Mexican-Descent Catholics and the U.S. Church, 1880–1910: Moving Beyond Chicano Assumptions

Abstract

Mexican-Descent Catholics and the U.S. Church, 1880–1910: Moving Beyond Chicano Assumptions Robert E. Wright O.M.I. With his editing of and contributions to the 1983 volume Fronteras, Moises Sandoval produced the first attempt at a comprehensive survey of Hispanic Christians in the United States.1 As president of CEHILA U.S.A. for the next two decades, he provided the stimulus and network for a growing body of scholarly research on that topic that has greatly matured. Yet, as in all scholarly fields, certain assumptions and lacunae invariably develop, waiting to be addressed. This essay points out one such important omission and the assumptions that have fostered it. In this instance, the work of respected colleagues has relied upon the early Chicano literature which has never been critically assessed. This essay, therefore, evaluates the most respected and utilized current surveys and, in the reference notes, the foundational Chicano literature upon which they rely. In doing so, I argue for a very different understanding and provide two case studies as examples of that needed revision. Historical accounts about Mexican-descent Catholics in the United States typically deal with the 1880–1910 period, if it is discussed at all, with a few general remarks that treat it as basically a continuation of the 1840–1880 period. By 1875 almost all of the famously (or infamously) chronicled players in the transition from the church of Mexico to the U.S. church in the Southwest2—Father Refugio de la Garza and Bishop Odin in Texas, Fathers Antonio José Martinez and Joseph Machebeuf and Bishop Lamy in New Mexico, Father José González Rubio and Bishops Alemany and Amat in California—had disappeared from the scene.3 Historical surveys generally assume [End Page 73] that the dynamics established in those first few decades remained basically the same after 1875, and focus upon 1910 as introducing the next major transition era. At that point the Mexican Revolution and the U.S. economy brought tens of thousands of Mexican immigrants to the United States and thus purportedly initiated a new phase in Mexican–descent Catholicism in the United States. Furthermore, surveys of the entire 1840–1910 period take an overall negative view, more highly pronounced in California and New Mexico, of church agents among those of Mexican descent. They have absorbed this view from early and more recent Chicano historians, as explained below. Problematic Current Surveys The landmark Notre Dame volume Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900–1965, actually begins its detailed regional histories with the year 1910. And, typically, its preliminary summaries of the previous history give very few specifics about Mexican-descent Catholics and the Church in the post-1880 years. Unfortunately, the major conclusions of those summaries are unreliable, following as they do the poorly substantiated Chicano assumptions. Thus Jeffrey Burns’ very brief sketch of pre-1910 California repeated without question the totally unsupported conclusions of Chicano historians Camarillo and Griswold del Castillo: By 1900 few Mexicans were attending the formal worship services of the Church. . . . The most important rites of passage—baptism, marriage, confirmation, and burial—continued to be celebrated in the church, but more daily devotions remained detached from parish life. . . . In sum, by 1900 ministry to the Mexican/Mexican-American community suffered from serious neglect.4 Camarillo5 and Griswold del Castillo6 cited Leonard Pitt’s The Decline of the Californios for their late-1800s generalizations. But the chapter on Catholicism in Pitt’s book dealt only with the 1850s, not treating at all the 1880–1910 period!7 [End Page 74] And yet when Burns began his discussion of the post-1910 period, he described the Catholic parish as a mainstay of Mexican life: “Catholic parishes, once established, played an integral role in barrio life.”8 Furthermore, the parishes in 1910 were often overcrowded.9 According to Burns, therefore, in one decade, 1900–1910, there was a complete shift from non-regular participation and serious neglect to overcrowded churches integral to barrio life!10 Gilberto Hinojosa’s fuller discussion in the same volume of the pre-1910 period in Texas and New Mexico pays somewhat more attention to the years after 1875, with...