Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  MEXICAN AMERICANS AND THE CHURCH IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA

  While black Americans in the 1960s captured the attention of the nation through the mass protests of the civil rights movement, Latinos, a smaller and less visible minority group, began their own movement toward freedom. The religious impulses of the civil rights movement soon inspired activists in other ethnic groups that had been denied first-class citizenship. Other theologians and activists took up the mantle of liberation theology, whose most prominent advocates came from Latin America. They argued that God was in solidarity with oppressed peoples everywhere. For black theologian James Cone, this meant that God was “black,” a term he meant metaphorically rather than phenotypically. For Latino Christians, God was living among the struggling farmworkers, denied decent housing or minimal health care, exposed to pesticides and disease, paid miserable wages for long hours of uncertain seasonal work, and turned away even at the door of the one true Church. Latinos took action to desegregate and implant an ethic of social justice into an ethnically divided Catholic Church.

  Cesar Chavez, a Latino Catholic and farm laborer, organized farmworkers in the Central Valley of California. He took his inspiration from a highly personal and mystical folk Catholicism, both drawing from and reacting to his own tradition in a way much like Martin Luther King did with his black Baptist upbringing. “We raise two things in Delano: grapes and slaves,” he said in 1969, at the height of the struggle. “But we will win with two weapons: dedication and disciplined sacrifice.” Chavez organized a series of farm worker strikes in the produce fields in the 1960s, where migrant laborers of Mexican descent toiled for low pay in terrible conditions. Migrant workers had briefly captured the attention of the nation in the 1930s when the “Okies,” whites from the American South and Southwest, migrated to California in search of work and often ended up picking produce in the fields. Mexican migrant laborers historically had been exploited with impunity and had difficulty organizing, since farm laborers had been exempted from many of the formative labor laws of the New Deal era.

  Chavez had grown up in Arizona, the child of struggling Mexican parents who once had been landowners. As a young man, he labored in the fields and later served in the military during World War II. After the war, he worked crops in California’s Central Valley. Prior to his leadership of the United Farm Workers, Chavez began to work with Catholic priests and organizers. He learned about the history of Catholic social justice thought from the traditional writers such as St. Francis of Assisi, as well as Gandhi. In his work with members of the Catholic left in the 1950s and early 1960s, Chavez was exposed to Rerum Novarum and other documents central to the history of Catholic thought on labor organizing. Issued in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, subtitled “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor,” decried “the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class,” defended the rights of laborers to organize unions, and set a pattern for Catholic economic social teaching over the next century.

  Chavez began to marry his political consciousness of the oppression of farm workers together with his religious faith in the worth of even the lowest toilers. In the early 1960s, seeking to unionize farm workers but finding the Community Services Organization resistant to labor organizing of that type, Chavez turned his attention to what became the United Farm Workers. Cesar Chavez deployed much the same philosophy and techniques of nonviolence that had worked successfully in the black civil rights struggle but added to it religiously based protest rituals such as fasts.

  Chavez drew on the rich legacy of the social teachings of the Church, and of Latino spirituality, to empower La Causa. Chavez experienced resistance from the Catholic establishment but knew that the church could be a powerful force on behalf of justice for farm workers. Chavez asked the Church to “sacrifice with the people,” to exert true servanthood. Some of Chavez’s associates took his call further. Figures such as Chicano activist Reyes Lopes Tijerina led groups who squatted on land they believed still rightfully belonged to Hispanic settlers who had been there centuries before the white American arrival in the Southwest. Other local Latino leaders occupied Catholic churches, insisting on Latino representation and the appointment of Latino Catholic priests to oversee ethnic parishes dominated by Latinos. Other voices from within the Latino Catholic community attacked the historic devaluing of the Latino presence in the Church. Their vision of social justice built on left Catholic traditions that emphasized community and God’s identification with the poor.

  Chavez developed a redemptive faith in nonviolence that was a Chicano Catholic version of Martin Luther King’s black Baptist faith. From Gandhi, for example, Chavez learned “moral jujitsu,” the art of “keeping the opponent off balance while adhering to your own principles.” Nonviolence called for organizing mass numbers of small actions, which is how Chavez saw Gandhi’s genius. “Strategy for nonviolence takes a tremendous amount of our time—strategy against the opposition, and strategy to strengthen our support. We can’t let people get discouraged. If there’s no progress, they say nonviolence doesn’t work. They begin to go each and everywhere. And it’s only when they are desperate that people think violence is necessary”—as Chavez witnessed a number of times during the movement. “The churches had to get involved in the struggle,” the devout Catholic had put it. “Everything they had taught for two thousand years was at stake in this struggle.”

  Chavez put his own words into action in 1968. His most striking public protest was the penitential fast. After the Delano grape strike had dragged on for over two years, and some militant strikers were found with guns, he informed his staff the he would take a penitential fast, an act to repent of the sins of the movement and renew the spirit of nonviolence. Chavez told the National Council of Churches that his fast was “informed by my religious faith and by my deep roots in the Church. It is not intended as a pressure on anyone but only as an expression of my own deep feelings and my own need to do penance and be in prayer.” In 1968, Chavez walked out of the Filipino Hall in Delano and to the UFW headquarters, which soon became itself a site of pilgrimage. Mark Day, a Franciscan priest and Chavez supporter, celebrated Mass there each day and commented that “the huge banner of the Union is against the wall, and the offerings the people make are attached to the banner: pictures of Christ from Mexico, two crucifixes, a large picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe—the whole wall is covered with offerings.” Another witness described it as a “monastic cell” for Chavez. As both an authentic witness and a brilliant maneuver to bring attention to the movement, the social fast was a combination of Gandhian struggles of resistance, the tradition of self-denial and civil disobedience of figures such as Henry David Thoreau, and the suffering servant popular in Mexican American piety.

  Chavez’s close associate and dynamic organizer, Dolores Huerta, noted the extent of opposition to not only the fast but also the Mexican Catholic symbols that pervaded the movement. Some in the union strongly opposed the influence of religion. “I know it’s hard for people who are not Mexican to understand,” Huerta later said, “but this is part of the Mexican culture—the penance, the whole idea of suffering for something, of self-inflicted punishment. It’s a tradition of very long standing. In fact, Cesar has often mentioned in speeches that we will not win through violence, we will win through fasting and prayer.” In 1968, calling a meeting of Mexican and Filipino farm workers, he said that “I was going to stop eating until such time as everyone in the strike either ignored me or made up their minds that they were not going to be committing violence.” During the fast, he lay in bed, continuing to work and taking communion and resisting pressures on him both internally and externally to quit the fast. “Very few people could see all the spiritual and psychological and political good that was coming out of it,” he later recounted. Examining his past closely, he concluded that “if I’m going to save my soul, it’s going to be through the struggle for social justice.”

  The fast came to an end in March 19
68, as Chavez broke bread with Senator Robert F. Kennedy and others. He then concluded with his famous statement:

  When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So, it is how we use our live that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!

  The farm workers saw the connection between the black civil rights movement and the Mexican American farm workers’ struggle. When Chavez sensed, at the beginning of his struggles, that staff people “didn’t thoroughly understand the whole idea of nonviolence,” he requested volunteers who had been involved with CORE and SNCC in the South. They proved to be “very good at teaching nonviolent tactics.” He also enlisted student volunteers from the Free Speech Movement and other settings. “If we were nothing but farm workers in the Union now,” he ruminated, “we’d only have about 30 percent of all the ideas that we have. There would be no cross-fertilization, no growing. It’s beautiful to work with other groups, other ideas, and other customs. It’s like the wood is laminated.”

  From that time until the 1970 contract between laborers and growers in the Delano area, Chavez employed his combination of mystical Catholicism, the philosophy of nonviolence, and creative strategies of action and defiance. In the process, he captured national attention. Like the black Protestants who dominated parts of the civil rights movement, Chavez drew on Latino spiritual traditions to empower his cause. Steeped in the traditions of Mexican popular religion, Chavez picked up on a suggestion from a farm worker who asked to bring a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe to a march in Oxnard in 1969. Soon, La Morenita, with her deep resonance of what it means to be a Mexican Catholic, appeared at the front of most of the marches of La Causa. In other areas, altarcitos and nightly prayer vigils provided a setting for meetings and union card signings. Often Catholic masses were offered at the end of strike days, followed by union organizing meetings and prayers directed toward seeking the will of God toward the future action of the unions. Chavez put into action religion casera, “homespun religion,” the kind of mixture of official and popular Catholicism that was theorized by the Latino theologians, especially Virgilio Elizondo, in the 1970s. As Chavez himself put it, concerning the idea of holding prayer vigils with makeshift altars near the fields during the course of strikes, “The ideas came from the workers themselves. When you search out these ideas from among the people you can get out of almost any jam. This is the real meaning of nonviolence, as far as I’m concerned.” In his Good Friday letter of 1969, he expressed his philosophy that “We advocate militant nonviolence as our means for social revolution and to achieve justice for our people . . . we shall overcome and change” the farm laborer system “not by retaliation or bloodshed but by a determined nonviolent struggle carried on by those masses of farm workers who intend to be free and human.”

  Chavez experienced resistance from the Catholic establishment (not unlike what Martin Luther King had seen in the Protestant establishment). As he once put it, referring to the movement in Delano, “The church has been such a stranger to us, that our own people tend to put it together with all the powers and institutions that oppose them.” But he knew that the church could be a “powerful moral and spiritual force which cannot be ignored by any movement.” For Chavez, as for liberation theologians generally, the church was spiritually mandated to side with the poor. He asked the Church to “sacrifice with the people,” to exert true servanthood.

  Chavez’s piece “The Mexican-American and the Church,” later widely reprinted, contains some of his most compelling ruminations on the relationship of spirituality, social organizing, and the organized church. Chavez recounted how he gradually had learned to involve the Church in the struggle of rural working-class Mexican Americans. At first, it was with the California Migrant Ministry, who implemented the kind of liberation theology that, in Mississippi, bore fruit as the Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches. Chavez commented a number of times on the degree to which Protestants were more active than the Church itself, especially through the activism of the California Migrant Ministry, which mobilized Protestant clergy who were on the front lines of the Delano strike and were often arrested with the farm workers. This compelled Chavez to raise the question of “why OUR Church was not doing the same. We would ask, ‘Why do the Protestants come out here and help the people, demand nothing, and give all their time to serving farm workers, while our own parish priests stay in their churches, where only a few people come, and usually feel uncomfortable?’” Local priests were recalcitrant even about loaning a building for a strike. Later, the Church appointed sympathetic priests, such as Mark Day, to minister for the workers.

  Chavez believed there was a “deep need for spiritual advice” when workers were struggling in a protracted conflict: “Without it we see families crumble, leadership weaken, and hard workers grow tired. And in such a situation the spiritual advice must be given by a friend, not by the opposition. What sense does it make to go to Mass on Sunday and reach out for spiritual help, and instead get sermons about the wickedness of your cause?” He called on Mexican American groups not to ignore the power of the Church, and for workers to defend priests who might get themselves into trouble because of their commitment to seeing justice. “What do we want the Church to do?” Chavez concluded. “We don’t ask for more cathedrals. We don’t ask for bigger churches or fine gifts. We ask for its presence with us, beside us, as Christ among us. We ask the Church to sacrifice with the people for social change, for justice, and for love of brother. We don’t ask for words. We ask for deeds. We don’t ask for paternalism. We ask for servanthood.”

  For all his various and diverse influences, Chavez was, as one writer and observer put it at the time of his death, “essentially a lay Catholic leader,” with his origins less in community-organizing radicalism than in the cursillos, the lay Catholic revival movement which spread from Spain to the United States in the 1950s and taught ordinary Catholics of social justice. “What many of the liberals and radicals on the staff of the union could never understand,” he concluded, “was that all the fasts, the long marches, the insistence on personal sacrifice and the flirting with sainthood were not only publicity gimmicks, they were the essential Chavez.” The same could be said for Martin Luther King and the other (lesser-known) figures traced in this chapter. All of them found in religious tradition the right teachings about and sustenance for overturning America’s racial and economic order. Religion radicalized them to confront racism dramatically and effectively. In doing so, they reoriented many people into conceptualizing what “religion” and “race” even meant as social phenomena, because they disrupted the bounds of habitation that those terms had long defined.

  CONCLUSION: THE INTERNATIONAL IMPACT OF THE MOVEMENT

  The rich history and historiography of the American civil rights movement grows even richer when the broad implications of the freedom struggle domestically and internationally are understood. That is even more true when the diversity of characters and impulses, religious and otherwise, that drove the movement forward are considered fully. The story grows in complexity and significance, for example, when including the Latino civil rights movement, one which drew from a Catholic symbology and leadership as deeply as did the southern black civil rights movement on evangelical Protestantism. The international impact of the civil rights movement is also impressive, as gauged particularly through figures such as Allen Boesak and Desmond Tutu in South Africa, and even into contemporary political heroes such as Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar. In effect, the language and movement culture of the black American civil rights movement has become a kind of international script for the working of freedom struggles everywhere.

  The limitations of religiously based social movements h
ave to be acknowledged, as well. In the post–civil rights era, some suggested that America had moved into a “post-racial” era, despite the overwhelming statistics documenting racial inequality in American society. In particular, both the black American civil rights movement and the antiapartheid crusade in South Africa helped grow a black middle class. At the same time, structural inequalities of opportunity, income, education, and life prospects remained relatively immune to the morally impassioned calls of the civil rights crusades. As a result, the movements transformed attitudes and opened up some opportunities, but religiously based crusades would have marginal impact on structural inequalities and institutionally racist patterns of the distribution of wealth and power that were deeply embedded in the United States. Contemporary versions of civil rights movements, notably including the #blacklivesmatter uprising, have begun to address those issues. Thus, activists who have mined the connection between religion, civil rights, and social justice will have plenty of work to do in the future. But as theologians and activists discovered in the late twentieth century, liberation theologies would struggle to have a real-world impact in an age of political conservatism and hardening economic divisions.

  7

  Liberation Theologies and Problems of Religious Freedom in a Conservative Age

  THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTS TRANSFORMED AMERICA socially and politically. Those changes became law in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the significant extensions of the New Deal, such as Medicare and Medicaid, signed into law under Lyndon Johnson. At the same time, although much less noticed at the time, the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 dramatically altered the country demographically over the next five decades. The 1960s proved to be as revolutionary as proclaimed not in the much-vaunted student movements or headline-grabbing brief-lived organizations, but in providing the legal foundations for an America that never before had existed—an America based on the legal principle (if not the de facto reality) of racial equality. By the millennium, the effect of these changes was apparent and would continue remaking the country socially into the twenty-first century.