Annotations
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.
To be nepantla is to be in the middle, in-between, or neutral (uncommitted).
Nepantla is the ‘in between’ of temporalities, worlds, processes, paradigm shifts.
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.
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.
But what I then read as terror also pointed to nepantla as a kind of freedom. Nepantla also refers to ‘neutrality’.