CHAPTER FIVE
Hispanic Catholicism and the Illusion of Knowledge
In their book on New Mexico, Marta Weigle and Peter White (1988) list four “focal places” that epitomize modern New Mexico’s multiethnic identity, and the only one of the four that is distinctively associated with New Mexico’s Hispano Catholic population is the small church at Chimayó, located about thirty miles northeast of Santa Fe.1 This church, it happens, is also a well-known Catholic pilgrimage site and attracts thousands of visitors annually as either tourists or pilgrims or both. Ramón Gutiérrez (1995) estimates that anywhere from five to ten thousand people visit this church on weekdays during the spring and summer, and that the number is higher on the weekends, when people from the local community attend church services there. Both Gutiérrez (1995; 2000) and Enrique Lamadrid (1999) state, though without citing any comparative data, that Chimayó is the single most popular Catholic pilgrimage site in the United States.
One of the recurring themes in both popular and scholarly discussions of Chimayó is the suggestion that the shrine there is associated with supernatural cures and favors in the same way that, say, the shrine at Lourdes is associated with supernatural cures and favors. Indeed, typing “santuario de Chimayó” into an Internet search engine quickly leads to more than a dozen websites, including one maintained by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, which describe Chimayó as “the Lourdes of America.” This characterization of Chimayó as the Lourdes of America is also found in guidebooks aimed at tourists visiting the Southwest (Knight 1999; Ward 1997), in scholarly articles (Lane 2001), and in early accounts of Chimayó addressed to the general public (De Huff 1931; Walter 1916). Unlike Lourdes, however, where supernatural cures and favors are associated with water from the spring that flows there, the cures and favors at Chimayó are associated with “holy dirt” from the posita (dry well) within the shrine. Phrased slightly differently, Chimayó is the sort of pilgrimage site you might expect Lourdes to be if it had emerged—like Chimayó—in a land where water is a scarce resource.
There are several origin legends associated with the Chimayó shrine (Gutiérrez 1995; Nunn 1993), and although these legends differ in many of their details, they generally agree in suggesting that the shrine emerged sometime in the period 1810–1815 through the efforts of a local resident, Bernardo Abeyta. Abeyta is a known historical figure who would become an important and influential member of the Penitente Brotherhood. We know for certain that in 1813 Abeyta sent a petition to Fray Sebastían Alvarez at Santa Cruz de la Cañada (the community where the nearest parish church was located) for permission to build a small chapel in Chimayó that would be dedicated to Nuestro Señor de Esquípulas. The title Nuestro Señor de Esquípulas was originally associated with a miraculous crucifix that had been enshrined in a church at Esquípulas, in eastern Guatemala, during the late 1500s. By the early nineteenth century, and so at the time of the Abeyta petition, satellite churches dedicated to Nuestro Señor de Esquípulas had been established throughout Central America and Mexico.
Something else found in almost all accounts of Chimayó is the claim that centuries before Abeyta erected his chapel, the Chimayó site had been sacred to the Tewa Indians who lived in the area. As far as I can tell, however, this idea is rooted entirely in oral traditions collected from Pueblo Indian communities in the twentieth century (see for example Gutiérrez 1995; Kay 1987) and I know of no archeological or pre–twentieth century ethnographic evidence to substantiate it. What this means is that, while it is certainly possible that Chimayó may have been a sacred Tewa site, it is also possible that this is a story that developed among Pueblo Catholics in response to the establishment of the santuario as a way of allowing Pueblo Catholics to explain their involvement with a sacred site that was otherwise ostensibly Spanish in origin. Nevertheless, the simple fact that this claim is now routinely made is in itself evidence that it is an important part of the story that scholars and lay Catholics (both Hispano and Pueblo) tell about Chimayó.
The matter of origins aside, another important element in the Chimayó story is always a description of the physical structure of the santuario itself. Entering through the main door of the modest-sized church at Chimayó, visitors first encounter a picturesque interior dominated by five altar screens. These screens contain retablos (painted wooden panels) and bultos (carved figures) created by three well-known nineteenth-century santeros (men who made religious art). The screen behind the main altar is the work of Antonio Molleno, while the others (two along each side of the church) are usually credited to José Aragón and José Rafael Aragón of Córdova. Since all three santeros are discussed at length in books about the religious art of New Mexico (see, for example, Cash 1999; Frank 1992; Steele 1994), it seems likely that many of the tourists who come to Chimayó come to see their work. For the pilgrims who come to Chimayó out of religious devotion, however, the most important part of the shrine lies through a small doorway to the left of the altar.
Moving through that doorway brings you first to the sacristy, a room lying alongside the main body of the church. Here you find an image of the Santo Niño (Holy Child) enclosed in a small wooden shrine (which appears to be an old confessional). Throughout the sacristy—hanging on the walls or from the ceiling, inside the Santo Niño shrine, sitting on shelves—are objects usually identified as ex voto (these will be discussed in detail below). Adjoining this room is a smaller room in which is found the posita that contains the holy dirt. Incidentally, it is common knowledge that the dirt in the posita is replenished regularly by church staff using dirt from the local area, but this does not seem to affect the regard in which the dirt in the shrine is held.
Today, the high point of the pilgrimage experience at Chimayó occurs during Holy Week, and more specifically on Good Friday (see Figure 6). Holmes-Rodman (2004) estimates that in the late 1990s about 2,000 pilgrims were visiting Chimayó on Good Friday; my own sense is that the number is likely a bit higher. Many Good Friday pilgrims arrive by car or bus, but many others arrive having made a long journey on foot. Indeed, anyone driving along the highways near Santa Fe in the days leading up to Good Friday will encounter “sanctuary walkers” moving along the side of the road toward Chimayó. In recent years, the New Mexico Department of Transportation has facilitated the Chimayó pilgrimage by closing one lane of selected highways to automobile traffic, and the State Police have assigned several dozen officers to help ensure the safety of the walkers.
Although Chimayó attracts a fair number of Anglo (English-speaking non-Hispanic) tourists, most of the pilgrims who go there for religious reasons are Hispano Catholics, that is, Catholics who claim descent from the Spanish colonists who settled in New Mexico during the seventeenth century. Gutiérrez (1995) estimates that more than 80 percent of the pilgrims who come to Chimayó for religious reasons are Hispanos. One result of this Hispano predominance, given the visibility and popularity of the Good Friday pilgrimage to Chimayó, is that this pilgrimage has become an important element in what it means to be a Hispano in contemporary New Mexico. (On the centrality of the Chimayó Good Friday pilgrimage to modern Hispano identity, see Carlson 1990.)
Because Chimayó will already be well-known to many readers, and because it is so strongly associated with Hispano religiosity, a close analysis of the scholarly literature on Chimayó—it seems to me—can serve as a useful first step in making the overarching argument that I want to make in this chapter. That argument, simply, is this: much of what we “know” about Hispanic Catholicism derives less from the evidence than from what American scholars studying religion want Hispanic Catholicism to be. Existing scholarly knowledge about Hispanic Catholicism, in other words, is often more an illusion, though undeniably an appealing illusion, than anything else.
Fig. 6. Pilgrims entering the sanctuary at Chimayó on Good Friday 1999.
“A Veritable Museum of Material Culture Artifacts Associated with Spanish Catholic Spirituality”
Because it is central to all accounts of Chimayó that the pilgrims see it as a place of supernatural power, these accounts (see, for example, Gutiérrez 1995; Kay 1987) routinely mention three things: the holy dirt in the posita, the Santo Niño (through whose intercession favors are granted), and the ex voto brought to Chimayó by the devout. The ex voto, that is, items left in the sacristy as testaments to a favor that has been granted, are especially important within the logic of these accounts because they provide tangible evidence that the pilgrims who go to Chimayó truly associate the santuario with miraculous cures and favors. Ramón Gutiérrez (1995, 80), for example, provides a detailed description of the ex voto in the sacristy:
In contemporary times, despite the centrality of the statue of the Santo Niño de Atocha and its grotto, what gains most attention in the ex-voto room (the Sacristy) are the numerous votive offerings that have been left there by pilgrims. Every wall space and every shelf space in the room is covered with religious statues of various sizes, with equally varied pictures of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the saints and angels, with very personal missives and poems, as well as canes, crutches, limb braces, and glasses. It is not uncommon for a person to vow a pilgrimage to the Santuario if they recover rapidly from a broken bone, surgery or an illness. Thus, in the ex-voto room one finds, as I did in 1990, twenty-five crutches, five canes, two leg braces, and two pairs of eyeglasses. The room had over 170 religious pictures [on] the wall. …The religious statuary that pilgrims had left as offerings was also immense, numbering around 150.
Other investigators have provided similar, if briefer, accounts:
Various offerings [hang] from the wall of the sacristy such as crutches, canes, a corset, etc., left by pilgrims who had been cured by the blessed earth. (de Borhegyi 1956, 26)
[The] small sacristy [is] filled with a veritable museum of material culture artifacts associated with Spanish Catholic spirituality. Multiple statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Santo Niño, the child Jesus, are dressed in doll clothes, slips of paper pinned to them with requests for prayer. Abandoned crutches and prosthetic devices hang from the walls with testimonial letters speaking of experiences of healing. (Lane 2001, 61–62)
Pilgrims, who often arrive (on Good Friday) on crutches or in wheelchairs and carry large wooden crosses on their shoulders, post small votive images of ailing body parts in the room called El Pocito (the little hole), which houses medicinal sand. (Holmes-Rodman 2004)
Notice that all these accounts mention items, like crutches and canes, which, when abandoned, become emblems of healing and so reinforce the suggestion that at Chimayó, as at Lourdes, there are miraculous cures to be had. Unfortunately, or so I now want to argue, the image of Chimayó and the Chimayó experience conveyed in most scholarly accounts, including all those cited to this point, is fundamentally flawed.
Visiting Chimayó during Holy Week
While writing a book on the history of the Penitentes (Carroll 2002), I made several trips to northern New Mexico to do archival research, and on each trip I made a point of visiting Chimayó. Partly, this was because Chimayó is a pleasant place to visit; but in addition, I had developed an interest in santero art, and the ex voto room did remind me of the many shrines that I had visited in Italy and Spain, and obviously something significant was happening at Chimayó.
Entering the sacristy on most of these occasions, I found it to contain exactly the sort of objects that Gutiérrez and others describe. One thing that was mildly puzzling to me was that most of the objects—the statues on the shelves and the pictures on the walls in particular—seemed more “generically Catholic” than Hispanic; notwithstanding a few statues and votive candles depicting the Virgen de Guadalupe, most of the statues and pictures seemed the sort of devotional objects that might be purchased in a Catholic religious supply store in any American city. Missing entirely was anything resembling the painted ex voto usually found in Mexican churches. These paintings, made on rectangular pieces of tin, often using house paint, depict a person (who is usually named) being delivered from danger as the result of an appeal to some madonna or saint. These painted ex voto have been a part of the Mexican Catholic tradition since the early nineteenth century (Giffords 1974; Luna 2000) and are still commissioned by migrant workers who have been delivered from some danger associated with the migrant experience (Durand and Massey 1995). Painted ex voto of this sort are also commonly found in churches in Central and South America and in Spain and Italy (though painted on wood rather than tin). But they are not found at Chimayó. At first, this seemed a minor detail. After all, the fact that pictures and statues were being brought to Chimayó as ex voto seemed more important than the type of pictures and statues involved.
In 1999, however, my visit to New Mexico coincided with Holy Week, and so afforded me the opportunity to visit Chimayó during the period when, everyone agrees, the pilgrims are most numerous. Because it had never been done, I wanted to do a before-and-after assessment of the ex voto in the sacristy, comparing the contents of that room on Holy Thursday (before the arrival of the thousands of pilgrims on Good Friday) with the contents of the room at the end of the day on Good Friday. So, on Holy Thursday I entered the sacristy around 8 PM (there were few people around and so getting inside was a simple matter) and, using a hand-held counter in my coat pocket, counted the number of items in categories that more or less matched the categories used by Gutiérrez (crutches, rosaries, religious pictures, religious statues). This count is given in the first column of Table 6.
TABLE 6
Objects Left by Pilgrims in the Sacristy at Chimayó, Holy Thursday Evening and Good Friday Evening, 1999
The next day, Good Friday, I visited the sanctuary in the morning, afternoon, and evening. It was packed with pilgrims on each occasion (notwithstanding the cold weather that year). By my calculation, it took someone joining the end of the line about 90 minutes to reach the church entrance. I joined the line in the evening, around 6:30, so that I would get to the sacristy around the same time I’d been there the night before. When I reached the sacristy, I was confronted with a display for which I was completely unprepared.
Stuck into every nook and cranny of the sacristy were hundreds, possibly thousands, of small photos. Most were wallet size, either school photos or the sort of photos taken at coin-operated photo machines, and depicted a single individual. There had been maybe half a dozen photos like this the night before, each stuck into the frame of a religious picture, but I hadn’t bothered counting them because I had assumed that they had been put there by the people who had brought the pictures (which I was counting). Obviously, however, depositing a photo of this sort was an important part of the pilgrimage experience for many Good Friday pilgrims, even though it was something unmentioned in all existing accounts. But there was a second surprise.
While in the sacristy, I did another count of the items I had counted the previous evening. The results of this count are presented in column 2 of Table 6. I should note that there was no wholesale replacement of items, that is, as far as I could tell, the vast majority of the “ex voto” counted in column 2 had been there the night before. What is significant, then, comparing the two columns, is that the overall number of these items had decreased slightly. This slight decrease, however, was the result of 53 candles2 being taken away. Still, the number of new objects is relatively small given the number of pilgrims who went through the sacristy on Good Friday and considering the hundreds of small photos deposited. The significant pattern, in other words, is that the number of objects in the ex voto room—at least the sorts of objects given special attention in existing accounts of Chimayó—had increased little despite the thousands of pilgrims who had come to the sanctuary on Good Friday.
What did the hundreds of photos deposited at the sacristy on Good Friday mean? I didn’t know and still don’t. Possibly they were brought in fulfillment of a promise to do so if a favor was received. Possibly they represent a request made on behalf of the person in the photo. Possibly too, however, they represent an attempt to secure protection from danger or to identify with Chimayó by leaving a bit of “yourself” there. And possibly, they are put there for all these reasons. One reason we don’t know what they mean, however, is that all previous investigators, in their rush to make Chimayó the “Lourdes of America,” have focused on those objects that “seem” like ex voto but which (apparently) are unrelated to the Good Friday pilgrimage and have ignored the photos that Good Friday pilgrims themselves prefer to leave at the shrine.
The focus on crutches, statues, and religious pictures is not the only way existing accounts of Chimayó have misrepresented the pilgrimage experience there. Typically, these same accounts give a distorted view of the history of the shrine since its founding in the early 1800s. Most existing accounts (in particular de Borhegyi 1956; Gutiérrez 1995) employ a common formula in presenting the history of the Chimayó shrine: they start by identifying it as a popular pilgrimage site and then go on to discuss (1) the founding of the original chapel by Bernardo Abeyta c. 1813, (2) its links to the Guatemalan shrine in honor of Nuestro Señor de Esquípulas established during the late sixteenth century, and (3) the Santo Niño cult installed at Chimayó in the late 1900s. The strong implication that flows easily out of all this is that Chimayó has been a popular pilgrimage site since the early 1800s (i.e., right from the time it was founded) and that it is heir to a continuing tradition of pilgrimage associated with the Spanish Americas. The addition by some writers that the site had previously been sacred to the Tewa Indians only reinforces this emphasis on longstanding and continuing traditions. Indeed, Ramón Gutiérrez (1995, 1) does this when he reports that “legend holds that pilgrims have been traveling to Chimayó for at least six hundred years” (p. 71) and that “during the early nineteenth century, the shrine constructed at Chimayó... became the northernmost shrine in an extensive network of shrines that extended from New Mexico all the way south to Central America” (p. 74). Gutiérrez goes on to suggest that this “network of shrines” included such well-known shrines as Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos in San Juan de Los Lagos, Nuestra Señora de Talpa in Talpa, and Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Mexico City. However, the suggestion that Chimayó was a popular pilgrimage site during the nineteenth century, and—in particular—that it was part of a “shrine complex” that included other undeniably popular shrines like those listed by Gutiérrez, is a claim unsupported by the historical evidence.
It is true that during the early 1800s, church authorities in Durango (New Mexico being part of the Diocese of Durango in Mexico at the time) issued a license permitting public masses to be celebrated in the chapel at Chimayó and that this license was renewed several times in succeeding years (Chávez 1957). This was not done, however, because large numbers of people were visiting Chimayó. On the contrary, as Fray Alvarez, the parish priest at Santa Cruz de la Cañada, made clear in his letter of support, the license was needed mainly because the residents of Chimayó found it difficult to get to the parish church at Santa Cruz de la Cañada to hear mass.3
Things changed a bit after Abeyta’s death in 1856. Sometime in the late 1850s, another resident of Chimayó, Severiano Medina, fulfilled a vow to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santo Niño de Atocha in Plateros, Mexico, if he were to be cured of rheumatism (which he was). Medina returned with an image of the Santo Niño, and a chapel was erected to house this image very near the santuario. The Santo Niño cult proved popular, and shortly the newer chapel was attracting far more pilgrims than the santuario. In response, the Abeyta family installed their own Santo Niño image, in the santuario. Although the image they used was really an image of the Infant of Prague (de Borhegyi 1956), it was seen to be an image of the Santo Niño de Atocha and began to attract pilgrims on that basis. Very quickly the Santo Niño cult at the santuario eclipsed the Esquípulas cult in popularity (Nunn 1993). Although the number of pilgrims to the santuario became greater than earlier in the century, it did not become the sort of pilgrimage site it is today.
For example, one of the earliest accounts of a visit to the santuario that we have comes from the Pueblo potter María Martínez (c. 1887–1980), who in later life recalled a visit to the santuario that she had made during the 1890s (Marriott 1948). Martínez’s account is interesting mainly because of what’s missing. First, although Martínez mentions the Santo Niño image on the main altar, she says nothing about the Esquípulas cult—thus reinforcing the conclusion that it was the Santo Niño cult, not the Esquípulas cult, which attracted pilgrims in this period. Also missing from Martínez’s account is the suggestion—routinely made in modern accounts of Chimayó—that the holy dirt had curative properties in the same way that water from Lourdes is said to. Martínez had been severely ill with a fever several months before their pilgrimage, and her mother had promised the Santo Niño that she would bring Maria to the santuario if Maria survived the illness. But it was only when Maria had recovered fully and regained enough strength to walk to Chimayó that she and her family made the pilgrimage. At the santuario, Maria did rub dirt from the posita over her body; but since she was fully recovered, the purpose, as her mother told her (Marriott 1948), was to secure the continuing protection of the Santo Niño over the rest of her life. Most importantly, what is also missing from Martínez’s account—even though it is central to the modern experience of pilgrimage at Chimayó—is any association of pilgrimage to Chimayó with Holy Week, and in particular, any suggestion that large numbers of Hispano Catholics went to Chimayó during Holy Week.
If the church at Chimayó (at best) attracted only a very limited number of pilgrims from outside the local area during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that would explain why there is no mention of Chimayó in accounts that almost certainly would have taken note of a popular pilgrimage site in the Santa Fe area if such a site had existed. There is, for instance, no mention of Chimayó in the pastoral letter that Antonio de Zubaría, Bishop of Durango, issued from Santa Cruz de la Cañada during his 1833 visitation to New Mexico. Nor is there anything in the documentary record to suggest that Jean Baptiste Lamy, Bishop and then Archbishop of Santa Fe from 1852 to 1885, ever discussed Chimayó as a pilgrimage site (see, for example, Steele 2000). Nor is Chimayó mentioned in the ecclesiastical history of New Mexico and Arizona written by John B. Salpointe (1898), who succeeded Lamy as Archbishop of Santa Fe in 1885.
True, a few stories about Chimayó were published over the period 1880 to 1920. The focus of these stories, which were always addressed to the general public, however, was the “holy dirt” and the people who traveled to Chimayó in search of a miraculous cure. Thus, on October 3, 1885, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported,
Perhaps it is not generally known that there is a spot of consecrated ground within a few day’s drive of Santa Fe, where there is not a day in the year but that some distressed (person) applies the consecrated dust to his or her body. … the writer was told by the devout layman that has officiated in the chapel for thirty years that not a case that has visited the holy place, in good faith, but has recovered. (reproduced in La Farge 1970, 125)
A few years later, another report about Chimayó (Walter 1916, 2) made the same point:
Stories are told of the cures effected by the holy clay from the little chapel....A few weeks ago, a woman from Galisteo who had been a paralytic for ten years (and) who had been pronounced incurable by physicians (came) to Chimayó. She had been unable to walk for years, but upon her return from the Santuario, while near Pojoaque, she leaped from the wagon to the great joy of her relatives with her, and since then has been able to walk and work as she did before she had been stricken with paralysis.
What is still missing from these reports is anything suggesting that Chimayó was a place of mass pilgrimage that attracted thousands of people each year, that it had some special appeal to Hispano Catholics, or that pilgrimage to Chimayó was associated with Holy Week (an association now central to the pilgrimage experience at Chimayó).
Additional evidence for believing that Chimayó was not a particularly important pilgrimage site until relatively recently is to be found in the reason that the Abeyta family gave for selling the chapel in 1929 to a group of Anglos: too few people were visiting the chapel and making donations (Kay 1987). This, incidentally, was not because outsiders never came to Chimayó. On the contrary, recollections collected from people who had grown up in the Chimayó area in the early part of the twentieth century suggest that a great many outsiders did come to Chimayó, but they came for the annual celebration in honor of Santiago (St. James), Chimayó’s patron saint (Usner 1995); they did not come to visit the Abeyta chapel. Nor is there anything in a story about Chimayó published in the mid-1930s (Hurt 1934) which suggested that the chapel was at that time a popular pilgrimage site or in any way associated with Holy Week.
Finally, as far as I can determine, there is no mention of a pilgrimage to Chimayó in any of the stories that the Santa Fe New Mexican published during Holy Week for the years 1938–1946. This is true even though the newspaper did routinely alert its readers to church services (both Catholic and Protestant) in and around Santa Fe during Holy Week and did pay attention to popular Catholic practice during this period. Quite often, for example, the New Mexican published stories about the Penitentes around this time of the year. In some years the New Mexican also described a type of pilgrimage (their term) that took place in Santa Fe on Holy Thursday. In its Good Friday (March 23rd) edition for 1940 the paper reported (p. 8):
Yesterday, Holy Thursday, there took place in Santa Fe the observance of a custom probably not observed anywhere else in this country on such a scale. The streets were filled with persons, marching from one Catholic church to another—to pay a visit to each. It was the pilgrimage done once a year by many of those of the Catholic faith and one that apparently never grows old for them.
The story goes on to note that on this occasion church authorities opened many churches normally closed to the public (“like the little buttressed chapel of St. Michael’s College”). A similar story about this Holy Thursday pilgrimage published on the New Mexican’s front page on April 21, 1943, reports that “thousands” of Catholics participated. But although the New Mexican reported on this Holy Week pilgrimage, there is no mention of a pilgrimage to Chimayó during these years.
So, just when did Chimayó become the truly popular pilgrimage site that it is today? As far as I can tell, it is only in the week following Easter in 1946 that we first encounter evidence of anything resembling the modern pilgrimage to Chimayó. A story in the April 24th issue of the Santa Fe New Mexican in 1946 announced that there would be a mass said on Sunday in the santuario at Chimayó “as a culmination of a pilgrimage which a number of Bataan survivors are planning.” Ten men, the story continues, would be making the trek from Santa Fe to Chimayó on foot, and buses would be provided for others. A few days later another story (published on the front page on Saturday April 27th) revealed that this pilgrimage was the result of a vow that the Bataan survivors had made while in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. The event on Sunday was described in a front-page story published on Monday, April 29th:
More than 500, probably the largest congregation ever to attend services in El Santuario, Chimayó’s famed chapel, were present at 10 a.m. High Mass yesterday which culminated the weekend pilgrimage of veterans to that tiny community. … Twenty-three veterans—all but two members of New Mexico’s 200th Coast Artillery which was captured on Bataan—made the 26 mile march. … The crowd overflowed until the 50 ft. patio in front of the church was more than half-filled. The narrow streets and yards of the rolling hillside confronting the church were filled with other groups and autos parked every which way....After the service with its sermon in Spanish had been completed, those in the patio surged into the chapel and the little side shrine was crowded with a patient stream of supplicants who gathered handfuls of the soil from the dry well, which supposedly has curative powers.
This story is significant for at least two reasons. First, although the writer takes it as obvious that readers will know about Chimayó, he or she is also suggesting that a crowd of 500 or so people at the sanctuary is something unusual. Second, although Easter had been a week earlier, and although this pilgrimage was clearly rooted in what had happened to these men after the fall of Bataan (which happened on April 9, 1942), the fact remains that this is one of the earliest reports that even comes close to linking a pilgrimage to Chimayó with Holy Week.
Interestingly, the slight lack of fit between this 1946 pilgrimage and Holy Week has been “adjusted” in the retelling. Thus, in the preface to a photo-essay on Chimayó, Enrique Lamadrid (1999, 23) tells us:
Pilgrimage to the Santuario exploded after the end of World War II, and the newly paved roads were an important factor in improving communication and transportation. The tremendous Holy Week celebration of 1946 with its thousands of veterans and former prisoners of war on the road to Chimayó is still a powerful living memory. (Emphasis added.)
While this account does at least acknowledge that the modern pilgrimage experience is a product of the postwar period—and setting aside the fact that the dozens of veterans who made the 1946 pilgrimage have now become thousands— Lamadrid has the original pilgrimage occurring during Holy Week, and so before Easter, even though the reality is that it was staged after Easter. I don’t fault Lamadrid for the chronological error. On the contrary, his reference to “powerful living memory” makes it likely that he is presenting what the older participants in the Chimayó pilgrimage now truly believe: that this pilgrimage has been associated with Holy Week since its postwar inception.
In the end, then, there are two models of Hispanic spirituality associated with Chimayó. The first, the model promoted in existing scholarly accounts, claims that Chimayó has been a popular pilgrimage destination for centuries, that the pilgrimage is a continuation of pilgrimage traditions common throughout the Spanish Americas, that the pilgrims who go to Chimayó go there because they associate the holy dirt at Chimayó with miraculous cures of the sort ascribed to the spring water at Lourdes, and that, in gratitude for these cures, the pilgrims leave crutches, canes, and objects that are distinctively religious but generally impersonal. The problem with this model is that it is unsupported by the historical record. The second model is the one that has emerged in the discussion here: both Chimayó’s popularity with Hispano Catholics and the association of the Chimayó pilgrimage with Holy Week are relatively recent phenomena, having emerged only after World War II, and the Hispanic pilgrims who come on Good Friday leave objects (wallet-sized photos) that are not overtly religious or obviously indicative of miraculous cure but which are indisputably tied to some particular individual.
I grant that there are many gaps in this second model that need to be filled in. What, for example, do the pictures brought to Chimayó on Good Friday mean? Was Chimayó’s postwar popularity the result of something happening in the Hispanic community or was it part of that more general religious revival that has been documented (Noll 1992) for both Catholic and Protestant groups in the aftermath of World War II? But questions such as these cannot begin to be addressed until the first model is set aside. After all, we will never come to understand why Hispano pilgrims leave gifts on Good Friday if we continue to focus on the wrong ex voto, on the objects that are clearly NOT the ones left by these particular pilgrims. Nor will we be able to answer questions about Chimayó’s postwar popularity if we continue to believe—à la Gutierrez and others—that it has been a popular pilgrimage site for centuries.
But all of this raises a question that is more historiographical than historical: if the first model of Hispanic piety associated with Chimayó is so easily discredited and so easily shown to be an obstacle in coming to understand the modern experience of pilgrimage at Chimayó, then why has this model been so popular for so long with scholars and their audiences? A clue to the answer, I suggest, is to be found by looking more closely at something that has already been mentioned: the Abeyta family’s sale of the chapel in 1929.
Preserving an Imagined Past
During the 1920s, a group of Anglos in the Santa Fe area—whose most prominent members included Mary Austin, Frank Applegate, and John Gaw Meem—formed the Society for the Revival of Spanish-Colonial Arts (later to be formally incorporated as the Spanish Colonial Arts Society).4 The stated goals of the organization were to preserve Spanish-Colonial (Hispanic) art and to educate the general public about the important role that such art has played in the history of New Mexico. Writing in Commonweal, Mary Austin (1928c, 574) made it clear why such a society was needed and why Anglos needed to take the lead:
[The] lovely arts of weaving and carving and painting and dyeing fell into disuse [after Annexation]. … Slowly the natives surrendered to the lure of the mail order catalogue. Only just in time to save them from oblivion, within the last fifteen years, artists and people of a more sophisticated culture began coming to New Mexico, and discovered that there were still reminders of the Spanish culture worth saving.
The implication is that enlightened and sophisticated Anglos like herself had to preserve the Hispano heritage of New Mexico because the Hispanos themselves had no interest, in Austin’s view, in doing so.
Although Austin herself seems to have been interested mainly in preserving traditions associated with bultos, retablos, weaving, and the like, others in the Society—notably Frank Applegate and the architect John Gaw Meem—were proponents of the Pueblo Spanish architectural style that became fashionable in the Santa Fe and Taos areas during the 1920s and 1930s.5 The defining features of this architectural style are an emphasis on rounded corners, on walls made of material that simulated adobe both in texture and color (which usually meant stucco over reinforced concrete), and on buttresses. Although the Pueblo Spanish style was very much a reversal of the sort of architectural designs that had flourished in New Mexico over the period 1875–1910, it was promoted as the continuation of traditions dating from the colonial period, and it functioned to create a romanticized impression of the past that very much appealed (then and now) to the Anglo tourists flocking to Santa Fe and Taos.
Architects like Meem designed new structures, including both public buildings and private homes, which conformed to the new style. But because the style was sold as the continuation of something that had long been in place, a number of older buildings which should have conformed to the style (because they dated from the pre-Annexation period) but didn’t were renovated to create the image that tourists wanted to see. The tourists who now flock to Taos to see the rounded adobe walls and flowing back buttress of San Francisco de Asís church—an image immortalized in one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s best-known paintings—would, I think, be quite surprised to see the more angular church that existed around the turn of the century. But older church buildings were also important to Austin and her group for reasons that went beyond architectural design.
In three articles she wrote for Commonweal (1928a; 1928b; 1928c), Austin asserted that colonial New Mexico had been a society in which the “whole of its aesthetic and social life [was] centered around the living church,” with the result that the “relations of the colonists and the Indians were better adjusted humanly than in other pioneer settlements” (she dismisses the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 as an aberration!), and that “Catholicism saved the colonies of New Mexico from what happened everywhere else in the United States—the separation of the economic life of the community from beauty, grace and suavity.”
Given their view of New Mexico’s past (as regards both architecture and culture), it was natural that Austin and her group in Santa Fe would take an interest in the nearby church at Chimayó. For proponents of the Pueblo Spanish style like Meem, it epitomized what they were trying to promote and preserve: not only was the church itself made of adobe, but it had a front courtyard surrounded by rounded adobe walls and an acequia (irrigation ditch) flowing in front of the courtyard. Indeed, writing a decade earlier, Paul Walter (1916, 6) had identified the church at Chimayó as “probably the most charming bit of primitive Santa Fe architecture in existence.” But this church was also important because it could be taken as a living reminder of the role that Catholicism had (supposedly) played in structuring New Mexican life during the colonial period. Elizabeth Willis De Huff (1931, 39), a member of Austin’s circle, made this clear in an article on Chimayó she wrote for the New Mexico Highway Journal:
Though the faith of their fathers may die, the Santuario beneath the old cottonwoods whose myriad branches droop like protecting arms before it, with the acequia madre running around it as if in motherly embrace, stands as a monument and a memorial to those earlier beliefs of the simple-living weavers of Chimayó.
Given all that Chimayó stood for, then, it is hardly surprising that Austin and her group became alarmed when they learned that the church at Chimayó might lose some of its connections to the past.
Sometime in the late 1920s, María de los Angeles Cháves, Bernardo Abeyta’s granddaughter, offered many of the artifacts found at Chimayó (including the carved wooden doors and an old bulto of Santiago) for sale to antique dealers. These sales came to the attention of Austin and her group, who got the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican to publicize the situation. Eventually, Austin was able to raise money from a private donor to purchase the church,6 and the deed transferring title to the archdiocese was signed by Cháves at her home on October 15, 1929. John Gaw Meem’s signature appears on the deed as a witness (Kay 1987).
Understanding why Chimayó was so important to Austin and her group helps us see why the usual story scholars tell about Chimayó has been so uncritically accepted, despite the fact that it is historically inaccurate. Simply put, the idea that Chimayó has been an important pilgrimage site for centuries and that it had links to Spanish colonial traditions of pilgrimage that are even older fits well with the romanticized vision of New Mexico’s past that Anglos like Austin and Meem were selling—a vision that continues to sell well with the hordes of non-Hispanic tourists who come to the Santa Fe–Taos region each year. Phrased differently, the usual story about Chimayó uses faux history to establish the same sense of continuity with a Spanish colonial past that architects like Meem have tried to promote using faux adobe. The fact that Anglos often hear this appealing story about Chimayó from Hispanic commentators like Ramón Gutiérrez only adds to its seeming authenticity.
The Hispano Catholic population of New Mexico is, I grant, only a small segment of the Hispanic Catholic population of the United States, and the Holy Week pilgrimage to Chimayó—as important as it is—cannot alone represent the Hispano Catholic experience. In the end, then, the misperceptions about Chimayó that have been discussed to this point might seem to be of only marginal relevance to the more general concern of this chapter, which is to identify what is problematic in the scholarly literature on Hispanic Catholicism in the United States. What makes the Chimayó case relevant to that more general concern, however, is that when we do turn to more wide-ranging discussions of Hispanic Catholicism, we find just what we found in the Chimayó case: American scholars telling stories that are widely accepted but little supported by the available evidence. Consider, for example, what social scientists—mainly sociologists—say about Hispanic Catholicism.
What Makes Hispanic Catholicism Distinctive?
The word Hispanic, like Latino and Latina (preferred by some commentators), subsumes into a single category people who are undeniably diverse. Although most Hispanics in the United States are Chicano (Mexican American), the rest come from a variety of other national origins. Data derived from the 1990 U.S. census, for example, show that Mexico is the national origin of 61 percent of all Hispanics in the United States, with the corresponding percentages for other national origins being Puerto Rico, 12 percent; Cuba, 5 percent; and other countries in the Caribbean or Central or South America, 13 percent (Moore 1994). The remaining 9 percent are classed as “other Hispanic” by the Census Bureau, a term that refers mostly to Hispanics living in the Southwest who are descended from the Spanish who settled in this area during the colonial period (Moore 1994).
For a few social scientists, the diversity that exists within the Hispanic population precludes talking about a generic “Hispanic Catholicism” and necessitates a focus on particular national traditions. This point is made by Timothy Matovina and Gary Riebe-Estrella, for example, in introducing their collection of essays (2002) on Mexican traditions within American Catholicism. One result of this diversity is that there are now many studies, several of which I will be citing, that investigate popular Catholicism within individual Hispanic subcommunities— Mexican American, Cuban American, and so forth. However, the view that Hispanic diversity precludes talking about a generic Hispanic Catholicism is very much a minority position.
Most social scientists writing on Hispanic Catholicism first make passing acknowledgment of the diversity within the Hispanic population but then go on to suggest that, nevertheless, there are numerous elements that distinguish Hispanic Catholicism from the sort of Catholicism that prevails in other Catholic groups in the United States. Indeed, for scholars in this category, focusing on popular Catholicism within some particular Hispanic community without attempting to assess the extent to which the findings can be generalized to all Hispanic Catholics is considered a deficiency. In her review of Thomas Tweed’s (1997a) study of religious practice at a Cuban exilic shrine in Miami, for example, Ana María Díaz-Stevens (1999) makes just this point, finding that Tweed’s failure to make clear to what extent his conclusions do or do not apply to other U.S. Latino groups was the most serious flaw in his book.
Although different investigators come up with slightly different lists when identifying what is distinctive about Hispanic Catholicism, the one element that appears on almost all such lists is the claim that Hispanic Catholicism has a “matriarchal core.” The following remarks are typical:
It is to be noted that both in Spain and America, women who are barred from the ordained ministry play a very important role in religiosidad popular. The mother (or grandmother) is the great leader of prayer and transmitter of religious lore and values. Rezadoras are much more common than rezadores. (Vidal 1994, 85)
. . . [T]he leadership of prayer life in the Hispanic community has traditionally been a feminine role. The main practitioners and promoters of popular religiosity are women. The first ways and words of prayer are taught by the abuelas (grandmothers), mothers, women religious and catechists. It is from them that the feeling of prayer, the holy, the love of God, Mary and the saints is transmitted. (Peréz 1994, 380)
Family life is stronger among Latinos than among other Catholics. Women (Latinas) are more active in parish life and devotional life than Latino men, and commonly religion is defined among Latinos as being the women’s domain. (D’Antonio, Davidson, Hoge, and Meyer 2001, 154)
I believe that special attention must be paid to the role women have played in the maintenance of our [Hispanic Catholic] faith. Consecrated religious women have been present to the people in our neighborhoods in ways that other institutional religious leaders have not. … They often have greater influence and can claim higher levels of loyalty than the ordained clergy, basically because the common folk recognize wisdom when they see it. (Díaz-Stevens 2003, 176)
For the most part, Latino rituals are preserved and led by the laity, especially lay women. The center of religious life is the home, where one finds private shrines or home altars. In effect, Latino Catholicism embodies the ongoing influence of a “domestic church.” Often a grandmother becomes the religious leader of the home and of the community. (Goizueta 2004, 2)
The claim being made in passages like these is not only that women are more likely to participate in religious activities (the feminization that is quite common in both the American Catholic and American Protestant traditions) or that women take charge of activities within the household unit, including those relating to religion; rather, the claim is that women, older women in particular, have been especially likely to take on leadership roles in connection with communal religious activities in Hispanic communities.
The “matriarchal core” hypothesis is of course entirely plausible. It is not difficult to imagine that under certain circumstances (say, for example, a scarcity of priests) women in a Catholic community might well take on such roles, both within the household and in regard to communal events. Indeed, that is exactly what seems to have happened in the Cajun communities discussed in the previous chapter. But suppose we ask the same sort of question that we have asked in earlier chapters in connection with Irish American Catholics, Italian American Catholics, and Cajun Catholics: What is the empirical basis for believing that Hispanic Catholicism has a matriarchal core? The answer, as I now hope to demonstrate, comes close to “there isn’t any basis.”
Searching for the Evidence
Searching for studies relevant to the matriarchal core hypothesis immediately turns up one important case that directly falsifies this hypothesis: the Penitentes of New Mexico, mentioned in passing in the discussion of Chimayó. The Penitentes were a lay brotherhood that emerged in northern New Mexico in the early nineteenth century. By mid-century, most villages and towns in the area were home to at least one local Penitente morada (a term that refers both to the local organizational unit of the brotherhood and to the meeting house that the local unit maintained). Importantly, at least for our purposes here, only males could become officers in the morada and participate in its core rituals. And yet, the public rituals sponsored by the Penitentes—especially those staged during Lent and Holy Week—were central to the experience of popular Catholicism for all members of the community, women and children included.7 In this particular Hispanic context, in other words, there was clearly no matriarchal core to the lived experience of Hispanic Catholicism.
More usually, however, what we find in looking at studies of Hispanic Catholic practice is that the matriarchal core hypothesis is not so much falsified (as in the Penitente case) as unsupported. Consider, for example, Richard Flores’s (1994a; 1994b) study of the Los Pastores skits. These dramatic presentations relate the story of Christ’s nativity from the perspective of the shepherds and are performed at private homes in San Antonio, Texas. Typically, Flores found, a family invites a Los Pastores troupe to perform at their home in order to fulfill a vow made to the Virgin or to the Christ Child. The audience at these events consists of adults and children of both genders drawn from the sponsoring family and their neighbors, and there is a fairly traditional division of labor among the audience: the women of the household prepare a communal meal and serve it to the performers and attendees, and men from the household help the male performers lift the heavy props into place. The skit itself, however, is organized mainly by the performers, and it is the performers who decide when and where to perform.
What Flores found in the 1990s was that a majority of the performers, about two-thirds, were female. While at first sight this seems to lend support to the matriarchal core hypothesis, there are two additional gendered patterns that must also be taken into account. The first is that women of high school age were about as numerous as women who were 35 or older. But the second and more important pattern is that when these traveling troupes were first introduced into the San Antonio area from Mexico, they were dominated by males just as such troupes had been in Mexico. Photographs taken in the 1890s of a Los Pastores troupe that performed in San Antonio (presented in Cole 1907—see, for example, Figure 7) make it clear that, except for the character of Mary, the roles were all played by men. The inclusion of more females is a relatively recent phenomenon (and so not at all traditional); and in any event, there is no predominance of older women (which is what proponents of the matriarchal core hypothesis typically suggest is the case). On balance, the evidence from Flores’s study provides no support for the claim that “older women known for their piety” have traditionally taken the lead in organizing and promoting communal religious rituals in Hispanic communities.
Thomas Tweed’s (1997a) study of the Miami shrine in honor of Our Lady of Charity is another instance where the matriarchal core hypothesis fails to be substantiated. This shrine, established by Cuban exiles in Miami in 1973, is now the sixth most popular Catholic pilgrimage site in the United States. More importantly, it is also—to use Tweed’s words (p. 3)—“the sacred center of the Cuban Catholic community in exile.” Thousands of individual pilgrims come to the shrine to petition the Virgin for a variety of favors or to fulfill a vow after a favor has been granted, and the shrine is also associated with a number of well-attended communal festivals that function to maintain a Cuban national identity. Tweed does report that participation in the religious events associated with the shrine is gendered: females usually outnumber males (both as pilgrims and among those attending the communal rituals). He also reports that (1) overall rates of religious participation are higher within the exilic community than they were in Cuba both before and after the revolution, and (2) that males, in particular, take a more active role in religious activities in Miami than was the case in Cuba. On the other hand, there is nothing in Tweed’s discussion of the lay groups that organize the popular rituals and festivals associated with the shrine suggesting that the leadership of these groups is “matricentered” in the way that the matriarchal core hypothesis dictates. Generally, Tweed’s sense of things is that, although women are probably a bit more involved in planning these public rituals than are men, planning is often joint (as when public rituals are organized by a married couple), men are slightly more likely to take the lead in public rituals (e.g., they are usually the ones who carry the statue of Our Lady of Charity from place to place during public ceremonies), and women are disproportionately the ones associated with support roles (like answering phones, providing flowers).8 Here again we have a case study—done by an investigator very sensitive to the matter of gender—that provides no compelling evidence for the view that older women are the ones who generally take the lead in communal religious rituals in Hispanic communities.
Fig. 7. Players who performed in a San Antonio Los Pastores troupe in the 1890s. Note that all the players with the exception of the young girl who played Mary are male. From Cole 1907, 12.
In his study of the Mexican American community in Houston over the period 1911–1972, Roberto Treviño (2006) did find that women were especially likely to have charge of the altarcitos (small altars) constructed in private homes. But, again, finding that women are especially likely to be associated with the domestic sphere and so the things in that sphere (like altarcitos) hardly seems to support the sort of claim that scholars like Díaz-Stevens are making about the distinctiveness of Hispanic Catholic traditions. In any event, there is nothing in Treviño’s discussion of parish societies or of popular religious activities staged outside the home—like the pastorelas or las posadas performed at Christmas time—which suggests that women, let alone older women, took the lead.
The studies mentioned so far—involving the Penitentes, Los Pastores troupes in San Antonio, Cuban-exilic Catholicism, the Mexican American community in Houston—might be dismissed as exceptions to the rule except for the fact that those promoting the matriarchal core hypothesis never present evidence that establishes the rule in the first place. On the contrary, many scholars who advance the matriarchal core hypothesis, including many of the scholars cited earlier in this discussion, simply assert that hypothesis without providing anything in the way of supportive evidence. Furthermore, in those cases where a scholar promoting this hypothesis does cite a study that supposedly provides supporting evidence, tracking down the cited study usually reveals that the evidence is less impressive than implied.
For example, one of the articles most often cited in support of the matriarchal core hypothesis is Ana María Díaz-Stevens’s (1994) contribution to Jay Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck’s Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S. Thus, Milagros Peña (2002, 283–284) tells us:
Ana María Díaz-Stevens (1994: 241) has documented that within the Latino/a community “religion has oftentimes given Latinas affirmation as leaders, especially at the grassroots level.” In her research Díaz-Stevens asked young Latinos/as in New York City aged 15–25 who was the person they most respected in their community aside from their parents. Two thirds of them mentioned an elderly woman in the community known for her piety and her role as the leader of non-ecclesiastical religious communal rituals and prayer.
Up to a point, Peña’s summary here is an accurate account of what Díaz-Stevens does report in her 1994 essay, but Peña leaves out some critical details. For example, Díaz-Stevens’s respondents were all Puerto Rican, and so Peña’s leap to “Latinos/as” generally is pure inference. Also, Díaz-Stevens interviewed only 30 people in total, and so the conclusion about matricentricity rests upon the responses given by 20 people (“two thirds” of 30). But the most serious problem is that Díaz-Stevens (1994) was only providing a brief summary of a study she did as a graduate student in 1980, and that study—as she herself tells us—was never published. This is important because there is nothing in her summary indicating how she reached the conclusion that the women “most respected” by these 20 respondents were also women known for their piety and/or women who took the lead in communal religious rituals. For that matter, there is nothing in her summary that tells us how many of the 20 women named by these respondents were simply seen to be “pious” (which might mean no more than that they participated in religious activities more than men or other women) nor how many were identified as being both pious and as taking the lead in communal religious activities (which is clearly the claim most relevant to the matriarchal core hypothesis). In principle, this sort of information might be retrieved by looking at the original interview data, to find out just what the critical 20 respondents did and did not say in answer to particular questions. Unfortunately, the relevant records were destroyed when a basement was flooded several years ago (information obtained from Professor Díaz-Stevens in a telephone call in April 2005). The net result: at this point, it is simply not possible to know if the conclusions that Díaz-Stevens reached about matricentricity—and which have been repeated by Peña and many others—were reasonable given the interview data she collected in 1980.
Interestingly, given that Professor Díaz-Stevens is one of the leading exponents of the matriarchal core hypothesis and given that her work is so often cited in support of that hypothesis, an argument can be made that if we read her own account of growing up in a Puerto Rican mountain village (presented in Díaz-Stevens 1993) as ethnography, then we have yet another case study that fails to provide support for this hypothesis and, indeed, even seems to falsify it. She describes several religious activities in her natal community in which laity took the lead—and in some of these cases, undeniably, women did clearly play a more active role than did men. We are told, for example, that one of the respected people in the village was the local midwife and that she baptized children right after birth. Díaz-Stevens also tells us that her own mother asked for God’s blessing each day as she opened the windows and doors of their house. On the other hand, we are also told that she and her siblings always asked for a blessing “from our parents” (i.e., from both father and mother) when they left the house to go to the fields or to school and when they returned. But most importantly, perhaps, given the matriarchal core hypothesis, the only gendered pattern that Díaz-Stevens mentions when discussing communal religious rituals in her natal community are patterns that associate lay religious leadership with older males, not older females. During Holy Week, for example, it was her father who led the family in prayer. Her father also had a reputation for being both a good rezador and a good cantador, we are told, and so was regularly asked to participate in wakes and in village-wide Christmas celebrations, by people in both his own village and neighboring villages. Finally, we are told that her father became the village catechist “by public acclamation” (1993, p. 8) after her uncle, who had previously performed that role, migrated. The fact that her father and her uncle are the only people she mentions as associated with communal religious life is the reverse of what the matriarchal core hypothesis would lead us to expect.
Yolanda Tarango is another example of a scholar who advances the matriarchal core hypothesis and yet whose own history undermines that hypothesis. Toward the end of her essay on the role of Hispanic women in the church, Tarango (1995) tells us that “Hispanic women [have] always been identified with religious leadership in the community.” Earlier, however, in describing her grandmother and the women of her grandmother’s generation, she recounts (p. 41):
I feel I entered the church at my grandmother’s side through the stories she would tell me of her childhood. These were usually narratives of family and communal events framed in liturgical celebrations, such as patronal feasts and holy days. When she described encounters with the official church, the men of my family were usually the principal actors. Many stories included accounts of my great-grandfather and uncles and their confrontations with the foreign priests in an effort to preserve cultural rituals. (Emphasis added.)
While this account certainly supports the view that older women were key agents in the religious socialization of children within Hispanic households, it also suggests that lay men, not lay women, were the ones who exercised leadership in regard to religious events at the community level.
Roberto Goizueta also cites evidence in support of the matriarchal core hypothesis that turns out to be something less than supportive when examined carefully. Goizueta (2002, 135) says:
Mexican American popular Catholicism has its principal locus in the home, the family, and the neighborhood rather than the geographical parish. As a consequence, everyday religious authority and leadership are exercised by the persons who have historically carried out those functions in the domestic sphere, namely, women—especially the abuelas, or grandmothers, whose age and experience give them a special claim to authority. … This is not to say that the padrecito, or parish priest, is not respected or recognized as a religious leader; on an everyday basis, it is the women of the family who function as religious teachers or as liturgical leaders. Thus, Matovina cites the influential role played by the Hijas de María in the historical development of San Fernando Cathedral.
The reference in the final sentence is to Timothy Matovina’s (2002) study of devotion to the Virgen de Guadalupe at San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas, over the period 1900–1940. Matovina’s study, I must note, is the only study that Goizueta cites in support of the matriarchal core hypothesis. Yet, when we consult the Matovina study, does it indeed provide the support this hypothesis implied by Goizueta? No, it does not.
Matovina (p. 28) is very clear in saying that “parishioners exerted their strongest leadership and influence at San Fernando through the numerous pious societies that they established and developed.” Furthermore, Matovina’s analysis of parish records does indicate that the Hijas de María (Daughters of Mary)—the society mentioned by Goizueta—“surpassed all other pious societies in organized plays, concerts, dinners, picnics, booths for parish festivals and other fundraising events” (p. 31). The problem here is the Hijas de María was an association composed of unmarried younger women. Hence, the fact that this group organized so many activities provides no support for Goizueta’s (and Díaz-Stevens’s) “leadership by abuelas” claim. Further, although there were several pious societies active in the parish, including, in addition to the Hijas de María, the Vasallos de Cristo Rey (composed of males) and the Vasallas de Cristo Rey (composed of females), there is nothing in Matovina’s discussion suggesting that female associations, on balance, took more of a lead in organizing important communal celebrations than did the male associations. Here again, in other words, as in Tweed’s study of the Our Lady of Charity shrine in Miami, we do encounter gendered patterns when looking carefully at the practice of popular Catholicism in a Hispanic community, but what we find is a mix, with males and females both involved but doing slightly different things. What we do not find is evidence that the individuals who took the lead in organizing popular religious activities outside the home, that is, in the community at large, were predominantly older women—which is what the matriarchal core hypothesis leads us to expect.
But, if it is so easy to locate studies that either falsify or at least fail to support the commonly advanced suggestion that Hispano Catholicism has a matriarchal core, and if proponents of that hypothesis fail to present convincing evidence in its favor, then we are once again confronted with a historiographical puzzle: why has a claim like this enjoyed such wide popularity within the American academic community? I think there are two answers here, and the first emerges when we look carefully at the meta-concerns shaping the work of those Hispanic scholars who have most forcefully advanced this claim.
Pervaded by Confessional Bias
During the 1970s, a number of historians, including Eric Cochrane (1970), Denys Hay (1977), and Giovanni Miccoli (1974), leveled some strong criticisms at the academic study of church history in Europe, especially in Italy. Too often, they argued, church history had become the preserve of scholars affiliated with the church or a church-sponsored university, which usually meant affiliation with one or another of the religious orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, etc.) within the church. While these scholars were in the main undeniably intelligent, thorough, and diligent, their scholarship—so the criticism went—was often shaped by their confessional orientation. Sometimes this meant only that they tended to focus on events of interest to the religious order of which they were a part but the larger historical significance of which was nil. “How many man-hours have been spent,” bemoaned Hay (p. 6) in identifying the place and time of Savonarola’s ordinations?... [H]ow many periodicals list similar details for thousands of dim and insignificant friars?” But mainly, the critics argued, the strongly confessional orientation of so many church historians in Italy meant that Italian church history was pervaded by apologetics (a desire to defend the church against criticism) and homiletics (which in this case meant a desire to use history for spiritual edification). As examples of this, Cochrane pointed to books on Italian church history that were concerned with demonstrating that the church had always been committed to the “defense of liberty for all men” and to books that used the concrete events of history to support assertions like “the well-being of the human personality results from the harmony with which body and soul... contribute the vital efficiency of the human composite.” In a similar vein, Miccoli pointed to well-known church historians who worked hard to establish the claim that popes had treated Jews more favorably than other European leaders had or that the atrocities associated with the Crusades must be balanced against the pious works performed by many Crusaders—in this latter case conveniently forgetting, Miccoli adds, that the Crusaders saw their massacres to be pious works.
Fortunately, the confessional bias that Cochrane, Hay, and Miccoli saw as pervading the study of church history in Europe during the 1970s is less in evidence today. Unfortunately, a similar confessional bias seems alive and well among those social scientists who have written on Hispanic Catholicism, and in particular, among those social scientists who have advanced the matriarchal core hypothesis in their work.
As a start, a great many of these scholars have strong ties to the institutional Catholic Church. Just to take people already mentioned: Ana María Díaz-Stevens was associated with the Maryknoll Sisters and later worked for the Archdiocese of New York (Díaz-Stevens 1993); Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo is a former priest and during the 1970s was assistant to Father Robert Stern, the director of the Office of Spanish Community Action for the Archdiocese of New York; Roberto Goizueta is a professor of theology at Boston College, an institution whose web page affirms the college’s continuing commitment to its “Catholic and Jesuit heritage”; Allan Figueroa Deck is a Jesuit theologian. Similarly, of the eleven contributors to Jay Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck’s Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S. (1994), three are priests, one is a “consultant on pastoral and ministry education issues that arise from the multicultural Church,” and another is editor-at-large of Maryknoll Magazine. In more recent scholarship, of the nineteen contributors to El Cuerpo de Cristo: The Hispanic Presence in the U.S. Catholic Church (Casarella and Gómez 2003), twelve are priests and/or members of a religious order and/or Catholic theologians.
I am not suggesting that these strong ties to the institutional church are problematic in and of themselves; what I am suggesting is that these ties help explain why a set of three interrelated claims appears over and over again in the social scientific literature on Hispanic Catholicism, namely,
• the claim that over the past several decades, Hispanic Catholics have come to account for a larger and larger proportion of the American Catholic Church;
• the claim that it is imperative that the church develop pastoral strategies that recognize and embrace this increasing Hispanic presence; and
• the claim that getting the official church to recognize and embrace this increasing Hispanic presence is the key to revitalizing the American Catholic Church.
Representative statements encapsulating all these claims would include:
This book is written with the conviction that what is done to promote the effective pastoral care of Hispanics today will determine to a degree still not fully appreciated the vitality and effectiveness of the U.S. Catholic Church of the twenty-first century. There can be no greater priority for the Church, her priests, pastoral ministers, and teachers than the flesh and blood people who will constitute the majority of the Catholic faithful in the United States in the very near future. Those people shall be of Hispanic origin. (Deck 1989, 2)
It scarcely needs repeating that the future of Catholicism in the United States will be shaped by Hispanics, who at 34 million are already the most numerous “minority” in the country and constitute a majority of Catholics in many dioceses. The religious affiliation of these Hispanics will largely determine which churches grow and which ones wither in the 21st-century United States. (Stevens-Arroyo 2003, 16)
Latino traditions can save the Church in the United States. … Of course, the term “Latino” is artificial; there are Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Hondurans, and so on. Nevertheless, they all share characteristics beyond their common language-traits with the potential to influence U.S. Catholicism’s future. The two most significant of these are the broad experience of mestizaje or mulataje, racial and cultural mixing; and a tradition of popular Catholicism. (Goizueta 2004)
The confessional orientation of these scholars, who are themselves usually Hispanic, and their commitment to the belief that revitalization of the U.S. Catholic Church requires that the church treat Hispanic Catholics and Hispanic Catholicism more favorably than it has in the past, helps to explain, I contend, many of the things that make the literature on Hispanic Catholicism distinctive.
This confessional orientation helps explain why works by these scholars—just like the literature on church history criticized decades ago by Cochrane, Hay, and Miccoli—so often comingles social science, theology, and homiletics. Roberto Goizueta (Goizueta 2002, 1), for instance, sees no problem with mixing statements describing Via Crucis and Día de los Muertos celebrations in Hispanic communities with statements like “popular religion does indeed affirm life and expresses a hope-against-hope that, in the long run constitutes the very foundation of the struggle for justice” (p. 137) and “in a world that, as we have seen, refuses to separate the physical from the spiritual, and understands the personal as inherently communal, what is healed is not only the body of an individual but the person’s whole world” (p. 138). Similarly, Virgilio Elizondo (1994), himself a priest in San Antonio, concludes a section on the critical importance of devotion to Virgen de Guadalupe in the maintenance of a Mexican American identity with the suggestion that the sacrament of baptism is “the complementary symbol of Guadalupe” (p. 123) because “through baptism a child not only becomes a child of God . . . but equally are children of our common mother of the Americas, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe” (p. 125).
Nor is this tendency to merge social science and theology accidental or the result of sloppy conceptualization. Quite the contrary, for these scholars it is something that is both legitimate and desired. Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo (1998, 6), for example, tell us that “the analysis of religion requires examination from two perspectives.” The first of these looks at how religion is shaped by its social environment, and that is the task of social science. But, they continue, “we also need to recognize that ... religion challenges the social context [and often] the best window on religion’s challenges to society is theology” (p. 8). Furthermore, although this latter statement talks only about “religion’s challenges to society,” Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo go on (see especially pp. 212–238) to make it clear that this entails both reform of society in general and reform of the church in particular, and that theology is important to reaching both goals.
Something else that is a common feature of the existing social scientific literature on Hispanic Catholicism, and that likely flows from the confessional orientation of many of the scholars who have produced this literature, is an emphasis on pastoral outreach programs—even when it means ignoring things that might otherwise seem important. To take a particularly clear example: the term “oxcart Catholicism” in Ana Maria Díaz-Steven’s Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue (1993)—which as far as I can tell is one of the monographs cited most often in sociological accounts of Hispanic Catholicism—refers to the sort of popular Catholicism that Díaz-Stevens knew while growing up in Puerto Rico. What the title implies, in other words, is that the book will be about Puerto Rican popular Catholicism as it developed when transplanted to New York city. In fact, as at least one reviewer (Kane 1996) noted, Díaz-Stevens says virtually nothing about the nature of Puerto Rican Catholicism in New York. Rather, the book is almost entirely concerned with the institutional programs established by the Archdiocese of New York in response to Puerto Rican immigration and with Díaz-Stevens’s analysis of the ways in which these programs were flawed.
Finally, the confessional orientation that pervades so much of the social scientific literature on Hispanic Catholicism also explains why so many scholars have accepted or even promoted the matriarchal core hypothesis despite the lack of supporting evidence for it. Remember that many of these scholars are committed to the view that revitalization of the American Catholic Church depends upon the official church’s embracing Hispanic Catholicism. For this premise to make sense, Hispanic Catholicism must be constructed not only as something different from the sort of Catholicism currently in place but also as something better—and this is precisely the argument that these scholars have been making for decades. They have contrasted the prominent role that the laity have (supposedly) played in Hispanic Catholicism with the sort of leadership-from-above associated with the mainstream church. While he was still a priest, Stevens-Arroyo gave an interview to the New York Times (Blau 1976) that explained the absence of Hispanics in the church hierarchy this way: “The church’s image of a bishop is ‘someone a little pompous, an administrator, a canon lawyer,’ asserted Father Stevens-Arroyo, adding that the ‘more people-oriented’ Spanish-speaking Catholics were thus excluded.” Decades later, this same message—that Latino Catholicism places more emphasis on lay leadership and less emphasis on the institutional church than Euro-American Catholicism and is for that reason more in tune with the sort of Catholicism that American Catholics want—continues to pervade Stevens-Arroyo’s sociological writing. But lay leadership per se is not the only reason that Latino Catholicism is seen to be different (and better). It is also different (and better) because it accords lay women a leadership role that is denied to women in the institutional church.
Positing a traditional matriarchal core to Hispanic Catholicism, in other words, permits Hispanic Catholicism to be seen as having the potential to transform American Catholicism by balancing the church’s tradition of vesting institutional authority overwhelmingly in males against a pattern of lay leadership that vests it primarily in females. Under this construction, embracing Hispanic Catholicism would have the effect of producing a type of Catholicism that is far more in tune with the cultural emphasis on gender equality that has increasingly come to characterize American society over the past several decades. Díaz-Stevens (2003, 179), who is the leading exponent of the matriarchal core hypothesis, is in fact quite clear that Hispanic Catholic’s matriarchal core is critical to the revitalization of U.S. Catholicism:
As I see it, the competition from other Christian denominations, plus a downsizing of the clergy, will push the Roman Catholic Church once again towards “innovative” approaches, which will incorporate what in fact the people at the local, grassroots level have found effective for hundreds of years in their land of origin. The role of lay persons, and most especially the role of women—ordained or otherwise—will continue to increase in importance. The end result of all these activities will be transformative.
What I am suggesting is that the matriarchal core hypothesis is very widely accepted, despite the lack of supporting evidence, because it allows Hispanic Catholicism to be what the many Hispanic scholars who are also Catholic activists want it to be: the best hope for revitalizing and improving the American Catholic tradition.
But I said that there were likely two reasons why the matriarchal core hypothesis has proven to be so popular. Its appeal to Hispanic scholars who are also Catholic activists seems insufficient by itself to explain its uncritical acceptance within the American scholarly community generally. After all, there are certainly many scholars studying Hispanic Catholicism whose work could not by any stretch of the imagination be seen as being pervaded by confessional bias. Moreover, the matriarchal core claim has been embraced by many non-Hispanic scholars who are not Catholic activists. Its continuing popularity must rest upon something beside Hispanic Catholic activism, and for the key to understanding what that something else might be, I must return to an argument advanced earlier, namely, that the academic study of religion in the United States is still being shaped by Protestant narratives and by historiographical predispositions that flow from those narratives.
Catholics and Other Primitives
In his presidential address to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Robert Orsi (2003) conceded that in the past the academic study of religion in the United States had implicitly taken “modern religion” to be a denominationally neutral version of liberal Protestantism and that this approach had defined religions that deviated from the liberal Protestant norm as both premodern and threatening. Thus, he argued (p. 170),
Fear was central to the academic installation of religious studies [around the turn of the twentieth century]. Religious difference, moreover, overlapped with ethnic and racial otherness, and this combination produced the pervasive and characteristically American idea that dangers to the republic were germinating in the religious practices of dark-skinned or alien peoples. … Practitioners of the emerging discipline of religious studies were among the most assiduous guardians of the boundary between the modern and the premodern.
In the thinking of these scholars, Orsi continues, what made certain religions a threat to the social order in advanced societies like the United States was the fact that they were pervaded by “primitive” elements—which usually meant anything that seemed emotional or exotic against the implicit middle-class Protestant norm. Although some of the religious traditions possessing the “primitivism” that posed this threat were from non-Western (and colonized) cultures, they also included—Orsi (p. 170) argues—religions within the United States, including Pentecostalism, Mormonism and Roman Catholicism. The rest of Orsi’s address was taken up with his thoughts on the increased “othering” of Islam in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. A year later, however, in his presidential address to the American Academy of Religion, Orsi (2004) returned to the matter of Protestant bias in the academic study of religion in America, but only to assure us that such an orientation had eroded. Protestant Christianity, he said, was “no longer the hidden norm of the academic study of religion, its secret telos or its horizon, the authoritative ground for the assessment of all religious traditions” (p. 399). Orsi would later borrow ideas from these two presidential addresses in order to make these same arguments in the final chapter of his most recent book (2005) on the sort of Catholicism that he himself experienced while growing up. Unfortunately, the demise of Protestant influence that Orsi posits, like Mark Twain’s death, is much exaggerated.
In fact, the historiographical patterns that have been brought to light in this and previous chapters suggest that there are at least two ways in which Catholics are still being constructed as the Other in the American academy. The first is the historiographical predisposition to see most variants of American Catholicism as having emerged in a foreign location. Such a predisposition is evident, for example, in the widely held belief that Irish American Catholicism is somehow linked to the devotional revolution in Ireland, that Italian American Catholicism was brought to America in the hearts and suitcases of Italian immigrants, and that Cajun Catholics cling tightly to traditions formed in Acadia. Although, as we have seen in earlier chapters, there is little foundation for any of these beliefs, they do function to associate Catholicism with a non-American Other. Seeing Catholicism as having a foreign origin also functions to discourage consideration of evidence suggesting that many of the things which are distinctive of, say, Irish American Catholicism or Italian American Catholicism came into existence as a creative response by the communities involved to their experiences in America.
Catholicism is also Othered within the American academic community by the historiographical predisposition to take ethnicity (which is always something different from “American”) into account mainly in connection with Catholicism but not Protestantism. Thus, for example, “Irishness” is almost always considered when studying Catholicism but almost never when studying Protestantism—even though, as we saw in Chapter 1, Irish American Protestants outnumber Irish American Catholics.
Even granting this longstanding and continuing predisposition to associate Catholicism with Otherness, it seems clear that Hispanic Catholicism presents some special difficulties for scholars writing under the influence of this predisposition. First, as commentators like Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo keep reminding us, Hispanic Catholicism is not associated with a “foreign” location in the way that Irish American Catholicism or Italian American or Cajun Catholicism is. Although Hispanic Catholicism derives in some ways from Spain, it is more appropriately seen as having emerged in the Americas and as a type of religious practice that predates the emergence of a distinctively American Protestant tradition. Furthermore, some variants of Hispanic Catholicism—notably those associated with Hispanos in New Mexico and Tejanos in Texas—emerged centuries ago in areas that are now part of the United States. The problem for these scholars, in other words, is how to cast as Other a type of Catholicism that cannot be characterized as “foreign” as easily as most other types of Catholicism. I suggest that the second reason the matriarchal core hypothesis is so popular, despite the lack of evidence, is because it provides a solution to this problem.
Quite some time ago, Edward Said (1978) argued that Western discourse about Oriental cultures (by which he meant mainly cultures in the Middle East) depicted these cultures as being simultaneously “different from” and “inferior to” Western culture. Difference was established by focusing on things that Western audiences would find exotic or strange. Although inferiority was established in many ways, Said argued, one of the most important of these involved constructing ethnographic accounts implying that Oriental culture was in some essential way feminized. Such accounts, he argued, established a contrast between an implicitly masculinized West that was active and innovative and a feminized Orient that was passive and submissive. Later investigators have subsequently argued that this sort of ethnographic “feminization” has also been used in other contexts to establish the inferiority of a non-Western Other. Barbara Babcock (1990; 1997), for example, has looked at the ways the Pueblo cultures of New Mexico have been feminized in Anglo discourse.
I believe that the matriarchal core hypothesis functions in exactly the same way as the ethnographic accounts examined by Said and by Babcock; it feminizes the Hispanic Catholic tradition in an essential way. The result is the same sort of invidious comparison that Said uncovered in Orientalist discourse, which in this case is a contrast between Hispanic Catholicism, where leadership is vested mainly in females, and the official variant of Catholicism, where leadership is vested mainly in males.
But, legitimizing the matriarchal core hypothesis (by accepting it uncritically) is not the only way that mainstream scholars have Othered Hispanic Catholicism—and this brings us to a commonly made claim about Hispanic Catholics that I have so far ignored.
The (Missing) Pentecostal Connection
In reviewing the literature on Hispanic Protestantism published since 1980, Larry Hunt (1999) points out that a common theme is that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of Hispanics who have abandoned Catholicism and become evangelical or Pentecostal Christians. Sometimes, scholars who make this claim do so quite explicitly. Allan Figueroa Deck (1994, 413–414), for example, says
Despite some gains on the part of Justo L. González’s United Methodists, however, it is not they who are attracting impressive numbers of Hispanics. … Today when one speaks of Hispanic Protestantism one is not usually taking about the “historical” churches at all but, rather, about some strains of evangelicalism and especially Pentecostalism.
In other cases, the claim is implied rather than stated outright, as when—for example—Díaz-Stevens and Stevens-Arroyo (1998) devote several sections of their book on Latino Catholicism to the matter of Latino Pentecostalism but have virtually nothing to say about other forms of Protestantism. Although the “Pentecostal defection” claim is usually made most forcefully by Hispanic scholars, it has been accepted at face value by non-Hispanic scholars concerned with the study of American religion (see Hunt 1999 for examples here). But, are large numbers of Hispanic Catholics in fact becoming Pentecostals?
Certainly, there are many surveys (reviewed in Hunt 1999) which seem to establish that since 1980 the proportion of Hispanics who identify themselves as Catholic has been decreasing9 while the proportion who identify themselves as Protestant has been increasing. But, there are three things that must be kept in mind when evaluating these patterns. The first is that almost half of all Hispanic Protestants are associated with moderate or liberal Protestant denominations, not Pentecostal churches (Greeley 1997). The second is that estimates of the proportion of Hispanics who are Protestant are strongly influenced by survey methodology. For example, surveys conducted in English only tend to find a higher proportion of Hispanic Protestants in the sample being surveyed than do bilingual surveys (Perl, Greely, and Gray 2006). This is relevant to the issue at hand because most studies that report an increase in the proportion of Hispanics who are Protestant use data from English-only surveys (Perl, Greely, and Gray 2006). Finally, conversion is not the only explanation for why there are relatively fewer Hispanic Catholics and relatively more Hispanic Protestants. Hunt’s own (1999) statistical analysis indicates that the increase in Hispanic Protestants is the result of an inter- generational, not an intragenerational, process. What is happening, he argues, is that the “Protestant children of Protestant parents” category is expanding far more rapidly than the “Catholic children of Catholic parents” category. Phrased differently, Hispanics raised by Protestant parents are more likely to remain Protestants than Hispanics raised by Catholic parents are to remain Catholic.
So, once again we have a puzzle: why—even now—do scholars writing on Hispanic Catholicism focus so much on Hispanic Pentecostals when almost half of Hispanic Protestants are not Pentecostal and when there is little evidence to support the contention that Hispanic Catholics are converting to Pentecostalism? The answer is to be found in the argument typically offered to explain why Hispanics are becoming Pentecostals, which is that, in becoming Pentecostals, they are not moving far from their cultural roots.
Deck (1994, 421–422) elaborates on this explanation. Under the heading “The Unanalyzed Affinity: Popular Religiosity and Evangelicalism,” he explains the supposed appeal of Pentecostalism to Hispanic Catholics this way:
[Hispanic Catholicism] eschews the cognitive in its effort to appeal to the senses and the feelings. … Its main qualities are a concern for an immediate experience of God, a strong orientation toward the transcendent, an implicit belief in miracles, a practical orientation toward healing, and a tendency to personalize or individualize one’s relationship with the divine. … The point I want to make here is that... [i]n a certain sense the movement of Hispanics to evangelical religion is a way to maintain continuity with their popular Catholic faith.
In short, this argument says that Pentecostalism is appealing to Hispanic Catholics because its characteristics are the same or similar to those of the premodern forms of Catholicism to which Hispanics have clung for centuries. Other versions of this same argument can be found in Espín (1994) and Davis (1994). This “affinity explanation,” I might add, tends not to be offered by scholars who have studied in some detailed way Latino Pentecostals whose families have been Pentecostal for generations; these scholars are instead more likely to see Latino Pentecostalism as a creative adaptation to the new social and cultural conditions that Hispanic immigrants encountered in the United States (see, for example, Sánchez-Walsh 2003).
As an explanation, the argument that there is an essential similarity between Hispanic Catholicism and Pentecostalism offered by Deck and others fails, if only because there is nothing to explain—Hispanic Catholics are not defecting to Pentecostalism in especially large numbers. But, in making this argument, scholars like Deck are in effect constructing Hispanic Catholicism in the same way that Catholicism generally, and Pentecostalism, were constructed at the turn of the twentieth century, as a religion that is primitive and premodern by virtue of its emotionalism and its emphasis on visual imagery, mystery, mysterious healing, and so forth. Thus, this argument, just like the matriarchal core hypothesis, functions to construct Hispanic Catholicism as Other relative to an implicit mainstream Protestant norm in the scholarly literature on American religion; and this, I suggest, is why the “massive Hispanic defection to Pentecostalism” claim—just like the matriarchal core hypothesis—has been so popular despite its lack of evidence.
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