By Wayne Trujillo
The historically staid First United Methodist Church in Aurora is an unlikely host to Hispanic immigrants, but the denomination sheds its inhibitions for a few hours every week and assumes a Spanish accent. The message of God and a thumping Latino beat power the proceedings while emotions and upraised arms strain the rafters.
Cover Art "Espiritu" by Jerry De La Cruz
Click here to see an exerpt from Jerry
Mere yards from the stomping and shaking are a kitchen and a dining area. Pots and pans replace the pews. The people preparing the post-service feast are no less animated than the worshippers within the vestibule, but their passion simmers rather than boil.
One worshipper, Moises Carranza-Reyes, moves around the kitchen with a confidence and ease that disguises his disability. It’s difficult for the casual observer to notice that he is missing an ankle and foot. A prosthetic and a prayer are equally responsible for Carranza-Reyes’ easy gait. He’s inclined to credit his recovery to faith more than any medical procedure.
The faithful rent their parcel of heaven on earth in increments, typically a three-hour haven from drudgery, danger and instability. Despite the constant clouds hanging over their lives in America, their most potent defense — and weapon — is faith. And there is an abundance of it in the First United Methodist Church.
Faces, both stoic and smiling, reflect the faith — faith that their decisions to abandon native countries will prove fruitful, and faith that steps taken to cross both borders and proprietary Americans will deliver them to the Promised Land. Most striking, along with the rays of optimism that stubbornly streak through the immigrants’ shadowy and overcast existence, is a preternatural faith that God and family will weather the inevitable storms.
For those illegal immigrants who dare follow the American Dream, the road is rough. The path to relative prosperity, if not earned citizenship, frequently dead-ends in treacherous terrain. Some lose their lives. Carranza-Reyes was lucky. He only lost a limb. But there is a common denominator that links — some say enchains — the newly-arrived Latinos.
Observers suggest that the very religion that sustains also shackles, disrupting Latinos’ upward mobility. A conservative disdain of birth control, let alone abortion, can give birth to families with members sometimes numbering in the double digits. Then there are extended families that occupy the same household. It takes the faith of Job and Noah combined to remain afloat in a flood of political impotency and Minutemen invective drowning out realistic discussion on the illegal immigration issue.
Perhaps most troublesome for Latino leaders is the future. The children, many scions of stigma and poverty, struggle with an environment that counterpoints American suburbia. Confronted by roadblocks to the American Dream, including detours around Main Street America, are a language barrier, widespread anger over border anarchy and a consensus that Latinos’ arrival on the national scene is flaunting American culture, laws and public services.
Indeed, no discourse of Latino religiosity can ignore the illegal immigration commotion that has shell shocked politicians into disquieted indecision or vehement umbrage. Add to this conundrum the Latino subsets that defy simple categorization of who and what constitutes membership in the ethnic group. Religion, especially Catholicism, along with the Spanish language, is the sturdiest tangible of the slippery definition popularized by U.S. Census Bureau — Hispanic. Consider that Latin and South American countries continue to be the Vatican’s strongest foothold in the Western Hemisphere.
Against a backdrop of diverging denominations, circumstances and monikers, the Latino condition is difficult to discern. Some prefer the universal “Hispanic” title, which generally connects the ethnic group to Spain and its language, while others favor the more Western Hemispheric identification, “Latino.” The Latino population isn’t homogeneous nor does the group, despite the current uproar, consist exclusively of immigrants. Many are political refugees who arrived in past decades while others have resided on American soil since before the Mayflower docked at Plymouth Rock.
In an upcoming profile of actor Esai Morales for Latino SUAVE magazine, I write that Latino New York City has traditionally been a distant cousin to Los Angeles’ Chicano population, with the cities being bicoastal bookends to the Hispanic-American experience. Shaded by Caribbean Latinos hailing from the palm-swept islands of Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and, to a lesser extent, Cuba, New York City’s ethnic enclaves spoke Spanish alongside a cacophony of international syntax with nearly the frequency of English.
Those same Big Apple streets have famously directed foreigners to the American mainstream, and the city celebrates the Statue of Liberty, a symbol that is both an immigration mascot and doorstep into American society. Agitated opponents of illegal immigration consider Lady Liberty’s iconic embrace of immigrants as being reduced to something resembling a doormat rather than a doorstep, a cherished institution that the undocumented walk over roughshod, wiping their feet on U.S. customs (not to mention border enforcement) in the process.
To the average Latino illegal immigrant, the complexities of the national dialogue register on a primordial level — namely fear, survival and endurance. Reliance on divine intervention, absent intercession by labor boards and pricey lawyers, is natural. But that religiosity isn’t unique to recent Latino arrivals. Since 1598, my ancestors stubbornly clung to their diminishing New Mexico plots with the same death-grip that they held onto superstitions and the Rosary. They prostrated before weary and weathered Santos and the Virgin Mary long after the industrial revolutions sent the rest of America on a space-age trajectory miles and millenniums removed from an agrarian anachronism that persists today in patches of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.
Catholicism overlaps generations and geography. Our Lady of Guadalupe is only the most celebrated Marian image among Latinos. While she remains the public face of Latino devotion to Americans, and is present in all aspects of Latino life as she smiles from church altars, billboards and even kitchen appliances, another icon approaches her stature in certain circles. Santa Fe’s gothic shrine, St. Francis Cathedral, houses the most definitive portrait of Mother Mary in New Mexican history. La Conquistadora is a wooden statue of the Blessed Virgin that accompanied Spanish settlers to the region in the early 17th Century. La Conquistadora has had some face and body reconstruction over the years, not to mention a new wardrobe (highlighted by a papal coronation; according to santafefiesta.org, “she was crowned in 1954 by Cardinal Francis Spellman and again in 1960 by an apostolic representative of Pope John XXIII”).
Catholicism’s influence in Latin America extends to America, but the considerable ethnic group’s faith is increasingly being “reborn.” The charismatic evangelical churches that promise a reawakening to spirituality have viscerally connected with Latinos of all origins and generations. According to FASTNET, an Internet news organization, approximately 23 percent of Latinos in the U.S. consider themselves Protestants, and even a considerable number of those remaining faithful to the Catholic Church report being evangelical or “born-again.”
Rebirth is the American way. where immigrants and citizens alike redefine their futures, both terrestrial and eternal. Using data published in Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States, Bruce Murray of FASNET quoted the book’s editor, Gastón Espinosa, as saying, “To put these numbers in national perspective, there are more Latino Protestants in the United States than American Jews, Muslims, Episcopalians or Presbyterians.”
Still, Catholicism dominates. Murray reminds us that a Latino-American plurality, some 70 percent, claims the Catholic Church as the spiritual steward. And recent reports revealing the migration of Latinos to Protestant denominations isn’t the thunder and lightning revelation that it appears at first blush. New Mexican Latinos experimented with Pentecostal churches decades ago, with a substantial number so overcome by spirits speaking in tongues and the acrobatic testaments that, thereafter, their raised hands grasped air rather than rosaries and holy rolling replaced holy water as the most sanctified blessing. Then there were the Presbyterian missionaries who traveled to remote New Mexican villages, teaching and encouraging generations of disadvantaged New Mexican children. Their successes included numerous first-generation college graduates. Of course, there were those like my grandmother who held steadfast to the Roman Catholic Church until her last breath.
Musical pews has historically been a popular game played by all immigrants to America, but even their American-born descendents typically sample various sects, denominations and congregations before settling doubts as to what works and what doesn’t. For secular concerns, the rhetoric doesn’t matter, only the results.
Latino immigrants are reviving moribund congregations and resurrecting hopes that organized religion will retreat from the lucrative political arena back into depressed communities. Headlines reporting an upsurge in Latino gang activity around the nation aren’t breaking news; rather they are 21st century updates to the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots culture of the 1940s. Already, Catholic and Protestant organizations are responding to crises in destitute enclaves historically populated by Latinos. Gangs, drugs and general mayhem have capsized generations of Latino youth. The churches are offering an alternative through faith-based programs. The success rate isn’t overwhelming, but impressive numbers of youth that had seemed destined for prison or early death are finding refuge in church organizations, and later, colleges.
The debate over whether tradition, values and religion helps or hinders Latino success and assimilation in American society continues. Particularly fascinating is the influence of religion. Does it enslave or deliver Latinos, particularly immigrants? And if it is capable of deliverance, what and where is the Promised Land? There are no easy answers or clear assessments, but there is no doubt that religion is often the only asset that impoverished Latinos possess.
Native-born Americans are concerned that fealty to traditions, intertwined with religion and culture, will bind immigrants to their homeland, psychologically if not physically, making it nearly impossible to assimilate. But theologians have no doubt that faith will carry illegal immigrants safely over both the Rio Grande and the River Jordan. The multi-purpose, multi-dimensional salve of spirituality soothes adversity on both sides of the border.
After all, to people of faith, boundaries between nations and realms are a state of mind rather than a law of man or nature. |
