2007/06/01 by Mary E. Odem · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Latin American and Latino Studies
paper · doi:10.2307/25094808
openalex publication_date 2007/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Roberto R. Treviño makes a welcome contribution to Chicano history with his fine study of Catholic religious belief, practice, and institution building among Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Houston. Despite the marginalization and discrimination they faced in the U.S. Catholic Church, Mexicans relied on their faith to support social and community life in Houston barrios from the building of the first immigrant churches in the early twentieth century to the emergence of the Chicano social justice movement in the 1960s. Although there are similarities in the historical experiences of Mexican and European Catholic immigrants, especially Italian Catholics, Mexicans differed from those European groups in two important respects: their status as people of color and their distinct form of Catholicism, a melding of pre-Reformation Christianity and New World indigenous religions. Drawing on oral histories, family and organizational papers, and an extensive array of church records, Treviño examines the development of Mexican “ethno-Catholicism” and its practitioners' fraught relationship with the Catholic Church in Houston in the twentieth century. A home- and community-based religion, “ethno-Catholicism” centered on devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, home altar worship, and other communal traditions, along with selective participation in formal church requirements. According to Treviño, ethno-Catholicism was more than a set of religious beliefs and practices; it was a way of life that sustained generations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Houston: