3.3 Racial attitudes and religious social work: the texas-mexican  (Page 8/14)

Without question the main function of the Dwyer Street project was to train young women for work as domestics. In fact, the nuns referred to the Girl’s Club as the “Homemaking Project.” The sisters involved in the work of the Girl’s Club attacked poverty among Mexicans by training young women for careers as maids and cooks, and finding jobs for them in affluent homes in San Antonio. Sister Mary Immaculate Gentemann, who was closely involved in these activities, recalled that the young tejanas lived in “deplorable conditions;” their families needed any income they could get. “We felt we needed to meet the needs of the time,” the sister explained. The nuns at the Girls Club expected their efforts would prepare young women for “successful lives.” Desperate for jobs, girls and young women flocked to the program and, indeed, the “Homemaking Project” was remarkably successful in terms of training and placing women in jobs as domestics. Hundreds of Mexican women in San Antonio found these kinds of jobs through their association with the Girl’s Club. Still, notwithstanding the program’s “success,” the sisters abandoned it in the late 1940s.

The fact that the Sisters of Divine Providence discontinued the “Homemaking Project” at the height of its success illustrates the changing attitudes and strategies among nuns who challenged social inequality. The sisters who directed the Girls Club grew increasingly concerned about the exploitation of their trainees —they knew the young women were incredibly underpaid. It was a terrible “injustice,” Sister Immaculate recalled. Significantly, the sisters eventually realized that they were actually “perpetuating an injustice.” They had tried to break the cycle of poverty among some of their Mexican parishioners but, ironically, the nuns instead found themselves unintentionally helping to perpetuate it. Rather than continue a program that was ultimately self-defeating, the Sisters of Divine Providence stopped the Homemaking Project and sought other ways to fight poverty. Gentemann interview. Clearly, these women of the Church were rethinking the nature of the “Mexican Problem” and their own relationship to it, as were other Americans.

By the late 1930s and early 1940s a new consciousness was emerging within the American Catholic Church. The “problems” posed by a burgeoning Mexican population created huge interest and generated a flood of popular and academic literature about Mexican-origin people in the United States. This new awareness coincided with a reassessment in the scientific community about the nature of race and ethnicity, as well as a more sophisticated understanding of group relations and social inequality. For examples, see Linna E. Bresette, Mexicans in the United States: A Report of a Brief Survey (Washington, D.C.: National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1929); Herschel T. Manuel, “The Mexican Population of Texas,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 15 (June 1934): 29-51; Father G. Mongeau, “Mexicans in our Midst,” Mary Immaculate , December 1933, 325-27, 345; Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963); Fred H. Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977).