Church Can Be An Unfriendly Place for Immigrants & Others

Rosenberg, Texas  1957

When I was five years old I enrolled in a Catholic School two blocks from my house.  I was the only Latino/Mexican child in my class.  There were two other kids like me in the whole school (grades 1-8), but I didn't notice them for a few years.  I was too preoccupied with my own survival.

Its hard to say just how much was my own perception of racism or the real attitudes of the parents and teachers (who were mostly nuns).  What is unquestionable was the Jim Crow situation in the town. It was deeply segregated (see my book Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire:  Unearthing Deep South Narratives from a Texas Graveyard)

A few months after starting first grade I decided one morning that I wanted to have Holy Communion.  The other kids in my class couldn't do this because they had not made their First Communion yet - in that school it was normally done in second grade.  I know for sure my parents had informed the nuns that I did indeed have my first communion, just after my fifth birthday.  The year before a  a nun named Sister Joachim, from the Mexican Church across town, helped my mother enroll me in the Catholic school "across the tracks."  I was four and very bored at home.  I did great in first grade, was ahead of everyone in my class, and even prepared for the First Communion.

After the school year ended, the priest at the Mexican Church suggested my parents enroll me in the "white" Church, which happened to be only 1 block from my house.  I could even walk to school safely, just crossing a quiet street to get there.

I was supposed to go into second grade, no questions asked.  However, the nuns thought I was way too young at 4 to be with kids who were 6 and 7.  Maybe they were right.  But they should have remembered that I already had my First Communion (the school was very small, only 30 kids in each grade).  The day I decided to walk up to the sanctuary to receive the communion, the nuns experienced selective memory and dragged me away.  I was terrified and sad.  I got in major trouble with them.  I am sure I told them I had every right to be at the railing of the sanctuary, but why would they listen to a five year old?

It was the beginning of a eight year long ambivalent experience.  While I received an excellent education in this Catholic school, I always felt most of the nuns didn't like me.  I was often left out of invitations at birthday parties.  I never forgot about being turned away from Holy Communion.  

Redemption came in 7th grade when a new teacher came in from Rhode Island.  Her name was Ms. Silvia.  She was the first one to take me seriously (besides Mrs. Wappel in 2nd grade).  I flourished with Ms. Silvia and will always appreciate how she showed me different things about the literary and cultural world that I would have never known.  By the second year I had Ms. Silvia for English class I was the top student.  

Ms. Silvia passed away fairly young.  I was never able to thank her for saving my mind.  Maybe being Portuguese (her family name had been Silva) made her more empathic to people who weren't "white."

One last note on Churches and segregation.  Martin Luther King is credited with saying that the most segregated place in America on Sunday mornings is the church...

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Brooklyn Immigrant Congregations Clash

By SAM DOLNICK  -  Published: December 28, 2010 - The New York Times

• The United Methodist church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is anything but united.

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Chinese ushers wait to begin their church services as the Rev. Hector Laporta, who leads the Latino congregation, called the Fourth Avenue United Methodist Church, leaves the chapel.

Two pastors preach from the same pulpit and live in the same parsonage next door, but they are barely on speaking terms and openly criticize each other’s approach to the faith.


In the church’s social hall, two camps eye each other suspiciously as one finishes its meal of rice and beans while the other prepares steaming pans of chicken lo mein.


Two very different congregations share the soaring brick building on Fourth Avenue: a small cadre of about 30 Spanish-speaking people who have worshiped there for decades and a fledgling throng of more than 1,000 Chinese immigrants that expands week by week — the fastest-growing Methodist congregation in New York City.


The Latinos say they feel steamrolled and under threat, while their tenants, the Chinese, say they feel stifled and unappreciated. Mediators have been sent in, to little effect. This holiday season, there are even two competing Christmas trees.


“This pastor is very rude to us,” said the Rev. Zhaodeng Peng, who heads the Chinese congregation with his wife.


The Rev. Hector Laporta, leader of the Latino church, responded, “He really has an anger problem.”
The standoff mirrors a tug of war that has played out for generations in New York, where immigrant groups — some established, some newly arrived — jostle on crowded sidewalks and in narrow tenements for space, housing and jobs...more