Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America's Largest Church by Matovina Timothy

Author:Matovina, Timothy [Matovina, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

6

CHAPTER

Worship and Devotion

Alvaro Dávila was surprised at his fellow parishioners, but more surprised at himself. Leaders at his parish, Nuestra Señora de la Merced (Our Lady of Mercy) in Chicago, had invited worshipers to wear the typical dress of their native countries to Sunday Mass. Back home in Guatemala, Dávila had been ashamed of the indigenous part of his heritage. He “learned to insult others by saying, ‘You look like an Indian.’ ” After his parents labored to help him get an education, his mother had even encouraged him “not to say that she was my mother, so that I wouldn’t feel tied to a ‘peasant reality,’ which in the capital city would only serve to make me part of a rejected heritage.” In his younger days he had removed the photos of his father’s ancestors from the wall of the family living room because he “was ashamed of them when my school friends came to visit me.” To this day he can “remember the tears in my father’s eyes” and he laments: “Every time I go home those pictures remind me of what I did.”1

Now Dávila sat in a Chicago church amid a congregation proudly adorned with the indigenous colors and dress of their native lands. He wondered at his fellow Guatemalans especially, many of whom had fled as he did during the violent strife of the 1980s. Even the adults wore the special clothing, something he had never seen at home, where “the only time indigenous dress was allowed during the religious celebration of the town was for the festivals of the Virgin of Guadalupe, for which the boys and girls dressed as ‘Little Indians,’ but the adults never dressed up.” Another bewildering thought followed: “My people, when they came to this country, brought with them those indigenous things that they had rejected for generations. It didn’t matter how many rivers we had to cross; it didn’t matter that we had never worn them; it didn’t matter that we might never wear them.” Looking at his own children beside him, he “trembled” to see them “dressed up like ‘Tona,’ the Indian woman who used to sell me corn drink every day.” What was happening here? Why were people “celebrating what we had rejected our entire lives”?2

Dávila continued to ponder these questions while pursuing a master’s degree at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union and in a series of pastoral leadership positions in Chicago. Eventually he returned to Guatemala to minister among those in his native land. His questions and his profound experience at Mass that Sunday taught him that “to be spiritual” involves getting “reconnected with my roots, with the source of my life.” He calls this reconnection nothing less than a conversion, but not in the typical sense of leaving behind one’s former self to become someone new. His transformation was just the opposite: it enabled him to embrace the beauty and dignity of his family, his ancestors, and of himself, even the indigenous part of him that he had been conditioned to conceal and despise.

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