Religion as Language, Church as Culture: Changing Chicano Historiography

Robert R. Trevino, in his text The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in Houston, establishes a new framework and focus in Mexican American historiography. As part of the third generation of "Chicano" historians, Trevino proposes a framework and focus for analyzing the Church, religion, and everyday life. He constructs and examines the "symbolic world" of the everyday lives of the Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in Houston, Texas, from the 1930s through the 1970s: from the period of the Great Migration from Mexico, as a result of the Mexican Revolution, to the early 1970s after the Second Vatican Reforms (1962–1965) and the "end" of the Chicano Movement (circa 1978). He, like the second generation of Chicano historians (1980s–1990s), accepts sociologist Robert Parks's notion that you can slow down acculturation, but you cannot abort it. In general terms, Trevino explains that from the 1940s there was "more acculturation" in the barrios; "it was a bicultural community more so than . . . 'Little Mexico[s]'" (p. 36). Trevino argues that during this period there was a developing middle class with more mobility and with the ability to purchase homes outside the barrios, which exhibited "a degree of socioeconomic improvement" (p. 36). Trevino also writes: "The colonia underwent substantial changes [in the post WWII period]. As their numbers grew steadily Mexican Americans in Houston revealed," he continues, "their class, cultural, and generational differences and they increasingly claimed rights as American citizens" (pp. 36–7). Trevino's text examines the culture in the Mexican and Mexican Americans barrios in Houston that have produced a continuing ethnic identity in spite of the acculturation process simultaneously occurring. Specifically, he analyzes the relationship of the Church in the barrio from within a religious perspective.

Trevino's search of Mexican American culture has resonated throughout the last four decades. The question, "What is Chicano culture?" was first asked by anthropologist Octavio Romano and the budding Chicano intelligentsia in 1969 at the Stanford Summer Institute on Chicano Culture and History and again in 1970 at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City, which hosted the Summer Institute on Mexican Culture and History. In both instances, the focus was on political culture, and not anthropological culture since many believed that "Chicano culture" was produced by everyday ideology, beliefs, and actions of the Mexican working class as a collective labor force. Trevino, however, approaches his study from religious and linguistic tropes.¹

This new type of approach has taken four decades to evolve: from the radical perspectives and assertions of the first generation of Chicano historians (1970s–1980s), who used internal-colonial and quasi-Marxist perspectives with on emphasis on resistance, victimization, and a separatist history to the second generation of Chicano historians (1980s–1990s), who turned to post-colonialism, post-modernism, and Stuart Hall's cultural studies perspectives with an emphasis on individual agency, hybrid identity, and cultural resistance. This second generation, however, began to move away from the "political-nationalist-separatist approach of the first generation and began to integrate Chicano history (following Patricia Limerick's themes) into the 'New Western History' and into American Immigration history. By doing this they 'accepted' Warren Susman's 'axiom' that all immigrants to the United States were different, but only 'in degree and not in kind.'"²

Trevino is one of the third generation of "Chicano" historians who are exploring the Mexican American experience through new perspectives, theories, and tropes, but without—according to the author—the "political and ideological baggage" of the first two generations. Besides Trevino, the "New Chicano Historians" who are doing imaginative studies are Daniel D. Arreola, Carlos Kevin Blanton, Anthony Quiroz, and Stephen J. Pitti. Trevino's questions and suppositions are influenced by such theological intellectuals as Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J., Virgil P. Eizondo, Orlando O. Espin, and Timothy M. Matovina, who are becoming part of the third generation of...