Latinos and the New Immigrant Church (review)

This book arrives on the academic scene in timely fashion. The existing English-language histories of Latino Catholics, often listed with the less fashionable "Hispanic Catholics," are either highly focused on one specific locality or can be contained only in multiple volumes. Examples of the first type are Angélico Chávez' classic Our Lady of the Conquest about New Mexico (1948) and Ana María Díaz-Stevens' Oxcart Catholicism about Puerto Ricans in New York, which won the Cushwa Prize in 1993. Into the second type fall the three-volume series out of Notre Dame, edited by Jay Dolan. David A. Badillo has written a worthwhile history of Latino Catholics that includes ample reference to these other works but manages to condense it into one volume of 275 pages.

Because it would have been impossible to cover every historical aspect, Badillo has wisely chosen to examine specific events at key moments in United States and Catholic history. Instead of a kind of tourist guide to Latino Catholic history trying to cover everything in a sort of once-over flight, Badillo has written a book that provides open windows to a theme of growing importance. The result is clearly superior to the kind of brief summaries of people and places that would have robbed history of much of its complexities. The reader is led to understand the roots of Latino Catholic identity by an examination of its Iberian and Latin American origins before nineteenth-century invasions by United States' troops raised the Stars and Stripes over the people's heads. Iberian-American Catholicism still reigned in our hearts, however, and Badillo does not shy from explaining the dilemma of a Catholicism based in the United States that was asked to Americanize the conquered in the Latino homelands as it was already Americanizing the immigrants from Europe. It is my experience that there is considerable intellectual resistance to the idea that Latinos and Latinas are principally "conquered peoples" rather than "immigrants seeking the American Dream." Perhaps the resistance can be blamed on a reluctance to judge the United States as guilty of imperialism, but this point is crucial to a non-politicized understanding of church history. Badillo handles this difficult statement about as well as I have seen, being neither too partisan in his judgments nor too shallow in his criticisms.

The book navigates the principal Latino groups in each of several chapters dedicated to Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and newer groups like the Dominicans and Central Americans. In Chapter Four, he examines the historical role of bishops, many of whom adopted strikingly different pastoral approaches to Latino ministry (and some who did nothing at all). Fresh information is provided in chapters on "Suburbanization and Mobility in Catholic Chicago" (6), "Church Leadership in Texas and New York City" (7) and about the impact of globalization on U.S. Catholics (8). These last three chapters may read as much like social science as like history, but given the relatively recent emergence of Latinos and Latinas as a rising force within U.S. Catholicism, this is a strength rather than a failing for the book.

The most interesting interpretative insight I found was in the seven-page epilogue, entitled "Latino Religious Tradition as Metaphor." It may be that my satisfaction with this short essay is influenced by the frequent and favorable citations that Dr. Badillo has made of my own work. Nonetheless, he convincingly argues that Catholicism has a double mission for many Latinos and Latinas: to preserve the faith and to express their cultural independence. This was the point elaborated in my book with Ana María Díaz-Stevens, Recognizing the Latino Religious Resurgence in U.S. Religion (1998), and Badillo has incorporated much of this interpretation in his recounting of select events, albeit with less attention to theology and the sociological theory of social movements.

The citations of primary and secondary sources are impressive; the index is complete...