Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:47:58.502Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tamales on the Fourth of July: The Transnational Parish of Coeneo, Michoacán

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Luis E. Murillo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article traces the significant yet largely unexplored experience of transnationalism in the lived religious experiences of Mexican and Mexican American Catholics by focusing on the parish as a central unit of analysis. Within this analysis, the parish unit is rethought as an analytical unit in two important regards. First, the way in which parish life in rural Mexico has been predominately conceptualized as one whose rhythm revolves around a traditional ritual calendar centered on community celebrations of particular religious holidays and localized votive devotions needs to be replaced. Based on research from an ongoing historical case study (1890-present) of a central Mexican parish, Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Coeneo, Michoacán, and on other parishes, the rhythm of parish life has clearly shifted to celebrations of marriages and baptisms. These religious celebrations of marriages and baptisms in Mexico have become the focal point of identity and community in this transnational Mexican and Mexican American experience. These sacraments of baptism and marriage have multiple meanings that not only include universal Catholic doctrines but also notions of family, community, and a particular appreciation for the sacralized landscape of their Mexican parish. Second, notions of parish boundaries as fixed and parish affiliation as singular must be reconsidered because many Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the United States consider themselves to be active members in at least two parishes: one in Mexico and one or more in the United States.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , Summer 2009 , pp. 137 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Description based on a visit in December 2004. For brief descriptions of Catholic transnational practice in other parts of central Mexico and the United States, see .Hirsch, Jennifer S, A Courtship after Marriage: Sexuality and Life in Mexican Transnational Families (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), esp. 57–75 Google Scholar; Cahn, Peter, All Religions Are Good in Tzintzuntzan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 20–26 Google Scholar; and Martinez, Ruben, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (New York: Picador, 2001), 139–61.Google Scholar

2. Archivo del Notaria de la Parroquia de Nuestra Senora del Rosario (ANPNSR), Libro de Bautismos, no. 51 (1997–2007). The average figure taken for the years 1999–2004. The baptismal records contain the name of the child, the date and place of birth of the child, the godparents, and a section to note when and where the child eventually marries in the Catholic church, if he or she so chooses.

3. As a Mexicanist, I hesitate to use the standard term American Catholicism, as Mexicans will often note that everyone in the New World is an American, not just those residing in the United States.

4. Names taken from ANPNSR, Libro de Bautismos, no. 51. To protect the privacy of parishioners all names have been changed as well as some of the locations where they were born.

5. Based on a review of the parish baptismal records. Ibid.

6. Levitt, Peggy, “‘You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant’: Religion and Transnational Migration,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 851 Google Scholar. In this article, I use the terms Mexican and Mexican American to differentiate issues of citizenship. The term Latino is used as an umbrella term to include also Central American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban populations. The term Hispanic is used in only those cases where particular institutions, such as the U.S. Catholic church, use the government definition for the population that includes Mexican American, Cuban American, Central American, and Puerto Rican peoples.

7. In the United States, Melvin and his family constitute part of the “Nuevo Catholics,” the majority presence of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, along with Central Americans, that fill the parish churches of the Los Angeles area, an archdiocese that has undergone a dramatic Catholic renewal, a golden age even, as the New York Times recently claimed. See Reiff, David, “Nuevo Catholics,” New York Times Magazine, December 24, 2006 Google Scholar.

8. According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Hispanic Affairs, close to 40 percent of the U.S. Catholic population is Hispanic, and that Hispanic population represents slightly more than 70 percent of the U.S. Catholic population growth since 1960. For the percentage of Catholics who are Hispanic, see U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanic Population in the United States, Population Characteristics, March 2001. On the percentage increase, see USCCB Committee on Hispanic Affairs, Hispanic Ministry at the Turn of the New Millennium, 1999. I use the categories of Mexican and Mexican American here to differentiate legal citizenship status. The issue is important in terms of the ability to cross the border freely and participate in transnational Catholic practice without severe consequences, as those without official papers often experience.

9. For an overview of the peripheral place of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, see Raúl Gomez and Manuel Vásquez, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Hispanic Ministry Study,” 1999, http://www.usccb.org/hispanicaffairs/studygomez.shtml, accessed July 7, 2009. The reference to the margins of the margins is from Tentler, Leslie Woodcock, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 45., no. 1 (1993): 104–27Google Scholar. Despite noting more than fifteen years ago the marginality of American Catholic history, the situation remains the same. Tentler noted the “analytically thin” scholarship regarding Hispanic Catholicism (120). Studies of Mexican American Catholicism still remain largely unexplored and on the margins of American Catholic history.

10. See also my work on local parish politics in central Mexico in the late nineteenth century, “The Politics of the Miraculous: Popular Practice in Porfirian Michoacán: 1876–1910” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 2002).

11. It is difficult to know how many return, but my estimate is hundreds of thousands. For migration, I mean simply those who leave and do not actively participate in their community of origin.

12. The rural hamlets that belong to Coeneo include: San Pedro Tacaro, El Rodeo, El Durazno, Ojo de Aguita, Cofradia, Quencio, San Isidro, Pretoria, Transval, Tunguitiro, El Cobrero, Colonia Benito Juarez, and Zipiajo. According to the Consejo Nacional de Población, in Michoacán slightly more than 34 percent of the population lived in 9,505 rural communities of fewer than 2,500 inhabitants in the year 2000.

13. Levitt, Peggy, “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging: The Institutional Character of Transnational Religious Life,” Sociology of Religion 65, no. 1 (2004): 5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Here the Mexican American Catholic experience shares much with Orsi's conceptualization of the domus. See Oris, Robert, The Madonna of 115th Street, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 75–150 Google Scholar.

15. On the variety of usages of transnationalism, see the introduction by Ebaugh, Helen Rose and Chafetz, Janet Saltzman in Religion across Borders, ed. Ebaugh, Helen Rose and Chafetz, Janet Saltzman (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Portes, Alejandro, Guarnizo, Luis E., and Landolt, Patricia, “The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 2 (1999): 217–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. León, Luis, La Llorona's Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 94 Google Scholar. Thomas Tweed also invokes a sense of transnationalism in the way in which mass in Miami is broadcast to Cuba and families become united by participating in that mass. Tweed, Thomas, Our Lady of Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

17. Rouse, Roger, “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Roger Rouse, “Mexican Migration to the United States: Family Relations in the Development of a Transnational Migrant Circuit” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1989).

18. Roberts, Bryan, Frank, Reanne, and Lozano-Ascencio, Fernando, “Transnational Migrant Communities and Mexican Migration to the US,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 2 (1999): 238–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Cahn, , All Religions Are Good in Tzintzuntzan, 10 Google Scholar.

20. For an overview of the limited studies dedicated to religion and transnationalism worldwide, see Levitt, “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging,” 1–18, and Levitt, , “‘You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant,’” 847–74Google Scholar. Peggy Levitt has also explored transnationalism among Dominican Catholics in Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). See also Ebaugh and Chafetz, eds., Religion across Borders.

21. Levitt, “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging,” 3–4 (italics in original).

22. Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony M., “From Barrios to Barricades: Religion and Religiosity in Latino Life,” in The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States since 1960, ed. Gutierrez, David (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 348 Google Scholar.

23. Interview on May 18, 2006.

24. Several Latino priests in Idaho noted this problem in interviews conducted by phone in April 2006 and in person in May 2006.

25. Levitt, Peggy, DeWind, Jose, and Vertovec, Steven, “International Perspectives on Transnational Migration: An Introduction,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 565 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Levitt, “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging,” 5.

27. Christian, William, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3 Google Scholar. Recently, Robert Orsi has argued along similar lines in that all religion should be considered local if one considers lived religion important. He argues that “religious cultures are local and to study religion is to study local worlds. There is no such thing as a ‘Methodist’ or a ‘Southern Baptist’ who can be neatly summarized by an account of the denomination's history or theology.” Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 167.

28. Friedrich, Paul, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977), 37 Google Scholar.

29. There is one large modern painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe in one of the back waiting rooms. That painting is by a young transnational influenced by the murals in Los Angeles.

30. During Easter week of 2007, I visited more than thirty parish churches in Michoacán, and more than half of them had this image of Christ, and all these parishes had an active devotion to Jesus Nazareno.

31. These were attached to the Christ statue rather than next to the nine-inch statue of Our Lady of the Rosary encased in back of the altar because the parish priest had decided to limit access to the altar and wanted a “clean” altar.

32. I worked in and visited four parishes in Michoacán during the summer of 2003, and three had ex-votos involving Mexican American members of the U.S. military stationed in Iraq.

33. Based on visits to these churches during the summers of 2000–2004 and the Christmas season of 2003. In the summer of 2003, in Charo, there were also photos of U.S. marines.

34. “Los que suscribimos vecinos del Pueblo de Araró (10/16/1880),” Archivo Histórico Casa de Morelos (AHCM), XIX Century Church Series, box 281, folder 526.

35. Interviews done on July 15 and 17, 2003, in the home of Crispina Rangel in Coeneo.

36. For example, in an otherwise insightful, well-researched, and well-developed parish study, Matovina, Timothy, Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, often notes Mexican immigrants coming to the parish without reference to their origin.

37. Christian, William. “Folk Religion,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Eliade, Mircea (New York: MacMillian, 1987), 5:372 Google Scholar.

38. Foster, George M., Tzintzuntzan: Mexican Peasants in a Changing World, rev. ed. (Nw York: Elsevier, 1979), 195 Google Scholar.

39. The marriage trends are based on extrapolating data from ANPNSR, Libro de Registros Matrimonials, no. 19 (1981–2007).

40. Levitt, DeWind, and Vertovec, “International Perspectives on Transnational Migration,” 568.

41. These trends and the subsequent discussion are based on extrapolating data from baptismal records for those baptized in Coeneo from the years 1955 to 1982, that is, those who were twenty to forty-nine years old in 2004, the last year analyzed. See the ANPNSR, Libro de Bautismos, no. 40 to no. 51. In order to contextualize the data better, two important factors should be noted. First, there is a general decline in population for the area that encompasses the parish of Coeneo due to the impact of intense migration. Second, in Coeneo, as elsewhere in Mexico, civil marriage is required by law, and the Mexican government does not recognize any religious ceremonies. Thus, marrying in the Catholic church is a personal decision that not all parishioners make, as many marry outside the church only in common law or civil unions. Of those baptized in Coeneo, the norm for those who eventually participate in the Catholic sacrament of marriage ranges from year to year between 40 and 50 percent. This norm dates back to at least the population born from 1930 until 1973. The drop in percentage married for the population born in 1973 and after is explained by noting that all are under the age of thirty. That said, as noted, there is a general decline in Catholic marriages in Coeneo.

42. Interview conducted on December 23, 2004. Banesa did not say much during the interview as she occupied herself with their twoyear- old daughter.

43. Orsi, , The Madonna of 115th Street, 77 Google Scholar (italics in the original).

44. Based on a review of Expedientes de Matrimonios, ANPNSR, from 1995 to 2003.

45. Those marrying in the United States also tend to be young. Whereas those baptized between 1955 and 1963 married in the United States at a 4 to 6 percent rate (with another 18 to 20 percent marrying in other parts of Mexico), beginning with those born in 1964 the percentage begins to climb, reaching a high of 27 percent for those born in 1982. Granted this is a much smaller group given their age of twenty in 2002, but the fact that 27 percent have married in the United States coupled with another 18 percent marrying in other parts of Mexico means that close to half (45 percent) of this young cohort is marrying outside of Coeneo, another reflection of the massive out migration.

46. I conclude that most drove based on interviews and observing the multitude of vehicles in Coeneo.

47. McGreevy, John T., “Religious Roots,” in Reviews in American History 28, no. 3 (2000): 419 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. McGreevy, John T., Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 25 Google Scholar.

49. Orsi, , The Madonna of 115th Street, xxxiv Google Scholar. As McGreevy noted, “Single books do not create historiographical fields, but it is tempting to claim Robert A. Orsi's first book, The Madonna of 115th Street, as an exception to that rule.” Quoted in McGreevey's review of Orsi's, St. Jude in Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (1997): 704 Google Scholar. There are other scholars working within this context. Tweed's examination of the Cuban exiles in Our Lady of Exile does much of the same, incorporating streets, shrines, and stores as sites for understanding the dynamics of Cuban American Catholicism.

50. Orsi, , Between Heaven and Earth, 146–47Google Scholar.

51. See Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful.

52. Hinojosa, Gilberto M., “Mexican-American Faith Communities in Texas and the Southwest,” in Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900–1965, ed. Dolan, Jay P. and Hinojosa, Gilberto M. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

53. See, for example, Matovina, Timothy M. and Riebe-Estrella, Gary, eds., Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, where among the articles only one focuses on a parish. The anthology also details the multiple problems Mexicans and Mexican Americans have had with the U.S. Catholic church.

54. The literature on the Catholic hierarchy's mistreatment of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the nineteenth century in the U.S. southwest is extensive. For a concise overview, see Matovina, Timothy M., “Conquest, Faith, and Resistance in the Southwest,” in Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States, ed. Espinosa, Gastón, Elizondo, Virgilio P., and Miranda, Jesse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 19–34 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55. Treviño, Roberto, The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in Houston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 89 Google Scholar.

56. Matovina, , Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 108 Google Scholar.

57. Quoted in Treviño, , The Church in the Barrio, 86–87 Google Scholar.

58. Gomez and Vásquez, USCCB “Hispanic Ministry Study.”

59. McGreevy, , Parish Boundaries, 22 Google Scholar.

60. Stevens-Arroyo, , “From Barrios to Barricades,” 585 Google Scholar.

61. Treviño, , The Church in the Barrio, 4 Google Scholar.

62. Ibid., 4–5.

63. Elizondo, Virgilio P., Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1983)Google Scholar.

64. Mary Kay Davalos, “The Real Way of Praying,” in Horizons of the Sacred.

65. Treviño, The Church in the Barrio, and León, La Llorona's Children.

66. Here I am thinking of Otto Maduro who, at every meeting, notes that, while exploring how mestizo elements of Latino Christianity reveal elements of resistance and cultural persistence, it tends to make Latino religious practice exotic. “Go to the suburbs,” he often exclaims.

67. McGreevy, “Religious Roots,” 420.

68. See the USCCB memo “Fifteen Questions on the Quinceañeras.” Interestingly, the memo notes the Mesoamerican origins of this ceremony.

69. Matovina, , Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 147 Google Scholar.

70. Camacho interview, May 2006.

71. Arrington, Leonard, History of Idaho, 2 vols. (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1994), 2:287 Google Scholar.

72. Popkey, Dan, “Rev. Camacho Ministers with Love and Soccer,” Idaho Statesman, October 13, 2006 Google Scholar.

73. “Between Two Cultures: Catholic Church Must Meet Challenges of Ministry to Hispanic Youth,” National Catholic Reporter, January 30, 2004.