3.3 Racial attitudes and religious social work: the texas-mexican  (Page 7/14)

In San Antonio, Sister Benitia joined some progressive nuns who were beginning to develop a more systematic attack on social discrimination against Texas Mexicans. Reverend Mother Philothea Thiry, Superior General of the Congregation of the Sisters of Divine Providence from 1925-1943, and her successor, Mother Angelique Ayers, embodied the changing ways Catholic sisters conceived and carried out their social ministry in the 1930s and 1940s. Thiry and Ayers headed their San Antonio-based congregation and its teacher-training institution, Our Lady of the Lake College (OLLC), from the early 20 ^th century to 1960. In the mid-1930s Mother Philothea spearheaded a movement aimed directly at the plight of the Mexican community of San Antonio, which had grown dramatically during the 1920s and 1930s. In order to better meet the needs of the indigent, Thiry began preparations to train nuns as professional social workers, signaling a new approach to the so-called Mexican problem. Eventually, these efforts led to the founding of a graduate school of social work at OLLC in 1942, the Worden School of Social Service. “The Worden School of Social Service, A Self-Study,” typewritten ms., AOLLU; interview with Sister Immaculate Gentemann, CDP, 8 August 1997, San Antonio, Texas (hereafter Gentemann interview); Sister Mary Generosa Callahan, The History of the Sisters of Divine Providence (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1955), 277-78. San Antonio’s Mexican population grew from 60,000 to 103,000, roughly, between 1920-1940. Richard A. García, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 29, table 1.

In late 1939, the Sisters of Divine Providence bought two large and fashionable older homes on Dwyer Avenue near downtown San Antonio. Once refurbished one of these houses became the convent for the Missionary Catechists of Divine Providence, still directed by Sister Benitia Vermeersch, and the other became a center for social services for the poor. The idea was to centralize catechetical and social service work among San Antonio’s Mexican and Mexican- American poor. Working with progressive clerics who called for social justice for Mexicans, particularly the soon to be archbishop of San Antonio, Robert E. Lucey, the Sisters of Divine Providence began to channel their charitable works into more systematic religious social work. Valdez, Missionary Catechists , 55-59; see also Callahan, History of the Sisters of Divine Providence , 267.

The social center on Dwyer Avenue soon became known as the Girl’s Club of San Antonio, a community center where poor and working-class Mexican-American girls aged 7 to 17 could find wholesome recreation and religious instruction. The Girl’s Club was in fact coeducational almost from the start. Close by the center was a clothing factory that hired many Mexican and Mexican-American men. The company provided no place for the workers to eat and, in all kinds of weather, the workers stood around the building and in the street having their lunches. Seeing this, the sisters provided the workers a place in the center to comfortably eat their noon meals. Soon the center became a meeting place and recreation center for young men and women, hosting dances, wedding receptions, and activities for married women. Valdez, Missionary Catechists , 59-61; Gentemann interview.