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Tamales on the Fourth of July: The Transnational
Parish of Coeneo, Michoacán

Luis E. Murillo

Introduction

During the 2004 Christmas season, in a scene repeated
throughout central Mexico, the rural town of Coeneo, Michoacán,
about 250 miles west-northwest of Mexico City, bustled with activity
as a multitude of late-model pickup trucks, SUVs, and minivans, each
filled to capacity with passengers, cruised up the principal street,
ranchera and banda music blaring. The population of Coeneo, a town
of approximately 4,500, had swelled as people filled up the sidewalks.
The parish church of Nuestra Señora del Rosario (Our Lady of the
Rosary) usually had a crowd of well-dressed people milling around
the front waiting for a quinceañera mass or a wedding or a baptism to
begin. One such ceremony took place on December 26 at precisely
1:15 p.m. in the auxiliary chapel. To meet the overwhelming demand,
the parish priest, Father Gomez, baptized twenty babies. Parents, god-
parents, and friends jockeyed for position in front of the simply dec-
orated chapel, loaded down with video and digital cameras. Upon
entering the chapel, Father Gomez quickly instilled order among the
chaos, organizing the event by ordering that only the parents and
godparents could remain with their babies in the front; the rest of the
crowd had to jam into the back of the chapel. After arranging the fam-
ilies alphabetically, Father Gomez began the ceremony, moving effi-
ciently from baby to baby until all twenty had been baptized in less
than half an hour, for he had other services to officiate.1 This group
baptism was an extraordinary event given that, on average, priests in
the Coeneo parish baptize only some 225 babies a year.2

This article posits that the bustling scene in Coeneo and the
baptism ceremony have as much to do with understanding the chang-
ing dynamics of Mexican Catholicism as they do with comprehend-
ing the dramatic changes occurring in U.S. Catholicism over the last
thirty years.3 The parade of trucks, vans, and SUVs1 that passed

Religion and American Culture: AJournal of Interpretation, Vol. 19, Issue 2, pp. 137-168, ISSN: 1052-
1151; electronic ISSN 1533-8568. © 2009 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American
Culture. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce
article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at
http://www.ucpressjournals.eom/reprintinfo.asp.DOI:10.1525/rac.2009.19.2.137.

http://www.ucpressjournals.eom/reprintinfo.asp.DOI:10.1525/rac.2009.19.2.137

138 Religion and American Culture

through the town, with a few exceptions, had U.S. license plates. A
majority of the guests who attended the baptism ceremony lived,
worked, and went to mass in the United States. Among the twenty
babies Father Gomez baptized, five were born in the United States:
Melvin, Salvador, Anahi, Efren, and Julio Cesar.4 For the parish o

f

Coeneo, these children constitute part of a recent trend where a sig-
nificant number of children born in the United States become
Catholics in Mexico: U.S. citizens/Mexican Catholics. In the six-year
span from 1998 to 2004, for example, there were at least 225 babies
who became U.S. citizens/Mexican Catholics in Coeneo, representing
some 17 percent of the total number of children baptized there during
this period.5

These baptisms, along with wedding and quinceañera celebra-
tions, should be considered transnational religious ceremonies that
help migrants stay connected with other members of their commu-
nity who live in disparate parts of the United States and Mexico as
Mexicans and Mexican Americans.6 Indeed, the five U.S. children.
baptized on December 26 point us to those U.S. communities that
have significant populations originating from Coeneo, sometimes
referred to as shadow communities. Melvin and his family hail from
southern California, where members of the Coeneo community have
been migrating for more than one hundred years to such cities as
Oxnard, Los Angeles, Riverside, Santa Ana, and Watsonville.7

Salvador, for his part, was born in the environs of Chicago, where, for
the last fifty years, parishioners from Coeneo have settled in Round
Lake, Libertyville, and Cicero. Upon Salvador’s return, he would join
some 500,000 Michoacanos living in the Chicago area, so many that
there exists a Federation of Michoacán Clubs of Illinois. Since 2004,
that federation has sponsored a Michoacán Presence in Illinois every
June. The celebration begins with a mass and blessing at the Des
Plaines, Illinois, shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the ubiquitous
patron saint of Mexico. Demonstrating the importance of this cele-
bration, the archbishop of Morelia, whose jurisdiction includes
Coeneo and all of the state of Michoacán, came to commence and
bless the events in 2004.

The final three U.S. children baptized on December 26, 2004,
Anahi, Efren, and Julio Cesar, rode down with their parents from their
birthplaces in southeastern Idaho. In many southeastern Idaho coun-
ties, Mexicans and Mexican Americans represent well over a majority
of the Catholic population. In May 2006, in a southeastern Idaho
parish, I witnessed the present reality of U.S. Catholicism and culture
that these three children and their families have influenced. At the
first of two Spanish masses scheduled for this rural parish church,

Tamales on the Fourth of July 139

Mexicans and Mexican Americans of all ages jammed the church.
During an energetic sermon, spoken in a flawless, heavily accented
Spanish, the parish priest detailed the differences between God’s love
(agape) and humanity’s love (philo), and I, along with much of the con-
gregation, drifted off. I began to read the parish bulletin and noticed
that the local Our Lady of Guadalupe Society sought volunteers to
make tamales all day on June 8 and 9 for the upcoming Fourth of July
celebration. Tamales made by Mexicans and Mexican Americans from
Coeneo as members of Our Lady of Guadalupe Society in Idaho for a
Fourth of July celebration encapsulates the complexity of Mexican
and Mexican American transnational Catholicism.

The children baptized in December 2004 in Coeneo and their
families, then, return to the United States, where they become part of
the 40 percent of the U.S. Catholic population that is Latino; a Latino
Catholic population that constitutes slightly more than 70 percent of
the U.S. Catholic population growth since I960.8 These transnational
parishioners will soon be part of the majority population of the single
largest church in the United States, the U.S. Catholic church. Despite
these numbers, however, they live on the margins of U.S. society,
working in construction, agriculture, meat packing, and service
industries. They also still inhabit the periphery of the U.S. Catholic
church and remain, despite pleas from some scholars, on the margins
of a marginal U.S. Catholic history.9

Based on archival research, interviews, and observations in
both Coeneo and in Idaho, this article traces the significant, yet
largely unexplored, experience of transnationalism in the lived reli-
gious experiences of Mexican and Mexican American Catholics in an
effort to shed some light, raise some questions, and hopefully stimu-
late more research. The research clearly demonstrates that the
transnational lives Mexicans and Mexican Americans lead have sig-
nificantly changed the rhythm of parish life on both sides of the bor-
der. In the case of Mexican parishes, the rhythm of parish life has
shifted away from traditional celebrations of local and national
Catholic images, celebrations that still occur but with less participa-
tion as so many live in the United States, to celebrations of marriages
and baptisms. These religious celebrations of marriages and baptisms
in Mexico have become the focal point of identity and community in
this transnational Mexican and Mexican American experience. In
turn, images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico,
are now often employed in U.S. parish churches, replacing local
Catholic images of Jesus and Mary.

My argument derives from an ongoing historical case study
(1890-present) of the parish and parishioners of Nuestra Señora del

140 Religion and American Culture

Rosario in Coeneo, Michoacán.10 A predominantly rural and poor
state in central Mexico, Michoacán garners some tourist trade with its
colonial cities that include the capital city, Morella, and Pátzcuaro.
Located within the Meseta Purépecha, a mountainous zone with lim-
ited agricultural land and a significant indigenous population, the
Purépechas, the parish of Coeneo is all but a shell of itself eleven
months of the year until everyone returns for the Christmas holi-
days.11 The parish of Coeneo rests within the municipality of Coeneo
and, according to Mexican census records, the population for the
municipality had a negative 1.5 percent growth for the period of 1995
to 2000 and is expected to decline from 23,946 in 2000 to 18,050 in
2030. The parish centers in Coeneo, Michoacán, where the two priests
in charge of the parish live. It also includes some fourteen other small
communities of populations ranging from five hundred to fifteen
hundred, giving the parish a total population of some ten thousand.12

This exploration, then, presents a view from Mexico and from
the perspective of a Mexican historian. The article begins with an
overview of the increasingly muddied concept of transnationalism
and how migration studies have approached religious phenomena. In
order to appreciate better the dynamics of transnational religious
organizations and practices, scholars have urged that one should
begin from “the ground up.”13 This exploration into Coeneo transna-
tionalism, thus far, leads to the conclusion that, in order to grasp best
the active transnational lives of many Mexicans and Mexican
Americans, the ground level should be the parish unit, a unit that
needs to be rethought as an analytical unit in two important regards.
First, the way in which parish life in rural Mexico has been predomi-
nately conceptualized as one whose rhythm revolves around a tradi-
tional ritual calendar centered on community celebrations of
particular religious holidays and localized votive devotions needs to
be replaced by one in which the rhythm of community celebrations
centers on the sacraments of baptism and marriage because of the
irregular attendance in traditional Catholic community celebrations.
Throughout central Mexico, parish life dramatically changes during
the Christmas holidays when transnationalists return briefly to
Mexico. Post Vatican II Catholicism may have changed many ele-
ments of Catholic practice, but the sacraments of baptism and mar-
riage must take place in the parish church, and many Mexicans and
Mexican Americans decide to take these sacraments in Mexico. At the
same time, one must also consider that, for Mexicans and Mexican
Americans, the sacraments of baptism and marriage have multiple
meanings that not only include universal Catholic doctrines but also
notions of family, community, and a particular appreciation for the

Tamales on the Fourth of July 141

sacralized landscape of their Mexican parish.14 Second, notions of
parish boundaries as fixed and parish affiliation as singular must be
reconsidered because many Mexicans and Mexican Americans living
in the United States consider themselves to be active members in at
least two parishes: one in Mexico and one or more in the United
States.

Transnationalism and Religion: Mexican and Mexican American
Catholicism

The concept of transnationalism has become a bit muddied
over the last ten years so that it now includes everything from glob-
alization to diasporas to transnational communities.15 Within U.S.
Latino religious studies, the concept of transnationalism has prima-
rily examined a powerful symbolic transnationalism. Luis León notes
the way in which devotion to La Virgen de Guadalupe connects
“Mexico City—place, history, and identity—[to] the disaporic
Mexican-American Catholic community.”16 The Coeneo case resem-
bles a different type of transnationalism, one that resonates with
anthropologist Roger Rouse’s “transnational migrant circuit.” For
Rouse, whose study focused on a small rural community in southern
Michoacán, Aguililla, and its shadow community in Redwood City,
California, “the continuous circulation of people, money, goods, and
information, the various settlements [had] become so closely woven
together that, in an important sense, they have come to constitute a
single community spread across a variety of sites.”17 The transnation-
alism described here, thus, contains a far more physical element than
symbolic. This continuous circulation of Mexicans and Mexican
Americans represents a new phenomenon in Mexican migration to
the United States, a phenomenon that occurred concurrently with
more traditional forms of migration. Until the 1970s, Mexican migra-
tion followed either a temporary pattern in which the majority of
migrants came for short periods of time, for seasonal agricultural
work or for extended industrial work; or some migrants came and
stayed permanently in the United States with limited ties to Mexico.
After the 1970s, the pattern of Mexican migration shifted as migrants,
often bringing their families, increasingly settled in urban areas of the
U.S. Southwest and went to nontraditional areas throughout the
United States, including Idaho. Unlike previous migrants, these post-
19708 migrants increasingly live transnational lives, going back and
forth with far greater frequency.18 They often either come back as a
family unit during the Christmas season or they send their children
“home” for the summer.

142 Religion and American Culture

Unfortunately, Rouse all but ignored religion in his study.
This is not surprising as many anthropological studies of Mexican
rural communities tend to overlook religious practices, unless that
practice has indigenous elements. For example, take perhaps the most
studied rural community in the world, Tzintzuntzan, which is some
fifty kilometers from Coeneo. With the arrival of George Foster in the
1940s, many anthropologists and their assistants have studied
Tzintzuntzan, and the community has become a veritable laboratory
for the University of California, Berkeley, anthropology department.
However, Foster and his cohorts have not shown that much interest
in religion. Investigators conducted six community-wide censuses
(1945,1960,1970,1980,1990, 2000) asking a wide range of questions.
In addition, investigators checked off a list of forty-one material items
that might be in a household. In none of the surveys did investigators
ask what religion was practiced in the household.19

Joining anthropologists in the lack of attention toward reli-
gion are transnational scholars, a significant lacuna that only
recently has been addressed by sociologists such as Helen Rose
Ebaugh and Peggy Levitt.20 Based on her own work and the exten-
sive research on religious communities in Boston undertaken by her
team of sociologists, Levitt tentatively posits that there are three pat-
terns of transnational religious organizations that, in turn, impact the
nature of transnational religious life. The first involves “the Catholic
Church’s extended pattern [that] allows migrants who choose to do so
to move almost seamlessly between sending and receiving country
parishes and religious movement groups.” This extended pattern dif-
fers from a second negotiated organization typical of Protestant reli-
gious groups, which generally lack the institutional reach of the
Catholic church. The third pattern involves groups such as the
Gujarati Hindu, whose transnational experience “strongly reinforce
members’ ties to their home country, often at the expense of receiv-
ing country social integration.”21

Levitt’s insights are keen and useful. However, Levitt derives
her conclusions on the extended Catholic pattern primarily from
observations of Irish and Irish American experiences, which differ
significantly from Mexican and Mexican American ones. The Irish
quickly assumed leadership roles in the U.S. Catholic church, while
Latinos still struggle for a voice. As will be noted in more detail
shortly, the persistence of racism, issues of citizenship, and general
institutional indifference on the part of the U.S. Catholic church
toward Mexican Americans have made the extended pattern far from
seamless. Thus, the transnational religious life of those from Coeneo
tends to involve both Levitt’s extended pattern of transnationalism

Tamales on the Fourth of July 143

and the pattern that reinforces member’s ties to their home country.
For example, the extended pattern becomes manifest in the seamless
way in which paperwork flows back and forth between the United
States and Mexico. While I conducted research in the Coeneo parish
archive during the summers of 2003 and 2004, people continually
came to ask for baptismal, confirmation, and marriage records for
family members living in the United States. Interestingly, one could
see the transnational mindset in action. No one ever said that their
family member lived in the United States; instead, people would ask
for the papers and comment that their relative “están alia,” that is,
“they are there.” For those living in the United States, Mexicans and
Mexican Americans can take the appropriate baptism or marriage
classes, often in Spanish, in the United States and then come to
Coeneo and submit their paperwork. The U.S. Catholic church,
whether in Idaho or California, provides all the necessary paperwork
in Spanish, making life for the parish secretary in Coeneo much easier.

For many, the extended pattern can be far from seamless, a
pattern full of pitfalls that go beyond the significant obstacles of citi-
zenship issues and of an increasingly dangerous border to cross. In
particular, for at least the last twenty years, U.S. Catholic church pol-
icy dictates that Catholic practice and parish affiliation be tied to
church attendance.22 This becomes problematic for a number of rea-
sons, most of which have their origins in cultural differences that go
beyond language. While many Mexicans and Mexican Americans
consistently attend a distinct parish church in the United States, they
are unfamiliar with the idea of registering with a parish. In rural
Mexico, one is born into a parish. In an interview with Father
Camacho, born and trained in Mexico but who completed twenty-five
years of ministry in Idaho in October 2006, he noted that even the way
in which U.S. parishes conduct their business hours can be problem-
atic. Most U.S. parishes prefer that parishioners come during the
week to arrange the necessary paperwork for baptisms and mar-
riages, he explained, “but Mexicanos like to do all their business right
after Mass, so I would stay for a long time to talk to them.”23 Further
complicating matters, many parishes use weekly contributions, money
placed in envelopes, as proof of attendance, another practice not com-
monly found in Mexico and, thus, Mexicans and Mexican Americans
are not familiar with this custom. Without proof of attendance or regis-
tration papers, most U.S. Catholic priests will not baptize or marry
these Mexican and Mexican American Catholics living in the United
States.24 The mobility of many of the Coeneo transnationale who
migrate for work across the country also means they cannot attend just
one parish in the United States or often cannot find Catholic services

144 Religion and American Culture

at all. Finally, some do not attend church for a variety of reasons,
including issues of racism and cultural insensitivity.

While difficult to quantify exactly, based on observation and
on interviews with the Coeneo parish staff, a significant number of
Mexican and Mexican American transnationals cannot get the appro-
priate paperwork done. Most must return earlier during the
Christmas season to Coeneo to complete all the necessary paperwork
and classes in order to celebrate the important sacraments of baptism
and marriage, to the chagrin of the parish staff, who quickly become
overwhelmed with all the demands. This group, then, has far stronger
ties to their Mexican Catholic life than to a U.S. Catholic life despite
living predominately in the United States. They would fit better in
Levitt’s third pattern.

Of course, Levitt’s three patterns are merely preliminary
steps for understanding religious transnationalism. As she and others
have asserted, “Making sense of transnational practices and placing
them in proper perspective still requires much conceptual, method-
ological and empirical work.”25 To begin, Levitt makes the sensible
suggestion that “to understand the role of religion in transnational
migration . . . we must build from the ground up.”26

The suggestion here is to consider the parish as the ground
level. The very nature of transnationalism, however, complicates mat-
ters methodologically because U.S. religious studies and Mexican
studies conceptualize the parish differently. In Mexican studies, those
studies that incorporate religion find resonance in the historical
anthropologist William Christian’s conception of local religion. For
Christian, “there were two levels of Catholicism—that of the Church
Universal, based on sacraments, the Roman liturgy, the Roman calen-
dar; and a local one based on particular sacred places, images, and
relics, locally chosen patron saints, idiosyncratic ceremonies, and a
unique calendar built up from the settlement’s own sacred history.”27

Christian used the term local, rather than popular, because he argued
that distinctions based on education, class, and setting were tran-
scended at the local level.

Given Christian’s focus on rural Spanish Catholicism, it is not
surprising that his conceptualization works well in Mexico.
Throughout central Mexico, there exists a vibrant local Catholic prac-
tice with locally chosen patron saints, idiosyncratic ceremonies, and a
unique calendar. Indeed, the parish of Coeneo has its own unique cal-
endar that centers around the patron saint, Nuestra Señora del
Rosario, represented in a small six-inch statue with reputed miracu-
lous powers associated with it. The principal celebration day for
Nuestra Señora del Rosario is October 7, when mestizos and

Tamales on the Fourth of July 145

Purépechas alike attend a series of masses and then process through
the streets, accompanied by musicians. The October 7 celebrations are
paid for by the community and increasingly funds come from those
living in the United States. Celebrating the miraculous statue of

ν Nuestra Señora del Rosario actually begins the week before on
September 30, when La comunidad indigena de la Villa de Coeneo del
Santísimo Rosario carries the statue in a procession, led by the parish
priest, to the capilla de la sierra, located in a nearby mountain. The
miraculous statue was found in the mountains, making it intimately
linked not only to the community but also to the land. A mass is held
in honor of Coeneo’s patron saint at the mountain site, and then
commences the festivities. After the mass, one finds an example of an
idiosyncratic ceremony, as William Christian would characterize it.
As with many of the idiosyncratic ceremonies in central Mexico, its
unique root lies in the continuing and powerful Mesoamerican reli-
gious influences. After mass in the capilla de la sierra, there are a series
of Purépecha inspired dances, including Los Tigres, which one scholar
characterized as “pagan gaiety.”28 The statue then returns to the
parish church for a novena, nine days of prayer, culminating with the
October 7 mass.

The Christian model proves useful because in order to under-
stand Mexican and Mexican American transnational Catholic practice
one must appreciate the central and critical role of locally venerated
sacred images that dominate the religious landscape of central
Mexico. These sacred images, mostly of the Virgin Mary and of Jesus
Christ, have long been intertwined with the lives of rural community
members. Each local sacred image has a series of particular rituals
associated with its veneration and specific days of celebration that do
not translate easily to the U.S. experience. To be sure, due to a long
history of veneration and recent intense efforts by the Mexican
Catholic clergy to promote the Virgin of Guadalupe in the late nine-
teenth century, the Virgin of Guadalupe is ubiquitous. However, in
many rural communities in Michoacán, Catholics venerate a multi-

, tude of local images rather than the Virgen de Guadalupe. In Coeneo,
for example, one will not find a representation of the Virgen de
Guadalupe in the parish church.29

The powerful local votive devotion in Coeneo includes
Nuestra Señora del Rosario and several other localized Catholic
images. For the last several years, just to the side of the main inside
entrance to the parish church, a life-size statue of a bloody Jesus
Christ has stood, wearing a crown of thorns and a purple velvet robe.
This image of a beaten Jesus Christ may be found in many other
parishes in Michoacán, and mestizo parishioners call that image Jesus

146 Religion and American Culture

Cristo Nazereno while the indigenous population refers to it as El Padre
Nazereno.30 As in many parishes, parishioners in Coeneo attached to
the robe photos, letters, and other assorted ex-votos either asking for
and/or thanking for intercession with God.31 The active votive devo-
tion surrounding this image in Coeneo involves many Mexicans and
Mexican Americans living in the United States as they petition for
protection in crossing the border, in finding work, in maintaining
health, in leading successful lives, and for a host of other requests. For
much of 2003, there were two photos of U.S. marines dressed in full
military regalia pinned to the robe. The photos of the marines had
been sent by their mothers living in the United States to Coeneo as
they sought solace in this local image as their sons fought for the
United States in Iraq.32 There were also photos of marines within the
glass enclosure that protects Nuestra Señora del Rosario. However,
one had to gain permission to unlock that glass casing whereas
parishioners had direct access to Jesus Cristo Nazereno.

These particularly poignant ex-votos of U.S. Marines highlight
the localized religious devotion of many Mexicans and Mexican
Americans from central Mexico. Simply put, the mothers could not find
solace and sufficient protection in their U.S. Catholic churches,
churches that likely had images of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Central
and southern Mexico is filled with these highly localized followings. In
Michoacán alone, there are dozens of images with some images having
a regional following, including those of the Immaculate Conception of
Mary such as the Virgen de la Salud in Pátzcuaro or the Virgen de la
Experanza in Jacona. At these regional centers or more local ones such
as El Señor de Araró in Araró or El Cristo de la Lampara in Charo, one
finds ex-votos from Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the
United States.33 In all of these churches, the veneration of the Virgen de
Guadalupe is secondary at best.

There is often a long history of each of these localized images
being tied directly and specifically to a particular community. For
example, an 1880 petition from community members in Araró,
Michoacán, explaining to the archbishop their relationship with El
Señor de Araró vividly captures this belief. The community
explained:

The rich treasury of the Divine Misercordia is always ready
to overflow towards men. Sometimes God, Our Lord, estab-
lishes singular images representing Jesus Christ or the
Blessed Virgin Mary and in that way He provides a special
protection to us in our needs and brings solace in our sor-
rows and afflictions or sweet résignation in our great
anguish. That is how in many towns the devotion to the Son

Tamales on the Fourth of July U7

of God or the tender Mother has developed through those
singular images or holy manifestations. And that is how in
our humble and small town began and developed the great
cult, the warm devotion that we dwellers of Araró and those
of the neighboring villages have for Jesus Christ through the
most noble and most holy image of the crucified Jesus that
exists in our Sanctuary.34

At present, the sanctuary of El Señor de Araró is filled with petitions
from those living in the United States.

The mothers w h o sent photos of their U.S. marine sons to
Coeneo understood and believed the miraculous powers of God to be
intimately tied to the parish and surrounding lands, to a fixed place.
In Coeneo, one can buy a multitude of copies of Nuestra Señora del
Rosario to take to the United States, images found on items ranging
from key chains, a best-seller, to large laminated photos. Yet, these
reproductions found in the United States lack the meaning and power
of the original statue housed behind the altar in the parish church. As
eighty-year-old Crispina Rangel noted, the Nuestra Señora del
Rosario keeps her in Coeneo despite the fact that all her family mem-
bers (some eighty plus members), with the exception of her husband
and one daughter, live in Santa Ana, California. She told m e that her
family is always trying to get her to live in the United States, b u t that
she remains because her “Virgencita” can only be found in Coeneo.
She has an intimate relationship with her Virgencita and takes comfort
in the fact that she can visit her at any time in the parish church.35 Of
course, she can stay in Coeneo because of the support she receives
from her extended family that has been migrating to Santa Ana,
California, since the early 1950s w h e n her husband and then her sons
went as part of the Bracero Program.

Understanding this localized practice becomes important
because too often scholars and priests alike reduce the votive devo-
tion among Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States to
the Virgin of Guadalupe, not fully appreciating the diversity in local
practice. Scholars often write about the Mexican and Mexican
American experience in the United States as an undifferentiated bloc,
as waves of Mexican immigrants.36 Distinctions need to be made. To
be sure, the highly localized and regional devotions have become
more familiar recently as the Virgen de Zapopan n o w annually goes,
first class no less, to Los Angeles and the Santo Niño Atoche comes to
San Antonio, among others. Yet, for many Mexicans and Mexican
Americans coming to the United States, where Catholic churches
almost exclusively use the Virgen de Guadalupe, that means an adap-
tation and change in their Catholic practice, an albeit familiar change.

148 Religion and American Culture

While William Christian’s conceptualization fits well for
Coeneo, problems lie in trying to grasp the bread and butter of the
historian’s craft: detailing change. The unique local calendar has a
timeless quality, and idiosyncratic ceremonies have been occurring, as
locals throughout central Mexico consistently like to say, “desde tiem-
pos inmemoriales” (since time immemorial). Christian himself notes
that, in rural peasant communities, “some aspects of their religion
[have] a remarkable and perhaps misleading permanence.”37 Based
on years of ethnographic research, for example, Foster noted “unbe-
lievable” changes in Tzintzuntzan during the 1960s and 1970s but
remarked in 1979 that, in “the varied activities that testify to the impor-
tance of religion, [while] there have been some changes, the picture is
very much as recounted nearly twenty years ago.”38 While the reli-
gious activities in Tzintzuntzan remained constant, Foster also detailed
sweeping and substantive changes in confraternity structure, partici-
pation, identity, and other critical aspects.

The Transnational Parish of Coeneo

How then does one capture the changes occurring under the
veneer of permanence? In part, the veneer of permanence derives
from the focus on the unique local calendar. Indeed, the traditional
celebrations for Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Coeneo continue, but
over the last thirty years attendance has consistently fallen in num-
bers. In the past, when migrant work was more seasonal and one
could easily cross the border, many would return for the October fes-
tival. However, over the last thirty years, Mexicans and Mexican
Americans increasingly live their lives in the United States and can-
not return in October due to responsibilities of work, school, and
other commitments. In addition, the increasing militarization of the
U.S. border has made it more expensive and dangerous to cross the
border, both keeping people out and those already here in. The cele-
bration still occurs, but its role as a community event has changed.

However, if one considers a unique local calendar based on
the timing of the important sacramental events of baptisms and mar-
riages rather than idiosyncratic ceremonies, then the impact of migra-
tion and transnationalism becomes readily clear. In many ways, these
marriage, baptism, and quinceañera ceremonies have become the prin-
cipal religious celebrations. As anyone who has been to the rural
Mexican countryside can attest, wedding celebrations often involve
much of the community and can last for days. At a December 2005
wedding in the rancho of Pretoria, one of the many rural hamlets that
make up part of the greater Coeneo parish, the small church was

Tamales on the Fourth of July 149

filled to capacity and spilling out into the small square in front. The
inside had been decorated with flowers, and streamers crisscrossed
the church. Outside, two large buses were parked on the dirt road.
They had brought some of the wedding guests from nearby areas and
a good deal of food to be served for the several hundred guests—an
impressive number given the population of Pretoria is only about five
hundred. Just beyond the church on the main square of the town, usu-
ally a basketball court, a large tower had been rigged with disco light-
ing and a complex sound system in preparation for the wedding
party. A fifteen-piece band warmed up in preparation for eight hours
of playing, the duration of their contract. This was but one of many
weddings that would occur during the Christmas season in the parish
of Coeneo.

The Pretoria wedding during the Christmas season typifies a
recent trend in Coeneo, where the majority of wedding services now
occur during that time. The reality of transnationalism has impacted
the time of year parishioners choose to marry in the parish of Coeneo.
Throughout much of the 1970s and even into the 1980s, parishioners
celebrated Catholic marriage ceremonies throughout the year in
Coeneo, with the rainy season months of June, July, and August hav-
ing the least number of marriages. Since the latter half of the 1990s,
however, a remarkable shift in the timing of wedding celebrations
toward December and January has occurred. In fact, since 2000 the
parish church is all but empty most of the year, whole months pass-
ing without a marriage ceremony. In December, however, the parish
church begins to resemble a Las Vegas wedding chapel with multiple
weddings a day. Whereas, in the 1970s, the percentage of marriages
celebrated in January and December ranged from a low of 22 percent
to a high of 36 percent, in the 1990s, the range was from a low of 40 to
a high of 80 percent. Some year-by-year comparisons demonstrate
more vividly the dramatic shift. In 1970, there were ninety marriages
in the Coeneo parish church, with twenty conducted in December
and January. By contrast, in 1997, there were also ninety marriages
celebrated, of which sixty-two were conducted in December and
January. More telling, since 1995, the percentage of marriages cele-
brated in December and January has not dropped below 60 percent.
Even that figure does not really tell the whole story, as most of the
December and January weddings occur over a thirty-day period from
mid-December to mid-January.39

The trends in Catholic marriages, then, reveal a dramatic
reordering of the rhythm of parish life in Coeneo toward December
and January. Here one clearly sees what transnational scholars often
note as a primary factor in the lives of transnational migrants, the

150 Religion and American Culture

power of the state.40 While only detailed ethnographic research will
provide definitive reasons, the data on the surface seems to indicate
that, when one considers the rhythm of parish life in Coeneo, one must
consider U.S. immigration law and policy. The shift in the timing of
marriages during the year occured roughly when the Immigration
Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 became U.S. law. That legis-
lation offered amnesty to more than three million undocumented
workers, and it appears more than a few came from the parish of
Coeneo. With U.S. citizenship comes not only U.S. residency but also
an ease to cross the border legally and return for the holiday season.
Equally important, one can also begin the process to get U.S. resi-
dence papers for other family members. In fact, the impact of IRCA
was almost immediate as from 1988 to 1989 the number of December
and January marriages in Coeneo jumped some 10 percent to 48 per-
cent and steadily increased and maintained an average of around
65 percent for the decade of the 1990s (with the exception of 1992
when it dipped to 40 percent and 2001 when it jumped to 80 percent).41

The marriage of Sergio Herrera Valencia to Banesa on
January 1, 2005, encapsulates this phenomenon. Born in the
ranchería of El Cobrero within the parish of Coeneo, Sergio has lived
in Roundlake, Illinois (outside Chicago), for over ten years. He has
U.S. citizenship thanks to his grandfather, who got citizenship under
the amnesty agreement and then did the paperwork for Sergio’s
father, who in turn did the paperwork for Sergio. For her, part,
Banesa was born in Mundelein, Illinois, to parents from El Cobrero
and who subsequently migrated to Mundelein. They also obtained
citizenship under the amnesty agreement. Despite living within 100
miles of each other in the U.S., the courtship between Banesa and
Sergio began and primarily continued in El Cobrero when they both
would return with their families to Mexico during the Christmas sea-
son. Sergio and Banesa married in a civil ceremony in Roundlake,
Illinois, in 2004 and decided also to marry in the Coeneo parish
church, despite being active members of St. Joseph parish in
Roundlake. It should be noted that their decision to marry in Coeneo
was not based on the fact that family members lived in Mexico. In
fact, with the exception of some great grandparents, all members of
both families live in the environs of Chicago, so well over one hun-
dred family members had to return to Mexico to attend the wedding.
When I asked Sergio why he wanted to marry in Coeneo, he
responded: “Pues, usted sabe, es mas bonito aquí” (Well, you know, it is
more beautiful here). When I would press for specifics of what was
beautiful, he could not express it but indicated that his culture and
religion were connected with Mexico.42

Tamales on the Fourth of July 151

Here one can clearly hear the echo of Robert Orsi’s notion of
domus, that the Italian home and family “is the religion of Italian
Americans.”43 While both Sergio and Banesa actively attended St.
Joseph’s Church in Roundlake, Illinois, and on occasion participated
in the festivities at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine in Des Plaines,
Illinois, the core of their cultural identity rested with their family and
the extended community of El Cobrero within the parish of Coeneo.
The importance of place and family becomes more evident when one
reviews the Coeneo parish marriage files. In order to marry in the
parish church, both the bride and groom, along with a witness for
each, must answer a series of questions. The questions range from
religious participation to whether the couple is already married in a
civil union to whether each enters the marriage freely. To the question
regarding religious dedication and commitment, and here the ques-
tion refers to going to mass consistently and following Catholic ritu-
als such as confession closely, the majority of grooms and close to a
majority of brides give a lukewarm response, often declaring their
participation as “más o menos,” (more or less). A rather distinct minor-
ity even responded with a flat no.44 Yet, all these potential brides and
grooms, most of whom are like Sergio and Banesa, living in the United
States and already married civilly, insist on marrying in the Catholic
church in Mexico. They do so, in part, because during the Christmas
holidays the disparate transnational communities of El Cobrero from
various parts of Mexico and the United States become whole again, at
least for a month. By marrying in the Catholic church, parishioners
connect themselves to their larger family and community, and by mar-
rying in Mexico they bring that larger family and community together.

The marriage of Sergio and Banesa is also typical of the mar-
riages in Coeneo during the Christmas season in that they involve
young couples: Sergio was twenty-one and Banesa nineteen. There
are exceptions, to be sure, like the case of Roberto and Maria, who
married in Coeneo in December 2004. They lived in Cicero, Illinois,
for more than twenty-five years and returned with their grown chil-
dren to be married in the Catholic church in Coeneo in 2003, despite
being married in a civil union twenty years earlier in the United
States. The majority, however, are young couples under the age of
twenty-three, ready to marry in the parish church and return to the
United States.

The passage of IRCA also seems to have inspired parishioners
from Coeneo to marry in the United States. The security of citizenship
made it possible to begin a Catholic married life the United States,
and the inability to cross the border also made a Catholic marriage in
the United States a more attractive option. Catholic marriage records

152 Religion and American Culture

reveal a striking trend when one looks at the number of marriages in
the United States by year. For much of the 1970s, few, if any, parish-
ioners from Coeneo married in the United States, and, prior to that,
almost no parishioner from Coeneo married in a U.S. Catholic church.
The number steadily increased throughout the 1980s but still repre-
sents a small percentage, less than 10 percent, in comparison to the
number who married in Coeneo. The decade of the 1990s tells a dif-
ferent story as shadow communities became more established and
increasingly more couples chose a Catholic marriage in the United
States, reaching a high of 32 percent for the years of 2001 to 2003.45

The recent shift toward marrying in particular shadow com-
munities may be best viewed by examining Catholic marriages in
southeastern Idaho, where parishioners from Coeneo have married in
Nampa, Rupert, Boise, Glenns Ferry, Pocatello, Jerome, Burley, and
Sim Valley, with Rupert the number one spot. The first marriage in
southeastern Idaho occurred in 1976 and was the only marriage for
that decade. In the 1980s, nine parishioners from Coeneo chose to
marry in Idaho, and then the number jumps to forty-two for the 1990s.
However, just in the years 2000 to 2003, sixty parishioners chose to
marry in Idaho, a dramatic increase. Along with the Idaho communi-
ties, the baptismal records indicate there are two other established
areas: California—Oxnard, Los Angeles, Riverside, Ventura, and
Watsonville; and Illinois—Chicago, Cicero, Libertyville, Mundelein,
and Roundlake. These are older shadow communities. Whereas the
majority of marriages in southeastern Idaho took place from 2000 to
2003, in Roundlake and Chicago, the overwhelming majority of U.S.
marriages occurred in the 1990s.

While marriages in Coeneo are skewed toward December
and January, the same does not follow with those from Coeneo who
choose to marry in the United States. This is another marker of the
impact of transnationalism. During the five-year period from 1998 to
2002, approximately 130 men and women who had been born and
baptized in Coeneo married in Catholic churches in the United States,
with only eight of them marrying in December and January, some
6 percent. The majority married, as is customary in the United States,
in the summer months. Among these U.S. Catholic marriages, there
are also some interesting gender trends. For the population under
study here, those baptized between 1955 and 1982, an almost equal
number of men (250) and women (249) married in Catholic churches
in the United States. However, the younger cohort born and baptized
between 1979 and 1982 indicates far more women (34) than men (12)
marrying in the United States. This stands in contrast to the larger
group consisting of those baptized between 1964 and 1978, in which

Tamales on the Fourth of July 153

more men (179) than women (157) married in the United States. The
difference in numbers could be due to the disparity in marrying ages
in which women marry younger than men or could be an indicator of
the increasing number of young women migrating to the United
States to live and work.

While the Catholic marriage trends indicate a population not
only dictated by the lives of transnational migrants in the United
States but also shifting toward the United States, baptism trends com-
plicate the picture. That is, Coeneo parishioners may increasingly
marry outside the parish but they also have increasingly returned to
Coeneo to baptize their children born outside of Coeneo. The phe-
nomenon of baptizing in Coeneo children born in the United States is
a recent one, and again it is the shadow communities from southeast-
ern Idaho that play the most significant role. Throughout the 1970s,
there were only thirty-three babies and children born in the United
States that came with their parents to be baptized in Coeneo. Not sur-
prisingly, most came from the shadow communities with eleven of
the thirty-three babies born in Idaho (nine from Rupert alone),
another eight from California, and another seven from the Chicago
area. From the 1970s cohort, almost all the parents brought their
babies within several months of their birth to Coeneo to be baptized,
demonstrating that these parents could cross easily into Mexico. In
addition, there was no general pattern in regard to the months when
parish priests conducted these baptisms in Coeneo.

The decade of the 1980s witnessed ninety-seven babies born
in the United States being baptized in Coeneo. As with the marriage
trends, IRCA plays a significant role, as thirty-seven of the ninety-
seven babies were baptized in 1988 and 1989. As in the 1970s, the
three predominate shadow areas are well represented. However, the
1980s cohort and especially the late-1980s babies reveal two new phe-
nomena. The first is the increase in cases in which older children are
brought to Coeneo to be baptized. In 1988, for example, more than
half the babies baptized were over one year old, well beyond the
three-month age average for children born in Coeneo. Luis and Eva
Arriaga brought from Rupert, Idaho, their six- and seven-year-old
daughters to be baptized in December 1988. Given the importance
that Catholics in Coeneo place on baptizing a baby as quickly as pos-
sible, this delay indicates the critical importance for some that their
children be baptized in their parish if possible. Most likely, they drove
their daughters back to Mexico after getting their amnesty papers in
order. By taking the long and sometimes dangerous trip, they demon-
strated their continuing participation as parishioners in Coeneo.46

Clearly, the universality of Catholic sacraments and the proximity of

154 Religion and American Culture

a Catholic church in their U.S. community did not outweigh the par-
ents’ desire to have their children become Catholics in Coeneo.

This transnational baptism of 1988 exemplified a Catholic
popular religious practice, one sanctioned by official Catholic church
priests but not necessarily in line with universal doctrine. In Coeneo,
the local Catholic priests seemed befuddled as to why someone
would undertake such an arduous trip when, in their eyes, the sacra-
ment of baptism itself was paramount, not where the sacrament took
place. The fact that Luis and Eva had their older daughters baptized
in December reveals the second new phenomenon, another dramatic
shift. Following the marriage trends, 70 percent of U.S.-born babies
and children were baptized in Coeneo during the Christmas season of
1988. Throughout the 1990s and up until 2003, the last year consid-
ered for this study, the trend for December and January baptisms con-
tinued reflecting this new rhythm to Mexican parish life.

In addition, two other interesting phenomena during this
period should be noted. The first involves the southeastern Idaho
parish of Burley. Beginning in 1995 and continuing up until 2002, an
inordinate number of babies born in Burley were baptized in Coeneo,
especially in comparison to nearby Rupert. In 1997, Maria and Eliazar
Rodriguez brought their four children, ages one to five, to be bap-
tized. According to several parishioners, the cause lay in the parish
priest of Burley at the time, who, despite being Spanish speaking, was
considered by many to be unapproachable. Rather than confront the
priest, parents brought their babies all the way to Coeneo. The second
phenomenon involves an increasing dispersal of the Coeneo popula-
tion. The three principal shadow areas still predominate, but babies
born in Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Georgia,
North Carolina, and Oregon arrived to be baptized in Coeneo begin-
ning in the late 1990s.

The Transnational Parishioners in the United States: Preliminary
Observations

Recalling Levitt’s call to begin to study transnational reli-
gious phenomena from the ground up, William Christian’s notion of
local religion, then, is useful for studying Coeneo from the perspec-
tive of Mexico. By the same token, these Coeneo transnationale live
most of their lives in the United States. Here one runs into a number
of methodological issues, for Christian’s notion of a local religion cen-
tered on a parish with a distinct calendar does not readily translate.
In fact, for scholars of both U.S. religion and U.S. Latino religion, the
suggestion to start at the parish may seem counterintuitive. Recently,

Tamales on the Fourth of July 155

respected U.S. Catholic studies scholar John McGreevy even argued
that, in the post-Vatican II United States, “evidence suggests consid-
erable fragility in the Catholic parish structure.”47 This is a remark-
able claim given he effectively argued that “as the site of both
American Catholic spirituality and American social structure . . .
parishes played an indispensable role.”48 In addition, beyond the
death of the singular parish, some of the best from-the-ground-up
ethnographic work detailing the complexity of Catholic practice and
identity in the United States over the last twenty years has shifted
focus away from traditional parish studies. It concentrates instead on
paraliturgical devotions and other aspects of Catholic “lived reli-
gion,” a “religion in the streets” as Robert Orsi has called it.49

Of course, both Orsi and McGreevy would not counsel the
end of parish studies. After all, Orsi spent hours in the Mexican parish
of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Chicago, of all places, to gain
insights into the devotion of St. Jude.50 Still, within the growing field
of U.S. Mexican and Mexican American Catholicism, and with notable
exceptions such as San Fernando in San Antonio,51 the parish has not
been the focus of scholarship for two overarching reasons. First, as bet-
ter chronicled in detail elsewhere, for too long the U.S. Catholic church
has been often indifferent at best and hostile at worst to the Mexican
and Mexican American community. Gilberto Hinojosa argued that the
“Catholic Church has always played an important role in the Mexican
American faith communities.” At the same time, he characterized that
role as “ambivalent.” He noted that the Catholic church, at times,
“nurtured popular beliefs,” and, on other occasions, “the goals of the
Church authorities have been in conflict with those of the Mexican
American community.”52 Simply put, for many, the U.S. Catholic
church for too long pushed away many Mexicans and Mexican
Americans. Second, for many scholars and theologians alike, there are
distinctive features of Mexican American Catholicism, features that do
not necessarily involve much parish or institutional input.53

Mexicans and Mexican Americans became foreigners in their
native land after the U.S.-Mexican war and subject to differentiation
from the start. They were Catholics who needed the attention of mis-
sionaries to correct their ways, and then later they were placed into
immigrant churches or Mexican national churches in order to facili-
tate the process of Americanization. One can draw a straight line
beginning immediately after the U.S. conquest of the Mexican
Northwest and the conflicts that arose in New Mexico over New
Mexican Catholic and cultural practices. On the one side, Mexican
priests such as Father Antonio José Martínez sought to limit changes,
and, on the other side, U.S. Catholic representatives such as the

156 Religion and American Culture

French Archbishop Lamy who wished to “modernize” Catholic prac-
tice.54 For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
Mexican and Mexican American experience entailed withstanding
prejudice and misunderstanding from both priests and Anglo
American Catholics. U.S. Catholic priests, for their part, often
lamented the “superstition” of Mexican Catholicism and that it was
“not a Faith of reason.”55 Even when Spanish-speaking priests took
over and revitalized predominantly Mexican and Mexican American
parishes such as when Spanish priests came to San Fernando
Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1930s, discrimination
occurred. The Spanish priests “reported that Mexican-descent
Catholics suffered from ‘religious ignorance’ and required ‘much
attention’ to keep them ‘constant in the practice of their religion.'”56

Anglo American parishioners also often rejected their
Mexican and Mexican American Catholic parishioners. The arch-
bishop of San Antonio would lament that “we are literally forced to
erect two churches in the same localities, one for the American
Catholics and the other for the Mexicans, for as one of our missionar-
ies put it recently—’An American church for the white people and a
mission church for the Helots, the Pariahs of the community, our poor
Mexican Catholic people and their little ones.”57 In a 1999 report, the
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Hispanic
Affairs noted the same problem still existed, although the level of
insensitively was far less. At the parish level, they concluded that “one
problem, often found, particularly in places where the Hispanic pop-
ulation is relatively new or poor, is that Hispanics do not feel included
in the process of decision making with the parish.” The report went
on to quote a lay leader who lamented, “I am discouraged by the fact
that we, Hispanics, don’t count here in this parish. We come to Mass
in great numbers and our Masses are really filled with the spirit. But
all the power is in the hands of a small group of (non-Hispanic) old-
timers who contribute a lot of money to the Church.”58 Not surpris-
ingly, then, many argue that Mexican Americans have an ambivalent
attitude at best toward local parishes and do not share the Euro-
American Catholic experience where “neighborhood, parish, and reli-
gion were constantly intertwined.”59 The parish church in the barrio
had a completely different feel.

Not only do scholars consider Mexicans and Mexican
Americans as ambivalent participants to parish life, but there is also a
growing consensus among scholars and theologians alike that a cor-
pus of practices set Mexican and Mexican American Catholicism apart
from Anglo American Catholicism. The argument is that these differ-
ences go beyond language and include what Anthony Stevens-Arroyo

Tamales on the Fourth of July 157

terms “cultural idiosyncrasy”60 and what Robert Treviño recently
coined as “ethno-Catholicism . . . a Mexican American way of being
Catholic.”61 Treviño eloquently notes that this Catholicism has ele-
ments from pre-Reformation Spanish Christianity and Mesoamerican
indigenous sensitivities. Mexican American Catholicism “favored
saint veneration, home altar worship, and community centered reli-
gious celebrations that blurred the lines between the sacred and the
secular; and tended simultaneously to selectively participate in the
institutional Catholic Church yet hold it at arm’s length,” according
to Treviño.62 He echoes the earlier work of theologian Virgilio
Elizondo, who argued that Mexican Americans practiced a mestizo
Christianity, one the U.S. Catholic church should embrace, that com-
bined Spanish, African, and Mesoamerican spirituality. Under a
rubric of cultural resistance, Elizondo outlined a distinctive sacred
calendar that included Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and December
12, when Mexicans and Mexican Americans celebrate the miraculous
powers of Our Lady of Guadalupe.63 Here one finds an echo of
William Christian’s notion of a distinctive calendar; however, for
Elizondo and others, much of Mexican American Catholicism
includes popular devotions only tangentially related to a parish.
Community leaders and elders guide such ceremonies as posadas and
pastorelas, the public miracle plays. Particular lifecycle events such as
baptisms and quinceañeras take on greater significance, and the focus
of the celebration is both family and community. Church-sponsored
events such as the via crucis, the reenactment of the crucifixion, in
Pilsen, Chicago, for example, is a multidimensional event in which
the role of the parish is secondary.64 Even with the veneration of
saints, and in particular that of La Virgen de Guadalupe, a practice
prevalent in many parish churches, the focus of scholarship centers
on home altars.65 In addition to church-sanctioned saints, Mexicans
and Mexican Americans follow folk saints, such as El Niño Fedencio,
and seek physical and spiritual healing from curanderos.

While not denying the centrality and importance of these
Mexican and Mexican American Catholic practices and beliefs, a
greater focus on parish studies is warranted for a number of reasons.
As noted by a number of scholars, all this scholarship on difference
has the tendency to marginalize Mexican Americans further and
ignores that many do participate in the institutional U.S. Catholic
church.66 Uniformly, scholars and church officials note how Mexicans
and Mexican Americans fill the pews. The view from Coeneo also
indicates that, in a number of churches, transnational parishioners
from Coeneo along with other Mexicans and Mexican Americans
have taken over parishes ranging from Rupert, Idaho, to Roundlake,

158 Religion and American Culture

Illinois, to Oxnard, California. As Mexicans and Mexican Americans
along with other Latino groups become the majority in their parishes,
the most effective way to examine the impact of these populations
becomes a parish study. However, given the mobility of much of this
population and the element of transnationalism, one should consider
carefully the reassessment of McGreevy concerning parish affiliation.
McGreevy asserts that “intense Catholic identification with the geo-
graphical parish, and that parish alone, turns out to have been histor-
ically contingent, a part of the Catholic revival that began in Europe
and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and abruptly
transformed itself in the 1960s.”67 Migrants and transnational from
Coeneo, then, demonstrate that parish affiliation as singular must be
reconsidered because many Mexicans and Mexican Americans living
in the United States consider themselves to be active members in at
least two parishes: one in Mexico and one or more in the United
States. Mexicans and Mexican Americans participate in multiple
parishes because, while there are a host of distinct practices that do
not necessarily center in the parish, priest and institutional church
sanction are still sought and needed.

Take, for example, the tremendous popularity of quinceañeras
that has become a cottage industry with magazines and fashion
shows. This rite of passage where a fifteen-year-old girl becomes a
woman fits within the idea of Mexican American Catholic syncretism
and cultural persistence. While not the focus of QuinceGirl magazine,
it is important to note that many quinceañeras begin with a mass or
blessing that increasingly has become, according to the USCCB, an
“unofficial ‘liturgical rite’ and is regulated in some dioceses with spe-
cific guidelines and norms.”68 In those parishes with long-established
Mexican and Mexican American populations, such as San Fernando
in San Antonio, Texas, there is a long history of celebrating
quinceañeras. For Guadalupe Alvarado, who came to San Antonio in
the 1950s as a young teenager, “her first vivid memory of the parish
[was] the celebration of her quinceañera.” She met her husband,
another Mexican, when they played the parts of Mary and Joseph in
the San Fernando grand posada.69 Only with a parish study and focus
can one trace the development of this popular celebration at local lev-
els in such areas as Idaho.

Father Camacho, a long-time Mexican priest in Idaho and
now a cultural force with his own radio show, recounted with some
frustration on how slowly the Catholic church responded to the
newly arriving Mexican immigrants from Michoacán, Jalisco, and
Zacatecas in the 1980s. Families who wanted to have quinceañeras
could not find priests, beside himself, to participate because, in Idaho,

Tamales on the Fourth of July 159

they were not part of the standard U.S. Catholic practice. Nonetheless,
the Mexican immigrant community found other ways to have their
celebrations. Camacho knew of these efforts because he would get
calls from Episcopal priests asking for instructions on what to do for
a quinceañera service.70 The situation began to change by the early
1990s, when one historian noted that “Anglos have learned to enjoy
many local Hispanic customs: the celebration of quinceañeras; Our
Lady of Guadalupe and Las Posadas holidays; [and] fiestas honoring
patron saints.”71 At the quinceañera of Andrea Murguia, in July 2006,
Father Camacho even sang one of his own songs. The impressed
Murguia noted, “not only is he a priest, he gives good advice and he’s
helped me a lot. I have him in my cell phone.”72

The quinceañera, at least in some places in Idaho, serves as a
strong link to the parish and priest. This does not mean that the
Diocese of Boise, which covers all of Idaho, is not without its prob-
lems. In 2002, the diocese hired Laura Henning as the coordinator of
youth ministry. She admitted that, when she took the job, “there was
no one really paying attention” to the young Latino population.
Things began to change when she noted that diocese census records
indicated that 40 to 45 percent of the youth and young adults were
Latino. The diocese began to institute more Spanish Masses, “and
we’re beginning to work on the grassroots level to build up leader-
ship. We identified leaders in the different parishes and began train-
ing them on various levels through the Fe Y Vida program.”73

Indeed, St. Nicolas parish church, in rural Rupert, and St.
Mary’s, in Boise, are among some of the Idaho parish churches that
now offer classes for upcoming quinceañeras, prominently placing
those classes in the church bulletins next to marriage and baptism
announcements. The view from Coeneo suggests that more than a few
in Idaho also take the marriage classes. For the period of 2000 to 2003,
for example, some 25 percent of all baptized parishioners from Coeneo
married in Idaho. From the Our Lady of Guadalupe Society preparing
tamales for the local Fourth of July celebration to energized Spanish-
language masses to, of course, Mexican Americans leaving their; U.S.
parish in December to reunite with their greater Coeneo parish com-
munity in Mexico during the Christmas season, transnationale have
begun to change the rhythm of parish life on both sides of the border.

Conclusion

One can vividly capture the transnational Catholic lives of
Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the ground up using the
parish as the primary unit of analysis. William Christian’s notion of a

160 Religion and American Culture

local Catholic religious practice works well with some modifications.
It works because it allows one to explore some of the unique local ele-
ments of a Mexican Catholic practice that involves a strong local
votive devotion such as that found in Coeneo, a votive devotion
embedded within the landscape. Christian’s notion of local religion
still works, ironically, in a transnational age. One must consider, how-
ever, expanding the sacred geography and calendar to incorporate the
increasing influence of migration and transnationalism on parish life,
especially the rhythm of parish life. The local idiosyncratic calendar
revolving around patron saints and major religious holidays has been
replaced in Coeneo, and in m a n y rural communities in central
Mexico, by a practice that involves the massive return in December
and January of parishioners w h o participate, in a variety of capacities,
in multiple baptisms, marriages-, and quinceñera ceremonies and cele-
brations. Those w h o return briefly to Coeneo for these ceremonies,
despite their participating, to varying degrees, in U.S. Catholic
churches and despite the universality of Catholic sacraments, do so
because they consider the sacraments of baptism and marriage essen-
tial and prefer to celebrate them in Mexico. It is in Mexico that the
community becomes whole again.

Notes

1. Description based on a visit in December 2004. For brief
descriptions of Catholic transnational practice in other parts of central
Mexico and the United States, see Jennifer S. Hirsch, A Courtship after
Marriage: Sexuality and Life in Mexican Transnational Families (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), esp. 57-75; Peter Cahn, All Religions
Are Good in Tzintzuntzan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 20-26;
and Ruben Martinez, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail
(New York: Picador, 2001), 139-61.

2. Archivo del Notaria de la Parroquia de Nuestra Señora del
Rosario (ANPNSR), Libro de Bautismos, no. 51 (1997-2007). The average
figure taken for the years 1999-2004. The baptismal records contain the
name of the child, the date and place of birth of the child, the godparents,
and a section to note when and where the child eventually marries in the
Catholic church, if he or she so chooses.

3. As a Mexicanist, I hesitate to use the standard term American
Catholicism, as Mexicans will often note that everyone in the New World
is an American, not just those residing in the United States.

Tamales on the Fourth of July 161

4. Names taken from ANPNSR, Libro de Bautismos, no. 51. To
protect the privacy of parishioners all names have been changed as well
as some of the locations where they were born.

5. Based on a review of the parish baptismal records. Ibid.

6. Peggy Levitt, ‘”You Know, Abraham Was Really the First
Immigrant’: Religion and Transnational Migration,” International
Migration Review 37, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 851. In this article, I use the terms
Mexican and Mexican American to differentiate issues of citizenship. The
term Latino is used as an umbrella term to include also Central American,
Puerto Rican, and Cuban populations. The term Hispanic is used in only
those cases where particular institutions, such as the U.S. Catholic
church, use the government definition for the population that includes
Mexican American, Cuban, American, Central American, and Puerto
Rican peoples.

7. In the United States, Melvin and his family constitute part of
the “Nuevo Catholics,” the majority presence of Mexicans and Mexican
Americans, along with Central Americans, that fill the parish churches of
the Los Angeles area, an archdiocese that has undergone a dramatic
Catholic renewal, a golden age even, as the New York Times recently
claimed. See David Reiff, “Nuevo Catholics,” New York Times Magazine,
December 24,2006.

8. According to the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Hispanic Affairs, close to 40 percent of
the U.S. Catholic population is Hispanic, and that Hispanic population
represents slightly more than 70 percent of the U.S. Catholic population
growth since 1960. For the percentage of Catholics who are Hispanic, see
U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanic Population in the United States,
Population Characteristics, March 2001. On the percentage increase, see
USCCB Committee on Hispanic Affairs, Hispanic Ministry at the Turn of
the New Millennium, 1999.1 use the categories of Mexican and Mexican
American here to differentiate legal citizenship status. The issue is impor-
tant in terms of the ability to cross the border freely and participate in
transnational Catholic practice without severe consequences, as those
without official papers often experience.

9. For an overview of the peripheral place of Mexicans and
Mexican Americans, see Raúl Gomez and Manuel Vásquez, U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Hispanic Ministry Study,” 1999,
www.usccb.org/hispanicaffairs/studygomez.shtml, accessed July 7,2009.
The reference to the margins of the margins is from Leslie Woodcock
Tentler, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,”

http://www.usccb.org/hispanicaffairs/studygomez.shtml

162 Religion and American Culture

American Quarterly 45., no. 1 (1993): 104-27. Despite noting more than fifteen
years ago the marginality of American Catholic history, the situation
remains the same. Tentler noted the “analytically thin” scholarship regard-
ing Hispanic Catholicism (120). Studies of Mexican American Catholicism
still remain largely unexplored and on the margins of American Catholic
history.

10. See also my work on local parish politics in central Mexico in
the late nineteenth century, “The Politics of the Miraculous: Popular
Practice in Porfirian Michoacán: 1876-1910” (Ph.D. diss., University of
California, San Diego, 2002).

11. It is difficult to know how many return, but my estimate is
hundreds of thousands. For migration, I mean simply those who leave
and do not actively participate in their community of origin.

12. The rural hamlets that belong to Coeneo include: San Pedro
Tacaro, El Rodeo, El Durazno, Ojo de Agüita, Cofradía, Quencio, San
Isidro, Pretoria, Transval, Tunguitiro, El Cobrero, Colonia Benito Juarez,
and Zipiajo. According to the Consejo Nacional de Población, in
Michoacán slightly more than 34 percent of the population lived in 9,505
rural communities of fewer than 2,500 inhabitants in the year 2000.

13. Peggy Levitt, “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging: The
Institutional Character of Transnational Religious Life,” Sociology of
Religion 65, no. 1 (2004): 5.

14. Here the Mexican American Catholic experience shares much
with Orsi’s conceptualization of the domus. See Robert Oris, The Madonna
of 115th Street, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 75-150.

15. On the variety of usages of transnationalism, see the intro-
duction by Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz in Religion
across Borders, ed. Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz
(Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 2002); and Alejandro Portes, Luis E.
Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt, “The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls
and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22,
no. 2 (1999): 217-37.

16. Luis León, La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the
U.S.-Mexican Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004),
94. Thomas Tweed also invokes a sense of transnationalism in the way in
which mass in Miami is broadcast to Cuba and families become united by
participating in that mass. Thomas Tweed, Our Lady of Exile: Diasporic
Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997).

Tamales on the Fourth of July 163

17. Roger Rouse, “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of
Postmodernism,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 18. See also Roger Rouse,
“Mexican Migration to the United States: Family Relations in the
Development of a Transnational Migrant Circuit” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford
University, 1989).

18. Bryan Roberts, Reanne Frank, and Fernando Lozano-
Ascencio, “Transnational Migrant Communities and Mexican Migration
to the US,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 2 (1999): 238-66.

19. Cahn, All Religions Are Good in Tzintzuntzan, 10.

20. For an overview of the limited studies dedicated to religion
and transnationalism worldwide, see Levitt, “Redefining the Boundaries
of Belonging,” 1-18, and Levitt, “‘You Know, Abraham Was Really the
First Immigrant,'” 847-74. Peggy Levitt has also explored transnational-
ism among Dominican Catholics in Transnational Villagers (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001). See also Ebaugh and Chafetz, eds.,
Religion across Borders.

21. Levitt, “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging,” 3-4 (ital-
ics in original).

22. Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “From Barrios to Barricades:
Religion and Religiosity in Latino Life,” in The Columbia History of Latinos
in the United States since I960, ed. David Gutierrez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), 348.

23. Interview on May 18,2006.

24. Several Latino priests in Idaho noted this problem in inter-
views conducted by phone in April 2006 and in person in May 2006.

25. Peggy Levitt, Jose DeWind, and Steven Vertovec,
“International Perspectives on Transnational Migration: An
Introduction,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 565.

26. Levitt, “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging,” 5.

27. William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3. Recently, Robert Orsi has
argued along similar lines in that all religion should be considered local if
one considers lived religion important. He argues that “religious cultures
are local and to study religion is to study local worlds. There is no such
thing as a ‘Methodist’ or a ‘Southern Baptist’ who can be neatly summa-
rized by an account of the denomination’s history or theology.” Orsi,
Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars
Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 167.

164 Religion and American Culture

28. Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977), 37.

29. There is one large modern painting of the Virgin of
Guadalupe in one of the back waiting rooms. That painting is by a young
transnational influenced by the murals in Los Angeles.

30. During Easter week of 2007,1 visited more than thirty parish
churches in Michoacán, and more than half of them had this image of
Christ, and all these parishes had an active devotion to Jesus Nazareno.

31. These were attached to the Christ statue rather than next to
the nine-inch statue of Our Lady of the Rosary encased in back of the altar
because the parish priest had decided to limit access to the altar and
wanted a “clean” altar.

32. I worked in and visited four parishes in Michoacán during
the summer of 2003, and three had ex-votos involving Mexican American
members of the U.S. military stationed in Iraq.

33. Based on visits to these churches during the summers of
2000-2004 and the Christmas season of 2003. In the summer of 2003, in
Charo, there were also photos of U.S. marines.

34. “Los que suscribimos vecinos del Pueblo de Araró
(10/16/1880),” Archivo Histórico Casa de Morelos (AHCM), XIX
Century Church Series, box 281, folder 526.

35. Interviews done on July 15 and 17, 2003, in the home of
Crispina Rangel in Coeneo.

36. For example, in an otherwise insightful, well-researched,
and well-developed parish study, Timothy Matovina, Guadalupe and Her
Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2005), often notes Mexican immigrants coming to the
parish without reference to their origin.

37. William Christian. “Folk Religion,” in The Encyclopedia of
Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: MacMillian, 1987), 5:372.

38. George M. Foster, Tzintzuntzan: Mexican Peasants in a
Changing World, rev. ed. (Nw York: Elsevier, 1979), 195.

39. The marriage trends are based on extrapolating data from
ANPNSR, Libro de Registros Matrimoniáis, no. 19 (1981-2007).

40. Levitt, DeWind, and VeAovec, “International Perspectives
on Transnational Migration,” 568.

Tamales on the Fourth of July 165

41. These trends and the subsequent discussion are based on
extrapolating data from baptismal records for those baptized in Coeneo
from the years 1955 to 1982, that is, those who were twenty to forty-nine
years old in 2004, the last year analyzed. See the ANPNSR, Libro de
Bautismos, no. 40 to no. 51. In order to contextualize the data better, two
important factors should be noted. First, there is a general decline in pop-
ulation for the area that encompasses the parish of Coeneo due to the
impact of intense migration. Second, in Coeneo, as elsewhere in Mexico,
civil marriage is required by law, and the Mexican government does not
recognize any religious ceremonies. Thus, marrying in the Catholic
church is a personal decision that not all parishioners make, as many
marry outside the church only in common law or civil unions. Of those
baptized in Coeneo, the norm for those who eventually participate in the
Catholic sacrament of marriage ranges from year to year between 40 and
50 percent. This norm dates back to at least the population born from 1930
until 1973. The drop in percentage married for the population born in
1973 and after is explained by noting that all are under the age of thirty.
That said, as noted, there is a general decline in Catholic marriages in
Coeneo.

42. Interview conducted on December 23, 2004. Banesa did not
say much during the interview as she occupied herself with their two-
year-old daughter.

43. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, 77 (italics in the original).

44. Based on a review of Expedientes de Matrimonios, ANPNSR,
from 1995 to 2003.

45. Those marrying in the United States also tend to be young.
Whereas those baptized between 1955 and 1963 married in the United
States at a 4 to 6 percent rate (with another 18 to 20 percent marrying in
other parts of Mexico), beginning with those born in 1964 the percentage
begins to climb, reaching a high of 27 percent for those born in 1982.
Granted this is a much smaller group given their age of twenty in 2002,
but the fact that 27 percent have married in the United States coupled
with another 18 percent marrying in other parts of Mexico means that
close to half (45 percent) of this young cohort is marrying outside of
Coeneo, another reflection of the massive out migration.

46. I conclude that most drove based on interviews and observ-
ing the multitude of vehicles in Coeneo.

47. John T. McGreevy, “Religious Roots,” in Reviews in American
History 28, no. 3 (2000): 419.

166 Religion and American Culture

48. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter
with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 25.

49. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, xxxiv. As McGreevy noted,
“Single books do not create historiographical fields, but it is tempting to
claim Robert A. Orsi’s first book, The Madonna of 115th Street, as an excep-
tion to that rule.” Quoted in McGreevey’s review of Orsi’s St. Jude in
Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (1997): 704. There are other scholars
working within this context. Tweed’s examination of the Cuban exiles in
Our Lady of Exile does much of the same, incorporating streets, shrines,
and stores as sites for understanding the dynamics of Cuban American
Catholicism.

50. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 146-47.

51. See Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful.

52. Gilberto M. Hinojosa, “Mexican-American Faith
Communities in Texas and the Southwest,” in Mexican Americans and the
Catholic Church, 1900-1965, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto M. Hinojosa
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).

53. See, for example, Timothy M. Matovina and Gary Riebe-
Estrella, eds., Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), where among the articles
only one focuses on a parish. The anthology also details the multiple
problems Mexicans and Mexican Americans have had with the U.S.
Catholic church.

54. The literature on the Catholic hierarchy’s mistreatment of
Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the nineteenth century in the
U.S. southwest is extensive. For a concise overview, see Timothy M.
Matovina, “Conquest, Faith, and Resistance in the Southwest,” in Latino
Religions and Civic Activism in the United States, éd. Gaston Espinosa,
Virgilio P. Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 19-34.

55. Roberto Treviño, The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American
Ethno-Catholicism in Houston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006), 89.

56. Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 108.

57. Quoted in Treviño, The Church in the Barrio, 86-87.

58. Gomez and Vásquez, USCCB “Hispanic Ministry Study.”

59. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 22.

Tamales on the Fourth of July 167

60. Stevens-Arroyo, “From Barrios to Barricades,” 585.

61. Treviño, The Church in the Barrio, 4.

62. Ibid., 4-5.

63. Virgilio P. Elizondo, Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American
Promise (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1983).

64. Mary Kay Davalos, “The Real Way of Praying,” in Horizons
of the Sacred.

65. Treviño, The Church in the Barrio, and León, La Llorona’s
Children.

66. Here I am thinking of Otto Maduro who, at every meeting,
notes that, while exploring how mestizo elements of Latino Christianity
reveal elements of resistance and cultural persistence, it tends to make
Latino religious practice exotic. “Go to the suburbs,” he often exclaims.

67. McGreevy, “Religious Roots,” 420.

68. See the USCCB memo “Fifteen Questions on the
Quinceañeras.” Interestingly, the memo notes the Mesoamerican origins
of this ceremony.

69. Matovina, Guadalupe and Her Faithful, 147.

70. Camacho interview, May 2006.

71. Leonard Arrington, History of Idaho, 2 vols. (Moscow:
University of Idaho Press, 1994), 2:287.

72. Dan Popkey, “Rev. Camacho Ministers with Love and
Soccer,” Idaho Statesman, October 13,2006.

73. “Between Two Cultures: Catholic Church Must Meet
Challenges of Ministry to Hispanic Youth,” National Catholic Reporter,
January 30, 2004.

A B S T R A C T This article traces the significant yet largely unexplored
experience of transnationalism in the lived religious experiences of
Mexican and Mexican American Catholics by focusing on the parish as a
central unit of analysis. Within this analysis, the parish unit is rethought
as an analytical unit in two important regards. First, the way in which
parish life in rural Mexico has been predominately conceptualized as one
whose rhythm revolves around a traditional ritual calendar centered on
community celebrations of particular religious holidays and localized
votive devotions needs to be replaced. Based on research from an ongo-
ing historical case study (1890-present) of a central Mexican parish,

168 Religion and American Culture

Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Coeneo, Michoacán, and on other parishes,
the rhythm of parish life has clearly shifted to celebrations of marriages
and baptisms. These religious celebrations of marriages and baptisms in
Mexico have become the focal point of identity and community in this
transnational Mexican and Mexican American experience. These sacra-
ments of baptism and marriage have multiple meanings that not only
include universal Catholic doctrines but also notions of family, commu-
nity, and a particular appreciation for the sacralized landscape of their
Mexican parish. Second, notions of parish boundaries as fixed and parish
affiliation as singular must be reconsidered because many Mexicans and
Mexican Americans living in the United States consider themselves to be
active members in at least two parishes: one in Mexico and one or more
in the United States.

f

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