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82 mario t. garcía 4 In Search of Chicano Catholic Identity and History I While I was a college student at the University of Texas at El Paso, every Sunday morning I drove my grandmother, whom we called Nama, to 6:30 Mass. This was from 1962 to 1966, years that coincided with Vatican II but before its liturgical reforms became very evident. It was a quiet Mass with not many in attendance, but always the same people. We sat in the same pew at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Arizona Avenue about a mile from our rented house, which was also on the same street on what was referred to as the Golden Hill with its sweeping vista of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez to the south. We literally looked south at the border and to Mexico where Nama had come from many years before during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. It was a silent Mass with only the drone of the priest’s prayers in Latin. Because it was the early Mass, no homily was preached and we were out by 7:00 a.m. We walked to the car—not mine but my mother ’s—and before driving home we always stopped at the Mexican bakery on Nevada Street, just a couple of blocks from St. Patrick’s. We always ordered the same Mexican bread whose colorful names I never learned as an acculturated Mexican American. But the teenage girl behind the counter, whom I liked and who was the daughter of the owner, always gave us one extra piece of bread—a pilón as Nama called it—for free. We then drove home where my aunt, Tanaca, had breakfast ready, way before my mother and my other siblings had yet awoken. This consisted of fresh flour tortillas that Nama and Tanaca had already prepared even before we went to Mass. Hot tortillas with butter, eggs over easy, a beef patty, hot coffee, and an orange drink called Tang that you mixed with water made up my big Sunday breakfast. After this, in the still-cool of the morning in summertime or in the bright glare of the winter sun, I retired to devour the Sunday El Paso Times. Religion, specifically Catholicism, was always with me. There wasn’t a day in my conscious coming-of-age years when I wasn’t aware of this. It was a Catholicism planted in the Southwest first by Spanish Franciscan friars and over time influenced by both Mexican and Anglo-American (in reality Irish American) sources in a border context. But I wasn’t yet aware of all of these historical influences. This would come later and, in fact, I’m still learning about this. My family was Catholic but not in an extreme way. This would not be fitting for a family on my mother’s side that saw itself as gente decente, or properly brought up and from the better classes that had escaped from the Mexican Revolution. My great-grandfather of the Araiza family in northern Chihuahua was a well-to-do landowner and partner to American mining companies. His fate was sealed as a supporter of Francisco Madero, the “Apostle” of Mexican democracy who raised his banner against the long-standing dictator Porfirio Díaz. My great-grandfather was executed and his family fled to the border and crossed into El Paso. The family left everything behind but its honor and middle-class Catholic values. I inherited that honor and those values. We were Catholics but not barrio Catholics; we had escaped the barrio experience. My mother, born and raised in El Paso, grew up not in the big immigrant barrio El Segundo Barrio, or south El Paso, but in west and central El Paso. This is where the middle-class political refugees from Mexico had settled—apart from the lower-class immigrants and workers, and with their own kind. They built the Catholic church of La Sagrada Familia, or Holy Family Church, in the westside Sunset Heights area where my mother was married to a man from the state of Durango, thus bridging the Mexican American experience with the Mexican experience, and especially with the norteno one, the northern Mexican region where most of our families were from. We were always on the move but always north of the tracks where the more aspiring Mexican Americans resided: first on Missouri Street where I was born, then Yandell Boulevard, then Wyoming Street, and...

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