Tucson’s Shrine to “El Tiradito”

by Brett Hendrickson

On both sides of the international border with Mexico, devotions to so-called folk saints flourish. Some of the major figures include Jesús Malverde, the Niño Fidencio, and—of late (pun intended)—Santa Muerte. Often unorthodox, these figures once operated on the institutional edges of Catholicism, but nowadays, they often extend their power and care over devotees with multiple religious backgrounds and histories. Unlikely ever to gain official canonization, borderlands folk saints nevertheless remain the focus of a great deal of material religious activity. 

It is no mystery why they are so popular. In his book on several of these figures, folklorist and historian James S. Griffith writes:

...these ánimas or folk saints, whatever they should be called, produce results. Many people pray to them or go to séances in which they are channeled because they have “come through” for friends or relatives....[Folk saints] seem to supply hope if not help to many who stand in most need of those commodities (152).

One of the less well-known of these folk saints is El Tiradito, “the little one who was thrown away” in Tucson, Arizona. His current shrine has been operational since the 1920s, but the devotion to him is older than that. Accounts vary as to El Tiradito’s origin, but many mention a man who was killed fighting over a woman he loved.

Last fall, when I attended the Western History Association in Tucson, I made my way to the shrine to explore this living example of folk devotion and negotiation between heaven and earth.

A historical plaque introduces the site and names it “the wishing shrine.”

The shrine itself resembles an open-air adobe side chapel, replete with candle stands and other evidence of use:

The back wall of El Tiradito functions like Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall in that petitioners insert their prayers and desires on little pieces of paper into crevices.

Another visitor had left something for a specific individual, hoping that “a message in a bottle” might do the trick.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of my visit to El Tiradito had to do with one unique group of objects. Near the base of the candles, someone had a left a metal sculpture of a cat’s face. At first I thought this must be the whimsical offering of an artistic cat lover. But then I noticed a red velvet bag near the metal cat. Nudging it open with my foot, I was startled by the mummified remains of a cat. I can only speculate that after someone’s beloved pet died, it was left for El Tiradito as a final act of devotion to both the saint and the kitty.

Like Griffith, I would suggest that special petitions can happen at the shrines of folk saints because the saints themselves in their lives knew the messy passions of love, grief, and longing. As long as these passions persist, places like El Tiradito shrine will thrive as sites of transaction and catharsis. 

Call for Papers

Editors' Note: This call might be of interest to those of you working on Catholicism in the American West.

U.S. Catholic Historian
Spring 2014 Issue: Saints in America

For more than thirty years U.S. Catholic Historian has published theme-based issues relevant to the history of American Catholicism.

An upcoming issue will assess the role of canonized saints or individuals on the path to sainthood (blesseds/servants of God) and the Catholic Church in America.

Contributions could include, but are not limited, to the following:

· Biographical studies of saints/blesseds/servants of God who ministered in the U.S.

· Studies of devotion to saints in the U.S. context

· Studies of the process of canonization for U.S. saints/blesseds/servants of God

Scholars considering a submission are asked to contact the editor, Fr. David Endres at DEndres@Catholic.orgDEndres@Catholic.org> before preparing a contribution. Approximate length is 7,000-10,000 words. We ask for submissions by March 1, 2014.

Book of the Month

Anne Butler, Across God's Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 

Reviewed by Jennifer Meredith

Anne Butler restores Catholic Nuns to the narrative of and highlights their contributions in shaping the American West. In Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920, Butler uses an array of archived materials from religious convents in the West to trace interactions of Catholic nuns and the variety of people in the West. From creating needed institutions, such as hospitals and schools, to relief for the poor, nuns influenced surrounding communities in the West. In this process, however, Butler argues the environment and interactions with minorities in the West also changed the sisters and shifted their ideas of gender, race, and class. Butler’s analysis portrays the sisters as real, complicated, and flawed women who influenced the West.

Butler asserts the environment and process of civilizing the west forced nuns to become independent and more self-sufficient. Most had come from established convents of order, routine, and authority. The new, harsh conditions and problems of communicating forced the nuns to make their own decisions. Butler writes, “After a few blunder’s, religious women on their own in the West learned to select the sensible solution and defend their actions at a later date” (47). Butler’s argument is compelling partly because she does not discount the community aspect of the sister’s experience. Rather, her argument suggests the nuns as a group became more independent and not just individually.

Through their interactions with different racial and economic groups the sisters began to view the west not simply as a savage place but a place of inequality. Drawing from the diaries of the nuns, Butler demonstrates their activism on behalf of American Indians, African Americans, and Mexicans and their disgust for minority mistreatment. Butler complicates her narrative, however, by acknowledging most sisters continued to hold racist views common in American society at the time. Butler admits, “The women endorsed a dominating Christianity and the layering of one culture over another until the latter became invisible” (245). Rather than these interactions changing the sister’s views of minority culture that they saw as inferior, they continued to try to teach and civilize the minorities into the white dominant culture at the expense of ethnic identities. Butler portrays the sisters as real people limited in their altruistic vision by their subscription to a dominant racial perspective.

Butler also analyzes gender roles and slight power shifts brought on by independence and self-reliance forged in the west. Butler asserts the sisters obeyed the patriarchic system of authority, yet at the same time, they also pushed for autonomy and freedom that many had become accustomed to in the West. Most sisters did not outright challenge the authority of males in the church, nor did they call for women’s liberation. Rather, they worked within the system to subvert individual male authority where it interfered with their goals. They understood their own capabilities and shifted their roles to increase their authority without undermining the patriarchic structure. Gender roles and identity shifted slightly with the introduction of an independent mindset, but governing gender roles continued to prevail. Butler highlights the sisters’ complex interactions with forces and people in the west that shifted their views and identities.

In Butler’s analysis, the West becomes malleable in form as a process with changing boundaries. Her sources draw their own borders, sometimes reaching more east than many western historians would allow. As a process, the boundaries shift with the progression to the Pacific and as savagery gave way to civility. Butler’s West allows us to view the process with its complex intersections of race, gender, class and environment. This analysis offers an appraisal of nuns’ contributions and restores them to their rightful place as important actors in the building of the American West. It also demonstrates the environments affect on the sisters. Merging process with ethnic convergence and conquest, Butler also provides a symbiosis of New and Turner West that demonstrates the value of both approaches.

Casual Friday: Our Lady of the Rockies and the Shape of Montana Christian Ecuminism

Earlier this summer, during a cross country road trip we pulled into Butte, Montana. I noticed right away (how could I miss it) a giant statue of what I took to be Jesus, with outstretched arms, overlooking the valley, positioned on the top of a mountain ridge in the eastern side of the valley. It made me think of the Cristo Redentor statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro, though on a slightly smaller scale. A brochure in the hotel lobby, however, explained that the sculpture is not Jesus but is the Virgin Mary, dubbed Our Lady of the Rockies.

I took it to be a sign of the prevalence of Catholicism in Montana, but the pamphlet from our hotel lobby described it as a nondenominational expression of Christian faith. Still, it seems like a rather Catholic expression of nondenominational Christian faith. Anyone more familiar with the religious landscape of Montana who can speak to this?

Columbus the Catholic

By Kate Moran

Landing of Columbus, oil on canvas by John Vanderlyn, 1846.  In the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.  Source: http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/historic-rotunda-paintings/landing-columbus.

This week many Americans will celebrate, as a founding hero, a man who is also widely believed to be a Roman Catholic.[1] This hardly seems shocking these days: we are, after all, moving quickly towards a Presidential election in which perhaps the only certainty is that we will elect a Catholic Vice President. Yet if present realities tempt us to forget the long and powerful history of anti-Catholicism in the United States, we risk missing one of the more interesting things about the history of Columbus Day: not just that a Catholic was included in the pantheon of American founding heroes during an anti-Catholic age, but that he was not the only one.

In the past few decades, the annual arrival of Columbus Day (or, in many parts of the country, Indigenous People’s Day) has raised important questions about how we define heroism and discovery, how we approach tragedy and violence in history, and from whose perspective history should be told. I’d like to add another thread to that discussion, one that links the American celebration of Columbus to the history of religion, nationalism, and the U.S. West.

Columbus, of course, was not initially celebrated in the United States for being Catholic. In fact, in Washington Irving’s popular 1829 biography, he is given a bit of a proto-Protestant gloss. Here is Irving’s (apocryphal) portrait of Columbus pressing his case in front of a tribunal of scholars and priests:

The hall of the old convent presented a striking spectacle. A simple mariner standing forth in the midst of an imposing array of clerical and collegiate sages; maintaining his theory with natural eloquence, and, as it were, pleading the cause of the new world. . . . Columbus was assailed with citations from the Bible, and the works of the early fathers of the church, which were thought incompatible with his theory: doctrinal points were mixed up with philosophical discussions, and even a mathematical demonstration was allowed no truth, if it appeared to clash with a text of scripture, or a commentary of one of the fathers.[2]

At this dramatic turning point in Columbus’s story, Columbus is cast as holding his own against the forces of received knowledge and tradition, hierarchy and authority. In this iteration, the story of Columbus becomes the story of an enlightened individual challenging a stereotypically “medieval” mindset: a quasi-Catholic hero for an anti-Catholic United States.

Yet as the nineteenth century unfolded, America’s Columbus became increasingly Catholic. A great deal of this change can be traced to American Catholics themselves, to their appropriation of Columbus as a hero who could tie them to the nation’s mythic past. Beginning in the 1860s, Italian Catholic immigrants celebrated the anniversary of Columbus’s landing, and gave the celebration a religious flavor: in 1869 in San Francisco, their celebration of “Discovery Day” began with a Catholic mass and involved a procession with a statue of Columbus, similar to a saint’s day festa.[3] Irish Catholic immigrants founded the Knights of Columbus in 1882, and they joined other immigrant societies and the Catholic press in lobbying for the creation of an official, federal Columbus Day.

Jacques Marquette, statue in marble, by Gaetano Trentanove. Presented by Wisconsin to the U.S. Capitol, 1896. Part of the National Statuary Hall collection. Source: http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/national-statuary-hall-collection/jacques-marquette.

But the emergence of a Catholic Columbus can also be understood as part of a larger trend, particularly apparent in the American West. Take Jacques Marquette. In the late nineteenth century, during the era of the Italian-American “Discovery Days,” Catholics and Protestants near Lake Michigan began to celebrate the life of the French Jesuit missionary who had helped found missions at Sault Sainte Marie and at St. Ignace and who had accompanied Louis Joliet on a 1673 expedition down the Mississippi river. Nineteenth-century promoters cast Marquette as a regional and national founding figure, frequently referring to him as the “first white man” to see the area. In the 1890s, Wisconsinites waged a successful battle against the anti-Catholic American Protective Association to place a statue of Marquette in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C., as one of the two statues representing their state. (The A.P.A., for its part, worried that the statue of a Jesuit in the Capitol would acclimate Americans to Catholic images in government buildings, enabling a smooth transition to Catholic rule when the Pope’s forces inevitably marched on Washington.)[4] Chicagoans, too, embraced the missionary as a city founder. In the boom decades after the Great Fire, Marquette became a useful spiritual symbol for a city often derided as a godless chaos of commerce. In 1924, President Coolidge would declare, “Of the men who laid the foundations of our country, he [Marquette] deserves his place among the foremost.”[5]

Junípero Serra, statue in bronze, by Ettore Cadorin. Presented by California to the U.S. Capitol, 1931. Part of the National Statuary Hall collection. Source:
http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/national-statuary-hall-collection/father-junipero-serra.

Or take Junípero Serra. As the Marquette commemorations were beginning in Wisconsin, Anglo Protestant boosters and prominent Catholics in Southern California began to celebrate California’s Catholic mission past. They worked to preserve and protect the ruins of the eighteenth-century mission buildings, arguing that these buildings were the equals of European cathedrals in beauty, romance, historical importance, and cash value. Indeed, the missions inspired a massive tourist industry that included, by the beginning of the twentieth century, pageants and plays, railroad and automobile tours, and even a spectacular theme hotel in Riverside called the Mission Inn, which once hosted President Taft. In the process, Junípero Serra, the Franciscan friar who led the mission effort, emerged as a popular historical figure. In poetry and prose, much of it published nationally, Serra was heralded as California’s own founding father—a West Coast corollary to the East Coast’s Puritan heritage. Protestant boosters often collaborated with prominent Catholics to celebrate Serra’s legacy, and both sides remarked with pride (if perhaps an excess of optimism) that these celebrations helped break down religious prejudice in California. In 1931, Serra joined Marquette in the National Statuary Hall, as one of California’s two representatives.

At least some of the people celebrating Marquette and Serra saw an explicit connection to Columbus. During the fight to place the statue of Marquette in the Capitol in the 1890s, Marquette supporters argued that if the country could rally behind Columbus, why couldn’t it rally behind Marquette? The Chicago Daily Tribune warned: “If these resolutions [objecting to the Marquette statue] were to be adopted, they would be followed by others demanding the removal of that of Columbus from the Capitol, because he was a Spaniard and a fervent Catholic.”[6] Such an outcome, the paper implied, would be ridiculous. The existence of one Catholic as a founding hero implied the possibility of including more. Tourist literature in California invoked Columbus as well. Take, for example, promotional material put out by the Automobile Club of Southern California in 1915: “What Columbus, Washington and Lincoln have been to the United States of America,” the club proclaimed, “Father Junípero Serra . . . has been to California.”[7]

What, then, can we make of this emergence of Catholic founding figures? To promoters of Marquette and Serra, it often meant the inclusion of their regions’ histories in the national story, a story that they complained (with justification) had too long been dominated by Puritans, Pilgrims, and the East Coast. To many Catholics, and to their non-Catholic allies, it meant a more inclusive, cross-confessional group of national heroes, potentially powerful symbols of Catholic national belonging in a society marked by anti-Catholicism. Finally, it meant that in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, many American Catholics and Protestants were united by their embrace of heroic interpretations of European exploration and empire, Christian evangelization and territorial acquisition. While they challenged exclusively Protestant notions of the nation’s origins and identity, they reinforced the idea that the United States was—from coast to coast—an essentially Christian nation born out of a Christianizing, civilizing project. At the dawn of the American century, this too was a legacy of Columbus Day.

[1]There are interesting theories that Columbus might have been Jewish, but since my subject is the myth rather than the man, those theories will be left for others to explore.

[2]Washington Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, abridged ed. (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1829), 41-42.

[3]Gerald McKevitt, “Christopher Columbus as a Civic Saint: Angelo Noce and Italian American Assimilation,” California History 71, no. 4 (January 1992): 518.

[4]K. Gerald Marsden, “Father Marquette and the A.P.A.: An Incident in American Nativism,” The Catholic Historical Review 46, no. 1 (April 1960): 8.

[5]“Text of Coolidge Speech Before Commerce Club,” Chicago Evening Post, 4 December 1924.

[6]“The Marquette Statue,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 2 March 1896.

[7]Automobile Club of Southern California, California’s Mission Tour (Los Angeles: Geo. Rice & Sons, 1915).

Florida: An Honorary Western State?

by Brandi Denison

This month marks my one-year anniversary of being a Florida resident. In honor of this anniversary and the Republican convention in Tampa, please allow me to indulge an idea that has been brewing since I moved. Since moving to the Sunshine State, I have been gradually piecing together of my new state’s history and I have been struck by the similarities Florida shares with the American West. Allow me to walk you through my cocktail party argument (which, like most cocktail party arguments, is by no means thoroughly vetted—feel free to vet in the comment section).

Via The Last Refuge

1) Florida, like the Trans-Mississippi region, has a lengthy, but largely ignored religious history.

I’m not just talking about the Spanish. (Although St. Augustine, established by the Spanish in 1565, is the oldest continuously occupied European city in North America. It served the dual function as a military fort and the base of missionary operations.)

Via Suncycler

In addition to the Spanish Catholic missions, Florida was the site of the first Protestant religious service in North America. In 1562, Jean Ribault led an expedition of persecuted French Huguenots to North Florida. They founded Fort Caroline, which eventually grew into Jacksonville. This was a short-lived colony. In 1565, the Spanish killed Ribault and most of the colonists. This brief history might signal its absence in many narratives of American religious history, but Florida, like the West, undermines the traditional Puritan-based narrative of American religious history.

2) Like many places in the West, Florida boasts a harsh environment.

Via Medical Reserve Corps of Sarasota County

Admittedly, this might be my weakest argument. During the two tropical storms that hit in May and June, we received nearly 15 inches of rain in one week. My hometown of Grand Junction, Colorado doesn’t receive that much rain in one year. Nevertheless, like Westerners, Floridians are persistently aware of the land and its weather patterns. Instead of snow, drought, and wildfires, wind, tornados, and water batter resilient Floridians. While many people have been victims of hurricanes, tropical depressions, and tropical storms, it seems to me that there is a feeling of bravado for having lived through one. (I felt myself falling victim to this, as I was thinking, “15 inches, that’s all you’ve got, Mother Nature?”) This is not unlike the stories of blizzards I grew up hearing from old-timers, or even from one of Annie Proulx’s Wyoming short stories found in Fine Just the Way it Is.

3) Like the West, the arrival of the railroad transformed Florida’s landscape and population.

This point reminds Western scholars that the expansion of the railroad in the nineteenth century was not just a Western project, but a southern one as well. Florida’s railroad hero was Henry Flagler, a business partner of John D. Rockefeller. When he moved to Florida for his wife’s health in 1878, he was charmed by St. Augustine’s tourism potential. Lacking transportation and accommodations, Flagler did what any nineteenth-century oil tycoon would—he built his own railroad and hotel.

Via My Life in Postcards

The railroad was central to Florida’s population increase. In 1880, when Flagler was still planning the railroad, the population was around 250,000 people. By 1910, when he completed the construction of the railroad to Key West, the population had tripled to 750,000 people.

Additionally, like the West, Flagler saw Florida as a gateway to greater trade relationships. Instead of Asia, Florida was the entry point to Latin America, Cuba, and the newly opened Panama Canal. Like the West, it was a land to be traversed for capital gain.

Finally, because of the railroad, business investors began to see Florida as a tourist site and as a place for new settlements. These investors started using booster campaigns to attract new residents, promising paradise. Many people came, but, like many immigrants to the West, they were disappointed to not find immediate paradise.

4) Like the West, Florida has been subject to intense boom and bust cycles over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In 2007, when the rest of the country was still high on climbing housing prices, the Florida housing market tanked. The Florida housing market was the canary in the coalmine. When NPR’s Planet Money purchased and traced one of those “toxic assets,” they discovered that the majority of the mortgages were in Florida.

Via jenks.net

This isn’t unusual for a state built on dreams. Flagler’s St. Augustine hotel never attracted the tourists he thought it would, and other entrepreneurs who attempted to attract tourists also ended up with empty luxury hotels. While Florida never had a mineral rush (with the expectation of a phosphate rush in the early 1900s), the boom-bust cycle of Florida fits the economic profile of many places in the American West. Its centrality in the economic downturn also signals that like the American West, Florida is not simply a peripheral state. It decides elections and directs the economy.

5) Like the West, Florida has inspired people to go on quests for mythical places, instilled the desire to create utopian communities, and is fertile soil for New Religious Movements.

The boom/bust cycle might be fueled on these dreams. Starting with Ponce de Leon’s quest for the Fountain of Youth, Florida, like the West, has inspired dreams of escape and perfection. Although I can’t recall specific movies, it seems to me that the fantasy of an idyllic orange grove in Florida is akin to the white-picket fence. To many people, Florida represents a place to get away from it all and to start anew. (Of course, as New West historians, we know that this is never possible, and Florida’s folly can be confirmed through Tim Dorsey’s novels.)

Via the Village Voice

This hasn’t stopped people from trying. I’ll skip right over Disney World and mention their master-planned community—Celebration, Florida. Celebration was built on the idea that it was possible to recreate the past of small-town America by making Disney’s Main Street come to life. I only need to remind you of Amy DeRogatis’s excellent book, Moral Geography, which traces the settlement of Ohio by descendents of Puritans who were finally going to get it right. Celebration was a chance for residents to finally achieve the American dream of the perfect community.

The Oratory at Ave Maria University, via Saint Peter's List

In addition to Celebration, there’s Ave Maria, Florida, which was the concept of Tom Monaghan, the conservative Catholic founder of Domino’s Pizza. Ave Maria initially attracted attention because Monaghan stated that the community would prohibit birth control, abortions, and other practices forbidden by Catholic clergy. There was a strong outcry, and Monaghan backed off. Today, Ave Maria is like any other Florida master-planned community with the exception of the Catholic university located in the center of the community. Yet, how many other Western communities were founded on the strict religious ideas of its founder, only to assimilate to the surrounding culture?

I could go on. There’s the Catholic New Religious Movement of Our Lady of Clearwater, the theme park of the Holy Land Experience, and the diversity of religious practices that comes with Cuban immigration. Like the entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, religious leaders have seen opportunity in Florida to establish communities set apart from the pace of modern life.

I’ll leave my extended points here, but I also would like to mention that like the West, Florida’s history has been defined by a history of immigration and racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. Additionally, like many Westerners, Floridians tend towards libertarian political ideas and general enmity towards the federal government (Governor Rick Scott’s refusal of federal funds linked to the ACA is a case in point). Like the West, Florida is a mixture of rural country (with many acres under federal control) and concentrated city centers. Finally, might Florida serve as St Louis did, as the entry point into the “final frontier?”

Ok, so this is just a fun little exercise. Florida is NOT the West in many ways—the fact that my crackers are always soggy is a constant reminder that I’m not in Colorado anymore. Nevertheless, I find it useful in thinking how a concentrated study of religion in the American West does not need to be regionally specific. Instead, the themes that emerge from a regionally-based study can help us to see the rest of American religious history (or even in points outside the US) in new light.

OAH 2012 in Milwaukee: lots of labor history, not so much on religion or the West

by Tisa Wenger, April 27, 2012

I don’t always make it to the OAH (Organization of American Historians), but this year I’d been asked to respond to a panel titled “In the Aftermath of Contact with ‘Others’: The Reformulation of Religious and Racial Identity on the Frontier”—with three papers very much of interest to readers of this blog—so I made my way to Milwaukee for the conference last weekend. Actually I headed to Madison first, where I fit in four days of research at the fantastic Wisconsin Historical Society.  (They have impressive holdings that go far beyond Wisconsin history, so check it out if you ever have the chance. I spent most of my time there immersed in the papers of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union, and related collections.)

At the conference I roomed with an old friend, Colleen O’Neill, author of an excellent book on Navajo labor history, Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century. I bring this up because Colleen also happens to be the associate editor of the Western Historical Quarterly, based at Utah State University, and she mentioned to me that the WHQ is always interested in articles on religion in the American west. So if any of you are working on essays that might fit in that venue, send them her way!

To some extent the OAH program reflected the interests of this year’s president, Alice Kessler-Harris, who is a leading labor historian and gave a very interesting presidential address titled “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Emancipation of Belief.” So there were a few more sessions than usual related to labor and economic history, important topics to be sure, but not really speaking to my interests. And there were correspondingly few either on the American West or in religious history, let alone the two in combination. I noticed one panel on the Joseph Smith papers, but that happened while I was still in Madison. Another session, “Catholic Lay Women and Mid-Century Public Life,” included 1) Mary Henold on Catholic lay women’s responses to Vatican II, raising important questions about methods and sources for studying the “average” lay women, 2) Karen Johnson on Catholic women and interracial activism in mid-century Chicago, and 3) Tim Lacy on the relationship between political position and conversion to Catholicism in the life of Clare Booth Luce. Great stuff, but unless we place Chicago in the West, not really within the scope of this blog.

These exclusions, of course, reflect something of the blind spots of all these fields: mirroring the traditional lack of attention to class, labor, or the West among historians of American religion, labor historians have only relatively recently started to work on the west, and only a handful have found religious history relevant to their concerns. Exceptions to these lines of division on the program included a roundtable panel on “Religion, Corporate Capitalism, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century,” featuring the star-studded lineup of Kate Bowler, Darren Dochuk, Darren Grem, Kathryn Lofton, and Bethany Moreton, and another roundtable on “Religion, Democracy, and the Working Class in Capitalist America, Gilded Age to the Present.” I couldn’t attend either of these panels—one was on Thursday while I was still in Madison, and the other was on Sunday when I was already on my way back home—but they bode well for the developing conversation between religious history and the histories of class and labor.

Finally, back to the session that took me to the conference in the first place, which proved a fruitful exploration of the construction of racial and religious identities within various sites of encounter in the American west. Kristine Gunnell’s paper, “The Daughters of Charity as Cultural Intermediaries,” examined the motivations and racial dynamics of the work of this Catholic order in early twentieth-century Los Angeles, a time of extensive Mexican immigration into Southern California. In “Texas Jews and other Others: Race, Masculinity, and American Identity,” Sarah Imhoff interrogated the interest among some Jews in early twentieth-century Texas in claiming kinship to Native Americans, or somewhat later in “playing Mexican,” as ways of asserting both whiteness and masculinity. For Imhoff these practices reflected an impulse distinct from but parallel to the contemporaneous Zionist movement—one that similarly sought to assert Jewish identity and masculinity, but in this case placing themselves at home in the American West. And finally, in “William McCrary’s Racial Ventriloquism during the Mormon Exodus, 1846-1847,” Max Mueller mined the few available sources in an effort to recover the perspective of McCrary, a racially ambiguous “Negro-Indian” Mormon convert who left the Saints after Mormon leaders refused to accept his claims to prophetic authority. I am looking forward to seeing all three of these pieces in publication.

So that was my experience of the OAH this year. The take-home for me, as it has been so many times before, was—why so little in our field on the program? And one answer to that question is that if we want to see sessions on religion in the American west, then we need to propose them. Kudos to Kristine, Sarah, and Max for doing just that at this year’s conference, and I’d encourage all of you to do the same in future years!

Religion and the Public School System: Why the West Matters

by Tisa Wenger

I recently had the good fortune to read Kathleen Holscher’s forthcoming book Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico, scheduled to appear very soon from Oxford University Press. This is a book that I think deserves a lot of attention, and I thought I’d give the readers of this blog a little sampling of what it might bring to our conversation.

Religious Lessons tells the story of Zellers v. Huff, also known as the “Dixon case,” decided by New Mexico’s Supreme Court in 1949. The case challenged the legality of Catholic sisters teaching in the state’s public schools, as well as the arrangements that had allowed former Catholic parochial schools to become the local public schools in many districts in the state. Upset by such an arrangement in their town, Protestant parents in the town of Dixon filed suit in district court so that their children would not be taught by Catholic sisters in a building that had been a parochial school, with many religious items in the classrooms. The case raised a variety of questions connected to the legal principle of the separation of church and state. Could teachers who were also Catholic nuns wear their religious habits during school hours? What sorts of religious objects and artwork were permissible on school grounds, and where? Was it legal for teachers to provide religious education to Catholic students outside of regular school hours?

This case is not very well remembered today, even by historians, and it is not usually included in the corpus of key First Amendment cases from the mid-twentieth century. But in the late 1940s it sparked a gigantic public outcry across the country, and as Holscher says, “its litigation and the extra-judicial hubbub that accompanied it said more about the relation of church and state within the lives and imaginations of midcentury Americans than precedent-setting cases from the period ever did.” This was the case that motivated the formation of the group Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (POAU), with the primary agenda of challenging all Catholic incursions into the public schools. The Dixon schools inspired the moniker “captive schools,” suggesting a sinister Catholic plan to take over America’s schools, and through them the nation.

Public school children in Blanco, NM, 1942.  From the collection of Kathleen Holscher.

Holscher provides a finely-grained study of the many different players involved in this case, and the complex and contradictory ways in which they understood the issues involved. Local context makes all the difference here. New Mexico, of course, had a very long Catholic history, and there were compelling reasons for many of its school boards to form cooperative arrangements with the church to make public schools possible in their districts. Most local people, who were predominantly Hispanic and Catholic, had few if any reservations about these schools, although as Holscher points out their interests could be quite different from those of the church. Holscher also shows how the sisters who taught in these schools attempted, in a variety of ways, to honor the “nonsectarian” public school standard and to keep specifically Catholic religious teachings and practices apart from their classrooms. But the situation looked very different to the Protestant minority, both Hispanic and Anglo, that had developed in some parts of the state. And from the court’s perspective such schools almost inevitably violated the “nonsectarian” public school standard—which in most of the nation had assumed a generically Protestant religious identity, and had been imported into New Mexico—along with the newer “separationist” standard that advocated a complete removal of any and all religious practice from the public schools.

So, what does this case and this book offer to our ongoing conversation on this blog about religion in the American west? My first thought here is that Holscher places a very western story at the center of a pivotal national debate. Protestant-Catholic tensions and efforts at dialogue in mid-twentieth-century America would have looked very different without the Dixon case and the consequent trope of the “captive schools.” POAU and its allies generalized that story to make it appear that Catholics were taking over schools all over America. Similar public-parochial arrangements did exist elsewhere in the country, especially in cities like Detroit that had significant Catholic populations, but nowhere were they as prevalent as they were in New Mexico. The events Holscher recounts are very specifically rooted in the cultural and religious history of New Mexico—a quintessentially western story. She clearly shows the importance of this story to national debates over church-state separation that are not generally associated with the west. And in so doing she illustrates one of our favorite talking points: just how important it is for historians of American religion to pay attention to the west.

Arizona Immigration Law

By Brandi Denison

“Arizona” is a word that is now spoken with utter disdain, at least in my circles and perhaps in yours too. Unless you have been hiding under a rock, Arizona Immigration Law SB 1070 and the subsequent arrest of American-born truck driver has inspired a range of opinions—that we should boycott the state and it’s products or that we should support the state for acting on an issue that the federal government has stalled on. National conversation about the immigration law provides a moment of visibility to religious activists, as well as a moment for us to reflect on Arizona’s complicated history with immigration, race, and religion.

Randall Stephens pointed readers of the Religion in American History blog to an interview with Catholic Bishop Gerald Kicanas as a way to help us gauge the religious response to this racist law.

Bishop Kincanas has been a long time advocate for immigration reform through the ecumenical movement “No More Deaths,” a non-profit organization dedicated to treating immigrants as human beings—including an effort to making water available to people who attempt the dangerous walk across the Sonora Desert. This organization makes the “radical” statement that “humanitarian aid is never a crime.” While it might be easy to associate this immigration law with loosely veiled religious and political conservatism, No More Deaths reminds us of the counters of religious responses to hot-button issues.

As an emerging American Religions historian, I can’t help but think about Arizona’s complicated history with the United States and the role of Catholicism and Protestantism in the efforts to assimilate Arizona into the Union. In the last 150 years, Arizona has been at the heart of national debates around the oft-cited, vacuous concern of the “direction of our country.” Race and religion have been at the center of these national debates.

Just as a reminder, Arizona was admitted as a state in 1912—the last of the “lower 48.” Less than a hundred years before, Arizona was a part of Mexico. Once the United States military occupied Mexico City during the Mexican-American War, the northern portion (including parts of Colorado, California, Arizona, and New Mexico) became United States Territory. Arizona silver mines tempted Eastern entrepreneurs, but “marauding Indians” and the US government’s inefficiency at protecting US citizens concerned these pioneers and stalled their colonial enterprises. In a familiar “Westerner” move, Arizonians blamed the federal government for their local problems and took matters into their own hands. They responded to perceived federal neglect by forming a militia to fight the Apache Indians who raided settlements.

Arizona remained peripheral to the nation’s problems in the years leading up to the Civil War, but the question of Arizona’s slaving holding status again centered national questions on the periphery. During the Civil War, Arizona became part of the confederacy. Pulled into turmoil over 1,000 miles away, the imagined “Arizona” became a site upon which moral debates were enacted and fought.

In the years after the Civil War, former abolitionists (mostly Protestant) turned their reformation energy into assimilating a variety of “new” United States citizens, including former Mexican citizens and particularly southwest Native Americans “tainted” by Catholicism. These reformers were responding to national concerns that the admission of Arizona as a state would change the direction of the country. Thus, assimilation of these non-white Catholics was the highest priority. Arizona again became a threat because of its provinciality.

Once again, Arizona has become the center of national conversation about the direction of our country by the state government’s attempt to take matters into their own hands. Arizona is once an imagined place for the rest of the country to debate moral issues rooted in race, and again, for many Arizona citizens, a place that feels forgotten by the federal government. It is also again a place where religious organizations are attempting to fill a vacuum, although quenching thirst rather than teaching mechanics and agricultural is the guiding principle today.

I welcome your thoughts about the passage of this bill and the response to it as a moment to reflect on the intersection of race, religion, and politics in the American West.