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178 l CATHOLICISM Hugo G. Nutini’s article “Pre-Hispanic Component of the Syncretic Cult of the Dead in Mesoamerica Ethnology: An International and Social Anthropology,” Journal of Culture 27.1 (1988), examines the pre-Hispanic component of this cult of the dead. Orlando Espin’s The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (1997) and his article, coauthored with Sixto Garcia, “Lilies of the Field: A Hispanic Theology of Providence and Human Responsibility” (1989) are invaluable sources for understanding the popular religion of the U.S. Latina population in the United States. A. M. DiazStevens ’s “Latinas and the Church” in Issues and Concerns (1994) explores the role and influence that these women have had in the Roman Catholic church. Jeanette Rodriguez’s Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment Among MexicanAmerican Women (1994) offers an interdisciplinary method for exploring the faith that empowers Mexican-American women. See also Virgilio Elizondo, Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation (1997). ASIAN AND PACIFIC AMERICAN CATHOLIC WOMEN Jocelyn M. Eclarin Azada ASIAN AND PACIFIC American Catholic women are a diverse group who trace their origins back to more than fifty countries and Pacific states in the Asian continent including Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Laos, the Philippines, Samoa, Tonga, and Vietnam. The first Asian women immigrated to the United States in the mid-1800s, often accompanying Asian men in their search for a livelihood and expanded options in a new America rich with opportunity. Asian men—from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and India—provided manual labor for San Francisco’s gold rush, the Transcontinental Railroad, Hawaii’s sugar plantations, and the seemingly limitless agricultural fields of the West Coast. No less than the men, Asian women in the United States also worked and contributed significantly to the establishment and stability of their communities. They managed households and contributed to the family income through grueling fieldwork alongside their husbands and even entrepreneurial home-based enterprises such as taking in laundry and cooking for single male laborers. Cultural constraints as well as immigration quotas restricted the numbers of women in the first wave of immigration from Asia to the U.S. mainland from the turn of the century until World War II. The men came from poor, uneducated, and rural backgrounds. Promising work, high wages, and even adventure in the United States, recruiters for American railroad and agricultural companies presented a way out of debt and poverty for these men. They came as sojourners—planning to work for a short period of time and then return to their homelands, having saved enough of their earnings to pay off their family’s debt or start their own family. Upon arriving, miners and farmers found backbreaking working conditions at subsistence-level wages. American society did not welcome them. They were segregated , physically abused, and denied the rights to become citizens, to own property, or to intermarry with whites. Generally, women came in far fewer numbers to the mainland. U.S. immigration policy discouraged the permanent settlement of Asian workers. Culturally, a single woman was not permitted to travel alone, and a married woman stayed at home to care for the children, and sometimes her husband’s parents, while he was away. Furthermore, companies recruited single men without families to lower labor costs and provide migratory labor that could move from season to season. Thus, in 1900, only 5 percent of the Chinese and 5 percent of the Filipino populations on the mainland were women. The percentage of women in the Asian Indian population in California’s Imperial Valley to the south and Sacramento Valley to the north was approximately 1 percent . The Japanese community was the exception to this pattern, as women in Japan, who were both educated and wage earners in their own country, had played a key role as factory workers in that country’s industrialization and could travel without censure. Between 1911 and 1920, women were 39 percent of the Japanese immigrants to the United States. Women made up 34.5 percent of the Japanese population on the mainland, concentrated in California, Washington, and Oregon. They worked as unpaid field laborers on family farms and provided other paid services, taking in cleaning, sewing, and washing, in addition to domestic responsibilities in their own homes. Legislation closely regulated the flow of Asian immigrant labor. The makeup of each immigrant population —the work they did, their respective numbers of women and men, the families they formed, and where they...

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