It must be difficult for someone from the deserts of Durango or the jungles of Chiapas to get used to the Windy City. While Chicago’s winds and snowstorms can be brutal, the weather has not stopped thousands of Mexicans from journeying north to find work. Only Los Angeles has more residents from Mexico and Latin America. Entire Chicago neighborhoods have rapidly transformed into Spanish-speaking enclaves, and it seems inevitable that Latinos will outnumber African Americans before long.
If all Latinos suddenly returned to their countries of origin, the hotel and restaurant business, the landscaping and gardening industry, and janitor and cleaning services would grind to a halt. Chicago would survive, but it would be a very different place.
Most of the new arrivals are young and Catholic. In 1956, when I visited the old detention center for illegal immigrants on Indiana Avenue, I found that the young men there were baptized and quite devout, but many had not made their first Holy Communion and had almost no understanding of their religion. The detention center, where they were held before deportation, seemed a strange place to make one’s first confession and Communion. It seemed to me that the Catholic Church in Mexico was not doing a good job of catechesis and spiritual formation. At the same time, the Archdiocese of Chicago was totally unprepared for the arrival of thousands of Catholics looking for jobs in the promised land of “Gringolandia.”
Just two parishes offered services in Spanish fifty years ago: one near the Chicago stockyards and another near the steel mills in South Chicago. Both were staffed by Claretian priests. Fifty years ago Chicago seminarians were given language lessons in Polish, German, Czech, Lithuanian, Italian, Hungarian, and French-but not Spanish. This had to change, and it did. Today, dozens of parishes have Mass in Spanish and the archdiocese has more and more Latino priests and seminarians. The archdiocesan newspaper even has a Spanish edition.
Yet a focal point for the Spanish-speaking community has been lacking. There has been no place of pilgrimage, no center for religious expression where Latino Catholics can gather. A couple of Mexican Chicagoans owned a copy of the famous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, but lacked a place to enshrine it. Fr. John Smyth, former director of Maryville Academy, a home for needy children, suggested they build on the institution’s grounds in a suburb of Chicago. Huge boulders were collected and piled into a large hill; a new Guadalupe rose from the flat land of the American Midwest. A waterfall flows down from the boulders into a large pool at the base of the hill. Rose bushes and small trees grow among the rocks. Pilgrims place thousands of brightly colored flowers around the pool and leave handwritten notes and letters in the grotto, as well as pictures of loved ones in Iraq, toddlers’ little shoes and suits, and, of course, numerous vigil lights. It is an astonishing construction.
But even more spectacular is the larger-than-life statue of the Virgin Mary at the top of this new Cerrito del Tepeyac. Before her kneels the figure of St. Juan Diego, the poor Indian who saw the vision of the woman the Mexicans call La Morenita, “little dark lady.” He opens his cloak, full of roses and marked with the image of Mary. At the base of the hill is an altar where Mass is celebrated every Sunday for over seven thousand people; last year on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, one hundred thirty-eight thousand people came to worship. It has become a custom for young Mexican men to run the twenty-five miles from St. Agnes Parish to the shrine carrying torches.
The intense devotion practiced at this new Guadalupe in suburban Chicago is not always appreciated by “gringo” Catholics. Some find this festive and colorful expression of Catholicism excessive and embarrassingly sentimental. It may be, however, that the humility, joyfulness, and faith of the Mexicans at their new shrine will provide a salutary challenge to the anemic religiosity of many U.S. Catholics. Racism, border guards, and fences have not kept out the newest wave of immigrants. Nor will their spiritual passion and zeal be suppressed.
