Latino Catholics Research Articles

Latino Catholic Biography

Latino Catholic Biography* Timothy Matovina Historians have produced various biographies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latinos who were lay Catholics, but examinations of the influence Catholicism had in their lives is often relatively brief or entirely absent. Like many studies of Catholic lives, on the whole extant biographical monographs on leaders recognized as Latino Catholics have examined clergy acclaimed for their faith and apostolic work. Several book-length biographies have explored the struggles and travails of nineteenth-century clergy who lived through the tumultuous period when what is now the Southwest passed from Mexican to U.S. sovereignty. Numerous writings have treated the most widely-known U.S. Latino leader, César Chávez. The selection and treatment of these latter two biographical subjects reflect not only the attraction of the historical figures examined, but also particular emphases among Latino historians on the U.S. conquest of Mexico and on the Chicano movement. Biographies of Latinas and Latinos have lauded heroic figures such as Mother Teresa (Rosa) Solis, I.W.B.S. (1840-1920), the first Incarnate Word sister from the Americas; early California bishops like Mexican-born Francisco García Diego y Moreno, O.F.M. (1785-1846); Catalan-born California bishops Joseph Sadoc Alemany, O.P. (1814-1888), Thaddeus Amat, C.M. (1811-1878), and Francisco Mora y Borrell (1827-1905); and Patricio Flores, the first Mexican American bishop. Several other book-length biographies have examined the lives of non-Latinos who are recognized for their leadership in Hispanic communities and evangelization, such as Italian-born Father Eusebio Kino, S.J. (1645-1711), whose missionary labors in New Spain included the establishment of the first missions in Arizona, and Archbishop Robert E. Lucey of San Antonio (1891-1977), widely known as a tireless advocate for social justice, the catechetical movement, and church outreach to poor and working-class ethnic Mexicans. 1 [End Page 59] Not surprisingly, there are also various biographical studies of Hispanics in the canonization process. Venerable Antonio Margil de Jesús, O.F.M. (1657-1726) is renowned as a Spanish missioner whose numerous accomplishments included the establishment of the most successful of the Spanish missions in Texas, San Antonio's Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo. Blessed Junípero Serra, O.F.M. (1713-1784), is acclaimed as the founder of the California missions. Servant of God Father Félix Varela y Morales (1788-1853) fled to New York in 1823 after the Spanish regime he opposed as a Cuban delegate to the Spanish Cortes (parliament) condemned him to death. In exile, Varela worked as a parish priest and eventually rose to the position of diocesan vicar general. He is recognized both for his dedicated pastoral service in New York and as a forerunner of Cuban pro-independence thought. Blessed Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Santiago (1918-1963) is known in his native Puerto Rico for his love of the liturgy, his translations of Catholic rites into Spanish, and his commitment to teach others about the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. Witnesses who knew him personally extol his virtue and his exemplary efforts to proclaim the ways of Jesus Christ in everyday life. He is the first layperson born in the territories of the United States to be beatified. Servant of God Bishop Alphonse Gallegos, O.A.R. (1931-1991), was born in Albuquerque, joined the Augustinian Recollects, was ordained a priest in 1958, and served as auxiliary bishop in the diocese of Sacramento for the last decade of his life. His cause for sainthood was opened fourteen years after his tragic death from a car that struck him as he tried to push his stalled vehicle to the roadside. 2 [End Page 60] Click for larger view View full resolution Father Félix Varela y Morales (1788-1853). Courtesy St. Augustine Historical Society. Biographies of nineteenth-century Hispanic clergy in the Southwest have sought to correct historical accounts about leaders like Padre Antonio José Martínez (1793-1867) of Taos, the priest most frequently associated with New Mexico's transition from Mexican to U.S. rule. In collaboration with Moises Sandoval, in 1976 Father Juan Romero published the first of such efforts to...

The Continuing Relevance of Family Income for Religious Participation: U.S. White Catholic Church Attendance in the Late 20th Century

The relevance of family income for religious participation in the United States has been largely ignored in recent decades. Addressing this neglect, we focus our attention primarily upon white Catholics, the poorer of whom we reason have fewer options to participate in the context of an increasingly middle-class Church. Analyzing the 1972–2006 cumulative General Social Survey data, we show that net of all other factors low-income white Catholics attend church less oft en than other white Catholics, although social integration mechanisms significantly moderate the effects of income. Additional analyses suggest that the effects of income on church attendance are greatest for the younger white Catholic cohort. In contrast, the role of income in Latino Catholics’ attendance is relatively weak. In our conclusion, we attempt to integrate our most puzzling finding – having children in the home does not increase the church attendance of low-income white Catholics – with our main theoretical line of argument concerning the central role of social integration in understanding the impact of income on religious participation.

Poetics, Politics, and the Life of Latino Catholics in California

This essay explores poetics and politics among Latino Catholics in Fresno, California, who draw on a tradition of storytelling and religious ritual to mitigate the hardships that result from their marginal social assignment. Storytelling and ritual allow them to recognize where faith and daily life intersect, exposing the tensions—including those caused by poverty, violence, and isolation—that separate one person from another. This combination of faith and poetics also allows them to cultivate the harmonies that bring people together. The essay focuses on stories told by Eva González, who relates her family’s dreams and disappointments and demonstrates the importance of her beliefs. It weaves together Chicano, religious, and performance-studies scholarship with philosophy, ethnography, and empirical research. As much spiritual as it is historical, psychological, and ethical, the essay is choreographed to produce a textual performance that introduces readers to the narrative process of making life whole.

Ritual, Stories, and the Poetics of a Journey Home Among Latino Catholics

ABSTRACTThis essay centers on a storyteller's performance of ritual in stories to draw associations between the life of the Biblical Mary with her son Jesus and the subjectivities and dispositions of people living in impoverished conditions. The storyteller explores these subjectivities and dispositions, characterizing the exploration as a journey. She also defines an ethical position where the self meets otherness—both sacred and cultural—to engender positive human relations. The essay combines the storyteller's performance with the author's to reproduce the effects, advance the ethics, mitigate the politics of representation, and provide an understanding of the journey's end—a place called home.

Guadalupe and her faithful. Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from colonial origins to the present. By Timothy Matovina. (Lived Religions.) Pp. xv+232 incl. 28 ills. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. £40 (cloth), £15.50 (paper). 0 8018 7959 0; 0 8018 8229 X

Guadalupe and her faithful. Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from colonial origins to the present. By Timothy Matovina. (Lived Religions.) Pp. xv+232 incl. 28 ills. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. £40 (cloth), £15.50 (paper). 0 8018 7959 0; 0 8018 8229 X - Volume 59 Issue 1

Parades and Processions: Protestant and Catholic Ritual Performances in a Nuevo New South Town

AbstractSince the early 1990s, the American South has changed drastically and Siler City, North Carolina reflects those changes. Like larger southern cities, Siler City has received a significant number of migrants from Latin America in a short amount of time. New migrants, many but not all of them Roman Catholic, bring diverse sets of ethnic, cultural, and religious practices to a town traditionally dominated by Baptists and Methodists. One of the most visible examples of local religious disruption in Siler City has been the public display of Good Friday processions by Latino Catholics. That performance signified the presence of new migrants in downtown space. White Protestants, in turn, drew on the long standing ritual tradition of downtown Fourth of July parades to reassert their presence in that same space. Annually performed since 1901, the parades revealed a moral order based on the logic of southern Christian sacrifice. And the vitality of downtown parades indicated the political strength of white Protestants to maintain established order. That strength diminished with the local economic decline of downtown businesses in the 1980s and was challenged by the arrival of Latino migrants in the 1990s. The parades ended in 1988 but were renewed in 1997, the year following the first Good Friday procession in city streets. In the revitalized parade, white Protestants expressed nostalgia for a southern way of life and publicly remembered a time and place — downtown Siler City — before economic decline and Latino arrival.

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present (review)

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present. By Matovina Timothy . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 232. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 22.95 paper. - Volume 64 Issue 1

TIMOTHY MATOVINA. Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present. (Lived Religions.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 232. Cloth $60.00, paper $22.95

TIMOTHY MATOVINA. Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present. (Lived Religions.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 232. Cloth $60.00, paper $22.95

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio from Colonial Origins to the Present (review)

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio from Colonial Origins to the Present (review)

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present

Reviewed by: Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present Virgilio Elizondo (bio) Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present. By Timothy Matovina. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005. 256 pp. $60.00 (hdbk.), $22.96 (pb.) The basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City is the most visited pilgrimage site in the Western Hemisphere. After Jesus of Nazareth, her image is the most reproduced sacred icon in the Americas. Increasingly today the exuberant veneration of Guadalupe is spreading beyond Mexico to the United States and other places throughout the American continent. Shrines dedicated to her are as far north as Johnstown, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. A growing number of Latino Protestant congregations celebrate the December 12 Guadalupe feast; Protestant pastors and theologians like Lutheran Maxwell Johnson have deemed Guadalupe a source of "hope and strength to a people wandering in despair." Most importantly, she continues to appear in the daily lives of her faithful in Mexico and beyond: on home altars, t-shirts, tattoos, murals, parish churches, medals, refrigerator magnets, wall hangings, and in countless conversations and daily prayers. Guadalupe and Her Faithful is the first book that illuminates the core of the relationship between Guadalupe and her devotees as Guadalupan devotion evolved [End Page 110] from its origins following the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica to become a regional, national, and then an international phenomenon. Focused on the parishioners of San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas, whose congregation has sustained their Guadalupan devotion for nearly three centuries and under five different national governments, this volume is a tour de force of religious history, with a deeply theological soul. One of the great contributions of this book is that it by-passes the debates on the historicity and focuses on the history of the devotion as it has spread through generations. There is no other book in any language which traces the development of Guadalupan devotion in this manner. Throughout the book Matovina grounds his analysis in the social forces and historical contexts which shaped congregants' lives and religious experience, while also offering magnificent insights on the Guadalupe-devotee bond which linked heaven and earth in ways that transformed parishioners' faith and everyday struggles. He shows, for example, the historical circumstances which led to Guadalupe's emergence as San Fernando's primary patroness in the century following the 1731 establishment of San Antonio as a rural settlement on the northern edge of New Spain. But in the process he also illuminates the theology of divine providence mediated in Guadalupan devotion, a fluid theology adaptable to devotees' physical environment, economic conditions, longing for security, racial mixing, and aspirations for social advancement, particularly in the settlements of what is now the Southwest like San Antonio, where isolation and the quest for survival bound residents more closely to one another, to God, and to celestial companions like Guadalupe. Furthermore unlike many studies of popular faith expressions which apply pre-determined theoretical constructs to people's everyday prayer, Matovina emphasizes "the insights, convictions, sentiments, and ritual actions of San Fernando Guadalupan devotees," stating explicitly that the goal of the volume "is to offer insofar as is possible a depiction of the subjects under study in which they would have recognized themselves" (21). He does this as only a devotee himself could do, and this is one of the great merits of this work. It is an insightful and truly objective view developed by an insider—a great work of theologian as organic intellectual. Subsequently, Guadalupan devotion at San Fernando was a significant public expression of group pride and identity in the tumultuous decades following the U.S. takeover of the Southwest; in the context of their increasingly subordinate social status the brown-skinned Guadalupe and public processions in her honor were also a visible reminder of ethnic Mexican devotees' ongoing dignity as the daughters and sons of the one they acclaim as God's own mother. As successive waves of Mexican émigrés dramatically increased San Antonio's Mexican-descent population during the early twentieth century, the newcomers refashioned San Fernando's annual Guadalupe feast day...

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present. By Timothy Matovina

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present. By Timothy Matovina

Review of Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present

<scp>Review of Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present</scp>

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present (review)

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present (review)

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present

Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present

Guadalupe and her faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from colonial origins to the present

Guadalupe and her faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from colonial origins to the present

Changements démographiques et religieux chez les hispaniques des Etats-Unis

The author explores the debate over US Latino religious affiliation. Depending on whom you believe, Latino Catholic affiliation in the United States runs from 77 to as low as 50%. After reviewing the limitations of previous studies, the author draws on the Hispanic Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL) national survey (n = 2060) to explore six demographic shifts in US Latino religions: (1) Catholic defections; (2) mass conversions to Protestantism; (3) mainline Protestant market share loss; (4) Pentecostal growth and the Pentecostalization of Latino Christianity; (5) growth of alternative Christian traditions; and (6) growth of world religions, metaphysical traditions and non-denominationalism. By breaking down Latino Protestantism into mainline, evangelical, and Pentecostal, the author challenges the theory that Latinos convert for status advantage and upward mobility. These shifts suggest that the future of US Latino religions is not only going to remain Catholic, but will also increasingly be Pentecostal/charismatic, alternative Christian, “heterodox”, and other non-denominational.

Book Review: Presente! U.S. Latino Catholics from Colonial Origins to the Present

Book Review: Presente! U.S. Latino Catholics from Colonial Origins to the Present

Religions of the United States in practice

The Religions of the United States in Practice is a rich anthology of primary sources with accompanying essays that examines religious behavior in America. From praying in an early American synagogue to reading anti-Catholic novels to performing Haitian Voudou baptism, the volumes explore faith through action. The documents and essays consider the religious practices of average people - praying, singing, healing, teaching, imagining, and persuading. Some documents are formal liturgies, while others texts describe more spontaneous religious actions. Because religious practices also take place in the imagination, dreams, visions, and fictional accounts are also included. Accompanying each primary document is an essay that sets the religious practice in its historical and theological context - making this volume ideal for classroom use and accessible to general readers. The introductory essays explain the various meanings of religious practices as lived out in churches and synagogues, in parlors and fields, beside rivers, on lecture platforms, and in the streets. Volume I moves from Colonial days to the end of the nineteenth century. Among the fascinating subjects covered are Early American hymns. Dutch-American wedding ceremonies, witchcraft in Puritan culture, Mormon healing rituals, Muskogee corn ceremonies, anti-Catholic pornography, debates over cremation. Volume 2 continues into the twentieth century, exploring such practices as Pentecostal prayer services, the singing of Hanukkah songs, debates over ordaining women, Buddhist chanting, the guitar mass, speaking in tongues, vision quests, Jewish mourning practices, and Charismatic renewal among Latino Catholics. The Religions of the United States in Practice offers a sampling of religious perspectives that approximates the living texture of popular religious thought and practice in the United States. The history of religion in America is more than the story of institutions and famous people. This anthology presents an engrossing and nuanced story composed of the everyday actions and thoughts of lay men and women.

Attributions for Success and Failure in Mathematics: A Comparative Study of Catholic and Public School Students

The documented higher performance of minority students in Catholic versus public schools raises questions about motivational factors that may underlie the impact of parochial education. This study examines attributions for success and failure and their relationship to mathematics achievement in a sample of African American, Latino, and Caucasian fifth- and sixth-grade public and Catholic school students. Results showed that relative to their public school peers minority students in Catholic schools endorsed attributions that were more adaptive for learning. Specifically: 1) Latino and African American Catholic school students were less likely to attribute success in mathematics to external factors, 2) Latino Catholic school students were more likely to attribute success to ability, and 3) African American Catholic school students were less likely to attribute failure to external factors. Further, for Latino students, Catholic but not public school membership was positively associated with mathematics achievement. Results are discussed in the context of school culture.