Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

consciousness. While symbolic forms of resistance are important, it is in collective activism that Latinas have nurtured a more effective political voice. Thus, moving from cultures of resistance to organized protest awakens a different type of consciousness and activism. It is this latter form of collective empowerment that I emphasize here. It includes forming alliances with and becoming politicized in a number of organizations including faith-based organizations.

Lara Medina (1997) notes the historical significance of Las Hermanas, a twenty- five-year-old national organization of mostly Latina Roman Catholics that promotes women’s equality within religious institutions and society at large. Medina points out that, as a religious-political organization, Las Hermanas was effectively the first crossover organization that brought the Latina gender and ethnic struggles of the 1960s and 1970s into the religious realm. Between 1971 and 1980, Las Hermanas influenced church politics by promoting women for leadership positions, pushing women’s ordination, promoting women’s right to choose on the question of abortion, and participated in secular political movements that focused on women’s issues. Las Hermanas has also focused specifically on issues affecting grassroots Latinas, including sexuality and domestic abuse. Medina’s study of Las Hermanas is among the first to examine issues integral to understanding Latina religious-political organizing. Significant in Medina’s work is the link she identifies between group identity, protest strategies, feminist models of leadership, and religious agency.

In broader terms, Carol Hardy-Fanta (1993) offers insight into this gendered process of political mobilization based on her study of Latina/o political mobilization in Boston. She states:

A key issue within the debate about gender differences is whether there is an essential divide between the public and private dimensions of politics. For Latina women, much more than the men, the boundary between these supposedly distinct spheres of life is blurred or indistinct. With their emphasis on grassroots politics, survival politics, the politics of everyday life, and the development of a political consciousness, Latina women see connections between the problems they face personally and community issues stemming from government policies. (1993: 18–19)

Most notably, Latina activism emerges as Latinas’ political consciousness is awakened in their everyday lived experiences. This also explains why Latinas in particular would ally themselves with women’s religious groups as they have on the U.S.–Mexico border. They go to women’s faith-based organizations for help in confronting, for example, domestic violence or for help with economic problems. In these settings, they meet other women like themselves, participate in programs that empower them, develop skills to confront their own problems, and in the process, often emerge as community activists.

BORDER REALITIES

Latinas on the border are affected by U.S.–Mexico relations, including immigration policies, border politics, and their own continuing ties to families south of the border. Barrera (1979) and Acuna˜ (1988) suggest that these relations are linked to the legacy established in the region when the U.S. border officially crossed into Mexican territory beginning with the Texas War of Independence (1835–6) and the signing of the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Tensions continue with the influx of “new”1 immigration, both legal and illegal. Mexicans represent a poor and disenfranchised transnational labor force that is used as a reserve army of labor for the United States. In both lowskill and low-wage occupations Mexicans are exploited, particularly the women who work in the border factories (Ruiz 1987). Border residents complain of intimidation by border patrol agents at checkpoints or when asked for legal documents when leaving food stores. The strains that come with the U.S.–Mexico border reality for people of Mexican descent, especially for women, have created a range of nongovernment organizations that provide social services and strive to raise political consciousness of the social problems faced by border communities.

In response to the social needs in these communities, several Catholic and nonCatholic religious organizations are actively involved in helping Latinas/os mobilize against the violence and economic exploitation occurring along the U.S.–Mexico border. The plight of migrant women along the El Paso/Juarez´ border, with reports estimating between one hundred and two hundred cases of murdered women in Juarez´ since 1993, has served as a rallying point for issues relating to violence against women. Church groups responding to this reality have become an important moral and fi- nancial support to Latinas and their families. That there is a religious connection in the mobilizing of Latinas should come as no surprise. Pardo’s (1998) research shows that several of the founders of Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA – an organization dedicated to neighborhood improvement) were encouraged by a local Catholic priest. Parish networks proved important to women organizing in East Los Angeles by providing them with space to meet and the mechanism through which they could tap into one another as resources in fixing or cleaning up local parks abandoned by city government. Thus, Latinas’ emphasis on grassroots activism and the survival politics of everyday life, suggests expanded possibilities when they can tap their own communities’ social networks and those of organizations such as church groups, that lend themselves to grassroots organizing.

Religious groups on the border, many of them influenced by the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and feminist ideals, have joined Latinas in their struggle for human rights. The surge in the number of NGOs in the border region (61 percent of the NGOs in my border study cluster were established after 1990), and especially of church groups engaged in community work, can only be understood as a product of particular border realities, U.S.–Mexico politics, and the social strains that they produce. For example, for religious groups in El Paso/Juarez,´ the issue of violence against women highlighted by the murders in Juarez´ led to an awareness of broader issues concerning border women’s struggles and helped the formation of alliances among community groups.

Cubitt and Greenslade (1997) note that the specific focus on violence and economic exploitation is the basis for understanding Mexican women’s increasing empowerment in social movement activism. I argue in the following section that this extends to understanding women’s mobilization on the border. At the same time, the numbers that have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border give pause to the notion that social life can be divided into public and private realms. For Latinas, and the non-Latinas on the border

1Considering that Mexico lost a large percentage of its territory to the United States with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, whether Mexican immigrants entering the United States, or Anglo immigrants entering the Southwest Latino/a homeland should be considered the “new” immigrants is a point of contention.

who support them, violence against migrant women is articulated as not the migrant woman’s personal matter, but a matter for all women. As Cubitt and Greenslade (1997: 61) note, treating women’s issues as personal matters cripples women’s ability to act politically to advance their interests, and in the process undermines all people’s capacity to participate in and transform civil society and public policy. In other words, to leave one woman’s narrative and the dangers and exploitations she experiences crossing the U.S.–Mexico border at the individual level is to miss the larger communal pattern of these border experiences.

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FAITH-BASED COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS IN EL PASO-JUAREZ

Latinas and non-Latinas, linked by their common concern for women in the greater El Paso/Juarez´ area, have developed a number of mobilization strategies to bring attention to problems facing women in the region. The relational ties among the thirteen NGOs identified in my border research between 1996 and 1999 show a strong link to a mobilization process tied to, or having been sparked by, members of religious organizations. Such patterns reflect how community and faith-based organizations that lend support to NGO activism along the U.S.–Mexico border are embedded in its sociopolitical reality. Ruben Garcia, one of the cofounders of Annunciation House in El Paso, spoke about it and Casa Peregrina, both of which are shelters for predominantly illegal homeless immigrants who come looking for work in El Paso and Juarez´. He recalled:

. . . Because of the economic development of the border you have this incredible migration from the interior of Mexico to the border areas. You know the maquiladoras, the famous maquiladoras. The year before Annunciation House came into being, the first maquila opened in Juarez´ – the RCA plant over at the Bermudez industrial park – and hired the first three thousand maquila workers. Well, twenty-two years later, there’s three to four hundred maquiladoras, employing two hundred thousandplus people.

This mass migration to the region created problems for social service organizations who were quickly overwhelmed by the number of people, many of whom found it difficult to find housing. As the numbers of homeless people increased, church groups responded by forming nonprofit organizations that provided shelter and other services to homeless migrants.

Reflecting on the circumstances under which Annunciation came into existence, Garcia recalled that in 1978 there were no other shelters except for the men’s Christian home, there were no transitional living centers, and there were no battered women’s shelters. Garcia said that he and a few others made personal commitments to working with the border’s poor:

Little by little, by word of mouth, Annunciation House filled out. . . . It also so happened that coming into existence in 1978, coincided with the explosion that took place in Central America and the mass of exoduses of people from Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras. And so, as these people made their way up to various kinds of borders, El Paso was one of the major crossing points for people. So, we found ourselves doing an immense amount of work with the refugees from Central America, along of course, with the people who have historically crossed over from the interior of Mexico.

This narrative of Annunciation House’s history is similar to that of several other NGOs that organized around border issues. And although neither Annunciation House nor Casa Peregrina began as shelters for women, both have come to serve women in various ways. Casa Peregrina (on the Juarez´ side) eventually became a shelter for women, mostly because the pattern of migration grew to include single women, single mothers with children, as well as families with children.

My interviews with representatives of the women’s organizations in the El Paso/Juarez´ border area highlighted the importance of Annunciation House and Casa Peregrina as part of the grassroots organizational network that Latinas and their families rely on in the region. They become particularly important in moments of crises such as when primary breadwinners lose jobs and find themselves and their families homeless. Many of these organizations are affiliated with a number of Catholic and Protestant church groups who support a wide range of border human rights issues, and many of the individual workers are motivated in terms of living a spirituality committed to the border’s poor. As recounted by Garcia,

Annunciation House was about looking inwardly and saying how can we live our lives with greater meaning, with more purpose. . . . We approached it from a faith based perspective, as we went through that year [1978], and as we reflected on scripture, we could not get away from the realization of the special relationship that exists between God and oppressed people, God and those who are poor, God and those who are marginalized, excluded, etc.

Similarly, Patricia Monreal Molina of Organizacion´ Popular Independiente (OPI) of Juarez,´ another of the NGOs in this network, noted a connection in the profiles of the people who came to create OPI as people coming to community work out of parish activities. In fact, several of the founders of OPI started organizing via the Base Christian Communities (BCCs) that exist on the edge of Juarez´. BCCs emerged in many Catholic communities initially as a response to priest shortages. In Latin America, they are known for allowing the laity to assume broader roles than traditional Catholic parishes. Base community members are encouraged to take greater responsibility for advancing a decentralized and participatory format in community leadership. Their nonhierarchical structure is attractive to women’s activism, and it is not surprising that some women activists who join faith-based NGOs (such as Patricia Monreal Molina of OPI) started their activism in BCCs. BCCs have been a force behind a range of movements (Eckstein 1999: 8), and the political reality along the border provides an expanded social context for women’s activism. Consequently, when women’s faith-based organizations like El Centro Mujeres de la Esperanza of El Paso come along, they find receptive audiences of like-minded lay and religious women to share the group’s vision.

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BORDER WOMEN’S FAITH-BASED COALITIONS IN EL PASO/JUAREZ

Founded in 1993, El Centro Mujeres de la Esperanza was among the first truly women’s faith-based non-government organizations to emerge in the region. Its members cut across ethnic lines. Ida Berresheim, a Catholic sister and one of the cofounders of El Centro, recalled that the lay and religious women who got involved in El Centro early on worked with refugees and homeless people. After a period of open discussion and evaluation, El Centro’s organizers, many of whom were educators and health workers,

decided to channel their efforts into programs focused on women’s development. As recounted by Sister Ida, after soliciting funds mostly from women’s [religious] congregations throughout the United States, they were able to open El Centro. They got to know and form partnerships with the local social service agencies and subsequently developed programs to train women as promotoras de salud (promoters of health).

El Centro is one model for women’s mobilization in the region. As its mission statement states, El Centro has become a mutual U.S.–Mexican culturally based community of women who work in the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez´ region. More generally, “As women on the US/Mexico border, they stand in solidarity with women throughout the world who actively seek peace with justice for the earth and for people.” Their goal is to work to transform the social structures that oppress or limit women, and they begin by focusing their activism on local projects. For example, El Centro’s Valores y Vida program focuses on building women’s self-esteem and challenging the assumptions of traditional family structures and women’s subordinate roles in them. The goal is to provide opportunities for women to discuss alternative family structures where women do not have to be subordinate to men. Other Centro programs are geared to address women’s economic marginality – identifying the sources of economic exploitation and developing strategies to combat them. It is by offering programs where women discover alternatives to their subordination and exploitation that organizations like El Centro become empowering organizations for border women.

By challenging the Latino family structure and critiquing other social institutions, namely religious institutions, Latinas/Chicanas/Mexicanas who join these NGOs organize to increase their political mobilization. They promote a nonpatriarchal actionoriented spirituality as part of a social activism that questions existing patriarchal structures affecting their lives. For example, women at El Centro articulate their rejection of church institutions that value keeping families intact without confronting family violence as a social problem, a problem that disproportionately affects women and children. As one woman put it after discounting her priest’s advice to return to her husband after a brutal beating, “how can a church, an organization, or society, judge me because of what it teaches us,” – expecting women to put up with the violence for the sake of keeping families together.

There is also the questioning of other oppressive social structures that produce economic and political marginalization. One of the characteristics of El Centro is the number of women who come from “colonias,” the rural and unincorporated subdivisions of U.S. cities located along the U.S.–Mexico international boundary. Colonias are characterized by substandard housing, inadequate plumbing and sewage disposal systems, and inadequate access to clean water. They are highly concentrated poverty pockets that are physically and legally isolated from neighboring cities. El Centro’s programs help these women to transform their everyday lived experiences and their spirituality into local border activism and to maximize efforts through effective networking with other women’s NGOs in the region.

Many of the organizations in the cluster I studied are affiliated with religious groups, including Catholic women’s congregations, a local Jewish women’s organization, and the YWCA. The interviews I conducted with organizers reveal that women’s NGOs on the U.S.–Mexico border are linked both by local and transnational concerns for women’s rights and human rights. Alliances among and across women’s NGOs focused on “being together” around women’s issues rather than being divided by nationality.

The research reveals a rich relationship between a number of women’s religious groups and the grassroots organizations with which they work.

For example, Sister Kathleen Erickson came to the border because her own background drew her to work in an organization that addressed border women’s concerns. As a Sister of Mercy whose religious order made a formal commitment to work with women and children, particularly the poor and marginalized, coming to the border was a calling. That is how Sister Kathleen came to Anthony, New Mexico (a town that is partly in the outskirts of El Paso, Texas, and partly in New Mexico). In 1991, she and several other Sisters of Mercy helped to form what is now known as the Women’s Intercultural Center. After several years, a spinoff organization, Mujeres Unidas, was founded to teach women business skills and to provide training that would help them find jobs. It is through these faith-based organizational networks that Latinas’ political consciousness has expanded and the resources provided for their successful mobilization (cf. Cohen and Arato 1992).

Among the NGOs in the greater El Paso-Juarez´ communities, the YWCA and Casa Peregrina serve women by providing transition housing; the Battered Women’s Shelter was started with support from the El Paso Jewish Women’s Council; La Posada, founded by a group of Catholic Sisters, also provides shelter for women who are victims of domestic violence and for their children; La Mujer Obrera, although not a faith-based NGO but important to the El Paso/Juarez´ women’s NGO network, provides political space for women to organize around labor issues; and other organizations disseminate educational materials on a number of issues important to women. Across the range of NGOs, the goals and objectives center on local activism and while the focus is on women’s issues, these are often framed within broader community struggles. It is this local activism that enhances mobilization and empowers the women involved.

Imelda Garcia, a Chicana and cofounder of a spinoff organization of El Centro, emphasized that the basic objectives of her organization were “to give a voice to the community and to work with them, with the community, to better their health and health as not just related to blood pressure and whatever . . . but basically to empower community.” Across the river from El Paso, in Juarez,´ a Mexican Catholic sister saw concerns over women’s issues as central to her activism on the border, stating:

I believe that among the most oppressed people, the most needy are women, especially among the poor, the marginal ones, the mistreated, the humiliated. I feel a great calling to work with women. We are working to recover our dignity, our place in society, families, and churches [translated from Spanish].

Sister Mar´ıa’s calling to work with border women reflects the spiritual journey that characterizes many of the women who work in faith-based NGOs. One Dominican sister who works at a faith based NGO in Juarez´ presented a relatively similar narrative:

I think I would trace . . . my interest to our congregational meetings that we had . . .

from the seventies on. We made as a congregation a deliberate choice to work for justice and peace and that was really based on what was happening in the church and what was happening, especially in our consciousness of women’s position and the injustice through which they are treated in our country and worldwide. We came to El Paso, we crossed over the bridge, saw what was happening in Juarez´ in the colonias there and . . . I decided to ask to come here and join Donna [another Dominican sister] who was already in this area to see what we could do together.

These brief excerpts illuminate how religious, class, and ethnic boundaries were crossed in women’s border organizing. Spiritual journeys combine with justice concerns and Latina activism to empower border women and their communities. These common goals are part of the tenets of global feminism. As Charlotte Bunch (1993: 251) has exhorted us: “To make global feminist consciousness a powerful force in the world demands that we make the local, global and the global, local. Such a movement . . .

must be centered on a sense of connectedness among women active at the grassroots in various regions.”

CONCLUSION

The research drawn on in this chapter speaks to and enriches feminist scholarship in that it shows the potential in global feminist approaches. Community-based activist research shows that “community is created in and through struggles against violence and for social justice and economic security, as well as through casual interactions with people who share some aspects of [their] daily lives” (Naples 1998: 337). This is important, because “as a dynamic process, the social construction of community offers the possibility for redefinition of boundaries, for broadened constituencies, and for seemingly unlikely alliances” (ibid.).

The study of the greater El Paso/Juarez´ area suggests that the role of women’s religious organizations is central to border women’s mobilization success. Catholic, Jewish, and YWCA women’s groups provide organizational skills, information, and other resources that are integral to Latina centered women’s NGOs on the border. Consequently, today, the experiences Latinas have and the work they do alongside non-Latinas in NGOs, creates a forum for the “chispa” – the spark – the passion for a type of women’s politics to flower that requires a global view of the women’s movement. In the process, Latinas engage with other communities of women and forge new opportunities for creating important alliances. That they are forming alliances with religious groups is part of the larger Latino/a story within the evolving U.S. ethnic and religious mosaic.

Thus, as argued earlier in the chapter, women’s activism in the Latina/o community emerges from but is not decoupled from larger community problems – economic exploitation, racism, poverty, and violence. But that the activism evolved into women centered goals speaks to a type of politicization that Latina/o ethnic communities must confront. Women’s subordination, marginalization, and exploitation are problems women face both within and outside their ethnic communities. Consequently, what this chapter shows is how “women are politicized and drawn into local political battles in a myriad of ways that reflect a wide diversity of personal and political concerns as well as varying constructions of community and social identities” (Naples 1998: 344). This research highlights why, how, and with whom Latinas came to construct communities of resistance and underscores the potentials for global feminism.

Dichotomous typologies such as these are built on the assumption that there is in fact a fundamental distinction between worldliness and otherworldliness. This assumption obstructs social scientific understanding of black religion, and organized religion in general, in at least two important ways. First, it suggests that religious people cannot use ostensibly otherworldly ideas for secular activist purposes. If some theologies are taken to be political opiates (recall that Karl Marx dubbed religion the “opiate of the masses”), others are considered amphetamines for activists. Moreover, both are thought to act unambiguously. That is, no religious tradition can be both worldly and otherworldly. No church can change orientations, chameleon-like, to fit the context or issue at hand. The second limiting assumption is that seemingly otherworldly religious practices (such as “shouting” or “getting the holy ghost”) do not have practical, even political, implications for the faithful.

Lincoln and Mamiya (1990), who are concerned with the historical development of black religion, and are reluctant to squeeze churches into starkly binary categories, declare that black churches are in fact suspended in perpetual tension not only between “otherworldly and this-worldly,” but between “resistance and accommodation,” “priestly and prophetic functions,” “universalism and particularism,” “communal and privatistic,” and “charismatic and bureaucratic” (10–16; see also Baer and Singer 1992). At various historical junctures, particular black churches swing toward one pole or another. While the tension model nominally escapes the trap of binary typology and allows us to appreciate some of the complexity and fluidity of black religion, it still describes a “dialectical” process. This assumes that world and otherworld, and other paired categories, are “polar opposites” (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990: 11) in black religious thought and practice. The tension between the two is never resolved, but is experienced in every era by religious actors who struggle to remain true to the transcendent amidst the pressing social, political, and economic exigencies of their time.

Lincoln and Mamiya (1990:12) concede that

[t]he otherworldly aspect, the transcendence of social and political conditions, can have a this-worldly political correlate which returns to this world by producing an ethical and prophetic critique of the present social order. In some instances, eschatological transcendence can help to critique the present.

Still, no sociological study of black churches directly challenges the idea that worldly and otherworldly ideas and practices are clearly distinct, polar opposites in the first place.

In this chapter, I question the usefulness of the worldly/otherworldly paradigm as a way of thinking about activism, retreatism, and all the combinations thereof, among black religious organizations. I take my conceptual cue from historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1993), who describes the black church as “a complex body of shifting cultural, ideological, and political significations” whose “multiplicity transcends polarity – thus tending to blur the spiritual and secular, the eschatological and political, and the private and public”(16; emphasis added). I concur also with the sociologist Nancy Ammerman (1997a: 213), who states that religious practices in general

cannot be confined to a realm we call “otherworldly.” Like all other either/or dichotomies, that one serves us no better. Those very “otherworldly” experiences are often in clear dialogue with the situations of everyday life. . . . These are practices that implicate this world in the very midst of providing points of transcendence.

I pose this challenge using ethnographic data collected during a five-year study of religious congregations in an economically depressed Boston neighborhood.

THE SETTING

Four Corners is a .6 square mile, largely poor, predominantly African-American neighborhood containing at least twenty-nine congregations in 1999. Fifteen of these congregations were majority African American. Of these, ten belonged to the PentecostalApostolic constellation of faiths. The remaining five congregations were Jehovah’s Witness (three), Baptist (one), and Catholic (one). Nearly all of the churches in Four Corners convene in storefronts. Fifty years ago, when the neighborhood was entirely white and Jewish, these storefronts housed actual stores. The expansion of the black population into the area sparked “white flight,” which in turn initiated the downward spiral of systematic economic disinvestment. This process left in its wake a glut of vacant commercial spaces. The result is what I call a “religious district,” where religious communities exist in high density not because residents are “overchurched” (Frazier 1963/1974; Myrdal 1944) but because the neighborhood contains an abundance of cheap, vacant commercial spaces on major thoroughfares.

Early in my study of religion in Four Corners, I thought it might be sufficient to classify churches dichotomously and explain why so many fell into the otherworldly, insular, nonactivist category. As I looked more closely, though, it became clear that binary understandings of church work did not capture what most churches in this religious district thought they were doing in and for society. Nearly all of the clergy, including those who preached fiercely against “the world,” felt their churches needed to leave an indelibly positive imprint on the world. As such, these churches could be called not only “worldly” but at least rhetorically “activist.” In short, the question for me became not whether, but how churches saw themselves as agents for world betterment.

In the following, I discuss two empirical phenomena that proved highly salient in this regard. Both phenomena challenge binary and dialectical modes of thinking by illustrating how religious organizations blur the distinction between world and otherworld so that the latter implies the former. One is the presence of churches that use ideas from stereotypically otherworldly theologies not to shirk, but to justify worldly activities. Second, churches ordinarily use transcendence-oriented practices, such as “shouting” or “getting the holy ghost,” not as an existential escape hatch, but to inspire and energize the faithful that they might be powerful agents for change in a twisted, but unavoidable secular world.

Theological Conservatism and Activism

A host of sociological studies have found conservative theology – with its biblical literalism and individualist, conversionist views of salvation – to inhibit ecumenism (Boldon 1985; Myers and Davidson 1984; Kanagy 1992) and social activism (Guest and Lee 1987; Hoge and Faue 1973; Kanagy 1992; Stark and Glock 1965; Hoge et al. 1978: 122). Ethnographic studies of black Pentecostal congregations also reveal a tendency for conservative theology to suppress social activism (Paris 1982; Williams 1974). Meanwhile, studies of ecumenical activist coalitions and recent dispatches from major sponsors of such coalitions report that few, if any, participating churches represent theologically