Mexican-Descent Catholics

Abstract

This chapter examines the history of Mexican immigration and the ongoing struggles of Mexican-descent Catholics. An expanding Mexican and Latino population is part of larger demographic shifts within US Catholicism. The US Catholic Church is no longer an overwhelmingly immigrant church, as it was a century ago at the end of the great period of European immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor is it solely an “Americanized” church. The Roman Catholic Church in the United States is a church largely run by middle-class, European-descent Catholics. Mexican-descent Catholics do not just add another chapter to the general history of US Catholicism, but a lens through which to examine significant components of that history such as its origins, westward expansion, ongoing immigration, and the struggles of non-European groups for dignity and justice.