526 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
activity, on the other, has had an enormous impact on the religious configuration of
the modern nations that constitute the formal Mesoamerican world. Dozens of U.S.
and European Protestant denominations, Mormons, post–Vatican II reform Catholics,
and militant “people’s church” advocates within the Theology of Liberation can all
claim extraordinary success in the late twentieth century. Their faithful number in the
many millions, almost none of whom can be claimed as loyal to the old order state
Catholicism. Already extraordinarily diverse at the time of independence from Europe,
Mesoamerican religious belief and practice in the modern period have splintered
even further with the successes of the new evangelism. The much sought-after “na-
tional integration,” in whose name missionary activity has sometimes been encour-
aged, has not always been achieved; indeed, the converts sometimes achieve the power
and influence to change the quality of the national culture itself.New Immigration
Another force that has contributed to the increasing religious pluralism of Mesoamer-
ican is the substantial non-Iberian immigration into the region, beginning in the
early nineteenth century and continuing, though at a diminished rate, in our time.
This new immigration of the postindependence era has brought many new strains
of religious belief and practice: West Indian Afro-Caribbean cult practitioners; Eng-
lish Protestants; Irish Catholics; Italian Catholics; German Protestants, Jews, and
Catholics; Eastern European Roman Catholics, Jews, and Orthodox Christians; Mid-
dle Eastern Jews, Moslems, and Christians; Chinese Buddhists; Vietnamese Catholics;
even North American Kickapoo Indian traditionalists; and U.S. and Canadian Men-
nonites. All came in quest of economic opportunity and, in some cases, religious
and political asylum. Several of the region’s major cities, such as Mexico City, Mon-
terrey, Guadalajara, Guatemala City, and San José (Costa Rica), have hundreds of
non–Roman Catholic practicing religious groups. Thus, from city to remote Indian
hamlet, modern Mesoamerica does not permit easy generalizations about traits that
characterize the whole.
If one adds to all of the preceding the especially important role of nations like
Mexico and Costa Rica in granting political asylum to refugees from other parts of
the Hispanic world in the twentieth century, the region begins to look increasingly
international in terms of the national and religious traditions represented. Hun-
dreds of thousands of Spanish Republicans, Cubans, Chileans, Salvadorans,
Nicaraguans, Argentines, and, most recently, Guatemalan Indians, have found refuge
in Mexico, almost all of them for reasons related to political upheavals in their own
countries. Costa Rica has also, in proportion to its small size, received enormous
numbers (in the hundreds of thousands) of political refugees in the late twentieth
century, most recently from Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Thus, the crucible of life and belief has become, in our time, enormously com-
plex in terms of who’s who. Like much of the world, Mesoamerica—for millennia a
region mingling many variants of great and little traditions—continues in the twen-
tieth century to be a borderland of spiritualities, now involving much of the hemi-
sphere and the globe rather than merely the extent of pre-Hispanic trade networks.