of voices in 

or from the Global North having a dialogue with voices 

from the Global South, across differences, because of 

the colonial enterprise that continues to reproduce 

asymmetries of power (Dussel 2021).  

We are trying to do this. We, I, participate 

imperfectly. But I also don’t think we are delusional 

when we say we are having a dialogue… 

 

Carlos: I don’t know what to say to those who question 

the possibility. I think we are having a dialogue! 

(Laughs) I will say that our conversations have 

reinforced and deepened ideas I have about how each 

person is their own world. It helps me to be mindful 

that we come from really different backgrounds. When 

I engage in dialogues and conversations, I am not 

looking for others to reflect my world. I try to be aware 

that it could be very enriching and for me to continue 

figuratively climbing, through back-and-forths with 

others, with you, into a bigger, more expansive 

understanding of the world itself. This is a kind of 

liberation—to grow, explore, expand paradigms.  

When I speak with you, sometimes you come 

across as sounding like you know what you want to say, 

because of everything that makes you, you. I may agree 

with you or disagree initially, but I take things in, and 

process later. There are times that you overlook 

something that is important. I think back on those 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025  

Castañeda and Hunter-Bowman, Immigrant-led Social Movements Confront Global Violence and Build Peace…   181 

instances and about how that might be because of who 

you are. This happens with everyone of course, not just 

with you. I bring those things into my processing 

moments. And I think to myself, okay, well, this is why 

she said this, this is why she didn't say that. Then I bring 

my reflections about what you missed to the ongoing 

conversation we are having.  

This has much to do with trust. If I didn’t trust you, 

I would be less flexible and less fluid. But I know you 

and trust you, so I’m willing to give you the benefit of 

the doubt and want to work to understand where you’re 

coming from instead of jumping to conclusions. 

For example, in a recent text message, you 

reminded me about how you parked at the church 

while staying at the Cosecha house in New Jersey last 

summer. One of the first nights you were in town I 

asked you, where are you parking? I asked because it is 

often difficult to find parking around the house and 

walking alone, especially at night, is risky. And you said, 

“at the church” And I was thinking, “What church?,” 

because we never park at that Catholic church across 

the freeway. We do not feel welcome there. 

You explained that you couldn’t find street 

parking, so you asked permission, they considered the 

request, and then said yes, go ahead if necessary. I was 

like, okay, I guess that's how things are different when 

you look different, White, and when you sound 

different. I bet you were very articulate in asking if you 

could park there and explaining why you should be able 

to in ways that made sense to them. The point is how 

that happened to you, or for you, versus how it has not 

happened for us. 

 

Janna: Hmm. 

 

Carlos: When you came back, and you asked me, 

“Should I not have parked there?,” there was the 

internal stirring up that occurs when having to explain 

why we are not welcome at a given place, this time in 

our neighborhood church. Having to explain why we're 

not welcome in that place forces me to face a 

contradiction of my own humanity because I was having 

to explain this contradiction of my own humanity to 

you! (Laughs)  

At first, I felt frustrated and then as the night 

progressed, I thought to myself—as compañeros and 

comrades, even though it hurts, we must go beyond 

emotional reaction and dig deep. If you were just a one-

time person, someone who was just passing through, 

then I would not have to use my emotional and mental 

capacity to try to let you in on things, but since you are 

not just anybody glancing at us one time, because we are 

becoming a community that sees each other, because 

we are embracing your person, we're bringing you in, 

we are letting you know not only how we live but how 

we feel and think—thinking-feeling. That to me requires 

the extra step of moving beyond an emotional reaction. 

The dynamic changes when I see that you are willing to 

become community with me, with us. I best explain my 

perspective and hear your feedback so that we can get 

on the same page. This is what I was saying about 

climbing together. In this way, we minimize those 

situations where we are going to feel frustrated about 

things that have to do with our humanity in the way we 

are seen in the world and by the world.  

 

Janna: Wow, that’s a clear illustration of my gap in 

understanding in the shape of myself, the limits of my 

reflexivity (Das 2022, 28), critical self-reflection 

throughout research, and the possibilities of dialogue. 

(Pause) 

I wonder what you think about this—in that 

scenario, I felt vulnerable and afraid walking around the 

neighborhood at night in part because you told me it 

was dangerous for me and not to. The ways I carried 

forward a sense of my embodied self that was afraid, the 

way that I moved in the world that day, prioritized 

protecting my sense of self rather than interrogating or 

refusing the systems that made safe parking accessible 

for me and inaccessible for those who live in the 

neighborhood. I connect what you are saying to what 

we talk about in [the Cosecha member] Rutilio’s terms 

of “phantoms,” here phantoms of Whiteness that make 

White people self-centered while persistently 

dismembering, negating, and killing the existence and 

full life of Brown immigrants, particularly those who do 

not have legal status. In these terms, I leaned into all the 

phantom had to offer my White woman sense of self 

rather than accept the opportunity to cross over into the 

reality of those with whom I am in solidarity, with the 

explicit purpose of collaboration towards dismantling 

what I had embodied and so reproduced. Does that 

make sense? 

 

Carlos: Yes. What’s more, those phantoms are dealt 

with in the community, literally meaning a “unity,” 

becoming one. In this figure, we come from different 

places, but we are coming together here, now. We 

create reciprocal relationships through practices of 

attention, care, and trust. So how are we going to deal 

with those phantoms that you bring and that I bring—

because your phantom of Whiteness is not the only one 

that needs to be dealt with. It is not the only one we do 

deal with. So how are we going to deal with those 

phantoms that keep us from coming together? That 

keep us from developing relationships of reciprocity, 

from becoming one, from becoming a community?  

As “one,” I don't mean uniform or locked in. I do 

not want to convey the message that we want to program 

robots who think the same or become the same. When 

I say “one,” I mean build communities of people who 

look at each other as people with the same worth, [sighs 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025  

Castañeda and Hunter-Bowman, Immigrant-led Social Movements Confront Global Violence and Build Peace…   182 

and switches to Spanish] who struggle towards the same 

rights that we do not currently enjoy, the right to be 

treated equally, the same chances to flourish in life… 

Janna: I hear you saying people who are equal, of equal 

worth, even though right now our rights and possibilities 

as political subjects are unequal.  

 

Carlos: Exacto, exacto. If any positive phantoms help 

us to come together and to be stronger as one, then we 

bring those too. And figure out how to work with them 

also.  

 

Janna: I think about the second phantom that Rutilio 

mentioned, the phantom of organizing. As Rutilio 

[from El Salvador] stated in a 2022 conversation, 

“Given my understanding of the gospel and my 

formation in the base communities, there is something 

like a phantom of organizing that we have known since 

we were very young, that we don’t want to leave behind, 

that we want to keep alive, that we have to hold on to, 

that I want to carry with me and pass on.”  And what it 

means to be collaborating as people from different 

kinds of backgrounds.  

 

Carlos: You parking in the church parking lot hit home 

for me more than it would have for others. Others in 

the Cosecha house would have been much faster to 

dismiss it, saying that the church people are bad people 

in the neighborhood, because they have personally 

experienced the church as an oppressive institution that 

rejected, excluded, and betrayed them. But for me, who 

still identifies with and as the Church, it created 

cognitive dissonance to have to explain that the Church 

that once embraced me—the Church that once took me 

in, that I once believed was altogether true and good in 

everything it touches—was not that now to this 

community. 

 

Janna: Right, “churches” are not one thing: there’s 

variety and diversity, among them and internally as well.  

I understood that cognitively, yet when it came to 

an embodied felt need, I just went ahead and did it, 

anyway. My solidarity failure pushed to the surface my 

inability to live fully into my commitments and 

provided ground to stand on when we say that dialogue 

as praxis moves beyond reflexivity. Your posture 

pluralizes the instance; what might have been only a 

failure on my part becomes a part of our praxis that 

enables me to see both of us more fully. This supports 

mutual recognition and exchange as knowledge 

production.  

 

Carlos: Yes! Yeah, it's good, this exercise that we are 

doing right now, this dialogue in which we are 

exchanging feelings and information.  

 

Janna: I want to acknowledge that earlier when we were 

talking about risks of encounter in the course of 

developing subject-subject research relationships and 

knowledge production through dialogue, I relied on 

theorists to make the point rather than name concrete 

instances in which I deviated from my script of how I 

engage. Maybe I was subconsciously concealing my 

own mistakes or my messy humanity, which is one way 

of exercising control, which is of course in tension with 

shared power in a dialogue. I apologize for that!  

This back-and-forth shows how we work with the 

core issue of accountability in long-term action research 

relationships. Without accountability, we do not have 

dialogue or ethical relationships. A core premise of our 

work is that all identities and people are complex. That 

starting point supports intercultural listening and 

dialogue, for we recognize that even in our intimate 

relationships we are coming into contact with complex 

identities while never arriving at transparency. We can 

say to each other, “I know you and trust,” fully aware 

that the effort of dialogue and exchange needs to be 

ongoing.  

On a related point, this back-and-forth has 

impressed upon me the need to write as a participant of 

the community in a way that acknowledges my 

positionality and moral imperfection in this dialogue 

and exchange. Efforts to engage nonviolently will be 

ongoing and full of mistakes. Looping back to what you 

said about point four of Isasi-Díaz’s dialogue (2010), I 

would specify that a given person in the community 

speaks from her own standpoint to make it clear that 

she is offering one interpretation. A modified statement 

might be something like, “the person is speaking from 

their own standpoint as a participant or member of a 

community with which one shares experiences, 

understandings, and to which one is accountable.” That 

provides me with a really clear sense of voice for writing 

the book that I’m working on now on this project. 

Examples might include naming but not dwelling on 

key mistakes and recognizing how interpretation 

unfolds through dialogue. Does that specification on 

voice make sense to you, given that the book is my 

effort to understand what it would mean to accept the 

invitation to “join us”? 

 

Carlos: Yes, my answer to that will be, “yes that is right.” 

As we continue going forward, as we continue doing this 

kind of exchange exercise, it’s going to continue to bring 

us together and strengthen the project. Also, beyond 

this project, it makes us better human beings, people, 

comrades, compañeros. May we continue to feel that it 

is so. This is good, it’s a good way to start my day.  

 

Janna: I hear you; it is for me too.  

 

 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025  

Castañeda and Hunter-Bowman, Immigrant-led Social Movements Confront Global Violence and Build Peace…   183 

Conclusion: Collaborative Research Moves 

Us Beyond Helper/Helped Relationships 

and Toward Transformation  
Carlos’ reference to well-intentioned people who 

think they are “helping,” his description of his 

experience with organizing nonprofit organizations, and 

this dialogue about dialogue signal that collaborative 

research moves us beyond helper/helped relationships 

in which asymmetries of power are reified and towards 

transformation. The term “helping” reveals problems 

in how the relationship is construed. First, the logic of 

helping often focuses on immediate needs or problems, 

whereas our collaborative research (positioned in 

relation to PAR) engages with underlying causes and 

long-term social change. Second, the relations of power 

to which our collaboration aspires clash with the notion 

of helping. One dimension of our work together 

involves highlighting how traditional helper/helped 

relationships are often structured by an implicit power 

imbalance between the helper (who presumably has 

resources, knowledge, or skills) and the helped (who is 

in need). In relation to immigrant populations, this 

helper/helped relationship is generally racialized and is 

imbued with host/guest dynamics. Collaboration and      

dialogue seek to move beyond “help” to seek 

alternatives to it in support of transformation.  

This dialogue is part of a larger project that 
provides an alternative to the helper/helped model. 
The alternative centers immigrant-led movements of 
protest and transformation as key to peacebuilding. 
Theological interpretation, the model, and specific 
recommendations are included in a forthcoming book 
by Hunter-Bowman tentatively titled “Would You Join 

Us?”: Latin American Migrant-Led Social Movements 

& Re-membering the Crucified Body.” 

 
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Carlos Castañeda, born in Peru, is a volunteer 

community organizer with Movimiento Cosecha. He 

has also organized in churches and workplaces. 

Castañeda currently focuses on intersectionality to 

build people power in New Jersey using the tool of 

prophetic dialogue. 

 

Author email: carloscastaneda1124@gmail.com  

 

Janna Hunter-Bowman, born in the United States, is 

Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Christian 

Ethics, and Director of Peace Studies at Anabaptist 

Mennonite Biblical Seminary. She is the author of 

Witnessing Peace: Becoming Agents Under Duress in 
Colombia (Routledge 2022). 

 

Author email: jhunterbowman@ambs.edu  
 

 

https://doi.org/10.1163/187251710X12578338897827
https://doi.org/10.1163/187251710X12578338897827
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195395914.003.0001
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195395914.003.0001
https://doi.org/10.1179/1462317X13Z.0000000007
https://doi.org/10.1179/1462317X13Z.0000000007
mailto:carloscastaneda1124@gmail.com
mailto:jhunterbowman@ambs.edu

