Deborah E. Kanter, Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexica

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 160–162 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.16 Book Review Deborah E. Kanter, Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020) Carlos Ruiz Martinez University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA In 1924 Elidia Barroso deboarded a passenger train and entered the grand lobby of Chicago’s Union Station. There she met up with her long-time novio; the couple married and settled in the city’s Near West Side. A few years later Ignacio Valle, another Mexican immigrant, opened El Arte Mexicano, a music store where the growing Mexican community could buy Spanish-language records. In Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican, Deborah Kanter argues that Catholic parishes were a refuge for such recently arrived Mexican immigrants who ventured north seeking jobs in the industrial city of Chicago. Such parishes “helped generations of immigrants create new homes and identities: first, at St. Francis of Assisi and, in the past half century, at parishes across Pilsen” (141). Kanter tells a chronological story of the making of Chicago Católico. The book’s first chapter illustrates the development of Chicago’s Mexican community between 1920–1939. As Kanter writes, “In the 1920s Mexicans came to Chicago in heretofore unimaginable numbers, but few had planned this destination” (17). Most migrants who left Mexico—many fleeing the Mexican revolution— settled in places like Texas. However, low wages and unreliable seasonal labor led many northward to Chicago. Here they encountered a small-but-growing Near Carlos Ruiz Martinez 161 West Side barrio complete with supermercados, restaurants, and music stores. The Archdiocese of Chicago failed to respond to the needs of the newly arrived Mexican immigrants. However, by 1927, the Claretians, a Catholic order eager to minister to Chicago’s growing Mexican population, took administrative possession of St. Francis of Assisi, formerly a German parish. The Claretians soon added a shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, cementing the Mexican laity’s growing presence in the neighborhood. Between 1940 and 1962, St. Francis grew in stature among the city’s Mexican community and came to be known as Chicago’s Mexican cathedral. As Chicago’s wartime economy expanded, the city attracted more Mexican and Tejano laborers . They gravitated to St. Francis where they received sacraments or looked for job leads and housing opportunities. By 1945, Mexican Catholics in Chicago could turn on their radio each Saturday and listen to Hora Católica Mejicana, a weekly half-hour program hosted by a Claretian priest at St. Francis. Chicago’s Mexican Catholic presence was now established in the built environment and on the airwaves. In chapter three, Kanter focuses on the experience of second-generation Mexican Americans during the 1940s. Here Kanter makes her boldest intervention . Scholars have argued that second-generation Mexican Americans struggled to balance the desires and culture of their immigrant parents with the reality of their own American existence. Providing an alternative view, Kanter suggests instead that in Chicago “Being Mexican, American, and Catholic fit together easily for that generation” (69). Kanter’s point that Mexican Americans embraced their mexicanidad and their American identity by entertaining hobbies like watching Hollywood films, playing softball, or even fighting in the US military during World War II is well taken. But one wonders if Kanter paints too optimistic a picture of the second-generation’s sense of belonging in Catholic Chicago. Kanter argues, for example, that Catholicism offered a common ground that shaped European Americans’ willingness to live with Mexican newcomers. Yet in this same chapter Esperanza Godinez recalls how nuns at the parish school referred to her and her classmates as “dirty Mexicans” for kissing their fingers while making the sign of the cross. Such anecdotes make it difficult to readily accept Kanter’s suggestion that young Mexican Americans “may have grown up in poverty, but with a parish to call their own, they did not feel marginalized” (88). By the late 1950s, the Near West Side barrio was under threat from a proposed new University of Illinois campus. The decision to build the campus in the city’s Near West Side was finalized in...