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>> 67 2 Making Sense of a Changed World The Strategies of Shared Parish Life at All Saints Church kitchens lend themselves to household metaphors. Standing in the small kitchen in the church basement at All Saints, an elderly EuroAmerican first communion teacher named Diane offered me her rendition of what had happened with the demographic transformation at All Saints Parish. It had all worked like a marriage where the daughterin -law moved into her mother-in-law’s house. Initially, the son’s wife is forced to abide by the mother-in-law’s rules and is none the happier for it. She paused. I weighed the analogy in my head. It did seem to capture the strong sense many Euro-American parishioners had of having others now living in a house they had managed for many years. It captured the Latino community’s frustration over having to live under someone else’s rules. Finally, there was an implicit acknowledgement that both parties had a right to live there. But I still worried that the generational element left all the authority in the mother-in-law’s (thus, the Euro-American community’s) hands. But Diane continued. Ultimately , she said, both have to learn from each other. The mother-in-law has to learn some of the daughter-in-law’s ways too. She then smiled a mischievous smile I have seen before—when older people know they speak controversial words but have confidence that age and experience will permit them to get away with it. On another occasion, I sat in a family’s kitchen listening to another household analogy for the parish. Octavio and Petra Fernández, a retired couple originally from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, had lived for decades in Havenville. They remembered well when they were 68 > 69 and correct ritual—occupied both cultural communities in a significant way. The second two—popular religion and evangelization—served the Latino community, engaged as they were in a more dramatic process of adaptation and change. All four strategies functioned as lenses for observing, understanding, and taking part in the transformed parish environment. They provided focus for both beliefs and practices. People saw them as representative of the evolving purpose of their life together as a parish. Through them, people at All Saints responded religiously to the historical, cultural, and ecclesial context in which they found themselves , especially to the juxtaposition of two cultural worlds within the one city and parish. Social Orders in Conflict In 2007 when I arrived in Havenville, All Saints remained at an unsettled moment in its history. The demographic transformation had left both city and parish rent in two. Euro-American parishioners routinely pointed out how the arrival of immigrants had radically changed their community. Latino parishioners, on the other hand, worried intensely about the insecurity brought to their lives by Euro-American opposition to immigration and the possibility that they or people they knew would be deported. In both communities, people worried about the dangers posed to their children by local gangs. A “discourse of alarm” about illegal immigration on television and radio exacerbated these tensions. By the middle of 2008, the housing bubble had burst and recession set in. Economic uncertainty and increasing unemployment provoked anxiety anew. Against this great tide of insecurity and anxiety, members of both cultural communities consistently focused attention on a social order in and for the parish. Many practices reinforced and reflected the focus on order. Parishioners remained constantly attentive to doing things in the “right way”—the proper way of receiving or not receiving communion, of saying the rosary, of leading the Stations of the Cross. People argued in minute detail over the proper amount of wine to prepare for mass. Both communities scrupulously followed the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church—Advent, Christmas, Holy Week. Members of both communities considered the church to be sacred space (using 70 > 71 question of how to keep the social order, each cultural community at All Saints worked with their own cultural tool kit, bringing forth different resources—narratives, ideologies, assumptions about reality, norms, and practices—that fit their historical and contemporary dilemmas around social order. In the Latino community, for example, Father Nacho’s ideological discourse around the “new evangelization” helped make a difficult transition to a new social order intelligible. Latino immigrants had left behind the customary order of their families and cultures at home. Many spoke limited or no English, the language of...

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