While Hispanics [Chicanos] were the first Catholic . . . inhabitants to establish settlements in territories now under U.S. control, for much of U.S. history Hispanics have constituted a relatively . . . overlooked group within U.S. Catholicism.

Timothy Matovina and Gerald Poyo

They can take away everything else from me but not my faith.

Father Virgilio Elizondo

Becoming a Chicano Catholic

As a student at the University of Texas at El Paso (then named Texas Western College) in the early to mid-1960s, I drove my grandmother Nama to 6:30 Mass every Sunday morning. These years coincided with Vatican Council II, but its liturgical reforms had not yet become evident. The council (1962-1965) had been called by Pope John XXIII to revitalize and breathe some fresh air into the Catholic Church. The Mass I took Nama to was a quiet one, with few in attendance, always the same people. Every Sunday we sat in the same pew at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Arizona Avenue, about a mile from our rented house on the same street on Golden Hill with its sweeping vista of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez to the south. I could see the border and south to Mexico, where Nama had come from many years before during the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

At Mass only the drone of the priest's prayers in Latin could be heard. No homily was preached, so we were out by 7 a.m. We would walk to the car—my mother's, not mine—but before driving home we always stopped at the Mexican bakery, or panadería, on Nevada Street, just a couple of blocks from the church. Invariably we ordered the same Mexican breads with colorful names that I, an acculturated Mexican American, never learned. The teenage girl behind the counter, whom I had a crush on, was the daughter of the owner, and she would give us an extra piece of bread, a pilón, as Nama called it. We then drove home, where my aunt, Tanaca, had breakfast ready while my mother and siblings still slept. Breakfast consisted of fresh flour tortillas that Nama and Tanaca had prepared early in the morning before Mass. Hot tortillas with butter, eggs over easy, a beef patty, hot coffee, and an orange drink called Tang, a powder that you mixed with water, was my big Sunday breakfast. Then, in the cool of the morning in summertime or the bright glare of the winter sun, I would retire to devour the Sunday El Paso Times.

Religion, specifically Catholicism, was always a part of my life. Not a day passed that I wasn't aware of this. It was a Catholicism first planted in the Southwest by Spanish Franciscan friars and over time influenced by both Mexicans and Anglo-Americans (mostly Irish Americans) in a border context. But I wasn't yet aware of all of these historical influences. Awareness would come later, and my education continues to this day.

My family was Catholic but not in a showy, exaggerated way. That wouldn't have been fitting for the Araizas, my mother's family, which saw itself as gente decente, or people properly brought up, and from the better classes that had escaped the Mexican Revolution. My great-grandfather Araiza was a well-to-do landowner in northern Chihuahua and partner to American mining companies. His fate was sealed as a supporter of Francisco Madero, the "Apostle" of Mexican democracy, who raised his banner against the long-standing dictator Porfirio Díaz. My great-grandfather was executed, and his family fled to the border and crossed into El Paso. They left everything but their honor and middle-class Catholic values behind.

We were Catholics, but not barrio Catholics. We weren't part of the barrio experience. My mother, born and raised in El Paso, didn't grow up in the big immigrant barrio, El Segundo Barrio, of south El Paso. Her family rented homes in west and central El Paso. Here, the middle-class political refugees from Mexico settled and lived apart from the lower-class immigrants and workers. The refugees built the Catholic church of La Sagrada Familia, or Holy Family Church, in the Sunset Heights area on the west side, where my mother married my father, who came from the state of Durango, thus bridging the Mexican American experience with the mexicano.

But we were always on the move north of the tracks, where the more aspiring Mexican Americans resided. First on Missouri Street, where I was born, then Yandell Boulevard, then Wyoming Street, and then finally to Arizona Avenue, all in the central part of El Paso.

As a kid, I don't remember particular Catholic images in our various homes. We must have had a crucifix and some holy pictures, but I can't remember any. I think it's because we didn't have too many of these images. My family was religious, but not like the poorer Mexican immigrants with their home icons and popular religious traditions. I think this was how my mother preferred it. She was proud of her ethnic heritage, but as a bicultural and bilingual Mexican American, she also desired American mobility. Appearance was important to her, and she probably didn't want a household that was too Mexican or Catholic Mexican.

I remember, however, the elaborate home altar at the home of my friend and classmate Frank de la Torre. I don't remember if this was Frank's house on Yandell or his grandmother's, but I do remember being there with several other neighborhood kids and being awed by the elaborate nature of the home altar. I don't remember specific images, just the clutter of items on it. It was like having a chapel in the house. I now am more aware that home altars, or altarcitos, big and small, elaborate and simple, are very much a part of Mexican Catholic culture along the border and in the Southwest. Some installation artists such as Amalia Mesa-Bains today have elevated home altars to artistic heights.

I also connected border Catholic culture with older women wearing black. Nama and Tanaca didn't wear black, or at least not often, nor did my mother, but I recall many other women, especially in El Segundo Barrio and around the Catholic churches there such as El Sagrado Corazón, or Sacred Heart Church, always wearing black, including black shawls, and always carrying rosaries in their hands. This darkness mystified me and made those south-side churches with their ornate icons, including darker and more bloody crucified Jesus figures, scary and even threatening to me.

Border and southwestern Catholic culture also prescribed that I attend parochial schools. My mother insisted on it. She had gone to public schools, but she believed, and correctly so, at that time anyway, that the parochial schools provided a better education. So my siblings and I were enrolled in St. Patrick's Elementary School. I remember the images of the Sisters of Loretto who operated and taught in the school. With one or two exceptions, nuns in classic black habits taught every class. Only a small amount of white garment around the rim of the head habit and a bit in the bodice challenged the blackness of the rest of the outfit. The habits seemed heavy and hot, especially for the El Paso climate, which, with the exception of some bitter cold winter weeks, was warm. I can still smell the odor of the habits, noticeable when I drew near one of the nuns. I don't know whether it was the habit or the nun herself, but it smelled of old cloth or an old gunnysack.

I don't recall whether any of these nuns—sisters they're now called—was Mexican American. Perhaps one or two were. The rest were Anglos. I remember some of their names: Sister Charatina, Sister Eugene Marie. They seemed old to me but probably were not. A few looked young and even pretty, though we couldn't see much of their faces.

It was a good education as far as I knew at the time. There was a good spirit about the school. It was a mixed school. Many of us were Mexican Americans, but there were also a good number of Anglos (again, probably Irish Americans). This was the usual pattern in the parochial schools north of the tracks. The schools in south El Paso and east El Paso parishes like Sacred Heart, St. Ignatius, and Guardian Angel had all Mexican Americans.

The other Mexican American kids and I knew mostly Spanish when we entered kindergarten, but we very quickly picked up English. There was no bilingual education at St. Patrick's in the 1950s when I attended, but, unlike the public schools, you were not punished or made to feel bad about speaking Spanish. The sisters were quite strict, but they seemed to care about us.

St. Patrick's under Monsignor Caffrey, with his full head of white hair, was not a "Mexican" parish even though many Mexican Americans attended the church. It was also the official church of Bishop Sidney Metzger, who seemed to reign for years and years. St. Patrick's and the Catholic churches north of the tracks were different from the "Mexican" churches south of the tracks. Our church was more "Anglo." It seemed more airy and roomier than Sacred Heart, for example, which seemed crowded and stifling. Our homilies were in English, while those at Sacred Heart were in Spanish. St. Patrick's was more middle class while Sacred Heart was poor and immigrant.

Yet our whole culture while growing up was very much Catholic. Our education was Catholic, our friends were Catholic, our sports activities were all centered on the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), our social events, such as dances, were all connected to our Catholic school. We lived in a border and southwestern Catholic culture. The metaphor of the border is very appropriate because, like real borders, different influences intersected in what some postcolonial theorists refer to as "contact zones." At St. Patrick's, it was an intersection of our family, Mexican American culture with what I now recognize as largely Irish American culture. St. Patrick may have been an Irish saint, but he was our saint as well and not as San Patricio but as St. Patrick. We proudly wore the green and white of our school athletic uniforms.

When I attended the local Catholic high school, Cathedral High School, just up the street from St. Patrick's, I identified with the school's nickname, the "Irish." Our colors were blue and gold, patterned after the University of Notre Dame, and our school song was the Notre Dame fight song. I'll never forget attending, as a member of the school basketball team, the Texas Catholic High School Basketball Tournament in San Antonio in 1961. Before one of our games, an older Anglo gentleman came up to us and asked us why we called ourselves Irish since we were all Mexican Americans. We didn't know what to say. This was before the Chicano movement. "It's our team name," we told him.

Catholic high school only added to my Catholic experience. The boys—the majority Mexican Americans—attended Cathedral, run by the Christian Brothers, while the girls, including, later, my own sister, attended Loretto High School, run by the Sisters of Loretto. The kids from south El Paso at Cathedral introduced me to Chicano barrio culture, which made me more aware of ethnicity. It wasn't that ethnic identity was not part of our growing up. It was. We knew we were Mexicans. How couldn't we? I spoke only Spanish to Nama and Tanaca, who knew little or no English. They didn't really need to because El Paso was such a predominantly Spanish-speaking city, with even more Mexicans across the border in Juárez. But we saw ourselves as middle-class Mexican Americans.

At Cathedral I learned more about barrio culture from my south El Paso classmates. I first heard the term Chicano, which the barrio students used as a term of identity. I didn't identify fully with Chicano, but the swagger and what seemed to be pride in identifying as Chicano fascinated me. I was impressed by the Elvis-style ducktail hair the Chicanos wore almost like a crown. I tried to comb a ducktail but with little success, probably because my hair was shorter than theirs. My cowlick always bounced back despite the large amount of hair gel I put on. I liked these kids, although I didn't run around with them. They were more barrio and working-class kids, while I was used to more middle-class friends. However, I played sports with some of them. I think this connection, fascination even, with the barrio students because they were different left an unconscious base for my later work as a historian, such as my history of Mexican immigrant El Paso, which focused on the south side and described the ancestors of many of the Chicanos I went to school with at Cathedral. By later studying and writing about this history, I came to appreciate what I didn't know as a middle-class Mexican American high school student from the "right side of the tracks."

Catholicism in El Paso was not just part of family and school life; it also had a public face. I particularly recall the large procession on the feast day of Corpus Christi each June. Because the temperature at this time of the year approaches one hundred degrees during the hottest time of day, the procession began at 5 p.m., when it had cooled off somewhat. I marched in one while in high school. We gathered at the front of St. Patrick's, people covering the front steps and spilling onto Arizona Avenue and Mesa Boulevard. I remember the richly colored robes of the clergy, including those of the bishop. Especially attractive were the elaborate outfits of the Knights of Columbus with their white-plumed hats and their black and red capes. It was, as the kids say now, awesome. We marched down Mesa into the downtown area, stopping to pray at decorated temporary Stations of the Cross or makeshift altars. People came from all of the parishes; some recited the rosary in English and some in Spanish. The procession through the streets of the city stopped all traffic. The later antiwar marches of the 1960s reminded me of these processions. The procession snaked its way into south El Paso, where it seemed to take on an even more Mexican character. It finally ended at Sacred Heart in El Segundo Barrio. By now it was evening, and this gave the ceremony within the already-somber church an even darker appearance. Everything was in Spanish now and more of a Mexican ritual.

I remember going a few times with my family, including my father, to Cristo Rey, a high hill overlooking the El Paso Smelter on one side and Juárez on the other side of the Rio Grande. At the top of the hill was a large cross of the crucified Jesus dedicated to Christ the King, or Cristo Rey. At different times of the year, but I mostly remember summertime, people made pilgrimages up the hill. It was a winding road, and mostly dark-shawled Mexican women prayed the rosary as they went up the hill. Like the Corpus Christi procession, this impressed me probably because of the spectacle of it all.

Visits to the Evergreen Cemetery, going over the bridge to Juárez to visit the cathedral on that side of the border, accompanying Nama when she took my little sister, Alma María, to offer flowers to the Virgin Mary at a small church on the edge of the barrio, all of these and more remain memories of what Catholicism meant to me growing up in El Paso, along the U.S.-Mexican border, and in the Southwest.

My Catholic faith was very much a part of a particular region. It had a southwestern touch. I now appreciate this more, but in a way my earlier work as a historian of the Chicano experience was already leading me in this direction.

Chicanismo and Catholicism

By the time I was in graduate school in the early 1970s at the University of California, San Diego, I wasn't as Catholic as I was when growing up in El Paso. By now I had become a Chicano owing to my involvement with the Chicano movement when I came to California in 1969. "Chicanismo" replaced Catholicism as my faith. It seemed more relevant to my life then. But I was still culturally a Catholic. I couldn't escape my Catholic upbringing.

As I look back on this highly politicized period in my life, I think my concern for issues of social justice, civil rights, human rights, and respect for people of all backgrounds had its origins in my Catholic background. I didn't become a Chicano out of thin air. My progressive political views were tied in part to my Catholic faith, taught to me by the sisters and brothers. I can't pinpoint any specific doctrine or biblical teachings that constitutes this influence. It was just a general sense that we were all people of God and that God did not support such things as racism and discrimination. Growing up during the civil rights era, I sensed in my high school years that what that movement stood for was the right thing and that as Catholics we should support it.

I remember watching on television as a sophomore in college Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963 and being moved by his stirring words. I think my reaction had to do with my own ethnic background as a Mexican American. In the early 1960s, I certainly wasn't politically conscious in ethnic terms, but I believe that part of my positive response to the black civil rights movement had to do with identifying with the underdogs. In my town, Mexican Americans were the underdogs. Growing up along the border, you couldn't help but distinguish between Anglos and Mexican Americans. Even though we had a Mexican American mayor, Raymond Telles, whose biography I would later write, most of the faces in the newspapers and on television, especially those representing business, civic, and social circles, were predominantly Anglos. The annual Sun Carnival Pageant over the Christmas holidays always had an Anglo queen and mostly Anglo princesses, the exception being the representative from Juárez across the border. I always thought this a bit strange since Anglos were a minority in El Paso.

I think that whatever political and even intellectual ideas I had then were shaped by my Catholicism and by being Mexican American in a border context. The Mexican part was intuitive and emotional, the Catholic, cerebral and intellectual. These two characteristics gave me the foundation on which I built my later conscious politics when I became part of the Chicano movement in the late 1960s and after I moved from El Paso to California.

This move influenced my ethnic identity as a Chicano—a term that I now embraced. I rethought my identity and took on a more radical, militant attitude concerning ethnic identity and prejudice. But my conversion to Chicanismo wasn't as big a leap as I might have considered it at the time. During much of the 1960s, I saw myself as a liberal Democrat. I supported not only civil rights, but also liberal reforms such as the War on Poverty, and gradually became more skeptical of the Vietnam War. In retrospect, I don't think it was such a huge change to go from liberalism to radical Chicano movement politics that stood for Chicanos not being ashamed of their ethnic background and for pushing more militantly for civil rights and equal opportunities.

As I became a Chicano radical, however, I also became less of a practicing Catholic. Chicanismo, or what was called cultural nationalism, absorbed my intensity and interest. I remember in the fall of 1969, shortly after arriving in California as an instructor of history at San Jose State College (later University), attending Mass in a downtown San Jose church and thinking how irrelevant the priest's homily now that I had been stirred by movement rhetoric and the excitement of participating in marches and demonstrations. My public Catholicism began to wane. During the next two decades, I attended Mass and other religious services only occasionally. These were my radical Marxist years, when I combined being a Chicano—in a political sense—with being a Marxist and joining the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party.

I wasn't a public Catholic, but I believe my earlier Catholic ideals still complemented my new secular ones. From a certain cultural and psychological perspective, my Catholic school formation was still very much a part of me. This included a sense of discipline, respect for others, and a certain proper behavior (which often conflicted with radical politics). I didn't completely abandon the Church. I suppose if asked then what my religion was, I would have still answered, "Catholic." I was a "cultural Catholic," to use Andrew Greeley's term. When I got married in 1979, I knew I wanted a Catholic ceremony. My wife, whom I met in graduate school, is also Catholic, although of Irish-Italian background. It's possible that we found much in common because of our similar Catholic upbringing, including attending parochial schools. In fact, my wife had done me one better. She had attended a Catholic college, graduating from Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution. Because of her Santa Clara affiliation, we were married in the beautiful Santa Clara Mission. I had no problem with this. I was still a Catholic.

History and Liberation Theology

But what does all of this have to do with my career as a historian? Historians and other scholars bring to their disciplines a whole baggage of cultural, social, political, ideological formation. What they chose to study is more than an intellectual and scholarly interest. They study in part based on who they are. Writing history is also autobiographical. "The storyteller is often as important as the story being told," the historian Michael P. Carroll observes. This doesn't mean that as a historian of Catholic background, I chose to work only on Catholic subjects, although, in my case, I am now doing so. But it does mean that one’s personal experiences have a lot to do with one’s research choices. The historian is a product of his or her own history. I agree with Timothy Matovina, one of the leading scholars of Latino religion, when he writes, "Every attempt at scholarly analysis is filtered through the lens of the interpreter's bias and social location."

In my case, I think the combination of my Catholic liberalism, which included accepting the new progressive winds of change brought on by Vatican II, and my political radicalism as a result of my involvement in the Chicano movement affected my research and intellectual interests. I chose to work on Chicano history, but it was a history that, in retrospect, was a liberating history. I was not conscious of liberation theology as it was developing in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. Liberation theology endorsed social change, even revolutionary change, and called on the Church to have a "preferential option for the poor." However, when I began my dissertation research, which in 1981 became my book Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920, I chose to focus on poor Mexican immigrant workers. This was, in a way, accepting a preferential option for the poor. It is a history that in a scholarly sense is aimed at uncovering the role of Chicanos in U.S. history, but at another level is also aimed at showing how the discovery or rediscovery of that history (I was in fact rediscovering my own history in El Paso) could likewise be liberating for Chicanos. A significant part of Chicanismo was knowing oneself through a rediscovering of one's roots in pre-Columbian history, in Mexico, and as a Chicano. The truth, or in this case history, would set us free. It would free us from what Carlos Fuentes calls "mental colonization." Chicano history and those of us who researched and wrote it were both scholars and, in a sense, "theologians." Our history had a dual purpose, although it was certainly written in a professional academic style. Still, the histories that my colleagues and I wrote were not written solely for a professional audience, but also for the movement, for Chicanos, our communities, and for advocating La Causa—the cause of freedom and social justice.

This theological involvement with history—this liberating aspect to my writing of Chicano history—was not only, I believe, the result of secular politics. It was part of my Catholic soul. It was my unconscious reflection on the Passion, the crucifixion of Jesus, carrying my cross, and the resurrection that would follow. I may have come from a middle-class Mexican American Catholic background, but my Catholic sensibility and imagination along with my ethnic border position and my later radical politics did not divorce me from the oppression of the poor. Indeed, it made me sympathetic to researching not only the Mexican immigrant poor, but also the Mexican American middle class (see my Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology and Identity, 1930-1960) because I knew, having been raised in a struggling middle-class household, that to be middle class and Mexican American also meant experiencing degrees of discrimination, injustice, exclusion, and being treated as a "stranger." When I chose to write about the civil rights and labor rights struggles of what I call the Mexican American Generation between the 1930s and 1960s, I again was continuing that liberationist tendency. To be a Catholic, a Chicano Catholic, along the U.S.-Mexico border and in the Southwest is to be an underdog—what the great novelist of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Mariano Azuela, referred to as "los de abajo."

This emphasis on liberation extends to some of my other works. In my oral history, or testimonio, of Bert Corona, a major Chicano labor and civil rights leader (Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona), I focused on Corona's long history of giving his life, almost in a sacrificial way, to empowering poor and oppressed Chicanos. In my edited volume on Ruben Salazar, a leading Mexican American journalist who championed the rights of Mexican Americans (Ruben Salazar, Border Correspondent: Selected Writings, 1955-1970), I stressed not only Salazar's writings on the impact of discrimination and exclusion on Mexican Americans, but how Salazar supported the Chicano movement for liberation. And in the coming-of-age story I coauthored with Frances Esquibel Tywoniak—the tale of a young Mexican American girl in the 1940s in the San Joaquin Valley (Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as Mexican American Woman)—we highlighted a daughter of migrant parents who struggled to make something of herself through education and who went on to dedicate herself, almost in a missionary sense, to teach the children of poor Latino families.

All of these texts have to do with the concept of liberation. They do not ostensibly focus on Catholic themes; however, they are guided, in my opinion, by my ingrained Catholic faith and sensitivity to the marginalized. Not all of this has to do, of course, with just Catholicism. The Chicano movement resonates in my research as well. But the liberationist character of these studies is the product of more than sectarian political influences. I believe there is also a certain spirituality to them that speaks to my own faith background.

Yes, I know some will say, "He's really straining here to make the Catholic connection, and he's reading back what might have not been there at all." This is a reasonable response. I am reading back. But in so doing, I truly believe there is a religious and certainly moral influence in my early work as a historian that in part has to do with my Catholic background.

Chicano Catholic History

My previous work, which I now interpret as a form of liberation theology and of my personal changes, including my rediscovery of my Chicano Catholic background, has brought me to this current work on Chicano Catholic history—my first effort at researching and conceptualizing this field of study. Like most things in life, however, change is rooted in a particular context. For me, this context involved my work in the mid-1990s with a small group of graduate students interested in Chicano/Latino religious subjects. One of these students, Gaston Espinosa, came specifically to UCSB to work with me and to develop a dissertation on early Latino Pentecostal movements in the United States. Luis León and Darryl Caterine, both graduate students in religious studies, asked me to be a member of their examination and dissertation committees and to work with them in the area of Chicano history with some emphasis on religion. I was most happy to assist them and am proud that all three completed their degrees and have gone on to academic and professional careers.

This work with the students stimulated my interest in Chicano religious history. In addition, and of great consequence for me, Espinosa approached me about organizing a conference—one of the first of its kind—on Chicano religions. This was to be an interdisciplinary conference that would include inviting a number of scholars from diverse disciplines working on various facets of what we called Chicano religions, which included not only Catholicism but Protestantism and Pentecostalism as well. Espinosa and I coorganized the conference in 1995, and it was, we believed, very successful. This experience not only moved me further in the direction of religious studies, but also specifically led to my initial research in Chicano Catholic history. Wanting to participate fully in the conference by reading a paper in addition to helping organize it, I decided to write a paper on Católicos Por La Raza, a Chicano Catholic group associated with the militant Chicano movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a student of Chicano history and of the Chicano movement, I was aware of the role of Católicos and of their struggle to make the Catholic Church in Los Angeles more relevant to the Chicano community. The conference, however, gave me the opportunity to research Católicos more extensively. No study of the group, which emerged in 1969, had been done. I spent the months leading up to the conference preparing my paper and then delivering it.

Encouraged by the positive response to my Católicos paper and stimulated by our conference, I began to think of doing additional research in Chicano Catholic history. I began to conceptualize a project that would provide a sense of the evolution of this historical experience over the course of the twentieth century, when Chicanos become a major ethnic group within the United States. This would not be an overview, but specific case studies of the role of Catholicism in Chicano life. I also knew that not every period in that century could be covered, but I hoped to unravel enough research sources to provide sufficient coverage of this time frame. On the basis of my knowledge of Chicano history and my previous research, I was fortunate to discover various archival collections along with the ethnographic employment of oral histories I compiled to put together a panorama of Chicano Catholic history based on case studies. Some of this research I presented at various religious studies conferences in California and elsewhere in order to get feedback and suggestions for revisions. This book is the result of my several years of research.

This work was also motivated by my recognition of the dearth of research in Chicano Catholic history. This remains a very underexplored area in an otherwise booming field of Chicano history. This is not just my assessment, but also that of various other historians and scholars. Roberto Treviño astutely observes, "The religious history of Mexican Americans remains understudied despite their long association with Catholicism and their growing importance in the American Catholic Church today." The number of monographs, and even articles, on religion and the Chicano historical experience is still quite scant. The same is true of the larger field of Chicano and Latino studies. I agree with Anthony Stevens-Arroyo and Ana María Díaz-Stevens when they write, "Although we admire the many university-based Latino and Latina scholars engaged in Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American Studies who have greatly enriched the knowledge of Latino experiences, we note with disappointment that most of them have afforded only limited and superficial importance to religion." David Badillo in his recent study of Latino religions also brings attention to this gap: "Religion's primacy has often been ignored in academic writing and other studies on modern Latinos." Luis León expands on this neglect when he writes, "Lamentably, religious thought and practice throughout the borderlands remain largely 'undocumented' in primary texts."

Recognizing this historical vacuum, I hoped I could contribute to fill it to some extent. As Bishop Ricardo Ramírez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, notes in regard to the importance of Chicano Catholic history: "History can be a powerful tool in the clarification of a people's identity and in the unification of its various components."

How does one explain that the field of Chicano Catholic history has been little explored? It cannot be because Catholicism is not a major influence on Chicanos as well as other Latinos. There is no question that religion, specifically, Catholicism, in both its institutional and popular religious forms, has been a central factor in the history of Chicanos in the United States, as it is, of course, in Mexico also.

In my estimation, the neglect of Chicano Catholic history is related to the development of Chicano studies as a field of study beginning in the late 1960s. Chicano studies is a product of the Chicano movement. It helped to institutionalize the intellectual and philosophical tenets of the movement. This included Chicanismo, the ideological grab bag that was rooted in what the movement referred to as cultural nationalism. This stressed a renewed sense of pride in being Chicano and of rediscovering the historical roots of the Chicano, especially the pre-European indigenous background. This emphasis, in turn, led to the further discovery and embrace of the concept of Aztlán, the mythic homeland of the Aztecs that Chicanos conveniently located in the Southwest. Aztlán became the historical birthplace of Chicanos, who eschewed the suggestion that Chicanos were immigrants like many other Americans.

However, the historical homeland also became the lost land as a result of the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848, which led to the taking of Mexico's northern territory, what became the American Southwest, by Yankees under the sway of Manifest Destiny. The conquest of Aztlán imposed U.S. racial attitudes and practices that relegated the newly formed Mexican American population to second-class citizenship and led to the rejection and subjugation of Mexican American cultural traditions and practices. Chicanismo embodied these historical insights and imaginations as well as other views that together formed a new Chicano cognizant of his and her history, emboldened by a new consciousness, identity, and collective personality prepared to wage a struggle for liberation.

Chicanismo and the Chicano movement were largely articulated in secular terms. While it was certainly not devoid of religious influences, for example, César Chávez's farmworkers' struggle and Católicos Por La Raza, for the most part the movement saw itself as a secular one. Indeed, because of its opposition to establishment institutions, the movement, as in the case of Católicos, considered the Catholic Church part of an oppressive system. In fact, as León correctly observes, Catholicism has always represented a dialectic among Mexicans on both sides of the border. While, on the one hand, especially in its institutional form, it has served as an ideology of domination, at another level, especially as León further notes, within popular religiosity it has functioned as a means of resistance. "In short," León asserts, "religion—broadly and personally defined—in addition to serving power as an ideological mechanism of social control, exploitation, and domination, is also effectively deployed in attempts to destabilize those very same forces by people who have access to only the bare resources that constitute conventional power." I agree with León. Although I challenge some of the stress on the secularism of the movement as more religious influences are discovered, still the lingering impression then and even now in Chicano studies circles is that religion played little role in the movement. Gaston Espinosa, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda observe that this misconception "contributed to the long-standing perception that religion has not had an important role in Latino political, civic, and social action." Chicano studies integrated this impression in the form of intellectual "constraints," to use Foucault's term, that did not allow other ways of thinking about the role of religion. As a result, the field’s curriculum and research emphasis, for the most part, excluded religious themes or relegated them, as Matovina and Poyo note, to a "peripheral topic." Today, almost forty years after the founding of the first Chicano studies programs, it is still difficult to find many courses that specifically focus on Chicano religion. As noted, this has also had an impact on the lack of research and publications in this area as well.

Yet, despite this omission, there has been a gradual emergence since the late 1980s of what can be called Latino religious studies. Many of these studies are theological in nature or what Andrés Guerrero calls a "Chicano theology of liberation." As the Latino population in the country has exploded in the past thirty years or so and now, numbering over forty million, is the largest minority, this has had an impact on churches such as the Catholic Church given the large number of Latino Catholics. Estimates suggest that Latinos now compose between 40 and 50 percent of all Catholics in the United States. Beginning in the late 1960s, as part of the Chicano movement but likewise influenced by the reforms of Vatican Council II, Chicano/Latino Catholic priests, sisters, and laypeople organized to bring about a new sensibility within the Church to this demographic revolution. This development can be considered the "browning of the Catholic Church" or its "Latinization" or what Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo call the "Latino resurgence in U.S. religion."

Led by key theologians/scholars such as Virgilio Elizondo, Roberto Goizueta, Allan Figueroa Deck, Orlando Espin, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Ana María Pineda, and various others, there has emerged a growing Latino theological response to these changes and challenges related to Latinos in the Church. Some similar work by Latino Protestant theologians has also surfaced. Latino theology in general stresses the particular religious traditions and practices of Latino Catholics, for example, especially those rooted in popular religiosity or the way people practice their faith on a daily basis, as opposed to the role of the institutional Church, which has actually in too many cases been hostile to Latino Catholics and to their popular religious traditions. Latino theology, moreover, in the age of academic multiculturalism, stresses a more pluralistic approach to religion and to the role of ethnicity and culture in the practice of religion. It reflects what the Protestant theologian Justo González refers to as "reading the Bible in Spanish," a metaphor for the inclusion of Latino theological insights in interpreting or reinterpreting the Bible. There is no question that Chicano/Latino theologians have, in turn, helped to stimulate academic scholarship in this area as well.

As a result, more academic studies, primarily in the social sciences but also in the humanistic wing of religious studies, have likewise been produced in the past few years as part of Latino religious studies. However, the one area still less researched is history. This is not to say that history has been entirely neglected. Indeed, in the academic studies as well as in the theological ones, most writers pay some attention to history, although without recurring to actual primary research in historical sources. The few specific historical studies fall into two categories. The first are overviews employing mostly secondary sources, although with some use of primary archival ones. These would include important introductory texts such as Moises Sandoval's On the Move: A History of the Hispanic Church in the United States. One groundbreaking text in the area of Chicano Catholic history that bridges secondary research with primary research is the coedited volume by Jay Dolan and Gilberto Hinojosa Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900-1965. This book focuses on the history of Mexican American Catholics in the Southwest, California, and the Midwest and on the importance of religion, in this case Catholicism, to the Chicano experience. In my estimation, this text is the best general historical study to date on Chicano Catholic history. At the same time, it represents an overview of this history.

Second, there is a small but growing body of historical work grounded in archival and oral history sources and on specific topics (as opposed to overviews) that is beginning to discover the significant role of religion, faith, and spirituality in the lives of Chicano Catholics. Of these, I would mention the work of Matovina, who has examined the nineteenth-century roots of Chicano Catholic popular religiosity in San Antonio, as well as his more recent and excellent study of the role that the adoration of Our Lady of Guadalupe has played in the history of San Antonio's Mexican American Catholics. More recently, two significant studies dealing with the Chicano movement period have been published. Lara Medina's fine work on Las Hermanas, the organization of Chicana Catholic sisters in the early 1970s, is a significant contribution to revising the impression, as noted, that the Chicano movement was largely bereft of religious influences. Likewise, Richard Edward Martínez's study of PADRES, the organization of Chicano Catholic priests in the late 1960s that strove to improve the status of Chicano priests and to sensitize the Church to Chicano/Latino needs and religious traditions, challenges these earlier misconceptions about the role of religion in the movement. Other historical studies include Félix D. Almaráz's sweeping biography of the Mexican American Catholic historian Carlos Eduardo Castañeda. In light of his older studies of the Church in Texas, Castañeda in some respects could be considered the father of Mexican American Catholic history. What distinguishes Castañeda work from the new literature is that his studies focused primarily on institutions rather than concentrating on Mexican American Catholics as a people. By contrast, perhaps the best study of a Mexican American Catholic community is Roberto R. Treviño's recent book on Houston. A comparative history of Latino Catholics, including Chicanos, is David A. Badillo's Latinos and the New Immigrant Church. There are also some monographs that while not specifically focused on Catholicism include the role of religion. An excellent example is Anthony Quiroz's study of the history of Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas, which includes a fine chapter on the relationship of Mexican Americans to the Church. Still another is Linda Gordon's outstanding study of Mexican American miners in early twentieth-century Arizona and the controversy over what she calls "the great Arizona orphan abduction." These studies, along with some journal articles and dissertations, are laying the foundation for the field of Chicano/Latino Catholic history. My book, which is based exclusively on primary sources, contributes to this developing field.

But if Chicano studies has neglected Chicano religions, so too has the larger field of U.S. religious studies, especially Catholic studies. With few exceptions, such as the work of Jay Dolan at Notre Dame, most historians of U.S. Catholicism seem totally ignorant or blasé about the role of Chicanos/Latinos in the history of the U.S. Church. "While Hispanics were the first Catholic . . . inhabitants to establish settlements in territories now under U.S. control," write Matovina and Poyo, "for much of U.S. history Hispanics have constituted a relatively small and frequently overlooked group within U.S. Catholicism." This gap represents part of what Juan Hurtado calls the "social distance" between Chicanos and the Catholic Church. What little does exist, according to Lawrence Mosqueda, "is limited and primarily impressionistic." Hence, the importance of Chicano Catholic history transcends Chicano studies and, hopefully, these studies will lead U.S. Catholic studies to integrate Chicano/Latino Catholic studies and "re-map," to use Matovina's and Gary Riebe-Estrella's term, Catholic studies as a whole in this country. As Sandoval critically observes about the neglect of Chicano/Latino Catholics by U.S. Catholic historians in the Southwest,

Church historians in the United States have given little attention to Hispanics. Though the Catholic Church had been firmly rooted in the Southwest for 250 years when the United States seized that region from Mexico in 1846, most historians imply that the church was really established by the non-Hispanic bishops and clergy who came after the conquest. Whenever Hispanics are mentioned in those histories, their religious expression is often demeaned; whenever there is controversy, their point of view is left out. Parish histories, even in places where Hispanics are now the majority, seldom mention them. It is as if they did not exist.

Resistance and Affirmation

This book reflects two dominant themes that have emerged in both Latino theology and Latino religious studies: resistance and affirmation. Indeed, resistance and affirmation are central expressions in Chicano studies. I borrow the theme from a landmark exhibit at UCLA in 1990 entitled "Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985" (the CARA Exhibit). "Chicano art is the modern, ongoing expression of the long-term cultural, economic, and political struggle of the Mexicano people within the United States," reads the founding statement of the CARA National Advisory Committee. "It is an affirmation of the complex identity and vitality of the Chicano people." If Chicano art is an example of Chicano ethnic and cultural resistance and affirmation, so too, I maintain, is Chicano Catholicism. Discussing my thesis here is not an afterthought. I believe I had to first position my personal context in coming to this study and, second, to address the historiographical vacuum that my study seeks to help fill. Having done so, I now want to discuss my overall thesis. This is particularly important because, unlike a more traditional historical text focused on a single topic, my book encompasses a variety of topics in a case study format. It is an anthology except that I have written all of the chapters myself. Because of this, however, it is important to connect the different case studies. My thesis flows from my reflection of what these chapters have in common.

By resistance I mean that Chicanos over time have resisted attempts to deprive them of their religious identity and of their religious traditions and practices, especially those associated with popular religiosity—the religion of the people that is not always linked to the institutional church. Resistance by Mexican Americans to what Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo term "pious colonialism" and what Guerrero refers to as "spiritual colonization" imposed by the U.S. Catholic Church after the American conquest of Mexico's northern territory in 1848 often took a religious form. "We think," Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo note, "that religious traditions serve as a collective memory for the colonized, preserving a cultural identity that cannot be easily destroyed even by military conquest." Although affected by the forces of Anglo-Catholic acculturation, what Matovina and Riebe-Estrella term the "Segundo Mestizaje," Chicanos and other Latinos have struggled—personally and collectively—to retain their identity as Mexican/Chicano/Latino Catholics. This can be interpreted as both a religious and political response and as what Treviño refers to as "ethno-Catholicism" and Gina Marie Pitti calls "ethno-religious identity." This was their way, as Dolan and Hinojosa stress, of understanding the Church as community. Thomas Steele further notes that religion "protected the culture . . . from the worst of all failures: the loss of the people's confidence in their way of life." Resistance has included remembering and passing on traditions and practices associated with weddings, baptisms, quinceañeras, feast days, blessings, home altars, pilgrimages, and key religious holidays, such as the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12. Such remembering was a way, Treviño observes, of fostering self-respect and confidence among Mexican American Catholics. Matovina, in his history of Guadalupe celebrations and rituals at the historic San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, links these events to Mexican American ethnic resistance: "Guadalupe celebrations at San Fernando have often ritually counteracted the hostility and disdain that ethnic Mexicans have endured in San Antonio, dramatically positing an alternative worldview that reinforces their sense of dignity and personhood and enables them to combat prejudicial views and the expectation that they become 'Americanized.'" Linking the popular religiosity of Chicanos to that of the workers and peasants of Latin America, the theologian Alan Figueroa Deck writes, "For popular religiosity is one of the more powerful forms of cultural resistance that exists in Latin America." Hinojosa adds, "Traditional Catholic devotions energized their [Mexican Americans’] spirituality and complemented their religiosity, assisting the faith community to survive exploitation and change." The one corrective I would add here, based on my research, is that not all Chicano Catholic resistance, as additional critics such as Luis León argue, has been based solely on popular religiosity, as the above quotations suggest. Chicano Catholic resistance has also been asserted in more public political venues, as several of my chapters reveal. That is, resistance has also come in the form of overt political struggles that are faith-based and that, while undoubtedly influenced to an extent by popular religion, go beyond that in more public displays of Chicano Catholic political movements. As León astutely observes, "Religions are shaped and reshaped in the struggle for political power."

But the other side of resistance is affirmation. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin. To resist is to affirm. As Bishop Ricardo Ramírez, a leading exponent of liberation theology among Chicanos, stresses, "The struggle of Hispanic Americans to maintain their cultural-religious character has gone hand in hand with the social-economic-political struggle." By struggling to maintain, adapt, and pass on particular ethnic religious traditions, Chicanos likewise have affirmed their identity and religious culture. Father Elizondo notes about Chicano Catholics, "They can take away everything else from me but not my faith." The interrelated themes of resistance and affirmation, at the same time, coincide with the broader historical experiences of Chicanos in the United States as they resist discrimination and exploitation and affirm their ethnic and cultural identity. Indeed, in my own work in Chicano history, these themes are manifest in my focus on such issues as civil rights and labor struggles, political representation, community leadership, and personal efforts to construct Chicano identity.

Yet, the twin themes of resistance and affirmation—whether in a religious, cultural, or political context—do not, and should not, convey a static, monolithic process. Religious identity and culture, like political identity and culture, are evolutionary. Different historical and social conditions impact this change. Moreover, within Chicano Catholicism there is a range of evolving differences that relate to the historical, cultural, and political diversity of Chicanos. These differences include immigration status, the U.S.-born populations, class context, regional location, cultural and language variables, political identifications, gender, and, of course, religious diversity. My case studies suggest such evolving differences.

These differences likewise include terminology. I understand that the term Chicano remains a debatable one. Not every person of Mexican descent employs it or relates to it. This is self-evident. I am using the term Chicano in my main title and as an umbrella reference term because it is used by my fellow historians to encompass their studies concerning Mexican American history. There is a field called Chicano history just as there is a discipline called Chicano studies. My book, and hence my use of Chicano in the title, deliberately engage these fields. My study is in dialogue with Chicano history and Chicano studies. This dialogue is similar to that of Treviño in his book on Mexican American Catholicism in Houston. Although Trevino does not use the term Chicano in his title, he acknowledges in his introduction that his work aims at a "recovery of Chicano religious history." Having said that, I also acknowledge that historically outside the academy people of Mexican descent in the United States use various terms. As a result, the chapters will reference certain regional and historical terms, for example, Hispano, Mexican American, and, of course, Chicano. At various points, in order to suggest a certain connection with other people of Latin American descent in this country, I will use the term Latino. But I use the term Chicano because the context of my study is Chicano history.

In resisting discrimination and exploitation and affirming their cultural identity, Chicanos likewise address the issue of poverty. Chicanos have historically been a poor people, working as cheap labor in agriculture, mining, railroads, construction as well as urban industries and services, including domestic work. As a result, Chicano theologians and scholars further emphasize the importance of writing a Chicano Catholic history from the perspective of the poor. They encourage others to adopt in their studies a preferential option for the poor. Sandoval, for example, urges "a new kind of church history emphasizing the religious experience of the poor." I accept this challenge and have written this book largely from that perspective and in the hope of influencing the "critical consciousness" advocated by Figueroa Deck in his writings.

Hence, resistance and affirmation characterize the chapters in my book. Although each chapter stands on its own as an individual slice of Chicano Catholic history, the chapters are tied together, in one form or another, by the expression of resistance and affirmation. This is what holds them together collectively.

In Chapter One, I interpret the work of Fray Angélico Chávez, a Franciscan friar and one of the most significant historians of Hispano Catholicism in New Mexico in the twentieth century, as a form of resistance and affirmation history. Hispano as well as Spanish-American were the terms that people of Spanish/Mexican descent in New Mexico employed following the U.S.-Mexico war and to distinguish themselves from the incoming Anglo-Americans. Reflecting the political, social, and cultural tensions between Hispanos and Anglos in that state, Fray Angélico, through his various histories of Hispano-Catholicism, challenged dominant notions of history in New Mexico after 1848 and the U.S. conquest. By affirming that the history of nonindigenous New Mexico commenced with the Spanish settlements in the seventeenth century, including the major role of the Franciscan missionaries, Fray Angélico brought attention to the Hispano contributions to the history of his native state. In all of his work, he strongly observed the pervasive influence of Hispano-Catholicism in the history and culture of New Mexico. Years before the Chicano movement elaborated its concept of a counterhistory, Fray Angélico, beginning in the 1940s, was proposing his version of an oppositional history to an Anglo-inspired version that marginalized Hispanos/Chicanos.

Resistance and affirmation can likewise be seen in the Chicano civil rights efforts inspired by Catholic social doctrine. This is the thesis laid out in Chapter Two, which concerns the leadership of two vital Mexican American Catholic leaders in Texas from the 1930s to the 1950s: Cleofas Calleros of El Paso and Alonso Perales of San Antonio. In their efforts to deal with racial discrimination against Mexican Americans, both were influenced by Catholic social doctrine. It is their Catholic faith in large part, I argue, that provides their sense of right and wrong and that influences their civil rights leadership. Catholic doctrine and civic culture come together in the work of Calleros and Perales. Their Catholicism provides much of the basis for their resistance to racism and also affirms their sense of the dignity of Mexican Americans as children of God and as citizens of the United States. Calleros and Perales belonged to what I term the Mexican American Generation of that period, who attempted to connect their Mexican cultural background and identity with their position as U.S. citizens—the "third space" that both David Gutiérrez and Gina Marie Pitti employ to suggest the ethnic space occupied by Chicanos. Calleros and Perales represent Hinojosa’s observation of this generation, that it "attempted to define not only what it meant to be Mexican American, but also what it meant to be a Mexican-American Catholic."

The significance and value of Catholic popular religious practices to a sense of identity and community is the theme of Chapter Three. It examines the work of Hispano Works Progress Administration (WPA) personnel as part of the New Deal's Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. This work led to major efforts to record and help preserve the Hispano village culture of northern New Mexico, including religious traditions and practices. Such forms of popular Catholicism had been the central basis of village culture for generations, much of it passed on by oral traditions. It represents what Harvey Cox calls the "people's religion" and what Figueroa Deck refers to as the "Catholic wisdom of the common people." Deprived of access to priests in these sparsely populated and isolated areas, Hispano villagers relied on themselves to maintain their Catholic faith and develop their various rituals, beliefs, and practices, including the observation of the feast days of each village named after a particular saint. This represented what Sandoval calls a "parallel church" or "non-institutional religion." The WPA set out through oral history and observation to record this popular religiosity as a way of validating it and preserving it for future generations. The extensive WPA records for New Mexico are a gold mine for the study of Hispano-Catholic popular religion that, on the one hand, served to resist Americanization at the expense of Hispano culture and, on the other, to affirm those traditions.

By World War II the Catholic Church hierarchy recognized that Mexican American Catholic culture, including the Spanish language, was of vital importance in maintaining the faith among Mexican Americans. Based on the records of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, Chapter Four reflects the resistance, affirmation, and vitality of Mexican-origin Catholic faith in the Southwest at a time when efforts by the Anglo-Catholic Church sought to undermine this faith and impose an Americanized Catholicism on Mexican Americans. Too many Anglo clerics incorrectly regarded Chicano Catholic rituals as a "scandal" and as "superstition." "To preserve the faith of 'Americans,'" Jeffrey Burns observes, "these practices had to be prohibited. Nonetheless, with or without approval, they persisted, reflecting the authentic faith experience on the part of the Mexican/Mexican-American people." The failure of this effort by the period of the war forced the Church to understand that the best way to reach out to Mexican Americans was to utilize Mexican American Catholic traditions, including the use of Spanish. This change of attitude was the result, as the chapter notes, of two key factors. The first is the perceived need by the Church to integrate Mexican Americans into the national effort in support of the war. The war was a test of ethnic Catholics’ loyalty to the United States, and in the Southwest this meant including the large numbers of Mexican American Catholics in the effort. The second reason, and perhaps the more important one, had to do with the Church’s concern over inroads made by Spanish-speaking Protestant and Pentecostal groups into Mexican American communities. Fearing the loss of more Mexican Americans to rival religions, the Church fell back on a more conscious outreach to this community through the validation of various Mexican American faith practices as well as the greater use of Spanish by its clerics. The Church's transformation, or at least partial transformation, prior to the changes of Vatican Council II in the 1960s, which encouraged multiculturalism in the Church through the process of inculturation, in my opinion, speaks to the resistance and affirmation by Mexican American Catholics in the pre-Vatican II years and the pre-Chicano movement era.

The Chicano movement, however, introduced new expressions of resistance and affirmation, as exemplified by the case of Católicos Por La Raza, the focus of Chapter Five. Although displaying new and more militant ideologies and tactics, the movement, as Sandoval notes, was "really part of the same struggle that has characterized the de alings of the Hispanic people with their oppressors ever since the occupation of the Southwest in 1836 and 1848." Organized in 1969 in Los Angeles by young Chicano Catholics who identified with the movement, Católicos challenged the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles for not doing enough for Chicanos, who formed a sizeable percentage of all Catholics in the archdioceses. Espousing a Chicano version of liberation theology, the group called on the Church to return to its roots as a Church for the poor and oppressed rather than continue to be the billion-dollar institution that Católicos charged it with being. Displaying the militancy and confrontational politics of the movement and of 1960s politics, Católicos publicly protested against the Church and, in particular, Cardinal Frances McIntyre, its head in Los Angeles. Its most celebrated demonstration involved a Christmas Eve confrontation at the newly built three-million-dollar St. Basil's Church on Wilshire Boulevard prior to the cardinal's midnight Mass. After holding its own counter-Mass, members of Católicos attempted to enter the church to address their demands to the cardinal, only to be met by undercover police posing as ushers. Confusion and conflict ensued, leading ultimately to the arrest and trial of twenty-one Católicos members. However, their tactics brought attention to their issues and forced the Church, especially after Cardinal McIntyre's resignation following the St. Basil's protest, to address more concretely the conditions of its Mexican American adherents. As noted, Católicos was an example not only of the role played by religion, specifically Catholicism, in the Chicano movement, but also of a new generation of Chicano Catholics who resisted second-class citizenship within their own Church and affirmed through their protests their right to the resources of the Church and to their identity as Chicano Catholics.

Influenced by Católicos and by the Chicano movement, some Chicano Catholic priests, beginning in the 1970s, took up the struggle to link Catholic values to civic life, in particular to advance the conditions of Chicanos/Latinos. Working within the Church but influenced by protest politics, such priests mobilized as community priests engaged in "civil religion." By community priests, I mean those who use the Church as a foundation to reach out to link the Church to civil and human rights struggles affecting the Chicano/Latino communities. They represent the influential roles that parish priests can and do play in community movements. This is where the people are, and some Chicano priests understand this. This is the focus of Chapter Six, which concerns Fathers Juan Romero, Luis Quihuis, and Virgilio Elizondo. Each in his own way displays various characteristics of the meaning of community priest, such as community activist, community organizer, and cultural worker.

In the 1980s a new Chicano/Latino Catholic movement surfaced, one that, although still influenced by the politics of the 1960s, adapted it to changing conditions, specifically, around the issue of providing sanctuary for the thousands of Central American refugees flocking into Los Angeles. This was the sanctuary movement at La Placita Church (Our Lady Queen of Angeles) in downtown Los Angeles led by Father Luis Olivares, the charismatic and dedicated pastor of the church. Olivares and his movement are the subject of Chapter Seven. Fleeing the civil wars in Central America, the refugees were regrettably refused safe haven in the United States. The Reagan administration insisted that the refugees from countries such as El Salvador were not legitimate political refugees but rather undocumented immigrants illegally entering in search of jobs. Rejecting this argument on moral grounds, churches and synagogues in the United States opened their doors to the refugees to shelter them and assist them in their efforts to avoid deportation. In Los Angeles, La Placita led this movement through the leadership of Father Olivares. Father Luis and his supporters, both Latinos and Anglos, resisted efforts to deny the Central Americans safe refuge, insisting that they were obeying a higher law, God's law. They affirmed that human life was above legal technicalities and that sanctuary was more than anything else a moral issue.

Finally, Chapter Eight underscores the continued importance of religion and spirituality, especially popular religiosity, to contemporary Chicano/Latino Catholics. Based on oral history projects conducted by students at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the late 1990s, the chapter explores the resiliency of such popular religious traditions as the role of women in preserving religious practices in the home, what some theologians refer to as "abuelita theology" or "mujerista theology"; blessings; pilgrimages; home altars; celebrating El Día de los Muertos and Our Lady of Guadalupe; and sundry other practices. Interviews with a diverse group of both older and younger Chicanos/Latinos reveal the significance of Catholic rituals in providing a sense of comfort and community in sometimes hostile environments in the United States and of the need for a particular Chicano/Latino Catholic identity.

These eight chapters, in turn, also reflect three important subthemes. One involves the role of Catholic intellectuals in Mexican American communities who have expressed a particular Chicano Catholic perspective through their writings. This includes the work of Fray Angélico Chávez in his many historical texts as well as journal and magazine articles. In addition, Cleofas Calleros and Alonso Perales, besides their community work, likewise served as public intellectuals through their long-standing newspaper columns as well as books. Both are the precursors of contemporary Chicano Catholic journalists like Richard Rodríguez and Rubén Martínez. Also a public intellectual, Father Juan Romero, in his many essays, published and unpublished, added to a Chicano Catholic worldview. Finally, Father Virgilio Elizondo, in addition to carrying out his pastoral mission as a community priest, emerged in the 1980s as the leading Chicano Catholic theologian whose many treatises have helped shape contemporary Chicano Catholic thought.

If the role of intellectuals forms one aspect of this study, still another is the key role of Chicano popular religiosity. The WPA project, in recording and preserving Hispano popular religious traditions and practices among the villagers of New Mexico, speaks to the resiliency of this religious culture centered on the people themselves and outside the Church's control. In turn, the continued importance of Chicano Catholic practices, including the use of Spanish, forced the institutional Church by World War II to incorporate some of these practices in order to insure the loyalty of Chicano Catholics and to ward off competing Spanish-speaking Protestant and Pentecostal rivals. The strength and continuity of Chicano Catholic popular religion are further seen in the oral history projects conducted by UCSB students in the late 1990s. These reveal the persistence of popular forms of religiosity well into the late twentieth century and the new millennium.

Finally, an additional theme concerns the linking of religion to public life among Chicano Catholics. Here the work of Calleros and Perales in the civil rights struggles of what I call the Mexican American Generation is suggestive. Influenced, as noted, by Catholic social doctrine, both consciously brought together their Catholic faith and their civil rights struggles. If the Mexican American Generation laid the foundation for the civil rights movement among Mexican Americans, the Chicano Generation of the 1960s and 1970s furthered this effort in a more militant and challenging way. Católicos Por La Raza, the work of the community priests, and the sanctuary movement led by Father Olivares, all expressed a new and more militant culture of protest influenced by the Chicano movement and the continued linking of religion to public life.

Approaching these themes under the rubric of resistance and affirmation, my book will bring greater attention to the importance of Chicano Catholic history in a reevaluation not only of Chicano historiography but also of Chicano studies as a whole and of U.S. Catholic history and Catholic studies. One cannot fully understand Chicanos, or any ethnic group for that matter, without taking into consideration the significant role played by religion in shaping community. In turn, one cannot do justice to the history of U.S. Catholicism without integrating the history of Chicano/Latino Catholics. This is part of the dialogue that Figueroa Deck calls for between mainstream U.S. Catholicism and Hispanic Catholicism, a dialogue that is essential to "shaping the future as well as recalling the past." I hope that studies such as mine will lead to this appreciation and to concrete changes, such as new and more courses in Chicano studies and religious studies on Chicano/Latino religions as well as increased research projects on Chicano Catholicism and other manifestations of religious practices. Such revision is important not only on an intellectual and academic level, but also on a demographic level as the Chicano/Latino population continues to grow and attain importance in the United States. Chicanos/Latinos will transform the contours of this country in the twenty-first century, not least its religious culture. Of this change, Father Elizondo asserts, "The Hispanics are not only entering the U.S. Catholic Church, but we are enriching it by bringing in everything which is distinctive to our expressions of faith: music, colors, dance, ritual and tradition."

Religion in the United States, certainly Catholicism, will become very much a Chicano/Latino-influenced one. While Chicanos and Latinos will continue to acculturate and be influenced by other ethnic cultures and a more generic U.S. culture, they will, at the same time, maintain and adapt their culture, including their religious culture, to this society. Yet such changes are not something to be feared or to be threatened by, but rather to be welcomed because, as Father Elizondo stresses, they will enrich us all. The strong religious values of Chicano/Latino Catholics exemplified in my book suggest that we can only profit by this strength. At a time of increasing concern over eroding values and morals in U.S. society, we should welcome this infusion of strong religious traditions and practices that characterize much of the Chicano/Latino communities.