Time to Pray: Devotional Rhythms and Space Sacralization Processes at the Mexico–US Border

Abstract

This essay uses the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge at the Port of Laredo to examine Catholic parish life at la Parroquia Santo Niño in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Considering how infrastructure works, how it literally keeps people and objects moving, nuances our understanding of the devotional rhythms and space sacralization processes of actors who move and wait in a border environment. Contributing to debates about rhythm and mobility in border studies, it highlights religion’s temporal particularities—specifically the role that an international bridge plays in influencing where, when, and how often border-based actors manage worship and spaces of reflection. Thinking with scholars of material religion, this essay maintains that accounting for border infrastructure is worthwhile. Using infrastructure as a primary reference point can productively challenge still influential distinctions between American and Latin American religion. It will also show that infrastructure not only animates religious practice and dictates devotional rhythms within the walls of la Parroquia, but also facilitates or at times deters movement to and from that site of worship. Mapping out routes and relationships among objects, places, and people, it traces how parish life and international bridge usage are inextricably linked across several planes—geographic, temporal, cultural, and economic; it is impossible to understand the significance of one without attending to the other.

Keywords:

• Border religion
• infrastructure
• devotional rhythms
• Catholicism (Mexico)

Acknowledgments

This analysis draws from ethnographic research conducted in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas and Laredo, Texas (2013–2016). I quote from recorded interviews conducted on route to la Parroquia and at the site proper as well as interviews conducted in Laredo at the base of the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge. I would like to thank the neolaredoenses and Laredoans with whom I worked, especially Marti Franco, for contributing their time and support to this endeavor. I would also like to acknowledge that thinking about this paper with faculty and graduate students at Princeton University as part of the Department of Religion’s “Religion in the Americas” workshop has been extremely helpfulnote

Notes

1 Fun facts: Distance from San Agustín Cathedral to Bthe bridge (approximately 320 meters) Distance from la Parroquia Santo Niño to the bBridge (approximately 270 meters) Length of the “Gateway to the Americas” International Bridge: 309 meters Distance from San Agustín Cathedral to la Parroquia Santo Niño (approximately 900 meters).

2 All translations from non-English sources are my own.

3 For more information about the construction of the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge see Peña 2017.

4 The Diocese of Laredo oversees San Agustín Cathedral and 31 parishes; San Agustín offers several mass services a day, the majority in Spanish. La Parroquia Santo Niño is one of 35 parishes under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Nuevo Laredo. La Parroquia offers mass three times a day—at 9:00, 12:00, and at 18:00. Parishes in residential areas offer mass up to four or five times a day.

5 According to statistics generated by Mexico’s Censo General de Población y Vivienda and the US Census, the Laredo/Nuevo Laredo metropolitan areas have a combined population of 600,000 documented residents. To give a sense of day-to-day cross-border movement, Gateway to the Americas International Bridge employees currently process over 200,000 pedestrians every month. For more information see the City of Laredo International Bridge System traffic distribution reports available at http://www.cityoflaredo.com/bridgesys/bridge_index.html

6 Cuban émigrés, interviewed by author in Laredo, Texas, February 16–18, 2016.

7 Several generations of scholars of religion have shown that believers and practitioners “in motion” use ritual, doctrine, idioms, symbols, imagination, and various forms of capital to overcome the hardships that accompany mobility—forced or voluntary (Smith and Prokopy 1999; see also, Bender et. al. 2013; Tweed 2008; Vásquez 2008; Warner and Wittner 1998). A subset of that literature has focused on how religion desires place—how refugee and migrant populations rally around faith-based values to cultivate spaces of worship. The need to sanctify space may present itself as a brick and mortar edifice, as a makeshift sidewalk altar, or as an annual public procession in which devotees physically imbue the areas they traverse with their religious sensibilities (Becci, Burchardt, and Casanova 2013; Knott 2005, 2009; McCarthy Brown 1999; Orsi 1985, 1999; Peña 2011; Tweed 1997). Each of these practices of place-making is powerful in its own right, building a deeply felt experience of home through the tangible and the intangible work of believers and the deities they venerate.

8 Anthropology of infrastructure and focused examinations of scale and jurisdiction provide a strong base for this study; see Harvey and Knox (2015); Marston (2000); Valverde (2009).

9 Key to understanding the complexities of mobility and emplacement, and specifically the utility of the terms presented here (i.e. wait-station devotees), scholars have productively laid out definitions and qualifications of what constitutes diasporic religion and migrant religious practices. Those examinations show that migration and diaspora may share a basic commonality—both involve people on the move—but they are not interchangeable terms. Moreover, the individually and/or collectively crafted worldviews people carry across spaces, however integral to the maintenance of a common religious identity, are not trans-historical and immutable. See, for example, Vertovec (2004), Brubaker (2005).

10 Historical studies refer to the church as “el Santo Niño de Atocha,” originally a Spanish icon who is also recognized as a patron of travelers and prisoners in Mexico, but the identity of la Parroquia’s namesake is still a debatable point. He is also referred to as “el Santo Niño Jesús” and “el Santo Niño de la Natividad del Señor.” La Parroquia does not carry either name affiliation. The identity of the child Christ, like many relics in the church, is continually negotiated.

11 In 1892, Laredo was already outpacing the seaport of Corpus Christi. Assessing the number of crossing entries tallied at Laredo (775) and Corpus Christi (3) between November 1890 and October 1891, the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce reported that the district collector, then based in Corpus Christi, felt “compelled to spend the major portion of the year [in Laredo].” See US Congress, House of Representatives, Bridge Over the Rio Grande. Report No. 798. 48th Cong., 1st sess., March 18, 1884, 1–2. See also US Congress, House of Representatives, Subport of Entry at Laredo, Tex. Report No. 1,014. 52nd Cong., 1st sess., April 7, 1892, 1.

12 International Bridges. Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, Senate, 86th Cong. 45–47 (1959).

13 Delivering on international manufacturing and trade corridor expectations put into place by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), the port of Laredo currently moves close to US$500 billion in import/export trade annually. See “2012 International Trade Corridor Plan,” Texas Department of Transportation (December 1, 2012) http://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/tpp/misc/itcp.pdf and “Laredo Monthly Economic Indicators 2002–2013,” Laredo Development Foundation (September 11, 2013). http://www.ldfonline.org/Economic_Indicators_091113.pdf

14 Interview, City of Laredo Tourism and Convention Center Staff Member, March 2016.

15 Drug cartel violence and accompanying negative press initiated an undisputable decline in monthly pedestrian, vehicle, and bus traffic at the port of Laredo’s two non-commercial bridges—the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge (I) and the Juárez- Lincoln International Bridge (II). Accustomed to promoting margarita tourism as well as facilitating the movement of domestic and service-sector laborers with US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)-issued Border Crossing Cards (BCC) and then US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)-issued laser visas—B1 (business) or B2 (tourist) Non-Immigrant Visas—both Laredos experienced a decline in pedestrian and non-commercial traffic. Like many Mexican border cities, Nuevo Laredo has a long history of thriving on tourist dollars. City officials commented that neolaredenses, specifically vendors and service-sector employees, could no longer rely on revenue generated by “prescription medicine tourism.” The municipality of Nuevo Laredo itself receives a relatively small portion of bridge revenue from the federal government after it is funneled through the State of Tamaulipas. The city of Laredo, on the other hand, channels 50% of the bridge toll revenue toward its general fund. That steady stream of income keeps the city’s tax base low and attractive to outside investors.

16 See US Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Border Crossings/Entry Data: Detailed Statistics, PEDESTRIAN, February 2003–2015.

17 Father José Martínez Ramírez, Interviewed by the author in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. Recorded September 24, 2013.

18 Father José Martínez Ramírez, interviewed by the author in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. Recorded September 10, 2013.

19 La Casa del Migrante Nazareth (est. 2004), which is connected to the Diocese of Nuevo Laredo, provides food, wash areas, beds, and counseling for migrants primarily from Honduras (60%) and Mexico (30%) but also from El Salvador and Guatemala. According to the center’s quarterly newsletter, the numbers of migrants who have sought help at the center have fallen over the past 10 years, from over 10,000 between 2004 and 2008 to 6,000 from 2009 to 2011, for a variety of reasons. Natural disasters have damaged train service. Organized kidnapping and extortion rings have also deterred migrants from the area.

20 María de Jesús Caballero Teniente, interviewed by the author in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. Recorded October 12, 2013.

21 Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), a federally funded organization, recognized la Parroquia as a historic monument in 1983. Based on that designation, Nuevo Laredo’s presidente municipal is obligated to take on 50% of operating and restoration costs. His office also provides city workers who supply all of the physical labor for the remodeling projects. Donations, such as those contributed by off-site parishioners, pay for the cost of materials. To learn more about la Parroquia’s history see Villarreal Peña (1988).

22 See also Houtman and Meyer 2012; McDannell 1995; Morgan 2009; Morgan and Promey 2001; Promey 2014; Vásquez 2010).

23 To be clear, citizenship or residency status notwithstanding, actors who live, cross, and or/wait at an international boundary line are subject to some form of state intervention even if they are perceived to be “stateless” (Arendt 1951).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elaine A. Peña

Elaine A. Peña is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the George Washington University. She received her PhD in Performance Studies with Northwestern University in 2006. Peña’s research has appeared widely including in e-misférica (2006), American Quarterly (2008), American Literary History (2014), and The Drama Review (2017). She is the author of Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe (University of California Press, 2011).