Border Identifications: Narratives of Religion, Gender, and Class on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Notes

NOTES Introduction 1. A brief note on nomenclature is important here. Following Riessman (1993, p. 18), I am aware that not all narratives in interviews are stories in the linguistic sense of the term: Individuals relate experiences using a variety of narrative genres . . . When we hear stories, for instance, we expect protagonists, inciting conditions, and culminating events. But not all narratives (or all lives) take this form. Some other genres include habitual narratives (when events happen over and over and consequently there is no peak in the action), hypothetical narratives (which depict events that did not happen), and topic-centered narratives (snapshots of past events that are linked thematically). In Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders and the present book I have shown a variety of these different types of narratives. 2. A brief disclaimer is pertinent here: I do not pretend to anthropomorphize narratives, i.e., I am not giving them an agency that, implicitly, I am taking away from social actors. Social actors have the capacity, within certain limits, of choosing among a variety of conflictive narratives and nothing is mandatory about choosing one or another. I want to thank Eduardo Barrera for making me aware of this issue. 3. I am referring here to the (for the time being) subordinated position of certain signs with respect to master signifiers or nodal points. Eduardo Barrera (personal communication, December 6, 2002) prefers to call them “peripheral, subordinated or satellite signifiers.” 1. Catholicism and Mexicanness on the U.S.-Mexico Border 1. Interestingly enough the relationship between Catholicism and the Chicano movement is also emphasized and popularly constructed around the Virgin of Guadalupe. However, we have to remember here that two out of the four most important Chicano leaders in the 1960s (Rodolfo “Corky” González, a member of the Presbyterian Church, and Reies López Tijerina, a Pentecostal minister—the other two being César Chávez and Miguel Angel Gutiérrez) were Protestants (Sylvest 1991, p. 127). 2. These are census figures. Most people agree that the Mexican Census tends to underestimate the general population; therefore, the total number of Protestants, according to some people, should be much higher. According to Bowen (1996, p. 61): “In 1993 the most commonly cited figure, put out by the Foro Nacional de Iglesias Cristianas Evangélicas, put Evangelicals at 16 million, or 17.5 per cent of the total population.” However, as Bowen points out, this figure seems a little bit exaggerated. 3. As we will see more in depth in the next chapter, the difference between religion and faith can also be understood as the difference between metaphoric and metonymic religious thinking. The latter is characteristic of charismatic Christians like our Pentecostal interviewees, for whom experiences become signs that express the concerns and activities in the individual’s life in the Holy Spirit (Poewe 1989). 4. For an explanation of such a lack, see Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000a, 2000b. 5. That Catholicism among Hispanics remained a popular religion outside the institutional channels of the American Catholic Church was compounded, according to Olson (1987, pp. 166–167), by the lack of attention the Catholic hierarchy dedicated to Hispanics. For instance, not until 1970, when Father Patricio Flores was ordained auxiliary bishop of San Antonio, was there a Hispanic bishop in the United States. 6. According to Elizondo (1994, p. 120): The Catholicism of the United States and the Catholicism of Mexico accept the same creed, ecclesiology, sacraments, commandments and official prayer. But the ways these are interpreted, imaged, and lived are quite different . . . The written and spoken alphabetic-word (dogmas, doctrines and papal documents) are most important in U.S. Catholicism while the ritual and devotional image-word have been the mainstay of Mexican Catholicism. The United States has been parishcentered while the Mexican Church has been home, town and shrine centered. 7. It seems that most current research on the matter is much more sensitive in addressing issues of internal national and ethnic conflict between people who are usually considered “the same” (Hispanics, Mexican Americans, and the like) than was the case in the past. Thus, in ethnographic work done on Hispanic religious practices in the United States in the early 2000s, the issue of internal conflict is explicitly addressed: “Even in congregations (Protestant as well as Catholic) where the entire membership is Hispanic, tensions arise among national origin groups, between established immigrants and the newly arrived, and between people of different regions of the same...