By: roberto r. treviño  (Page 2/14)

In this chapter, I explore a part of the tejano Jim Crow experience. The terms used in this essay to refer to Mexican-origin people--Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Texas Mexicans, and tejanas/tejanos--convey important distinctions. However, for stylistic convenience and to reflect the actual makeup of the communities examined here, these terms will be used interchangeably. Similarly, “nuns,” “sisters,” “congregation,” and “community” also will be used synonymously though historically these terms have had different meanings. I examine an aspect of that era that remains virtually unknown; that is, the attitudes of Catholic sisters in a time when segregation reigned and racism, religious bigotry, and class prejudice made most Mexicans social outcasts. Particularly, how did the widespread anti-Mexicanism of the times affect the religious social work Catholic nuns provided to poverty-stricken tejano communities? These questions have not been sufficiently studied by historians. The religious history of Mexican-Americans has been long neglected by social historians and its reconstruction is still embryonic. Two groundbreaking works are Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto M. Hinojosa, eds., Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900-1965 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994) and Timothy M. Matovina, Tejano Religion and Ethnicity: San Antonio, 1821-1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). On the lack of emphasis on Spanish-speaking Catholics by American historians of religion, see Martin E. Marty, “The Editor’s Bookshelf: American Religious History,” Journal of Religion 62 (January 1982): 104; Jay P. Dolan, “The New Religious History,” Reviews in American History 15 (September 1987): 449-54; and Leslie W. Tentler, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 45 (March 1993): 104-27. The scant work in this area, not surprisingly, remains particularly silent about the impact of women’s religious orders on Mexican-American history. Most historical accounts of women’s religious communities are characteristically uncritical and hagiographic. As historian Margaret Susan Thompson stated, “much of the writing… consists of unimaginative narrative, tedious chronology, triumphalism, flowery pietism, or some combination of these.” Margaret Susan Thompson, “Women, Feminism, and the New Religious History: Catholic Sisters as a Case Study,” in Belief and Behavior: Essays in the New Religious History , ed. Philip R. Vander Meer and Robert P. Swierenga (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 141. In short, crucial aspects about the Mexican-American religious experience remain misunderstood or unknown. I seek to understand a part of that experience— how the issue of race affected the delivery of religious social work carried on by Catholic sisters among Texas Mexicans in the early to mid-twentieth century.

I argue that Catholic sisters were precursors of social change, transitional figures whose attitudes and activities regarding Mexicans often reflected both racism and egalitarianism, mirroring the ambivalence and contradictions of a Jim Crow society inching toward its democratic promise. Nuns provided desperately needed social services and opportunities which most Texas Mexicans otherwise would have been denied, but, paradoxically, some aspects of those efforts actually helped to perpetuate social discrimination against Mexicans even as they aimed to hasten its demise. However, over the course of the first half of the 20 ^th century, sisters haltingly made the attitudinal and organizational changes necessary to fight Mexican-American inequality more effectively, and they inspired others to work for social justice for Texas Mexicans. By the mid-twentieth century, Catholic sisters labored among those helping to usher in the Civil Rights Era of the post-World War II years.