Reterritorialized Spirituality: Material Religious Culture in the Border Space of San Fernando Cathedral

Reterritorialized Spirituality: Material Religious Culture in the Border Space of San Fernando Cathedral Ellen McCracken L· Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she teaches Latin American Literature , U.S. Latino literature , and cultural semiotics . She has written Decoding Women's Magazines : From Mademoiselk to Ms. (St. Martin's, 1993) and New Latina Narrative : The Femenine Space of Post-modern Ethnicity (U of Arizona P, 1999), and edited a volume of essays , Fray Angélico Chavez : Poet, Priest, and Artist (U of New Mexico P, 2000). At the exact geographic center of the borderlands city of San Antonio, Texas, the Americas spill to- . gethet and traditional spatial, temporal, and cultutal borders lose their ability to divide. Here, in San Fernando Cathedtal (Fig. 1), one ofthe oldest continuously functioning cathedrals in the United States,1 ordinary people live in a dynamically hybrid border space in which diey express their spirituality thtough die concrete and material. The movement of human bodies engaged in various ritual practices through the interior and exterior spaces of die cathedral materially redefines a diasporic community while simultaneously reconfiguring die symbolic material objects enshrined in the sacred site. At die cathedral today, the popular marks the institutional with its strong vernacular expression as the botder between official and popular religiosity increasingly erodes. Historical Borders Constructed in the years following the arrival of settlets from the Canary Islands in 1731, the first parish church in what is now Texas was originally dedicated to the patroness ofthe Canary Islands, Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, to the Vit gin of Guadalupe, and to San Feinando , the namesake of a relative of the King of Spain who would latet become King Ferdinand VI. In 1755, after the chutch's completion, die town council met on the feast ofthe Virgin of Guadalupe, vowing to celebrate the feasts of these three religious figures in perpetuity Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 4, 2000 194 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies (Matovina, "Memories Create a People" 19 and "Development of a Tradition" 25). This early patronal hybridity combining devotion to both Old and New world sacred figures was a forerunner of die mixture of traditions diat has characterized worship at the church to varying degrees diroughout its history. During the period of the Texas Republic (1836-1845) and after Mexico's defeat in the Mexican-American War (18461848 ), new settlers of Anglo and German origin began to outnumber the Mexican population of the city. English became the official language of the civic sphere and public education, and priests from Spain and France were appointed to replace the Mexican clergy ofthe parish for the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Despite these changes, the predominantly Mexican parishoners kept a number of popular religious traditions alive to celebrate such feasts as the Virgin of Guadalupe, San Fernando, San Antonio, and Christmas. After the church became a Figure 1 cathedral in 1874, official diocesan celebrations took precedence over popular rituals; the first bishop went so far as to discontinue the celebration of midnight Mass and the adoration ofthe Christ child on Christmas "because of the intrusion of improper and disorderly persons with die vast dirongs of all classes, races, and religions, who poured into die cathedral" (cited in Matovina , "Development of a Tradition" 33). Such a decree attempted to impose a strict border between official and popular forms of religious expression, in great contrast to the attenuation of such a border that characterizes San Fernando today. As Timothy Matovina has documented , Mexican rituals again gained predominance in the cathedral with the arrival of a large number of exiles from the Mexican Revolution (1910-17) and the religious persecution of the Calles period of the 1920s. Many ofthe clergy and religious who emigrated to escape Calles brought strong Mexican religious traditions with them. By the 1930s there was a resurgence of public ritual at the Cadiedral—processions through the plaza and streets for the feasts of Cristo Rey, the Virgin of Guadalupe, posadas, and First Communions. The exiles integrated symbols of Mexican nationalism into their public religious expression: on December 11, the eve of the feast...