3.3 Racial attitudes and religious social work: the texas-mexican  (Page 3/14)

The flood of Mexican immigration in the 1910s and 1920s gave rise to the so-called Mexican problem. During these decades, especially, many Americans viewed Mexican immigrants ambivalently, as a sort of necessary evil. Some Americans wanted Mexicans as a source of cheap labor, but others resented them as economic competitors, or despised them as potential despoilers of the social fabric. On the one hand, rapid capitalist development in Texas made Mexicans highly prized workers, especially in the agricultural, mining, and railroad industries. On the other hand, as Mexican-origin people gained visibility and apparent permanence, Americans grew alarmed and increasingly worried about the challenges of social incorporation the immigrants posed. Mexican immigrants— and by extension, Mexican- American citizens— were both wanted and feared. This dilemma plunged the nation into a rancorous debate about what to do with a growing mass of presumably inassimilable but dearly needed “foreigners.” As a result, racial segregation and other means were devised to exploit the Mexicans’ labor while blunting the perceived threat of their social and cultural pollution. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas , 179-96; Ricardo Romo, “Responses to Mexican Immigration, 1910-1930,” Aztlán 6 (Summer 1975): 173-94.

In the early 20 ^th century a nun’s newsletter tellingly described how two sisters at Houston’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish “go every morning . . . to civilize , catechize and Christianize these Mexicans.” Family Circular , November 1912, 23 (added emphasis). In a similar vein, a new sister superior who had never ministered to Mexicans before arriving in Houston created serious problems at Guadalupe Parish because she “did not understand . . . [Mexican Catholics], feel for them, nor actually care for them,” a fellow nun claimed. Sister Mary Paul Valdez, The History of the Missionary Catechists of Divine Providence (N.p.: privately printed, 1978), 70. Having internalized the pervasive racial prejudice against Mexicans, some nuns would find their ministry greatly limited, if not totally ineffective, by their own racial biases. Consciously or not, some sisters shared the negative images that society at large held about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.

The scourge of racism in American society did not spare religious institutions. As historian Margaret Susan Thompson recognized, “religious orders generally mirrored the secular world in which they functioned and from which their all-too-human membership was drawn.” Margaret Susan Thompson, “Sisterhood and Power: Class, Culture, and Ethnicity in the American Convent,” Colby Library Quarterly 25 (September 1989): 149-50. On racism in the Church, see Jeffrey M. Burns, “The Mexican Catholic Community in California,” in Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900-1965 , eds. Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto M. Hinojosa (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 131; Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 372 and passim; José Roberto Juárez, “La Iglesia Católica y el Chicano en Sud Texas, 1836-1911,” Aztlán 4 (Fall 1973): 217-55. One sister reminded the archbishop of San Antonio in 1948, “In your position as bishop I know you have had enough experience to know how fickle human nature can be, how misunderstandings and even sometimes a little malice, jealousy and spite will be found in religious houses.” Sister Mary Dolorita to Archbishop Robert E. Lucey, December 3, 1948, Franciscan Missionary Sisters of the Divine Child File, Archives of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas. More recently a sister wrote that Mexican-origin nuns lived with “pain . . . humiliations and difficulties” in her congregation. María Luisa Vález, “The Pilgrimage of Hispanics in the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word,” U.S. Catholic Historian 9 (Spring/Winter 1990): 181-94; quote, 189. Sister María Luisa Vález reported that Mexican-American nuns in early 20 ^th century Texas often felt the sting of racial slurs, and were routinely assigned primarily to menial tasks and routinely excluded from educational opportunities. When Mexican nuns visited San Antonio, their White sisters were warned, “Put everything away and lock your things because the Mexicans are coming and they are thieves.” A Mexican-American nun, Vález, tearfully recalled how a White sister at a hospital where they both worked refused to lend her an instrument to treat one of her Mexican patients, referring to them as “dirty Mexican dogs.” Ibid., 190.