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Resistance and Accommodation in a Border Parish
ANTHONY MORA
During the late nineteenth century, Mexicans' control over their religious space was challenged by the arrival of European and Euro-American clergy along the U. S. Mexican border. This article explores the ways a Catholic parish figured in racial and national conflicts in the border community of Las Cruces, New Mexico.
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RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS HAVE served complicated, and even contradictory, roles in the history of the U. S. West. After the U. S.-Mexican War, religious sites often supported U. S. imperialism, housing Catholic and Protestant missionaries who sought to change Mexicans' beliefs and practices.1 At the same time local churches attended the needs of those same Mexican communities. Church participation created a sense of community, spiritual comfort, and unity.2 The Roman Catholic Church, in particular, incongruously worked to "Americanize" Mexicans while also defending their rights. European clergy and Mexican laity often divided along racial lines within their parish, but would unite when challenged by competing religious groups.3 Mexican racial identity and Catholic religious identity intertwined as Catholicism influenced the ongoing process through which Mexican Americans understood their position in the U. S. |
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Studying religion in the West, as a result, raises questions about accommodation and resistance to U. S. expansion. With those questions in mind, this essay treats Catholicism in two chronological periods along the U. S.-Mexican border in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. |
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The first period covers nineteenth-century conflicts in the southern New Mexico parish of St. Genevieve's. Las Cruces's St. Genevieve's became a contested space that signified larger struggles created by U. S. conquest. Considering how religious and racial ideologies developed in Las Cruces is particularly important because it was one of the first areas where the U. S. grappled with the implications of its new border with Mexico. The tensions that played out in St. Genevieve's would not have seemed unique to most Mexican parishioners throughout the U. S. West. As in numerous other Catholic parishes, the relationship between European clergy and Mexican-American laity complicated racial and religious identities. Religion played a role as ideas about the racial meaning of "Americans" and "Mexicans" formed in the nineteenth century. Along the border, following their vision of "American Catholicism," European priests made substantial changes to predominantly Mexican parishes. |
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In the second period, I jump ahead to examine the ways twentieth-century individuals and groups explained, remembered, or forgot these past conflicts. Unlike Texas and California, New Mexico had a relatively small migration from Mexico in the twentieth century.4 Conflicts that influenced Las Cruces's early history, therefore, more readily haunted the ways Mexican Americans structured their memories and stories about their parish. This means we are better able to see how Mexican Americans organized memories about their religious communities as part of a historical process. Although they often figured centrally in the historical events, popular memories and oral histories sometimes obscured racial and religious tensions in St. Genevieve's. Historian Henry Rousso observed that "at the social level, memory is a structuring of forgetfulness."5 Exploring memories suggests Mexican Americans' ongoing decisions about resistance and accommodation in their religious spaces. |
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