Latino Catholics and Parish Boundaries: Notes from Chicagolandia

Abstract

Latino Catholics and Parish Boundaries:Notes from Chicagolandia Deborah E. Kanter14 Parish Boundaries offers an engrossing, magisterial account of U.S. Catholic life in the twentieth century through the 1960s. In John McGreevy's capable hands, the history of parishes in Buffalo, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere makes for a surprisingly unified narrative about the ways that "black" and "white" came to the forefront of "the Catholic imagination."15 The book, however, only sparsely considered the experience of Latinos, a group poised today to become the majority of the Catholic laity. As we reflect back on McGreevy's work, I would like to draw upon my own work to invite us to dig deeper into how Latino Catholics fit into the Parish Boundaries story. As I began to research the history of Chicago's Mexican churches, McGreevy offered an indelible lesson in how a parish meant more than a church to local people. I shifted my attention from the church building and, when visiting, I prowled the entire block, spying the rectory, school, sometimes a gym, and always a convent. With the parish as my lens into ethnic identity and community formation, I wrote Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican, which argues that Mexicans who settled in Chicago were fortunate to arrive in a multi-ethnic, Catholic city.16 In the 1920s, two national parishes were established to welcome the "Spanish speaking." When subsequent waves of Mexican immigrants and their children arrived in areas like Pilsen, they took over existing parish structures (built by European immigrant predecessors) and created more refugios. In more recent decades, arrivals from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Guatemala, and beyond inherited a church shaped by the story that McGreevy tells, while also invigorating Catholic Chicago. Since the 1990s new Latin American devotions have emerged in the parishes, annual processions once again wind their way through city streets, and the sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Des Plaines, northwest of the city, welcomes [End Page 14] teeming crowds of the faithful.17 At the same time, Latinos also inherited an archdiocese in contraction, weighed down by huge, aging physical infrastructure that had been built for densely populated, ethnically diverse, Catholic neighborhoods. Step back a century. As Mexicans presented a new immigrant stream in Chicago and other Midwestern cities, social workers, landlords, bishops, teaching sisters, and priests all found themselves asking where these newcomers fit. What happened when Latin Americans and their children moved into a neighborhood, testing parish boundaries as fellow Catholics who were not Black, but not perceived entirely as white either?18 McGreevy devotes two pages to the postwar Latino growth in which he summarized that Euro-Americans proved more accepting of Latinos than African Americans. Based on secondary sources, he further surmised that Mexicans were relatively accepted, while Puerto Ricans in places like New York "faced more barriers." McGreevy contended, correctly I believe, that Euro-American parishes initially had tenuous ties with Spanish-speaking newcomers.19 In my own work, I found that Euro-American laity and clergy were not necessarily hostile to the new Mexicans in the pews, but the parishes hardly welcomed the new arrivals. In time, Catholicism offered common ground between Euro-American clergy and laity and their newer Spanish-speaking counterparts.20 The desire to maintain parish structures explains Euro-Americans' willingness to live with Mexican newcomers. Priests came to understand that Mexican Catholics could become part of the parish structure. If they developed loyalties to a fading Czech or Croatian parish, if they enrolled their children at the school, if they dropped a dollar into the weekly collection, the Mexicans would enable an aging parish to keep its doors open. Even so, these new parishioners often opted to attend Mass or Holy Week liturgies at a Spanish-speaking church. Chicago Catholic Charities reported in 1955 on the recent arrival of Mexicans in the majority Slavic Pilsen neighborhood. "Mexicans are still viewed as `invaders' by the older residents . . . However, the Mexican is considered a much lesser evil [End Page 15] than the surrounding Negroes."21 In the shadows of Spanish-speaking integration often lay the specter of "Negro invasion." The history of Latino Catholics offers a...