Aztlan in Arizona: Civic Narrative and Ritual Pageantry in Mexican America

Dolores Rivas Bahti, Ph.D.

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"My dearest Father in Christ: Today, I take pen in hand to relate some impressions of America." [1] With these lines P. Alejo de la Virgen del Carmen Coll began a November 1912 letter about a journey from Iberia to his new post in Arizona. The missive to Provincial Vicar Lucas de San Jose Tristany in Tarragona chronicled a turbulent trans-Atlantic passage to New York and overland rails stretching south- and westward from Atlanta, New Orleans and the Mississippi River Delta toward San Antonio. "Thus far, I encountered an America true to images conjured by poets and travelers," he wrote, "then everything changed." P. Alejo recoiled from the limitless landscapes of New Mexico and Arizona. His dismay increased upon arriving in Sonora town, the Arizona mining settlement where P. Pedro de San Elias Heriz planned to establish a Carmelite parish. "I cannot share his optimism, since I could never have imagined a place like this. I sometimes think that Your Reverences have established our mission in the worse part of America." Determined to do as God and his Order commanded, he added, "I know that these lines cannot please Your Reverence, but I will neither lie to you nor embellish my view of this reality. I will now undertake to learn English, for I cannot be effective in these parts without it. Yesterday I spoke with the Superintendent of Hayden. He told me that he wanted to donate a parcel and five hundred dollars for a chapel in Hayden. I forgot to mention that in Tucson as in Phoenix, we were treated most kindly. Father Enrique accompanied us from Tucson to Sonora."

This letter from the Clifton-Morenci district affirmed a communal vision that relocated the Spanish Discalced Carmelite Order then in northern Mexico and transported others from coastal Iberia and Goa in India to Arizona. These transfers took place precisely in time and space that scholars of Mexican America have framed within Ôrace"- and Ôclass"-based critiques of Western imperialism. [2] Imperial displays shaping postcolonial discourse about the internal colony as Orient in North America also resonate with P. Alejo"s errand into the wilderness. And, while local formulations of Mexican American culture in frontier theater and border journals also reflect the discursive reach of ideas about an internal Orient called Aztl‡n, Spanish Discalced Carmelite narratives demonstrate yet more specific manifestations of Mexican America in early Arizona.

In Arizona, Carmelite parishes promulgated civic cum cultural loyalty as signs of Mexican American identity. [3] In a transnational district defined by sustained exploitation of contested land and labor, these relationships ranged from global seats of religious piety in France, Rome, and Iberia to Carmelite provinces in Mexico and the United States. The level and pace of religious forms in these sites of cultural contact also telescope social responses to popular constructions of national identity within a region redefined as well by statehood, regional expansion, and increasingly diverse immigrant groups. [4]

The location, frequency and scale of ritual patriotism portray Mexican American culture in terms of regional growth that drew migrants and ministers into Arizona. U.S. census figures two years prior to P. Alejo"s arrival summon images of young native and foreign-born Catholic populations located within small regional copper mining districts. At first glance, they describe growing labor sectors distributed geographically along principle river basins. These areas also contained church populations and nativity rates indicating regional strides toward relative social stability. Yet, as historian Mary Melcher has noted, one of five Mexican American infants in 1924 perished before their first birthdays. [5] Mexican American infant mortality surpassed Native American child loss, a function of Ôsocial childbirth" amid poor sanitation and medical care, rural poverty, and urban overcrowding. This poignant image of maternal and infant health in agricultural fields, shantytowns, and rail yards casts disparities of economic prosperity and abject poverty into unsettling relief.

Dynamic combinations of ritual worship and popular performance of actual or mythic regional events overlay this social grid. Performance theorist Richard Scheckner visualizes a braided structure where some ritual performances engage and interpret site-specific political, social and economic power, while others aspire to public entertainment. [6] Ritual and pleasure thus described public entertainments within which Mexican America in Arizona negotiated national and cultural integrity. Gadsden Arizona, the last territorial acquisition of the intra-continental Union, represents a mythic communal space where pubic performance designated actors and their audiences within a cultural geography of public Catholic ritual.

State formation in Arizona played out regional ritual culture within a nexus of geographic dispossession and cultural recovery. [7] Sacred space of Yaqui immigrant culture, for example, embodied a history of disputed lands, contested political boundaries, ambiguous social relationships, unrelenting cultural change, and expanding spiritual and capital labors along the San Francisco, San Pedro, and Santa Cruz rivers. Spiritual labors within Carmelite religious precincts in the Tucson Diocese portrayed these and other themes of Mexican American popular culture through public celebrations.

In the high desert river region where P. Alejo began his religious labors, Carmelite parishes nurtured local demonstrations of sacro-secular unity, social order, and cultural specificity in rural and urban ministries. Carmelite priests documented processes of national identity formation found in public forms of communal worship. Correspondence and publications with formal portraits and candid images describe commemorative rituals, dedicated vocations and devotional societies, ritual processions within religious precincts, Spanish plays in parish halls, and festival parades in commercial districts. As rural populations drew toward growing urban districts, journals, memoirs, travel chronicles, popular literature, and civic oratory generated local Spanish-language print culture and journal narratives about Mexican American culture. Public pageantry reflected public spirituality through serial images of ritual processions and civic parades that provided sequential testimony about how Mexican American religious communities shared and observed religious and civic events. Photo images likewise conveyed collective and individual viewpoints and authenticated the discursive momentum of regional Mexican American cultural identity. [8]

Three intricate and integrated factors shaped how Spanish Discalced Carmelite priests such as P. Alejo viewed their frontier tenures. As a mendicant missionary sect of the Roman Church, the Discalced Carmelite Order historically negotiated adverse geographical, economic, and political conditions in a range of global ministries. In addition, as immigrants to Spanish-speaking North America, Discalced Carmelite priests acquired and applied forms of regional cultural fluency to missions that in turn increased over decades of social reform in Mexico and the United States. Measured colonial experience, cultural fluency, and political acumen gained in global missions thus prepared the Order to negotiate new and known conditions in Arizona.

Less than a week before Arizona acquired full-fledged Union membership in February 1912, Tucson Bishop Henri Granjon assigned the Carmelites to Winkelman, Hayden, Kelvin, Sonoratown, Christmas, Arivaipa, Mammoth, Oracle, Barcelona, and the American section of Ray mine. [9] P. Alejo in November joined four Spanish priests whose skills and ideas derived from training and experience in post-Imperial Spain, British India, and pre-Revolutionary Mexico. [10] Since provincial leaders in Arizona emerged primarily among Spanish missionaries with prior experience in the transnational region, a brief survey of Carmelite reform in Mexico is in order.

Mexican Points of Departure

Nationalist aversion to foreign clergy in Porfirian Mexico hindered efforts to re-order convents transformed by generations of conservative and insurgent priests and by religious practice crippled by expropriation (confiscation of church property), exclaustration (laws against cloistered communities), excommunication (isolation, segregation of foreign clergy), and exile (expulsion of Spanish clergy). [11]

Modernist claims to the contrary, Mexican religious prelates in time not only tolerated but also mandated foreign priests. By the first decade of the twentieth century, public religious practice kept pace measured applications of the Laws of Reform. [12] Spanish Carmelites with other sects of the Roman Church noted conservative concessions to clergy dictated by small and dwindling numbers of Mexican religious vocations. In response, Provincial Vicar Ezequiel de los Sagrados Corazones, of Navarra, dispatched P. Pedro de San El’as Heriz and P. Justino de Santa Teresa Equileta to Mexico. [13]

In a Carmelite history published in Tucson, P. Eduardo del Nino Jesus Farre in 1927 recalled how Arizona priests P. Basilio Delgado and P. Damian de Jesus Mar’a y JosŽ established religious confraternities, negotiated ecclesiastic imperatives in Spain, and managed the rigors of frontier ministries, physical distress and abject poverty. In 1904, P. Ezequiel del Sant’ssimo Sacramento de Jesus, in Rome, wrote P. Pedro de San El’as. "It serves no purpose to provoke the Mexican fathers. Grant them peace and work silently, not to bring them to strict observance of our Rules but rather to prepare houses wherever they are and by whatever means to gradually achieve restoration." P. Pedro in 1909 described members of the Order as refugees from Mexico disposed to serve as confessors, ministers, and missionaries to English and Spanish-speaking subjects in the United States. Tucson by 1915 provided an urban base for a swiftly escalating lattice of regional parishes and similarly mushrooming labor contexts in southeastern Arizona. [14]

Northward migrations also extended mythic space along the Santa Cruz toward Guadalupe, located just north of the Gila River near Phoenix. [15] Yaqui ritual nurtured in the Carmelite Chapel of Santa Rosa de Lima, for example, followed the northernmost banks of the Santa Cruz River to Guadalupe, where a pastorela entitled "Pastorel para el nacimiento de Nuestro Senor," appears to have traveled with a Yaqui maestro from Sonora"s Valle del Yaqui. The script interspersed phonetically transcribed Spanish pastorela verses and Yaqui songs. Iberian and Indian traditions melding Spanish ritual and indigenous oral history acquired meaning according to what was understood and what was intended. The play, which initiated a liturgical cycle from nativity to crucifixion, conforms to a New World spectrum of Christian reenactments. Anita Louise Alvarado traces this ceremonial dynamic to rituals in Catalonia and the Basque region. [16]

Arizona Points of Arrival

As national conflict in 1911 engulfed northern Mexico, the borderlands became a wobbly realm of capitalist development and labor unrest. [17] The Arizona-Sonora borderlands reflected regional shifts in power relations, property distribution, institutional loyalties, and national economies. While not all priests considered themselves to be at precisely the right place in time, Carmelite priests still gained civic status through informed conduct, prolonged contact. and vast investments of time, human resources, discipline, and physical energy. In January 1912, P. Pedro occupied a small room in Winkleman that alternately served as home, sacristy and office where he ministered to Catholic populations in Sonora, Hayden, Christmas, and Kelvin. "I"m making slow progress here," he wrote P. Lucas, in Tarragona. "I travel to Hayden by train every weekday and return on foot to prepare about 55 children for their first communions. I now have a rail pass from here to Ray, where we have begun to make adobes for the church that will be built on the land you visited." [18]

In June 1913, Bishop Henri Granjon assigned parishes in Morenci, Metcalf, and Duncan to the Spanish order. Situated along the Gila and San Francisco rivers and Chase Creek in Greenlee County, these mine towns connected with the New Mexico and Arizona Railroad at Guthrie. The rail spur veered eastward along the border, crossing southern New Mexico through Lordsburg and leading to El Paso and Ciudad Juarez toward Mexico. West of Lordsburg, the rails connected to the Northern Railroad serving Solomonville and Globe-Miami mining camps and to the Southern Pacific Railroad headed to Tucson. Just as rails and rivers connected mining camps to company headquarters in southeastern Arizona, rails and roads knit local priests to regional parishes. In 1914, Holy Family church in Tucson joined parishes in Florence that included mission chapels in Casa Grande, Illinois, Superior, Picacho, and Oracle.

From these urgent beginnings, Carmelite ministries served constituencies in copper towns, cotton fields, and outlying ranches in the southeastern reaches of the state. Adapting Iberian forms to Arizona contexts, however, was both harsh and swift in the 276-mile Clifton-Salomonville district, the epicenter of borderland capitalism, unskilled labor, and radical labor activism. [19] This slippery slope was soon evident when Spanish Carmelites cultivated the support of mine owners and company managers in rural townships and from lay religious and well-established families in Mexican American colonias. Images of duplicitous foreign clergy then coalesced around the Spanish immigrant/exile priests who represented the two-pronged threat to class struggle: religion corrupted ideas; capitalism monopolized land and labor.

The wake of widespread anticlericalism in northern Mexico; misguided efforts to garner capital support; and escalating tension among ethnic groups later shifted spiritual goals toward counteracting Protestant inroads. As obligatory shifts in religious devotion and seminary petitions for Arizona revenue eclipsed efforts to increase regional Carmelite ranks, P. Jose Maria Mele urged P. Lucas de San Jose to require obedience to a strict routine of religious devotion. In November 1915, P. Pascasio Heriz wrote Visiting Provincial P. Lucas de San Jose about these contingencies. "Your Reverence must establish a post for P. Alejo in Morenci. P. Pedro believes that P. Jose Mar’a would not do well here because he is reserved and reluctant. The insurmountable cliffs and spiritual burdens [cuestas] of Ray are not for the faint of heart." [20]

Carmelite responses to the social value of Catholicism in the United States included the voices of Catholic laborers who alone or with their families hoped to reproduce Catholic ritual from Ireland, France, Italy and Poland. English-language proficiency was a cultural imperative: some priests learned through formal programs and language classes; others improved through sustained interactions with English-speaking parishioners about internal economic and social conditions in the diocese, in parishes, in each township. Intellectual exercises such as writing, oratory, and ritual performance gradually introduced specific Carmelite practice to regional religious repertoires. [21]

A spiritual pilgrimage in search of sanctuary and secure networks of religious practice lured Carmelite priests toward Arizona parishes in urban working-class neighborhoods, where status predicated on public avowals of cultural solidarity; social effects of capital gains and organized labor; and Carmelite service discursively aligned church affiliation and national loyalty. Carmelite ministries activated regional Spanish-language ritual and print culture in every township through discursive venues such as ritual pageantry, civic oratory, and journal narrative. Public ceremonial processions, for example, symbolize local civil and religious pageantry in the United States. In Tucson, local papers reported popular hymns and (bi)national anthems celebrating local fusions of Mexican and American national identity. For example, Holy Family Church planned and adorned cultural displays for Fourth of July parades and ceremonies with the Carmelite banner unfurled beside the Mexican and United States flags.

Carmelite parishes traced a sequential arc of cultural influence in southern Arizona: first, as European extensions of Carmelite reform in northern Mexico; and then, as regional sources of revenue for Spanish seminaries and, ultimately, as cultural agents of Ibero-Mexican pastoral traditions in Arizona. Mexican American rituals portrayed Mexican American nationalism through Carmelite ritual, secular entertainments, civic oratory, and popular journalism. [22] Rural missions and urban parishes together created a petit cosmos of Carmelite ministries that provided civic and spiritual guidance to local families, itinerant workers, long-term residents, and immigrant laborers. If public forms of religious worship can be viewed as markers of social stability and cultural consolidation, Spanish Carmelite sources document social processes of being Mexican and becoming American in southern Arizona. [23] Carmelite P. Justino de la Sta. Teresa Equileta in October, 1918 left Mazatlan for Holy Family and Santa Cruz parishes in Tucson, where he served until just before his death in India in 1939. P. Basilio Delgado, P. Jose Maria Mele and P. Fernando Nagore served in Arizona after sojourns in Mazatlan and Durango. Fathers Carmello Corbella, Lucas de San Jose Tristany and Carmelite Brothers Simon de Jesus Fuste and Angel Fort served until the Spanish Civil War called them to Spain. Together, members of the Spanish Discalced Carmelite Order introduced Carmelite spirituality and social authority to Tucson in Arizona, the heart of Aztlan.

14 November, 2001

AHS Loan Inventory Narrative

Loaned to Dolores Rivas Bahti, Ph.D. for a presentation at "The Interpretation and Representation of Latino Cultures: Research and Museums," a national conference at the Smithsonian Institution, a collection of eighty (80) 36 mm. slides and two hundred and thirty (230) b/w photographic prints. The slides duplicate some of approximately five hundred (500) 5 x 7 representative images made from 36 mm. copy negatives of original prints held in the Spanish Discalced Carmelite Archive in Mallorca, Spain.

These representative slides and photo images represent a portion of early twentieth-century visual evidence about Mexican American cultural history in early Arizona. Sorted thematically and chronologically, they create a visual narrative of Spanish Carmelite influence in southern Arizona during early statehood: rural churches; Holy Family and Santa Cruz churches in Tucson; ritual processions and civic parades, religious and secular theater, spiritual and recreational events; dedications and commemorations.

In addition to using the slides for the presentation, the representative archive will also be shown to Smithsonian officials to acquire support to finish the catalogue process and make the collection available for scholarly research. The loan period extends from Nov. 15, the date of departure from Tucson to Washington to Nov. 30, shortly after the date of return.

Copyright © 2003 Smithsonian Institution