CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Latina Empowerment, Border Realities, and
Faith-Based Organizations
Milagros Pe ̃na
Any discussion of Latinas must begin with some understanding of their experience
within the larger context of their communities. To understand Latino/a empowerment
in faith-based communities, this chapter begins with a brief overview of the Latino/a
religious experience and then outlines Latinas’ particular contributions to faith-based
community activist organizations. The research literature on Latinos and Latinas and
their place in the U.S. religious mosaic parallels non-Latino/a immigration stories when
consideration is given to the role of religion and religious institutions within ethnic
enclaves. These ethnic studies can be useful because they highlight nuances that some-
times are glossed over by sweeping immigration theories. As Jaime Vidal (Dolan and
Vidal 1994) found when looking at the Puerto Rican migration story, there were nu-
ances to the Puerto Rican experiences that spilled over into shaping the character of
previously established Euro-ethnic faith communities.
One difference was Puerto Rican migrants’ insistence on maintaining their culture
rather than embracing the expected assimilation with U.S. society: “The insistence
of Puerto Ricans on speaking Spanish among themselves and on speaking Spanish at
home in order to pass on the language (as afirstlanguage!) to the next generation
was deeply disturbing and even offensive to Americans, who instinctively perceived
it as a rejection of the ‘melting pot,’ a symbolic way of clinging to an alien identity”
(Dolan and Vidal 1994: 59). Subverting assimilation and the “melting pot” translated
itself into establishing faith communities that insisted on and asserted Puerto Rican
ethnic identity in a way that other immigrant communities had not. One could argue
that the Puerto Rican story in many ways foreshadowed the present-day expected tol-
erance for multiculturalism. Of course, Puerto Ricans do not represent the experiences
of all Latino/a groups. But as one of a number of ethnic groups with similar stories,
we learn from their experiences that even before the current immigration influx, the
U.S. religious character was a contested one. Puerto Ricans came to New York “with a
culture pervaded by the Catholic ethos – but it was a different kind of Catholic ethos”
(Dolan and Vidal 1994: 67; see also D ́ıaz-Stevens’s [1993a: 240–76] study of the impact
of Puerto Rican migration on the Archdiocese of New York).
These studies show that communities of faith can be, and are often, linked to the
struggles of ethnic communities to be accepted in a society that marginalizes them.
This is evident, for example, in acts of devotion to La Hermita de la Caridad del Cobre,
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