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E-book Undocumented Saints : The Politics of Migrating Devotions

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Penilaian

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For some people life begins only after death; for others, life is a shifting journey toward a better place. As a kid, I dreamed of becoming a priest, and as a young adult, I lived for a few years in a consecrated community in Florence, Italy.1 Those years joyfully, and painfully, transformed my relation-ship with the Catholic Church. They helped me distinguish the institution from my own desires to both experience transcendent spirituality and to change society. More importantly, that experience allowed me to understand that the Church is not just its formal hierarchy and structure2 but comprises its enormous and diverse body of believers. It is a Church-in-pilgrimage, if you will—one that is diverse and uneven and whose boundaries are often blurry and contradictory.This understanding of the Church as an institution that materializes (and thus necessarily responds to) the needs and concerns and beliefs of all its adherents underpins this project. My conceptualization of the Church as his-torical and cultural archive is, for me, crystallized in the figures of the ver-nacular saints. In the late 1990s, during my time in Tuscany, I attended a class on the Church’s social doctrine. Vera Araújo, a Brazilian sociologist on the faculty, told us, “Certainly, the history of the Church can be explained by the many Church councils and papal encyclical documents. . . . But its history can be also studied and understood by the succession of saints and charisms that have emerged over time, one after the other, as they respond to the needs of the times.”3 That encounter was one of two moments of genesis for this project.The other moment is deeply connected to my immigration to the United States. I had my first encounter with one of the saints discussed in this book, Toribio Romo, while I was visiting my family in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2010. That year, Arizona’s then-governor, Jan Brewer, signed into law the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, also known as Arizona Senate Bill (SB) 1070, introduced by state senator Russell K. Pearce. This law made it a misdemeanor for individuals to be in Arizona without proper documentation and authorized local police to lawfully stop, detain, and ar-rest any individual suspected of fitting that description. With the support of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, SB 1070 expanded racially motivated incursions into Arizona’s Latina/o/x and Chicana/o enclaves, or-ganizations, and allied groups, particularly in Phoenix, which has the fourth-largest Latinx population in the United States.4The ensuing period saw unprecedented, systematic, and explicit terror inflicted on the Latinx communities in Phoenix. Meetings were organized around the state to assess the consequences of the anti-immigrant rhet-oric and legislation. One in particular took place at Holy Family Catholic Church in south Phoenix, an old working-class Latinx neighborhood where my family lived. People there expressed alarm about the multiple raids and abuses of power carried out by the local police force, led by Arpaio: assaults were targeting parents bringing their children to school, those visiting shop-ping centers during the holidays, and people driving to work.Attendees at the south Phoenix event discussed a range of strategies for responding to the terror campaign, from the implementation of a text alert network using radios and cellphones to warn of incoming raids to plans for transferring custody of children to fully documented family members if parents were deported. The gathering ended with a community prayer led by a local Catholic priest. This community organizing event, held in the church, exemplified the connections between social-civil activism and faith-based services that have historically grounded civil rights movements in the United States.5 As Jonathan E. Calvillo explains, for many immigrants living in the United States “faith infused these residents with a sense of fight that kept them pushing on, in the face of immediate financial needs, deportation, and sustained inequality.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

282 CAL u

Penerbit

USA : Oxford University Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

369 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780197630228

Klasifikasi

282

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Roman Catholic Churches

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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