Islam is to Catholicism as Teflon is to Velcro: Theorizing Ambivalence About Religion and Ethnic Culture Among Second Generation Muslim Women and Latina College Students
by R. Stephen Warner, Elise Martel, & Rhonda E. Dugan
Department of Sociology (m/c 312), University of Illinois at Chicago
April, 1998
Revision of paper prepared for the 1998 annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society Kansas City, MO April, 1998
Part II
Let us now turn to the Latina focus group. As we have reported, seven of eight participants in the Latina group self-identified during the round of introductions as "raised Catholic." Seven had Mexican origins, including five who simply said "I'm Mexican" as they identified themselves. Another, as reported, identified herself as Puerto Rican; introducing herself after all but one of the Mexican women, she said she was "raised Lutheran." Teaching at a public university in Chicago, Warner was not surprised to hear these women say that. Half the students in his sociology of religion classes over the past fifteen years report having been raised Catholic and half of them say they have left the faith by the time they get to the class (at least for their college years). But Sharon, our moderator, "naively" asked the Latinas what they meant by having been "raised Catholic," and that expression turned out for most of them to represent both an ambivalent attitude toward their parents' religion and an awareness of their identities.
Olga, for example, responded to Sharon's question by saying: "My Mom's really Catholic. I went to a Catholic elementary and high school. . . . I was a practicing Catholic but now I just don't [practice]." Later, she elaborated, "I didn't question [my religion] until I came to the States because in Mexico all my classmates--everybody was Catholic. People didn't ask you 'what is your religion?' Because everybody just assumes that you're just Catholic. But when I came to the States, I encountered so many different racial backgrounds and religious backgrounds and . . . . that's when I became aware of my ethnicity and my religious background." Some of the Latinas had grown up in the U.S., but the rootedness of their Catholicism with their Mexican origins was most evident to those who had immigrated. For example, Lena said, "I was raised Catholic. First of all I was born in Mexico. I was raised very Catholic. . . . We were in church on a daily basis. Or every other day. For sure on Sundays." Milly agreed: "I lived in Mexico most of my childhood, so if you live in Mexico you don't have much of a choice. . . . Plus I lived in a very small town. . . . You have no choice but to be raised Catholic. So you end up going to church and end up in the Catholic school. . . . All that stuff."
From the outset, these women voiced a flood of complaints against the Catholic religious tradition within which they were raised. Olga rejected the notion that the Roman Catholic church is the only true religion. Yolanda was turned off by the church's rituals and wished they had a more of a place for young people. Ana took issue with the church's "ideology," especially as represented in the Inquisition. Lena spoke of the "domination" of male priests. And all this was before Sharon came to the point in the discussion guide where she was to ask the participants to give her a list of the negative as well as the positive aspects of their religious upbringing. At that point, more came out on the negative side: "the Pope," confessions, exclusivity, submissive roles for women, rules and punishments. The church was accused of hypocrisy about sex and money, upholding a double standard of machismo for men and virginity for women, and always appealing for donations, seemingly oblivious of its history of exploitation of indigenous Americans. We doubt this indictment would surprise anyone in the field of Latin American studies, but it surely represents a different attitude toward religion than that articulated by the Muslim women. For these Latinas, Catholicism has the qualities of "velcro:" everything bad sticks to it.
Yet these Latinas had positive things to say about their religion when Sharon turned to that side of the ledger. Good things also adhere to religion for them. Olga, who had earlier said that she had stopped practicing her mother's religion, liked the fact that that religion promotes psychological security. Judy, who had earlier likened herself to Olga in having "no religious preference," thought it was good to have theological answers to life's questions. Ana sought out the spirituality she encountered in church. Judy and Lena especially spoke of the importance of having tradition, and they mentioned the festival of the virgin of Guadalupe and the house-to-house ritual of the posada that closely follows it in December. The rub is that the good and the bad seem to be inextricable, both being aspects of a religion that is bound up with the Mexican identity that most of these women affirm.(1)
Earlier in the discussion, the value of religious tradition had come up when the women discussed dating and marriage. Two of them were in fact married with young children, and thus had faced the problem of passing on their heritage. Here is Lena's paradoxical statement:
For me it's kind of funny, when I started questioning the Catholic church. When I got married, where was I going to get married? My husband was Catholic. And how was I going to raise my child? . . . I can't really get married in the Catholic church because I'd be a hypocrite because I disagree with most of the things. I haven't gone to church in like years. Only once in a big while. Finally, I ended up getting married in the Catholic church because that's what I grew up with. I baptized my son into the Catholic church, although I don't agree completely with the Catholic church but that's all I know.
Olga, who had likewise stopped practicing, looked ahead hypothetically to marriage and motherhood and came to the same conclusion. "I'll do the same thing my Dad did, because my Dad doesn't believe in the Catholic church. . . . So I told my Mom, I'll raise my kids Catholic but when they grow older [they'll be free to make up their own minds]."
Ana, the other young wife and mother, linked her return to the church most explicitly to Mexican culture. "It's like synonymous with Catholicism. A lot of the traditions are viewed as Catholic. . . . So I want my child to grow up with those traditions. They're synonymous with the Catholic religion. . . . I don't agree with the ideology, but I agree with the tradition. I want to instill in him those morals, those values, those traditions." When another participant asked if the traditions Ana valued included the Day of the Dead, she responded, "Yes. It has Catholicism in it but it also has indigenous meaning to it. That's very important to us in our tradition and our culture." Lena summed it up late in the discussion when she said, "We're mixed, you know."(2)
For all the maturity and wisdom in these thoughts--and they strike us as remarkably perceptive and articulate--they do not seem to offer much leverage for the person who would like to use religion to change her life or to confront a father or a husband with demands for just treatment. So enculturated is the Mexican Catholicism these women know that for most of them religion appears as more of a fate than a force.
One of the participants, Milly, had left Catholicism to escape these contradictions--especially what she called the "idolatrous" mixtures of indigenous and Spanish elements and the paradox of her Mexican grandmother watching her novellas on tv and praying the rosary during commercials. Milly decided to convert to evangelical Protestantism.(3) But in so doing, she was turning her back on her heritage, with some regrets:
Like when I told my Mom I wasn't going to be Catholic anymore. . . . It was hard at first because I realized how many traditions are associated with [the Catholic church], around Easter, around Christmas. I didn't believe in them [and thought] 'why are we doing that?' But then I kind of missed it. Dang, everybody's doing it.
Yolanda was also partly drawn to Protestantism,(4) especially for its offering a direct relationship between the believer and God. (She doesn't believe in the saints and saying confession to a priest.) But her mother told her that if she left Catholicism she'd be renouncing her ethnicity as well, which is something she is not ready to do. ("I find myself more compatible with Hispanic guys.") So she says she "can still consider myself Catholic and kind of not." For her, liberation from the Catholic church would not be worth the consequent deracination.
Catholics may well wonder if these women were aware of liberation theology, but there is nothing in the transcript to suggest that they were. (It is quite possible that the college courses some mentioned, in which they learned of the atrocities perpetrated by the church in colonial times, had been informed by the writings of liberation theologians.) One of the Latino men, late in their focus group discussion, referred to liberation theology as one way the church, as an inherently political institution, can position itself, but his comment was the end of that thread in the discussion. What seems more likely as a factor experienced by both the Latinas and the Latinos as a lever for change is education, which became a topic in the men's group and was a presupposition in the women's group for whom the consciousness of having been "raised Catholic" came "as soon as I got out of high school." For most of these Latinas, their religion is neither something that they experience as a force for their advancement, nor is it something they either can or wish to escape. The contrast with the Muslim women is stark.
Our analysis of these texts is broadly congruent with what other literature and research would lead us to expect: the deep ambivalence of Mexican and other Latina women toward the church, on the one hand, and, on the other, the critique addressed by Muslim feminists to patriarchal practices in their societies in the name of higher ideals they claim to find in the teachings of the Prophet. It is also worthy of note that most of our Muslims have their origins in far-away India, where their co-religionists are an embattled minority, whereas the Catholics from Mexico come from a nearby country where their religion enjoys hegemony. Moreover, Islam is much more egregiously stereotyped in America than is Indian culture, whereas it seems that the opposite is true for Mexicans, their culture disparaged in the U.S., while their religion, especially in Catholic Chicago, is a respectable pillar of society. No wonder the Mexican women feel so surrounded by their religion whereas the Muslims experience it as something they have had to strive for.
Nonetheless, we should acknowledge that we have been analyzing only two tape transcripts of discussions of only a little over an hour each among 15 students at an urban state university (7 Muslim, 8 Latina) who self-selected themselves to talk about religion. None of our Muslims were married, let alone mothers, whereas these important life course transitions were closer at hand for the Latinas. Moreover, we sampled asymmetrically, one group being identified on the basis of their common religious identity and the other on their ethnic identity. We did this because we knew that visible campus groups were so identified by the student-run Muslim Student Association and the university-sponsored Latino Cultural Center and Latin American Studies program. Thus, our mode of selection may have militated against our encountering Muslim women who feel oppressed by their religion and Latinas who feel liberated by theirs. Notwithstanding these cautions, we think we have tapped into significant discourses informed by the experience of growing up as members of minority groups in contemporary America.
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REFERENCES
Elizondo, Virgilio. 1983.
Galilean Journey: The Mexican American Promise. Marynoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books
Flores-Gonzalez, Nilda. 1998.
"The 'School-Wise' Attitude: High School Completion Strategies Among Urban Latinos." Latino Studies Journal (forthcoming)
Roof, Wade Clark. 1993.
A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation. San Francisco: Harper
Warner, R. Stephen. 1994.
"The Place of the Congregation in the American Religious Configuration." In New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations, edited by James P. Wind and James W. Lewis (volume 2 of American Congregations), 54-99. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Go back: Part I
Islam is to Catholicism as Teflon is to Velcro: Theorizing Ambivalence About Religion and Ethnic Culture Among Second Generation Muslim Women and Latina College Students
’Hijab and American Muslim Women: Creating the Space for Autonomous Selves
Creating Urban Evangelicalism: Youth Ministry, Moral Boundaries, and Social Diversity
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