Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900-1965 ed. by Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto M. Hinojosa

Abstract

Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900-1965. Edited by Jay P Dolan and Gilberto M. Hinojosa. [The Notre Dame History of Hispanic Catholics in the U.S., Volume One.] (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1994. Pp. viii, 352. $29.95.) Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900-1965, is the initial volume of a trilogy of books from University of Notre Dame Press focusing on a broad canvas of issues affecting Latino Catholics in the United States. Jay P Dolan served as senior editor for all three volumes. Sometimes a few restless writers, eager to establish a reputation as intellectual iconoclasts, become so enamored with a hypothesis that they willingly reject contradictory data that might weaken their theoretical framework. Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church,1900-1965, falls into that category. The editors,Jay P Dolan of the University of Notre Dame and Gilberto M. Hinojosa of Incarnate Word College (now University), postulated a hypothesis that liberation theology constituted the only ministry that could properly address, with sympathy and understanding, the spiritual and temporal needs of Hispanics in the Southwest. The outcome is a compilation of selectively sifted evidence that undergirds the framework of three interconnected essays, each by a different author (Hinojosa, Jeffrey M. Burns, and David A. Badillo). In the blurred canvas that evolved it became difficult to separate the composition by Hinojosa the writer from the arrangement by Don Gilberto the editor. Taking the essays in sequence, in Mexican-American Faith Communities in Texas and the Southwest, Gilberto Hinojosa hastily fashioned an overview of the Hispanic colonial experience. Determined to discard functional terms that Herbert E. Bolton, Carlos E. Castaneda, and other Borderlands historians wove into their monographs, Hinojosa crafted convoluted phrases that obscured the passages more than they clarified, such as soldier-settler town garrisons for presidios; missionary-Indian towns for missions; and faith for secularized mission pueblos and parishes. Since the overriding theme of this volume was the twentieth century, Hinojosa devoted cursory attention to the historical antecedents. The modern Mexican Revolution furnished the backdrop for the influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants into Texas and the Southwest. The swift rush of new immigrants overwhelmed the capacity of the Catholic Church to acculturate and assimilate them into mainstream society. Hinojosa and his colleagues critically indicted the Catholic hierarchy for lagging behind Protestant ministers in providing temporal and spiritual assistance to the Hispanic faithful. Occasionally they praised the apostolic work of parish priests who offered comfort and assistance to the new arrivals, but generally they regarded the institutional Church with disdain. Hinojosa's lengthy essay has its composite of flaws and merits. On the credit side of the ledger are several subthemes of South Texas communities in which the ministry of the Catholic Church, at the height of political turmoil in Mexico, advanced commendably and without fanfare. His historical reconstruction of faith communities, on the other hand, hampered by autobiographical experiences, might have been improved if documentary materials from diocesan archives in Brownsville and Corpus Christi had been consulted. …