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171 8 Youth and Charity in a Sweetwater Parish Our Lady of Divine Providence Church AIDIL OSCARIZ On a typically hot and humid Miami day in , bulldozers, forklifts, and construction workers moved busily about the Our Lady of Divine Providence churchyard, erecting a twenty-thousand-square-foot church. The new edifice, completed late the next year, replaced a squat red brick structure less than half its size that was built there a quarter-century prior, just as the congregation was about to open its doors to the waves of refugees from Cuba and, somewhat later, from Nicaragua, then crashing on Miami shores. From the time that Archbishop Coleman F. Carroll designated the parish in June of  until the parish’s first building was dedicated in December of , the congregation gathered in a trailer about fifteen blocks away from its present location in Sweetwater, a small municipality a few miles west of downtown Miami. The construction of the first church was soon followed by the construction of the parish school, which in  began housing after-school programs and Catholic religious education classes, all administered by the Theatine Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, who joined the parish that same year. By , over two hundred children, kindergarten through third grade, were enrolled in the school, which added a grade each year thereafter, and by  was offering classes from kindergarten through eighth grade. The timing of the construction of both the church and the school was nothing short of auspicious, theologically speaking, as between May and September of , the Mariel Boatlift brought “more than , unscreened and undocumented aliens” from Cuba to the United States, the vast majority to Miami (Sandoval , ). The church had become a haven for hundreds of Marielitos, as the new Cuban refugees were called. In the early s Our Lady of Divine Providence’s congregation was thus heavily Cuban, with a sprinkling of other Latin American immigrants. But soon 172 AIDIL OSCARIZ enough, political turmoil in their homeland drove an unprecedented number of Nicaraguans to seek refuge in the United States, many of them settling within the boundaries of the Our Lady of Divine Providence parish (Fernández Kelly and Curran ; Portes and Stepick ). The  U.S. Census reported that , Nicaraguans then lived in Dade County, which is likely an underestimation (Konczal ). The parish’s growth was commensurate with Nicaraguan immigration to the city, and within a few years the congregation’s ethnic demographics had shifted considerably. By the end of the s,  percent of members were Nicaraguan, rendering the once-predominant Cuban parishioners a minority. According to Orlando Aleu, a Cuban American who joined the congregation in , initially this demographic shift did not result in any discord between the new group and the Cuban exile community, who could themselves relate all too well to the refugee experience. During an interview he indicated, “There was a solidarity because we knew, we came from a Communist country, of people who are fleeing the same system.” Nicaraguan immigrants, however, did not find the United States to be as welcoming as had the Cubans before them. The U.S. government was reticent to consider them to be “political refugees,” thereby denying them asylum, and thus many settled in the area as illegal immigrants . Moreover, the Cuban exiles’ warm reception of the new Central Americans was short-lived, and soon a power struggle emerged in the neighborhood and in the parish. In short time, though, the parish’s Nicaraguan majority and the significant number of Cubans and other Hispanics appear to have settled their differences in the local Catholic community, which they have each infused with their own unique cultural traditions. While Nicaraguans come to Divine Providence from all over Miami for a taste of their homeland culture and a sense of national pride, people from all different countries join them December  to celebrate the Feast of La Purísima, Nicaragua’s patron saint, which is the highlight of the year at the church. The feast days of the patron saints of other “sending” Latin American countries are also celebrated at the parish, making the church an important part of Miami’s vibrant popular Catholic cult of the saints. Such devotions issue from, just as they reproduce and augment, the rich stores of religious capital at Our Lady of Divine Providence, religious capital understood here as “the degree of mastery of and attachment to a particular religious culture” (Stark and Finke , ). As is the case in much of the Catholic world, however, popular saint devotions...

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