Mestizo Lady

The Feast for Our Lady of Guadalupe is a secular celebration that has been absorbed by the Catholic Church throughout Latin America and in predominantly Hispanic parishes of the United States. The Church of St. Marks in El Paso is devoted to this story of the peasant Juan Diego. More broadly, the Catholic Church in the Southwestern United States knows it must minister to their majority Hispanic communities or lose them. The Catholic Church is/like/a state apparatus which itself is/like/a fence. Gloria Anzaldua wrote: "The border is una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds." Numbers. Hispanic majorities. A potent power not only in modifyng Catholic ritual but perhaps to shape politics. And these significant numbers are now spreading out from the Southwest throughout the rest of the United States. (December 12, 2017)