María Pilar Aquino
[1] Her parents participated in the Bracero Program and emigrated to San Luis, Arizona, where she had contact with César Chávez's farm workers movement.[2] From the age of 18 until 1983, Aquino belonged to the Society of Helpers of the Souls in Purgatory, an Ignatian spiritualist female congregation of French origin, devoted to caring for the most vulnerable.[3] Aquino acknowledges that, as a young catechist, she was influenced by liberationist Catholic nuns working on the U.S.-Mexico border.[11] She was a member of the USD Theology and Religious Studies faculty from 1993 to 2018 and was named Professor Emerita in the College of Arts and Sciences in 2019.Of the first, she questions its androcentric perspective; the second, its assimilation of the paradigms of liberal modernity and its excessive emphasis on cultural identity issues, disdaining the socioeconomic reality of Latinos and Latinas in the U.S. and in Latin America.