Deborah E. Kanter, "Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican" (U Illinois Press, 2020)

(upbeat music) - Hola, y bienvenidos to new books and Latino Studies, a podcast channel on the new books network. I'm your host, Jaime Sanchez Jr. Today, Dr. Deborah Cantor joins us on the podcast to discuss her new book, Chicago Católico, making Catholic parishes Mexican. Published by the University of Illinois Press in 2020, as part of the Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest series. Cantor is the Johnus Leadington and Dog Professor of History at Albion College. Deborah, welcome to new books Latino. - Hi, my thanks for talking with me and thanks for your interest in the book. - Before we start talking about the book, could you briefly tell us a bit about yourself and your past interests or your past research? - Sure, I think there's two main things that are important to my backstory. One is that I am a native Chicagoan and two that I came to Latino history as a historian of Mexico. So and those things obviously intersected with this project. So yeah, I was born in the city of Chicago grew up on the edge of the city in Oak Park, Illinois, which is on an L line, which means I was in the city a lot. All four of my grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. I remember having to get through conversations with my grandparents who did not speak English well and feeling a little bit disconnected from them, but always kind of having this sense of connection with immigration, even though it was in my case, two generations back. I went to college at the University of Michigan and that's where I got interested in Latin American studies. It was where my Spanish became very fluent. I went back to Chicago after college and one of my first jobs was teaching English as a second language for the city colleges of Chicago. And I was on the L trains every day going to my job. I was watching how quickly the city was changing. This was in the 1980s. Mexican neighborhoods had been more of a story of the south and southwest side, but I was living on the far north side in Rogers Park. My neighborhood, all of a sudden, had takerías and lavandarias, so things were changing quickly. So I had my eye on this demographic change in Chicago. I went off to go to graduate school in colonial Mexican history. I went to study with William B. Taylor at the University of Virginia. A little ironically, the first semester of grad school, I did a tutorial with him about colonial Mexican churches. And I was always kind of a shared interest. I didn't do that much with it. When I was writing my dissertation, I did work in some church archives. And what I was trying to get at in my dissertation was how gender functioned in indigenous communities in 18th and 19th century Mexico. And church records ended up being a place that had quite a bit of information. But I lived in Mexico for about three, four years at that point. The, I finished the dissertation. Eventually, it became my first book, which is called "Ejos del Pueblo, "Gender, Family, and Community in Relaxico." While I was doing all that work, I kept coming back and visiting Chicago and it always felt like more and more Mexicans were there and more states were represented. I was kind of, I was just sort of fascinated, you know, walking or driving around Chicago. Wanted to make connections between the research that I had done on colonial Indígenas and who was in Chicago. And it felt like a big jump for a long time. And I was walking in the southwest side neighborhood of Little Village in Chicago, La Vieta. I walked into a church. A blessed Agnes church. Just to kind of have a look around and it seemed super mechicano and everybody was speaking Spanish and the Virgin Guadalupe was up front. And then I looked up at the windows in this church and realized the names of the donors and all of the words on the windows were actually in check. And I started to think about what I knew about Chicago neighborhoods and I realized, oh my God, this was a check neighborhood. 35 years ago and wow, every church in this neighborhood probably wasn't Mexican once a bonnetive. And I decided at that point, maybe the story of churches would be a way to think about who immigrants to Chicago were. Who were these people coming from Mexico? What did it mean? Do they want to retain mechicanidad? What did it mean when they moved into European neighborhoods how did churches change? And I didn't really wanna become a Catholic historian. I really wanted to continue doing Mexican history but north of the border, very far north in Chicago. And I guessed that churches would be a place where I would find a lot of information. They would be a locust where communities would meet and where identities would be on full display. And I promised myself one week at the archives in Chicago and then I spent like the next two decades doing research and wrote Chicago-Catholic-Coup. - Quite a big change in your research plan. - The other thing I would say is like, in certain ways I'm a very unlikely person to have written this book I don't have any formal training in like modern US history. And that's I think is the field that most people who do Latino history, most people do come out of US history whereas I'm trained as a Latin Americanist and I had to do a lot of catching up. And I also had no formal training as a historian of Catholicism, and definitely not about US Catholicism. And you know, that's a hat that I now wear quite proudly. I just got really kind of won over and fascinated by US Catholic history thinking about it for Latinos or more generally what it tells us about immigrant history in the United States. - So let's jump right in. What do Catholic churches tell us about this demographic transformation in Chicago? And more importantly, I think, how did Catholic parishes become Mexican? - The story goes back to like the first 10 years that Mexicans really began to settle in Chicago. They came, you know, the first ones came in good numbers in the World War I area, era. And I think that was, you know, especially for Americans that was supposed to be a temporary sojourn, you know, men coming to work on the railroad during the war or on farms in the Midwest. But by the 1920s, they were settling out in Chicago soon in the tens of thousands. And within, I don't know, by 1918, there was some interest in setting up a Catholic a parish for Mexicans that came out of church. It was actually out of Mother Cabrini, actually was the one who came up with that idea. But by 1924, 25, there were two churches that were established in the two main Mexican settlements in Chicago in South Chicago, which borders with Indiana, which Michael and his humanist wrote about in Stilbario. 1924, our Lady of Guadalupe Church was established for what was then called the Spanish speaking. And in 1926, St. Francis of the CC Church was established much more in the center of the city on the near West Side, which is where the University of Illinois, Chicago is. And I think these churches were very much places of Refuge, of Refuge, you had new immigrants. These would have been quite young adults, starting families. They didn't, many of them did not have had anything with them. And I think that the church became a place where they found kind of a new kind of family, effective kin, they found job leads, they found presets with Spanish, you know, I think that for many of them the other six days of the week, they were never in a majority. They were always working with people of many other ethnicities and living in mixed neighborhoods. But when they came to these churches on Sundays in the 1920s, this was a, you know, this was as though you were going back to your village in Mexico. So, go see Yafuera and Mipueblo, this is something which I heard many times from people. So, that is the beginning of it. In the 1920s, these folks have families. You get this generation in the 1940s of Mexican Americans, who also really kind of glum onto these churches. And, you know, the story obviously of immigration is, with the exception of the 1930s, every half-ing decades since, right? There are people coming from Mexico. There are always new immigrants. There are always people who need a refugio. And these churches, you know, become that place. And they serve social functions, community functions, as well as, of course, like devotional needs and religious needs. And so, you know, Chicago, the Mexican population, again, the 1930s is kind of a period with very little growth, maybe even some decline in the population. But, you know, people really begin to come in the 1940s and these two clusters around our late Guadalupe Church in St. Francis of Assisi, those two neighborhoods, you know, by the late 40s, they got a lot of Mexican people. It's hard to find apartments. The numbers continue to grow in the 50s and in the 60s. And by that point, these two churches cannot hold all of the Mexican Catholics. Also, at the same time, in the late 1940s Puerto Ricans are beginning to come to Chicago. And so, you know, in terms of like what these churches say about demography is that churches and different, the Latino population basically begins to disperse. It moves beyond these two clusters into other neighborhoods. And in time, especially like by about 1960, more and more Catholic churches have to consider whether they are going to add a mass that will be aimed more, it's Spanish-speaking people. And to what degree they are going to include people. And things kind of, it's kind of like the dam overflows by about 1960. And by that point, the archdiocese of Chicago very much recognizes that the number of Spanish-speaking Catholics is really increasing and that this is going to be pretty key to holding on to a lot of older parishes in the city of Chicago. And by the early 1960s, the archdiocese is starting to encourage priests to learn Spanish. Today, and just, you know, kind of like fast-forwarding up to where we are in 2020, at this point, I think it's about 40% of Catholic churches in Chicago land offer Misa and Espanyón. And the lay people in Chicago are maturity Latino at this point. So it's, you know, it started off with two churches, two neighborhoods. And I think it's, you know, the store I'm telling in this book is about kind of a remaking of vast expanses of the city of Chicago becoming, you know, more Mexican neighborhoods and churches and other community institutions, changing. Many community institutions that start with an older European immigrant group like Lithuanians or Poles, and these things, these institutions, settlement houses, parks, schools, churches, eventually in big parts of the city, these things become Latino. I think I got you other. Yeah. We just did 100 years of history. No big deal. You know, right away, I could tell that this was a unique take on the Catholic church because it's a religious history, but with an emphasis on the perspective of lay people. Can you tell us more about the research process and the types of sources that you drew from? Okay. So when I got into this work, I was maybe about a year into it and I first I started off in the archives, you know, reading any histories that did exist. I would read, like, parish annual reports, you know, what year did they start to say a mass in Spanish? What year? Do I see the first Hispanic surname people, like in the parish records? So I spent about a year just, you know, working in sort of text things. I started to meet some older Mexican American people. There was somebody who was doing an oral history project and I was invited to assist with that for a day. And I met these, like, adorable Mexican Chicagoans who were like in their late 70s. And I realized I wanted to hear their stories and they really wanted to tell their stories. And so then I just switched pretty quickly too. I need to start doing oral histories. Because I was concerned, these people are older, right? Like, let's jump in and get them. And so that was kind of my next turn. And, you know, when I first started interviewing people, you know, who were very strongly associated with specific parishes in Chicago, I kind of figured I was going to hear all these stories about, like, La Reca de Guadalupe and, like, the San Titos that my mom had and blah, blah, blah. What I found is the old folks, the old timers from St. Francis C.C. Church. They always said to me, "Hey, has anybody told you about the gym?" And I, at first, I was like, "Huh, the gym, like, what are these people talking about?" Well, it turns out in the late 40s when these people were young adults, one of the big Catholic, the biggest of the Mexican Catholic churches. They actually organized and they built a free standing gym, which is about the size of, like, half a city block. And this became their hangout. They went to, you know, the, the women played volleyball and the men got together for basketball and they used the locker rooms and the showers and they went to dances on Saturday night. And yeah, they went to Mass on Sunday. But the thing, but they really remembered from their youth about their parish was like, we had the gym. It was the newest building in the neighborhood. And, you know, we were really into sports and we had these amazing dances. And that, that was not at all anything I was expecting to hear. Like this idea of a parish, you know, from there, you know, these are 70-year-old people recalling their 20s. And, you know, a lot of what they wanted to talk about was just sort of social networks. And, you know, I got their stories about going to church and working with the sisters and the priests. But I guess I, and as I continued to do oral histories, you know, they moved up into the decades. I got stories more about the 50s and the 60s and maybe even the 70s. Some of the stories that interested me the most, they were not about what happened in the sanctuary of the church. They were not always about priests. I was super excited to hear the stories that some of my female informants would tell me about getting involved with cooking for the church carnivals when they, we first moved into like an old Polish or Lithuanian parish. They were still called the church festival, the church carnival. You know, within a decade they became the Keter Mes, right? Is they're called in Mexico. And these women telling stories about like, oh, we wanted to cook the same foods that we cooked for Mexican church festivals. We wanted to make dostadas. We wanted to make, you know, enchiladas and flautas. But the Polish ladies didn't like it. They just put up these like amazing sort of down on the ground story about Catholic women of different ethnic groups basically fighting for turf and control in a Catholic parish of which they were all members. And it was just such a fascinating window on, you know, what kind of what's social and and geographic spaces exist in a parish and what was meaningful to people. I think they were, you know, most of these people I'm talking, talking with they're people of faith and they're religious but um the stories often got pretty far away from talking about mass and sacraments and the version of Guadalupe and and that was um pretty fascinating to me um and I got those stories I got them a lot out of older Mexican American people but also heard stories like that for people who were newly arrived from Mexico um and I also was fortunate to talk to some early Tejanos who settled in Chicago in like the 30s and 40s and 50s for whom Chicago was a really big change. Let's let's talk a little bit more about that. So you mentioned the importance of the gym and the gitamas. How did the social and economic life of Mexicans develop around the St. Francis parish especially as more immigrants continue to settle um you know from the 20s through the 40s. So that at the St. Francis of Assisi which is um still standing um and on the edge of the University of Illinois um at Chicago campus um that was the largest settlement of Mexican people in the city of Chicago um from the 20s to about 1960-1962 and the only thing that is left of the Mexican neighborhood is St. Francis of Assisi that's it you know there used to be Pana de Rias and Supermercados and Tienda's the Musica and Libererias and Cardi Serias and everything and there were some 40, 50,000 Mexican and Mexican American people who lived in that neighborhood and the sort of end of the neighborhood is really the construction of that campus um in the early 1960s but um you know oh it was an older neighborhood it's one of the oldest neighborhoods in Chicago um you know for people who are not really familiar with Chicago it's a neighborhood the near west side which is kind of like the lower east side of New York you know it was a sort of a port of first entry neighborhood for immigrant groups from many different places, Greeks, Jews, uh checks, African Americans um so Mexicans were not the majority of the neighborhood but they were a big clump by the World War II period in that neighborhood and it was a neighborhood that was really well situated for employment there were a lot of Mexican men who worked in the railways and the rail yards were you know they started half a mile away and went all the way to downtown where this neighborhood is maybe a mile mile and a half to the loop in Chicago um people were also able to get jobs working in the loop for example working in hotel um kitchens and bakeries and housekeeping um a lot of factory jobs of different types in that neighborhood one of my favorite little details was that uh the cracker jack factory was like uh would run ads in Spanish they were always looking for new arrivals to go work in the candy factory and there is this whole weird little tradition in Chicago of um Mexicans working in um candy factories Chicago had a ton of them um and uh so people were you know they had jobs um they had apartments in this neighborhood they were pretty tightly packed together uh the kids played out on the stoop um families who were not related acted like they were teos and fias uh and they were like godparents to each other for baptisms and weddings and all of that um they interacted with especially Italians in the neighborhood um so you know in terms of socio-economic life you know a lot of people a lot of people very devoted to that church the church was able to do a lot of renovations in the 1940s this was a church that went back to the 1870s um and you know when they needed a new um heating system they were able to raise that money um no problem because uh you know people were packed into that church every weekend there were like seven eight nine masses every weekend and they were full um and um people were very very supportive of the church um you know they built uh they built a new school for students there was a Catholic school there um with mostly Mexican kids there was a fire that burned down the school they were able to rebuild the school in like a year because the fundraising efforts were so good and also the I would say one other thing you know in terms of like finances and what sort of kept St. Francis of a CC going um across the middle of the 20th century the priests who served Mexican people from the 20s through the 60s are a member of a Catholic order called the Clarition Missionary Fathers they had originally come up from Mexico and then to Tejas and then they made their way to Chicago in the 20s um the Clarition Fathers were incredible champions of Mexicans of immigrants of um working people and they were very creative and very active fundraisers um and um so why these you know people were basically working poor salaries but I think sort of together as a community in the church they were able to um have a you know quite a lovely place that was their parish with a lot of activities and it became kind of a stepping stone to jobs that often paid better the the children who were raised in that neighborhood who attended high schools in Chicago both public and Catholic high schools um most I would say in the 40s most of them were actually graduating from high school very few of them went past high school there's no question in the 1940s but like guys the young men you know a lot of them got jobs working for the city of Chicago they got you know they became police officers they became firefighters um other kinds of city jobs you know they had good benefits and you have this you know and it's because of their connections I think with that parish and with that the Clarition Missionary Fathers that got them connected in with other like um other Catholic people you know it was like the Irish were basically running the Chicago police and um many of the first Latino officers uh came out of St. Francis and it was out of that kind of network and they you know their parents were working poor immigrants and these kids raised in Chicago you know they sort of enter a lower middle class and uh I think a lot of it had to do you know with access to education and and and the kind of pull and the network of being part of a Catholic parish it's interesting that you mentioned the US-born Mexican-Americans that were basically raised in this parish because the book frequently points to a persistent contradiction in Chicago's Catholic churches which I think simultaneously served as sites of both Americanization on one hand and the development of ethnic Mexican identity or mexicanidad on the other you walk us through how these forces interacted and how they differed in impact across not just the generational divides but also the US-born and recent arrival divide from many of the recent arrivals and we could say this for you know people who came in 1925 or people who came in 1945 or 65 most people who came straight from Mexico they came from rural areas right they came from Boyblos they came from Granchos a lot of them were Catholic but a lot of them did not have regular access to um the equivalent of a parish church if you live on my Rancho you know it might be like a seven mile walk into you know the parroquia in you know from your Rancho and Haleesco or Michoacán and people couldn't go all the time they couldn't you know they weren't necessarily regular mass attenders um and children sort of Catholic education familiar familiarity with the catechism might be a little weak well when they go to Chicago the Catholic churches are like everywhere it's they're pretty hard to miss if you live near St. Francis if you live within a mile of it well of course you could attend mass on a regular basis and you know like I think from a like a modern perspective we think of like regular mass attendances going every week well Catholics in the United States um before Vatican II, which is like in the early 1960s, a lot of Catholics in the United States are trying to take communion, like as often as they can. There are people who attended mass every day. There were like two masses every week day, at St. Francis II, three, maybe. Some people will go in their lunch break. And so I think one of the things that happens for these new arrivals from Mexico, their worship was maybe a little more based home base back in rural Mexico and when they're in a Chicago parish full of Mexicans. They get more involved, I think, with the sacraments. They attend more often. They are introduced to devotions that they would not have known about back in Mexico. There was a very prominent Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Francis Church. But, you know, newly arrived Mexican. They also got to know Our Lady of Fatima in the late 40s and 50s. It was a tremendously popular Catholic devotion in Europe and the United States and very tied to anti-communism. When Our Lady of Fatima comes to visit at St. Francis, it was like a big traveling, like statue version of Fatima, you know, the church in St. Francis was absolutely packed with people. Everybody came out to see her. This is something they wouldn't have known about from their little towns in Mexico. So one of the things I think is for like the Mexican, the immigrants from Mexico, they're kind of learning how to be Catholic in a more American way, in a more urban way. And, you know, regularly donating to the church, the collection baskets, going around the men, get involved with clubs like the Holy Name or the Santo Nambre. Many men want to volunteer to be what were called Usheres. And I'm very struck by the use of that word, Usher's. So, but the way it was always written, it was spelled like it was Spanish, U-I-J-E-R-S, Usheres. So, you know, this was like a very honorable thing to be an Ushere and especially this meant that you were involved in distributing the collection basket during the mass. And I don't think these were practices that people would have been participating in very much in Mexico. Their kids, on the other hand, they're learning to be Catholics like other Chicago Catholics. If they are dealing, if they're going to Catholic school, the nuns are not Mexican, they're being spoken to in English, they're not really being encouraged to speak Spanish, they're not learning like Spanish Catholic hymns at Catholic school. I don't, there were a lot of the children's public upbringing, playing baseball, the Catholic schooling education or the Chicago Public Schooling Education, you know, was always English in public. They were definitely bilingual, but Spanish was really more for home. And these kids, you know, they all had Hispanic names, Almondales, Robriez, Gonzales. But, you know, in lots of ways, you know, their parents were immigrants, but these kids were really Chicagoans. I think they were kind of Chicagoans first. And the parish was, you know, the idea that one of your big associations with the parish is being on the parish baseball team, like there were, and that girls would learn to play on the parish baseball team. They planned the Saint Francis, Cobra's girls baseball team. They're Prima's back in Mexico. There was no way those girls were playing sports. That wasn't going to come for a couple more decades. So I think, you know, come surprisingly, at a Mexican church, for young people, it was a place to be super American. At the same time, they do talent shows and fundraisers where they would bring in Mexican singers and they would do bily folklorico. I feel like in the end, in like the 40s and 50s, the young folks are kind of, they're going back and forth. So, you know, there's baseball and there's bily folklorico. They're celebrating Mexican Independence Day. They're doing DSEA's De Septiembre. There's a big parade. But what's one of the, where does the parade end up? It ends up at the Lakefront Park, Grant Park, and there's a big baseball tournament, which is not really how I think about people celebrating DSEA's De Septiembre. So I think for the young people, it's kind of a mishmash. Right. They're, I mean, they're really becoming Mexican and American at the same time. Yes. And I was, I actually was invited to an annual like a gala dinner from a club that came out of St. Francis. It's a fraternal organization called the St. Francis Wildcats. And once upon a time, like in the 40s, you know, there was the St. Francis Wildcats baseball team and basketball team and they became a fraternal organization and they raised money for like Hispanic college students and they buy annual gala thoughting. So I was invited to their gala dinner at a, what do we call it? Like a, my kid days place. And they asked me to say a little bit to them. And these are people like basically 60 to 90 years old who had grown up at St. Francis. And my big line with them was that the people at St. Francis had grown up Mexican, American, and Catholic. And all of a sudden I was met with thunderous applause. Like they just thought I had nailed who they were. Mexican, American, and Catholic. So. Well, that was my shining moment. I mean, when you know them, you know them. And so by the 1960s, like you mentioned earlier with the construction of UIC, the University of Illinois campus in Chicago, urban renewal and the general expansion of the Latino population in Chicago, leaves a lot of people somewhat far away from the original Mexican parishes. What happens when Mexicans move into other neighborhoods, particularly the Pilsen neighborhood? And they start attending Polish and Slavic parishes. Um, good question. And like a really, you know, this is the beginning of the phenomenon that is really apparent all over Chicago today, right? Like we go from having two Mexican neighborhoods to like 50 percent of the city is more or less meekano. Um, so yeah, the Pilsen neighborhood, which is well known by a lot of people today. Um, I forget which magazine like two years ago called it one of the 10 hottest neighborhoods in the world. So it's a hot neighborhood. It's a hot neighborhood facing justification. Um, and the in the early 1950s, people of Mexican origin begin to move into this Pilsen neighborhood. This is about a mile south of St. Francis. And um, it's a neighborhood that was known as like Little Bohemia. It was a neighborhood that was known as being very Polish. But there were also Croatians and, and, um, slow vox and Lithuanians. There were 13 different churches in the Pilsen neighborhood. And, um, they mostly belonged to specific Eastern European groups. And all the clubs that existed at these churches were clubs that basically functioned, especially for older people, you know, they functioned in the language of the old country. Um, and, um, so people, you know, the church down the block belongs to the Polacos, which the Mexican arrivals called them, whether they were Czech, Lithuanian or Polish, they were all Polacos in Chicago. And, uh, you know, I think it's kind of tentative. They, you know, it's called in Chicago. And sometimes you just want to go, if you want to go to mass or you want to light a candle, you go to the church that's two blocks away, instead of waiting for the street car and transferring to a bus and going to St. Francis. So people sort of begin to go to these neighborhood churches. Um, and, uh, they're a lot younger than the Eastern European people whose parishes they are. They have kids with them. Um, one, um, amazing Tecana Gway interviewed and moved to Pilsen in this neighborhood. She would go with her, um, baby daughter to mass and a Czech bearer. And she always had the feeling that the Czech people were like looking down on her or we're angry at her because her baby would make noise, right? She's basically in a church with a lot of older folks and she's the one with the baby who's fussy. She feels super comfortable there, right? Everything that was happening in that church would have been happening in Latin, English, and Czech, right? And she spoke Spanish her whole life. But the key thing, I think, to breaking into these parishes was when people decided for the people that decided to spend the extra money and send their kids to Catholic school. And you have a lot of parishes that quite quickly, you know, the majority of students in the paris school are Mexican American kids. And the priests and the sisters want to keep the schools open. And they are willing to enroll these children. As I tell in Chicago, Catholic, those Polish and Lithuanian parishes, they are not willing to enroll African American children. They always send those parents away. They've always find some parish in another neighborhood and tell the parents, "I have to send their kids there." They do not turn away the Mexican children. They enroll them and they take the tuition money from the parents. And you know, you have kids who just like they start to grow up at St. Procopius Czech Parish. They grow up at Providence of God, Lithuanian Parish. You've got years where you really have overlapping populations in these schools. Providence of God, which is one of Chicago's oldest Lithuanian churches. In the 1950s and '60s and into the '70s, that school was very next. You know, good numbers of Lithuanian family stayed in the neighborhood and continued to send their kids to the Perogiel School. And you know, they became classmates and friends with Mexican American families and kids in the neighborhood.