Mixed: Embracing Complexity by Uncovering Your God-led Identity

By Eli Bonilla Jr. and Samuel Rodriguez

Many of us feel like we don't belong or are out of touch with our true identity. Discover how you can gain a stronger sense of who God made you to be and step confidently into every relationship, fully owning your unique distinctions and celebrating the differences of others.

Group dynamics can be based on the simplest forms of physical and cultural distinctions, and those who don't quite fit the mold of a group can feel like outsiders. The reality is none of us fit into a box. We're all unique with a mixed background—socially, culturally, experientially. For some of us, like Eli Bonilla Jr., we are also mixed ethnically. No one person is an identical copy of anyone else.

In Mixed, Eli questions the basis of unity and inclusion and explores the multiple components of our identity, discovering how they can all be reconciled for God’s purpose as we reflect His image. Mixed will lead you to:

• find peace with the complexity within yourself,
• understand yourself more deeply so you can relate to others,
• experience more human connection through a God-led identity, and
• develop greater empathy, celebrate cultures without creating division, and fight for people in the margins.

Eli will remind you that God made you the way you are for good reason, and you belong wherever He says you belong. Pairing personal stories with biblical teaching, Eli will inspire you not to hold back from others but to confidently share the fullness of who you are, and to love, celebrate, and unite with people who are not just different, but beautifully complex.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9780785293965

Eli Bonilla Jr.

Eli Bonilla Jr. is an emerging leader in the NextGen space. He serves several national networks in various roles, including the NextGen regional cochair for North America with Empowered21 and the national millennial director for the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC). His full-time responsibilities are with Bethany Church in Baton Rouge, LA, as Global NextGen Pastor. Eli is the father to two beautiful children, Novalee Grace and Ezekiel Eliezer Rafat, and husband to Alexis Gabriella Bonilla.

Book preview

PART 1

MIXED UP

1

I’M CONFUSED

Can I Be Upset Too?

I’m confused, said my Dominican mother in the summer of 2020.

Our family was participating in a public forum taking place in an African American church in the Eastside neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas, and my mother was puzzled by the conversation unfolding from city leaders, pastors, policemen, and local government officials. Most of the room was African American with several Anglo pastors and participants, and very few Latinos. My mother, father, and I were part of the small number of Latinos in the room; however, my mother and I were also a part of the larger populace of black constituents present. This duality came to a head in the mind of my mother in that moment. Having immigrated from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey, she already had a complicated past with African Americans, as many Afro-Latinos do in the Northeast United States. She would tell me stories of confrontations she had in her school and neighborhood growing up where the tension and division among Caribbean Afro-Latinos like Dominicans and African Americans spilled over into verbal and even physical bullying. Both black communities are very similar in appearance but divided by culture, language, and country of origin. So now that the conversation had landed on the racial category Black, my mother felt the moment was right to bring clarity and depth to the conversation.

The country was fresh on the heels of the death of George Floyd. The tidal wave of civil unrest in our nation was being exacerbated by the growing undercurrent of past tragedies and broken systems. A pandemic had given us space to try to digest all that was going on. With the spotlight shining brighter than ever on the tensions between races in the United States, the faith community in San Antonio felt the need to act. So, to bridge racial relations and allow for raw and authentic conversations to take place, we found ourselves assembled in one room. My father, a Mexican immigrant and a prominent pastor of a large Spanish-speaking, immigrant church in our city, had brought my mother and me to the open forum.

Discussion reached a fever pitch, and the tension in the room was palpable. Then my mother walked up to the open microphone stationed in the middle of the room. With a look of exhaustion and pain, she uttered the words, I’m confused. A hush came over the room. She continued, I raised my son, a Black man, to live in a society that judges him by the color of his skin. We talked about issues related to race regularly. Yet I feel like today’s conversation around race doesn’t include us. We look the same as those fighting for their rights, but I’ve been told my whole life that I wasn’t really ‘Black’ Black. So can I be angry? Can I be upset? I’m confused.

There was a pause, followed by an eruption of applause as the moderator said, Yes, you indeed have the right to be upset too.

Like Mother, Like Son

For the first twenty or so years of my life, I checked the racial box marked white on education and governmental forms (per my teachers’ guidance), but if you saw my mother, there would be no questioning her African ancestry. Whether it’s the people living on the continent of Africa today, or the African Americans who spent centuries fighting for their rights, the blood in their veins runs in my mother’s too. That blood is in me as well, and yet through years of being led to mark white, I consistently chose to label myself that way.

It was not until my son, Ezekiel, was born at the beginning of 2021 that I made a different, and to some within the Dominican community, controversial choice. At the hospital, a nurse asked my wife and me to provide general information, including our racial identities, and after I paused a moment, I answered Black.

My wife was pleasantly surprised, as she’d witnessed my identity crisis over the previous year. Wow, babe, you’ve been talking about the opportunity to mark ‘Black’ as a Dominican for a while now, she said. How does it feel?

The nurse quickly interjected with a surprised yet kind response, saying, Oh wow, I’m Dominican, and you’re the first Dominican I’ve seen come through here who chose ‘Black’ as a racial distinction. (My wife later admitted that, at first, she had assumed our nurse was African American, but I, being Dominican, had realized she was Caribbean.)

I’m no hero for switching from white to Black. I don’t even believe in this system of racial categorization. But not shying away from what I knew to be true of my genetic makeup felt liberating even though I knew the system at play. For the first time ever, I embraced the African ancestry that, as my mother had taught me, made me different from others and informed my social interactions throughout my life.

***

Growing up in San Antonio provided the groundwork I needed to deal firsthand with these tensions I feel now. I was ni de aquí, ni de allá, a Spanish phrase used by second-generation Latinos meaning not from here, or from there. It expresses the tension of being born to immigrant parents and raised in the United States. I had the added complication of not fitting into a predetermined racial category.

From the age of five until I graduated high school, I lived on the Northeast side of San Antonio. Our house was barely inside the affluent Northwood neighborhood—only two houses away from the edge of it. My father, who has been in full-time ministry my entire life, was able to move our family into the neighborhood through a personal connection. He was working at an Anglo-German church at the time, and an older white gentleman he knew from the church invited us to live in a house at the same price we were paying at an apartment complex. Neighborhood-wise, it was a huge leap for