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Chapter 2 MEXICAN AND MEXICAN AMERICAN PROTESTANTS Introduction If, as I have tried to show in the previous chapter, on the border there is a close relationship between being a Mexican and being a Catholic, the process of identity construction among Protestants of Mexican descent is, to say the least, complicated.1 They are something that is “unexpected” from the commonsense point of view of the region. We have already seen some strategies developed by several of the Mexican Catholics I interviewed to make sense of this “inconsistent” type of identity, for instance, to claim that many Mexicans become Protestants only because of economic necessity. Thus, I thought that it would be interesting to know what kind of narrative plots Mexican Protestants develop to make sense of a particular kind of identity that supposedly is an oxymoron. We had the opportunity to hear such narratives in several interviews on both sides of the border with people of Mexican descent who identified themselves as Christians but not Catholics. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, in the conclusion of Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America, stresses that Latin American Protestantism has the potential of redefining people’s social identities. According to her, it is quite obvious that Pentecostalism in particular has improved the situation of women in the household (more of this below ), but she asks (1993, p. 208): “Might the same also be true, say, of class or ethnic conflict? Could conversion change the terms in which social classes and ethnic groups define their differences, making them more amenable to nonviolent resolution through the definition of new ‘imagined communities’?” In the pages that follow we will see that, at least in relation to Mexican and Mexican American Protestantism, there is not a simple answer to her question, because on certain points it seems that Mexican Protestants do not differ whatsoever from their Catholic counterparts in their anti-Southern, anti-Mexican, and/or anti-American stance, while in certain circumstances they seem to advance a much more pious stance. Let’s turn to the ethnographic material, which illustrates this complexity. The first thing that rapidly caught my attention when interviewing self-defined Mexican Christians is that, in many cases, there is not BORDER IDENTIFICATIONS 58 much difference between the way Mexican Catholics and Mexican Protestants construct their most important narrative identities. In this regard I have found Mexican Protestants who utilize very similar narrative arguments to differentiate themselves from the “others,” when those others are defined in regional and national terms on the Mexican side of the border or in ethnic and national terms when the interviewees construct their identities on the American side of the international divide. We have to remember here that some of the anti-Southerner stances on the Mexican side of the border and anti-Mexican stances on the American side quoted in Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders and in other chapters of this book came from people who identified themselves as “Christians,” that is, Protestants. At the same time, in some other cases there is a very pronounced variation in the way Mexican Protestants and Catholics construct their identities, and those similarities and differences are not necessarily related to which side of the border the interview was conducted on. Let us delve into the ethnographic data to see how this operates. Similarities at Work between Mexican Catholics and Mexican Protestants On the Mexican side of the border, for instance, we had an opportunity to interview a group of Baptists, which offered us a glimpse of how Mexican Protestants construct their “unexpected” identities as “nonCatholic Mexicans.”2 The participants of that interview were José Luis, who was twenty-five years old, an accountant, and married, and who was born in Ciudad Chihuahua and had moved to Juárez three years before; Teresa, a fifty-year-old married nurse who was born in Durango but who had moved to Ciudad Juárez more than twenty- five years before; Lupe, a thirty-four-year-old insurance agent who was single and a native Juarense; Clarisa, an eighteen-year-old student who also was from Juárez; and Ada, another student, who was twenty years old and married. At first glance there is not much difference between these interviewees and most Catholic people we interviewed in Juárez. They also use very common narratives like the “despised Southerner” and “materialistic Anglos.” In this sense, Lupe, for instance, firmly believes that female Southerners only come to Juárez either...

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