3.3 Racial attitudes and religious social work: the texas-mexican  (Page 4/14)

Mexican nuns were usually the ones assigned to do the cooking, washing, and sewing in the convents, according to Vález, and the congregation’s leaders were unwilling to spend money to educate nuns who were essentially housekeepers, even when they pleaded for the chance to study. Poorly educated and even illiterate nuns from Europe, on the other hand, received educational opportunities. However, Mexican-American nuns were pressed into service as teachers whenever it was expedient —especially among Mexican-American children— despite their lack of preparation and often in circumstances that virtually assured failure. “How can I teach when I have not had the proper preparation; I have never studied; I have never taught,” a nun protested to no avail. Ibid., 191. Another sister echoed the experience: “I worked as a teacher but I [had] never studied. They sent me anyway.” The nun “taught” 150 students in a tiny classroom. “What could I do with a group so large?” she recalled sadly. “In another place the school had 500 students but only two Sisters,” the nun recounted, “both without proper training…” Looking back at those years, the elderly sister bitterly remembered being told that these “were Mexican children; it did not matter what they learned.” Ibid. In addition, deplorable conditions often characterized “Mexican” schools. See, for example, Sister Margaret P. Slattery, Promises to Keep: A History of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, Texas (Np: privately printed, 1995), 1:99-103.

These and other examples of ethnic animosity and discrimination among some of the sisters explained, to a large degree, why historically there were so few Mexican-American nuns. Negative attitudes and a policy of not recruiting significant numbers of “home-grown” Mexican- American nuns fed off each other. The systematic exclusion of Mexican and Mexican-American nuns from educational opportunities reverberated far beyond the crushed dreams of individuals. Congregations that shut the doors of education to Mexican-American nuns diminished not only the number of badly needed social workers for Mexican communities, but also the life chances and aspirations of future generations by denying them role models and accessible professional networks. Individual sisters who were unable to transcend their personal biases hindered their own ministry among Mexican Catholics and they also undermined the efforts of others who tried to improve conditions in Mexican communities. In the larger picture, racial prejudice among sisters bolstered the racial status quo that undergirded the social subordination of Texas Mexicans. But even while some sisters’ attitudes and practices hindered tejano aspirations, others broke new ground by challenging Jim Crow.

Sister Mary Benitia Vermeersch, of the Congregation of the Sisters of Divine Providence of San Antonio, arrived in the sweltering summer heat of Houston in 1915 to begin her duties as school principal at the city’s Mexican mother church, Our Lady of Guadalupe. Her leadership there would span 23 years, but even before she opened the school doors she set to work to alleviate the oppressive living conditions she found among her prospective students. Many of Guadalupe’s parishioners worked for the numerous railroad companies in the Second Ward neighborhood around the parish, and often lived in company housing, which usually meant dilapidated two- or three-room shacks with outdoor plumbing. It was not uncommon for less fortunate workers and their families to share empty boxcars temporarily before finding better quarters. For many, as the people themselves would say, it was a life of “ mucho trabajo y poco dinero ” (lots of work but little pay), a dismal and often desperate picture. Valdez, Missionary Catechists , 5-6; Arnoldo De León, Ethnicity in the Sunbelt: A History of Mexican Americans in Houston Monograph Series No. 7 (Houston: University of Houston Mexican American Studies Program, 1989), 12; quote in de Anta, “Missionary Work in the Diocese of Galveston,” 22.