Working for God, Country, and "Our Poor Mexicans": Catholic Women and Americanization at the San Antonio National Catholic Community House, 1919-1924

Abstract

ON A HOT JULY DAY IN 1919, May J. Williams arrived in San Antonio on official business for the National Catholic War Council (NCWC). As a trained social worker and a member of a prominent Milwaukee Catholic family, she applied her professional skills and an outsider’s eye to complete a detailed survey of the city. Williams researched a broad range of issues, but she paid particular attention to the plight of Mexican immigrants, describing their vice-filled neighborhoods that lacked running water, sanitation, or police protection. The solution to these problems, she concluded, was “a little Americanization work.” She warned, however, that white San Antonio Catholics were ignoring these conditions, while at least five Protestant groups were ramping up Americanization efforts in Mexican neighborhoods. The NCWC, she recommended, could fill this gap by establishing a National Catholic Community House in San Antonio as a center for Catholic Americanization. Between 1919 and 1924, the NCWC hired professionally trained laywomen like Williams to do Catholic Americanization work in San Antonio. These women, known as “secretaries,” almost all came from outside the Southwest, and most did not speak Spanish, but they shared a deep commitment to a vision of Americanizing Mexican immigrants while also preserving their Catholic faith. The NCWC leadership sent them to the city as part of their National Catholic Community House project, a larger national program of war reconstruction and immigrant outreach. As they enacted this national agenda, however, the secretaries had to confront the racial and sexual politics of postwar San Antonio, which posed special challenges to them as social missionaries within the Church. They found themselves on the front line of the struggle to define what it meant to be both Catholic and American in the modernizing and multi-ethnic United States. John McGreevy and other historians have examined the ways American Catholics contended with the tensions associated with modernity in the