Migrant Hearts &
the Atlantic Return
Transnationalism and
the Roman Catholic Church
Valentina Napolitano
MIGRANT HEARTS AND
T H E AT L A N T I C R E T U R N
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migr a nt he a rts a nd
the atl a ntic r et ur n
Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church
!
Valentina Napolitano
Fordham University Press
New York
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2016
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Frontispiece: Virgen Dolorosa, Church of Santa Maria Della Luce.
Photo by the author.
Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—
except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior
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Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
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Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of
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Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
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to Kamau, il Guerriero Silenzioso
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Catholic Humanitas
ix
1
1.
Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
000
2.
The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
000
3.
The Legionaries of Christ and the Passionate Machine
000
4.
Migrant Hearts
000
5.
The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Nexus of Affects
000
6.
Enwalled: Translocality, Intimacies, and
Gendered Subjectivity
000
Epilogue
000
Notes
000
References
000
Index
000
vii
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Acknowledgments
Single authorship of a book is a myth. Many voices, people, ideas, and
stories percolate through writings. I cannot see this book only as farina del
mio sacco (lit., a sack of flour, meaning “my own work”). Ideas are cocreated. They emerge in small and big talks, through shared silences, in
front of midmorning and late-night coffees. They come through us, more
than they are by us.
I am indebted in this journey to all the formidable people I met in
Rome, in the Latin American mission and beyond, including Ada, Ana
Maria, Angel, Carlos(es) (one Costa Rican and one Ecuadorian), Cena,
Conchis, Elizabeth, Elvezio, Frida, Gloria, Griselda, Lina, Lorena, Maria
Rosa, Maricela, Marina, Marisol, Myriam, Rosa, Ricardo, Rudy, Ruth,
Sandra, Teo, Vincenzo, and many, many more whom I cannot mention
here. A deeply felt thank-you to the religious fathers Alfredo, Antonio,
Helkyn, Jesús, Jorge, José, Juan Carlos, Oscar, and Pancho, who let me
wander around the Latin American mission churches or met me at the
Colégio Mexicano in Monte Mario or talked about their life in Rome,
asking from time to time if the book had come out. I know it took much
more time than I hoped for, but thank you for your infinite patience.
In Rome I am in debt to Mario Brunello, the brilliant librarian of
ARSI, the Jesuit archives, and to the wonderful new and old friends in
Rome: dear Isabel Cruz and Mattia Chiusano, who opened so many doors
with their warmth and friendship, and Jesús Colina, who, with his friendship and great insights into the organization of the Catholic Church, gave
me many contacts and ideas to consider. Eloisa Stella and Angelo Marano,
with their gregariousness and witty discussions of Italian politics, kept me
sane in moments of fieldwork impasse and made me realize that the
“return” I write about is also a personal one. I am grateful to my dear
uncle and aunt Luigi and Loredana Napolitano, who with their hospitality
and warmth made my life in Rome so much easier and familiar, and to my
cousins Daniele, Matteo, and Nicolò and their families, who engage more
ix
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x
Acknowledgments
than I do with the Catholic faith. Thanks also to my joyful, warm sister,
Antonella, with witty and insightful Barry; Anna with my beloved father,
Picchio; and my wonderful nephew and niece, Noah and Sarah, who
remind me that being brought up in mixed-faith homes can seed wonders.
I am especially indebted to my colleagues in Toronto and elsewhere
who gave me so much food for thought and heartfelt intellectual blood to
make this project reach its conclusion: among them Joshua Barker, Janice
Boddy, Kevin Coleman, Simon Coleman, Jane Cowan, Hillary Cunningham, Girish Daswani, Naisarge Dave, Andrew Gilbert, Paul Kingston,
Rebecca Kingston, Chris Krupa, Ashley Lebner, Tania Li, Nimrod Luz,
Maya Mayblin, Carlota McAlister, Ken Mills, Andrea Muehlebach, Alejandro Paz, Xotchil Ruiz, Rosa Sarabia, Gavin Smith, Nurit Stadler,
Edward Swenson, and Donna Young. At the University of Toronto my
students, among them Norangie Carballo-Garcia, Alejandra Gonzalez
Jimenez, Mac Graham, Daniella Jofre, Peter Skrivanic, and Daniel Spotswood, have also been a great source of inspiration and helped refi ne my
thinking. In addition, I thank many other passionate students whom I
cannot name who have put up with my less-than-clear and often tooexperimental ideas. And I would have never completed this without the
administrative and intelligent support of Annette Chan and Berenice Villagomez. Thanks also to colleagues at the Università della Sapienza in
Rome, Alessandro Lupo and Pino Scirripa, who gracefully reminded me
of the depth of Italian anthropology. Thanks also to the late and visionary
Helen Tartar at Fordham University Press, who cannot see this book in
press; she is sorely missed. I also thank Thomas Lay, with whom I have
worked in the fi nal production of this book, as well as Teresa Jesionowski
and Justin Sully, who carefully edited the book manuscript (and were
patient in unraveling some of my Italian-sounding, too convoluted sentences) and to the anonymous readers who have vastly improved this fi nal
version (if one could one ever say final) of the book.
This research was supported by grants from the Social Science and
Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Connaught Foundation.
I would never have been able to fi nish this book without a productive year
spent in the Anthropology Department at the University of California,
Berkeley, in 2011–12. I thank in particular Mariane Ferme. I also thank
Stanley Brandes, Charles Briggs, Lawrence Cohen, Rosemary Joyce, Saba
Mahomood, and Donald Moore. A special thanks to Charles Hirschkind,
who, beyond generous ideas, kept me jolly, while writing, through wonderful (and competitive!) tennis matches; Cristiana Giordano, who read
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Acknowledgments
xi
part of this work and made profound comments; and Chris Kiefer, Amal
and Charles Dabbas, and the life-enhancing and graceful Margarita
Loinaz. I am grateful to other dear friends and colleagues who in different
corners of the world have insightfully commented on this work and kept
me joyful in the last ten years: Cristina Bandiera, James Durkerley, Chris
Garces, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Dalia Kandiyoti, Michael Lambek, David Lehmann, Nimrod Luz, Yael Navaro-Yashin, Emanuela Nordio, Kristin Norget, Filippo Osella, Mariella Pandolfi, Sarah Radcliffe, Fiona Samuels,
Nurit Stadler, Ann Varley, and Alberto Zaffaroni, and Ato Quayson, who
with all the ups and downs is still a heartfelt friend. Last but not least, I am
thankful for, and together with, my beloved son, Kamau Mattia, who
gives me more joy and wisdom than I can ever imagine and who reminds
me that humanity is never given, but always lived for.
May you all be free from suffering and live at ease.
Rome, July 2014
Some sections of chapter 3 appeared in “Phantomatic Presences and
Bioreligiosity—On the Legionaries of Christ and the Jesuits,” Postscripts:
The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds 5, no. 3 (2011): 293–317.
Some sections of chapter 4 appeared in “Of Migrant Revelations and
Anthropological Awakenings,” Social Anthropology 15, no. 1 (2007): 75–93.
Some sections of chapter 5 appeared in “The Virgin of Guadalupe, a
Nexus of Affects,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 1
(2009): 96–112.
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MIGRANT HEARTS AND
T H E AT L A N T I C R E T U R N
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Introduction
Catholic Humanitas
It was he, old and tired. Four popes had died, eternal Rome was
showing the first signs of decrepitude, and still he waited. “I’ve
waited so long it can’t be much longer now,” he told me as he
said good-bye after almost four hours of nostalgia. “It may be a
matter of months.” He shuffled down the middle of the street,
wearing the combat boots and faded cap of an old Roman,
ignoring the puddles of rain where the light was beginning to
decay. Then I had no doubts, if I ever had any at all, that the
Saint was Margarito. Without realizing it, by means of his
daughter’s incorruptible body and while he was still alive, he
had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of
his own canonization.
—Gabriel García Márquez, “The Saint,” in Strange Pilgrims
On a Thursday afternoon, the view from Ponte Garibaldi is stunning. On
one side the tall synagogue of Rome is in shining light and in the distance,
on the left, is another well-known dome, the cupola of St. Peter’s. In front
lies the neighborhood of Trastevere, which, with a buzzing entertainment
life and charming little winding streets, has become a fancy and expensive
place to live. Tourists are on the streets but also many people going about
their errands and chores. I am walking with Eloisa, a very smart, softspoken Peruvian migrant—raven hair, bright smile, hands unaltered by
repetitive use of cleaning products. She moves with slow, poised, and
graceful movements—nothing seems to agitate her in the few years we
have known each other. At least not on the outside. We are talking about
the parish we are heading to, the headquarters of the Misión Latino
Americana in Rome (Latin American Mission, henceforth MLA) for the
weekly celebration of El Santísimo.1 The sixteenth-century church is Santa
Maria della Luce—a rather ordinary one by Roman aesthetic standards; it
1
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2 Introduction: Catholic Humanitas
is located in a hidden street of Trastevere. This church, dedicated to the
Latin American migrants in Rome, is in Eloisa’s words a “world of its
own” (mundo a parte). I agree that it is—and that it is not.
The Roman Catholic Church is increasingly a key political subject in
matters of governmentality over migration around the world, even if locally
it is often imagined as a mundo a parte. The Catholic Church unfolds its
care for migrants locally and at the same time globally. On 5 December
2011 the Holy See became an official member of the Organization for
International Migration (OIM) in Geneva, gaining strength as a moral
subject in defense of a humanitas based on the “belief of the unique dignity
and common belonging to the same human family of every human person,
that is antecedent to any cultural, religious, social, political, or other consideration.”2
This book is about being both Catholic and a Latin American transnational migrant in the context of the Catholic Church’s entrenched anxiety
about the never-ending project of the full conversion of the Americas. It
is about a “local” migration, yet a continental and historical anxiety. Margarito’s story is that of a Colombian in Rome, advocating for the canonization of his dead daughter, who lies buried across the Atlantic. The
daughter has not been canonized and perhaps never will be. Márquez’s
story not only narrates a not-yet-achieved canonization; it also evokes
parallel and never-ending processes of mastery. Moreover, it contains histories of hopes, suffering, carnalities, and the sanctification of ordinary
lives. All these elements of what it means to be Catholic in such contexts
are the subject of this book.
In conversation with Eloisa, the juxtaposition of the two words Catholic
and migrant can appear rather innocent. Though once we articulate them
together, they open up important questions about being “human” and the
tensions between the homely (in the sense of being at home) and the
unhomely. To address these questions, this book became a search for a new
perspective, a new language to shed light on what can be articulated about
the Catholic Church and processes of transnational migration. To address
the connections between the Catholic Church and transnational migration I propose the idea of an Atlantic Return. By this I mean the return of
people of the Catholic faith from the Americas to Rome, and the Catholic
Church is fortified and strengthened by this return. But the Return is
more than this. The book also explores it through the affective histories
and labor of the migrants from the Americas to the “center” of Catholic
Western civilization and the ideas, hopes, and fantasies about what the
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Introduction: Catholic Humanitas
3
Catholic Church and being Catholic was, is, and will be. The return is for
a future, not only of a past. The Catholic clergy see the migrants as new
blood for the church that has the potential to feed, as they see it, a muchneeded revitalization of the Catholic heart of Europe. Pope Francis, who
was elected well after I fi nished the ethnographic work for this book, is a
symbolic tip of this Return. The Return is not just about the past; it is
very much for a present and a future of an imagined humanity by Catholics and non-Catholics around the globe.
Many may not know that when you enter the Vatican State in Rome
from Porta Saint Anna you are welcomed by Swiss guards, that you must
have your shoulders covered, and that you need to stop at a side office to
show your passport. You are in a “foreign” state in Rome. Hence to study
how Catholic migrant subjectivity is constructed we also need to understand the parallel and intersecting discourses on migration that are produced by the Italian nation-state and the Vatican. These processes are not
separate. The Roman Catholic Church is a religion, a faith, but the Vatican
is a state in all effects and purposes. It is, as I explain in the following
chapters, a passionate machine. Thus I want to foreground the Catholic
Church as a producer of passions and affects that are important both in the
singularity of people’s experiences and in the directions that different publics and politics take. The Holy See, as the Vatican state and as the Catholic Church, is a global, multifaceted political subject that shapes global
assemblages on transnational migration. It is a part of, not outside, the
political, intimate, and economic dynamics and frictions that constitute
transnational migrant labor.3
The ethnographic work that is the door into these local and global,
intimate and public assemblages emerges out of my fieldwork in Rome.
Conducted over periods of varying length between 2004 and 2011,4 it has
been an intimate and distant affair that at times worked and at times did
not. Born and bred in Catholic northeast Italy, formed as a British social
anthropologist, and with acquired kinship ties with West Africa, I have
had a long-time love for the elsewhere—yet for me this has been strangely
a “return home.” It was just after engagements with liberation theology in
Mexico, Mexican day laborers in San Francisco, and Jesuits in Guadalajara
that I turned to the thread of one of these fieldwork interests, which took
me to the Gregorian University in Rome. From there I went to the
Comunidad Católica Mexicana—a small group that had begun to meet
regularly in the early 2000s in a parish on the outskirts of Rome through
a joint initiative with the MLA—and then to the Church of the Virgin of
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4 Introduction: Catholic Humanitas
Guadalupe entrusted to priests of the Legionaries of Christ order. Different field trips to Rome allowed some important friendships to develop, but
working on transnational migration and being myself in the thick of it
between England and later Canada, I also found the “return” at times
disappointing. Some of the people I had known were not there; priests had
moved away from Rome; seminarians had finished their period of training; and mobile phone numbers were no longer in service.5
The transitoriness of life, which appears only more acutely through a
transnational paradigm, had to become more of a friend than an enemy. So
when I could, I moved to cultivate an intimacy of friendship that also
brought me to explore the puzzling domains, moments, and narratives
that I have sought to unravel in this book. They have been unnerving in
some instances, not just because they often appeared after the tape recorder
was turned off. A sense of writing as poaching 6 has been very much with
me while writing parts of this book: Writing can be a loss and a mistemporality. Closures are not only epistemological affairs, but embodied
chances in life.
I have chosen in some parts of this book to “reveal” stories, rather than
to recount them, not so much for their unsayable nature, or the violence
of their public secret,7 but in order to open up the field of being Catholic
and migrant as a living, nuanced, and sometime difficult itinerary to be
lived. Without judgment, I am also placing myself within these stories of
(“wrong”) desires, sexual and sensual attractions, longing, and doubts.
Having assumed in the unfolding of this research the role of both confidante and confider, I am also part of these stories, not apart from them. I
hope that these moments, stories, and intimacies can be understood as a
larger narrative of the complexities of migrant life, religious callings, and
the experience of being incarnated in a gendered body.
But intimate puzzlements and impasses are also institutional, and so
they belong to the church too. Hence the aim of this book, as an ethnography, is to bridge the long-standing and unhelpful divide between popular and institutional Catholicism, between devotional, embodied passions
and the Catholic Church’s long history of anxieties about and hopes for
the conversion of Latin America. Throughout fi fteen to eighteen centuries the project of conversion to Catholicism in the New World gravitated
toward a purification of indigenous souls and the control of eroticism,
especially of women’s bodies, and paralleled by the appropriation of labor
and resources. In the eyes of some missionaries, such as Vasco de Quiroga
in sixteenth-century Michoacán, conversion raised the possibility of a
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5
New Church in the New World, a rejuvenation of the corrupted church
in Europe. Most important, the theological hinge of Catholic conversion
was ultimately to transform Otherness into Sameness. But conversions
often were not successful, could not last, or were partial. In this sense the
presence of Latin American Catholics in Rome subtly stirs a long-time
fear of the never fully achieved conversion from Otherness into Sameness.
This tension is foundational in ethnographic practice and the anthropological discipline. Explorations of an anthropology beyond the subject that
have begun to emerge in the twenty-fi rst century are also in response to
the limitations imposed by the concepts of Sameness and Otherness. Thus
this book is also a contribution to a larger debate that has to do with the
Catholic underpinnings of a genealogy of anthropological theory and its
limitations, not yet fully explored.
Ethnographically speaking, the subject of this research is the Misión
Latino Americana (MLA) in Rome, which is a Catholic umbrella organization, formed in 2003, to organize pastoral care for a plethora of national
Latin American parishes. The MLA headquarters are located in the neighborhood of Trastevere and attended mainly by women from countries
such as Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia. They come into the
church to participate in the Catholic celebrations but also to seek jobs in
the caring sector through an office in the parish that connects care workers, or badanti,8 and Italians seeking domestic laborers and caregivers. In
this sense the MLA is a small job center. Father Alfonso, an Italian chaplain
and Scalabrinian priest, who had previously lived for a long time in Argentina, coordinated the MLA from 2003 to 2012. He was assisted by Latin
American vice-chaplains—mainly from Mexico, Chile, and Brazil.
The Comunidad Católica Mexicana (CCM) was a prominent member
of the MLA network, but in 2005 it decided to break away from its Latin
American counterparts to operate independently and to celebrate Mexican
national events under the rubric of the Catholic Church. This group, composed mainly of Italo-Mexican mixed couples (often the wife is Mexican
and the husband Italian) and of Mexican nuns and priests who are currently training or residing in Rome, is active and in a way a microcosm
of some of the strengths and the tensions involved in the return of migration to the heart of Catholicism and to the Italian capital. Although my
fieldwork sought to grasp the nature and practices consistent throughout
this network of migrant religious communities—for example, the material importance of work in the caregiving sector and the prevalence of
mixed marriages with Italians—the ethnography presented in this book is
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6 Introduction: Catholic Humanitas
structured around Catholic devotions such as the devotion to the Virgin of
Guadalupe and the Corazón de Jesus, or Sacred Heart of Jesus, as well as
the Peruvian Brotherhood de El Señor de los Milagros and the Mexican
celebrations of El Dia de las Madres (Mother’s Day) and El Dia de la Independencia (Independence Day).
In Rome, Mexican nation-state memories and affective returns of religious histories are, on one hand, harvested by conservative streams of the
Catholic Church, such as the Legionaries of Christ, producing narratives
of martyrdoms and a church under attack.9 On the other hand, these
memories engender new possibilities of migrant Catholic presence. The
CCM, for example, has distanced itself from the MLA precisely because of
criticisms that the chaplains of MLA moved toward the community for its
celebration of nation-state commemorations and the relatively little interest it has shown in promoting an apostolic path to Catholic pan-American
identity. For the CCM, the church is more an Iglesia Morena (literally a
“brown church,” meaning a racially composite church) than it is an aspiration for an elite church, which is what characterizes the sociality of the
Legionaries of Christ (which I analyze in chapter 3), who have privileged
a whiter, economically powerful, and less indigenously rooted church.
This tension renews, within the relatively small Mexican presence in Italy,
an old colonial racial cleavage.
However, many Latin American migrants in Rome do not take part in
the MLA or CCM and do not think of themselves as particularly Catholic;
they may belong to other denominations. My intention is not to describe a
representative Latin American migrant community in Rome but to focus
on migrant itineraries, by which I mean an analytical attention to how
threads of gendered lay and religious labor, family, and national histories, as
well as devotional affects, intersect and recraft particular pedagogies and
materialities of Catholicism. By making this analytical move, I can address
first wider and important tensions of centrality and periphery that characterize the (re)production of the Roman Catholic Church from within. Second,
I can break away from such problematic notions of migration as the sociological imagination of transnational migrant communities as formed by the
push and pull of resistance and agency, social participation and absence of
representation, assimilation and lack of social mobility, and instead I can
move toward an open-ended inquiry of historically and materially crafted
struggles for desires and the homely in the process of migration.
Ethnographically, what emerges from this are two points. First, the
migrant itineraries in this book often show a longing for the nation, which
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7
interrupts the Catholic Church’s desire to forge a “common” Catholic
identity of pan-Americanism. Second, and at the same time, histories of
betrayal of kinship, families, and nations are often the unspoken affective
matrix out of which those migrant itineraries unfold. Pedagogies of family
reunification, so much championed by the Catholic Church, fall short of
capturing and responding to the complexity of these betrayals. I use here
and throughout the book the term pedagogies to signal that the relation
between the Catholic Church and migrants is a relation of orientation,
guidance, and “walking together.” In this sense the word pedagogy captures
a developmental path (from childhood to adulthood) that frames the pastoral church’s relationship with transnational migrants.10
Moreover, the idea of the Atlantic Return helps in exploring the
articulation between migrant itineraries and the histories of being Catholic. These histories include colonial encounters, labor, and imagination. A
return of the missions, part of an Atlantic Return, then raises a debate
about the remainders of coloniality in present-day postcolonial and postFordist formations.11 Anibal Quijano rightly notes that coloniality is a lens
through which we understand the present existence of ideologies, materialities, and dispositions in race and labor relations. These were shaped in
colonial encounters but have survived the end of colonial empires in new
postcolonial formations. He argues that Otherness and Sameness have
been, and still are, central to the reproduction of inequalities in Atlantic
terrains from the conquest of America onward, especially as a hegemonic
form of knowing.
This persistence of coloniality is partly about knowledge but also, I
would argue beyond Quijano’s position, about subtle returns of affective
histories and their carnalities as modes of being and living. In this book
they are connected to the anxieties of a never-ending project of full
conversion to, and continuous apostolic expansion of, Catholicism. Taken
together, they are then historically informed ontologies that migrants
need to become the living blood for the New Evangelization—the new
missionaries, so to speak.12 In Benedict XVI’s words, the same Virgin of
Guadalupe in America and in Rome drives this afán apostólico (apostolic
longing).13 So this migration is a reinforcement of a traditionalist wing of
the church at the heart of Rome at the same time that it is a decentering of
the Catholic heart of Europe. Hence the migration and the Atlantic return
are profoundly ambiguous.
Such ambiguity embraces postcolonial trajectories that result in the
destabilization of old imperial binaries and with them Western notions of
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8 Introduction: Catholic Humanitas
sameness and subjectivity,14 mobilizing uncharted processes of spacemaking and subject formation where metropolitan Europe is itself reshaped
by this return of migration. Central to a modality of postcolonial powers
has been an anxiety about hybridity and the location of “civilized humans,”
as well as forms of mimicry of, complicity with, and subversion of power
relations. Indeed, the actions of the MLA, the Legionaries of Christ, and
the CCM in Rome show traces of both the reproduction and the destabilization of hierarchies.
Both the reproduction and destabilization of hierarchies quiver around
the central node of Catholic humanitas. Since the Renaissance, a racial
distribution of knowledge made belonging to the category of “fully
human,” humanitas, an apparently inclusive, but actually exclusive, attribute of sameness.15 More than ever now it is relevant to ask how a (Catholic) faith, based on such a notion of sameness, can still be both inclusive and
exclusionary when it comes to transnational migration.
Thus with such ontological and epistemological tensions in mind, this
book is also a contribution to an anthropology of Catholicism and a wider
debate of critical Catholic studies. I have discussed elsewhere how an
anthropology of Catholicism takes inspiration from, but also takes issue
with, current developments in the anthropology of Christianity.16 Rather
than add to the work on the cultures of Christianity, we need to develop
an ethnographic focus on the Roman Catholic Church’s governmentality
(its guidance and regulation of Catholic bodies/souls in tandem with a
constant remaking of its internal clerical structure). This is particularly so
today, with the current revisions of Vatican II and the old/new terrains of
Catholic subject formation.17 This emergent form of the church’s governmentality, as imagination, control, and action on life, bodies, and people,
is shaped by emerging forms of translocalism where flows and interruptions of “symbols, images, ideas, people, and power constitute trans-border
communities structured by forces other than—but not outside of—the
social, political and economic exigencies of bounded nation-states.”18 This
focus is important for an anthropology of Catholicism to blur the unhelpful analytical distinction between popular religiosity and the politics of
institutional reproduction of the Catholic Church.
One of the kernels of an anthropology of Catholicism is the study of
carnality. As Fenella Cannell rightly pointed out, the ambiguity in Christianity is that the “flesh is an essential part of redemption.”19 The focus is not
only on a state of worldliness, or on incarnation as potentially antithetic
to spiritual pursuits; carnality is the quality and state of being flesh, or as
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9
Elizabeth Povinelli suggested, the politically and “socially built space
between flesh and the environment.”20 Carnality and its dimension of
incarnation of spirit into matter is a constitutive conundrum of Catholicism, as the divine, in the form of Jesus, is present in matter and yet is
beyond or transcending matter. Divinity is expressed in a Trinity, but that
Trinity (God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit) needs laboring and an enfleshment to exist; it needs an oekonomia.21 And the Labor of Mary (to give a
material form to the spirit of Christ) is also what has sanctified her and the
Catholic Church as an institution.
In evangelical Christianity preaching the word is a form of converting
by listening, but for Catholicism the nature of the being of the flesh, its
powers and limitations, and the divine laboring of matter are paramount.22
The incarnation of Christ in a human body, of the divine presence in a
fleshy vessel, is one of the theological kernels of Catholicism. This is why
an anthropology of Catholicism needs more than ever to explore the
boundaries of the flesh, what affectively gets stuck to it, how eroticism is
mediated or unmediated in Catholic practices, and how incarnation
becomes a vessel, not just a vehicle, of the (un)homely.
From the study of the Sacred Heart as well as the Virgin of Guadalupe,
in migration, in this book it becomes clear that they are not only of a
materiality that signifies a vehicle of the sacred; they are also about a bundle
of affective and sometime repressed histories. These religious materialities
can become vessels that contain, breathe, sweat the divine, and animate
the homely or unhomely in migrant itineraries. As Catholic vessels, they
have a particular metonymical, more than metaphorical, relation to the
divine—vessels point to a communion (a coming together of that which is
familiar but also estranged) and metonymical places of encounter (between
divine and human). The carnality of the divine for Catholicism is also a
practice of presence, as it is of place-making.23
Studies in anthropology of Christianity have informed important
debates on the nature of mediation, presence, absence of the divine, and
the nature of the material processes of Christian semiosis. This literature
has also dwelled specifically on tropes of cultural ruptures to understand
the inception of conversions. Concepts such as “thingification”—the process of divesting objects of their immateriality—have shown the paradoxical and ambiguous struggle of making the presence of the divine
tangible, through the world and embodied actions—with the perennial
doubt of becoming too worldly and wordy and less divine.24 Ethnographies
of Catholicism instead see this conundrum less as a question of mediation
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10 Introduction: Catholic Humanitas
but more as an issue of containment. In fact, the Sacred Heart, for example,
is not imagined as medium, or vehicle, of the divine, but rather as corporeal container/vessel. To explore the nature of carnality and containment
in Catholicism I study in this book ethnographic encounters and histories
of excesses of signification that emerge through ritual celebrations and
affective devotions. Those point to the imbrication of histories in the present (to be in the place of the other), an importance of the long durée and
the lingering histories,25 rather than to ruptures of temporalities of conversion, as it has been the focus of important work in the anthropology of
Christianity.
To study forms of containment and in a way continuity, rather than rupture, an anthropology of Catholicism needs to engage with the articulation of the church’s governmentality in different terrains: studies of the
affective and embodied domains that emerge in ongoing processes of
enculturation, devotion, canonization, and sanctification; of the multiple
ethical horizons that arise in the awareness of social suffering and physical
death and in light of multiple and confl ictive ethical domains;26 and of the
underpinning of Catholicization in different welfare states and labor relations.27 A focus on emerging forms of governmentality requires that we
understand how different local fragments of histories are not peripheral to
the “center” of the Roman Catholic Church, but that they can be both
destabilizing to center/periphery binaries and reinforcing an imagination
of the Catholic roots and “blood” of Western Europe.
However, to engage anthropologically with the ethical horizons of
Roman Catholicism we also need to consider the Catholic underpinning
of new post-Fordist economies. Andrea Muehlebach has insightfully
argued, following Carl Schmitt’s notion of complexio oppositorum, that
Catholicism in northern Italy has the capacity to effectively produce forms
of moral voluntarism that give rise to productive, neoliberal moral subjects
in post-Fordist societies where state welfare is receding.28 The complexio
oppositorum of the Catholic Church, unlike in a “secular” nation-state, is
the institutional, ideological, and managerial capacity to foreground a
politics of collective authority that defies multiple and antithetical voices
within, so that there appears “to be no antithesis it does not embrace.”29
Be this a democratic or an autocratic form of government, or a theologically gendered foundation that rests on a Father God and a Mother Church,
the Catholic Church has expressed this oppositorum in particular ways.
One way, central to this book and much rehearsed by Benedict XVI, is by
embracing a representation of the Catholic Church based on transcen-
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11
dence, truth, and morality, which establishes its “formal superiority over
the matter of human life.”30
The Roman Catholic Church has had a particular interest in the normative “guidance of human life.” However, this human life, as a historical
event, is often strategically evacuated or belittled by a history of providence, as the human is considered to be ruled by the weak nature of being
an incarnated creature. From this perspective I argue that Catholic humanitas (as a notion of being human) is short-circuited into a civitas humana (as
a notion of a common way of being related, a common civilization). This
shift seems to be accompanied by the ambiguously related emergence of
homo relatus within church practices—of “personalized” clerical attention
and care. Hence some affective practices promoted by orders such as the
Legionaries of Christ, which have paid much attention to the care of
wealthy elite, show how Catholic faith can promote a homo relatus that is
not in opposition but in support of an exclusive ethics of personalized
attention and capitalist wealth accumulation.
Clearly a word on affect is due now. A calibrated examination of the
contemporary face of Catholicism demands attention to the affective
domains of gendered and transnational labor in the care of the Catholic
Church. Affects have been a surging area of interest in recent anthropological exploration and critical theory. With affect we have come to understand the domain that resides at the interface between prediscursive and
discursive practices: that which animates social and psychic life, without
being fully articulated and enclosed in a socially shared language. The
notion that affects are shared and circulated through bodies and fantasies is
central to this book.31 But fantasies of those same shared affects—through
collective investments such as upward mobility, social equality, and durable
intimacy—are increasingly becoming more remote from embodied, affective rhythms of survival,32 especially in processes of migration.
Although affects can disrupt such investments, they can also reinforce a
desire for normativity. The ambiguity of the reemergence of an “integralist” (or traditionalist) church and a progressive understanding of the relation between the Catholic Church and migration in the current revision
of Vatican II sum up the powerful affective ambivalence toward migration
as being both historical (in the sense of being part of a divine history and
being a phenomenon with very old roots) and living in a singular, unpredictable moment.33 But how might a consideration of Catholicism in
particular contribute to the “affective turn” in theory and ethnography in
general? I see three points that stand out.
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First, Spinoza, whose Ethics has been rightly taken as a key formulation
anticipating the turn to affect theory, foregrounds the existence of substance as that which contains all. The so-called metaphysics (the eternal,
the infi nite, or the divine) are there, but only present in substance. The
unsettling of binaries, including the divisions between ontology and epistemology and immanence and transcendence, is at the core of Spinoza’s
Ethics. Then following from this interpretation affects are neither fully in
the domain of representations (epistemological) nor fully in the domain
of being (ontological); they cut across both. If affects are transmitted
through matter and substances, and not only between humans but also
through and across space and the environment, 34 carnality becomes particularly poignant to studies of Catholicism. The study of substance, in
Spinoza’s sense, is helpful in shedding light on the articulation of carnalities and Catholicism.
Second, Catholicism is a complex of Judeo, Roman, Byzantine, and
Greek histories, and it is also very much part of multiple medieval traditions. Given this lineage, it is surprising how extensively research in the
anthropology of Christianity has focused on conversion and the Reformation period as the generative landscape of new forms of material ideologies. Faced with this tendency in existing research, we must wonder if we
are missing important strands of the history of Catholicism. One such
strand of research, crucial to the interests of this book, is to follow the way
in which carnality, metamorphosis, and transformation have been present
throughout medieval Catholicism and Christianity into the present.35
Uncovering some of these neglected strands is to recognize the numerous
ways in which an anthropology of Catholicism needs to consider affective
matter and affective histories that emerge well before the Reformation,
not only as a recrafting of an anthropology of Catholicism, but possibly
and more broadly, as a contribution to an archaeology of the anthropological discipline. The engagement with this archaeology is a project I can
only signal here as being in need of further elaboration.36
Third, affective histories are also explored in this work as force fields
that extend through particular types of caring labor, as well as through
specific spatial landscapes and architectures (such as the churches themselves), which animate aesthetic presences (the Virgin of Guadalupe, the
Sacred Heart, and El Señor de los Milagros). Thus I challenge theories of
affects that engage with only the relation between affect and materialities/
space and I encourage an exploration of the relations of affects and histories. Specifically I am intrigued by the potency that Catholic materialities
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13
and affective histories can have in their unfolding within different political
imaginaries.
A focus on affects also complements existing approaches on studies of
Catholicism and migration. Well-established North American analyses of
migrant diaspora and religiosity have stressed the importance of kinship,
intimate dialogue, and the emplacement and the embodiment of Catholic
devotions.37 Devotions, especially to the Virgin Mary, but also to particular saints, such as Saint Jude, are open channels for the imagination of
united diasporic moral communities and often act as platforms for meaningful engagement for migrant social justice.38 In this body of work on
migration, religion is the primary vehicle for understanding mobility and
the confluence of “flows” that organically intensify the experience of
human suffering and happiness, and help produce the homely. Urban
devotions have often been read in this literature primarily as phenomenologies of self and community making, but I add here that they also have to
be studied as contested political spaces of abjection—abjection understood
not always as that which stands completely outside the symbolic order, but
often as marginal to it, while still gendered.
Hence a study of Catholicism, as in this book, that focuses on the symptoms, returns, and remainders of affective histories and migrant itineraries,
follows but also challenges these existing analytical traditions. Building on
feminist critiques that pay tribute to the psychic life of power and histories, it moves a critique to a “lived” religion approach in its analysis of
Catholicism and migration. Important studies of the intersection of
Catholicism and migration based on the study of “lived religion” run the
risk of a certain Western/North American–centeredness. By adopting the
guiding concept of an Atlantic return instead, I argue that we need to
challenge an assumption of the “free-flowing” of Catholicism, since it is
based on a problematized understanding of a common humanitas.
The fieldwork on which this book is based offers concrete cases that
contest these types of approach by exposing the ways in which the common humanitas is hijacked in multiple directions within the Roman
Catholic Church, and projected in different forms of political imaginaries and consequently different forms of governmentality of (migrant)
bodies within different transnational terrains. To problematize a common
humanitas in the practices of Catholic (and migrant) faith helps calibrate a
political understanding of the Catholic Church as a passionate machine.
And it deprovincializes the notion of humanity embedded in studies of
Catholicism.
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North American scholarship has engaged with Roman Catholicism as
a minority immigrant religion and part of a public sphere where the
presence of Catholic migrants has been ethnicized and made an object of
resistance to different forms of social exclusion. Sociologically oriented
studies, such as the work of Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, have shown
that U.S. anti-immigrant legislation and an “embedded restrictionism”
(according to which migrants may have acquired rights that can be potentially lost) have bred an active and complex form of resistance and labor
organizations. Especially in the southern border states, Catholic and labor
movements have often come together to mobilize for social justice and
inclusion under the umbrella of the Catholic faith. In a North American
context studies of Catholicism have emphasized a structure/agency tension through, for instance, a focus on “civic social capital” and new forms
of leadership in migrant Catholic terrains in the United States.39 Other
studies have informed our understanding of the changing nature of the
relation between Catholicism and transnational migration as the problematic encounters between Catholic clergy and (new and old) believers,
as well as through the tensions between unity and integrity. The old
saying that in the American Catholic Church one must “pay, pray, obey”
seems not enough in the current politics of identity of immigrant Catholics in the United States—and more active social mobilization is perceived
as needed, at least in quarters that have seen the growing of an “immigrant church.”
However, as I explain in chapter 2, in an Italian context and from a
Vatican perspective, Catholicism can engender both inclusionary and dismissive postures toward migration.40 The latter are generated by the
defense of a powerful marriage between Christian and Roman civitas. If
in some U.S. cases “civility” comes from participation, civitas also emerges
from an exclusionary heritage. But if a personal, empathic, and open relationship to the divine that Catholic believers engender in everyday life
requires an egalitarian and serious engagement rather than a folklorization
of beliefs,41 we likewise ought to see how Catholicism, in its intersection
with migration, also creates painful and unequal forms of difference, even
if official discourses hinge on representations to the contrary.
Catholic Latin American migrant itineraries in Rome speak to centers
and peripheries, to inclusions and exclusions. The Latin American migrant
itineraries explored in this book allow me to frame the relation between
migration and Catholicism differently from the way it is framed in existing
North American studies: through returns of histories, the contested nature
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15
of affects for the nation, and the tension between the homely and the
unhomely in the materiality of devotions and in the enfleshment of migrants’
desires.
Finally zooming into the present and imagining possible futures in
Catholic (missionary) terrains in Rome, this books argues that the relation
between Catholicism and migration reveals neither a clear-cut process of
subjugation of migrants to received doctrines nor a confl ict-free “humanitarian” embrace. Focusing on the interface of migration and the return of
the missions shows that this is an ongoing process of embodied negotiations and pedagogical fantasies, both shaping and being shaped by the
circulatory forces of histories. Catholicism and migration are, of course,
constantly in the making; so the expression, weight, and form of a Catholic humanitas—and more than ever the gendering of this humanitas—
force us to query the unsettling nature of given moral representations.42
It is probably clear to the reader at this point that circulations and
interruptions of affective histories are analytical tools derived from a
feminist and psychoanalytical tradition that has focused on alterity, Lacanian gaps, and Freudian symptoms in religious imagination, including
the embodiment of experience and the limitations of official histories and
language.43 From these historical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical
perspectives have emerged a focus on marginality, mysticism, and the
repression of the often racialized and gendered Other within multiple
Catholic traditions.44 If migration is also lived on, between, and underneath gendered skins, I hope this book is a contribution to this tradition
of the study of Catholicism.
A Road Map
We all need road maps, and different road maps lead to different terrains.
The road map of this book points out different aspects of an Atlantic Return
in articulation with official Catholic Church postures and on-the-ground
practices (the combination of which I call Catholic pedagogies) vis-à-vis
migration. My biographical road map has included multiple spells of fieldwork in Rome between 2003 and 2011, living with uncles, aunts, and
friends—and for a time in a convent. The fieldwork narrative I have decided
to use is not only dictated by the nature of multiple visits rather than a
single prolonged period of fieldwork, it was also an analytical choice.
Instead of comparing and contrasting different fieldwork sites, I foreground the relation between Catholic Church policy on migration, its
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16 Introduction: Catholic Humanitas
theology, and the complexity of the New Evangelization and the variation in missions by different religious orders through different ethnographic encounters, historical threads, and Catholic theological material.
My use of the ethnographic pen puts in conversation different registers of
knowledge and contributes to a field of interdisciplinary studies on the
present and future of the Catholic Church, what I call here Critical Catholic Studies. Such an approach is required because the Catholic Church is
such a tremendously important political subject in the dynamics of migration and mobility worldwide. With the papacy of Pope Francis, the role
of the Catholic Church in matters of migration has become important in
the media, but of course it has to be analyzed within a longer history and
some of its lingering in the present. My point is that an ethnographic
method, in a classic, comparative, and community-bound sense is important, but it is not enough to understand the dialogical relation between
the Catholic Church and transnational migration.
I have participated in many celebrations in the churches of Santa Maria
della Luce and Santa Lucia for Easter week, Days of the Dead, celebrations
of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Señor de los Milagros, and I have assisted
at many Masses and meetings of the Comunidad Católica Mexicana, as
well as attended many parties, baptisms, and weddings of migrants. I have
also lived in a Mexican nuns’ convent in the heart of Rome. Nonetheless,
despite these experiences, I have not privileged life histories or a sustained
comparative methodology between different church sites. I may have
“wasted time” on long bus trips accompanying migrants back from work,
or from their Thursday and Sunday gatherings, looking for Latin American restaurants open in peripheral areas of the city after Sunday masses.
Yet in many of those eclectic moments there have been startling illuminations of the anxieties, hopes, and difficulties that permeate migrant itineraries at the heart of this Atlantic Return of Catholicism. The familiarity
engendered by hanging around for many years with a changing group of
migrants, clergy, nuns, and members of Catholic organizations has inspired
me to think through migrants’ itineraries and to thread together multiple
ways of being Catholic. These itineraries are the weaving together of ordinary lives (rather than extraordinary encounters), threads of histories,
papal teachings, missionaries present and past, religious iconographies, as
well erotic longings, family failures, hopes, and fears. Thus my use of the
ethno-graphos, as writing about the Other, wishes to inspire a way to “do
anthropology” through traces and itineraries, together with, but also
beyond, a comparative method of the study of migrant communities.
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17
A road map is needed for the writer as much as it is for the reader. In
chapter 1, I explore changes in the Italian legislative system in relation to
local municipal policies on migration during the tenures of the last two
mayors of Rome, Walter Veltroni and Gianni Alemanno, and how the
Latin American presence in Rome ignites tensions, fears, and nostalgia for
a clear center/periphery division of “civilization.” These tensions are then
read through revisionist interpretations of Vatican II, which tend to leave
unacknowledged potential confl icts over different cultural embodiments
of the Catholic Church. Chapter 2 looks at how Latin American transnational migration in Rome stirs an old confl ict within the Catholic Church:
the paradox of Catholic conversion and the tension of Sameness and Otherness, which have been present at least since the “Encounter with the
New World.” I read closely twentieth-century Catholic pedagogies on
migration that contribute to forging a Catholic humanitas that undergirds
national sentiments and highlights a culture of life as the cradle of a specific universal and given notion of personhood. In chapter 3 I compare the
Legionaries of Christ, an important twentieth-century Mexican order
that was strong under the papacy of John Paul II, with the Jesuits. I connect it here to the study of the Catholic Church as a passionate machine
that produces gendered and affective passions within this order, but also
between orders, and I explore the return of the missions not only in the
lived experience of religion and history, but also on what never was or was
partly abjected. Through a focus on what I call the psychic glue of histories, and especially the mimetic drives of imitatio Christi,45 which exist
between these two religious orders at the particular conjuncture of the
revision of Vatican II, I point to the force that a Catholic integralist church
is acquiring in Europe—with blood (as the Mexican clergy) that is, in part,
of an Atlantic return.
Chapter 4 looks at how, in twenty-fi rst-century Rome, Catholic
migrants’ out-of-wedlock sexuality and eroticism, their uncanny senses
of the homely and the unhomely through the Sacred Heart and the Señor
de los Milagros, disturb and unsettle the completeness of the fantasy of
conversion and of turning natives into new apostles—especially in the
present debates of the Nueva Evangelización.46 Through the analyses of
ritual celebrations as well as devotional practices, Latin American migrant
itineraries reveal the circulation of deep-seated anxieties about the pollution of a migrant Other. I show how those itineraries also subtly destabilize official pedagogies of migrant evangelization that wish for a shared
pan-Americanism. Tropes of “migrant communities,” while promoting
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Introduction: Catholic Humanitas
the abode of the normative family and family reunification as the unique
and most viable way for the redemption of migrants’ bodies and souls,
frame the experience of labor migration and immigration as a heroic spiritual journey.
Chapter 5 focuses on Mexican transnational returns of histories and the
affective politics of celebrating the Virgin of Guadalupe in Rome, arguing
that these transnational Catholic devotions may contain or exceed the
affect of the nation. The analytical interplay between a fantasy of the nation
and its political reenactment gives us important insights into how racialized transnational religious histories are intimately connected to national
and political affect. So if Marian religious devotions are about presence,
relationships, and lived religion, I show in this chapter how they should
also be studied as a constellation of fragments that reemerge in histories
that have been partially forgotten or have been abjected.
Finally, chapter 6 explores intimate affective domains of the return of
the missions that emerge in the experiences of gendered migration situated
at different socioeconomic conjunctures—with continuity between religious and secular domains. Looking at lay migrant women’s labor and that
of Mexican Catholic nuns within the convent’s walls, I explore gendered
spatial affectivity and its relationship to labor, histories, marriage, and
memories. I show that if an ideal form of lay Latin American transnational
caring labor is professed by the church missionary pedagogies as a female
heroic journey in Rome, it is constantly interrupted by ambiguities, by
“lying,” and by stretching of different ways of experiencing time and labor
between the convent’s walls.
Now, having been given a road map, let’s continue the journey.
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1.
Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
Here is the entity [Rome], which has suffered so many drastic
changes in the course of two thousand years, yet is still the
same soil, the same hill, often even the same column or the
same wall, and in its people one fi nds traces of their ancient
character. Contemplating this, the observer becomes, as it
were, a contemporary of the great decrees of destiny.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, 1815/17
Goethe was as fond of Rome as he was anticlerical. The history of Rome’s
“ancient character” and its pontifical powers is a complex one. In this
light, I situate broad changes in Italian legislation on migration that will
set the context for the next chapter, in which I discuss the positions on
migration of the Holy See and of particular religious orders within the
Catholic Church. Understanding the practices of religious orders in relation to migrants is fundamental to grasping the church’s dual positions on
immigration. I argue that an understanding of the contemporary church
requires a multilayered, differentiated, and multipolar study of competing
positions, faces, and “souls.”
Italian migrant legislation has become increasingly restrictive and based
on jus sanguinis (right of blood, or birth descent) rather than jus soli (right
of the soil, or place of birth). I read here changes in the Italian legislative
system in relation to local municipal policies on migration of the two
mayors of Rome in the period of study of this book, Walter Veltroni and
Gianni Alemanno.1 I discuss how these two mayors have held, broadly
speaking, two different political stances toward Roman heritage as it
relates to the Catholic Church and to migration. I then illustrate, through
a particular ethnographic encounter on Piazza Mancini, how the presence
of migrants in Roman public spaces ignites tensions and fears, along with
19
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Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
nostalgia for a clear demarcation of a center and the periphery of “civilization.” Finally, I dwell on current revisions to Vatican II and begin to map
the different souls of the church toward migration that have been marked
by these current revisions.
The politics of immigration in Italy has been murky since the early
1990s; since the early 2000s, this political landscape has become more
regimented over the course of two distinct periods of municipal governance: fi rst, the municipal government of Mayor Walter Veltroni (2001–8),
a left-leaning liberal associated with the Democratic Party, and, second,
that of Mayor Gianni Alemanno (2008–13), a member of Alleanza Nazionale, a right-wing party that has deep, populist roots in the Roman social
landscape.
During the portion of the Veltroni period that coincided with the second national mandate for Berlusconi as prime minister of Italy (2001–5),
there was a schism between the national outlook on migration and the
more liberal outlook of the municipality of Rome. Veltroni’s vision was
more in tune with the government of Romano Prodi, head of the leftcenter coalition of L’Ulivo (now the PD, Democratic Party), which ruled
the country in 2006–7. Berlusconi’s fourth mandate (2008–11) coincided
with Alemanno’s term, and these two governments have shared a similar
outlook on migration, with no major open clashes between them.2
Before 2011 there were three major phases of national immigration
policy in Italy: the Martelli Law (1990–98), the Turco-Napolitano Law
(1998–2002), the Bossi-Fini Law (2002–8), and the Decreto Sicurezza
(Security Decree, from 2009). These phases have marked important shifts
in the ways in which migrant subjectivity is legally constructed in Italy,
signaling a trend toward an increasingly restrictive immigration policy.
The Martelli Law fi rst marked clearer boundaries between asylum seekers,
legal migrants, and undocumented migrants, and introduced a language of
expulsion from the country, if undocumented migration was at stake. The
Turco-Napolitano Law instituted the figure of the (legal) migrant as the
bearer of rights to family reconciliation, health, and education; yet it was
also the fi rst law that introduced the Centri di Permanenza Temporanea
(Centers of Temporary Permanence, CTP) more recently called Centri di
Identificazione ed Espulsione. These are state-regulated and enclosed
structures dedicated to the identification of migrants for purposes of either
possible expulsion from the country or their right to appeal for asylum.
The Turco-Napolitano legislation framed the expulsion of undocumented migrants within a civil code rather than the penal code. But with
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Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
21
the Bossi-Fini legislation the figure of the (undocumented) migrant
became increasingly criminalized, and expulsion became a matter of the
penal code rather than a civic code. In the process, the rules for asylum
seekers were made more difficult, and what was essentially a two-tiered
system was put into place that favored migrants arriving under the umbrella
of binational agreements and penalized as “illegal” those who did not have
already in place a permesso di soggiorno (permit of staying). This permit is
granted or renewed only if the bearer holds a work contract, as a guarantee
of their capacity to provide for their basic livelihood.
The twist of this law, however, was and remains that a work contract is
required to obtain a residence permit, which makes it difficult for migrants
to invite other migrants into the country. Those same conditions apply for
the renewal of the permit of residency within the country—even if the
migrant has been living in Italy—with a grace period of only six months.
In constructing this framework, the Bossi-Fini legislation enabled the
creation of paternalist and exploitative relations between employers and
migrant employees. The murkiness and exploitative potential of this law is
especially evident in the labor relations structuring live-in care, a niche
heavily fi lled by migrants attending the Latin American Mission (MLA).
But it is with the Decreto Sicurezza (security decree), promoted in 2008
and ratified in 2009, that the criminalization of migration comes into full
public force, moved by internal politics within Berlusconi’s government
that led it to concede the Northern League’s anti-immigration sentiments
in exchange for their support in passing the ad personam laws that allowed
Berlusconi to avoid prosecution on different fraud and corruption charges
while serving in government.3
The main restrictive points introduced by the Decreto Sicurezza left
migrants in a more precarious condition than ever.4 For instance, the law
introduced a formal obligation for public employees to denounce anyone
suspected of not possessing a legal residence permit. This civil policing
initially targeted health care providers in public institutions, but as withdrawn before the law was officially passed because of the outcry from the
medical community. This legislation also establishes hefty penalties—
including fi nes and seizure of property—for landlords who rent out to
migrants not in possession of legal documents. Undocumented migration
itself becomes a criminal act, punishable with a large fi ne, expulsion, or
detention in CTP. Moreover, this law legalized the formation of civil
night watches (particularly active prior to the fall of the last Berlusconi
government) to patrol urban areas against organized crime, a development
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22 Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
bearing, especially in the northeast of Italy, a disturbingly anti-migrant
tone. For many Italians not inclined to Northern League thinking, this is
reminiscent of the not-too-distant past of Italian fascist rule.
This legislative move to an increased criminalization of undocumented
immigration has prompted a degree of resistance and criticism from
Catholic associations in Italy. Many Catholics have contested the detrimental effect that these laws have had on the sacredness of the family, by
de facto precluding even civil marriage to undocumented migrants.
Catholic media have defended individual migrant rights and the rights of
children born even in civil unions, and they have criticized the idea that
there is a connection between an increase in immigration and an increase
in crime. The CEMi (Commissione Episcopale per le Migrazioni) has
voiced that in Rome and in the Lazio region the functional connection
between increased immigration and increased petty criminality is statistically inaccurate.5 In 2012, in order to comply with EU mandates, Italy
created two separate tiers of migrant labor. A new “Blue Card” was
approved, enacting a 2009 EU law that gives priority to “highly qualified”
immigrant populations coming to Italy from non-EU countries. The recognition of a special identity card for highly qualified workers creates a
new differentiation of migrant identities in Italian labor legislation.
Capi Mundi, Kaputt Mundi
In November 2005, I accepted the invitation of a Peruvian friend to attend
a public meeting about the troubles that are taking place at Piazza Mancini.6 This piazza has been a place of contention since a highly publicized
“peaceful” meeting of Filipino migrants. Since the early and mid-2000s,
noisier and “undisciplined” Latin American migrants have made it their
place to meet, particularly on Thursday afternoons and evenings, and all
day Sundays.
We arrive with a friend, Toño, originally from Cuzco, on a rainy late
afternoon in the oratory of a Catholic education college just off the piazza.
Within the oratory, I turn to see whether there are any familiar faces.
Father Manuel, the Scalabrinian priest in charge at the time of the Mexican and Brazilian communities in the MLA, is on the right up near the
front, and in the middle rows on the right a group of Latin Americans is
sitting quietly in somewhat hunched positions.7 On the left side, opposite
the long table where representatives of institutions, a group of vociferous
Italians, mostly middle-aged or pensioners, are itching to take up the micro-
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Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
23
phone. The right of fi rst word is with a representative of the carabinieri8 of
the Questura of Rome, lodged in the barrack of Maurizio Giglio (around
the corner), who is sitting next to Madisson Godoy Sánchez, then president of a Latin American Ecuadorian organization called Simon Bolivar.9
The representative of the carabinieri makes a small introduction and then
leaves the floor to the public. Father Manuel nervously touches his umbrella
while the crowd of Italians begins to pour out stories in heavy Romanesque accents about the troubles that the Latin American migrants have
brought to the piazza.
Earlier, Filipinos were using it, and that was good. They were proper
and did not make much noise. But now, one old man in a jittery, pitched
voice states, the piazza has turned in a bivouac, a degradation of the urban
space. Not only male, but even female migrants are urinating publicly at a
place where Italian mothers take their children to play. An Ecuadorian
woman will complain later that the 50 cents paid for access to a public
toilet is wasted, as those are kept in horrible conditions. The man carries
on, spelling out that Rome used to be capi mundi, the center or leader of
the world, but is now kaputt mundi, the broken down of the world:
These gardens have been transformed into a bivouac; those people
[pointing to the brown-skinned Latin American migrants sitting in a
corner] don’t know that we cannot piss here in public; they shit, urinate,
I would call them anthropomorphic. . . . Man has dignity; those [the
migrants] do not have it; on top of this they are our guests, and they
should adapt to our own manner. . . . Roma is capi mundi, it was the
center of an empire, and there were people here from all over the place,
but now it is kaputt mundi. . . . If nothing is done, the last resort [ultima
spiaggia] is to call Toto Rina [a key Sicilian mafia leader now in prison,
but still rather powerful]. (My emphasis)
An Italian woman in her late forties grabs the microphone and states:
The gardens are made for us, and we cannot use them. If you visit
Germany and Austria, the police there are much stricter, and you can
use the parks and the squares, not like here. There is no control over
territory [controllo sul territorio]. . . . We are not racist, but one thing is
certain, they have to go. . . . If D’Alema and Veltroni [a former prime
minister of Italy and a former mayor of Rome, respectively, both of
the Democratic Party in Rome] lived here, something would be done.
We are class-B citizens.
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Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
The public conversation gets even more animated, and the Italian
neighbors begin to direct their complaints to the Forze dell’ordine, which
are on the other side of the table, and who keep on insisting that they have
a limited mandate and cannot really fi ne people to prevent them from
using the public space in a particular way, until they really breach a law.
Then a neighbor proposes that all the migrants should be permitted to
hang around only under the bridge, on the one side of the piazza, but a
carabineer replies that this is not possible as there are no barriers on the
bank, and people, even migrant children, could fall in the river Tiber. The
voices are getting louder and louder; one older neighbor fidgets with the
tape that holds together the stems of his broken glasses. Retired Italian
people are seeing their purchasing power shrinking because of the economic recession.
The African representative of the municipality of Rome, himself a
Nigerian migrant, keeps on trying to get the microphone. In the end he is
given a chance to speak, and he calmly and repeatedly pictures migration
as “an opening of the heart,” an opening to the novelty that migration
represents. His pitch feels out of place in the very tense room. It reminds
me of the charitable empathy of the civilizing new Italian nation of the
book Cuore—still utopic in twenty-fi rst-century Italy.10
Finally, Madisson Godoy intervenes and proposes that a newly founded
migrant association be tasked with forming a migrant patrol (wearing the
recognizable association T-shirt) that could ensure that noise and littering
are kept at bay, especially on Thursdays and Sunday nights. So, in the end,
although this is not the fi rst choice for the neighbors, the meeting is
adjourned with this decision taken. I head back to the bus terminal with
Toño, an old-time Peruvian friend, and he shakes his head as he does not
think this is going to work. These newly created migrant associations, he
argues, are often tied to the interests of a few. More than a few have street
businesses in the piazza selling homemade food and beer. If they tackle
that, they would go to the heart of the problem, he adds. But “Italian
people do not know that.” Parallel economies are at the heart of this contested public space.
This ethnographic encounter illustrates some aspects of multicultural
Rome and the production of contested publics. One element of this is a
nostalgia for a strong, fascist, strong-state model, the countermodel to the
municipal policies of the then-mayor Veltroni. Veltroni, who had centerleft impulses geared toward an “Italian” multicultural agenda, was strongly
criticized by rivals for not foregrounding public security, and his party lost
the 2008 mayoral election in part over this issue. Another element in this
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Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
25
encounter is the unacknowledged proliferation of small migrant businesses
that create particular strongholds on specific public spaces, just as they also
renew forms of ghettoization. The neighbors’ reaction to the confl ict over
Piazza Mancini signals what has been called a “fortress effect,” like a shell
on the skin and in the heart of social interaction.
The emergence of an affective politics of alterity in migrant terrains, as
Sarah Ahmed suggests, sticks to people’s skin and bodies.11 The fortress
effect revives a mythological, historical, and politically loaded nationalist
identity, in this case transposing it onto an ideology of Italianness as a
shared civic value and common culture.12 So transnational migration,
while provoking some neighbors to fidget and declaim vociferously against
it, undermines from the interstices this colonial idea of the unity of the
nation, and makes of Italy and the Roman landscape a case of postcoloniality occurring without the loss of territories.13
Antonio Gramsci warned that the Catholic Church, since medieval
times but also explicitly in the worlds of post-Concordato, sees civil society as belonging to the secular state and its politics in counterposition to a
society based on the family and the church.14 For those who may not be
aware of it, the Concordato, or Patti Lateranensi, is a legal accord signed
between the Holy See and the Italian government (of Mussolini) in 1929.
That accord formally regulated the relations between the two states in
matter of freedom of cult on the Italian soil, but also established fi nancial
exemptions for the Catholic Church from Italian taxes. In 1984, there was
a revision to this Concordato, which de-linked Catholicism from being
the state religion of Italy.
This operational disjuncture between the Catholic Church and Italian
civil society that Gramsci highlighted is still at the heart of the multilayered
pedagogies that the current Roman Catholic Church implements in the
field of transnational migration. These pedagogies operate with an implicit
dimension of “saving” civil society from its own demise, rather than allowing for the Catholic Church itself to be changed through its dialectic interaction with it. To paraphrase Divini Illius Magistri, Pius XI’s 1939 encyclical,
a natural perfection of civil society helps the development of family, but it
is subordinated to the spiritual order of the Catholic Church.15
Multicultural Rome
Rome is an interesting migrant landscape because, as with a few other cities
in Italy, it has been the cradle for the encounter of different immigrants
since the Roman Empire. It has undergone different waves of expansion
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26 Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
and contraction in trade and labor, and the changing topography of the
urban landscape has reflected the consolidation of different migrant waves at
different historical conjunctures.16 In the 1920s and 1930s, during the development of the Fascist regime, Rome reached a population of just over a
million. Nowadays more than 194 groups of different ethnic and national
origins are present in Rome; they constitute cosmopolitan, migrant, and
diasporic communities as well as minority religious groups. Migrant demographics in Rome show an overall increase of immigration since the late
1980s. Interestingly enough, the same Catholic Church in Rome has been
both a producer of analyses of migrant labor conditions and the active coordinator of some of that migrant labor. Catholic “field observatories” have
produced statistical analyses that are then used by the state and local governments to understand changing migration patterns.17 From these statistics
(which give the number of documented migrants), Peruvians and Ecuadorians—who make up the largest part of the Latin American Mission—are the
most consistent presence; the Mexican numbers are lower, but growing.18
In a 2000 renewal of a municipal Roman statute, four Consiglieri Aggiunti (lit., added councillors) were introduced to the municipal council,
each representing a different immigrant population (although these institutional figures were not renewed at the end of their last mandate in 2013).
They participate in the activity of the council, but they have neither the
right to vote nor the right to veto—they are in a way an absent presence
in the municipal council. So although the city has a long history as an
immigrant city, government structures at the municipal level have registered this only in a symbolic way, at best.
Broadly speaking, up to 2013 the two municipal governments of Rome
led by Walter Veltroni and Gianni Alemanno were marked by a shift in
the city’s political relation to the Holy See. The Veltroni government had
an interest in promoting an image of Rome as possessing a dynamic cultural heritage that is partly shared, yet identified within a wider Christian
umbrella and the Roman Catholic Church. Under Alemanno, however,
the city emphasized the fundamentally Catholic heritage of Roman civil
society as the cradle of Western civilization. Key initiatives introduced
by the Veltroni municipal government pivoted around a vision of Rome
as a multicultural city, distinguished, since the inception of the Roman
Empire, by its welcoming and engaged attitude toward migrant and diasporic communities. Many of the initiatives, at least on paper, fostered the
construction of a collective citizens’ memory and the development of a
sense of shared multi-ethnic civic identity. Piazza Mancini shows, how-
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Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
27
ever, how these multicultural policies and representations of a multi-ethnic
civitas are, in practice, intersected by affects of fear and shame.
From the late 1990s until the mid-2000s, several multicultural and
intercultural initiatives in Rome were media-based and for political ends.19
Part of municipal funding for migration-related services was directed to
online information provision and multi-ethnic local guides to events and
associations with the direct editorial contribution of migrants and linked
to Servizio Intercultura—a municipally funded initiative through local
libraries to enhance the cultural presence of migrant and diasporic communities.20 Many of these initiatives, however, were fi ltered through a
fundamentally conservative conception of cultural heritage—that is to
say a conception of Roman culture rooted in the city’s classical art and
architecture (housed, for instance, in museums such as the Musei Capitolini) and promoted to extracomunitari21 migrants with the implied intention of furthering their cultural integration through exposure to the
wealth of Roman and Italian culture.22 Integration (integrazione) has also
been at the forefront of Roman Catholic policies on immigration in
Rome, and often in tandem with, or covering for, a lack of municipal and
national long-term policies. An example is the Forum per l’intercultura
founded in 1991 by caritas Roma for the organization and promotion
of intercultural education, which has aimed for a “positive” integration
of migrants into Italian communities, while appreciating their cultural
roots.
A principal shortcoming of Veltroni’s municipal initiatives vis-à-vis
migrants was that they lacked institutional support for fostering and maintaining existing social and linguistic networks within Rome’s migrant
communities.23 Forms of pan-ethnic identities, which were often the
default mechanisms of municipal interventions, did not take hold on the
ground, especially for categories such as Latin Americans. Such categories
and modes of governmental address failed to recognize the many racial
and class divides within these “pan” and ethnic identities and the way that
ethnic migrant groups are themselves internally percolated by forms of
racialization and class distinction.
These tensions are partly captured in the confl icts that arose around
Piazza Mancini, one of several public spaces of contention in the Roman
landscape. Piazza Mancini is also a space where migrants’ economic differentiation takes place, which is something that both categories of pan–
Latin American migrant communities and the Catholic image of the
suffering migrant on a Christic ( Jesus-like) path of redemption fall short of
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28
Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
capturing (which I discuss in the following chapters). Migrants are, of
course, laboring subjects, but also different laboring subjects.
With Alemanno’s municipal government, Programma Integra replaced
culture-centered initiatives, emphasizing instead the “integration” of
migrants and refugees, not only in the labor market but also in “Italian”
culture, foregrounding the command of the Italian language. Municipal
resources for fostering cultural diversity and celebrations of migrant culture were curtailed or redirected to programs geared to increasing the
skills of migrant laborers and to improving the legally sanctioned trait
d’union between employees and employers. The cultural aspects, as well
as in some cases the folklorization of migrant cultural celebrations, became
confi ned more than ever to private artistic initiatives and to the Catholic
Church. Within this period of Alemanno’s leadership, media attention
contributed to a criminalization of the figure of the migrant, and there
was also a surge in acts of violence against unprotected migrant labor, and
a strong stand against nonsedentary communities.24 In a clear conjuncture
of economic downturn, Othering had become (as it continues to be today)
a political leverage informing a patterned anti-immigration reaction as
well as an eruption of what the media have often defi ned as “apparently
meaningless” violence.
The conjuncture of economic downturn in Italy is as much about labor
restructuring as it is about changing family demographics and orientations. Much literature has discussed and engaged with transnational
migrant labor in the caring industry as a labor of love and Latin American
migration especially from the Andean countries fi nds its insertion in this
labor market.25 Compared with Eastern European migration, Latin Americans have a higher number of family reunifications, even while often little
family network and welfare support is available to these female migrants.
Moreover the rule of jus sanguinis rather than jus soli has clear consequences for children’s care, their behavior, and integration into Italian way
of life. Members of the youth section of the Latin American Mission,
themselves second generation migrants, complain that either one is left
alone at home or one grows up in enclosed and straitjacketing Catholic
colleges in Rome, where one may be in a class with Italians from very
different social backgrounds. In other parts of Italy the presence of Latin
American youth has been studied in relation to the increase in youth street
gangs.26 Targeted and attentive care to Latin American youth has increasingly become a key concern for Peruvian and Ecuadorian migrant net-
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Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
29
works and associations, as well as to therapeutically oriented social services
available to migrants.27
Indications of a critical attitude toward homogenizing defi nitions of
migrants have begun to emerge in the analysis of current immigration in
Italy. Interesting analytical tools such as “internal frontiers” productively
challenge collective metaphors of migration. In ethnographically engaged
studies of badanti in Tuscany, for example, this tools has provided an
understanding of life cycle phases within existing local traditional caring
models to open up how the dynamic of badanti becomes a “bottom-up
process of experience of multiculturalism, which may erode the cultural
frontier gap in the context of routine everyday life.”28 In this sense, from
the perspective of affective labor, the intersections between migration and
the Catholic Church are multiple. One dominant perspective engendered
by both the Scalabrinian order and caritas,29 begins with reenvisioning
the church in terms of a voluntary-based openness to a marginalized and
pauperized migrant presence in Rome. Thus, “being the Church” implies
a “listening center, the path of accompaniment for a defense of human
rights, the construction of relationships for people who live in solitude and
marginalization.”30 So the Catholic Church’s position is both to connect
migrant labor to Italian families (especially for the care of the elderly living on their own) where isolation is a growing problem, and it is to help
migrants themselves to come out of the isolation they experience in the
path of migration. Through this perspective both documented and undocumented migrants seem to share an affective terrain of isolation with a
local aging and ailing population.
But the Catholic Church holds multiple views on migration. In the
2009 annual papal visit to the municipality of Rome, Benedict XVI
responded to the mayor’s proposal for a new “Observatory for Religious
Freedom” by emphasizing the “ancient law” and the Christian faith as the
best roots the city has for peaceful civil cohabitation. He also reiterated
the connection between migration and individual rights, stressing how the
Roman Catholic community remains central and essential for the “respect
of the fundamental rights of the person in the respect of legality.”31
Based in Rome, the “Observatory for Religious Freedom” is a new
official partnership between the municipal Roman government and the
Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was ratified at the beginning of
2012. The observatory, among other things, was to compile an annual
report of national indexes for religious freedom. At the inauguration of the
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Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
observatory, then-mayor Alemanno recalled attacks suffered by the church,
“such as the one suffered in Nigeria by the Christians, that in the world are
the fi rst to suffer attacks to their personal religious freedom, with physical
threats, killings and massacres.”32 The then Italian foreign minister counterpart, Giulio Terzi di Sant’ Agata, emphasized: “The promotion of the
freedom of worship and the peaceful cohabitation of faiths will continue
to be a qualifying trait of the ethical dimension of foreigner-related Italian
policy.”33
Mayor Alemanno strongly supported the observatory as an instrument
of partnership between the Roman local government and the pontifical
state, based on a common root in Catholic evangelization—once again
demonstrating the strong relationship of the Catholic Church and the Italian state. This interface between municipal and Catholic action on the
Roman territory shows some “openness” to the process of migration, but
it also has its subtle counterpart of closure, clearly diverging from the
conception of a partnership based on the common defense of a tangible
Roman cultural heritage promoted by his predecessor.34 A documented
ambivalence by the Roman municipal government and the Italian state
over processes of transnational migration,35 I argue, is paralleled by a similar ambivalence within the Vatican.
Migration is intrinsically connected to the foundational act of delimiting the modern state. As Adelmalek Sayad beautifully argues in his work
on the suffering of migrants of Algerian origins to France, this state of
openness and closure also animates a recurrent representation of emancipation in the process of migration, when migrants are confronted with the
violence of the realization of migration’s fantasy and impossibility.36 This
paradox between the fantasy and the reality of migration is grasped (or
not) in multiple ways within the Catholic Church itself. Moreover, different political imaginaries around migration are mutually shaped across the
relation between the church and municipal and state governments in Italy;
none of the multiple positions can be understood in isolation from the
others.
Different bodies within the church have conceptualized and operationalized work with migrants differently. There are, broadly speaking, three
different approaches toward transnational migration—different souls, to
use an emblematic metaphor—within the Roman Catholic Church. A fi rst
broad approach to migration within the church is represented by a contingent within the Roman Curia associated with cardinals such as Giacomo
Biffi, who understands migration to Italy through a prism of illegality, with
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Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
31
limited interest in improving conditions of social plurality. Cardinal Biffi,
in early 2000, sparked a major debate in the press, coalescing major conservative voices around the spirit of European civilization. Together with
Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Cardinal Biffi has been a strong ally of the
Legionaries of Christ (at least prior the demise of its founder, which I will
address in the next chapter), stressing a particular understanding of “humanism” as the root of Italian/European culture.37 What is even more complex
is that this point of view has also been partially shared (around the sanctity
of the baptized family) by more liberal voices within the Italian church,
such as in the case of the late Cardinal of Milan and Jesuit Carlo Maria
Martini.38
The second approach is most closely associated with one key organization in Rome and across Italy: Migrantes a Catholic foundation dedicated
to the care of human mobility.39 Since 1992, Migrantes, along with other
groups in the city including the Community of Sant’Egidio and the ACLI
(Italian Catholic Labor Association), started a process of reflection on the
dynamics of migration. Members of this association even commented on
drafts of the Bossi-Fini law, though largely without with the hoped-for
effect. In May 2008 Father Bruno Mioli, a Scalabrinian father from Vicenza,
who was the head of the organization at the time, complained in a personal interview that the changes within the church had not been fast
enough to respond to legislative restrictions on immigration in Italy.
Father Mioli insisted that part of the church is not in favor of the criminalization of migration but rather sees the need to impose some sort of restriction, a form of “regulatory rationale.” For him, the divisions within the
church are more a matter of degrees of restriction of migration and whether
to make the issue of migration a priority in the everyday practices of the
church and its public interventions.
As processes of political subjectivities, migrant itineraries are deeply
entangled in embodied and mediatic productions of publics.40 However,
these migrant itineraries are often validated and nested within forms of
Catholic pious and voluntary labor and still circumscribed in their production by subtle forms of exclusion. Some of these forms of exclusion are
sharply visible in the third key formation shaping the contemporary politics of migration in the church. A more entrepreneurial side of the Catholic priest body has seen migration as not a priority issue for the church.
The willingness of this segment of the clergy to dismiss migration as a
distinct priority for the church is consonant with the church’s historical
failure to adopt positions critical of the social and economical structures
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32 Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
that have produced the type of migration associated with poverty worldwide. I am not arguing here that Pope Francis’s 2013 statements concerning the “culture of waste” of capitalism and the need for the church to pay
attention to poverty and transnational migration in the world did not exist
prior to his papacy. I am here interested in the different compositions of
and the multiple responses to transnational migration that have been present and are still present within the Catholic Church and, to certain extent,
regardless of current indications by Pope Francis.
The complexity of Pope Francis’s papacy is beyond the purview of this
book. Nonetheless, it is important to understand that the church is not just
the pope; the pope is one of its faces, more or less courted by the global
media, but still only one among many. The long history of the interface
between the Catholic Church and transnational migration enlightens the
present. The Catholic Church is composed of many dynamic and everchanging souls that make the analytic of “conservative” versus “progressive” rather inadequate for understanding its many local and global
expressions. In fact, a part of the church and the clergy in Rome that could
be described as “conservative” because it is not particularly critical of the
global economic conjunctures that have created increasing wealth for a
few and poverty for many is also “modern,” competent, and innovative in
creating the ZENIT Catholic web news service, although this was founded
by the “conservative” Legionaries of Christ. The web news service has
become, since the early 2000s, a key player in online Catholic news distribution. As I describe in the following chapters, the Mexican-based Legionaries of Christ is a neoliberal order in that it courts capital markets and the
wealthy elites, but it is considered innovative in its use of the media and,
although traditional in its liturgical posture, modern in its evangelical
horizons.
The coexistence and the confl ict of the different souls of the church are
also reflected in concrete, although often minor, examples of migrant
presence in the media in Rome. That is the case of the radio program Hola
mi Gente (Ciao Amici). This program was promoted by the CICS (Interdisciplinary Center for Social Communication) at the Gregorian University
under the guidance of a motivated Venezuelan Jesuit priest, with a small
source of funding from the EU (which ran out in 2008—since then the
broadcasting has been funded on a shoe string by the Vatican Radio), and
in synergy with a caritas network of local radio stations in Western
Europe and South America. The program has aimed to disclose some of
the myths of Spanish-speaking migration to Italy and opens up a forum to
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Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
33
give voice to the lives of ordinary migrants, while providing information
on how to improve the lives migrants and their integration into Italian
society. The program has addressed many themes, including the condition
of children of migrants in Italy, the conundrum of labor de-skilling especially for Andean origin women (but also others), and the distribution of
information about education opportunities in Italy.
The program was run for many years out of the Gregorian University.
Since the funding from the EU ran out, the program has been broadcast
from Radio Vaticana, and the organizers work on a voluntary basis (with
only travel expenses reimbursed). Two of the highly skilled women (Ecuadorian and Mexican) who have run the program think critically about
migration and provide a small but growing Spanish/Italian forum to create bridges, especially for Latin American migrant laborers who are too
often stuck behind walls going about their daily cleaning chores. Until
2007 the program was coordinated by an Italian radio producer, who was
the only one paid a salary from the EU/Gregorian University sponsorship.
However, Maria Luisa, an articulate, bright Ecuadorian woman married
to an Italian, who was one of the organizers of the program, was puzzled
by the division of labor within the organization of the program and that
the Italians were still officially leading, although the organizational work
of the program was really the fruit of the migrant women. The Jesuit priest
organizer often asked her to be patient and not to voice her concerns.
Maria Luisa found herself in a conundrum: She realized that her labor
was not valued enough, and that Italian laborers always have the upper
hand. She felt that the Italians thought of themselves as knowing best, as
“having more culture”—and seeing migrants as coming from “uncivilized
places.” It was clear in her mind that even in the context of this program,
where we fi nd the church embracing a progressive discourse on migration
and cultural pluralism, the status quo of material inequality was reproduced to a certain degree by the Jesuit priest/organization behind the
program. Migrant labor, she mentioned, is often seen as voluntary labor,
whereas the Italian laborer (even if not so skilled as the migrant one) gets
preferential treatment in a condition of scarcity of resources.
Once the EU funding ran out, the Italian radio producer shifted to
other programs, and Hola mi Gente continued to be broadcast from Vatican
radio facilities, but a sense of uneasiness stayed with Maria Luisa for a
while. She is now an Italian citizen and active in different migrant networks and labor organizations; she balances these commitments with
much dedication, but she is also juggling with housework, her husband,
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34
Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
and two young daughters. For her it was clear that subtle forms of exclusion were still active even among more liberal factions of the Catholic
Church, in the name of Italian culture and civilization. Toño, the Peruvian man who fi rst brought me to Piazza Mancini and an organizer of the
radio program for a time, said that, behind the lack of “society integration,” there was a lack of labor integration, based in turn on much ignorance. Too many Italians, both he and Maria Luisa argued, know little
about migrants’ worlds; nonetheless, they keep an upper hand on labor
relations. Although Maria Luisa may no longer be bothered by the confl ict
at the radio program, it is still an episode deeply expressive of the ways in
which even embryonic forms of migrant female labor mobility face challenges within the world of the lay Catholic voluntary sector. Even if the
Second Vatican Council has named the lay sector as a priority for the
church’s apostolic renewal and attention, labor relations between lay people and clericals in their affective, gendered, and productive regimes are
still a terrain of contestation. This aspect of the Second Vatican Council’s
recommendations has still not been fulfi lled.
Migration and the Second Vatican Council
A main focus of Vatican II has been on the church’s relation to “liberation”
and “inculturation” and the role of lay Catholics in the promotion of the
church. The current conjuncture of revisions of and rethinking about
what Vatican II is and has meant for the church is having subtle effects on
different fields. The implications of this revisionism are not limited to the
internal politics regarding the promotion of a canonical liturgy and the
reassertion of a centralist and hierarchical decision-making structure. This
revisionism has also had concrete effects on the politics of migration.
A major development of Vatican II has been of inculturation as a movement inspired by the aggiornamento—the process of revision of the church’s
canon law that has come to see local cultural expressions as possible proclamations of Catholicism. Inculturation refers to a relative willingness of
the church to adapt Catholic doctrine to local social systems and cultural
traditions and to be renewed by these encounters. This approach sees
native and non-Western societies as already potentially embedded within
expressions of Catholicism, in different forms and fashions. Catholic inculturation is not a new concept, and it has been a bone of contention since the
beginnings of modern missionary life. It was in the middle of the seventeenth century that the Jesuit order successfully promoted Catholic missions
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35
in China by allowing the translation of the Bible into local languages and
interpreting it through local understandings of the cult of the ancestors.
Later, because of the demise of the Jesuits’ fortune in Rome and Europe,
their missionary policy was effectively undermined in China, beginning
with the prohibition of the use of translated texts and the imposition of
Vatican political presence within the Chinese empire.41 The church’s
anxieties about its lack of control over its powerful orders translated to an
increased suppression of local expressions of Catholicism.
Since the 1960s a debate on inculturation has also engendered important discussions, at least in Latin America, about the relation between
evangelization and culture and the inculturation of the gospel. Through
these debates, the Catholic Church began to wrestle with the historicity
of its own message and the centrality of popular and local religiosity to
its own theological reproduction. With this came the recognition that
hybridity and syncretism offer points of departure for understanding the
everyday phenomenology of Catholicism. All of this has been a radical
challenge for the church from within, but potentially also that which has
engendered its own backlash.
Interpretations of Vatican II have been numerous and increasingly contentious. Here I highlight two.42 On one hand, early interpretations of
Vatican II saw it as an event that reinscribed and opened up the roots of the
liturgy and the standing of the church. Vatican II, although not endorsed
unanimously within the church in 1965, has reformulated a relation
between scriptures and tradition, allowing for a profound inculturation of
the sacred word. In this respect, Vatican II signaled a shift to a praxeology
and the inculturation of theology within the humanmade world, away
from the divine heritage of the scriptures. This implied a theological challenge to Thomist interpretations and a renewed opening to national episcopal conferences for the interpretation and implementation of those
guidelines.
On the other hand, Vatican II has been read by Benedict XVI in continuity with previous church traditions, rather than as an event that has
broken away from them. Especially for Benedict XVI this rereading of
the Second Vatican Council focuses on the immutability of the liturgy,
the institution of the church, and its ultimate authority over the recent
multiplication of biblical and liturgical movements within. Moreover,
this revisionist school argues that the tension of modernists vis-à-vis antimodernists (themselves) is a false one. However, modernists, especially
within the Dominican and Jesuit ranks, have privileged instead a reading
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36 Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
of immanence, a focus on the “religion of the heart” as the one lived and
experienced by the human subject, and they have held an ecumenical
view of the church as extending the heart of the “mystical body” to other
Christian churches. A lay counterpart of this reading was fostered by the
Bologna school championed by Giuseppe Alberigo, whose position is
now refuted by some.43
John Paul II was key to this revisionist debate of Vatican II. For John
Paul II, this was a debate about the “transformation of the heart” away
from the encompassing limits of civil society. He also emphasized the
subjective dimension of dominion in the practice of faith, as the ethical
capacity to “dominate” the world through work as “free” subjects.44 Part
of John Paul II’s position in this debate is a focus on the revivification of
Marian cultures, which represented a rift with the Jesuits from the beginning of his papal mandate. This rift was in part about conceiving culture
connected to the principles of liberation theology in the Americas as the
product of social and divine transformations. So both John Paul II and
Benedict XVI, although in different ways, championed a revisionist reading of Vatican II, a recalibrating of the church as a passionate machine.
The former did so via a particular faith on a freely chosen embrace of
Marian love; the latter through an undefeated faith on the transcendental
truth of Catholic liturgy.
These competing interpretations of the meaning and legacy of Vatican
II intersect with the problem of migration within the church in at least
two ways. First, as in the theology of Benedict XVI the backtracking over
the importance of “culture” as the location of the gospel reclaims a precultural space as the location of the key sacredness of Catholicism. This revisionist interpretations of Vatican II tend to leave unacknowledged the sorts
of potential confl icts over different cultural embodiments of the Catholic
Church that have emerged in Rome over the course of the 2000s. Fueled
by right-wing mayoralties such as that of Gianni Alemanno, the tendencies within the church that privilege a notion of Roman civic heritage that
is intertwined with that of the Catholic Church tend to conflate an attack
on civitas (in the singular) with an attack on Catholic humanitas.
Second, this revisionism is empowering more conservative and neotraditionalist wings of the church in Rome that promote an understanding of
“the” Catholicism as the cradle of Europe. These orientations have long
flourished as part of a Romanization of Catholicism in Rome itself (but
also conspicuously in North America).45 By Romanization I refer here to
the ways in which a direct contact with the Vatican has been weighed in
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37
the professionalization of clergy worldwide. It is a long-standing practice
that the cream of the national clergy is sent by bishops from different
dioceses in Latin America to study in one of the many pontifical universities in Rome (such as the Gregorian and the Urbaniana). By being physically and historically immersed in the romanità of the church, priests and
seminarians not only absorb a sense of Catholic civitas and humanitas but
also become, through their shared connection to the Vatican, strategic
players in supporting local bishops within national church’s politics.
Since Pius IX in the nineteenth century, national seminaries in Rome
have hosted select clergy during a period of formation and specialization,
strengthening both a sense of civitas romana and an allegiance to the pope.
Making future Latin American clergy “Roman at heart”46 was both cause
and effect of the creation of the Colegio Pío Latino Americano, founded
by José Ignacio Víctor Eyzaguirre, a Chilean priest, in 1856. The establishment of that pedagogical hub as a formative space for young Latin American priests was also to combat “the anti-Catholic spirit, indifferentism and
the corruption of habits” widely condemned by the church at the time.47
This historical push toward a Romanization of the Catholic Church
often assumes a paradoxical appearance when it comes to immigration in
Italy. Thus, one side of the clergy sees Catholic migrants as “new blood”
that might renew and defend a Catholic Church that is in decline across
Europe and actively under attack at the borderlands of Christianity—for
example, in Palestine and Israel, or in Nigeria. Yet at the same time transnational migration is seen as destabilizing the foundational core of Europe.
Transnational Catholic migration from the Americas to Rome thus carries
a paradoxical symbolic weight. The indigenous migrants from the Americas form a stream of new apostolic blood revitalizing both the clergy and
the popular perception of the church—Pope Francis clearly stands as the
emblematic case; at the same time, as I explain in the following chapter,
for the same clergy, the “return” of Latin American Catholics to Rome
constitutes an unnerving reminder of its incomplete dominion over the
affective and sexualized nature of migrant itineraries.
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2.
The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
I hope that a balanced management of migratory flows and of
human mobility in general will soon be achieved so as to benefit the entire human family, starting with practical measures
that encourage legal emigration and the reunion of families,
and paying special attention to women and minors. Indeed,
the human person must always be the focal point in the vast
field of international migration. . . . Moreover, the migrant family is in a special way a resource as long as it is respected as such;
it must not suffer irreparable damage but must be able to stay
united or to be reunited and carry out its mission as the cradle
of life and the primary context where the human person is welcomed and educated.
—Benedict XVI, Angelus, 14 January 2007,
World Day of Migrants and Refugees
The relation between migration and Catholicism is complex and requires
an understanding of the changing nature of Catholicism, as well as the
resilient endurance of its past in the present.1 The present that I interrogate
in the following pages shows a tension between a part of the church that
privileges a historicized approach to migration and one shaped by a conservative revision of the meaning and legacy of Vatican II. The former,
endorsed by orders such as the Scalabrinians who run the Latin American
Mission (MLA), frames migration as an aspect of contemporary human
experience and advocates a positive response to this condition defi ned by
the active engagement and adaptation of church structures, pedagogy, and
practice. The latter position sees transnational migration to Rome, the
figurative heart of Catholicism, as a potential threat to an allegedly authentic and avowedly European Catholic heritage. This perspective actively
obscures issues of difference and distribution while foregrounding a uni38
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39
versal notion of the “Culture of Life” and a Catholic humanitas. Its advocates fuel and support political expressions in Italian society that amplify
discourses of the illegality and of the need for a tight control over transnational migration.
The argument here is that both of these approaches in different ways
and with different accents have to grapple, fi rst, with migrants’ affective
relation to their nation of origin within an imagined pan-American
Catholicism and, second, with the heterogeneous practices that escape the
tropes of migrant suffering and an idealized Catholic notion of migrant
family and unity of the sort so apparent in the epigraphic quotation from
Benedict XVI above. I use the phrase migrant pedagogies here to describe
the projects championed by different religious actors in the church that
aim to encourage and educate migrants to be good apostolic agents of
what I have emphasized in the introduction of this book is a central,
Christocentric mandate of the Catholic Church: the New Evangelization.
Pedagogy (from the Greek paidos) refers to teaching children and similar
types of instruction. In the case of migrant pedagogies the term foregrounds a paternalistic relation between those who are in authority in the
church and the laity. Finally, I argue that this conservative tendency positions the Catholic Church as an active agent involved in shaping migrants
into being “good” laborers, especially in the care industry, where the majority of Latin American female migrants to Rome are employed.
As I outlined in the introduction, Latin American transnational migration in Rome ignites an old confl ict within the Catholic Church and a
lasting paradox within a Catholic humanitas: the paradox of Catholic conversion as the tension between Sameness and Otherness, which has been
present at least since the Encounter with the New World. This tension
between Sameness and Otherness emerges from the historic debate about
the nature of the human person since the Valladolid’s dispute between
Ginés Sepúlveda and Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas. In this chapter, I read
echoes of this sedimented tension of totalizing Sameness versus Otherness
as implicitly haunting the Roman Catholic Church’s postures on twentyfirst-century migration.
Different pontifical guidelines since Exsul Familia (1952)2 have stressed
migration as a “sign of the times” but current rereadings of this sign awaken
confl icts within the church about it own form of governmentality.3 These
debates reflect long-sedimented tensions between territorially based parishes and their diocesan clergy and religious orders (such as the Scalabrinians and the Jesuits) working in those same territories. These tensions have
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The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
a direct bearing on how migration is dealt with and managed at the level of
local constituencies such at the MLA. The Scalabrinian order’s strategies
of engagement in Rome highlight a particular approach to migrants that
emphasizes their suffering, their vulnerable position, and Jesus/Mary-like
paths to redemption. That which exceeds this imagining of migrant’s subjectivity creates areas of contention within the church itself.
La Vergine del Carmelo and El Señor de los Milagros
It is July 2009 and the migrants in the Latin American Mission in Trastevere are getting ready to celebrate the Vergine del Carmelo. This is the
fi rst time the celebration has been held in the neighborhood. The Latin
American Mission is participating, and Father Alfonso, the Italian Scalabrinian priest at the head of the mission at the time, has been involved
in making this happen. The Virgin will be taken around in procession
through the streets of Trastevere, and will stop at Santa Maria della Luce.
She is taken out of the Church of Santa Agata, among a flock of Italian
devotees, some of whom have come from the provinces; others are from
Trastevere itself. Gianni Alemanno, the mayor of Rome at the time and a
member of the right-wing Alleanza Nazionale party, addresses the public
after this short introduction by the head of the community of Sant’Egidio:4
It is said that Trastevere is the heart of Rome, and we want the heart of
Rome to be full of sentiments, sentiments of love, hospitality, mercy, and
of meeting and dialogue. This is what Mary teaches us, and it is what we
want from this celebration, from this neighborhood, which from the
heart of Rome can reach all the city, so thank you, Mayor, also for the
work in this direction.
A reply from Mayor Alemanno follows shortly afterward:
Thank you. I see Trastevere as one of the most profound and old roots [of
our city], but this procession and this devotion to Mary is also the soul of
Trastevere, the air of our neighborhoods. In these moments we fi nd ourselves to be stronger, more convinced to construct our future, so I am
really pleased to be among you all. Let’s honor Mary, since this procession will give us much strength.
The heart of Rome is a terrain of dispute. The procession, headed by an
Italian cardinal and followed by the Italian Marian confraternity of the
Carmele, proceeds straight for Via Lungaretta, where beyond a narrow
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The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
41
bend the Church of Santa Maria della Luce stands. Migrant women at the
church have been preparing the altar all afternoon, with flowers, empanadas, and fruits. When the Virgin arrives in front of the Latin American
Mission’s parish, a group of members of the brotherhood of the Señor de
los Milagros joins the procession and helps carry her the final distance.
When the Virgin arrives, Father Alfonso addresses the crowd and the
institutional representatives, which include different forze dell’ordine (police
forces) and Mayor Alemanno. Father Alfonso gives thanks for the “wonderful visit of the Virgin” to this church and community, and then becomes
increasingly energetic. The vein on his neck starts to pulse visibly. Leticia,
a Peruvian migrant, will describe later how he “looked enraged,” and
spoke as “never before.” Father Alfonso’s words are very direct. The core
of his speech is about the oneness and power of the heart of Jesus. If you
are in his heart, you are open, and as such you are open to those who
come and knock at your door and ask for dignity, a life, and work. If you
are not open to that, if your heart is not open to the call of these migrants,
you are not in the heart of Jesus; you cannot be called a Catholic. Either you
are with these migrants and with the church (stressed in his words), or you
are outside it; you are against the real foundation of the church, the love of
Jesus.
These are very strong words; I have never heard Padre Alfonso talking
about these issues in front of such a “respectable crowd,” and his words
take on a particular resonance in front of Mayor Alemanno and just a few
days after the ratification of the security decree, which has promoted
harsher measures against undocumented migrants. Then the Hermanos de
Los Señor de los Milagros help carry the Virgin out of the church toward
the fi nal leg of her procession. There is a startling moment. They walk
with a steady, rhythmic step—something they have supposedly learned
since the time they enter the brotherhood. But the Italian carriers adopt an
equally well-practiced, but very different step: much faster, nearly rushing.
The Virgin sways dangerously for a few meters. Some fear she may topple,
but in the end it is the Italian carriers that take the lead, the pace is still fast,
although not that rhythmic. This year, the Hermandad del Señor de los
Milagros have to adapt. Maybe next year will be different.
Second encounter, two years earlier: Father R. is a diocesan chaplain of
a much bigger church than Santa Maria in Trastevere, Santa Maria degli
Angeli, a basilica where the Peruvian Church, part of the Latin American
Mission, has had its base for a few years. The group has the spiritual guidance of a Scalabrinian priest younger than Father Alfonso, but he could
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42 The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
not do much aside from asking the migrants to be calm and endure some
of the “misunderstandings.” In the words of Rosa, a Peruvian migrant
who has resided in Italy for more than fi fteen years, Father R. is “racist.”
I can see why she is saying that, as I have myself been bewildered by the
manner of this priest. Perhaps an index of my partially anticlerical family
upbringing in northern Italy, I share Rosa’s distrust for the patronizing
tone, which I have also encountered with other priests.
Father R. arrives one day in the back of the church, the oratory, where
migrant women were celebrating the Virgin of the Chapi with Peruvian
food and songs. He openly expressed his aversion to the look and smell of
what had been cooked and shared. For sometime he has complained about
how the Peruvian group makes too much clatter with its music, and he
always asks them to be quiet, to make no noise. The infantilization of
migrants is not new in this church, nor is it in Italy in general. Father R.
repeats that this basilica is a “national” one, where “official burials take
place” and official national events are held. The smell of Peruvian food can
dangerously penetrate the walls of the basilica, often empty of devotees,
and only full of tourists.
The tension between Father R. and the Latin American migrants meeting at the Basilica had already reached some heights. In fact in the months
following the encounter in 2007 he ordered them to put the large painting
of the Señor de Los Milagros in the basement, directing them to expose it
only just before their Sunday Spanish mass, and to remove it immediately
afterward. This leaves no way for the devoted Peruvians to pray to this
much-beloved image at their own leisure. A plan to move the painting to
Santa Maria della Luce is put in action in 2007. One side of the group does
not want this to happen though, preferring that it be taken to another
church, Santa Lucia. The painting is snatched away the day before it should
have been transferred to Santa Maria in Trastevere. “Happily,” the painting turns up safely the day after in the MLA in Trastevere, heralding the
permanent demise of the “hijacker” group.
This story is also an index of clerical relations within parishes. There
are more than a few diocesan priests who think like Father R. As a diocesan
priest, he upholds the territorial government of his diocese. The Scalabrinians have to adapt to what the diocesan priests decide, although a few of
them were the ones who suggested moving the painting of the Señor de
Los Milagros elsewhere, away from the basilica in the first place. This is
not an isolated case, nor is it a “pathology” of an individual priest, who was
brought up in a heavily Catholic, provincial northern Italian small town
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The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
43
in the 1950s. These tensions in a given dioceses, between religious orders
operating in that territory and diocesan priests, have a long history in the
functioning of the church—they are not an exception. Although what is
a nearly xenophobic tint in Father R.’s response may be of more recent
appearance in Italy; for a very long time religious orders have had, in
principle and in practice, to coordinate their efforts within and underneath the authority of the local bishop. More than ever, these relations
of authority and obedience are important in Rome whose bishop is the
pope.
Third encounter: In spring 2008 we are celebrating the Día de las
Madres with the Comunidad Católica Mexicana (CCM) in Parco Gelsomino, a lovely, park that feels like a countryside farm, tucked away in
the middle of the city, just off the Villa Aurelia. The mass in Spanish is
celebrated by Father Hector, a Mexican diocesan priest from Veracruz,
who has studied at the Gregorian University and later at the European
University, championed by the Legionaries of Christ. Around two hundred people are enjoying barbequed meat and quesadilla, with Corona
beer, while we mingle with religious nuns and priests: There are many
Mexican women married to Italian men present, with children running
around. Market stalls are set up, selling Mexican arts and crafts. I am sitting down with Lorinda, Damiana, and Iris, who have all been living in
Italy for a while and who are married (or once married) to Italians. The
security decree has just been passed, and Damiana and Lorinda agree that
they have found it really uncomfortable speaking Spanish to their children
in public or on the bus, for instance. Both have turned to speaking Italian
to their children in public spaces, at least for the time being. Lorinda corrects Iris, saying that Italian people are not the children of the fascists, but
are fascist themselves. Rome is becoming different and there is a sense that
xenophobia has arrived for them too.
They carry on, remarking that the day of the mother is celebrated in the
absence of their own mothers. There is a sense of loss and absence, Iris
adds, and Damiana, who is well educated and now runs a web service for
Spanish-speaking children’s activities, intervenes, saying that the power of
motherhood is being able to protect your children; if things turn nasty
here, Damiana continues, she will pick up and leave Italy—though how
could she do it, she cannot say. Then they remember the blessing of Father
Hector, who earlier in the mass symbolically showered the congregation
with water and mentioned the power of all mothers, and of the Virgin of
Guadalupe especially. He prayed that even the mother of Felipe Calderón
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The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
(the president of Mexico at the time) could inspire him to address the
difficulties of the country back home. Mother’s love is in the nation too.
Lorinda adds that it is great here, in Rome, to be part of something that
it is “so Mexican.” One of the reasons she had been initially skeptical
about joining the CCM was that she thought it was Catholic; she has a past
in the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) in Mexico, so the nation
and national celebrations are important for her, as it is having her child
take part in them.5 I then recall, together with them, that in 2005 the issue
of contention with the MLA and CCM was that the CCM was celebrating too many national celebrations and did not do enough evangelization.
Odette then says that the CCM is different because the women who come
here are different. The majority of them do not, and would not, do the
same work that other Latin American women migrants do (as badanti, or
housecleaners); nonetheless there are no jobs for them in Rome. Some of
these Mexican women face a very difficult transition into the Italian labor
market. Employed or jobless, they are nonetheless all Catholics, “Mexican
Catholics.”
A group of Mexican sisters of an order dedicated to the Immaculate
Heart of Mary comes and joins us on the lawn. The music picks up before
the mariachis play; some salsa and Latin music is put on a stereo. Couples
are dancing, a few rather close to each other. One couple I recognize is a
Mexican seminarian, who is dancing sensuously with a Mexican woman.
He is not a Legionary of Christ, but he belongs to the diocese of a central
Mexican state. The sisters and I look at each other in the eyes, and we kind
of giggle. Love is probably not in the air, but something is there for sure.
Martha, the president of the CCM, as a good norteña (from Monterrey)
often jokes about the sexuality of the priests, and some are very good at
bouncing back her jokes, while others shy away. Maybe love is not in the
air, but a few boundaries are being crossed on this Día de las Madres. One
sister actually stops looking and turns her sight away. We come back to the
subject of speaking Spanish in public and the anti-immigrant sentiments
in Rome. In other contexts, Mexican nuns too have expressed to me that
they feel insecure because of their accent when they are not wearing religious habits in Rome. If a nun wears a habit, she won’t be stopped by the
police and asked for her papers. Clerical uniforms in Rome still give those
who wear them a positive aura that overcomes, most of the time but not
always, anti-immigrant sentiments.
Rogelio is a gay man who is part of the Mexican folkloric dance group
Ramatitlán. Rogelio has a stand in the market, where he sells Mexican arts
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45
and crafts. For a few years, he has rented a little atelier just off the Aurelia
Antica road. It took him a while to be able to afford it. Rogelio was one
of the founding members of the CCM. He arrived in Italy in the middle
of the 1990s, when his brother was working as a chef in Rome, but he was
not warned that it would be hard, physically as well as spiritually. For years
after his arrival in Italy he worked as whitewasher, after more than ten
years as an insurance broker in Mexico City:
When I arrived, I thought that in Italy there was no racism. But when
I arrived here, I felt like un indio or una Maria,6 as if I was always going
around dirty. And you know there was another Mexican group here.
But they were different from what the CCM is now; they just wanted
Mexicans to be part of it, somehow elitists. It was like we were the indios
. . . but for me it does not matter if you have a name which is Chinese or
Jewish, for me you are still very much Mexican. This is also why we are
now more independent [from the MLA], but we are still called Comunidad Católica Mexicana. For us this is a place for all types of people; this is
the true spirit of a Catholic Mexican.
Rogelio also came to Italy because he was gay. When he was in Mexico
he became really tired of having to ask a good female friend to act as his
girlfriend when he had to go to work-related parties. In Rome he has a
stable boyfriend, and he is not hiding his relationship. Life is not always
easy, but that initial sense of betrayal of his nation has waned,7 even if his
puzzlement about interracial tensions between fellow Mexicans still
remains. A reproduction of different facets of the nation is still engrained
in people’s lives.
The tensions between the CCM and the MLA have been mainly because
of the viewpoints of the Scalabrinians priests heading it. The Scalabrinian
missionary order is playing a central role in translating emergent migrant
demands for social and labor inclusion. Founded in 1887 and originally
dedicated to supporting Italian migrants in the Americas, by the turn of
the twentieth century, it had more than 600 priests across North America,
Brazil, Italy, the Philippines, and Australia. The history of the evangelization of transnational Latino migrants in Rome is closely connected to the
efforts of this order. Scalabrinians are playing a central role in the institution of Capillania (chaplaincy), which was designed as a mission of cura
animarum (the obligation and task of the diocesan clergy to care for souls),
promoted toward migrants initially by the Exsul Familia of Pius XII in
1952. The Capillania, as in the case of the MLA, serves the diocesan church
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The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
by transforming its care from monoethnic to pluriethnic8 and by ensuring
that the center of evangelization becomes the person and the promotion of
his or her dignity.9
The Scalabrinian Order
The order of the Scalabrinians was founded by the Italian bishop Giovanni
Battista Scalabrini, under the name of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo (with a female counterpart of Missionary Sisters established in
1895); it is the only order in the Catholic Church exclusively dedicated to
the cause of migrants. Following on the debate generated by the publication of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII, Blessed Giovanni
Battista Scalabrini contributed to the reflections on Catholicism, the rights
of laborers, and the “love for immigrants.”10 He posited that the paramount problem of migration was a potential loss of faith because of deprivation and loss of religious instruction.
The appeal of Scalabrini pivots around a belief that migration is an
opportunity for the improvement of human relationships and the relations
between nations. Beyond a vision of the migrants as the “children of indigence,” Scalabrini promoted a rethinking of migrants as the holders of
cultural values. But in order to be good Catholics, migrants need a religious
environment that fosters a transnational practice of faith. For Scalabrini,
the pastoral charisma was not in opposition to national belonging, but the
reason for a mutual strengthening:
The national sentiment becomes a support for religious sentiment, and
the poor immigrant receives not only the assistance of a Catholic priest
but also the endearing care of an apostle, who will foster in him or her
the old tradition of the nation (patria) and of the family; this tradition is
the basis of his or her faith.11
For the Scalabrinians, migration is part of divine providence. As Father
Battistella puts it:
In the Scalabrinian tradition, migration is considered part of a holistic
approach, which requires combating the causes of migration, which so
often is not a choice, but a constraint, and promoting respect for
migrants’ rights and dignity. At the same time, migration is not just a
problem but an opportunity for society and church, and migrants are not
simply victims to be helped, but persons with much to offer and to con-
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47
tribute to the community, subjects of transformation and mission. We
need to understand the providential optic of migration in its positive and
negative aspects. Of course, there are negative aspects such as the suffering in migration, but we should dwell not only on the suffering of migration; we should also understand it as God who is leading history.12
The Scalabrinians also emphasize the importance of learning the language, the culture, and the religious expressions of migrants both of their
countries of origin and of their country of residence. The capacity of religious actors to understand the cultures of origin/departure and residence/
arrival of the migrants is seen as strength not weakness. This is so because
Scalabrinians conceive of a culturally relativist, migrant perspective as a
fundamental part of an integrated church:
In the complex, laborious, and often contradictory process of integration
[inserimento], the migrant needs to be recognized as a citizen of the church
who receives the challenge of Catholicity: While with autochthonous
people, the migrant is called to enter the path of cultures’ death and resurrection; he becomes capable, together with them, of a Pentecostal communion of reconciled diversities.13
In more recent debates internal to the order, migration is for the Scalabrinian pedagogy a challenge to resist a homogenization of migrants
through “unity in diversity.”14 Recent and sophisticated Scalabrinian reflections are now also taking into account the transforming ethical horizons of
migration. They also see that migration has been normalized as a state of
exception. However, in these reflections the nation and the affective forces
associated with it are still minimized.15 Yet the strength of Scalabrinian
pastoring lies in the strong relation it draws between migrant, national, and
religious affective terrains, but this is also its Achilles’ heel. I say Achilles’
heel because in the recent practices of the MLA, the role of the nation has
been an unspoken point of dispute. If Scalabrinian pedagogy has in the past
fostered migrant cultures by using the original languages of the migrants in
sacramental and evangelical celebrations, today the MLA shows an increasing tendency to perform sacraments and masses in Italian, despite the complaints of some of the migrants who attend. Nonetheless, there is more to an
approach of a celebration of the nation than the use of a native language.
Until 2007, the second in charge of the MLA in Rome was a Mexican
Scalabrinian priest, Father Manuel. Clearly influenced by Brazilian liberation theology, Father Manuel pointed out a disjunction between the
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Catholic hierarchy that preaches rigor in matter of sexuality, contraception, and out-of-wedlock sexual relations and the realities of migration.
Often in a passionate mood he defended migrants who lived in unstable
economic and familial conditions and who had sexual and affective ties
outside of wedlock; he saw these as the result of social isolation. For
Father Manuel, such realities and the response they seemed to demand of
the church contradicted sharply with the guidelines that, as a missionary
priest, he was directed to follow by the Archdiocese of Rome.
In 2006 a rift emerged between the lay organizers of the CCM and the
MLA while Father Manuel was taking care of the spiritual side of CCM.
The CCM, which informally began its activities in 2000, but officially
registered as a civil association in 2003, had grown by that time not so
much in numbers as in its capacity for promoting events and gatherings
that went beyond strictly religious and sacramental celebrations. After a
verbal confrontation in a meeting, a split occurred, and a Jesuit took charge
of the association while CCM meetings began to take place in the Church
of Caravita, rather than in the church premises that were coordinated by
Scalabrinians. In the wake of these events, Father Manuel complained that
the CCM was no longer interested in evangelizing and had become too
interested in celebrating secular national events. In contrast, the organizers
continued emphasizing that in a profound Mexican way those national
markers could not be separated from the Catholic identity of Mexico as a
nation. The severity of this rift was such that the two sides did not speak
to each other for some time. The CCM criticized some of the Scalabrinians of Santa Maria della Luce because they felt ordered around and treated
as children. Even the Jesuit spiritual head of the community that followed
recognized that
there is a need to respect the differences of the [migrant] groups. They are
not parishioners, they do not want to be controlled and to follow orders
(do this, celebrate that . . . ). They have their own life; they are not children; let the people celebrate their cultural and national feasts, the day of
the dead . . . let them lead their lives.16
However, the tensions were also organizational. Father Manuel helped
draft the constitution of the CCM as a civil association, but in the end, and
somewhat to his disappointment, he was not nominated as its president.
He had hoped to be able to organize activities and gather funds for initiatives free from the gaze of his superiors and with more room to maneuver
for a way of practicing a Catholicism that was more involved with the real
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49
lives of people. Instead, Father Alfonso, his direct superior, asked for “numbers”: bodies to fi ll up the church, baptisms and confirmations to count in
the church’s archives to prove to the diocese that the Scalabrinians were
looking after a consistent number of devotees. Since leading CCM members started to complain that he had lost interest in their work, this disagreement over the function and future of the organization became rather
tense, and Father Manuel eventually left the staff of the CCM and focused
on another migrant group part of the MLA—the Brazilian group. Father
Manuel was eventually moved to Germany to take care of another Spanishspeaking congregation.
It is important to mention, though, that Father Alfonso was in some
instances also critical of the Catholic hierarchy and diocesan forms of governing priests’ lives. He did not openly voice his criticism, for instance,
that the top floor of the living quarters of Santa Maria della Luce was still
being used by a relatively young diocesan priest, whose life in Rome centered less on the church and more on selling secondhand furniture. Father
Alfonso felt that the interests of the migrant church were always secondary
to the diocesan Roman apparatus, and that too often the care for migrants
“was more in words than action.” But Father Alfonso as well as some of
the other Scalabrinian fathers living at Santa Maria della Luce had difficulties with the composition of the CCM leadership. They could not accept
Rogelio’s gently but surely disclosed gay identity, nor could they fully
understand the support and the influence that the Colegio Mexicano17 had
in the CCM. For Father Alfonso, though, the central problem was that the
leaders of the CCM “do not feel they are immigrants; they feel different;
they feel self-sufficient. So they have taken advantage to celebrate their
[own] culture; they are not interested in evangelizing.”
But if the CCM was accused of celebrating the popular side of Catholicism, it also meant it looked after the “locuras de la vida” (crazy things of
life), in the words of Martha, one of the organizers. The association has
also taken care of Mexican women who have been subject to domestic
violence and has become involved in a few cases when violence was perpetrated against gay people. They have aided Mexicans in Italy who have
been robbed, and they have attended to Mexican clergy who wanted to
leave their orders but who had originally arrived in Italy on a religious
visa. It is clear then that, beyond the ritual celebrations of Catholic and
national events, the CCM has also engaged with those who do not fit into
the picture of the normative family, the idealized narratives of the process
of migration, or the “path of suffering” of migrants. If their dispute with
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the Scalabrinians was about not being evangelical and apostolic enough,
they themselves have nonetheless attended to the socially less than accepted
margins of migration.
Many in the CCM expressed resentment toward the infantilizing character of Scalabrinian pedagogical practice. But a top-down wish to turn
migrants into (childlike) agents of new evangelization is not the only vision
of migrant Catholics that the organization had to contend with. Take the
position of Cardinal Biffi in an infamous and much-debated intervention in
2000, when he stressed that the Italian government should favor Catholic
over non-Catholic immigration. He said, “The criteria for admitting immigrants cannot be only economic. It is necessary that one seriously concerns
oneself with saving the identity of the nation itself.”18
The debate over the Catholic roots of Italy and the Christian underpinnings of Europe is, of course, polymorphic, but it is critical to point out
that Biffi’s position is an expression of a wider spectrum that has on one
(and more militant) side a strong call for Catholic apologetics (apologia
Cattolica). This is a theology that strongly defends the truth of the Catholic
faith. Social expressions of Catholic apologetics have been gaining renewed
strength in Italy, and they all condemn what they perceive as an increasing
laicization of society. I refer here to movements (and forums) such as Forza
Nuova, a neofascist, grassroots organization, present in some neighborhoods of the municipality of Rome, which has a strong association with
family-oriented Catholic policies.19 Forms of Catholic apologetics have
continuity with the ideology of the fascist regime. Members of parliament
at the time too, such as Alfredo Mantovano, have often contributed to the
discussion generated in Catholic forums, such as Alleanza Cattolica and
Totus Tuus Network (connected to the magazine Il Timone).20 Italian historians and sociologists such as Giovanni Cantoni, Massimo Introvigne,
Franco Cardini, and Roberto de Mattei are also well-known intellectuals
who have strongly supported an idea of militancy against laicism. These are
all multiple Catholic voices, which, more or less adamantly, have strongly
spoken against a perceived laicization of the Italian nation-state.
Hence, in the realm of Vatican’s interventions, Biffi’s voice is a “defense”
of Catholicism and falls within the spectrum of what John Paul II called
“the urgency of not squandering this precious patrimony and helping
Europe to build itself by revitalizing its original Christian roots.”21 These
words index a reality and an anxiety that Europe might lose its Christian
and Catholic roots. This call, in John Paul II’s words, is an allegedly positive reading of Eurocentrism. Instead, Benedict XVI has emphasized a
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51
negative impact of the loss of Catholic roots and the elevation of technology as a site of misplaced worship when not combined with a proper moral
compass.22 Hence, it is really important to see, and open up from different
angles of inquiry, why and how different forms of transnational migration
and immigration unsettle the church’s focus on Europe as historically and
religiously Christian.
In a similar vein, Luis Garza Medina, the Mexican vicar-general of the
Legionaries of Christ until 2011, warns about the danger of ideologies that
“divinize” concepts that belong to secular language, such as freedom or
democracy, and dissociate them from realms considered worthy by the
Catholic Church, such as family and faith.23 Voices such as Garza Medina’s
are representative of a part of the church that has, since the mid 1990s,
tried to reconquer a space in the public sphere by abandoning overt and
unilateral political affi liation, instead placing its bets on emphasizing a
communal Catholic culture based on a particular anthropological reading
of the defense of “human values.”24 This is an important shift that cannot
be overstated.
If orders such as the Scalabrinians have developed their pastoral care
around ideas of cultures as diverse heritage backgrounds that migrants
bring with them and transform in a host society, there is another part of
the church that is using culture, in the singular, defi ned and circumscribed
by a notion of human culture, or more specifically a condition of being
human that is perceived as universal. This notion of human culture as the
“Culture of Life” gets translated into a perspective of the church that animates a defense of life (see, for instance, anti-abortion stances) and a
defense of the sacredness of the heteronormative family (see hostility
toward the introduction of same-sex marriage laws). The voices of this
part of the church are not new, but well rehearsed. More than ever, however, transnational migration and the Catholic pastoral toward migrants in
the heart of Rome highlight a collision within the church between understandings of culture conceived of as the articulation of Christian heritage
with a perceived-as-universal condition of being human and cultures as
the diverse practices of identity articulated often, but not exclusively, in
terms of affi liation with nations and languages.
Under the pressure of the conservative discourses of a Catholic culture
of life the heterogeneity of migrants’ lived experiences and fantasies is
constantly threatened with reduction to a form of Catholic humanitas,
where the human person is understood as part of a universal, single heritage, an offshoot of the roots of European, Roman civilization. Michel de
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Certeau has explored an aspect of this tension in the production of knowledge. In his view, the “scriptural economy” is the violent act of disavowal
performed by patriarchally orchestrated textuality against the multiplicity
of embodied and often feminized experiences.25 Being a Jesuit himself, de
Certeau was aware of how the Catholic Church generated and also tried
to break from different forms of scriptural economies in the long durée of
its monastic, colonial, and modern history.
Numerous Italian intellectuals have voiced concerns about the move of
the Roman Catholic Church, and particularly of Benedict XVI, of inserting a particular value of the human into a universal and totalizing notion
of truth.26 Gustavo Zagrebelsky, a prominent judge and briefly the president of the Constitutional Court, questions how an ethic of truth can
really be a contribution to a national democracy, where ethics (rather than
morality) should be informed instead by the possibility of doubt and questioning. Francesco Remotti, an Africanist anthropologist and leading academic figure of the University of Turin, raised related concerns in an
extended letter to Benedict XVI, specifically addressing the sedimented
cultural historicity of the family structure and the need to embrace a less
reductive working notion in Catholicism of what can be considered a
household unit. This is to be aware, in Remotti’s view, of the forms that an
“imperialism” of “the family” may take, and of the dangers of an abstract
and unhistorical notion of human nature.27
Interventions such as Zagrebelsky’s and Remotti’s champion a notion of
human nature that emerges out of multiple and historical forms of kinship,
ethics, and, I would add, desires: Human nature is enfleshed, so to speak.
Migrants’ fears about being discriminated against if they speak their own
language on a bus or while talking to their own children in public or the
necessity of getting in step with one’s Italian counterparts in a procession of
El Señor de los Milagros on the streets of Rome or the openness or closure
of civil institutions as the felt-in-your-veins openness or closure of Jesus’s
heart; the indio (the pejorative term used in Mexico to indicate a person of
lower status) that sticks, with its multiple meanings, on the bodies of some
Mexican Catholic migrants (often browner of skin and of perceived lower
social status) rather than others in Rome; the understanding of the relation
between faith and national, cultural celebrations, which impels a particular
form of Catholic civic association (CCM) to break from a missionary form
of the church’s governmentality—all of these are examples of a surplus
that cannot fit easily into Cardinal Biffi’s evocation of the stronghold of a
Catholic Europe.
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53
Migrant itineraries and experiences may fit at times within the Sameness
of the Catholic Church’s clerical imagination about a common Catholic
humanitas; at other times, they clearly do not. Their pluralization and
enfleshment constantly challenge Catholic migration pedagogies.28 Those
are pedagogies that imagine, wish, represent, and create migrants as sacrificial carriers of family unity and sufferers in the process of migration.
On Sameness, Otherness, and Migration
What does the modern discourse of Christian humanism have to do with
current Latin American migration in Rome? Some may see this line of
questioning as a daring jump to take, but thinking about migration beyond
a strict sociological paradigm of migrant faith-based communities can help
expose the political subtlety of this connection. This is why Catholicism
and transnational migration in contemporary Rome, with its multiple
facets, demand to be examined within an Atlantic frame of analysis, as part
of an Atlantic Return. As I discussed in the introduction, approaching
Roman migrant communities in terms of a study of an Atlantic Return
enables a detailed focus on exchanges, circulation, presence, and absences
that shape the relations of people, ideas, texts, fantasies, and materialities
that link the Americas, Europe, and the Mediterranean. It is through this
perspective that the discourse of human nature (irrevocably linked to
a sixteenth-century debate about slavery in the New World, as I discuss
below) still resonates for a Catholic Church that situates the humanness of
twenty-fi rst-century immigration in an increasingly prominent area of
action and reflection.
This take on human nature is intimately connected to histories and
debates on conversion. However, rather than query a debate on conversion, agency, and the notions of self-transformation, I would like to interrogate the nature of Sameness and Otherness from debates on slavery,
labor, and dominion. In a famous article revising Locke’s theory of the
modern subject, Talal Asad rightly argued that a medieval notion of the
saeculum as a sense of the timing of history gave way in the Enlightenment to a “domain of ‘purely natural’ human action opposed to a domain
of ‘supernatural’ belief.”29 In the wake of Asad’s argument, Webb Keane
argued that 1920s Dutch Indies Calvinists criticized practices of Catholic
liturgy as a deceiving formula that claimed that the supernatural could be
transformed into the material expression of the body and blood of Christ
(the Eucharist). For them a practice of conversion was located instead in
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54 The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
the “physical locus of the individuated subject” and in “sincere” acts of
everyday speech.30 Agency in Protestant conversion was seated not in
human interiority or in God as such but in the effectiveness of extrahuman
mediations in human life. Important debates in the anthropology of Christianity have emphasized action, agency, and material and linguistic mediation and their histories in the Reformation as critical vectors in the shaping
of subjects, whether converted or converting. However, I argue here that
it is also important to foreground pre-Reformation debates on Sameness
and Otherness in order to explore present-day forms of Catholic subjectivity, labor, and mobility—and to a certain extent the study of distributions of subjectivity, beyond the subject, through a focus on the circulation
of affective histories and (religious) materialities.
There have been competing takes on Catholicism and human nature.
The Christian humanism formulated by friars such as Bartolomé de Las
Casas31 and Sahágun in the sixteenth century is marked by a resignification of paganism (embodied in the otherness of the “Indians”) not as heresy, but in terms of an anticipation of fulfi llment of Christian subjecthood
(both in term of self-mastery and subjection). This meant that the otherness of the New World was resignified through the sameness of Christianity. The Americas, as described by Johannes Fabian, were recast as a
pre-Christian Rome. The heterologies of the New World were translated
into a social imaginary of a universal (and teleological) temporality, the
basis of a ‘humanistic’ discourse.
The 1550–51 Valladolid debate presided over by Charles V staged two
competing interpretations of Aristotelian thinking about the Spanish
empire’s enslavement of the Indians in the New World. The theology of
Ginés de Sepúlveda inscribed the Indians within the “great chain of
being,” confi ning Indians to a subhuman category of irrational beings. On
account of this irrationality they could be enslaved as productive subjects
and subjected to a form of territorial control through the legislative frame
of encomienda, a trusteeship granted to individuals, where the forced
extraction of indigenous labor became central to the reproduction of
Spanish elites. In opposition to Sepúlveda, Bartolomé de Las Casas relied
on his witness of the mistreatment of the Indians in the New World to
argue against Sepúlveda’s claim of indigenous irrationality, barbarism, and
transgression of natural laws (e.g., cannibalism), emphasizing instead the
common humanity of the Indians and their basic sameness of spirit beyond
their paganism and their unenlightened mores. Indians, in Las Casas’s
view, were not heretics (as radical others to the Catholic and Christian
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55
civilization) but potential converts; they might be pagan, but they were
open to conversion.
Las Casas’s views prevailed in principle in the Valladolid dispute, but in
practice slavery survived in the New World long after Valladolid. Nonetheless, the language of conversion was used to justify the conquest of the
New World. The Valladolid dispute had built on Pope Paul III’s 1537 bull
that subscribed to a vision that “those living in all the vast regions of ‘the
Indies’ were human beings with liberty and dominion, capable of faith and
salvation, and they were to be drawn to the Gospel by preaching and good
example.”32 In this Augustinian view, no human being could have natural
dominion over any other; only God has this power and right. It is on the
basis of the concept of natural dominion (in the sense that it was divinely
given by being children of God), and its inalienability (not to be taken away
by other humans) that the subjectivity of the unconverted Indians was
thought through and constructed.
The concept of dominion understood in its Augustinian formulation
and elaborated by the Dominican Franciscus de Victoria (1480–1546) and
Las Casas relates to the “capacity of human beings to own material goods
and exercise legal jurisdiction.”33 Dominion is not part of natural law but
rather what humans possess in relation to nature, and it became the basis
for Las Casas’s refutation of Sepúlveda’s application (and justification) of
Aristotle’s conception of a natural slave to the indigenous population of
the Americas. Dominion is also the basis for early elaborations of human/
individual rights, for instance, in the work of Locke and his outlook on
animal and property rights, insofar as an entitlement to possession is a
condition that characterizes the individual as the subject of a right.34 Interestingly enough, this characterization emerged in an even earlier dispute
within the Catholic Church between Pope John XXII and the Franciscan
order about the latter’s right to embrace and exercise full poverty as part of
a natural right (I return to this in the epilogue).35
Las Casas’s position provided a way in which Indian “difference” could
be read as “cultural” and thus within a sameness of humanity guaranteed
by potential conversion to Christianity. He, together with others such as
Franciscus de Victoria, helped develop a framework based on a Thomistic
universal nature which preceded cultural difference, where “the notion
of a common human nature embedded in the medieval discourse of natural law and natural rights points the way toward the toleration of cultural
difference.”36 I emphasize here the word toleration and the manner in
which the concept of a common human nature precedes that of cultural
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difference. In short, natives in this reading and through conversion could
become part of the human family rather than be considered part of the
category of the subhuman and the animal, in the Aristotelian great chain
of being.
Much has been written about the power of mimesis in the early descriptions of the New World and the linguistic reproduction of imperial relations of production.37 I am interested here in only one particular question:
What do these “humanist” debates within the church in the sixteenth
century and the concept of conversion as the basis for the possible fulfi llment of Christian apostolic ambitions have to tell us about the contemporary return of Latin American missions to Rome? How do “returns” from
the Americas resonate with this project of “humanist” appropriation? And
how does this Atlantic understanding challenge the study of Catholicism
and transnational migration? These are, of course, on one level open postcolonial questions. Postcolonial subjectivity has queried the Other/Self
tension and analyzed the disjointed circulation of desires that co-constitute
both Other and Self, colonized and colonizers. Postcolonial critiques have
rightly pointed out the potential and the difficulties in formulating new
terrains where the Other is recognized for its true complexity and plurality, without being fully known.38 However, I am also asking about a particular aspect of the governmentality of the Catholic Church that centers
on the tension between the authority (potestà) and divine power of the
church, on one hand, and its capacity to regulate the praxis of the world,
or its social manifestations, on the other.
I see the exploration of these questions as part of a genre of cautionary
tales, paraphrasing Irene Silverblatt, who very cogently reads aspects of the
Colonial Spanish Inquisition in Peru from the sixteenth century to the
eighteenth century through Arendt’s analysis of the deadly combinations of
bureaucracy, modern rationality, and extreme violence, which link European colonialism in the nineteenth century to the birth of totalitarian
states in the twentieth. Silverblatt calls for us to locate the inception of that
modern state even further back to the birth of racialization in the New
World, the bureaucratic work of the Spanish Inquisition, and anxieties
about the purity of blood.39 My own questions seek to draw constitutive
linkages between modern church governmentality and the emergence of
a primitive racial logic in the encounter of the New World. However,
while these continuities remain rooted in the Americas for Silverblatt, my
interest is rather to excavate their transatlantic articulations.
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57
New Blood and Migrants’ Catholic Pedagogies
Blood is important, indeed. Many Italian legislative framings of migrant
terrains have their underpinnings in the principle of jus sanguinis, or the
right to citizenship connected to blood descent, rather than jus soli, the
right of citizenship related to the place of birth. The defense of a blood
family is a central concern of the Roman Catholic Church and a key to its
transnational migrants’ pedagogies. The cautionary tale I am interested in
exploring conjures a process of conversion and of apostolic mission that
was not fully achieved; I reads migrant itineraries in continuity with the
anxiety around the possibility of partial failure of the colonizing project.
Concern over the purity of blood, central to the interface of Christianity and empire in the colonial Americas, has bred an anxiety about another
potency of the blood. In the eyes of the Holy See, the influx of Catholic
“migrant blood” can be turned into a positive asset for a New Evangelization that is badly needed in Europe. But this new blood potentially escapes
the church’s projection as a blood of renewal, a new apostolic blood for
existing and potentially new Catholic communities. As I explain in more
detail later in this book, issues of national affects and belonging, on the
one hand, and sexuality and eroticism, on the other, challenge this project
or projection of the Catholic Church. From this point of view, migrant
itineraries are not only reminiscent of the past; they also open aesthetic,
sensorial, and spatial routes to becoming otherwise (as an open-ended
process of transformation) in the present and the future.40 This is why a
study of migrant itineraries is central to see and foresee how the center of
the Catholic Church can be transformed from some of its margins and
how its Catholic humanitas can be challenged by the opening up of other
forms of being Catholic.
Since the 1950s the Vatican has issued several official documents specifically dedicated to the migration phenomenon. The International Catholic
Migration Commission was the very first major institution created by the
church to pursue the cause of the migration phenomenon and the needs of
migrants. Founded in 1951, the commission was designed to provide guidance and support to national governments and institutions in finding solutions for the world’s migrants and refugees. The following year, Pope Pius
XII issued Exsul Familia, the first encyclical on this issue, which is still
considered the magna carta of the church’s teachings and guidelines for the
pastoral care of migrants.
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In 1969 Pope Paul VI amplified and adapted the encyclical’s doctrines
to the new directions indicated by Vatican II. The pope issued the document Motu Proprio Pastoralis Migratorum Cura, which introduced the instruction De Pastorali Migratorum Cura (“Nemo Est”) to the Congregation for
Bishops. The adjustments were primarily a response to the Second Vatican
Council’s documents Lumen Gentium (1964), which focused on the church’s
commitment to evangelization and human promotion, and Gaudium et
Spes (1965), a compendium of doctrines and guidelines that positioned the
church as a promoter of charity and social justice in the world. The 1969
papal instructions recognized the migration phenomenon as a new “sign
of the times.” In the instruction, the church recognized both the necessity
of helping a growing number of migrants in need and an opportunity to
evangelize the migrating world through ecumenical dialogue, charity, and
advocacy. This was a shift within the church after Vatican II that opened
the church’s teaching to a new alignment with changing events.
In 1970, Pope Paul VI created the Pontifical Commission for the Pastoral Care of Migration and Tourism, which in 1989 became the Pontifical
Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People. The commission/council was entrusted with the coordination, management, and
pastoral encouragement of the cause of migrants, refugees, and itinerant
people, especially in relation to the local bishops’ conferences.41 The recognition of the migrant population as a core priority for mainstream
Catholic evangelization in Italy, however, is relatively new. It was only in
2003 that the Permanent Episcopal Commission officially dedicated both
diocesan and missionary resources to the evangelization of migrant communities in Italy. Though based in Italy, the foundation Migrantes and the
CEMi (Commissione Episcopale per le Migrazioni) are playing important
roles in the process of Catholic evangelization worldwide.
In 2005, the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and
Itinerant People issued a key instruction titled Erga Migrantes Caritas Christi
(The Love of Christ toward Migrants), in which the migration phenomenon is identified as a “structural component of society.” Such acknowledgment is not a new notion for the Roman Catholic Church, but it is the
result of a long process of adjustment to the growing phenomenon of
migration on a world scale. In this instruction, migrants are portrayed as
individuals who are particularly exposed to human rights discrimination
and racism, who often suffer from the separation from their own families
and culture, and who are exposed to labor exploitation, social neglect, and,
at times, persecution. While condemning these conditions of migrant life,
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59
Catholics are called on to be apostolic and charitable subjects by welcoming
and assisting immigrants in their new countries, and at the same time by
assuming an evangelical role that promotes Catholic values among foreign
residents.42 Broadly speaking, then, in Italy the church works as the “state’s
nurse,” in charge of mending the social wounds caused by the lack of civic
engagement and adequate sociopolitical measures toward immigration.43
A large part of the responsibility of welcoming and assisting newcomers
is entrusted to the care of dioceses and parishes, which are tasked with
providing a variety of charity and social services. The parish, in particular,
has become the primary social subject of the church operating in the territory and the home open and available to anybody. Pope Benedict XVI
underscored such issues by identifying the twofold role of the church. In
his words, as a common house, the church provides support to all migrants
from all faiths and cultures through organizations and institutions that
offer missionary services and solidarity. At the same time, as a congregation of Catholics, the church is called to assume a role of advocacy to
ensure the respect of human rights of migrants at the local and international level.44 In Erga Migrantes Caritas Christi, a divine parallel is established between the figure of the migrant and the figures of Jesus, born in
exile, and Mary, the “living icon of the female migrant.” Migration
becomes, through the mystery of Easter, the death and resurrection of
humanity, a transformation from otherness into sameness via a harmonization of differences. In principle then, the particularities of migrants are
an appeal for other Catholics to live again the solidarity of Pentecost,
when the Spirit harmonizes differences and charity becomes authentic in
accepting one another. The experience of migration should be the
announcement of the Paschal mystery, in which death and resurrection
make for the creation of a new humanity in which there is no longer slave
or foreigner.45
In principle, in the church everyone must fi nd his or her own patria;
hence, the Holy See’s position on migration articulates a language of cultural pluralism, which upholds the right to dignity, promotes “fraternity,
solidarity, service and justice,” and sees the migrant family as the “domestic church.” However, as is spelled out in the same Erga Migrantes, the Holy
See discourages mixed-faith marriages and actively encourages marriages
between people of the same faith. Again, the tensions between an imagined common human nature and the toleration of cultural differences
reemerge. Or, as Benedict XVI puts it in the epigraph for this chapter, the
migrant family becomes the cradle for “humanity’s development.”
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An understanding of the heteronormative family as a cradle of life and
the primary context for human development and adaptation is a terrain of
ambiguity and contestation. The Catholic Church wishes to provide pastoral care to migrants, as well as humanitarian support—and in countries
such as Italy, the church provides the bulk of the humanitarian assistance
available to new immigrants—but the church’s assistance is often paternalistic, and sometimes falsely inclusive.46 The ambiguity is not only theological but also anthropological. The Holy See has focused its political
intervention on the resacralization of specific forms of life vis-à-vis the life
of individuals in specific political spheres and cultures—somehow basing
this defense on a notion of traditional Christian civilization. Benedict
XVI’s rhetoric emphasizes a church as a direct defensor hominis (protector
of man). The role that the Holy See has played in the UN debate over the
abolition of the death penalty is a clear example of its efforts to appear to
be a protector of people’s lives under threat.47 The resacralization of
human life, however, is embattled terrain for the church. From a politicotheological perspective, this is so because life is always a form of “living
state” that has to be constantly articulated and divided from within by a
tension between organic (as natural) and relational (as social) living.
Giorgio Agamben explains this tension and disjunction as one intrinsic to
humanism:
But if this is true, if the caesura between the human and the animal passes
fi rst of all within man, then it is the very question of man—and of
“humanism”—that must be posed in a new way. In our culture, man has
always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and
a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a
supernatural or social or divine element. We must learn instead to think
of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and
investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the
practical and political mystery of separation. What is man, if he is always
the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions and
caesurae?48
For our purposes, then, this articulation is a constant point of tension
within the church, between human rights (as belonging to a polis and to
the social) and the culture of life (as a right to life as “natural”). As Asad
suggested, we encounter an interesting paradox between physis and polis:
the notion that the inalienable rights that define the human and relate to a
state of nature do not depend on the nation-state, whereas the concept of
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the citizen, including the rights a citizen holds, presupposes a state that
Enlightenment theorists called political society.49 As I have explained, a
tension between animality and humanity, as a debate about the human
person (where to place the natives, so to speak) became central in Catholicism with the fi rst colonial missionary encounters in the New World. The
articulation of the human as a conjunction of a supernatural spirit, an
organic animality, and a socialized materiality has always existed as a set of
potential disjunctions with high political relevance—what Agamben calls
the Mysterium disiunctionis.50
Hence Benedict XVI’s perspective on migration as seated in a cradle of
life and in a “culture of life” has been in continuity with a Thomist understanding of a universal natural and rational dominion. However, it has to
wrestle with this disjunctive mystery. Those aspects of migrant itineraries
that cannot fit into this culture of life call into question the limits to
Catholic understanding of migration under the rubric of Catholic Sameness (the other is always recognizable as “us,” as a “human person,” a child
of God). More questions beg to be asked here: If disjunction is at the heart
of life, as Agamben shows, how can we read politically the Roman Catholic Church’s impulse for a specifi c conjuncture of life, as the Culture of Life?
And, further, how can a historically seated disjunction between animality
and humanity, and related anxieties about sameness and otherness, still
linger in the current Catholic Church’s dealing with Latin American transnational migration in Italy?
On Mary and Jesus: Dancing in the Basement
In December 2009 Jessica and Juanito got married in the Church of Santa
Maria della Luce, not a very common event in this parish where people’s
stories are riddled with marriage betrayals rather than tying the knot. Jessica already has a child back in Peru; Juanito too has a child, and neither of
them has been married before. They now have a young daughter together,
and they are both household workers in a villa on the Casilina. There are
guests whom I don’t often see attending this church. They are the compadres
of the couple—gente de dinero (well-off people)—as they have businesses in
the area of Rome close to Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. The crowd of the
parish is excited about this marriage. At the mass, Father Alfonso repeats
that Juanito and Jessica are poor, they do not have anything, but the most
important thing is that they have the love of each other. They also have
friendship and faith here: The two go together, Alfonso insists.
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Alfonso continues that they are the “blood” of the mission and the
Latin American community of migrants—and when friendship goes
together with faith, he insists, then no rumors can divide the community.
But el chisme (gossip) is unavoidable here. Some women complain that the
women close to Father Alfonso run the church. Others say that you should
be very careful to whom you pass on your job to replace you while you are
away, because they could take advantage of you and spread gossip about
you with your employers while you are not there. Others observe that
some are able to get emergency small loans from the priests, whereas others do not have access to them at all. And the words go round.
Jessica is moved when she describes that her mother sent the shawl that
is wrapping her child (not his biological one), as the girl gets baptized in
the same ceremony as the wedding. Jessica speaks to the crowd with a
microphone at the end of the ceremony, thanking the church, the priest,
and their friends there, and vowing that from now on she will live the life
of a “true” Catholic: “Me comprometo a vivir desde ahora como la Iglesia manda”
(I vow from now on to live as the church orders). Father Alfonso smiles,
and we all clap and follow the newlyweds to the doorstep of the church.
With the group we get into some cars and follow the winding roads of
central Rome close to the Metro station of Porta Furba. Then we arrive at
the Hijos del Sol, a Peruvian basement restaurant in a residential area—
basements are often the living alterity of daylight cities.51 A blast of music
receives us. I am hanging out with Dalia, who looks rather sad on such a
festive day. She is a history teacher in Peru and has three children whom
she is now supporting and paying for their education. It is tough as her
husband in Peru has not been keeping in touch, and things between them
are not good. She is working as a caregiver for a nonita (an elderly woman),
and money is very tight. She keeps her coat on; she will keep her coat on
for the few hours we stay at the restaurant. We eat and talk, and then a
Peruvian woman in a tight dress starts to dance onstage—a rather explicit
dance—women from our group glance at her and do not seem disturbed.
I ask Francisca what she thinks about the music and the ambiance:
You know, Valentina, you need some romance, and here in Rome it is so
difficult, because you live in [at the employer’s] most of the week, but also
because men are not to be trusted here. Italians do not really want to be
with us, and Peruvian men often have double lives . . . what double, triple at times! But you need to take your mind off, especially if all is crumbling around you [si es un desfase]. Father Alfonso does not fully
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63
understand our life either. I am a very devout woman, but in the mission
they do not understand we need some fun, some healthy fun, sometime
an apapacho [a hug], and we are here on our own, so that is why the mission is important, but the fathers do not understand enough. In some of
the celebrations we make in the church, or take the Day of the Migrant,52
there is no music or dancing, or if there is, it is so late that we have to
leave to be back home, where a nonito is waiting for us. Sometimes we
can dance for a while in the church, but not all priests like that.
I then get up to dance on my own—I like the salsa music—but I make
a mistake. After a short while Juanito comes up to me and dances with me.
I realize the code is not to just get up and dance. In this group you dance
in a couple, as it is inappropriate to be seen dancing on your own. I sit
down again and Dalia is still sitting there; she has been asked to dance too
for a short while. But she still wears her coat. I gently ask why she does not
take it off. She smiles at me with a glance, holds my arm, and I understand
we will speak about later. The music is really loud now; the woman on the
stage is half naked and surrounded by some men who in turns are coming
up from the audience and dancing with her mimicking a sexual act. Our
group rather openly invites Juanito to go up. He is tentative, shy to start
with, but then he goes up for his turn too. This is defi nitely a big day for
him. Francisca laughs and says that probably some Italians do not even
know that there are places like this in Rome, where “we” Peruvians have
fun. The problem for many attending the church is that there is no public
place to gather, and you may have to end up in these basement clubs, that
at times she likes, but that at times are “places of troubles,” where violence
can erupt unexpectedly.53
After a few hours Dalia and I walk back to the metro together. She
takes my arm and complains that where she has been working she eats
pasta, pasta, and pasta; she loves it, but she has put on weight. I smile back,
a common problem for women: not fitting in your clothes. We are in the
subway now; before departing, I give her a hug and promise to see her the
following Sunday in church. While she gets out, her coat gets partially
snagged and opens on her back. I can see a tattered dress that looked much
better in the front. She is definitely going through a hard time. I wonder
if she is still sending all the money she earns back home.
If “suffering” is part of life for many of these Catholic migrant women,
it is not the only register. Father Alfonso is not the only priest in the Scalabrinian community of the MLA who does not mince words about the
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The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
municipality of Rome’s interventions and government policies toward
migrants. However, his religious order’s interventions implicitly still support a very Christian-confessional mode of granting legal residence for
undocumented migrant that is implicitly consonant with the official discourse of Italian immigrant regularizing practices. As Cristiana Giordano
has argued, within the frame of current Italian legal discourse, an account
of oneself (as an illegal migrant)—la denuncia—cannot be given (or legalized) but through a procedure resembling a confession. Moreover, where
cultural citizenship constructed by ethnopsychiatric experts tends to focus
on the “retrieval” of a migrant “tradition,” what is often lost is the powerful drive for rupture intrinsic in some of the migrants’ processes of individuation.54
Hence Scalabrinians emphasize a vision of the MLA as a pan-American
community, where the expression of devotion to the church and active participation in evangelization and sacramental life should unify the body
of the migrants under the umbrella of Latin Americanness. But on the
ground, interruptions of national affect, forms of subtle racialization even
within the migrant’s body, betrayals at the start of migration, and the
proliferation of out-of-wedlock erotic relations (see following chapters) do
not allow a neat closure of identity to the process of migration. Neither the
culture of life nor an attempt to mold a pan-American community identity onto the bodies and stories of migrants is fully successful as a Catholic
pedagogy.
Migration and Vatican II
To understand the relationship of migration, the culture of life, and an
MLA fantasy of pan-Americanism, we need to return to the particular
historical context in which a revision of Vatican II is taking place. This
context contains both a reinforcement of a medieval conception of Christendom—a romanization of world Catholicism and an internationalization of Rome—and advocacy for universal human rights. The implications
of this revisionism are not limited to the internal politics of the church
around the promotion of a canonical liturgy and the reassertion of a centralist and hierarchical decision-making structure. The revisions have a
wider implication for debates on secularism and for the concrete politics of
immigration in Italy.
A large debate is taking place across many disciplines, including anthropology, in response to a critique of secularism as having been (although
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65
not totally) oblivious to its own religious Christian underpinnings—for
instance, the binarism of transcendence and immanence. Scholars have
addressed how understandings of gendered affective subjectivity, moral
injury, and the nature of transforming multiculturalism in plural societies
has required engaging existing exclusionary forms of universalizing secularism.55 With this scholarship in mind I argue that the numerous debates
about secularism need also to be understood through specific national
histories of church-state relations.56
If some Italian intellectual debates have emphasized the ethical nature
of secularism and the historical formation of human nature, interventions
from historically Protestant countries have also shown an interest in secularisms in the plural. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, for instance, have
compellingly argued the view that not all secularisms are a result of European colonial history, nor are they all based on a universalist transhistorical
reason. They instead see a plural conception of the secular as decentering
the tacit association of secularism with a specifically Christian context: the
division of public and private and Protestant-infused market-centered
political economy. “Telling time and histories” of secularisms as “ways of
living out, of embodying, secular possibilities” calls for a new openness of
the continuum of the secular and religious and of the possibilities for envisaging different futures.57
The notion of a Catholic humanitas pivots on an universalist understanding of human nature and Catholic civilization that has been mobilized in debates on secularism. It is also playing a role in apparently secular
spaces of (Italian) national policy, producing, from the point of view of the
Catholic Church, paradoxically exclusionary legislation on migration. If
thought in continuity with secularist debates, rather than in isolation from
them, untangling some of the working of Catholic humanitas in the field
of migration contributes to what Simon Coleman and Joel Robbins think
of as the potential of anthropology of religion to “[make] reports of otherness effective at home,”58 and I hope a contribution to a queered, radical
pluralism, which “need not banish religious possibility from its midst.”59
For Benedict XVI, the revision of Vatican II emphasizes canonical liturgy and rites as the ultimate way into Catholic faith. In this view, by
understanding the canonical ritual essence of Christ’s presence (as a truth
and incarnation in the liturgy), Catholicism as a faith and teaching is already
inculturated. For Benedict XVI, Catholic truth is inculturated as precultural,
seated in the body as the culture of life. Hence, it is a particular regimentation of the body that becomes the cradle of true Catholic subjectivity and
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the precondition for what the same Vatican II explored as the inculturation
of faith and the spiritualization of culture. Moreover, in his work on the
spirit of the liturgy, Benedict XVI argues that liturgical rites are certain;
creativity is not seated in spontaneity. Instead, the whole essence of the
body in ritual motion is its lack of spontaneity, and participation in the
mass is not about what is visible, but about what is spiritual in essence. A
particular boundary between the social and the spiritual emerges from
specific orientations of the body:
Unspontaneity is the essence. In these rites I discovered that something
was approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from
divine revelation. This is why the Christian East calls the liturgy the
“Divine Liturgy” expressing thereby the liturgy’s independence from
human control.60
But privileging this reading of inculturation as a precondition (the presence of Catholic Truth in the liturgy) rather than as an effect—an index of
diversity of cultures (the incarnation of Jesus and his teaching have different human, cultural manifestations in the world)—is not confi ned to the
teaching of the former pope. The same ideas are taken up by conservative
wings of the Roman Catholic Church, rooted in some diocesan enclaves,
which emphasize the Aristotelian/Augustinian roots of European civilization and see migration, at least within the Italian political context (articulated fi rst by the 2002 Bossi-Fini law and in 2009 by the Security Decree)
through a prism of criminalization and illegality. It is to these long theological and pedagogical lines of Catholic interventions that a pluralization
of secularism(s) should respond.
The case of the Mexican order of the Legionaries of Christ, which I
discuss at length in the following chapter, constitutes a transnational perspective on this articulation, and another conservative dimension of the
return from the New World in the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries to
the heart of the church. Legionaries of Christ mimic some of the positions
the preconciliar Jesuits. Parts of the Jesuit order have been actively involved
with Vatican II in trying to understand this inculturation as a precondition
of culture. This is what some Jesuits have pursued while also clarifying the
differences between a concept of relativism and a concept of pluralism in
contemporary society, in conversation with what they see as a too-radical
revision of Vatican II by Benedict XVI. In the words of F.L., a long-time
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director of the Jesuit College in Rome and a much-loved spiritual adviser
of the CCM for a few years:
The second extreme would be an excessive identification of the church
with itself, to the point of drawing a radical division between the church
and the secular world. In other words, to put the church at the center,
and stress what divides her from the rest of humanity. This would be to
stress excessively the difference of the Christian, stated strongly by Romano
Guardini in the postwar years, rightly with a defensive attitude. If we
were to go down that road, all the debate about the inculturation of the
Gospel, the inculturated evangelization, the necessity to permeate all the
aspects of human life with the value of Jesus Christ will be meaningless
and useless.61
F.L. is claiming that for the Roman Catholic Church a danger of selfaggrandizement remains. But this language of difference is also a language
of the recognition of plural sociality. F.L. is thus also skirting around an
important aspect that is awakened by the presence of migrants within the
Catholic Church related to the circulations of narratives and experiences
of (lay and religious) migrant betrayal. Simply and maybe very boldly put,
the lingering danger for the Roman Catholic Church is that it can become
captured in its own narcissistic fantasy. The other side of betrayal is to get
too attached to the object that it is perceived to be betrayed by. Without a
narcissistic attachment there cannot be betrayal.62
Twists on Catholic Humanitas
Multiple Catholic migrant pedagogies are nested in long-term tensions
between the diocesan priests and the priests of the religious orders operating over the same spatial and symbolic terrains. Diocesan priests (such as
Father R., the priest in charge of Santa Maria degli Angeli) are not always
on the same page on issues of migration. There is a real impasse visible in
Italy within the Catholic Church toward migration. This was illustrated
to me by Archbishop Marchetto, the secretary of the Pontifical Council
for the Pastoral of Migrants and Itinerants until 2010. A day after the ratification of the 2009 Security Decree, when undocumented immigration
became a felony, newspapers reported that he denounced the chain of
suffering that this law would engender.63 Predictably the following day
saw Father Lombardi, Pope Benedict’s Jesuit spokesman, announcing that
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Marchetto’s remarks were a titolo personale, or his own opinion, and that
they did not reflect the official posture of the pope and the Holy See.
Archbishop Marchetto, in a personal interview, pointed a (diplomatic)
finger at the lack of integration of different areas of the church and their
different receptions of the Erga Migrantes Caritas. He argued that in some
quarters of the church it has not been received at all. He saw one side of the
church fully immersed and committed to l’accoglienza (reception/organized
welcoming), but this lacks, he insists, “a more complex work of evangelization.” He argues that the Roman Catholic Church needs to develop a pastorale d’insieme (an integrated ministry) that would entail both a process of
advocacy, which would serve as a hub for a dignified national vision, but
also a diocesan communion, a religious diocesan dimension. For Archbishop Marchetto, there was and still is a lack of integration between different structures of the church and a lack of “ecclesial integration of the
immigrants into the local church.” In other words, Marchetto subtly
pointed out how closed part of the diocesan world in Italy is to the presence
of migrant life in their own constituencies: The case of Father R., which I
describe at the beginning of this chapter, is a clear example.
Moreover, for Marchetto different migrant waves bring a “vital dynamism,” which is part of his understanding of the culture of life. We need a
new “humanism,” he kept arguing, “that can be religious, lay, doesn’t
matter,” that is based on a “dignity of the person that is universal.” Nonetheless, a slip between “human dignity” and social normativity is still
present in his words. Hence a dominant part of the Roman Catholic
Church and the Roman Curia ideologically promote a normative family
and family unity as an anchor to migration and the culture of life. Another
part of the church, which at times gets silenced (as in the case of Marchetto),
still take seriously the generative force of cultural difference. Religious
orders such as the Scalabrinians and the Jesuits are not always on the same
page either. At the grassroots level—such as the interventions of the Scalabrinians—cultural differences cannot be ignored. Priests such as Father
Manuel are torn by dissonances and by the incongruity that requires him
to follow a pastoral teaching that, in important ways, runs counter to the
everyday reality of migration in Italy. This is so because the territorial
responsibility within the Catholic Church is well divided and the Scalabrinians have to negotiate with diocesan priests for any help they wish to
receive from the Diocese of Rome, help which they absolutely need.
Within the widespread disenchantment with secular governing institutions during the papacy of Benedict XVI, we can see one Catholic social
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imaginary that expresses itself through the notion of a “right” liturgical
body and an ideally sexualized body of Catholic migrants. Benedict XVI’s
theology spoke and continues to speak of a Catholic humanitas in relation
to migration that is based on a reading of the human person derived from
an interpretation of the Augustinian dominion that turns thought away
from an understanding of the human as the product of a dialogical practice, wherein sexuality, race, gender, and also disability play important
roles.64 Benedict XVI’s positions may appear to be different from those
of Pope Francis interventions into the church’s discourse on migration.
Although the latter are beyond the scope of this book, it is important to
understand Pope Francis in the light of the history and the tensions that I
am highlighting here, not as separate from them.
To sum up, a paradox runs through the Catholic Church, which treats
migration through a communitarian and contextual approach (human
dignity for all, a clear rebuff of violent forms of governmentality, and an
interest in migrant cultures, an approach actively practiced by Jesuit and
Scalabrinian priests), and yet theologically grounds human rights for
migrants in a precultural, universal understanding of human beings. The
theological impulse of Benedict XVI to think of Catholic migrants as a
community of humans based on a “true” and universal Catholic humanitas
requires an imagined universal tradition, a specific notion of the heteronormative family, a belonging of the Nation (to the People), not nations, to
History, rather than histories. But as I explain in the following chapters,
Catholic migrants’ itineraries are also constellated by divisive affects toward
different nation-states, eroticism, and uneven racialized histories. And this
proliferation at its margins can be a challenge to the core of the Catholic
Church.
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3.
The Legionaries of Christ and the Passionate Machine
This chapter explores the Atlantic return from a return of the mission and
the specific perspective of a religious order founded in Mexico, the
Legionaries of Christ.1 Specifically, I focus on the attachments and the
mimetic drives that mediate the relationship between the Legionaries of
Christ and the pre– and post–Vatican II Jesuits.
Although the two orders—the Legionaries and the Jesuits—are in
many respects different, I argue that they are connected via a shared death/
life wish: The self-fashioning of the Legionaries of Christ has developed
out of the partial death of some aspects of the Jesuit order. Those aspects
relate to the key role the Jesuits had before Vatican II in the education of
the elites. When analyzed in light of the revisions of Vatican II during the
papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the symbolic and historical
relations between the two orders show that a Catholic integralist church 2—
born in reaction to modernism and the social doctrine of the church, and
to which the Legionaries are associated—has acquired strength in Europe,
in part because of an Atlantic return.
The affective dimension of the relation between these two religious
orders emerges out of, and extends through, a complex set of historical and
political contexts. Here I pay particular attention to the manner in which
a renarrativization of the Cristero War in Rome takes root in and revivifies a love for an apostolate of the Roman Catholic Church. At the same
time, the constitutive relationship between these two religious orders is
fi rmly located in affective histories of confrontation between Church and
state—in this case, between the Mexican state and the Catholic Church.
The strength of the histories of confrontation between Church and state
(in particular, in the 1920s and the 1930s in Mexico) is transnationally
reanimated in Rome through a rehearsal of a narrative of a Catholic
Church under attack by the hands of secularist forces. The Legionaries of
70
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Christ, a Mexican order, have played a role as an integralist force within the
Catholic Church in Rome. They have concrete linkages with Italian politicians and administrators, who have themselves been involved in migrant
“secular” governments in the Italian territory playing a role in the design
and implementation of particularly restrictive legislation, promoted under
Berlusconi’s governments, which have criminalized undocumented immigration, but which are still in place after the end of those governments.
As in the preceding chapters, the relation between different souls of the
church and multiple Italian local and national governments is complex and
not as homogenous as an official position of Roman Catholic Church in
Rome wishes to portray. It is important then to pay attention to the institutional and ideological alignment of conservative and integralist factions
in the church within the Italian political scene. What appears out of this
institutional and governmental analysis is a larger story, that echoes in
different ways throughout this book, in which the preservation of an Italian civitas is too soon identified with a Catholic humanitas.
None of this should suggest that the migration of Catholic clerics, missionaries, seminarians, and nuns from the Americas to Rome has not
existed for hundreds of years. My intention is not to claim that this phenomenon is new but rather to read specific forms of this migration in light
of the intersections they may have with shifts in laws about migration in
Italy and Rome. In this sense I want to place both religious and lay organizations under the same analytical gaze of transnational gendered labor,
to explore how they may have more in common than readings that divide
“secular” from “religious” migration have highlighted.3
The “Old” Jesuits and the “New” Legionaries
The nearly five-hundred-year history of the Jesuits is very complex and
has been debated and characterized by an ambiguous relationship to papal
authority. Popularly, the Jesuit General has been addressed as the Black
Pope, to emphasize the mimetic and antithetic nature that links the Jesuit
order to the Roman Curia. The order of the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus,
was founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola in 1540 and was originally dedicated
to missionary and pedagogical endeavors. It has been transformed through
different crises. The crisis of the order’s vocation that coincided with Vatican II was thus not the fi rst. In the early seventeenth century, the crises of
the Company, as the Jesuits were then known, appeared at the same time
as the first internationalizing of the order. Tensions grew between new,
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emerging political patriotisms, the role of the Roman Catholic Church,
and the order’s religious unity and activism. Pierre Coton, a seventeenthcentury French Jesuit, wrote about saving the order from its Jesuit activism, while Antoine Artaud, a contemporary Jesuit, wrote about defending
the “motion of the heart” and expressed a call for a clearer Jesuit posture
on the work “from the inner to the outer.”4
Anxiety over the right balance between the apostolic life and the inner/
spiritual formation has driven different reformations of the Jesuit order.
Within the fi rst, the sixteenth-century Jesuit reformation, the inner formation not only of individual Jesuit spirits but of the spirit of the Company
became one of the building blocks of a renewed doctrinal corpus. Under
General Acquaviva, stricter and longer process for the training of novices,
a strengthening of the ratio studiorum, and the production of a canonical
Jesuit spiritual literature were put in place. However, this internal reformation was subtly but consistently weakened by the proliferation of
“extraordinary devotions” both within and outside the Jesuit order in the
fi rst part of the seventeenth century.5 These mystical devotions incarnated
a religiosity that had become marginalized by an institutionalized and
rational apostolic Jesuit endeavor. Mystical devotions within Catholicism
have a complex and profoundly gendered history.6
The continuing anxiety within the Jesuit order concerned the fear that
the love/desire for the absolute Other and one’s own dissolution in it may
have been alienated in its members by a Jesuit-driven vision of a postTridentine church (the 1545–63 Council of Trent, at the time of the
Lutheran schism, was intended to reaffirm the unity, dogmas, and sacraments of the church). In other words, the notion of a mystical speaking to
God was irremediably separated from the mastery of speaking of him.
Therefore, the practice of minor sixteenth-century mystical devotions
represented a thorn in the side of the Jesuit order, indexing a more general
anxiety about the connection between visibility and invisibility, a potential schism of the “God of the heart and the God of a society at work.” 7 I
argue that this anxiety did not go away, but runs through Jesuit history to
the present.
The sixteenth-century tradition of the Ignatian spiritual exercises to
some extent embraced a self-inquiry rather than a mystical root of Christianity and medieval Catholicism and opened a decisive path into the
modern shaping of self-inquiry and self-identity.8 In Ignatius’s spiritual
exercises (which Roland Barthes defi nes as a “psychotherapy” that awakens the dullness of a body through the production of a phantasmic lan-
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guage), Loyola stressed imaginative views and terrains as language vectors
of direct divine communication and a subsequent will to action. It was
the constitution of a field of images as a linguistic system that kept at bay
the potentially unruly aspects of mystic experience.9 Speaking with the
divine had been entrenched in the use of language as a gradual path to
illumination, not as a bewilderment of the emptiness of experience, typical of mystics such John of the Cross or Teresa of Ávila. In this way, the
Jesuits designed a new form of mysticism of service entrenched in the
energy of language, not in the absence of it.10
Even if Jesuits reacted against the mystical line of Quietism 11 in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, they were the clerics associated
with those dimensions of Catholic religiosity linked to the secrecy of the
confessional, the emphasis on interiority, and the enigmatic language of
mysticism.12 However, it is a reading of mysticism as secrecy and obscurantism vis-à-vis the transparency of legitimate secular authority that
actually signals the history of transformation (and the internal death[s]) of
the order. It also runs through other momentous conjunctures in the history of the Jesuits, such as when the order was suppressed and then restored
(between 1767 and 1814). Hence, the ambiguous relationship between mysticism (as ravissement, witnessing the divine in the absence of language) and
the apostolate (as the language of a mysticism of service) runs throughout
the history of the Jesuits. I argue this is a tension that runs through the
Catholic Church at large.
Finally I bring attention to a later potential schism within the Jesuit
order that took place in 1960s Spain, the implications of which shaped the
order’s transformations during and after Vatican II. This is the crisis of the
true Society of Jesus, which had its historical roots in the revisionist, antimodern doctrinal posture present in the order since the 1814 restoration
and which can be read as parallel to the history of the Legionaries.
It is no secret that Vatican II represented a particularly important historical conjuncture for the Jesuit order, and that it marked both a transformation of and a crisis in the order’s public role and image. The order lost
more than ten thousand members (both seminarians and priests) between
1961 and 1970. What is even more striking is that while there were more
than ten thousand Jesuits dedicated to education worldwide in 1970, their
number fell to nearly half (6,528) by the end of the 1970s. Even in the view
from the higher spheres of Vatican, this crisis had repercussions not only
in the formation of new priests and seminarians worldwide but also in the
Catholic education of the laity.13
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An anxiety about Jesuits moving away from education is captured in a
letter sent by a group of parents of students in the Sicilian Jesuit College
Pennisi in June 1977 to Cardinal Gabriele Garroni, the prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education:
Exhorted by a profound attachment to the Mother Church, we parents of
students at the College Pennisi of Acireale, which has been the pride and
glory of Sicily and Southern Italy, take the license to direct our prayers to
you, so that your knowledgeable intervention would lead the General of
the Jesuits to stop the worrying resolution to suppress the Catholic cultural center which has been so important to the College Pennisi. This
would indicate a major defeat of the Christians, though, to the advantage
of the enemies of the church. . . . The lack of vocations and therefore the
lack of personnel are the false excuses, without credibility, that the Jesuit
Fathers can claim. But the reason is that they do not want to dedicate
themselves to education and to the work with the youth; hence we take
the license to object: Why not give this difficult and delicate task to other
religious orders?
This letter points to a crisis, not confi ned to the Italian case, in the field
of Catholic education promoted by the Jesuits. This crisis about the demise
of his historical role of the Jesuits was not confi ned to Italy. It was also
behind the tensions around a potential schism that happened in the 1960s
in Spain.
The Spanish “revolt” of the true Society of Jesus began in January 1969,
when a group of eighteen senior Jesuits, led by Luis González, openly challenged the work of General of the Jesuits, Father Pedro Arrupe.14 A document signed by the so-called Group of 18 pointed out emerging obstacles
within the order to practicing ascetic traditions, and criticized the company’s turn toward secularization.15 The Group of 18 led a movement that
sought recognition and autonomy from the Spanish state to carry out a life
through precepts and postures considered by them traditional to the Jesuit
order. The petition was received by the Spanish archbishop Casimiro Morcillo González, who asked the Spanish episcopate to respond to the request.
Pedro Arrupe acted quickly and appointed a commission to analyze the
situation of the Jesuits in Spain. The episcopate responded in favor of this
Jesuit minority group. However, a year later, it emerged that this decision
might have come on the strength of a personal crusade by Archbishop
Morcillo, who it seems forwarded the petition to the Spanish episcopate
without of any explicit request from the petitioners.
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Soon after, in February 1969 Arrupe wrote a letter to express his view
on the recent incident, invoking the principle of Jesuits en fidelidad to call
on the internal cohesion of the order under the umbrella of the fourth
papal vow (more on this below). With the effect of that letter, Arrupe
reconsolidated the order as an apparently unitary force out of the XXXII
General Congregation.16 Today the “real” source behind this alleged petition is unclear: Some even point to Father Dezza, a very powerful Jesuit
close to the pope in Rome (a Jesuit who was much later appointed by John
Paul II as the pontifical delegate to lead the company in September 1981,
when Father Arrupe was suddenly incapacitated by a stroke). What is at
stake in this question of authorship is the possible interference by the Holy
See into the state of the company in Spain.
However, I read the presence of this counterreformist dissent group as
an expression of a trauma and a profound religious shock generated by the
aggiornamento of Vatican II17—an interpretation that partially echoes the
broader interpretation of Vatican II itself as a not-free-of-confl ict transformation of the church from within.18 This internal battle within the Jesuit
order and an impulse toward restoration was a traumatic confrontation
that implied a “death” of the traditionalist and conservative wing of the
order—a silencing within. I read this as a psychic death, a phantom that
haunts not only the Jesuit order but also the Roman Catholic Church at
large. Moreover, I argue that these crises of the Jesuit order—in the 1960s
as a loss of its tradition and in the sixteenth century as a loss of the “motion
of the heart”—were also about different directions of apostolic renewal
within and outside the Catholic Church and the passions that motivate
these directions still today.
As in Mexico, the Italian Jesuits’ post–Vatican II turn away from educating elites toward an interest in the church of the poor has had a profound effect on the Catholic education of the ruling classes. In turn, along
with other orders like the Salesians, the Legionaries of Christ have tried
and are trying to fi ll a void in the Catholic pedagogy of the laity that has
been left by the Jesuits’ post–Vatican II transformation. In a letter from
Pope John Paul I to General Arrupe, never sent during his papacy because
of his premature death but endorsed and released by John Paul II the following November, the pope reflected on the perceived changing direction
of the Company of Jesus:
But in the solution of these problems [we must] be able to distinguish the
tasks of the religious priests from those which are of the laity. The priests
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76 The Legionaries of Christ
have to animate the laity to comply with their duties, but do not have
to substitute for them, forgetting their specific task in the evangelical
action. . . . Together with the doctrine we have to keep to our heart the
religious discipline, which has also constituted a characteristic of the Company and which has been indicated as its secret and strength. Achieved
through demanding Ignatian asceticism, fed by an intense spiritual life,
and backed by a mature and virile obedience, this is naturally manifested in
the authority of life and the exemplarity of religious behavior.19
Compare Pope John Paul I’s letter with one written a few years earlier
by the head of the Jesuit Seminary in Puente Grande Jalisco, Mexico, to
Father Janssens, Jesuit General in Rome, anxiously describing the shifting
behavior of some of the Seminarians:
In dealing with people outside the seminary, a tendency which is less
austere and somehow dangerous is notable among some of the junior
seminarians of the south. In order to strengthen the link with the families of their fellow seminarians they are allowed noticeable familiarity.
For instance: they talk to young ladies in the gardens of the house,
sometime unaccompanied, sometimes hugging them with one arm, sometimes hugging them under their arm, while they talk to them.20
A perceived lack of “virile” support for the Mother Church and too
much interest on lay pursuits, combined with perceived “dangerous”
emerging forms of eroticization, produced anxieties in senior Jesuits, the
Roman Curia, and the pope. An othering of the Jesuit order, which was
in the sixteenth century the mystical, erotic, and feminized love that spoke
to God, is indexed here in a fear of a male eroticization of bodies that are
lacking their (necessary) virile austerity. And it is also feared as too much
interest in worldly matters, which should belong to the laity.
On the Legionaries
There have been uncanny parallels, as well as tense encounters, between
the Legionaries and Jesuits since the early 1940s. The Legionaries of Christ,
originally called the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin of Sorrows, were founded by a Mexican, Marcial Maciel Degollado,21
in 1941 and encouraged by Pope Paul XII. It was only in 1965 that the
Misioneros changed their name into the Legionaries of Christ and obtained
the Decree of Praise, or full legitimization as a religious order. However,
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The Legionaries of Christ 77
the official blessing of this newly formed congregation did not go smoothly.22
Marcial Maciel was a contested figure, who died in 2008 in Florida, after
having been asked by Benedict XVI, a few years earlier, to retire from
public engagements, because of sexual and drug abuse allegations.
The Legionaries were very highly regarded by Pope John Paul II, and
Maciel was the leading organizer of the first successful papal official visit of
John Paul II’s pontificate—in Mexico in 1979. Before that in 1970, Paul VI
entrusted the prelature of Chetumal-Cancún to the Legionaries of Christ,
whose missionary work focused on the Mayans of the Yucatán and Quintana Roo. At a stroke, one of the most racially selective religious orders23 in
the modern history of Mexico had been chosen as a missionary order in an
area of Mexico populated mostly by indigenous people. Years later, in an
interesting twist of Vatican politics, it was the Jesuits, rather than this local,
“Mexican” religious order tasked with evangelizing the indigenous poor,
that assumed such an important role in the EZLN movement (Zapatista
Army of National Liberation) in the nearby region of Chiapas.24
In Rome, the Legionaries have been informally called the “new Jesuits.” This expression is sometimes uttered with disbelief or amazement,
but its implications are intriguing for current and possible future directions of the Catholic Church. Prior to the demise of their founder in 2008,
the Legionaries had become a very powerful order in Rome, with important transnational connections not only in Mexico but also in other parts
of the Americas. Part of a counter-Enlightenment tradition of Catholic
integralism, which embraces the nuclear family, anti-individualism, and a
denunciation of the dehumanization of a perceived “culture of relativism”
in Benedict XVI’s words, the Legionaries are at the same time “modern”
and among the fi rst orders in the Catholic Church to grasp the importance
of mastering new communication technologies.25
In the words of a former rector of the Scalabrinian order in Rome in
2008, “They are the modern Jesuits, and they feel they are like the Jesuits
at the time of the Church crisis in the fi fteenth century; they see now the
Church in crisis and they think to save it.” The Legionaries, then, speak to
both medievalist and hypermodern readings of Catholic humanitas,
through the embrace of a neoliberal ideal of prosperity, but also through
attention to relationality against capitalism’s atomism and relativism—
shortcomings that Benedict XVI highlighted as the evil of capitalism to be
fought with renewed social and divine love for human integrity.26
Aspirations and fears of emerging integral Catholicism do not align
with clear-cut extremist political formations. Instead, they have tended to
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The Legionaries of Christ
percolate, at least during the last two governments of Berlusconi, through
political discourses and pedagogical interventions that “can render them as
a far more significant peril that any overt ‘fascist’ or ‘neofascist’ movement.”27 In other words, it is reductive to talk about a binarism within the
Catholic Church in terms of opposing liberal and integralist takes on
transnational migration. Yet it is important to focus on the kinds of alliances that have been forged by different religious orders with political
groups that have been involved in the field of migration. Scalabrinians,
Jesuits, and the Legionaries of Christ are the three orders that I focus on in
this book and that have a particular relation to the Latin American mission
and the Comunidad Católica Mexicana. Of course, there are other religious orders that interface with Latin Americans in Rome, but I focus
ethnographically and historically on only these three as they stand for parallel yet different approaches within the church. The Legionaries in particular produce and embody imaginaries and actions that aim to reanimate
the force of Militia Christi—a conquering and missionizing religious spirit
that has circulated within the Catholic Church for centuries, and most
clearly since the foundation of the Jesuits.
This spirit is one aspect of the historical conditions of possibility that
allowed for the emergence and consolidation of the Mexican order of the
Legionaries of Christ in Rome (not only there but also in other countries
such as Spain and Chile). One of these conditions is nested in imagery of
national martyrdom that is then transnationally resignified into an embodiment of the fear of a church and faith under attack, which has found a
particularly powerful referent in the history of Mexico’s Cristiada War during the early twentieth century. This history of Mexico, I argue, is not
confined to Mexico, so to speak, but it is currently “resignified” in Rome,
and this resignification is part of an Atlantic return. If so then also a surge
of contemporary Catholic integralism at the heart of the Holy See in
Rome can be, and should be, understood through such a transnational
prism representing a return to the center of evangelization.
A focus on the reemergence of integralist Catholicism at the heart of
Europe (as something connected to ideas of European civilization, as I
argued in chapter 2, that are challenged but also fueled by increasing transnational migration) fi nds an illuminating parallel in ongoing debates concerning Islam and secularism. Indeed, in the case of Italy, the debate about
the government’s political views on Muslim immigration cannot be separated from a close analysis of different anxieties and perspectives that animate the Catholic Church from within. Moreover, the politics of moral
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The Legionaries of Christ 79
injury, which produces projects such as the Observatory of Religious
Freedom in Rome, is intimately connected to anxieties about the integrity
of the civitas and its reproduction within an increasingly racialized and
plurifaith society. This is also, as Saba Mahmood argues, connected to the
broader problem surrounding how conceptions of the law may be biased
by a normative disposition toward a majority culture.28
To understand the formation of the “new” Legionaries requires situating
the birth of this order at the conjuncture of a particular moment in Mexican history and in the relationship between the church and the Mexican
state known as the Cristero War. Historians and journalists have claimed
there is a connection between the suppression and killings of Catholic
priests and lay people at the hands of Mexican government forces during
the Cristiada (or Cristero War) during the 1920s and the emergence of the
Legionaries of Christ. The Cristero War (1926–29) was sparked by the confl ict between local Catholics and central state governmental forces over the
application of the Calles Laws. These laws, named after their chief architect
and champion President Plutarco Elías Calles, and particularly article 130,
were changes to the 1917 Mexican revolutionary Constitution concerning
the control that the Constitution exerted over the Catholic Church in
Mexico. The Calles Laws, which took effect in 1926, established a stronger
control over and even an impediment to the formation of Catholic congregations, mandated the closure of existing ones, increased control over
priestly participation in public life, and increased taxation on the Catholic
ministry.29 These legislative changes were seen by many as an anticlerical
move by the new postrevolutionary state against the church. Others,
though, saw it not just as a forced laicization of the state, but as a challenge
to the Catholic monopoly of religious faith and practice. The Calles Laws
spurred a series of heated reactions, including the formation of the Liga
Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa (LNDLR) in 1925 to try to
unify different Catholic forces to call for freedom for religious cults.
Responses to the laws, coming from a mixed class base, were often violent
in nature.30
The Legionaries of Christ seem to rearticulate ideas sown during the
Cristiada to save an endangered Catholic Church and to follow the pope’s
teachings closely. This renarrativization is a small part of a larger confrontation between lay and religious forces over the matter of freedom of
Catholic religious cults in the public sphere, and the ramifications of this
confl ict were felt well before and after the war. At the core of this rearticulation is an implicit but fundamental tension between a secular state
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The Legionaries of Christ
and the church that holds a universal (Catholic) truth. The modus vivendi
expressed by the Legionaries of Christ is clearly positioned across this
divide, in a way very different way from the Scalabrinian connection
between migration and the relativism of culture(s). The Legionaries are
“defenders” of the teachings of the popes, such as John Paul II and Benedict XVI, especially in matters of culture of life and bioethics.
The history of the Legionaries of Christ has associated itself genealogically to the martyrs of the Cristiada as can be seen in their active role in
the recent beatification of José Sánchez del Río, a fourteen-year-old boy
killed on 6 February 1928, while in a company led by the Catholic general
Guízar Morfín.31 The Legionaries of Christ have played a key role in the
canonization (performed by John Paul II in 2000) of the martyrs of the
Cristiada or Cristero War and the sanctification in 2006 of the first Latin
American bishop, Rafael Guízar y Valencia, who was also the uncle of the
founder of the Legionaries. Other canonizations are potentially on the
way, though they are less clearly bound to the heart of the Cristero War,
which historians locate in the regions of Jalisco and Michoacán, but which
spread to more racially mixed regions, such as Veracruz. Broadly then, the
role of the Legionaries in those canonizations indexes the order’s position
toward the history of the Cristiada—to be a strong supporter of an integralist church that promotes the centrality of the clergy to Catholicism and
allegiance to the pope.
The tensions of this history are possibly engrained differently in female
bodies. A paradigmatic case of this emerges in the story of Leonor Sánchez
López. Hector, a very smart diocesan priest training in Rome at the Gregorian University, recounts her story in his words as follows:
In Orizaba, Veracruz, in 1937, when the law passed by Alejandro Tejada
prevented the public from celebrating mass, the mass was then celebrated
in private homes. One day the police broke into a home after a fight and
they shot a fi fteen-year-old woman, Leonor Sánchez, and then her parents and other people, who were mainly factory workers in the textile
industry, marched to the palace of the governor and asked that he “diera la
cara,” but “el no la dio” [that he come forward, but he did not]. So the
people went to open the temples [churches] and carried the fathers on
their shoulders and brought them back into the temples. They are trying
now in Orizaba to promote the cause of beatification of Leonor Sánchez,
but [this] has not happened yet. The people maintain the memory of
those events that happened around the temple, and this is still very strong
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The Legionaries of Christ 81
there; people talk about it; it is in their memory; for some, it is engrained
in their bones. The Cristiada was not only in Michoacán and Jalisco.32
In this interpretation innocent women and their martyred bodies were
the bastion and the carnal symbol for the defense of Catholicism in times
of encroachment.
If the Legionaries of Christ repurposed ideas sown during the Cristiada
in their own call to arms to save an endangered Catholic Church, these
efforts appear decidedly reactionary in the eyes of some Mexican fathers in
Rome, one of whom I quote anonymously here:
The Legionaries of Christ say “I am faithful” [soy fi el]; however, they
are repetitive, they do not make steps forward. . . . They wish to go
back to the Christian church where there are churches and public
buildings, where the Catholic space is total, where there is a crucifi x
everywhere, where there are Catholic schools, to the point of even having Catholic cars! This is the Cristero spirit: have a powerful church
facing a strong state.
But there is also a side of the Legionaries that has led to much critique
both outside and inside the Catholic church. The fourth vow of the
Legionaries of Christ, which was temporarily revoked by Pope Benedict
at the time of the death of its founder in March 2008, professes a hermetic
secrecy about, and a total dedication to, the acts and words of the founder.
Repeated reading of lengthy scripts and letters by the founder are key parts
of a Legionary member’s formation and daily discipline. This has led to
critiques about a “cult” of the founder within the order, which actually
seemed to have led the group of leaders of the order around him to cover
his illicit behaviors for many years. A special commission of the Roman
Curia headed by Archbishop Velasio de Paolis carried out in 2009–10 an
Apolostic Visitation to evaluate whether the order could survive in the
same form after the demise of its founder or if it had to be taken under the
fi rmer and closer apostolic and disciplinary wing of the Holy See. In 2012
the constitutions of the order were revisited and the figure of the founder
recalibrated, while key figures in its leadership in Rome and Mexico were
changed. The order was not dismembered then but allowed to grow again
under renewed directions.
Regardless of these powerful real and potential restructurings of the
order, the Legionaries of Christ have had and still have an important role
in Catholic higher education and the development of diocesan priests in
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The Legionaries of Christ
Rome and in Mexico. The motto of the Legionaries is “teach, educate,
and form.” Their skills are focused on attending to the individual and the
whole human being as integer homo. Although they have become the confidants of some members of the higher Mexican and Italian social classes,
they nonetheless dedicate themselves to ordinary people. Or, better, they
attend to people as individuals:
I do not know much about their ideas about migration, but I know that
[the Legionaries of Christ] are very sensitive to those who are in need.
I was walking with Padre Rodolfo and when a beggar asked him for
money, . . . he stopped to talk to him; he asked his name, where he was
from, how long he had been there; they had a long chat. He showed a
real interest in the guy, who was defi nitely a foreigner, sitting there begging. . . . I do not know but they have a particularly good manner with
people; they make you feel important. (Soledad, a Mexican student at the
Gregorian, a Jesuit university in Rome, personal communication)
It is this emphasis on the care of the individual that has made the Legionaries so successful in recruiting wealthy elites and in creating a feeling that,
by being a member or sympathizer of their lay movement, they belong to
a “club.”
The Legionaries operate two major universities in Rome. The University Reginae Apostolorum, founded in 1993, is a pontifical university
dedicated to training diocesan priests andclerics of different orders with a
Legionary of Christ mandate. The inauguration in 2004 of the Università
Europea, which is situated on the same campus and is dedicated to lay
peoples’ study, was attended by key Italian politicians including Marcello
Pera, the head of the Senate Chamber at the time. All ordained Legionaries
have to spend at least a few years of their thirteen-year training in Rome.
Important Italian politicians have been connected to the lay movement
of the Legionaries of Christ, including Alfredo Mantovano and Antonio
Fazio, the governor of the Bank of Italy between 1993 and 2005. Mantovano, an MP of the right-wing party Alleanza Nazionale, wrote the
main text of the 2001 Bossi-Fini law, which, as I explained in chapter 2,
regulated immigration until the Security Decree of 2009. Mantovano,
who until 2011 was an undersecretary for Home Affairs, asked for an even
tighter version of immigration law against what he terms “liberal attacks”33
and resigned his post because of an ongoing confl ict with then Interior
minister Roberto Maroni regarding the proposed relocation of newly
arrived illegal migrants from Northern Africa across the whole Italian pen-
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The Legionaries of Christ 83
insula, a move that Maroni, a key player in the separatist Northern League,
did not want to embrace politically.
The influence of the Legionaries of Christ on the Berlusconi government since the early 2000s can also be traced through their role in shaping
policy through educational and research institutions. Through their connection with the Università Europea the Legionaries have hosted congresses
of Catholic intellectuals and politicians dedicated to forging pedagogical
and political avenues for an integralist Catholicism. Alfredo Mantovano,
for instance, had a central role in crafting a master’s degree program
in migration studies hosted at this university in 2005/6. The master’s
courses were focused on understanding the current and possible future
legal and social pitfalls of illegal and legal migration to Italy, with conspicuously little reflection on any contemporary cultural perspectives or
on migrant flows might contribute to the destination country’s growth.
The master’s program imagined migration not as a part of divine providence, but as a state nightmare. More than fi fty people initially enrolled
in the master’s program, mainly individuals working then in the Italian
ministry of internal aff airs in Rome (which paid the tuition fees), so
it had an impact on social servants working directly on immigration
issues. 34
Guest speakers to the course included intellectuals such as Giovanni
Cantoni and Massimo Introvigne, who are both at the forefront of a small
but powerful movement of the Italian Catholic right called Alleanza Cattolica.35 In the inaugural speech of the master’s program in the university
of the Legionaries, Giovanni Pisanu, then minister of the Interior, confi rmed his connection with Alleanza Cattolica and Alfredo Mantovano,
reflecting on the centrality of Catholicism to the politics of immigration,
and the spirit of conversion:
So no to whatever form of syncretism, no to any form of confusion
between religious cultural identities, but yes to a dialogue for the defense,
since I am a Christian, and proud of my identity. Moreover, if I can speak
for a second as a believer, the truth is only there, in the cross of Christ. I
have kept a vivid memory of a childhood reading that has marked me
deeply. It was a sort of letter of instructions that was given to the missionaries . . . : When you meet a pagan, a nonbeliever, one who has other
religious beliefs, do not tell him his God is false, or mendacious, but help
him to reflect because you will see that at the end of his reflection he will
fi nd Christ. Hence I think that our identity has to be nourished by this
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certainty, and, in being sealed to this certainty, we can gently and peacefully engage in a dialogue with other religions.36
So there has been a clear group of political interests that have benefited
from an affi liation to the Legionaries of Christ. There are thus multiple
lines of political alliance that connect players in Berlusconi’s governments,
integralist Catholic intellectuals, employees in the Roman municipal government of Gianni Alemanno, and the Legionaries of Christ, especially
via their educational efforts. I am not suggesting that these are secret alliances, as a journalistic mode of writing might imply. Through an anthropological lens instead, I want to open up a reading of these threads as
potentially at the core of one of the many souls of the Catholic Church in
its transnational returns.
Parallels between the Jesuits and the Legionaries
In this chapter I am drawing a parallel between the “old” Spanish-founded
Jesuit order and the “new” twentieth-century Mexican order of the Legionaries of Christ. I want to explore here how these two religious bodies may
be phantomatically connected via the presence and the mimesis of the
haunting spirit of the other.37 Phantomatic refers to a spectral presence of
something that was there before but is not there anymore—a haunting sense
of belonging (here as attachment to the spirit of another order), that some
scholars have productively investigated as reposed in materialities.38
A phantomatic presence here takes the form of the embodiment of
someone’s secret, or can be the haunting and living repository of somebody’s else unspeakable drama.39 This unspoken drama is partly situated in
a historiography, contested today, that locates the death of an “old” church
as intrinsic to the birth of a “new,” post–Vatican II church. A phantomatic
relationship between these two orders is based on mimetic analogies affectively active in the histories, formations, and pedagogies of the transnational reproduction of the orders of the Legionaries and Jesuits. This
relationship exists within a Roman Catholic Church that is able to contain
within it what Carl Schmitt called a complexio oppositorum (complex of
opposites). Current revisions of Vatican II with its focus on charismatic
renewal, Marian devotion, and antirelativist perspectives have direct
implication for forms of governmentality and “passions” that are cultivated
by the Roman Catholic Church. This passionate machine—the articulation between governmentality and the production of passions—is moved
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The Legionaries of Christ 85
both by transnational Marian mobilization of affects (see next chapter) but
also by militant ones—Mary and the militia have often gone together.40
The Legion’s close ties with the elite are even more conspicuous in
Mexico. Monterrey, the fi nancial hub of Mexico (also called the “Houston
of the North”), is dominated by a group of business families that are the
most powerful in Mexico and throughout Latin America—the so-called
Group of Ten. The Jesuits played a major role in educating the children of
the wealthy in Monterrey, but in 1968 the local bishop, Alfonso Espino y
Silva, drove them out of the archdiocese with the accusation they were
backing a group called Movimiento Estudiantil Profesional and its leftist
call for strike at the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey. Since then, the
Legion assumed a similar role to that formerly played by the Jesuits, setting
the social and intellectual tone for Monterrey’s wealthy through a web of
schools, clubs, and charitable organizations.
The Legionaries’ educational work in Mexico parallels the work of the
Jesuits on two fronts. They are particularly strong in the pastoral de la Joventud (youth pastoral work) and have had a strong and growing influence on
Catholic higher education since they created the Catholic Anahuac Universities Network. Work on both fronts can be read as a conservative strategy aimed at counteracting the effects of liberation theology in Mexico and
in Latin America by gaining direct access to the future Catholic elites of the
country. Whereas the Jesuits moved toward an opción preferencial de los Pobres
(preferential option for the poor), the Legionaries have been described as
holding a teología de la prosperidad (theology of prosperity).41 John Paul II’s
difficult and somehow alienating relationship with the “new” postconciliar
Jesuits, and in particular with General Pedro Arrupe, should be interpreted
alongside his privileged relationship with the Legionaries of Christ in
Mexico and Rome. During the papacy of John Paul II and the mandate of
Angelo Sodano as Vatican secretary of state (1990–2006), the Legionaries of
Christ gained a strong degree of influence within the Curia Romana.
Although many forces are involved in the relative successes of the two
orders in Mexico and in Rome, their sharply contrasting relationship with
the Holy See during John Paul II’s papacy has undoubtedly contributed to
their parallel stories.
Central to the argument of this chapter is that an analogical mimesis has
taken place between the two orders, and that the spirit of the militia, a
legion for Christ, is a key aspect of this mimesis. This analogical mimesis
takes different forms: the centrality of the apostolic work, the pedagogical
formation, the importance of the Ignatian exercises, the devotion to the
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The Legionaries of Christ
Sacred Heart, and the charisma of the founder. Apostolic work has been
central to the formation of the Society of Jesus since its sixteenth-century
inception. St. Ignatius felt the need to create an order that was devoted
neither to monastic life nor to the parish. Hence, the vow of the Jesuit
dedicates him to a special obedience to the missionary vision and directions of the pope. The Legionary practice and vocation are also fi rmly
rooted in apostolic work, especially with the educated classes. This orientation translates ethnographically when lay members of the movement are
repeatedly encouraged (in quasi-soldierly tones) to take up this apostolic
task in their everyday life, to turn from being a lukewarm Catholic into an
active agent of the apostolate.
The training, or formation, of a Legionary of Christ is remarkable
among the religious orders in its similarity to the formation of a Jesuit. In
both orders, one initially joins the novitiate, after which the first “simple”
vows are taken. As a member of the juniorate, one engages in a period of
theological study, which is followed by a period of philosophy. A period of
regency, or work, follows, and then a return to theological studies. Finally,
one enters a period of tertianship, which St. Ignatius called the period of
the “school of the heart,” before the one is presented with the option of
professing perpetual vows. The Ignatian spiritual exercises are also central
to both orders and consist of a unique and lengthy thirty-day silent retreat
carried out by members of both orders before ordination, although this
occurs at different stages in the priests’ formation in the two orders. Both
orders also practice a yearly eight-day silent retreat. The militaristic tone
of the specific images evoked by this Ignatian exercise could forge different interpretations of an “unconditional defense” of the Roman Catholic
Church against “evil” forces.
The charisma of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial
Maciel, has characterized, for better and for worse, the history of the
order, and it is around a clash of charisma that the first tensions between
the Legionaries and Jesuits appeared. This clash fi rst became apparent during the early 1940s, when Maciel attended the Jesuit seminary at the University of Comillas in Spain, as well as a few years later, when he was
expelled from the Jesuit seminary of Montezuma in Texas. As a letter from
the head of the Jesuits in Comillas read:
But it is regrettable that Father Maciel has shown so much distrust for our
Society and to some extent has given signs which render him suspect to
us about the insufficiently virtuous means he is using to achieve his own
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The Legionaries of Christ 87
ends. Moreover, since he also has novices there (even if the house was not
canonically erected) and since he possesses a great power of attracting
them, there is a danger of the bishop’s displeasure if more vocations to
this new recently and approved religious congregation emerge. In fact,
in 1947 three pupils and in 1948 another three entered this institution.
(My translation from the Latin)42
In the words of another Jesuit supervising the Comillas province of
León:
Since his arrival, Marcial Maciel, a young Mexican priest and the founder
of a certain religious congregation, has greatly fostered this separation
among the Americans and the Spanish. Lest I say too little, I am soliciting
information from the assisting priest received from Father Rodrigo (who
knows the man very well), about this singular and dangerous man, and
about the necessity that he depart entirely from the Seminary of Comillas
with his pupils. (My translation from the Latin)43
I am interested here in the fact that Maciel is described as having “dangerous” power and “greatness” in these and other Jesuit letters. There is a
real fear of a powerful and charismatic force that championed a group of
“young” Latin Americans and could take Jesuits “away from their order.”
To an extent, there was a perceived betrayal here as well. Senior Jesuits in
Comillas felt that this young Mexican priest was given hospitality, was
embraced with open arms, and then began to bleed forces away—his
actions were perceived by senior Jesuits as dangerously duplicitous. If the
Legionaries of Christ have been key for John Paul II in reaching out
toward Latin America and its rejuvenation of the Catholic Church, fear
and betrayal, between the Legionary and the Jesuit orders, are also affects
of an Atlantic Return.
Since the inception of their order, the relationship of the Legionaries to
the Jesuit order has been characterized by an anxiety about the former
order’s mimetic powers over the latter one. Parallels exist between both
orders, in their militaristic interpretations of the apostolate, in their
emphasis on education and intellectual formation (which can become an
attractive force for the formation and control of diocesan priests and the
laity), and in their understanding of the Sacred Heart as the foundation of
the spirituality of both orders. These are some of the building blocks of
both orders, emphasized or de-emphasized at different historical moments.
At one level, the mimetic relation between the Jesuit and Legionary orders
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The Legionaries of Christ
is an anxiety about “too much proximity” because of similar elements
between the two, in the present as well as in their pasts. Before I further
explain these connections, I want to elucidate some key elements of the
bioreligiosity of the Legionaries of Christ in relation to the history of the
Jesuits I have presented.
Legionaries’ Modus Operandi
Michel Foucault has given us tools to understand how bodies act and are
acted upon. Through a study of how bodies are normalized in social practices, we can discern situated and profound relations between politics and
ontologies. In this way, for Foucault, biopolitics is a form of government
over those conditions of life produced by normalizing technologies of
population, as well as a power over human conduct through particular
political technologies. Those technologies of the well-being of the subject
are seated not only in material conditions, the distribution of the rhythms
of labor, but also in the demarcation of transcendental boundaries—
boundaries of mediation with an otherwise.
However, I think we need to consider the affective presence (not the
embodied practice of a belief ), the modus operandi of theological horizons
in religious life and the way in which these too are entangled in the presence of lived and “un-lived” histories. In chapter 2, I analyzed how the
Holy See has recently focused its political energies on the resacralization
of individual life, with a hypostatization of a “culture of life” vis-à-vis the
lives of individuals in specific political spheres and cultures. In the light of
this historical conjuncture, the modus operandi of the Legionaries shows
at least three key elements.44 First, the heart has to be cultivated with a
mix of humility, virility, and apostolic heroism. As it says in one of the
order’s internal manuals:
What is my love of Jesus Christ like? Is it genuine, profound, based on
faith and reason? Is it virile? Or is it shallow and prompted by feeling?
Rather is it passionate, leading me to accept the sacrifice of the religious
life joyfully? . . . [Does my love for Jesus] keep the meaning of the cry
“Adveniat Regnum Tuum!” always foremost on my mind, on the tip of
my tongue and embedded in my heart? . . . Do I think I can be a follower of the Sacred Heart without a deep, practical, and sincere selfdenial? Does the thought of Christ incline me to happy, prompt, and
heroic obedience? To minute and perfect fulfi llment of the Legion’s call
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The Legionaries of Christ 89
to love others? Does it foster imitation of his meekness and humility, and
bring me to union with Him through strict control of my affections and
purity of mind?45
The true “man of the kingdom” has to love the mystical body, in the
form of the Legion itself, through his imitation of the ideals of Christ’s
heart as a redeemer and a conqueror. The mystical dimension of the
Legionaries’ bioreligiosity dwells in this mystical body that governs the
inner practice, and other practices, of surrendering with unlimited selfdenial to the cause of the apostolate of the Legion. The affective force of
and the love for the apostolate acquires, as for the Jesuit, a mystical power.
As we know, affects are transmitted through the social, but they also prefigure social relations themselves. They are constitutive of the latter without being fully acknowledged by individuals.46 So the force of this apostolate
becomes an affective field that moves the Legionaries practice as a whole,
not just the individual priests of the Legionaries. In turn, this is a force that
shapes the Roman Catholic Church as a passionate machine.
Marcial Maciel required that all the Legionaries of Christ in training,
from any part of the world, should spend some part of their formation in
Rome. They may not be able to do so in the future, but in the words of
Father Jesús L.C., with whom I once visited in the inner chapel of the
Regnum Apostolorum:
Father Maciel wanted this chapel to be a space for recogimiento, but also a
space of inspiration. . . . You see that light coming through [pointing to
the skylight over the altar]? Father Maciel wanted the light to be like the
one created by Bernini, as the descent of the Holy Spirit, but this Church
is open, like a fan, as the inclusion after Council Vatican II, we are opening new missions in the Philippines and in Africa . . . and we all pass
through here. I love this chapel, it reminds me of the Tepeyac. Every
time I go to Mexico I try to visit the Virgin, even if it is for a short visit.47
The church is decorated with onyx and alabaster brought from Mexico, the
benches are of solid handcrafted wood, the colors are brownish, and somehow the strong light of the outside contrasts with a protected, dimmeddown ambience. When I shared with Father Jesús my feeling that this
church seems to me to be like a “womb,” he said:
Yes, it is like coming back to the mother; that is why I like so much this
chapel and the Virgin of Guadalupe; it is this light and shadow that make
one feeling he is coming home. There are more than 450 Legionaries liv-
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The Legionaries of Christ
ing now here in the Regnum Christi,48 and more than 1,250 here in
Rome. All of us are different, but I think that for each one of us this
chapel is really special.
Hence the Legion (La Legión), as a “she,” may have its spatial “womb” too.
The Legion is also a “she” in a liturgical sense and as an affective agency,
and the legionary is the cultivator of a love that streams forth from an ideal
total identification with the order. In the order’s daily book of prayers (used
by every Legionary as a guideline for prayers before the death of the founder
in 2008): “Can I say that I think like the Legion, love as she does, feel as she
does? Do I feel responsible for the plan God has for her?”49 There is a strong
gendering of the order here, and a totalizing identification with a female,
passionate quality. But my conversations with Father Jesús, a Mexican
Legionary of Christ, make me understand that there is a “soft” side to the
Legionaries, one that is as intimate as its journalistic image of an order led
by a fierce apostolate and its power-seeking within the Vatican is hard.
Vernacular realities are always more complicated.
The second element of the modus vivendi of the Legionaries requires a
technique of the body that pays particular attention to a careful posture of
the body and to an appropriate presentation. A Legionary should always eat
with style, not too much, so as not to “show passions” in eating, as another
Mexican diocesan priest who lived in a Legionary-led Mater Ecclesia in
Rome explained to me. Or when involved in the football championships of
the priests’ league, a Legionary team is always recognized for its “tidy” look
and “shining” outfits—and seen as such by other priests who play in the
league. Again, in the words of the same priest, the Legionaries need to have
“discreet glances,” especially with women, and they need to be careful
about their looks during outings so that “self-control helps them keep feeling the presence of God in their soul.”
Legionaries are also recognized in the Comunidad Católica Mexicana
for their outfits. Whereas Mexican Jesuits, diocesan priests, and other seminarians may dress rather casually, the Legionaries are always dressed in
clerical collars and immaculate grey or black priestly suits. Legionaries
move around in pairs, and when coming up to strangers or people known
to them, they “act as a team.” Critics of the Legionaries have said that this
is a subtle but very strong form of peer control, so strong, in fact, that it
minimizes the potential for Legionaries to interact with the “outside”
world on their own. They are also very diligent. Legionaries often carry a
notebook, and while conversing they are always very ready to get a person’s
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The Legionaries of Christ 91
contact details and invite them to events. The use of the media by the
Legionaries is very effective.
Third, the modus operandi of the Legionaries stresses the believer’s individuality, his or her own uniqueness in the path of fi nding and uniting with
God, while maintaining a very strong sense and aesthetic of the mission of
the whole body of the Legion. In the words of Gaston, a young Legionary
from Puebla whom I met at a Comunidad Católica Mexicana event in 2010:
I grew up in Puebla with many brothers and sisters, and I have been used
to helping at home. Now here in the seminary we have to study very
much and it is very long, and we all help, we do all by ourselves. We do
not have sisters [religious nuns] doing it for us. Father Maciel thought it’s
important we keep it that way; we need to be very organized, and pay
attention to details. We have to study to be very prepared, to speak well
and to strengthen the church.50
But to “speak well” is a function of education or erudition and also an
imitation of the aesthetic of Christ’s love in the being of the Legion. The
love its members feel for the Legion is also a love for the “spirit of combat”:
Do I practice the Legion’s spirit in my conversations? Do they radiate the
“sweet fragrance” of Christ? Do I argue? Do I know how to give in, even
thought it hurts me? Am I humble in this respect? Are my conversations
frivolous? Do I make an effort to speak of Legionary themes? . . . Can I
say I am at one with the spirit of the Legion? Is my love for the Legion
strong enough not to omit even the most trivial details? Do I uphold the
primary demand of the spirit of combat, blind faith in my Cause and in
its eventual triumph, as well as burning love for my spirit and my fellow
combatants?51
It is clear in passages like these that the Legionary modus operandi has a
less public, even “intimate,” aspect and endorses a regimented individual
and communal apostolic body. Moreover, as I’ve suggested above, it is also
anchored in specific geopolitical terrains and often based on the affective
return of transnational stories of Catholic martyrdom. Through its unique
claim to these stories of martyrdom, through its occupation of renewed
spaces of Catholic education in Italy,52 and its closeness to some conservative
political elites in Rome, this order, and the orientation within the Catholic
Church it stands for, actually, more or less implicitly, supports a perspective
that sees a connection between immigration, illegality, and integration to a
strong, Catholic notion of national identity. The Legionaries have invested
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92 The Legionaries of Christ
themselves in educating the political elite in Italy and Mexico. While mixing with and acting as the spiritual advisers of some in those elites, they have
been a group of references for politicians who have played a role in the
drawing of Italian immigration policy, which has become increasingly
exploitative and exclusionary during this time.
The Church as a Passionate Machine?
It is in this light that contemporary voices of the members of the Regnum
Christi in Rome are still strongly supporting the order of the Legionaries,
even after the revelations of their founder’s second life (fathering children
in two separate relationships).53 However, in the eyes of the Italian and
Mexican women who belong and participate in the activities of the Regnum Christi at the Università Europea in Rome, the story of the “weakness” of human nature (and, specifically, of the founder of the order) should
not spoil the higher ideals, practice, and apostolic work of the order of the
Legionaries of Christ and its lay movement. However, in the group that I
followed, this attitude was not easily accepted, but came out of renewed
discussions between priests/animators and the women lay members.
To sum up, then, the Legionaries of Christ are not the new Jesuits. The
two orders are not homologous, but they are connected by revelatory
details and the affective forces that animate them. Sigmund Freud talked
about how a methodology inspired by the work of an artist such as Michelangelo draws attention to unnoticeable details that actually reveal other,
less evident possibilities and intentionalities.54 Finding in Freud’s speculation the basis for a rethinking of method, Giorgio Agamben suggests that
the form of scrutiny Freud intimates is an archaeology of signature, which
emerges in the interstices between the semiotic field (what we recognize
as a sign) and the hermeneutic (the interpretation of signs). We can understand the signature as dwelling at this interstice, in the moment of schism,
by embracing the presence of what could have been, as a constitutive force:
In other words, archaeological regression is elusive: It does not seek, as in
Freud, to restore a previous stage, but to decompose, displace, and ultimately bypass it in order to go back not to its content but to the modalities, circumstances, and moments in which the split, by means of
repression, constituted it as origin.55
This understanding of schism, of what it could have been as a genealogy
of the present reveals a methodological way forward for understanding the
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The Legionaries of Christ 93
relation between the Jesuit order and the Legionaries of Christ. The copresence of “lived” and potentially repressed elements of each one of the
religious orders is illuminated by focusing on details, such as the potential
internal schism of the Jesuits in late 1960s together with the anxieties
around the presence of Maciel in a Jesuit-led seminar in 1940s Spain. The
detail as a signature reminds us, or better yet, takes us to the moment of
the inception, of an oblivion—the forgetting of what it could have been,
but that is nevertheless constitutive of what it is now. The oblivion of the
Jesuit order is itself a complex historical formation, but I have highlighted
here at least two components: the oddity of the Jesuit’s sixteenth-century
mystic devotion and the “disappearance” of the true Society of Jesus in
twentieth-century Spain. These two apparently minor moments in the
order’s history are considered by many historiographers as receding elements in a Jesuit history.56 However, that confl ict within the order was in
a sense a “true” killing, as the “mystic” space in the Jesuit apostolate is still
one of contention.
The history of the true Company of Spain (which was dismembered and
quieted by the voice of the company that emerged after the XXXII General Congregation lead by Father Arrupe) was the suffering of a death
within. I argue that the details of those “inner deaths” should illuminate
the Legionaries of Christ’s analogies with the Jesuit order and the fi lling in
of the latter evacuated spaces. Those spaces have also been historically
masculinized (and eroticized). By fi lling in/taking over affective spaces
(promoting a virile posture of priesthood in the church, where Jesuits
were perceived as lacking), the Legionaries may have implicitly benefited
from the strength of the “death” within another order and captured some
of their historical affective power, some of their virility. To describe it
differently, they captured some remainders of a (symbolic) capital that the
Jesuits had accumulated more than 450 years.
A “simple” rivalry between two different Catholic religious orders in
their transatlantic reproduction helps explain how affective forces can be
harnessed from realms of both official and leftover translocal histories,
which, for anthropologists, both shadow and enlighten contemporary and
coexisting ethnographic encounters. A study of a translocality of the
Roman Catholic Church at this particular historical conjuncture of a new
Romanization of the Catholic Church and a universalization of the Holy
See as a political/moral subject needs to engage with the particular articulation of these affective forces. The Atlantic return is illuminated here by
an attention to mimesis between orders in the Americas and Europe. This
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94 The Legionaries of Christ
is an attention to both the lived experience of Catholicism and the role of
phantomatic presences—of a past call of the Jesuits in a present call of the
Legionaries—shaping each respective order.
Just as affects circulate, intensify, and “stick” to the skin57 of particular
religious orders, they are also hijacked for the agenda of a particular
Catholic project. Celebrating this harnessing/hijacking mainly as an
understanding of affects that signal eruptive, creative potential and liberating forces—as some theorist of affects have done58 —may well obscure
more than it reveals. In fact, affects mobilized in the relation between the
histories and practices of both Legionaries and Jesuits are also the haunting imprint of very conservative and, to a certain extent, hypermodern
projects of a (“universal”) Catholic humanitas. So Catholic humanitas is
not only a theological project of the church, it is also a pedagogical apostolic one that is affectively transmitted through religious orders. This
affective articulation of apostolic (and virile) forces and the anxiety of
their loss throughout history are parts of what constitute the Catholic
Church as a passionate machine, marked by forces and weaknesses within
an Atlantic return. The powerful ways in which theologies are affectively
transmitted (and incarnated) are central to an anthropological understanding of Catholicism, and so to an understanding of the forces of histories in the present.
Coda
I am not interested in debating the scandals that have been attributed to
the founder of the Legionaries of Christ or in examining journalistic
interest in the internal discipline of the order and its particular inclinations
in recruiting members among the very wealthy and powerful for its lay
movement, the Regnum Christi.59 However, it is important to note that
the Legionaries have undergone a major crisis, and an apostolic visitation
(an internal review by a higher commission of the church). Less in favor
with the papacies of Benedict XVI and Francis than it was with John Paul
II,60 the order was audited (a process technically called an apostolic visit)
between 2009 and 2010. The visitation also evaluated the order’s reliance
on the charisma of its (now dead) founder Maciel, in the light of recent
revelations concerning his fathering a child and earlier accusations of drug
abuse and pedophilia.
The Legionaries of Christ, whose project is entrenched in that of a
Catholic humanitas, have received much attention from the media. The
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The Legionaries of Christ 95
accusations of pedophilia laid against Marcial Maciel have marked both
the early and later parts of his priestly career. Maciel was suspended from
his ministerial functions between 1955 and 195761 and after another investigation of allegations of pedophilia and drug abuse by the head of the
Council of the Doctrine of the Faith (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger then,
now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) he was advised that he should retire
to private life in 2006. When he died two years later, one alleged daughter in Spain and one son in Mexico appeared, the second suing the order
for compensation. Cracks in the ideal of the purity of the Legion had
begun to emerge just before Vatican II.62 The case of Maciel became one
of the key examples of Benedict XVI’s annus horribilis for the priesthood
in 2010.
However, in order to address this constellation of events properly, we
would need to analyze the phenomenon of the Legionaries of Christ in a
broader register of the eroticism of the church—the subject of another
work to be written. I want to signal here that in the Catholic Church
boundaries between eroticism and abuse may be thin, and a focus on the
return of the missions can be helpful. To understand abuse within the
Catholic Church we cannot confi ne the (painful) debate to lay-clerical
relations (see abuse taking place in parishes by the hands of priests). I think
we need to focus also on a history of the Catholic Church from within its
clergy. We need to understand sexual abuse of the clergy in the light of a
suppression of a force of eroticism.
A rubric of historically informed relationships between the “suppression” of Jesuit mystical impulses (in the sixteenth century), the increased
eroticized expressions of the order (with and after Council Vatican II,
when many Jesuits left the order and some married), and particular forms
of “virile” postures and “love” for the Legion may help us address eroticism as an ambiguous force. Its lack of containment within the clergy
when transformed into abuse is, of course, a very worrisome aspect. But
eroticism, in its symbolic and fleshy forms, is also an embodied and passionate force that is present in a renewal of a communal “apostolic” body
within the Church—eroticism as ever, has an ambiguous position. The
chapter that follows will focus on further emergences of eroticism at the
intersection between migrant itineraries and the Catholic Church.
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4.
Migrant Hearts
It is a warm afternoon in April 2011. I am getting out of the San Giovanni
metro station in Rome. I am going to visit Eloisa and Roberto for a meal
in their one-bedroom apartment, a place that took them forever to fi nd to
rent but is still not really affordable. Eloisa1 likes this flat, although it is a
bit damp and right at the entrance of this lower-middle-class condominium building, so the curtains have to be kept shut for privacy. Eloisa
attends Santa Maria degli Angeli and Santa Maria della Luce, two churches
in the Latin American Mission (MLA) network of national churches in
Rome, and she shares with the many other women who attend these
churches a great devotion to the Virgin of Quinche and to the Sacred
Heart, or Corazón de Jesus. She keeps a beautiful representation of the
Virgin on her vanity table, together with the many other devotional representations she has received from friends and priests both in Rome and in
Peru. Space in the apartment is limited. The Italian owner of the flat did
not want to move out the old furniture, so Eloisa and her partner have
created storage space along the upper parts of the walls. The place feels
cramped but also full of memories. After her partner has gone to a meeting, we start to share stories of migration, love, broken hearts, and Catholic faith while curled up on the sofa, with a nice blanket over both of us.
We talk about women breaking the hearts of men—of good men
here—with endless strings of betrayal. We talk about women involved in
the church, who sometimes gather in migrants’ houses where beer drinking is taking its toll and where new sexual liaisons are formed and others
broken. We share stories of other women who have left overnight, one in
particular who took all of the furniture from the flat she was sharing with
a “good” man. Eloisa recalls the love of her life, a Peruvian priest in a
religious order, who stole her heart. Or better, they stole each other’s
hearts. He met her in Peru a long time ago, and she saw him again in
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Rome. She remembers his laugh, his articulate speech, but also their
shared sense of isolation here in Rome, and then a touch she felt from him
one day here, the hand she felt on her lower back, and then a kiss. That left
her in the air for days—affects that circulate between (forbidden) bodies
and that make the hunger for contact and warmth very real here: “I felt I
was melting, Valentina, but at the same time I was finally alive again, my
heart was alive again, my skin was alive again. “ I am reminded again that
affects are transmitted through skin; they can open new horizons just as
they close others; and they arise between people rather than within them.2
Anthropological studies of Catholicism and migration that focus on
tension and division between popular religiosity and Catholic hierarchy
have taught us to pay attention to life-cycle rituals and the hegemonic and
counterhegemonic forces that are at play in ritual performances, symbols,
and the discursive practices that constitute the everyday life of Catholic
faith.3 These studies have shone light on the gendering of popular devotion, the relationship to saints’ lives and local clergy, the embodied and
ethical directions that identification with the life of Mary means for
migrants in new social and geopolitical terrains, and the way new local
shrines reinforce a sense of community identity in the diaspora.4
This chapter—through the analyses of ritual celebrations, including
devotions to the Sacred Heart (a fi fteenth-century devotion to the suffering of Jesus)—captures (re)emerging struggles for the colonization of
“new” territories within the Catholic Church. It argues that Latin American migrant itineraries and Roman urban landscapes reveal the circulation of deep-seated anxieties, fi rst about pollution by a migrant Other but
also about the possibility for renewed forms of Catholic centralization and
counternarratives of the periphery.
A key difficulty in studying forms of Roman Catholic pedagogy vis-àvis migration centers on the celebration of the strength of the Latin
American Church within the global Roman Catholic scenario, a strength
that is so often identified with its passions. Desires, passions, and fantasies
are important focuses for understanding migrants’ religious experiences.
Migrant hearts are what drive the church, but they are also a thorn in the
side of the church; for example, the embodiment of sexual desires outside
of marriage is a problem for the church, which constantly advocates for a
stable Catholic family. As I have already suggested in the second chapter of
this book, the culture of life is founded on a specific idea of the family,
which stresses heteronormativity and condemns out-of-wedlock sexual
relations. Migrant erotic longings for inappropriate intimacies, whether
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98 Migrant Hearts
transgressing marriage or clerical chastity, haunt the normative idea of the
family and the culture of life anchored in it. This comes into striking view
in Rome.
Although a pastoral evangelization at the MLA in Rome stresses a drive
for a pan-Latin American church, my analysis here does not wish to
address “migrant communities,” a concept of community that, in its fulfi llment of a holistic longing, has too long fascinated anthropological
inquiries on migration. Migrants instead, taking a de Certeaunian angle of
analysis, are those who “teach us to circulate in our language and our
customs, and adapt to our material and symbolic universe”; they point to
itineraries that are difficult to contain, but also potential engines of revitalization: “All we have to do is invent with them [the migrants] a ‘culture
in the plural’ in offering them the condition of a plurality of mixed itineraries that are diverse, changing and constantly being re-shaped.”5
Migrants’ subjectivities are forged in a process of mobility and a cultural
swarm, as the ensemble of that which can proliferate at the margins and
that, at the same time, in de Certeau’s view, actively undermines centrality. Migrant itineraries constitute a making and unmaking of margins and
centralities.
Questions of centralities and peripheries, and of the recomposition and
decentering of the Roman Catholic Church pass obligatorily through
migrant terrains today. Such terrains are often elided from view, their
constituents seen as unskilled and unnecessary by Italian publics. Yet just
as migrant labor has become indispensable for the reproduction of advanced
industrial economies, migrant passions are in fact central to the rejuvenation, as well as, paradoxically, to the decentering of the Roman Catholic
Church today.
In this chapter, I explore these questions in the return of affective histories of the Church of Santa Maria della Luce and the articulation of these
histories across the MLA network in Rome. These stories are history and
spaces of new orientations of hope, but also of betrayals. As one of the key
sites of Catholic worship for Latin American migrants in Rome, the
Church of Santa Maria della Luce thus functions within my study as a
prism, allowing me to address some of the strengths and difficulties of
Catholic migrants in Rome.
A second and, as I will show, related thread in my analysis centers on
how migrant itineraries become embedded, more or less problematically,
in erotic desires that “stick to the skin” and how the devotion of the Sacred
Heart, with its long history, captures some of the tensions of divine love,
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the incarnation of passions, and the aesthetics of tactility and presence.
Finally, I turn to what I describe as hearts in motion to discuss, through
the examples of a pilgrimage to Il Divino Amore and a procession of the
El Señor de los Milagros, how the affect of national devotions intersects in
contradictory ways with a notion of common Catholic Latin American
identity, a “common identity” (adopting the language used by Scalabrinians) that is seen by the Catholic Church as central to its own apostolic
renewal in twenty-fi rst-century Rome. My aim in drawing together this
apparently diverse range of phenomena and experiences is to point to a
deeper continuity of being Catholic and migrant that is not tied to a common and universal Catholic identity, but rather to multiple conditions and
aspirations to the homey in migration and faith, and their intersections
with conditions and experiences of betrayal.
Hearts Emplaced
The Church of Santa Maria della Luce is tucked away in an old barrio of
Rome, Trastevere, just south of St. Peter’s and the Holy See. It is the only
church dedicated full-time to the whole Latin American population.
There are other churches in the city that are part of the MLA, but each one
of these is dedicated on a part-time basis to the evangelization of particular
national groups, normally carried out through a Sunday mass in Spanish
and regular Sunday convivencias (gatherings).
Catalina, the Peruvian churchwarden at Church of Santa Maria della
Luce is a widely trusted, yet very private Peruvian woman who has been
working in the church since the Latin American Mission was established
in this parish in 2003. Through my conversation with Catalina, I have
come to realize that it was not Santa Maria della Luce but Santa Cecilia in
Trastevere that Pope John Paul II had originally intended as the center of
the Catholic Latin American community in Rome. That beautiful edifice,
referred to by Catalina as a museum church, stands only a short hop away.
It was the perceived preciousness of Santa Cecilia, however, that led a
group of archbishops to challenge Pope John Paul II’s original plans in
2002. Catalina added that this is because “they think the migrants will
ruin the place; they will spoil and dirty it.” As I explained earlier, in
chapters 1 and 2, the clear evidence that the Catholic hierarchy in Rome
do, in fact, see migrants in this way is part of a wider tension between
culture as a “historical heritage” and culture as lived, embodied experience that plays out in multicultural Rome. This tension is not confi ned to
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the politics of sacred domains, but emerges in the discourse of municipal
authorities as well.6
Santa Maria della Luce may not be an important church in the Roman
landscape or a particular asset for the urban religious cultural heritage, but
it definitely has a rich affective labor history, which has emerged through
practices of migrants’ reappropriation. Santa Maria della Luce is a very old
church. It was originally founded by Santa Bonosa, a Roman heiress, on
the remains of what was possibly an even older Augustan court or a Jewish
tribunal. The zenith of its social significance in Rome occurred from the
eleventh century to the thirteenth, when the area was populated by
migrant women and men coming from the provinces, who provided services for the Vatican. During this period, it was a church of secular laborers for the papal court. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, the
church entered into a period of decadence (like hundreds of other churches
in Rome), during which time “della Luce” was added to the name of the
church, after the miracle of the apparition of the Virgin to a blind man.
Father Manuel, insists that this has always been a church of laborers, whose
work, often unrecognized, was actually the engine of a local as well as a
larger economy. The historical continuities in the current role and constituency of this church—Latin American laborers employed in Rome’s
informal and service economies—is striking and appears so to me and to
Padre Manuel as we discuss the church’s history.
Yet the church has also experienced a history of deaths and reincarnations. It was closed to the public during the 1990s and the early 2000s, and
only revitalized by the settling in of Latin Americans in the summer 2003.
In the words of Leticia, one of the more active Peruvian helpers at the
church, the story of the church’s recent rebirth often emphasizes the prior
decadence and the dirtiness of the church before the Latino community
and the Scalabrinians moved in. It is also the story of the work a group of
women: “para hacer un hogar a El y a nosotros” (to make a home for Him and
us). Leticia recalls huge shopping trips that Padre Manuel makes regularly
to one of the big shopping centers in Rome, bringing back cars “full of soap
and everything to clean,” as well as the back pain and the strained wrists of
migrant women who had just helped clean the church, the ritual silverware,
and the Crucifi x in preparation for the celebrations of Good Friday. Dirtiness and the labor of cleaning seem to be continually evoked in secular and
religious migrant itineraries. And this evocation is gendered.
Cleanliness has a long history in colonial racialized labor, articulated
through the subtle imposition of internalized spatial segregations.7 This
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internalization of cleanliness (often as an marker of value) is transmitted
and inscribed in the everyday care of the church. But it is also through the
materiality of this labor that a reproduction of otherness sticks to the
migrants’ skin and is at times challenged. The stress on cleanliness and the
acts of cleaning a church that once was left shut and uncared for and now
is the migrants’ “home” is thus neither a private domain of self-care nor a
public act of compliance. It is an affective material transmission and the
making of homely and unhomely via “official” and competing histories.
Santa Maria della Luce is a place with competing histories and values—
one is a certain idea of (Italian) culture as heritage, the other has to do with
history in the making. This history in the making is an active revaluing
and reinscription of the church through a new apostolic blood and labor
that is affectively transmitted more than ever through the handling and
rubbing of soap and the breathing and sweat of the workers.
Erotic Hearts
Rosalba is an educated Ecuadorian woman who has been working as a
badante (caretaker) since 2001. She was unmarried and in her early forties
in the spring of 2005. The trajectory of her story is not unique, but it is
revealing. Rosalba came to Rome after her best friend was murdered in
the streets of Guayaquil. She followed her married sister and brother who
were already living in Rome. She benefited from one of the early regularization processes, and she obtained a permesso di soggiorno (residence permit)
in November 2002. She remains a legal resident in Italy. Yet despite the
relative bureaucratic ease of her arrival, her life in Italy has not been easy.
Before she arrived in Italy, her siblings warned her it would be hard: “But
nobody can conceive how hard it can be, before you arrive here.”
In four years, Rosalba changed live-in households four times. She
fi nally started sharing a flat with her brother and sister in one of the
peripheral neighborhoods of Rome. Although this afforded housing security, she had to spend more than an hour and a half on the buses to arrive
at work by 8 a.m. For her, the major problem in Rome is the “humiliation
of the heart.” She talked at the time about the complexities, the abuse, the
anxieties, and the pettiness of the bourgeois Roman families with whom
she happened to live and work for more than three years. For example, an
older man whom she looked after bothered her at night for sexual favors;
the elderly wife of an ex-general arrogantly assumed that Rosalba could
not read and write; another older woman, afraid of solitude, demanded
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102
Migrant Hearts
company in front of the TV until the early hours of the morning; and the
daughter of one of her employers envied Rosalba’s education and Englishlanguage skills. Rosalba was also puzzled about Italian family relations:
The son of an elderly person in her care lives around the corner but seems
to visit his parent only infrequently.
Along with many other migrants, Rosalba is obsessed with time: “There
is no time,” she repeats. When you manage not to live puerta adentro (literality “inside the door,” meaning live-in), you have to hold multiple jobs,
often on different sides of town, which requires much juggling on public
transport. There is often not even time to eat between jobs. Time, or its
scarcity, is what kills women here, she claims. This was quite literally the
case of an Ecuadorian acquaintance of Rosalba’s, who was killed while
running to the bus stop, because she was rushing to work.
If Rosalba’s acute sense of the scarcity of time reflects a general experience among other women in the parish that the time between jobs seems
to rush by, never slowing or stopping, it is a relation to time that is accompanied by the equally common feeling that time scarcely moves at all.
When I was chatting with some migrant women on a Sunday at the parish
of Santa Maria degli Angeli, they recalled looking at the clock as if “time
never passes.” When one is puerta adentro, the uninterrupted and singleminded attention required to care for their often elderly clients can begin
to absorb every minute of these women’s days. In contrast, as soon as they
begin living away from their place of work (what is called puertas afueras,
living outside the house), their wages are inadequate, and they have to take
up more work; so time that goes too fast becomes the bad master of daily
life. Rosalba, like other badanti, is an intimate witness to the breaking down
of older structures of Italian family care that has accompanied the aging of
Italian society. Her accounts are full of amusement, sadness, disbelief, and
a sense of moral superiority, since in Guayaquil “we do take care of our
papis [fathers].”
Although Rosalba’s tone is often upbeat, there is much insecurity and
precariousness in her life, starting from her work contract: “They can
throw you out of the house overnight, and you may not even have time to
come back for your things; so it’s better to not possess anything of value
here.” Her sense of powerlessness emerges from being the weak and disposable link in endless Italian family sagas. Migrant workers, in their role of
badanti, can often turn into the sacrificial carriers of intimate Italian familial odysseys. The term sacrificial here evokes Mayblin and Course’s ideas
about sacrifice beyond ritual in the wider spectrum of social life and labor.8
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Migrant Hearts 103
Hence within specific social and labor relations, and in contingent
Italian immigration policies that have made migrant family reunions
increasingly harder than in the past, a perceived migrant moral superiority
emerges. When the story is about other migrants, a different moral economy seems to apply. Rosalba and her friends often mention the multiple
relations that Latin American women and men have here. Starting with
Rosalba’s sister whose child is in Ecuador and whose husband is in the
United States, but who has now got a younger and “lazy” Peruvian boyfriend living in the house: “Is it because people are lonely here? . . . There
are no roots here?” Rosalba asks herself. Or in the words of a friend of hers
who is a Peruvian domestic worker, “People’s hearts here are getting
colder.” The cooling of the heart is about a lack of caring too. A lack of
caring toward others—is perceived by some migrants as being at the heart
of some Italian families. Thus the Catholic Church and the clergy see so
much potential in transnational Catholic immigrants to Europe to reinvigorate family life.
Father Roberto is a Mexican diocesan priest who has helped at times
with the evangelization of the migrant women in Santa Maria degli
Angeli. In preparation for Easter Sunday in 2010, he stresses in the Sunday
meeting group that women “should be like the Virgin mother, you should
have the courage [valor] that she had as mother of Jesus, and do not feel
alone. You are all a living sacrifice.” In that same week, for the exposition
of El Santísimo in Santa Maria della Luce, Father Josefi no, a Scalabrinian
priest from Guadalajara, reminds twenty or so women at the Thursday
mass that, during Pentecost, it is the love of the community that is important, as well as the “presence of Mary with us, the migrants.” Receiving
the sacraments and praying to Mary are important; “Sacraments are a
chain of love” that link the father and the mother with the child, the
golden link that “makes us a community.” That love for the church, El
Santísimo, and Mary is what makes us endure this path, Father Josefi no
continues. It makes women “firme en la difi cultad” (steady in the difficulty)
and able to cope with the “path of suffering” that is turned into love for
the community. For Father Roberto, Father Josefi no, and other Scalabrinian priests, migrant women become “sacrificial carriers” (since they “carry”
the sacrifice of migrating, enduring difficult jobs, and leaving their family
behind) in a world where the heart is getting colder. But the comunidad de
verdad, the real community, is often a fantasy and a longing. Father Josefi no remarks, during the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday, that “we
do not only have to wash our feet; many here have also to wash their ears
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104 Migrant Hearts
and mouth; we need more community here.” Migrants’ sacrifice is built
on a rock, but the rock turns to sand, he adds, if women do not pray, and
it will soon turn to quicksand—if mouths and ears are left unwashed.
Language excesses and the proliferations of gossip and rumors become the
signals of divided communities.
In that same church’s oratory, on Pentecost Sunday, we cut a cake in
celebration for one of the women’s birthday. Noemi, a Scalabrinian nun
who helps with the evangelization of migrants, stops us all before we eat
and asks the women around the table to pray:
Put your distresses [penas] in the Sacred Heart, and let your sacrifice be
like that of the worthy Virgin, as the mother who gave life to us, so you
will not be selfish. Take advantage [disfruta] of the love within your circle
and share with all. This love allows us the sacrifice of our life of work,
which turns into love, the love of the Sacred Heart.
Then Dalia and I step out in the courtyard with pieces of cake in our
hands. She recounts her recent trip to Peru to meet her children and her
husband after nearly two years of absence. It was a disaster: “He did not
even buy me a coke,” she says sadly. As soon as she arrived, he started to
sleep on the couch, pretending it was because of the heat; then he expected
her to buy all the food. The house was badly maintained—junk everywhere, old appliances rusting in the courtyard. It took her days to clear the
junk away. And he was constantly on the phone texting. One day she
checked his phone and realized that he was texting a lover. She was so
upset that he did not tell her to her face.
In the past Dalia and I had sat together or walked around Trastevere
eating Italian ice cream, recalling often that she was “ready to go” while
working as a live-in maid. Like other women, she has a suitcase ready
under the bed. Dalia was a secondary-school teacher back in a suburb of
Lima, but the money did not last to the end of the month there, so she
made this sacrifice (her word) to migrate for her children and her husband.
But now all has been crumbling down, and she does not understand where
it went wrong, where the heart went wrong. For years, she bought nearly
nothing for herself, to the point of near obsession; she sent so much of her
earnings home that her friends in Rome began to worry. They thought
she was doing too much for her family abroad, nearly killing herself from
work. Her friends could read in her a deception that is part of other women’s
lives here.
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Migrant Hearts 105
While we eat cake, Dalia insists that when she is with the Corazón de
Jesus she feels a warmth and renewed call; she insists that she has to do this
work for her children but also for her husband. But now her husband, who
is much older then she is, is with somebody else, and she does not understand what happened. She feels betrayed. She has accumulated nothing
here, and when she was back home in Lima she just cleared away unwanted
junk and without any help. “I just needed an apapacho [a hug],” she adds. In
the MLA the clergy and nuns see the migrant working experience as moral
and emotional suffering, which produces a moral force that migrant women
are bound to acquire—a journey of the soul and a trial of the spirit, like the
biblical experience of Jesus and Mary in the desert land. However, a language of sacrifice for family and children back home obscures the presence
of a lack. This is a lack of affective proximity and erotic warmth animated
by the “fleshed” entanglements of hopes and attachments in the present.
Noemi’s prayer to the Sacred Heart does not always work; it can also
leave her at an impasse, a melancholy impasse of betrayal and affective
disorientation. Evocations of labor, love, community, and sacrifice ride
high in the affective terrains of these migrant spaces; but these spaces are
also littered with betrayal and broken hearts.
I have kept in touch with Dalia, and three years later, she is no longer
the bouncy, bright-eyed woman I met when she had recently arrived in
Rome. The color of her skin is duller; her hair is shorter; she has put on
some weight; and the tone of her voice has grown weaker. Her hands show
some allergic reaction to the house-cleaning substances she uses in her
work. She now wears clothes an employer has left her. Those clothes can
be recognized by other migrants as “simply out of fashion.” In the words
of Catalina: “Italian women look generous, but they always give you
clothes that they do not use anymore that are out of fashion, and you know
when a migrant woman has either just arrived here or when she is struggling with money because she wears out-of-fashion clothes.” If Dalia looks
less attractive and eroticized, her devotion to the Sacred Heart is still there.
This is an expression of an affect that Father Manuel has rightly noted
among many women here, that for them “hay un desfase” (there is a mismatch or gap) so that “la señora suspendió que vivió aqui” (the woman suspended the fact that she was living here). There is a temporality of
suspension: a suspension of disbeliefs (a withholding of a realization that
one’s hopes for a better life as a migrant have not materialized), which can
take place in migrants’ experience of actual de-skilling. This suspension
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106 Migrant Hearts
can be a space out of one’s own control, a desfase, where an experience of
migration fails to be linear, accumulative, and positive. Migratory experience becomes a gap, a condition of misrecognition, as Dalia’s body and
story at certain conjunctures of her itinerary suggest. Scalabrinians often
insist on the power of making community and admonish women for never
fully creating a pan-American Catholic community. However, this pedagogy contributes to a misrecognition of the forms that migrant life takes;
it cannot acknowledge fully this gap and how it works out in (especially
female) migrants’ subjective experience, rather than community.
It is difficult to place within those pedagogies the unexpected erotic
vitalism that is injected by a casual male stroke on the lower back of these
women, or the convivencia, such as with Rosalba’s sister’s out-of-wedlockrelation, or the affect of betrayal and desfase woven into Dalia’s life. These
disturb the matrix of a community of “good” Catholic subjects, which
then in turn imagined and referred to by the Catholic Church as a new
apostolic blood for the reconversion of shrinking congregations of the
faithful in Europe. Maybe it is the narcissistic projection that the Catholic
Church is a stronghold of unity and a cradle of family life that makes
betrayal such a powerful affect in these Catholic migrant itineraries. I am
referring here again to Freud’s idea of narcissism as the other side of betrayal,
where he reads an experience of betrayal as the impossibility of standing up
to an image of narcissistic love—explained as the child’s introjection of his
or her parent’s sexuality expressed as a form of separation and betrayal.9 The
anxiety that has plagued the Catholic Church about its own unity cannot
be confined just to a narcissistic reading, of course; but the connection
between a fantasy/love of a normative family and the impossibility of its
fulfi llment makes the experience of betrayal an important analytic aspect of
the relation between Catholicism and migration.
Moreover, Dalia’s desfase and betrayal emerge at a particular conjuncture of transnational labor and exploitation of the labor of love, in an Italian
context where migrant legislation on immigration and migrant labor are
very constrictive, as I have addressed in earlier chapters.10 For many migrant
itineraries, these forms of transnational labor require the refinement of an
affect of constancy, respectability, and familial love in their workplace. At
the same time, women often have to deal with transforming transnational
intimacies: they have been and are affected by betrayal.
Against the official position of the Catholic Church that stresses the
existing, psychologically detrimental effects of transnational migration on
the family and reproduction, it is crucial to recall that betrayal in kinship
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Migrant Hearts 107
and family relations is present well before transnational migration. To
understand an affect of betrayal in different migrant itineraries is an important shift of focus away from a psychological reductionism of migrants’
lives, toward an analysis of the situated (and therefore historical) affective
field of migration. This analytical shift builds on existing historical and
political economic analyses of the relation between female migration and
the Catholic Church, as an embattled terrain of sexual deviancy from normative, family-bounded sexuality.11 In short, nuanced forms of betrayal are
the products of an intersection between migration, labor, and Catholic
faith. If that intersection produces and contains different forms of love, so it
also produces betrayal. Studying this intersection, I argue here, is central to
seeing how the heart is animated and invoked in different forms and
migrant itineraries.
Heroic Love
Hearts live because blood circulates. If the Sacred Heart is originally a
fi fteenth-century devotion associated with penitence, suffering, and its
expiation, divine blood is both a sign of community and of cruor, blood
spilled in violence and for revenge. A spilling of blood is not confi ned to
the Sagrado Corazón de Jesus; in the Church of Santa Maria della Luce it
is also present in the Virgen Dolorosa (Lady of Sorrows) who looks on
majestically from the fi rst left apse of the church (see the frontispiece of
this book). The two-meter tall statue is moved to the central altar on
particular occasions, such as Holy Friday. The Dolorosa is a baroque image
of the Virgin at the foot of the cross. The Virgin is shown with a daggerpierced heart, an iconography that originated in Spain, but which spread
in New Spain in the sixteenth century. In some representations she also
cries blood from her eyes.
A heroic dimension of suffering is sacralized but also destabilized in the
iconography of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary as La Dolorosa. During
sermons, priests and missionaries repetitively stress the importance of the
family, the solidity of (monogamous) marriage, and the central role that
migrant women play in reproducing these institutions.12 During one of the
Via Crucis organized by the MLA in 2008, Carola, a Colombian woman,
stands out from the group as the only one carrying a small baby on her
back. She showed little fatigue in our nearly two-hour walk, interspersed
with many stops, reflections, and prayers. During one of these stops, Father
Josefi no stresses a parallel between the Via Cruces of Jesus and the Via
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108 Migrant Hearts
Cruces of all migrant women here away from their children. I ask Carola
whether she agrees. She was in a different position from that of many of
the women in the MLA. Coming from Colombia with her husband, they
both helped out in the parish in exchange for some temporary accommodation. Nevertheless, she reflected,
Yes, family is important, but it is also what chains you. It is your source
of joy but also of sadness, because many here cannot follow their children, and you see what happens to Latin American children who grow
up here—often they are lost [se piérden]. So it is a blessing but also a limit;
we women cannot do it all, and everyone calls on you, the children and
in the job, especially here in Italy where it is so expensive to live. But it
was also difficult back home, so it is never easy for women.
The following Saturday, I am sitting with Father Manuel having a coffee in the upstairs quarters of the Santa Maria della Luce, where a group of
Scalabrinian priests lives. Catalina was preparing the coffee, and Father
Manuel was “cross” with Pope Benedict XVI. He had written three letters
to him recently, but he had received no reply. He wrote the letters because
“continuing like this is not possible” (hací no se puede):
In the recent encyclical, the pope says that the Fathers cannot give communion to those who are separated or divorced. But there is not a pastoral for the woman migrant who has come from Latin America. They
have left because there is domestic violence, family prostitution, and the
father there does not have time for them. They [the priests there] tell
them: Why did you get married? Now aguantate [cope!] and you will go
to heaven. But this is not useful anymore. And we have more and more
women arriving here, and we do not know enough; we are not enough
[of us] to attend to them, and we do not know enough of what they are
going through. The ritual we follow in the church is often too masculine;
there is a need for a pastoral feminina.
We finish drinking our coffee. It tastes bittersweet. In the meantime, the
preparation for a later mass continues; flowers are arranged by some of the
women who have their day off or who are unemployed and thus are helping
at the church. Some men are cooking simple food in a little room on the
side of the church that normally hosts migrants’ gathering. They are called
los pollitos, a small group of men who, because of the way the migrant labor
market favors women, or due to their age and physical health, cannot fi nd
jobs. The church provides a place for them to be and occasional unpaid
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work to keep them busy. Feminization of male transnational migrant labor
is not new here either; many men who would wish to work in the construction industry end up caring for elderly or sick, bedridden Italian men.
Later that same year in November, the mass of Todos los Santos (All
Saints’ Day) was celebrated by Father Joselito, who, like Father Manuel, is
originally from Guadalajara. He is an energetic priest with a witty sense of
humor. This is the “feast of all of us,” he mentions, a day to celebrate each
and every saint’s name, and the saint within each of us. This is also a celebration of remembrance, different than the Dias de los Muerto for the
Mexicans that I have attended in Rome13 —less public and somehow more
intimate.
Father Joselito is leaving soon. He has been posted to Switzerland after
a year of service here. Young missionary priests are moved around so that
they do not get too attached to a given situation or to a particular group of
people. You cannot get too comfortable in missionary life. Father Joselito
reflects that some of the women at the Church of Santa Maria della Luce
love him, he thinks, because he gives his time and has been good at “listening to them.” They often live encerradas (lit., locked in, meaning as
live-in maids), he adds, and he has made a point of taking them around, to
discover a bit of Rome and have fun together. In that year, Father Joselito
has taken a group of women to open air concerts at the Capannelle, organized trips to museums and gardens in Rome, or just taken them for an ice
cream in the Piazza Risorgimento. Some of the Peruvian and Ecuadorian
women feel that he has helped them experience a little freedom, a moment
of laughter to “para olvidar las penas” (forget their worries). Hence missions
such as MLA can become important places for socialization, springboards
to “explore the city,” “get out of depression,” and “rencontrar el ambiente”
(lift one’s spirits).
But by the end of that mass something different happened. The women
in the church gathered close to the altar and surrounded Joselito, a group
of around ten, tighter and tighter. He makes a joke that they are going to
kidnap him. A woman took an Andean shawl and wrapped it around him.
The women become quieter and raised their hands over Joselito’s head, but
they are also touching his body, one woman begins speaking a benediction
for him, or literally over him. It is a benediction for his family, his health
in his new place, as well as for all the women who follow him here. Some
women begin to cry silently. The irony of the women blessing the priest is
not lost on anyone. The women disperse around him and come down
from the altar; two worry that maybe they did too much in taking the lead
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110 Migrant Hearts
to bless the priest. The normal arrangement of roles is quickly put back
in place.
Maybe Father Manuel was wrong: There is already a feminine pastoral
in action in the migrant churches in Rome; it does not await Benedict
XVI’s recommendation, nor is it contained in the migrant pastoral teaching designed by the Archdiocese of Rome, or the Pontifical Council for
Migration. It just happens. It arrives unexpectedly, a matter of female
presence and of affective forces that circulate in this and other migrant
churches: forces of love, benedictions, erotic desires, and attachments.
So if “the heart grows cold” in migrant itineraries, it is reignited in
multiple spaces of Catholicism. This reignition is part of a history of gazes
and touching, exposure and veiling of the flesh that permeates Catholic
aesthetic culture and devotions, especially mystical ones. Mystical devotions are not only visual; they are also manifested in bodily and language
excesses.14 In a complex hagiographic tradition, reread by feminist scholars, mystical devotions are sites of creative freedom away from a patriarchally imposed identification with Jesus’s flesh and its suffering, toward a
lived heart and blood of interior and loving passions.15 Yet histories of
female mysticism and suffering can be as concealing as they are revealing.16
Eloisa, who is an organizer of the Peruvian and Ecuadorian group that
meets at the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, reinforces the idea that
for some women it is a matter of the heart in a particular way:
The affectivity of the woman here is crushed [la afectividad de la mujer aqui
se destroza]. It is so difficult for women here, so when people live in close
proximity in a rented fl at very many things happen. Many times it happens that a man sleeps with the cousin of his wife, who may be living
there too. So there is much mezcla de la famila [mingling/mixing up of the
family], and it is such a mess for the children. . . . When I pray to the
Sacred Heart, it is like finding a peace, a great love, but also to not forget
that the heart unfortunately shuts here, because migration in Italy is so
difficult. The Fathers do not get sometimes that when they put their arms
around the shoulders of women, it can be difficult. They do not realize
what they do, but then women in the parish get stuck in a net of affects
[se quedan enredadas en los afectos].
So the heart is shut at one level to cope with the reality of living in
migration; but a touch, an embrace from a priest can open the gate to the
heart, allowing one to feel how dead one has become within. The body of
the priest is a presence that can open remembrance of vital but also haunt-
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Migrant Hearts 111
ing attachments. Lay and religious migrant bodies are a complex “fleshy”
presence, woven together through particular historical conjunctures.17
Kevin O’Neill has noted the way that in Guatemalan evangelical
Christianity, eroticism permeates a language of call for Christ and his
coming.18 The eroticism of language deepens the evangelical call. In the
MLA context eroticism, in the affective presence such as that of the Sacred
Heart (and La Dolorosa), is more an absence of words; it embraces both the
suffering and affective physicality of life, through an identification with
Christ or the Virgin’s life. But it is also a reminder of living with betrayal
as an inception of the process of migration.
Sacred Heart(s)
Erotic passions are a dimension of the cult of the Sacred Heart. The symbolism of the Sacred Heart has a long history: from early apparitions
revealed to the French saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque in 1680s, to the
use of the Sacred Heart as a protective symbol during an outbreak of
plague in 1720s southern France, to its wide circulation as a counterrevolutionary and countersecularist symbol after the French Revolution and
well into the early Republic. The secularist histories, against which this
symbol is counterpoised, were part of the modern project of the nationstate and the supremacy of secular powers over Catholic religious and
mystical practice.19 In Paris, the cult of the Sacred Heart was galvanized
during the contestation of the building of the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur
and its symbolism as a site of martyrdom that embraced both conservative
allegiances to the ancient regime and communard revolutionary commitments.20 Paradoxically, in a strange quirk of fate, the basilica openly commemorated martyrs of the right and, unwittingly, “in its subterranean
depths a martyr of the left”—Eugène Varlin—who was a respected and
committed socialist, brutally murdered in May 1871 during the Commune repression on the exact spot where the basilica was finally built.21
From its inception, the Sacred Heart was an embodied image, a verbal
and visual living image,22 that contained and called upon both official and
unofficial histories.
The histories of the early female saints that championed the need for the
church’s (male) establishment to embrace such devotion reveal interesting
tensions. The cult of the Sacred Heart has historically worked as a call for
the chosen people in moments of historical and devotional upheaval. It has
also been a call for a bodily and intimate experience of the divine and in
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112 Migrant Hearts
particular the love for Christ: Through the symbolic door of Christ’s
wound, believers could reach the dwelling of the divine heart incarnated
in a human form. This symbolic evocation of the divine in a human
dwelling (the heart) indicates a movement from the periphery to the center, from the unhosted (away from the heart), through the wound, to the
hosted (into the heart).23
Michelle Molina has pointed out that in medieval times Catholicism
cultivated an openness of the heart and its readiness to be inscribed by
God’s presence. With St. Ignatius’s spiritual exercises there is a shift, however: The heart becomes the “seat of religious being.” Containing a tension of penetrability and impenetrability, Catholic heart-centeredness
encompasses by then both the carnality of the heart, the cultivation of its
capacity to be inscribed, and the site for a possibility of the passionate subject’s self-renewal.24
In late nineteenth-century Italy, devotion to the Sacred Heart had at
least two natures. It was an individualization of devotion, a personal search
for sanctification that has championed the stability of the family and
marital union above the corruption of the senses and contemporary habits.25 But it was also a devotional symbol in time of cholera, epidemics, and
wars, especially during World War I. For Italian soldiers on the front, the
Sacred Heart was a powerful point of collective, devotional, and nationalist identification. Similarly, it functions as a unifying and protective shield
for particular labor guilds and factory workers. The Sacred Heart has been
a devotional “point de ralliement” (lit., the point of winning over), a moment
to abandon oneself into the hands and protection of Jesus.
Robert Orsi noted that, among American Catholics, the Sacred Heart
icon has been more than a “meaning-making” representation. For American Catholics, he argues, it has much more to do with the making of
kinship and the phenomenological and transformative nature of retelling
stories.26 The Sacred Heart is a form of mediation, between the social and
the divine worlds, and its affective potential is not set in stone, but rather
arises in unpredictable ways. It is present, but not always as part of received
and official church histories. The multiple and contradictory natures of
this devotion emerge in different encounters in the MLA, but also among
the Legionaries and the Jesuits. In fact, the central role held by the cult of
the Sacred Heart in both orders is also rather telling.
It is illuminating to briefly explore the way that devotion to the Sacred
Heart marks the complicated relationship of the Jesuits and Legionaries
of Christ. The key yearly celebration of both orders is that of the Sacred
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Migrant Hearts 113
Heart in June. However, there are similarities and differences around this
cult. A reemergence of the cult of the Sacred Heart took place in the Jesuit
order around the time of Vatican II. For the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner,
the Sacred Heart is a “primordial word,” a primordial symbol that indexes,
through the corporeality of Christ, the center of life. For Rahner, the
heart is not divine love itself but a “container,” fi lled with evocative powers that we, as humans, have to direct toward divine love. For General
Pedro Arrupe, too, the Sacred Heart becomes central once it is stripped of
its excessive piety, and revitalized by fi nding its meaning and relevance in
the contemporary context. I encountered references to the Sacred Heart in
the Legionaries and their lay movements specifically in relation to the
“Great Promise,” which is a series of devotional practices to the Sacred
Heart performed over a period of nine months that help the seeker to the
path of “grace of the fi nal penitence toward heaven,” in the words of a
Mexican member of the Regnum Christi. In both orders, the Sacred
Heart encapsulates the strengths and limitations of a personal and individual experience of divine love and forgiveness. But the Legionaries stress
in their prayers the promises that Jesus made to Saint Marguerite-Marie
Alacoque and her obedience to him, while the Jesuits stress the Sacred
Heart as a primordial symbol that needs to be revitalized in contemporary
contexts.
In the MLA the Sacred Heart, or Corazón de Jesus, appears in both
Father Manuel’s and other Catholic priests’ evangelization as well as in the
migrants’ stories. Itineraries such as that of Marialuisa are exemplary.27 An
intelligent Ecuadorian immigrant who started out in Italy as many others,
as a badante for a nearly blind nonito (a term of endearment for a grandfather), Marialuisa is equipped with strong motivation and a commitment
to self-improvement. She trained in communication at the Gregorian
University in Rome and has been working in Spanish-speaking broadcasting for a while. Married to an Italian man who is younger and less educated than she is, she refers to the Sacred Heart as that which helps her to
navigate the difficulties of everyday life, but also as that which is there
when everything else fails. The turning to El Corazón de Jesus is for matters of the heart, to “encomadarse a El” (entrust yourself to Him); it is the
presentation of oneself to the warm gaze of Christ (“He is looking at you;
He is with you”).
Marialuisa is active in an organization of migrant women and the leader
of the fi rst radio program for Spanish-speaking migrants broadcast from
Radio Vaticana, which I introduced in chapter 2. Her approach to this
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Migrant Hearts
devotion is not merely a form of prayer to ask for a blessing. She describes
the Sacred Heart as a sense of the homely (in the sense of being at home).
When she is before his image, which hangs in the entrance hall of her flat,
it is like “being back in Ecuador.” The Sacred Heart is thus not only a
representation that can evoke a believer’s pledge, but it is also a sense of
homeliness in transnational migration. In Ecuador, this image is in “so
many houses,” but it is also in Italy. The Sacred Heart becomes uncanny
because it brings one home, as it is also reminds one of the estrangement
from one’s own home:
When you see Him [in the portrait] in your house, you think you are in
Ecuador, but then you turn around and look out of the window, and you
know you are not home. [The Sacred Heart] is so beautiful, He takes you
[te lleva], and then still, you know you are not home.
As with the Freudian uncanny, it is this paradox that makes the Sacred
Heart such a powerful site in these migrant itineraries: It is both location
and dislocation.
The Sacred Heart in some migrant itineraries becomes a vessel, which
contains the believer, where a sense of the presence of home and peace is
felt, but at the same time, it is talked about by the clergy as playing a role
in the reproduction of a particular Catholic hogar (household). For the
priests and nuns, the evocation and reminder of the strength of the cult of
the Sacred Heart (both of Jesus and Mary) is, on one hand, professed as
that love which keeps together and blesses a Catholic household as the
“primary cell of society.” On the other hand, it is a promise of absolution.
In the words of John Paul II:
The day after tomorrow we will be celebrating the Solemnity of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus. This feast recalls the mystery of God’s love for the
men and women of all times. Dear young people, I invite you to train
yourselves at the school of the Heart of Christ to deal confidently with
the commitments that await you in life. I thank you, dear sick people,
for the spiritual help that you give to the Christian People in accepting
to do the will of the Crucified Jesus in a fruitful union with his saving
sacrifice. Lastly, dear newlyweds, I hope that you will feel the true joy
that stems from daily fidelity to the charity of God, of which your conjugal love must be an eloquent testimony. ( John Paul II, General Audience, 16 June 2004)
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A commitment constitutes then a devotion to the Sacred Heart. It is so
in the case of Jorge, a Costa Rican man who plays an active role in the
MLA and at Santa Maria della Luce. Jorge comes from a poor family of
twenty-two children, and he has five children and an ex-wife, ten years
younger than he is, back in Costa Rica. Prior to leaving Costa Rica ten
years ago, he owned a small hotel, a “good business,” but his ex-wife
“betrayed him,” left him and then wanted to come back. However, “Her
love was too passionate, and that was no good [she started to see another
man]. Women let down [their] men, and men let down God, man is the
head of the woman, so in this way it is not possible.” Then he says he went
to live with another woman with whom he fathered a daughter in Costa
Rica before coming to Rome.
Living conditions were hard, and ten years ago he made it to Italy on a
tourist visa and started to work as a badante for a string of different elderly
men, and then stayed for more than five years as a badante of a relatively
young widow. Unexpectedly, her children asked him to leave the job one
night, but he did not want to elaborate why, so I can only infer that he and
the widow may have become “too close.” For Jorge, rallying to the
Corazón of Jesus is tinted by a commitment to God’s plan:
In a dream that I had recurrently for three years, I dreamt about a property I had. I was walking toward the house, and when I entered there was
the Corazón of Jesus, and then a man, a friend appeared at the threshold
and he was very tired and sweaty and was saying “Jorgito, this is not
mine,” and he took me under his arm because he was worried. When I
asked my brother about this dream, he said that this was a sign of Him,
that I had to dedicate things to El Corazón de Jesus; it is the sign that you
dedicate yourself to Him.
The Sacred Heart is an orientation of commitment, a mediation, as well
as an uncanny presence. In the words of Benedict XVI the presence of
the Sacred Heart is in the mediation of the liturgy and is an emulation of
the love of God, but it is also the celebration of all priestly mediations. The
Sacred Heart is an outward and inward bridge of the sanctification of
priests and a reminder of their apostolate, and Jesus’s spilled blood is a gift
of grace:28
We are celebrating the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and in the liturgy we peer, as it were, into the heart of Jesus opened in death by the
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Migrant Hearts
spear of the Roman soldier. Jesus’s heart was indeed opened for us and
before us, and thus God’s own heart was opened. The liturgy interprets
for us the language of Jesus’s heart, which tells us above all that God is
the shepherd of mankind, and so it reveals to us Jesus’s priesthood, which
is rooted deep within his heart; so too it shows us the perennial foundation and the effective criterion of all priestly ministry, which must always
be anchored in the heart of Jesus and lived out from that starting point.29
But commitment is not all. The Sacred Heart is also an affective domain
that includes the humanized, erotic, and aesthetic dimensions of faith.
And its devotion is seated in histories of betrayal too. That is so in the case
of Ricky, a Peruvian man in his early forties from the Selva, who when I
spoke with him in 2011 had been in Italy for about six months. His wife,
who arrived in Italy more than eight years before him, put in the papers
for him to come after his having raised their two daughters in Peru with
her fi nancial help. However, when Ricky got to Rome he realized that she
was betraying him and living with another man. She had asked for the
ricongiungimento familiare (family reunification) really because she was tired
of caring for all the family, and wanted him to come to Italy and work to
provide for the kids too.
Ricky now works on and off in the construction industry, but work is
really scarce for a migrant man. He keeps on repeating that it is really
harsh to leave the adolescent daughters on their own in Peru. His estranged
wife, now living with a singer in a Peruvian band, seems to not realize that
“girls need at least one parent with them there.” He still hopes she will
come back to him, but expresses his own crisis in terms of women’s libertinaje (debauchery) in Italy. He recognizes that women in Peru often leave
to come to Italy because, he thinks, they want something different that
they cannot fi nd at home, even if they do not know what it is. “There” it
was a “simple” life, but “here” things get complicated for some women,
because they follow a life of “pleasures” and their hearts change:
[His estranged wife’s] heart has become wrapped up, as if covered in bandages, and now it does not feel the same, migration is like bandages that
cover up your heart, and then it is not the same. I pray to the Sacred
Heart at times, to lift those bandages from her, so that the purity and
simplicity of her heart can shine again.
The Sacred Heart is a material icon animated by the homeliness of official
Catholic narrative and the unhomeliness of migrants’ uncanny, embodied,
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Migrant Hearts 117
and erotic journeys. In other words the Sacred Heart is an intimate and
complex vessel for harboring affective betrayals and the embattled unpredictability of gender relations.
Eroticism is a lived affective force and a drive. Georges Bataille has
argued that eroticism has a sacramental and sacrificial character. For him
both eroticism and sacrifice pivot around the violence of opening up
beyond a presumed separateness and discontinuity of individuals to a connection between individuals through a continuity of disrupted boundaries:
“The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character
of the participators as they are in their normal lives.”30 Hence eroticism is a
form of divestiture, a nakedness that calls for continuity between participants. Beyond Bataille though, eroticism of religious materialities (such as
the Sacred Heart) can be read in continuity with a mystical, divine erotic
experience. But mystical experience does not always require the absence
of objects;31 instead, it can be mediated by situated religious objects or
images. Objects such as the Sacred Heart condense a force of circulation
and sedimentation of affective histories; they are it, rather than merely representing it.
Caroline Walker Bynum, analyzing the material devotion of the late
Middle Ages, has suggested that we need to rethink religious icons and
relics through an expanded light that incorporates an ontological paradox. The paradox is that some Christian religious materialities are the
“changing stuff of no-God and the locus of a God revealed.”32 Through
a particular historically situated reading of medieval devotions and their
struggling with complex ontologies, the reading of Bynum helps us
understand some of the paradoxes and religious materialities in twentyfi rst-century migrant Roman terrains. If we need to go beyond the
power of representation of religious imaginaries into the study of how
they matter, we need to take into consideration the historical traces of a
Catholic corpus. This implies going beyond the confi nement of Catholic
migrant personhood and seeing how affective circulations of histories
engrave religious materialities and are woven into transnational migrant
itineraries. Forces of Catholic histories ignite the affective paradoxical
powers of Catholic religious materialities because “the expression of and
reaction to Christ’s humanity, even his bodiliness, were part of a larger
religious discourse about the material itself and how it might manifest
or embody God.”33 If visionary religious culture has been central to
aesthetic and anthropological readings of religious Christian modernity,
so the materiality of tactility, fi rst, and sensorial dimensions of (divine)
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matter, second, have been central to the Catholic visionary culture’s healing powers.34
If the Catholic corpus, as Bynum has suggested, is manifested in pain,
perception, and survival,35 then MLA’s experience highlights a current
paradox in this corpus. Migrants are sacrificial carriers in a “heroic” and
community-oriented journey in priestly discursive practices. Together
with an invisibility of presence in Italian society, the Catholic migrant
experience is a sacrificial standing out, but it can also be at times a desfase,
a suspension of living here, an experience of betrayal, of betrayed intimacies. The paradox of the Catholic corpus is then about love and betrayal,
the homely (in the sense of homey) and the unhomely.
The Sacred Heart is a mediator, an index of materialities of love, of its
continuities and discontinuities, and marks a paradox of longing for, and a
stillness of, arrival.36 Its devotion and presence in migrant itineraries is
both about a sacrifice of (in the sense of giving up) as well as a longing for
heartfelt bodily passions. If Carl Schmitt discussed the complexio oppositorum as the Catholic Church’s capacity to combine (politically) opposite
tendencies in its governance and still prevent schism, here the oppositorum
works as a material and devotional tension entangled in affects of belonging, the (un)homely, and betrayals.
Hearts in Motion
In this last section I follow up on the reflections and refractions of the heart
and turn briefly to a 2006 MLA pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Divino
Amore on the outskirts of Rome and to the Brotherhood of the Señor de
los Milagros. This pilgrimage, organized annually by the MLA, was not
as well attended as in previous years; nevertheless, more than sixty Latino
migrants and a group of Mexican sisters of the order of Santa Maria Immacolata joined forces and walked overnight from the Coliseum in the center
of the city to reach the sanctuary by dawn, eighteen kilometers away. I
went together with Jorge and Eloisa, who reassured me that while it was
hard to walk all night, once I had made it, it would be “bien bonito llegar allí
en la mañanita” (so good to get there in the morning). We left around 11
p.m., and the Latin American Mission had planned a series of prayers and
chanting, but at the last minute the pilgrims’ group was attached to a bigger Italian pilgrimage devoted to the Virgin of Fatima, which was walking
to the sanctuary that same night.
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Once we joined the Italian group of more than four hundred people,
there was some talk between the Scalabrinian priest, heading our group,
and the priests who were in charge of the other pilgrimage. The result was
that we had to forgo the Spanish prayers and follow the Italian pilgrimage,
which disappointed some of the migrants. During the first part of the
night we recited the rosary seven times in Italian, which was led by Italian
pilgrims ahead carrying loudspeakers. The rosary, of course, is all about
the suffering of the Virgin and the role of woman as the mother of Christ,
and prayers were interwoven with songs for the well-being of the clergy,
the strength of the Catholic family, and women as its pillars. Marian cults
and devotion are defi nitely resurgent in Italy, but they are also a source of
contention.37
Once we stopped midway for a rest around 2 a.m., and some took out
something to eat; the night was demanding on the body. When we started
again on the pilgrimage route, all of a sudden some MLA participants
began to chant Marian and Catholic Latin American songs in Spanish,
accompanied by guitars and drums. The lyrics were about the joy of life in
the Catholic faith and the joy of receiving Mary’s and Christ’s spirit within,
inside the body. The rest of the group, but especially two Italian priests
who were are the back, were taken by surprise. The priest-organizer of the
Italian section in the front, came back to the end of the procession and told
our Scalabrinian priest—half whispering—to “be quiet” and stop the
singing with the guitars. In a short while though, some of the Italian pilgrims began to join in. From then on, the spirit and the mood of the pilgrimage changed in our group: There were comments from the migrants
about the joys of being there, shaking away the earlier suffering mood, and
singing aloud their songs in Spanish—the soundscape had changed.
Lamentations of the rosary could still be faintly heard at the beginning of
the pilgrims’ group, but the sound of the guitar with the Spanish prayer
songs seemed to be the energy many of us needed to fight tiredness and
arrive at dawn at the Divino Amore. Once we had arrived, the Latin American group was directed toward the Old Sanctuary (built in the 1750s) at the
top of the hill to celebrate mass in a small modern church added to the
compound in the 1970s. The Italian group instead celebrated their mass in
the larger and impressive new Sanctuary of the Divino Amore, which had
been opened in 1999 by John Paul II, in the lower part of the compound. We
were all exhausted in the early morning, but elated to have made it. Eloisa
laughed, saying that “we” are always put in windowless basements, or in
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small rooms at the top. She was jokingly referring to the living topography
of her past employments and the present ones of many of her mates, who
were live-in carers, or badanti, in Rome.
These experiences of religiosity point to a transnational sense of the
sacred, where Catholic religious identification is still crafted through
common symbolism (the Virgin) and an experience of sacred inclusion
(the invocation of a Catholic spirit moving into the body), but nonetheless
negotiated in a transnational, at times exclusionary, space (the Italian pilgrimage). Devotional forms need to change with the migrant revitalization
of the Catholic heart. That change is sometime perceived as a challenge. If
devotions such as the pilgrimage to the Divino Amore are spearheaded by
the Latin American Mission to create a sense of a unified Latin American
Church in Rome, the goal of a pan–Latin American Church is not always
successful. Attempts to create a pan-American ethos over a national one
may be a pedagogy of the church designed to defuse rifts in some North
American contexts about different homelands, but this is not particularly
the case in Rome.38 So if confl icts of racialization and national and class
distinctions take place within and around the MLA and the CCM (Comunidad Católica Mexicana), there are also tensions around ways in which
migrant Catholic passions fit (or not), or threaten certain forms of Italian
Catholicism.
Nonetheless, certain forms of migrant devotions are becoming attractive even to dedicated Italian Catholics. This is the case of the Virgin of
Guadalupe and El Señor de los Milagros, which I discuss in the next chapter. The Peruvian confraternity of El Señor de los Milagros, with his presence, organization, and rituals, is gaining notable strength in the parish of
Santa Maria della Luce, not always to the liking of other non-Peruvian
migrant devotees. This lay religious brotherhood performs its rituals with
militaristic and legionary passions that remind one more of the Legionaries of Christ than they do of lay religious associations such as the CCM.
With their growing transnational presence, they signal other important
aspects of a return of the missions within the cardiovascular paralysis of
the Roman Catholic Church in Rome.
El Señor de los Milagros is one of the most important devotional Catholic images and was brought to Peru in the sixteenth century, possibly by the
first Africans working in the plantations. The Cristo Morado, or Lord of
Miracles (other names for the Señor de Los Milagros), and its undamaged
survival through both the late seventeenth-century and the late eighteenthcentury earthquakes in Lima, made him a very popular devotion with both
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mestizo and indigenous constituencies.39 Its transnational devotion is
strengthening in different parts of the world, from North America to Spain
to Japan, showing a productive tension between the globalization of its
devotion and the migrants’ conquering of public spaces and moral status in
often unwelcoming hosting societies.40 The devotion is organized as a
brotherhood composed of male groups called quadrillas—which take turns
carrying the heavy representation when he is taken in procession—and by a
women’s group, which traditionally carries the incense and sings the litanies.
Interestingly enough, the Hermandad de los Señor de los Milagros
(HSM) in Rome passes through the prison of Regina Coeli in Rome. The
story that is told in the mission is that in 1986 a transsexual sex worker
from Peru, who was detained in the Roman prison of Regina Coeli (close
to the MLA), brought the image to Rome and began to spread its devotion
among fellow Peruvians. A person whose sexual orientation would not
clearly fall into the normative cradle of a migrant’s family was the one who
marked the inception of this devotion in Rome.
The brotherhood of the Señor de los Milagros is one of five Catholic
Peruvian brotherhoods officially recognized and organized in Rome.41
There are more than three hundred families active now in the HSM, and
the organization attempts, for the most part successfully, to attend to the
needs and the emergencies of fellow migrants. Many of the organizers
think that that there is a crisis of the clergy in Rome, that there are not
enough priests attending to even the basic needs of the people. So migrants
who arrive here, Roberto explains in perfect Italian, have a “spiritual
shock;” as the church does not give space: “It does not and cannot help.”
Roberto is an articulate, perfectly bilingual lawyer in his late twenties
who grew up in Rome from the age of thirteen, in a family whose grandmother was totally devoted to El Señor de los Milagros. He was the fi rst
general secretary of this organization in Rome, nominated directly by the
Roman Curia; now he is a legal adviser for the institution and an outspoken advocate for immigrants’ right in the Roman political scene. Others
agree with him in believing that the Hermandad develops a parallel form
of governance and evangelizes in very direct ways. In Roberto’s words,
One of [Hermandad del Señor de los Milagros’] aims is to transform
from illegality to legality through the sacraments. One has to have proof
of having received them, or to take them if one has not done so yet, so it
is a form of evangelization or catechesis. It is a form of life. So it is not a
legality of the state; there are people who belong to the Hermandad who
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are in prison; we know they have stolen because they needed to send
money to Peru, and they did not know how to do it otherwise, but we
talk of the legality of the soul. (My emphasis)
The brotherhood has strict rules: People apply formally and are vetted
in relation to their family values. Following admittance to the organization, they must maintain a strong Catholic discipline and put in frequent
appearances at the brotherhood for rehearsals. Impeccably dressed in a
violet tunic and a white cordon knotted around their waist, each man in
the brotherhood is trained to carry the icon of the Señor de los Milagros
on a sedan that weighs more than two tons. The carriers are divided into
four distinct groups according to their skills and physical strength. Each
woman wears a characteristic white embroidered shawl. The women form
the sumidhoras (incense holders) and cantoras (singers) who walk before and
behind the icon in the procession. Normally there is a clear gendered
division of labor, but since Peruvian female migration has been prominent
in Rome, women here do carry smaller icons, as was the case of the
“enthroned” Señor de La Justicia, in the Church of Santa Maria della Luce
in spring 2011.
In the process of caring for and carrying these icons, these men and
women give of themselves as true Catholics. They become the passionate
engine of a renewed Catholic Church. Roberto again:
Italy has to learned to give, to give even its dreams, as one gives himself
when carrying El Señor. . . . We are not carrying a piece of wood; we are
carrying him. In the procession we [men] are all bundled up, but often
after the major procession in October, my shoulders are blue, and once I
had a slipped disk. If you really cannot do it anymore, you ask for a
change, but this is a shame [vergüenza], just as it is when you are not permitted to carry him because of discipline within the brotherhood. When
you are carrying the Señor de los Milagros, you are not thinking that “this
is just another thing.” What we carry on our shoulders is not a symbol of
the Señor de los Milagros, it is the Señor de los Milagros. For this reason
we cannot touch him with our own hands; we just have to hold him on
our shoulders. Because the hands are dirty, and would you touch a señor
puro with dirty hands?
So the Señor de los Milagros, especially in the yearly celebration on 28
October, blesses the city. Some other carriers in the group describe the
violet uniform as a form of protection. If you are wearing it during the
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carrying of the Señor in the streets of Rome, you can get closer to an
Italian policeman and you do not feel threatened by the police. Even if you
do not have a legal permit of residence, you become a regolare dello spirito
(one regularized in the spirit). The power, presence, and proximity to the
Señor de los Milagros can grant a “legality of the soul.”
A problem exists, however, since the Scalabrinian priests themselves do
not always agree with the governance of the HSM. Some of the members
of the brotherhood are not married in the church but live with their partners, and often have children (sometimes from previous unions or marriages in Peru). So there are different family configurations even among
strong devotees. In the words of an elder member of the brotherhood:
The Scalabrinian priests had to turn their ideas around. It is better to be
in than out, we told them; the church is stronger with us and with our
presence, even if we do not reflect the ideas of the Scalabrinian priests
and the officials of the Roman Curia. But the Roman Curia nevertheless
loves what we are and what we do, not only for the evangelization but
also for good behavior and caring of our fellow migrants. There are tensions between the different national churches here in Rome, and the
spaces to meet are only a few, but this is our struggle, also the struggle of
Christ and the Señor de los Milagros. We are also the new blood of the
church here in Rome: We are the pulsating heart. Look at some churches
here: No passions, no devotions—they would be dead spaces, if it were
not for us immigrants.
In April 2011, during the Via Cruces on Holy Friday, these types of
confl icts within the church seemed to reach a high. Father Simon, a wellinformed Brazilian Scalabrinian priest who is now in charge with Father
Alfonso of Santa Maria della Luce, has his job on the line. A letter has been
sent to his superiors and the Roman diocese to complain about his work
and behavior. Gossip is circulating even during the procession that Father
Simon wants to stop the growing power of the Hermandad del Señor de
los Milagros; there are complaints that he does not allow Peruvians the
space they should have. In his turn, Father Simon complains swiftly that
these misunderstandings happen “when lay people are put in charge of the
church.” This is, of course, one of the conditions generated by the changes
introduced with Vatican II, which emphasized the need to strengthen the
participation of lay people in the church’s apostolic work.
During the sermon at the mass earlier that night, Father Simon emphasized that there is “no understanding, no meaning to the process of
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migration, but one has to give himself or herself [entregarse] to the process,”
like Christ in his life, death, and resurrection. But this process is riven by
tensions between nation and church. This Peruvian brotherhood wants its
space in the MLA, and its leadership is not ready to negotiate with its
Brazilian counterpart. Father Simon, though, is afraid that they are taking
too much space and that other, non-Peruvian migrants feel marginalized.
This brotherhood has a strong affective attachment to the Peruvian nation
that does not work well within the project of pan-Americanism fostered
by the Roman diocese and the Scalabrinian priests. For instance, an affective attachment to the Peruvian nation comes out strongly in the repetitive
songs that are chanted through the streets of Trastevere on Holy Friday.
While carrying a smaller sedan with Señor de Los Milagros to the
Square of Santa Maria in Trastevere and back to Santa Maria della Luce,
we are all chanting the well-known hymn of El Señor de los Milagros:
Señor, de los Milagros a ti venimos en procesión
tus fieles devotos a implorar tu bendición
con paso firme de buen cristiano hagamos grande nuestro Perú
unido todos con una fuerza te suplicamos no des tu honor.
[Lord, of the Miracles, we come to you in procession
Your faithful devotees to implore for your blessing,
With a steady walk of a good Christian we are making stronger our Peru
Altogether with strength we implore you to give us your honor.]
Non-Peruvian devotees of the MLA are part of the procession, but the
voice of a woman next to me in the procession repeatedly dwindles on the
“make stronger our Peru.” I ask where she is from; from Salvador, she
replies. Later, when the procession is nearly over, she points out that Salvadorans are few in number here, and that she is devoted to the Señor de
los Milagros; she is moved by him, although she feels there should be a
more equitable sharing of resources in the MLA and that “el honour” to
be Peruvian is not really close to her heart: “The mission is not only for
Peruvians, but it is difficult, as the love for your nation [patria] is like your
fi rst love, you never forget it.” Once again affects of the nation interrupt
Catholic migrant pedagogies.
On Migrant Itineraries
In this transnational landscape the Sacred Heart and national devotions
such as the Señor de los Milagros become affective fields that move as well
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as interrupt the “good functioning” of the Catholic Church as a passionate
machine. In contemporary Rome, threads of histories animate the Catholic evangelization of Latin American migrants’ itineraries. They weave in
reminders of the church’s spatiality, migrant labor, Sacred Heart(s), hearts
in love and motion, and erotic hearts, pointing to an ongoing but also
unfi nished project of Catholic evangelization. It is unfi nished because part
of the official pedagogy of the Catholic Church has pushed eroticism and
carnal passions to its margins—something to be strongly discouraged if
out of wedlock. But carnal passions, the passions of the flesh and the
betrayal of the flesh, are what animate Catholic vessels such as the Sacred
Heart of Jesus and the long history it carries—a long history that embraces
the paradox of the incarnation of the divine: of Christ in a human body,
of the divine presence in a fleshy vessel.
In twenty-fi rst-century Rome, the Sacred Heart is paradoxically both
a dwelling and an exiled abode. For the clerics it becomes a mediator that
turns migrants into renewed apostolic actors for evangelization, to convert
their passions into the passion to convert. It is also a subtle reminder of
unhomeliness and the betrayal of nations and families. (Sacred) Hearts
point to migrant subjectivities that struggle with but are also animated by
different erotic, familial, and spatial vessels for a sense of homeliness. Thus,
one of the Catholic Church’s theological fears around the Sacred Heart
occurs when the Sacred Heart’s connection to Christ’s humanity (the basis
of the “culture of life,” in Pope Benedict’s words) is played down to favor
a reification of earthly sentiments.42 Transnational migrant itineraries and
religious practices can tell us a story of renewal of the Catholic Church
from within, but they are also stories of a struggle for inclusion and autonomy. As is the case of embodied devotional pilgrimage performances, such
as the rituals of the Hermandad de Señor de Los Milagros, Catholic practices are often played out on multiple exclusionary national fabrics. Devotional hearts, Sacred Heart, and Catholic hearts in motion are all affective
domains that are deeply connected to the movements of histories, to their
condensations, returns, and hauntings—key tools of a renewed analysis to
understand the intersection of religion and transnational migration.
To conclude the articulation of mobility, passions, betrayal, and desfase
of the heart that I’ve elaborated in this chapter demands a few further
remarks. First, the migrant itineraries presented here are about migrant
subjects who are sacrificial carriers in the eyes of the church but also at
times perpetrators of (erotic) betrayal and the victims of betrayals by others, and the betrayals of their nations. These migrant itineraries aid but
also destabilize official Catholic pedagogies of migrant evangelization that
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Migrant Hearts
emphasize the normative family and family reunification as the focal points
of an imagined redemption of migrants’ bodies and souls. This contradiction is better understood if we situate these cases within the larger system
of desires and anxieties of the church toward the New Evangelization and
the return of Catholic blood from the Americas, which (as I have suggested
in previous chapters) is always also a spectral return of missionary histories.
Second, a study of the Sacred Heart and the Señor de los Milagros pushes
at the analytical enclosure of a study of migrant communities, through a
study of affective and religious materialities. Belonging to a brotherhood
such as to the Hermandad del Señor de los Milagros can challenge the
boundaries of migrant “illegality” and makes devotional hearts the center
of a renewed affective politics of spiritual legality and purity. And the
Sacred Heart points to a tension between the homely and the unhomely,
fidelity and betrayal. If desfase is a misrecognition, a suspension of being
here and ultimately an unhomely condition for some migrants who are
actually employed in caring for elders and children, in making other homes
homely, then desfase emerges as a transnational matter of the (sacred) heart.
Third, we must understand how transnational migration is both marginal and central to the Catholic Church in its multiple hearts and their
articulation. Sacred material devotions and the tactility of their presence
are the incarnation of passions, and, as such, they carry both histories of
inclusion and exclusion of imagined relationships and communities. In the
next chapter I discuss in more detail the church’s pedagogies of a “common identity” of being Catholic and Latin American and how they are
further challenged by affects of the nation.
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5.
The Virgin of Guadalupe
A Nexus of Affects
A connection between Marian devotions and the (un)making of nations is
one of the threads of an Atlantic return of the mission. This chapter focuses
on Mexican transnational returns of histories and the affective politics of
celebrating the Virgin of Guadalupe in Rome. I argue that these transnational Catholic devotions contain or exceed the affect of the nation. The
analytical interplay between a fantasy of the nation and its political reenactment gives us important insights into how racialized transnational
religious histories are intimately connected to national political affect.
Broadly speaking, it allows us to think about how transnational religiosity
becomes a symptom (in a Freudian sense) of what has been repressed
within the birth of a “modern” nation. This chapter, then, continues to
explore the changing heart of Catholic migration while engaging with
presences of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Rome.
My exploration of these questions proceeds through an ethnographic
attention to the forms that this transnational religious celebration has
taken within a four-year period and foregrounds some of the gendered
complexities and anxieties that these celebrations unleash as strengthening
a conservative Roman Catholic Church. Extending this analysis, I turn to
a TV production on the Guadalupe devotion in Rome that portrayed the
Virgin of Guadalupe as folkloric, rather than a sensuous, affective presence. Finally a study at the heart of the transnational Roman Catholic
Church needs to engage different haunting presences in the political
imagination of transnational displacement and reemplacements. This is
also illuminated by a focus on repressed and returned histories, histories
that I argue come back sometimes in symptomatic forms around issues of
the nation(s) and its relation to Catholicism.
I argue here that the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe becomes a
nexus of affect that gives force to an ultramontane (in defense of papal
127
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
teaching) and conservative part of the Roman Catholic Church, which is
transnationally reproduced in Mexico and in Rome. This renewed force
promotes Mexican notions of patria, faith, and family and a reappropriation of the cultural memory of a violent confrontation—for a long time
“repressed” topic in Mexican historiography—of twentieth-century
Mexican history, namely the Cristero War.
As I have already noted, the Mexican church plays an important role in
the current rearticulation of conservative forces in Rome through the
work of Mexican orders such as the Legionaries of Christ, and their
articulation and mimesis with the Jesuit order. The celebration of the
Marian and Mexican cult of the Guadalupe Virgin must be understood
within a critical approach to Marian studies—an approach that does not
separate a study of popular religiosity from the one of the institutional
church but analyzes them as co-emerging. Such a critical examination of
these cults of the Guadalupe helps us explore how affective forces and
the return of histories are valuable focuses within the burgeoning field
of the anthropological study of Marian cults, which complements, but also
exceeds an emphasis on the study of lived religion. The study of the
emplacement and phenomenology of religion as rich and complex sets of
spatial, material, and kinship relations is an approach that benefits from a
parallel one that focuses on the histories and fantasies that were never fully
lived, or were forgotten.
To explore these histories and devotions I use the concept of symptom
to indicate the expression of an imaginative intrusion that undermines a given
form of political and social control. A symptom is a defensive mechanism
generated by anxiety that is rooted in a traumatic event and reenactment of
being-in-danger. The traumatic event connects to an impossibility to fulfi ll a desire, which is therefore displaced or repressed and comes back in a
symptom-form, such as a prohibition, or in a “substitutive satisfaction
which appears in symbolic disguise.”1 Symptoms have the character of
interruption and the eruption of an unexpected and uncanny affect. Hence
they also connect to a paradoxical potentiality of histories that never were,
but still are.2 In adopting an affective histories approach, I follow the proposal of Eric Santner (rereading Franz Rosenzweig) that a focus on the
symptoms of history need not pay attention exclusively to the rise or fall of
nations and empires, but “rather to moments of uncoupling—of exodus—
from the fantasmatic ‘holism’ of epochal or cultural totalities”3 —in other
words when symptoms open up and liberate history from a totalizing interpretation and closure.
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
129
La Guadalupana
La Guadalupana has a complex historicity that fascinated early anthropologists.4 There is a long, well-documented history of the Virgin of Guadalupe
as a multifaceted Mexican symbol of inculturation and subversion of colonial powers, the struggle for the independence of the new nation, and
anxieties around its secular and religious roots. The transformed use of the
image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who allegedly appeared to the indigenous (now Saint) Juan Diego in 1531, is indicative of changes in the collective imaginaries of colonial and postcolonial Mexico. The barometer of
this imaginary and the mobilization of the Virgin as a contested sign span
centuries.5
The Virgin of Guadalupe has been interpreted, on one hand, as a sign
and a reflexive prism of the historical transculturation of a Mexican
imaginary6 and, on the other, as a survival of devotion throughout different periods of Mexican history.7 With the publication in 1648 of the fi rst
book on Guadalupe by Miguel Sánchez,8 she became a theological symbol
imbued with an Augustinian tradition rooted in medieval Christian practices. However, the resonance of an immanent, indigenous presence of the
divine through the Virgin’s appearance also challenged and transformed
the transcendental, Augustinian Catholic pedagogical impulse that characterized the fi rst Franciscan missions in New Spain. An analysis of the
emergence of the cult of the Guadalupe shows how a density of historical
specifications helps us understand how any interpretation of believers’
“consumption” of this image or its mobilization in national (and later
transnational) localities should be read within and as a product of particular historical conjunctures: specifically that of Mexico in the latter half of
the nineteenth century and the emergence of the social doctrine of the
church, with Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891).
The historical conjunctures of the second part of the nineteenth century, in fact, pointed to a new paradox developing within public perceptions of devotion to the Guadalupe. On one hand, the devotion to the
Virgin of Guadalupe was seen as a negative expression of popular religiosity that had been strategically orchestrated by the clergy against liberal
and anticlerical forces; on the other, her celebration was lauded as an
embrace of a authentic indigenous and Mexican religiosity that dovetailed
with emerging indigenistic and nationalistic discourses—for instance,
in the work of the nineteenth-century intellectual Ignacio Manuel
Altamirano—that promoted liberal modernity and progress for a newly
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
born Mexican nation.9 It was in this context, and specifically during the
coronation of the Guadalupe in 1895, that she became the official patron
saint of all Latin America. Yet behind the regional significance of this
event, this coronation represented an important turn in the relationship
of the Catholic Church and the Mexican state. It effectively symbolized
an end to the self-exile of Vatican clergy from Mexico that had taken
place in response to the liberal, and perceived anticlerical reforms introduced in the 1857 Mexican constitution.
In October 1895, when the new shrine in the Tepeyac was officially
dedicated to the Guadalupe, prelates delivered a series of sermons about
the wonders and the powers of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her capacity as
“protector of the nation,” the “Lady of Mexican history” and hence the
bearer of both Mexican tradition and its future.10 This articulation of the
Guadalupe with the future progress of Mexico ideologically bore both
social redemption for the popular masses and the advancement of Mexico
as a religious nation. This articulation entailed an intense condensation of
historical, political, and racial referents, making the Guadalupe the lady of
national history, the mother of the Mexican mestizo, and the Queen (La
Reina) of Mexico, while also the symbolic mother of all the Americas.
Looking ahead thirty years later, during the Cristiada or Cristero War in
the late 1920s revealed this exalted celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe
as an idealized and deeply problematic marriage between the public sphere
of the nation-state and an institutionalized Catholic practice. Further, the
(failed) pre-, and postrevolutionary Mexican anticlerical efforts to defanaticize and desacralize Catholicism, which at the same time sought to
sacralize, in a rather Jacobin spirit, the “perfectibility of man and society
through the rational applications of science and technology” represent
what is perhaps an even more problematic legacy of this moment.11
In more recent twentieth-century history, the Guadalupana (another
way to address the cult of the Guadalupe) has been interpreted as a mediator between liberation and submission, as a liberating symbol with significance for salvation. Within this view, and affirming the lasting influence
of nineteenth-century nationalist discourses, some Latino theologians
have played a key role in arguing that she is a central player in the process
of the inculturation and mestizaje of Christianity in the Americas. She is
then described as a popular religious symbol for evangelical transformation and life-enhancing processes rather than disruptive racial mixing,12
providing a sense of origin of the “new Mestizo” of the Americas that
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
131
signals a passage from “brokenness to integration through a conversion
process.”13
The Guadalupe has figured in recent discussions as a call for dignity and
hope in social transformation, as seen in Timothy Matovina’s ethnographic
work on the U.S. Catholic South,14 and as a potential to reinscribe human
and immigrant rights in Mexican transnational communities’ political
struggles within a post–9/11 U.S. society.15 However, new arguments for
the liberatory power of this sacred feminine icon have been accompanied
by criticisms of the way these perspectives effectively reinstate a patriarchal cosmology that ascribes to femininity a submissive aspect of the
sacred. This critique has emerged from a Chicana feminist perspective,
which has advocated a reimaging of Guadalupe that highlights her contested and warrior-like nature and her contribution to radical struggles for
social justice that resonate with Latino women’s experience in the United
States.16 In this sense, the Guadalupe becomes a liberatory symbol because
she allows a space for founding a renewed Chicana (and more broadly)
female speaking-subject position. By deconstructing the Guadalupe’s
patriarchal formation and exploring her as a healing enunciatory position, the Guadalupe acquires a capacity to embrace ambiguity as the “new
mestiza.”17
Yet the Virgin of Guadalupe is not only a liberatory icon or, like other
Virgins across the Americas, a symbol of a nation in exile.18 I would argue
that she is also a nexus of ambivalent affect that are embodied and mobilized transnationally at particular historical conjunctures. I use the word
nexus to indicate a field of force in the social imaginary,19 which has current
and possibly proleptic effects. In my previous work, I engaged with the
production of prisms of belonging in urban Mexico in order to address the
interface of cognition, history and memory as they are expressed by people’s narratives of time and space.20 Here, I am interested in a nexus of
affect mobilized by a transnational social imaginary.
The OED defi nes nexus as a “bond, link; a means of connection
between things or parts,” but also as a “predicative relation.” Affects have
a material presence within a system of transmission between people and
hence do not belong only to people’s imagination and desires.21 By awakening sedimented histories in the present, affects shape the social imaginary. To study nexus of affect is to study predicative connections in the
circulation of histories, condensed as well as displaced in transnational
localities. Thus, the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Rome has a
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
materiality of make-believe;22 it comprises a return of histories and anxieties around the national and the familial. By exploring this nexus of
affect, I wish to develop what Aretxaga and others have discussed as a
symptomology of the nation and the problematization of national gendered metaphors.23 To ground my exploration, I examine different settings of the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Rome, which took
place from the mid–2000s to Benedict XVI’s celebration in St. Peter’s
Square in 2011.
La Virgen “Danzante”
In this section I compare the celebrations of La Virgen Danzante (the
“dancing” Virgin) Sunday, 10 December 2006, and Sunday, 8 December
2004, at the Church of Nostra Signora di Coromoto, Italy. The annual
mass for the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe in 2006 is presided
over by the Salesian priest Pascual Chávez Villanueva.24 In the fi rst ten
rows and at the altar, priests are dressed in ceremonial white tunics wearing different cassocks, some of which differentiate the priests’ origins in
Mexico. Chávez is the only one wearing a tunic with the Virgin embroidered on the front. A large reproduction of the Virgin on a banner is
standing on one side of the altar. After the mass the banner will be carried
in procession from the church to the Mexican Pontifical College, two
kilometers away in Monteverde. Visually there is a marked contrast
between the priests, dressed in white in the front and at the altar, and the
public, among whom many Mexican sisters are present, wearing somber
colors and longer plain skirts and veils. As Lucy, a member of a female
congregation dedicated to the Sacred Heart, explained to me once in
Rome, her superiors recommended that she wear the veil, which she did
not wear in Mexico. She longs for the freedom of dress she was allowed
back there, but she also recognizes that wearing the veil here allows her
not to be confused with lay Latin American migrants in Rome. There are
fashions to follow in the clergy too.25
Chávez’s sermon opens with a dedication to the 475 years’ celebration
of the “hechos de Guadalupe” (in the sense of the apparition of the Guadalupe). In his words the Virgin is misionera y alejada (missionary and faraway). The events of her apparition and subsequent recognition as a Virgin
are stories of missions and margins, of “a presence full of ternura [caring]”
and of that which “gives dignity to sons of God in Latin America.” Her
celebration, Chávez continues, helps all of us “deepen our faith and make
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the nation” (as in creating a sense of belonging to the nation). The story he
tells is also about remembering that she is a pregnant Virgin “a symbol of
the battle for life.” and, since her celebration falls during Advent, she is
also “a historical presence of salvation . . . who gives us dignity in front of
the eyes of God in Latin America.” Chávez continues, “Faith is important
in public life. . . . Faith has to have a strong social dimension as citizens and
Christians are the same person, this is the mestizo Christianity [cristianismo
mestizo]” (my emphasis).
It is important to recall here that a little more than a week before
Chávez’s sermon, on 1 December 2006, Felipe Calderón was sworn in as
the new president of Mexico in a very turbulent and contested inauguration—at midnight, in the middle of a tense atmosphere in the Mexican
House of Commons, where deputies had seized the speaker’s platform and
blocked the doors of the chamber. Calderón, a fervent Roman Catholic,
originally from the state of Jalisco, was the candidate of the pro-Catholic
PAN party (Partido Acción Nacional), and the contestation raged around
electoral forgery and the specter of a parallel presidency by the runner-up
Manuel Lopéz Obrador. Lopéz Obrador was the candidate of the PRD
party (Partido de la Revolución Democrática), the left-wing contestant in
the election and a former mayor of Mexico City. In the aftermath of the
election and the recounting of the votes, he founded a movement, the
Coalition for the Good of All, that mobilized demonstrations and set up
camps in the capital’s main square of the Zócalo even after the Federal
Electoral Tribunal declared Calderón the winner. Lopéz Obrador himself
had performed a mock swearing-in ceremony a week earlier.
At the time, the Mexican press described the atmosphere of the moment
as one of extreme social agitation and ungovernability.26 The inauguration
ceremony was cut short and performed, unusually, at midnight, and the
presidential speech was recorded in the private presidential residence after
Calderón made a short, private visit to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Subsequently, there was a debate over whether vote rigging or a
forgery of the judicial recount had taken place, although the consensus
now is that this may have not been the case. Yet the lack of clarity in the
aftermath of the election seemed due both to the idiosyncrasies of the
electoral system 27 and to the mistrust and resentment of the state-run control for potential rigging of the election that seemed biased in favor of the
PAN candidate.28
In the political climate of 2006, violence around the contested Calderón’s election in Mexico became a public secret in Rome, a ticklish, spectral
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subject.29 The public secret is the actually failing idea that the nation, or
patria, is “for all.” A week after the election, on another continent, this
failure to pacify a nation beyond the new president and a Catholic response
to it is palpable between the lines of Father Chávez’s sermon in the Church
of Nostra Signora di Coromoto: “The problem is not poverty; it is the
cultural model that legitimizes poverty. We cannot stay still; the baptized
have to evangelize. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a mission. She is for all of
us. The mission is not to do things, but it is to be the manifestation of God.
It is to be collaborators of the salvation of God.”
The Virgin is a mode of being for “all of us.” But there is a historical
ambiguity about being for “all of us” Mexicans. To say todos somos Guadalupanos (we are all Guadelupians) is to name an important tension with
regard not only to the phenomenon of the Virgin of Guadalupe but also to
the formation and the reproduction of the Mexican state, which has an
anticlerical history at its foundation and yet is devoted to this female figure.
At the end of the mass, after following the standard of the Virgin out of
the church, we head up to the Mexican College. It is dark and humid; a
drizzle is descending on us. Priests have quickly changed clothes. The
procession starts to disperse. This year’s procession is somber in comparison with the procession of 2004. There are no people dancing as we sing
the rosary and songs dedicated to the Virgin. We pass a major streetcrossing full of Christmas shoppers. Some stop to look at this crowd of
pilgrims, some in a distracted way, others with interest. A group of youngsters on scooters, bothered by the length of the procession (by now we are
around three hundred people), honk their horns and bully some of the
priests who are blocking traffic. There is some tension in the air. I later
asked Valerio, the Italian husband of the Mexican president of the CCM
(Comunidad Católica Mexicana), whether this was a common reaction
that they encountered in other contexts in Rome. He pointed out that at
the celebrations of the Dias de los Muertos organized by the CCM some
Italians had tried to take away pieces of the altar (when in the church) to
take home, so that coordinator members always have to watch out. He
added that Italians do not understand what Mexican celebrations are
about; they do not understand the spirit, and they see them as folkloric. So,
for him, the local youths’ response to our procession through the street
resonates with a sense of belittling of Mexican traditions. However, to
what extent this is a local response that indicates treating Mexican Catholic religiosity or of Catholic religiosity in general as folklore is an ethnographic question to explore further.
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Following along with the procession, on the other side of the street,
Iris, a Mexican woman, focused on the calmness of the mood of the procession: “Look, Valentina, the Virgin of Guadalupe is cultural, also here in
Rome; it is for lay and religious people together; it is for the nation [patria].
You see we are all here with the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin of
Guadalupe is for all of us.”
Once we get to the college, we pass in front of a sculpture of a large
map of Mexico, which is supported on the back of a statue of a forwardlooking Christ. The sculpture celebrates the fall of the Cristero martyrs,
with the place of their martyrdom highlighted by worn-out red bulbs. A
ghostly presence of the Cristero War is welcoming us in our procession.
Inside the college, a large 1950s bulding on a beautiful hill in Monteverde, the walls are covered with tapestries hanging from the ceiling.
Repeatedly inscribed in woven cubical letters is fe y patria (faith and nation).
As in previous years, an all-male costume band inspired by twelfth- to fi fteenth-century university traditions from Spain, the orchestra Estudiantina
de Guanajuato, is playing. Padre Lucio, a member of the college is dressed
in mariachi clothes and goes on to sing solo for a long while, after the
Romatitlán group—a Roman-based mariachi and folkloric dance troupe,
whose two leaders are a Sicilian and a chilango from Mexico City, has performed. The public is by now mingled; there are not only the Mexican
diocesan priests of the Mexican Pontifical College, but also other Mexicans
from different congregations and religious missionary orders, as well as
many lay people. While we watch these songs and dances the public is
mingling in the corridors that face the cloister where the performance takes
place. Some are joking that padre Lucio is so good that he should not have
been a priest but should have pursued a career as a mariachi singer. The
mood is by now cheerful. I am sitting not far from a Mexican woman who
works in one of the two Mexican embassies in Rome.30 She is passionately
telling Iris that they “will not pass.” I step into their conversation and ask
who will not pass: “The envoys [of the new Calderón government] just
visited the embassy a few weeks ago, and they asked, Why is there not a
Virgin of Guadalupe [here]? But the Mexican state is not that, and we are
not going to change. . . . They were cross and arrogant; we should not let
them [pass], but it’s difficult” (my emphasis).
The “that” is a perceived threat of interference by the Catholic Church
in a domain of the Mexican state seen as secular. We should position this
response within tensions in Mexico about a “taking over” of the public
sphere of the state by Catholic, conservative forces. Vicente Fox, president
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
from 2000 to 2006, had an ambiguous relationship with the Catholic
Church hierarchy, expressing his personal Catholic devotion and using
religious symbolism for his own political campaigns but also dismissing
criticisms from the Catholic hierarchy concerning, for instance, his marrying a second time.31 Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, president from 2006 to
2012, had a stronger connection with the Catholic hierarchy.32
Without taking up an openly pro-clerical agenda, Calderón had nevertheless promoted a religious politics that facilitated the Catholic Church
within a rubric of religious freedom of expression. This involved not reprimanding the Catholic hierarchy’s intervention in the public sphere while
the church’s hierarchy was attacking the secularism of the Mexican state.
Moreover, Calderón had been allegedly linked to the ultraconservative
secret Catholic society called El Yunque.33 Hence, the Mexican woman’s
anxiety is rooted in a felt attack on the laicity of the state or, from another
perspective, of an overt push of religiosity into public space. Different
registers of history emerge through the nexus of affect of the Virgin of
Guadalupe in Rome. Those registers claim different lay and religious roots
for the Mexican nation-state.
Racially embodied tensions also emerge in the history of this procession for the Guadalupana in Rome, which was established in the mid1990s. In retrospect, the celebration of the same procession in 2004 in
Rome foregrounded and minimized similar, but also different, narratives.
In that procession one group of priests who had trained for a few months
had dressed up as Matachines and Danzantes (dancers dressed up in particular indigenous clothes, partly reminiscent of the medieval European confl icts between Moors and Christians). They performed as a group in two
lines dancing rhythmically up to the hill. They wore white robes embroidered with indigenous colorful motifs and conch shells tied around their
calves to keep the rhythm of the dance. Drums, maracas, and guitars followed the procession, and many in the procession tried to follow the
priests’ steps. All of the eight diocesan priests dancing had learned the
dance in the previous two months, rehearsing at the college. According to
Father Geremia, a member of this group and a leading Mexican student in
the college, those who danced were all from the northeast of the republic,
where these dances had not in fact originated. The priests from the south
were not inclined to dance as Matachines or to wear indigenous clothes in
Rome as, in his words, “Those dances are too close to home.” Subtle racial
and class distinctions thus reappear in the Mexican Pontifical College.
Wealthier priests from the north (especially Nuevo León) are often able to
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pay for pachangas (parties) in the college, and some may want to learn to
dance, whereas more indigenous-looking priests from the south mainly
come from poorer dioceses and families with scarcer resources. These are
the ones who do not dance. For many in the latter group, in Geremia’s
view, priesthood and being sent to study in Rome is a form of upward
mobility, an opportunity to distance themselves from their indigenous
roots.
Once the procession of the Virgin of Guadalupe from the Church of
Nostra Signora del Coromoto arrives at the Mexican College and we are
inside the building, in the large cloister that is decorated with traditional
Mexican paper cuttings, nuns serve tostadas, beans, and chicken in tomato
sauce with a nice warm fruit punch. The catering has been prepared by
around fi fteen nuns of a Mexican order dedicated to the Sacred Heart,
who live on the premises but in a gated compound. They cater to the
daily needs of more than 150 diocesan priests together with the help of a
smaller group of men from a Mexican order who care for the gardens and
the switchboard. The place of the female religious order within the male
diocesan college is one of dedicated but also problematic “servitude,” and
there is some discontent among younger nuns over not being able to
properly advance their studies while in Rome, because of the amount of
work to be done.
In conversation with me, Martha, originally from Monterrey in the
north of the republic and the head of the CCM in Rome, emphasizes that
you would never see diocesan priests dressing in indigenous clothes in
Mexico, while the college priests are asked to come to this celebration de
collarin, wearing the white, stiff collar that, with a black suit, clearly marks
out a diocesan priest from laypeople. Inside the college, the celebration is
officially opened by the spiritual head and counselor of the college, who,
dressed with the indigenous huipil (traditional embroidered shirt), opens
his brief acknowledgments with “I am the spiritual guide of this community, también si no se parece [even if it does not look like it].” Everyone
laughs. Indigeneity again appears as an ambiguous marker.
Within the specific conjuncture of Rome in 2004, the affective nexus
of the Virgin is generated in part through a transnational mimesis and a
(mis)recognition of Mexican indigeneity. The fact that in the same celebration two years later references to Mexican indigeneity in the forms of
performance or display of elements of indigenous people’s heritage disappeared completely from the public performance, both in the procession
and in the subsequent fiesta at the college (where these elements partly
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
reappeared in the 2007 celebration),34 is interesting. It suggests that at a
different historical conjuncture, the nexus of affect generated out of an
apparently very similar celebration had shifted in significant ways. When
asked why there were no danzantes in 2006, a group of college priests
whom I queried appeared not to know, but once we continued our conversation two mentioned that the rector thought it was not appropriate for
that year.
What had changed? In comparison with previous and later celebrations,
the 2006 celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe points to a nexus of affect
that required a performance of a nation emptied of its own indigeneity.
This indigeneity, embodied in a performance of indigenous dances, has
shifted from being portrayed as an innocent, mythical cultural heritage
that is treated as folkloric and proudly national to one that must be played
down. It is played down when it may evoke contemporary sociopolitical
formations and counternarratives of power involving both indigenous and
nonindigenous peoples.35
Indigeneity as a discourse of appropriation and belonging around the
Virgin of Guadalupe in recent Mexican history is a complex and multilayered phenomenon. We cannot assume a monolithic Catholicism in Mexico
or a strict overlapping of the spiritual imaginary around the Virgin and the
imaginary of institutional Catholicism. For instance, the Virgin of Guadalupe was evoked by the revolutionary EZLN (the Zapatista National
Liberation Army) as part of their collective imaginary.36 And the PRD
coalition headed by Manuel Lopéz Obrador also referred to the Guadalupana while demonstrating in the central Zócalo of Mexico City and
demanding a recount of the presidential electoral votes. Needless to say, on
that occasion the Mexican Catholic Church hierarchy headed by the conservative Cardinal Norberto Rivera expressed its profound discomfort
with the (alleged) manipulation of this image.
The Virgin of Guadalupe as the Virgen Morena (brown Virgin) has also
been a key figure in the Teología Indígena (Indigenous Theology), a
movement within the Catholic church that, developing out of the implementation of Vatican II in Latin America and liberation theology, has
advocated for the revelation and incarnation of the Gospel in indigenous
cultures, granting to indigenous spiritual practices a renewed capacity for
revelation of religious truth and an important role in interfaith dialogue.37
Nonetheless, the Teología Indígena has also been a contentious subject
between pro-indigenous clergy and the Mexican and Vatican clerical hierarchy, not least concerning its potential to embrace a social (and political)
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139
effort for indigenous people’s liberation and autonomy and the fostering of
an autochthonous church.38 However, some appropriations of the Teología
Indígena, as part of a theology of inculturación and a contextual theology,
can be read as reproducing neocolonial missionary impulses of assimilation to the Catholic Church rather than as representing a dialogical process
of grassroots theological and liturgical formation.39
Hence in 2006, in the midst of a struggle in Mexico about the secularization of the state and the religiosity of public life, the nexus of affect that
was mobilized in the Mexican College was about a mestizo Christianity
(Cristianismo Mestizo), a Catholic citizenship (“for all of us”) based on the
phantom of a unified nation emptied of aspects of its own complex indigeneity. The phantom of national unity was and still is treading the corridors of the Mexican College.
La “Virgen Cristera” and the Legionaries
On Tuesday, 12 December 2006, the mass for the celebration of the Virgin
of Guadalupe had just ended in the Church of the Virgin of Guadalupe in
the Aurelia. This relatively new church is the mother church dedicated to
the order of the Legionaries of Christ in Rome. On this day the mass is
celebrated by a bishop from northern Italy and some senior priests of the
Legionaries of Christ. It is attended by Italian parishioners and members
of the Regnum Christi, a lay movement promoted by the Legionaries of
Christ. The mass is accompanied by a soprano who is dressed up for the
performance. No more than one hundred people are gathered for this
Tuesday afternoon celebration, but afterwards a small group of Italians
listen to an explanation of the Virgin of Guadalupe delivered in a Spanish
accent by a Legionaries of Christ priest. The man is smartly attired in his
priestly clothes and fashionable glasses, with well-cut blond hair. He talks
in an amicable and soft-spoken tone to this group that seems to not know
much about the Virgin, although it will emerge later that a few Italians
have traveled to Mexico, where they have experienced the power of the
Virgin as “love at fi rst sight,” in the words of a well-dressed middle-aged
woman.
This priest from the Legionaries of Christ tells the story of the apparition of the Virgin to Juan Diego, and then he explains that she was a
support to the fighters of the Cristero War. He narrates some of the
encounters of the Legionaries of Christ founder with the Guadalupe, the
response that the Mexican people had to the Cristero calls for resistance
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
against the modern Mexican state, and the way in which the founder saw
the Virgin of Guadalupe as central to that moment of church history. He
also dwells at length on the mystery of the Virgin, much to the interest of
the attentive audience. On the walls of the church there is an exhibition
about the unresolved scientific mysteries that the Virgin de Guadalupe
poses to scientists. Among other things, the priest mentions the image of
the retina in the Virgin’s eyes and the inexplicable endurance throughout
the centuries of the simple cloth on which the image of the Virgin appeared
and which is now housed in the Basilica of the Guadalupe. However, the
Legionaries of Christ are not the fi rst to have observed the scientific inexplicability of the Virgin of Guadalupe. But for the Legionaries, she is also
the defensora de la vida (defender of life), an advocate of another sort (a reference to the culture of life). Father Fidel who was for forty years the priest
in charge of this church, said that the Virgin “helps people very much. She
gives life, which is why the pro-life movements are very devoted to her.
She wears two bracelets, which in the Nahuatl culture means she is pregnant, and she is telling us all, Mexican and not, to fight for life with faith,
charity and hope. This is what she is.”
But back to the church that day. We follow the priest to the vestry
where other priests from the Legionaries of Christ are gathering. The
iconic feminine image which is presented in the public side of the church
is replaced by a series of pictures on the foundation of this particular
church: the laying of the fi rst stone, which was brought from the hill of
Tepeyac, close to Mexico City, where she appeared, and the blessing by
Pius XII in 1955.40 In another room, there is the picture of the first beatified man of the Cristiada, now Saint Toribio Romo from the Altos of
Jalisco, who has also become the popular patron saint of undocumented
migrants.41 We are then invited to sign up for a program called the Virgin
of Guadalupe Peregrina (female pilgrim). This is basically a rotation among
a network of families that will each have a “traveling” statue of the Virgin
in their house in Rome for part of the week and will recite the rosary to
her. Similar types of home visits of the Virgen itinerante are also found in
the central and northern parts of Mexico and in Texas.
A man from the group asks the reason for the rotation. In the words of
the Legionary priest, “She comes alive when passed from one household
to another. . . . She makes the household stronger”; she helps the families
“rejoice in praying together in their home.” Then the small crowd engages
the priest on the point that society is in crisis and that the sharing of the
Virgin’s presence in one’s own household is good. The Spanish priest replies
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that we are in difficult times, remembering once again the bravery with
which the Mexican people defended the faith when it was under attack in
the Cristero War.42 This represents a second evocation of a powerful,
sedimented, and transnational history in the same afternoon. So let me
turn now to this sedimented history.
As I introduced briefly in chapter 3, the Cristero War remains a complex and difficult part of twentieth-century Mexican history, staging a
confrontation between lay and religious forces in matters of Catholic
religious cults in the public sphere. Recent readings of this historical period
and of some of the Catholic processions that took place at the time capture the fears different actors had about a “forced” secularization of the
Mexican state. Important readings of this period illustrate some of the
ways in which women became the key in subverting a sacrificial and
passive economy of Catholic sanctity: from a passive submission to a perceived attack on the Catholic faith to an active and reactive (and therefore
partly violent, as in taking up arms) response to such an attack. Women
were not only passively resisting the encroaching of the state on the
Catholic clergy; they were central actors in raising up a resistant defense
to perceived (secular) enemies of the faith. Describing the aftermath of
the killing of Juan Tirado in Mexico (a member of the LNDLR43 who
murdered the Mexican president Alvaro Obregón in 1928), Matthew Butler writes:
Indeed, women acted as celebrants [at the burial] and sacred orators as
well as political-religious agitators, and did so without class distinctions.
This social leveling and feminization created an aggressive mood, furthermore, culminating in actual violence: the smashing of the comisaría
door, the assaulting of [male] state agents. These female socio-religious
interlocutors exceeded women’s prescribed roles within the Church, yet
probably, they saw themselves not as usurpers but as embodiments of a
“true,” “virile” Catholicism, whose defense could not be left to others.
Defense justified any secondary transgressions, even if the subtext of this
credo was that enemies of the faith could be killed. As the true faith’s
custodians, women were not spiritual rebels but Lady Macbeths urging
Catholics to screw their courage to the sticking-place and fight an
unclean state in the streets.44
Female Catholics could then call for more of a “virile” Catholicism, in
moments of perceived danger for the Catholic Church. However, Matthew
Butler argues that the ways in which the cult of the Guadalupana emerged
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after the Cristero War in Mexico as a symbolically and pedagogically unifying cult had a price. That was the death of the hope for a sociologically
embodied and enacted Kingdom of the Cristo Rey, where the national
public could militantly sustain and perform its Catholic fervor. I emphasize
enough how important this historical and religious conjunction was. The
emergence and consolidation of the Guadalupana cult meant that the Cristo
Rey and its secular-religious battlefield were “demobbed and dethroned”
and “put off for better times.”45 The haunting forces of these better times
are uncannily present in contemporary Rome. They are present in the
celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe and in the rhetoric and impulses
that foster the transnational rise of the order of the Legionaries of Christ.
In the intimacy of the church vestry of the Legionaries of Christ, in the
Via Aurelia, the performance of the circulation of the Virgin and her
devotional presence, with an accent on its “inexplicable” scientific reality
and its connections to the Virgen Peregrina, evokes another symptomatic
lack of unity. The fantasy of and the desire for a unified Catholic family
household make up the nexus of affect that the performance of the Virgin
presents in this Legionaries of Christ scenario in Rome. But the Guadalupana devotion is also composed of forces associated with the Cristo Rey,
as Butler suggests. This is an undisclosed desire for a call to arms to defend
a traditional Roman Catholic Church perceived under attack. In this context the Virgin could be seen as a female force that called for resistance in
the name of Catholic truth.
Hence, through the perspective of the Legionaries of Christ in Rome,
the Guadalupana becomes a powerful nexus that links, among other
things, the divine feminine with its historically and ambiguous potential
for “right” violence in defense of the Roman Catholic Church, which is,
of course, not to say that the Legionaries of Christ and their vision, which
other Catholics may also share, demand a “call to arms” and a call for
female violence. However, as Butler’s reading suggest, a renarrativization
of the Cristero War is also about an evocation of a (female) mass violence
that at a particular historical conjuncture successfully scuttled a perceived
fanaticization against Catholicism.46 In the context of the 2006 celebrations, this ambiguous lens is the product of a real and potentially violent
border within the Mexican nation—an internal confrontation between
the secular and religious roots of the nation-state. It is this internal border,
with its gendered, historical, and racialized registers that is transnationally
resignified and evoked in Rome and which is both reenacted and silenced
through the Virgin of the Guadalupe. That border “is a compromised for-
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mation in both the political and the Freudian senses, as a symptom in the
body of the nation that contains an excess of signification.”47 In this sense,
the Virgin becomes a nexus of affect that evokes and mobilizes this border,
which enables, just as it also negates, the unity of the nation.48 This is
another element in a Catholic puzzle of the Atlantic return: an excess of
signification around affects of the nation.
Guadalupe Spectacles
On the 4 July 2009, I had the opportunity to be part of a television program about the Virgin of Guadalupe. A called went out via the CCM
website to gather at the Basilica of St. Nicola in Carcere behind the Teatro
Marcello church where the oldest representation of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Rome is in a dimly lit lateral nave. I arrive there at around four in
the afternoon, and there were already some women and a full TV troupe.
They will be recording for an RAI 1 Sunday program A Sua Immagine, as
part a series that was exploring different sanctuaries in Europe and the
Americas. To cut costs and engage with the Guadalupe, they are seeking
locals to show the devotion she receives among Mexicans. One woman
from this local parish insists that Mexicans come here on the dawn of 12
December at 6 a.m. to sing the mañanitas (birthday song) and then share
tamales and atole (typical Mexican food made out of corn and cooked in
corn or plantain leaves, and a hot, thick drink prepared with corn or
starch). I know she is right because I was there once myself in 2008, but
some of the CCM women have never heard of this event, which is definitely small in scale.
We are now a group of around fi fteen women and an ex-seminarian
with his Peruvian fiancée; they are to be married soon. There is Violeta,
who has been in Italy for eighteen years, married to an Italian and then
divorced, and now living with a Kung Fu instructor and acupuncturist.
She was born in Tala, Jalisco, raised in LA and now works (underpaid) for
a Montessori school as an English/Spanish teacher in Rome. She has two
sons. Two Mexican women from the Focolare group49 are there too. Clara,
who arrived from Mexico City a few months ago, is also here; she is
divorced and looking for a job. She did not want to appear or be interviewed, half-jokingly saying that “she is wanted [by the law]”—she has
overstayed her visa, and, at that time, this was a criminal act in Italy.
Clearly she does not want to give her name to Martha, who is writing up
a list to give to the TV presenter, the flamboyant B.R.
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We rehearse the questions off air: “Is the Virgin of Guadalupe important for you?” and “Why?” None of us is relaxed around the microphone;
some of the answers are roundabout: “The Guadalupe is important for all
Mexico. . . . You feel received [acojida] by her. . . . She is with you always. . .
. She does not let you down.” I myself mumble a sort of answer, emphasizing that the image of the Virgin is not only Mexican but also global. By
then the painting of the Guadalupe has been moved to an opposite nave,
and strong TV lights have been turned on. We still have a long while to
wait before they begin shooting, and some of the women start to get fidgety. We have already spent a few hours preparing for the recording. B. has
reassured us beforehand that she knows that the cult of the Guadalupe is
on the rise in Italy and in the migrant population. Nonetheless, she keeps
asking why women come to the celebration on the 12 December so early
in the morning and then go to work in other people’s houses. She does not
seem to get that this particular group of women do not come for the early
celebration at this church on the 12 December, nor are they in their majority working as badanti in Italian families. Only two of our group work as
hourly maids although they are married to Italians. Ada is one, and differently from the majority of other women there she is of indigenous origin
from the Mayan region of Yucatán.
When B.R. moves away to the other side of the church, Ada turns and
elaborates that she was paid five hundred fi fty euros to work in a house
caring for two young children from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and then the father
asked her to do more household chores. Though she needed the money,
she asked advice of the other women about whether she should leave that
job—it sounds as if she had decided to leave. In Mexico, “They mistreat
indigenous people because they talk an indigenous language, but here, I
sense we face racism too.” Women like her are not tall and slender as the
beautiful B.R., but Ada is more graceful on this occasion, as I will explain
below.
While B. mentions that we must wait a little longer for the shooting to
begin, a loud thunder is heard through the walls of the basilica. The sky
looks particularly dark through the antique and poorly maintained glass
window of the little side chapel dome we are now sitting in. While we are
waiting, B. is standing at the altar, and the Virgin of the Guadalupe is next
to her. We are sitting on the church benches at the feet of the Guadalupe
and the TV presenter. Drops of rain begin to percolate through a hole in
the dome of this side chapel. One woman stands up quickly to go and find
something to clear the water and to check that it is not dripping on the
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
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Guadalupe. The TV presenter begins to joke while we are waiting. She is
standing close to the Guadalupe’s portrait. She mimics a Hawaiian hula
dance while we are rehearsing the song of the Guadalupana; in a way she
is mocking the song. I look at Martha—this is not really proper, and we
share glances among the group with a sort of grimace. The TV presenter,
a glamorous-looking young Italian woman, who should probably know
more than we do about sanctuaries and Marian devotions, continues to
not get it; she continues mocking the Guadalupan song with her dance at
the altar. Something discomfiting is taking place.
The summer storm is over, and so is the shooting. I leave with Violeta,
and we walk toward Largo Argentina. While we are walking, she is the
fi rst to mention that the television presenter was off-putting. Violeta then
reflects that she was so happy when she discovered, during her mother’s
visit the previous year, that there was a Guadalupe in that church, and that
she knows why Italians like B. do not get it. They think she is an image,
but she is not: “They do not get it, she te baña con su calor [she washes you
with her warmth]. . . . In her presence, she is there on your skin, she is in
your body, she is not a touristic image. Her presence makes you shiver
with sweat.”
She is a presence, not an image, Violeta keeps repeating. I share Violeta’s
anger about the insensitivity of the TV presenter, which was so clear to
those of us sitting on the benches. B.R. was bluntly considering the Virgin
as folklore; she understood it as one of the many expressions of the “new
immigrant communities” in Italy. She was not aware of the affective force
that this Virgin carries, although she has also been working for Vatican
broadcasting for a while, and clips of the interviews were to be shown in
the program A Sua Immagine on 26 July. Undoubtedly the awkwardness of
this afternoon will be purged from the final product, but this folklorization in the presentation of the Guadalupe probably will not be.
But devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe is defi nitely on the rise in
Rome. In December 2011, a major event for the Guadalupe was celebrated
in Rome. This was an official mass to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Saint
Peter’s Square celebrated in Spanish and Latin by Benedict XVI for the
bicentenary celebration of independence throughout the Latin American
continent. In front of official dignitaries from Latin American embassies
and cardinals such as Norberto Rivera, Benedict XVI reiterated the
church’s commitment to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Before announcing in
the same sermon a new apostolic visit to Mexico and Cuba in spring 2012,
Benedict XVI explained:
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146 The Virgin of Guadalupe
At this time, as various parts of Latin America are commemorating the
bicentenary of their Independence, the process of integration in this
beloved continent is progressing, while at the same time it is playing a
new role on the world scene. In these circumstances it is important that
its diverse people can safeguard the rich treasure of faith and their historical-cultural dynamism, always being the defenders of human life from
conception to natural end and promoters of peace; they must likewise
care for the family in this genuine nature and mission, at the same time
intensifying a vast grass-roots educational campaign that correctly prepares individuals and makes them aware of their capacities in such a way
that they can face their destiny with responsibility and dignity.50
The pope goes on to mention the Virgin, confi rming the afán apostolico
(apostolic eagerness) of the New Evangelization that John Paul II introduced on the occasion of the commemoration of the five hundred years of
the evangelization of the Americas. Benedict XVI endorsed John Paul II’s
vision and reiterated that the Virgin is a testimony of this conversion, the
roots for a new hope of evangelization for the Holy See. Iris, who works
at the Mexican Embassy to the Holy See refers to that mass as muy emocionante (very touching), especially since it was a misa criolla (lit., a creole
mass, a mass musically written in 1964 with the use of Andean instruments
by the Argentinian musician Ariel Ramírez in celebration of the Second
Vatican Council) within St. Peter’s. The sounds of the charangas and the
tambores within St. Peter’s Church alone made the experience unique. The
return of the mission in this official setting evokes a power of the Virgin
in Rome that is on the performative side criollo, but at its core the mass is
celebrated in the old ritual that Pope Benedict has been championing, the
old Latin missal. Latin and criollo are performed side by side in powerful,
but still subtly hierarchical, ways.
Transnational Marian Celebrations and Affective Histories
It is clear that the migration of the Virgin of Guadalupe through different
political, transnational, and religious terrains in Rome shows a series of
desires, losses, and anxieties about the strength of the Roman Catholic
Church and different national projects. Her celebration unveils the affective and effective social force of transnational histories, even as devotion to
her is misread and misrepresented as a folkloric sentiment. In this respect,
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the Virgin does not resonate at the symbolic heart of the Vatican and the
Roman Catholic Church—as it does in some cases in the United States—
with a desire for the empowerment of marginal subjects, especially in
relation to migration. Yet it is impossible to deny that she resonates through
the history of the relation between the Roman Catholic Church and the
Mexican nation-state. This is also a history of martyrdom and violence,
linked to anxieties around the secularization of society and the hope for a
Catholic religiosity intimately married to public, national, and intimate
spheres.
I have argued that to understand this nexus of affect we need to pay
attention to symptoms that recur about a loss of unity of the nation—
related to repression and renarrativization of religious histories within a
modern Mexican nation. This nexus of affect points to a desire for a project of Catholic citizenship as the basis for the unity of both the Mexican
nation and the Catholic family, both of which have been, and still are,
contested. Read in this context, the Virgin of Guadalupe is not just a
symbol, where a signified connects to a historically changing signifier, but
also a field of forces. The space of fantasy, the social imaginary, and Catholic rhetorical and discursive practices become a field of forces and affect
mobilized by and through the Virgin of Guadalupe. This field exposes a
phantomatic unity of the family and the Mexican nation.51
If we approach it in these terms, then, any specific mobilization of the
Virgin of Guadalupe cannot be understood only as a set of Catholic
pedagogical practices but also as an ambiguous excess of signification.
Thus we need to pay attention to the circulation of affect and the related
social energies that are condensed and dispersed in religious, and in this
case transnational, performances. As I have shown, this condensation and
dispersal of these social energies exposes remainders of, for instance, the
birth of a nation, as forces and histories that are never fully articulated,
but that are nevertheless present in the form of anxieties, traces, desires,
and symptomatic presences. Thus, a rethinking of affective religious histories is at play in migrant itineraries, and the way these circulate as fields
of forces contributes to a broader understanding of Marian cults and to a
refi ning of our tools for analysis toward a more robust anthropology of
Catholicism.
I hope it is clear by now that I use a political reading of histories that
intersects migrant terrains and itineraries. In this, I use “itinerary” in a
different way from the way Thomas Tweed uses the term. His view of
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The Virgin of Guadalupe
religion as a “confluence of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and
confront suffering by drawing on human and superhuman forces to make
homes and cross boundaries”52 is problematic exactly because it tends to
evacuate the situatedness and political force of these same religious practices. Although he also draws on the work of de Certeau, he draws on the
line of “flows” and free circulation, whereas I focus on aspects of de Certeau’s work that speak to the politics of alterity and the misrecognition of
official histories that render invisible nonofficial ones.53
The conservative aspects of the celebration of the Virgin in Rome—
for example, as a defense of a church seen under attack—contribute to
enhancing values that constitute Catholic humanitas within the New
Evangelization. In other words, in this way of being Catholic, one is loyal
to the pope and to traditional Catholic beliefs about family, reproduction,
and the primary role of the clergy. So Latin American transnational devotions in Rome not only decenter but also recenter the Roman Catholic
Church.
All of this suggests pragmatic ways forward for studies of the relation
between transnational religion and the religious practices of transnational
migrants. First, we must attend closely to the role of states, which regulate
movement and religious expressions and influence the magnitude and
character of migrants’ transnational religious practices. And so we should
consider the ways in which “ordinary individuals live their everyday religious life across borders,” and we should “explore the ways in which these
activities influence their continued sending and receiving-country membership.”54 Second, we must focus on what I have termed a religious nexus
of affects, which are closely intertwined with a symptomatic expression of
the state and its unequal formations. Some transnational Marian studies
have captured parts of this complexity, especially through an analytical
lens of performance, emplacement, and labor, and some have rightly have
emphasized that, even in local celebrations, a translocal set of social and
cultural practice is at play.55
Marian devotions in particular cannot fit easily into a modern view of
the subject as a singular and individual domain.56 Religious histories and
national religious images are not always shared as a “common” identity,57
but affectively they are revitalized or repressed at particular local conjunctures, while their effects and forces may be distributed across space and
places differently, and they may shape multiple forms of subjecthood. So if
Marian religious devotions are about the presence of the divine, the rela-
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149
tionship between humans and the supernatural, and thus about “lived”
religion, they should also be studied as a constellation of fragments that
reemerge in histories that have been partially forgotten or have been
abjected and peripheralized. The complexity of transnational Marian devotions and their political forces compels us to engage with these multiple
analytical frames.
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6.
Enwalled
Translocality, Intimacies, and Gendered Subjectivity
The treatment of enclosure and confi nement serves to refract
aspects of imperial discourse about race, civilization, and place.
—Dalia Kandiyoti, Migrant Sites:
America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures
You don’t put things up on the wall.
—Rosalinda, Ecuadorian migrant, Rome
In this fi nal chapter, I explore intimate affective domains that emerge in
the experiences of gendered migration. I analyze these in their continuity
between religious and secular domains. As in the preceding chapters in
this book, migration opens up questions of gendered affectivity and its
relation to space, labor, histories, marriage, and memories. Here, however,
I want to reexamine these questions through the figure—real and metaphorical—of walls, which I examine in connection with the conceptualization of migration and borders.1
My project in this chapter extends work I began in chapter 3, through
the use of genealogies and histories, where genealogy “seeks to re-establish
the various systems of subjection: not the anticipatory power of meaning,
but the hazardous play of dominations,”2 and where history is not a genealogy of origins, a metaphysical closure, but a dynamic of “intensity,
lapses, extended periods of feverish agitation, fainting spells.”3 Paying
attention, in a de Certeaunian mode, to the destabilizing work of details4
as dynamics of affective intensity, I wish to counterbalance readings of
transnational migration that are driven toward spelling out (sociological)
categories that are too neatly conclusive.5
It is through affective qualities attached to figures of walls and skins, in
both lay and religious migrants’ lives, that parallel forms of becoming inter150
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sect and are continuously remapped. Walls and skins are fields of potentiality as well as closure; this becomes acutely true in the paradoxical
reproduction of colonialism. The aspirations, dreams, tensions, closures,
and disappointments that stick to these dividing surfaces give shape to complex fields of affective forces that cannot be neatly confined to the Catholic
Church’s concept of a culture of life as the base of migrants’ experience.
When I discussed the Vatican’s current positions on migration and its
understanding of transnational migration in the light of “humanity,”
“civilization,” and the culture of life in chapter 1, I argued that these positions effectively erase the complexity and the gendered politics of migrant
intersubjectivity and the affective spaces I am presenting here.
This chapter continues this work by focusing on three differently situated groups of migrant women and their respective relations to walls.
These relations extend through differential spaces of intimacies produced
by specific relations between enclosure and translocality. To better understand migrant itineraries, a focus on biopolitical citizenship needs to be
combined with a focus on gendered affective labor. My interest here is in
fact with the affects that circulate between walls in the process of the
transformation of shared intimacies through the work of love, service/
care, and material/immaterial labor. Throughout this exercise, I wish to
bring up a tension between place and barriers/boundaries, and to tease out
some of the heterologies that manifest at that intersection.6 Following this
vein, I hope to capture some of the traces of affect that make migrants
“endure also a future that never became present.” 7
Enwalled: Mixed Marriages
December 2004
Lorinda’s two-bedroom house is simple. It belongs to her brother-in-law,
and he will soon, in August, return to live here. She and Emilio, her
husband, pay six hundred euros a month for the place, although the price
for a flat like this in the San Giovanni area is around one thousand euros.
Housing is expensive in Rome. The walls are pure white, and she does not
like white walls: “They are cold.” In a new house, she would love colorful
walls like those in Mexico, but her husband is horrified at the idea. She is
twenty-nine and married to a man who is more than twenty years her
senior; they have a child, Giacomo, who is three. She met her husband at
Termini Station, when she was sleeping there while visiting Rome from
Madrid, where she had a government grant to study for a master’s degree
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Enwalled
in politics and communication. Lorinda would have loved to go back to
work for her beloved PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) in Coahuila
(Monclova), north of Mexico City, but now she has to be distant from two
of her loves: her mother and party politics.
She is very careful about cleanliness. She mops while I am sipping my
coffee. I ask if I can help, but she refuses the offer; it’s a gift to her, she says,
that I am there, chatting, in the house. Her husband points out that she
should do the mopping later. She jokes with him that Italian men marry
Mexican women because they think they are more sumisas (submissive).
Maybe. Her husband leaves for work. Although he is retired from the
Italian railway company, he is now a waiter in the Roman catering business. This is very professional waitering, done as in the old times. He still
pays regular alimony to his fi rst wife and helps out with his two children,
who are now grown up.
Lorinda’s lower-middle-class in-laws are obsessed with cleanliness—
“todo en la casa es super-limpio, tienen miedo al polvo” (all in the house is
super-clean, they fear dust). With children it is the same: “no jalan a los
niños” (they do not allow the kids to move around and about); the children
have to dig their hands in the earth, “son animalitos selvajes, que sientan la
tierra, que sienta la vida, pero con los italianos no, no es así” (like little wild
animals, they should feel the earth, the life, but for the Italians no, it is not
so). For Lorinda, the Italian mother is chioccia (henlike): “They suffocate
their children, as it is always a no for this, because you could get a cold, no
for that as you are going to get a stomachache.”
Her in-laws are also obsessed with talking about money—or, better,
with talking about the lack of it. That obsession is matched by consistent
expenses on the care of the body. Her sister-in-law spends over three hundred euros a month on hairdressers and beauty parlors. It’s kind of baffl ing—on this we both completely agree. Maybe, I think, if she was
coming from the neighborhood of Lomas de Polanco in Mexico City she
would not notice this, but if that were so, we would not be sitting down
in this flat, in this part of Rome.8 Some members of the family own the
flats where they live and have managed to buy or contribute to one for
their children. One of her sisters-in-law is now a housewife, but was a
nurse a long time ago and has retired with a baby pension—one of the
recent labor scandals of Italy.9 The other sister-in-law is also a housewife,
but, in Lorinda’s words, no books, cinema, or culture is of any attraction
to this class of women. For Lorinda, it’s hard to fi nd her place in this
fishpond.10
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Enwalled 153
Lorinda wishes she could find work, but every time she calls up an
agency for a job she is turned down: “It is my accent; as soon as they hear
that I am a foreigner, they do not want me.” And she does not have the
support of her husband on this—he does not help out with the care of the
child, nor does he understand or support her aspirations. Lorinda thinks
this is because he is afraid that she is more than a pinch better prepared and
educated than he is. The battle is a long one.
There are two types of Italian women for Lorinda. One is the ignorant:
“They do not know anything; they are gossips and metiches [invasive,
nosy].” The other kind is educated, knows a lot, reads a lot, and treats you
well: “When one arrives in Europe, one thinks that everybody is educated
here, but this is not true; you do not expect to encounter such ignorant
people.” Some of these people think that, as foreigners, they marry for
money, but Lorinda married for love. And still, Mexican women have
approached Lorinda, both in Rome and in Mexico, about how they could
“marry a good man” here.
Back in Mexico, 2006–7
Lorinda tells me about the past year: She is now back in Mexico with her
child, after a painful falling out with her husband over his relationship
with her in-laws. The marriage is over. However, a few months later, her
husband goes to live in Mexico, too. It did not take long for him to change
his mind, but it is tough. She has started to work for PRI again, and she is,
once again, starting from the bottom—she has lost ground by being away,
but the ground is more easily regained than it would be in Italy. In Rome,
she missed a richer social life, her outings to chain restaurants such as
Sanborns or Vips with her female friends in Monclova.
Emilio is at home a lot in Monclova, and it is scorching hot. No more
of the long, pleasant, wandering walks they used to take together in Rome.
And in the winter, it is still boiling. They try an Italian catering venture.
They are both hard-working and generous people—too generous—and
the top-notch parmesan they buy here is too expensive. The red in their
accounts balloons. Despite their love for mamacita, who speaks to Emilio
in Span-Italian, it is time to move back to Rome. Once they are there
again they have to buy new furniture to resettle. No savings left.
Lorinda and the Suburbs, November 2007
I visit them in their temporary flat in Rome. It takes a long time to get
there from the terminal metro station of Rebibbia. It is another half an
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154 Enwalled
hour—and traffic is heavy. The bus to get there is infrequent, so Emilio
drives us. Even before we arrive, I sense that Lorinda’s wandering spirit
feels really trapped in this flat. Trapping is part of an affective map. With
this I refer to a sense of dependence on their partners that women like
Lorinda experience in immigration to Rome, where reasonably paid
employment for mothers like her is difficult to fi nd.
The block is rather isolated and run down. The building company
promised a set of stores on the ground floor of this suburban block of flats
that were never built. In place of the promised stores are huge concrete
holes, partly covered in graffiti and with half-built door frames with no
glass—one of the many symptoms of a process of the ruination of the
suburbs.11 Lorinda complains that it is cold and damp here. The flat is tiny,
and they had to divide the sitting room with a partition to create a separate
space for their child to sleep. The flat belongs to another one of Emilio’s
brothers, who will need it again soon. As in the previous apartment, they
cannot put anything on the walls. Lorinda also feels that Emilio’s niece,
who is expecting a child and lives next door, visits too often. Emilio’s
niece has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and Lorinda thinks her
parents have given them this temporary flat because it is far away and so,
somehow, they can keep an eye on a pregnant woman whose health is
uncertain.
They prepare me a wonderful, elaborate meal while we talk about losing weight—Lorinda has put on more than a few pounds, and it has exacerbated a problem with her knees and hip joints. She still wants to find a
job, and Emilio’s words seem to have mellowed. She is now enrolled in a
local program and spends two mornings a week working to pass the exam
of terza media (middle school). Going back to school is more than a fi rst
step. Lorinda cannot wait to leave this flat.
Beyond the Suffering Mother
May 2008
We manage to meet one last time at Termini Station for a long coffee on
the day before I return to Toronto. We talk about the fact that the working
situation has not improved for migrant women, although it is the same for
Italians, too. I know she has been attending a few gathering of the Comunidad Católica Mexicana but with some reservations. We dialogue about
the class and racial divides that permeate the Comunidad Católica Mexicana, as she sees they were performed on the Sunday of the Dias de las
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Madres. She remarks that “algunas mujeres llegaron con su piél, pero
después se relajaron y devinieron mas aprochables [some women arrive
here guarded (lit., with their skin), but then they relax and become more
approachable].”12
Emilio has turned 180 degrees and supports her much more. She comes
to a full realization that she will never make a living here from her interest
in “reading up” and periodismo (journalism), but will have to do something
more practical, such as opening a small food business—she loves cooking.
Food and nation occupy our conversation. She talks about Mexican delicacies and the sacrality of the nation, while Italians have the fi rst but not
the second—why do they not sing hymns at school? I am wondering why
she is pointing this out now.
There has been a major falling-out within the family. Her husband does
not talk to his sister anymore. They were eating at the old mother’s house
on a Sunday, and she came out with a racial remark, but more vehement
than ever, that immigrants should go back home and should not dirty
Italian soil. Lorinda could not stand it anymore. She recalls getting up
from the table, as an immigrant too: “El unico que tengo es mi dignidad y tu
en fruente de mi no puede decir esto! [The only thing I have is my dignity, and
you cannot say this to my face].” The walls trembled with more heated
exchanges. Emilio was furious with his sister; that would not have happened a few years ago. Things have changed. The tensions with the inlaws have never been so high. Lorinda also mentioned that when Emilio
fell ill with the Legionnaires’ disease, a form of pneumonia, a year after he
returned from Mexico for the fi rst time in 2002, they insisted that he must
have contracted it in Mexico. She is still scarred by the unfounded remark;
you forgive but do not forget. Those marks engrave the veins of mixed
marriages.
Lorinda’s New Flat, November 2008
Emilio still does not speak to his sister, and the walls are now a bright
patchy orange—signs of an emerging independence, recognition, and the
vitality of life. To an untrained eye, these walls look unfinished, but they
are painted using a typically Mexican technique called the esponjado. You
dip a sponge in the paint and then press it onto the wall in seemingly
unfi nished but regular strokes. It looks very bright, and I think how
unique it must be in this area of Rome, imagining the interiors of the
many apartments in the unending rows of blocks that can be seen from the
open window of this top flat overlooking Arco Travertino. This is actually
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Enwalled
the flat of Emilio’s ex-wife; more precisely, it is the apartment that Emilio
and his ex-wife once shared and that was left to her when they separated.
They pay only 750 euros a month. Lorinda loves her walls. Now she would
not exchange them for anything in the world. Well, maybe for a little
more household help. Her life back in Mexico would have been more
middle-class, but defi nitely anchored to very long hours of work and less
time spent with her son. Her orange walls are bittersweet.
The sweetness. Emilio is now supportive of her looking for a job. She is
actually setting up a business to home-deliver handmade piñatas around
the city. It has become a rather popular addendum to kids’ birthday celebrations in town. By setting up a web page and doing some market research,
she hopes eventually to open a space for children’s events. The bitterness.
She loves to be out and about, to eat in the calle (street), and sometimes to
eat kebabs around the corner. But if her husband is off work, no way. As a
traditional popular Roman, he wants his meal ready at home—why eat
out, what for? Better at home. She knows she will not see eye to eye with
him about this. But, maybe, the orange is bright enough.
On the Bus to Parioli, May 2009
Lorinda and I are on a bus on the way to the upper part of Parioli to deliver
a piñata. The piñata, which is stuffed inside a gray rubbish bin and strung
with metallic wire, is rather bulky and heavy. It takes us over an hour on
the bus, asking directions. We see a hefty Latino woman getting off the
bus; her midriff is bare. Lorinda does not wear clothes that bare her midriff; women who are actually Mexican here do not do that, she insists.
This is what distinguishes them from the other Latina women here. A
piñata wrapped up and a belly exposed. “Somos mujeres decentes y con estilo
[we are decent women and with style]”. Lorinda also got a piel y no se
relaja—she has a thick skin and does not let herself be taken off guard.
A new phase of life: Lorinda has applied to a program for immigrant
women launched by an organization called Risorsa Donna, a World Bank
program. The program, DIPA (Donne Immigrate: Percorso per un Autonomia), has, since 2004, promoted the integration of pilot groups of skilled,
immigrant businesswomen into the Roman labor market.13 It is clear to
Lorinda that the only way to make it here is to exploit her practical, creative capacities: “el trabajos de mis manos, no mis estudios y experiencia en la
política [the work of my hands, not my studies or political experiences]”.
She is really happy with this program and sad that so few migrants know
about it. She is the only Mexican there. In a series of meetings, they have
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Enwalled 157
assessed her capacities and she has been offered a three-month course to
learn about budgeting, legal, and managerial skills to assist her to open a
small business here in Rome. The dream of the kids’ party space seems
closer. And if that does not work, her husband is trying to get a license to
open a bar in a nice villa close to where they live, while she has put down
her name as a substitute teacher of Spanish for secondary schools. Plans A,
B, and C. She is settled now—in her plans.
Her mother-in-law is now in love with her. Lorinda takes Giacomo, her
son, to see Emilio’s mother once a week in the house she shares with her
older daughter and husband, who are living with the old woman in order
to leave their other flat to the daughter who has (still mild) MS. The eightyeight-year-old woman cannot stand the situation, but the house is technically owned by her daughter. Now Lorinda is not the only one to have the
experience of being an outcast in her own home. Even if it is not a wonderful intergenerational bond of solidarity, the much improved relationship is
a source of relief and a laugh for Lorinda. How things have turned around.
When I tell Lorinda that I want to write about her and her walls, she
quickly and fondly remembers a movie with Salma Hayek, Fools Rush In,
a 1997 romantic comedy. The main WASP character Alex (Matthew
Perry) comes back home to find that his once beige flat in suburban Las
Vegas has been painted in bright tints by his Chicana girlfriend (Salma
Hayek) and her family, who have recently moved in. Changes of colors
tint spaces of differential intimacies.
Mexican transnational marriages, at least in the United States, have
shown that there is an increase in the impulse to be compassionate and
sharing. Documented as an effect of having assimilated aspects of “modern” subjectivity, such as increased independence, marriages become sites
for renewed female bargaining agency.14 Mixed marriages can be brightly
colored and contain the kernels of confl icts. Those are confl icts around
what Sara Ahmed calls the narcissistic love of a nation that celebrates diversity as part of a (forced) unity—the love of the nation is a unitary ideal.15
Lorinda’s case shows the partial (in the sense of temporary) failure to
resettle and highlights not only that Italianness is problematic but that
Mexicanness is too. Two countries renowned for their emigrants feed the
love of their nations out of a failure to retain some of their citizens. They
may celebrate this centripetal national tendency in poetic forms, but there
is still a failure at stake.16 However, migration processes are also potentially
creative affective spaces, where national ideals are not only broken down
but are actually cut, pasted, and reassembled.17
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Lorinda’s story contains some aspects of a tension between enclosure
and translocality in the transnational migrant process. On one hand, there
are translocal imaginaries and places of memory, the bright walls and the
trips to Sanborns with friends. On the other, these tensions contain traces
of a colonial power, the transformative forms of historically racialized and
class stereotypes that (still) mark forms of exclusion in the everyday life of
migrants. Lorinda’s story tells that one’s own paint on a home’s wall may
fade or one may not be allowed to paint the walls in the first place, as
otherness, “being different,” may painfully stick to the skin of migrants
within the intimacy of family meals. Yet there is transformation.
Lorinda’s itinerary points to tensions between a space/life of transformation (the potentials of a life in Rome rather than her home city of
Monclova) and the aliveness of translocal images of coloniality (her racialized encounters within intimate spaces of Italian families), where class
distinctions, race, and gender divisions are subtly inscribed. A migrant
spatial reality emerging at Rome’s peripheries that has fallen out of the
Italian dream of prosperity is marked by regulatory ex-closures. There
may be no regular bus service to take you back home, and the dwellings
there are dumpy and often overpriced. But if there is space for colorful
walls, that space can be conquered, willfully and day by day, in a dynamic
negotiation internal to the intimacy of the family and kinship relations. It
is at the intersection of intimate and public that the battle for labor and
gender recognition for married Mexican women in Italy is being fought.
Whenever possible, Lorinda attended the celebration of the Virgin of
Guadalupe at the Church of Nostra Signora di Coromoto, although she is
critical of some of the clerical postures, and especially of the Legionaries
of Christ (she used to work for the PRI press agency in her town of Monclova, so her anticlerical attitude is no surprise.) The nation is not only
symptomatically present in the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe, but
it is lived here through particular ethical intersubjective positionings (“we
respect the older people in Mexico”) that are colored through a no dejarse
(do not give in) struggle for a space of visibility in Italian culture and
society. The tensions in Lorinda’s household are as much about a transformation of shared intimacy as they are about class repositioning and the
gendered language that has to fi rst be fostered and then mastered in these
negotiations.
These tensions are also about intertwining Catholicism into her migrant
itinerary. While hanging together in Rome in May 2011, Lorinda shared
new histories about her growing involvement with the life of the local
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Catholic parish, which allowed her to meet more Italians and widen her
social network. It also allowed her to negotiate some aspects of gender
positioning beyond the immigrant Catholic image of the mujer sufrida (suffering woman) championed by the MLA (Latin American Mission).
Her reality resonates with that of other Mexican women who have
married Italian men in Rome, and their communalities emerge not so
much from being “authentically Mexican”—there are too many class and
racial divisions and forms of distinction for a collective authenticity—but
from a sense of the communal vulnerability they share. They are affected
by, rather than merely subjected to, the movement of migration in terms
of “a common experience of displacement and fractured reality”;18 there
isn’t a unitary experience of intimacy and belonging.19 In this respect, the
affective fields of intimacy have more “forms, fits, materialities,”20 and, I
would add, colors on the walls, than a normative, Catholic semantic of
migrant intimacy and its culture of migrant recognition allow for. Mixed
marriages thus become a revealing staging ground where an affective multiplication of intimacies and differences confronts a liberal and Catholic
dream of equality. When migration is the cradle of the culture of life for
the Catholic hierarchy, a Catholic reading of the culture of life can turn
into a hegemonic force attempting, but never succeeding, to achieve an
ideal and to resolve the never-ending differences.21
Enwalled: Badanti
July 2009
We are walking toward the back entrance of the Coliseum metro station
with a group of around ten Peruvian women and men, compañeros de la
Iglesia, giggling and chatting. We have just left a local park where a number of Latin Americans meet on Sundays to play volleyball and soccer and
to eat inexpensive homestyle food. Parks are the cradle of “freedom” and
contention in the transformation of Roman urban space. They chart a
fi ne, and often embattled, line between a Rome as Capi Mundi and Kaputt
Mundi (leader of the world and the end of the world)—the visible limits
of a sophisticated episteme of integration (integrazione).
Now in her early forties, Magdalena has been in Italy on and off since
2002. She explains to me that you can be lucky in a house, have your
bathroom, too, but there are nonitas (an endearing Spanish-Italian word for
grandmothers) who do not want you to use the bathtub. Your bedroom
might actually be a storage room. Even worse, your bed might be a fold-out
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couch in the sitting room. The friends walking with us are enjoying la libertad. They peek, dash, and creep out of the houses where they live during the
long part of the week. Living-in is not a joke. A woman has arrived late at
Mass today because the nonita always asks her something when she is at the
point of leaving. Sometimes they ask for coffee when you are well into your
afternoon break. The dictates of the rhythm of older people has a real hold
on the daily and sleeping routines of live-in caregivers.22 These interuptions
make temporal boundaries even more porous than spatial ones.
A nail or a tack on the wall is a boundary trespassed. You may have to
leave the house soon, so you had better be ready. Under these conditions
of precariousness, holes are signs of possession. Magdalena had worked for
a family in Parioli for over two years. The patrons were both screenwriters
and helped her fi le her residency papers in the 2007 sanatoria 23 —they were
gente muy buena (very good people). Two years later, Magdalena is still
waiting for her permesso di soggiorno. The father of the two that Magdalena
cares for is a bit absent-minded, and when la signora was away for work
Magdalena has to be doubly vigilant—in her words, he is a third child to
care for. A friend replaced her when she needed to go back to Peru.
Replacement is a must among migrants who are maids, child caregivers,
or badanti, but it is a murky business, always risky, for the employers might
not like your replacement, or they might like them too much. There was
no more work with her employers when Magdalena returned from Peru;
the replacement got the permanent job. Magdalena is still sad about it.
Magdalena is a devoted Catholic, and she has been coming to the Latin
American Mission since she came across it in 2004. For her, the house walls
are protección, alegría, sufrimiento (protection, joy, suffering). They become
the materialities of the burden of another person’s household: “At times you
feel you are carrying these walls and your head is bursting with headache
because of all the problems one has, but you call on Him, who is always
with us, and the walls are less heavy, and sometime, if you are happy, they
share your joy.”
When Magdalena arrived in Rome in 2002, she did not want to go out.
She lived in the barrio close to St. Peter’s, and she recalls that an older man
living nearby kept following her while she was out on little shopping trips
for la signora. Another man stopped her while she was going to church:
“I suffered from nervios”24 for a week, a strong headache from the fear; I
thought that the man was going to kill me, and I could not speak with
anybody about it.” The parish of Santa Maria della Luce has been her
family ever since, where she gets recharged. Hence the Scalabrinian order
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plays a role in maintaining one form of porosity of other walls, or in
women’s peeking through the windows. The walls of the church are still
damp, but there is now sun outside.
I have known Magdalena for a few years now. We have walked to the
city center, many times enjoying ice cream. Now our relationship has
changed: We sit down at a café in Santa Maria in Trastevere—not at
McDonald’s.25 I fi rst met her when she said she was used to always having
a maleta (suitcase) ready to go to leave her place of work. As a badante, or
a live-in caregiver, she is constantly on the go—the nonitos may become
too aggressive or make unwanted sexual advances; the older couple can
turn despotic over the organization of your work time and ask you to wear
polished white maid dresses (in their posh houses) with hair tied back and
no makeup. This is a disciplining of the female body that positions a few
young migrants on one side, and the more educated on the other find it
painful to reconcile in the mirror. It is not easy to come in and out of new
skins; skins are pride, boundaries, and memories.
The maleta, though, can be the hope for a new skin. These are the
words of Alma, a well-educated Peruvian woman who arrived in 2006 to
support her two children through university in Lima. She has moved
through many different families, sometimes to the bewilderment of her
friend in the mission; it is a long story about one of the too many elderly
and frail nonitos dead in her care. Or maybe it is because of what she
should not have seen in the posh flat of a couple living in Piazza Flaminio,
where she was employed for two months—many dinner parties at home,
cocaine in the woman’s suit that was to be taken to the drycleaners, a
missing diamond watch (she spent a few days frantically trying to fi nd it,
fi nally fi nding it in another suit). When the lady of the house fell into a
depression because she was no longer in her accustomed inner circle, Alma
decided to leave. These migrant women may have been the unwilling
witnesses to the everyday acting out of a beauty-and-the-beast social
imaginary of the Italian Berlusconi era.26
Magdalena has now taken up a second job for a year to pay for her
upcoming visit to Peru; she starts at two on Saturday and is finished at
eight in the evening on Sunday—she is living puertas afueras (living out).
Now she shares a flat with a cousin in the suburbs along the Via Flaminia;
however, it takes hours to get back from the center of Rome. The flat
where she currently works is large; la signora, in her forties, and her husband, the owner of a hotel chain, have another five-and-a-half-days-aweek maid and need Magdalena’s help when the other is off. And la signora
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is always worried that something is out of place in the flat, and tells Magdalena time and time again about closing the downstairs entrance door to
the building well.
Double shifts, double commitments. Magdalena is also paying a mortgage, three hundred and seventy euros a month for five years for a plot of
land in a suburb of Lima. She wants to build her dream there, a small
pharmacy for her daughter. This is also an investment plan, and a future
option to generate rent money. Her daughter, in her mid-twenties, has
come twice to work in Italy, but now is back in Peru and has started a
family. This is also a change for Magdalena. Since I met her, she has
become more managerial in her migrant strategies. She is not drained
anymore by her hopeless ex-husband. Good, I think, she is settled now—
in her heart.
To decorate a room is like staking out territory and a politics of visibility.27 A focus on maintaining the borders of homely spaces (in the sense of
feeling at home) is a way to balance an otherwise overwhelming condition
of spatial and temporal precariousness. Walls are walls: They cannot be
moved. They can be knocked down, but it takes work, and it takes more
work to build them up again. Walls are literal signs and the excess of signification of situated politics of home and away, where home is both an
exclusionary space and a space of mutual recognition.28 I am intrigued
with how Latin American caregivers not only perform a labor of love, but
how existing imaginative geographies and inscribed temporalities together
create walls that “affective claims and relations simply do not cross.”29 I am
interested in walls and bounded intimacies as affective fields of objectsubject relations, which index not only forms of invisible servitudes but
also transformative potential.
The productiveness of migrant women is a transnationally produced
fantasy. If Latin American female migrants in Rome are hired for the
particular self they carry (good with children, Catholically devoted to
elder care, clean), in fact, they are hired for what they can become in the
eyes of their employers.30 Some mold themselves better than others—some
stay longer, some leave. The evangelization and the socialization that takes
place in the Latin American Mission inscribes these women in multiple
ways. On one hand, they become better subjects of enduring suffering; on
the other hand, the mission provides forms of sharing and negotiating
work that otherwise would be difficult for individual migrants to achieve.
An unintentional side effect of Scalabrinian evangelization is that the
church is providing migrant women a network for sharing information
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that makes them more savvy in how to negotiate with their employers by
using tactics such as silence, misinformation, and “lying.” “Lying” plays
an important role in migrants’ lives and cuts across gender divisions.
Maria, from Ecuador, has come to the MLA saying she has just arrived
and, quite anxiously, that she has no place to go for the night. After a short
interview with her, the nun who is helping at the front desk of the MLA
that day anxiously calls Catalina, the housekeeper, but Catalina is not in.
She really needs advice on what to do with this poor woman in need. A
place is found for Maria for the night, and a potential employer for the
following day as well, but when Catalina has a talk with the woman a few
days later; it is clear to Catalina that the woman has been in Rome for
much longer than she said, that she was not in as desperate a need as she
portrayed, and it also came out that Maria actually had a sister living in
Rome. She concealed much information from the nun working at the
desk. As Catalina puts it:
Italian people, and even the religious nuns and seminarists working here
at the MLA, do not know how to read us migrants. You should never
take a word for granted, but you should look at a whole series of things,
how the person talks, how she is dressed, who she knows, what she
cooks, her cellular phone. . . . We know how to read those signs among
ourselves.
However, “lying,” or concealing, has a different moral valence for these
migrants than it has for the priests working with them. If concealing
information or misrepresenting is an ordinary act in the everyday life of
some of these men and women, for the priests it is a moral flaw in the
character of the Latin American migrants. But migrant “lies” and concealments are somehow forms of enwalling, of enclosing what may be difficult
to guard. Read in parallel to an intimate sphere, where physical intimacy
and privacy are often hard to set up for these migrants, concealments play
a role of guarding, and a certain power of separation.
In a long conversation I had with Padre Alfonso, the Italian Scalabrinian Capillano (chaplain) of MLA, who had lived for long time in Argentina,
he says:
The pastoral of the migrants here is a centered on problem resolution. . . .
The pastoral with the Brazilians is especially with the youth, with the
Spanish-speaking. It is more a female pastoral; the feminine figure is at
the center. They are adventurers, not in that sense [meaning sexually],
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but they do it for improvement [riscattarsi], for their children, their families, they try . . . . But for the Latina women there is no youth; they pass
too quickly from puberty to wanting to have kids and a partner; they do
not live the stage of doing things together with friends, of having fun,
since they think their mother had a kid at sixteen so they can at eighteen. . . . But the real problem is the ambiguity [ambiguitá]; hence you tell
them something, to tell this or that to their [prospective] employer, and
they say, yes, yes, but when they arrive they say something else; they say
they do not want to work as a live-in maid, but they want to work for
hourly wages; so it is difficult. On the top of this, they sell work, and they
do not tell us. If they have more than one [job], they give it to another
woman for a price. . . . However, women are courageous, more than men,
but they suffer from solitude which is affective, moral, and spiritual [solitudine che e’ affettiva, morale e spirituale]; they have a circumstantial faith. They
live with a fragility of affects, and they also give their bodies for money.
If domestic workers, and especially live-in workers experience a disjunction between home and family,31 then boundary-making has a profound
effect on subjectivity and the art of concealment. Spatial and narrative
boundaries intertwine here: If you cannot put a nail up, then you can
attempt to control through “lying.” While making up temporal narratives,
one may well be trying to counterbalance spatial forms of being subjected
and navigate those vulnerabilities. From this perspective, “lying” can be
about faith too. A protection of one’s own intimate space, secret and sacred,
is maintained within a community of fellow migrants by shared secrecy
and codes: Faith and concealing may have more in common than we think.
However, these tactics are not the only forms of ambiguity lived by
domestic workers, nor are they mere reactions to spatial restrictions. Space
and its appropriation show a migrant’s ambivalence toward transiency and
the temporality of relations,32 an ambiguity in the continuity of one’s own
personal narrative. Hence the lack, to a lesser or greater extent, of this
continuity is not an exception, but rather it is constitutive of the ambiguous everyday matrix of subject formations for Latin American migrants
attending the Catholic Mission in Rome.
Enwalled: Mexican Nuns
These are thick walls. My mobile phone does not pick up a signal. It is cool
and damp even though we are already in May. On the wall of my room
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and in other parts of the convent there is a representation of the cross of
the Apostolate, which is a nineteenth-century version of the Sacred Heart.
Adela explains that it is an upright cross, a living cross that comes from the
heart. It has thorns and smaller crosses over it; these are the sins of the
priests, and nuns pray for them, dedicate their life to them. I am living in
the Roman home of a nineteenth-century Mexican female order, with six
wonderful women between thick walls of a sixteenth-century palace. This
is now the home of the male Mexican order of the M.E.S., which hosts the
Mexican female order of O.J.S. formed in 1924 and officially founded in
1937 by a French Father F.J.R. to assist the M.E.S.33
The female order to which these women belong has been in this house
in Rome for twenty-five years, but the house has a much longer religious
history. St. Paul is said to have lived around the corner in this neighborhood of La Regola, and in 1834 this palace came into the hands of the
Order of Minime of St. Francis of Paola. However, because that order lost
vocations, the house was sold to a male Mexican order, which was then
escaping from religious persecution in Mexico during the Cristero War.
With the help of an Irish sponsor, T.F., the founding father of this order,
bought and secured this house as the refuge in Rome for the order in 1926.
This house is, then, yet another Mexican presence in Rome born out of
traces of the Cristiada.
Many chores need to be done during the day, particularly taking care of
the bodies and souls of male priests who reside on the upper floors of the
house. We always eat in the basement, with no natural light, watched over
by two huge china vases, and a bust of the founder in storage in this dining
area. The air is stifl ing—nearly gluey. We are underground, a few yards
away from a very busy tourist street that leads to the Campo de Fiori, where
a painful historical mistake of the church is catching the often distracted
gaze of tourists—a statue of Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar and
astronomer burned at stake by the Inquisition in 1600. And we share a
massive wall with a tucked-away little square where another less spectacular, but nevertheless painful, chapter related to the history of the church is
memorialized. In 1604, the Monte di Pietà was a pawnshop, built by the
Franciscans and Pope Clement VIII. It stands today as a reminder of a history in which Jews were condemned to “immoral” economies by the
Catholic Church. A thickness of affective traces leaks in through the sometime porous, sometimes too thick walls and eats with us at the dining table
covered with a plastic cloth arranged with natural and plastic flowers—
aesthetic sensibilities of a life in a Mexican pueblo.34
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Each day we need to prepare food for over thirty people. I start to bring
down one of the many cases of food left weekly by the deliveryman on the
ground floor. Rosa Maria, a nun from Monterrey, gently approaches and
whispers that I shouldn’t do that chore. I am puzzled, but as a good anthropologist I bring the crate back to where I found it. Still puzzled, I rinse the
salad. Rosa giggles and with her northerner accent says, “If we do it, the
padres get used to it and that’s it; they pretend they become used to us
doing it.” Here we are: tactics of gendered labor relations in practice.
Mexican nuns and Latin American badanti: With veils or without, they all
need to set up as well as trespass boundaries.
This gendered negotiation is a public secret among the clergy, and it is
often portrayed to outsiders in terms of female heroism. Padre Hector, an
intelligent and informed Mexican diocesan priest from Orizaba, in Veracruz, says,
The women are the strong hands in Mexico and so they are here. The
religious sisters here live off their rents, but women here in Italy do not
go into religious orders, so the orders receive new blood from Mexico.
For example, the order of the A.P.—they now have six Mexican nuns in
Ischia, two in Castellamare, and some in the convent at the headquarters
in Rome. Or the same for the order of S.S.M.A. in Chioggia. Now they
have vocations in Chioggia who are running the convent, who are from
Veracruz! The Italian nuns are very old. This el pago de la evangelización
[payback of evangelization], these nuns come back with the gospel. The
more middle-class nuns in Mexico go to orders that are expert in education, but the others from more working-class [backgrounds] often end up
here, to take care of the older Italian sisters. They are heroic nuns.
But where there is heroism there is often strife. The evening before I
leave the convent, Madre Consuelo, the superior of the house, shares what
has been burdening her. She closes the door. They are at war. War is permeating these walls, not only dampness. It’s a historic war. They call it
negotiation of labor between diocesans and religious orders and between
gendered religious orders. They are at war with the padres of the house. She
would like to negotiate a new and better three-year contract with them,
but her superior in Mexico “doesn’t want to hear [about it].” Her superior
does not know the real prices of zapatos (shoes) in Rome, and Mother
Consuelo has to juggle with the bookkeeping—not to go into the red.
So Consuelo has told the nuns to take their time in doing the chores, to
not iron too fast, to leave the mess the fathers may leave on display for
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longer, and to take time to study and eat more leisurely together. These are
fallen words still for some of the nuns—for Consuelo is clear that doing
too much weakens their collective labor position, and creates too much of
a wrong love: “The fathers may give you more and more to do, but it is
hasta aqui [up to here].” I love the wit in her eyes and the spirit of her voice.
There is not only Sor Juana de la Cruz, but there have been scores of nuns
taking on that battle in Rome from all corners of the world. The walls
bounce memories back, even in a tucked-away basement. And there is
wrong love, too:
El amor de cuando te pisotean, te aplastan y tu sigues serviendole, mas y
mas también cuando pudieran hacerlo ellos mismos, y no dices nada, pero
esto no es amor. [The love of when they step on you, they squash you
and you carry on serving them, more and more even when they could do
it themselves, without saying anything, but this is not love.]
Tensions of intimacy and servitude, in the past phrased as tensions
between choir and servant nuns, has a long history from the time of the
early modern monastic female communities.35 The products of a postTridentine Roman Catholic discourse, such tensions are still a signature of
religious labor and love.36 The roots of servile love in the present day have
multiple historical registers. In this case, not so much about a subjection to
a mastery of personal care of upper-class nuns, servitude exposes a language of rights rather than duties. Duties immolate female work and
sanctify it. That others have a right to use what is the property of a person
as a labor-object is not sanctification, however, but a tontería a (stupidity)
for Madre Consuelo.
The line between amor and tontería is a fine one. And there is right
love—the affective labor of praying. This order of O.J.S. is dedicated to
the support of priests; it was founded in Mexico in the mid-nineteenth
century with the specific aim of helping priests on their long road of
priestly vocation. In Madre Consuelo’s words,
What we do is strong. A nun has to love many who are in need, and
sometimes this is very demanding. The priests take a long time in their
formation, more than nine years, and after that we carry on following
them so that they will be strong in their sacerdotal life, and we have to
carry many of them. . . . This is another type of love; it is a vocation of
the heart [esto es otro tipo de amor, es una vocación del corazón]. If you get
married, you have only one family, but we, you do not know how many
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we have. And those who do not know us think we are lonely between
these walls [entre estas paredes]. [She laughs.] Those poor people—they do
not know we have so many [y no saben que tenemos a tantos].
The nuns then imagine their own migrant itineraries in terms of other
forms of ambiguity, quite distinct from the heroic sacrifice explicit in Father
Hector’s words, and over different boundaries of family and intimacies.
They speak also of religious families that do not work, and of intimacies that
are shared, but at times also resisted.
But nuns do not only pray for priests, they also pray for el amor de mi vida,
que nunca fué (for the love of my life that never was). These are the words of
Adela. She grew up in a little village in the state of Jalisco, on the road to
Colima. Dirt poor and the eldest of seven children, she fell in love at fourteen, and the bond was very strong. One day he told her to come and live
with him, regardless of what her parents would say. That was a form of
marriage proposal, in the pueblo’s code. She recounts how she was set to do
it, but then while stepping out with him at sunset with her heart beating
and about to leave, her mother came down the road, unexpectedly, with a
shawl on her head. The chance was lost; she never left with him.
Then he went to the States to try his fortune. When he returned to the
village a year later, she had, in the meantime, heard the call and applied to
enter the convent. A few years later, she was about to take the fi rst perennial vows and had gone back to the village after a long while away. She
asked his family if she could see him for the last time before marrying
Christ—she knew he was married now with two children. “What, don’t
you know?” his sister said in a quiet voice; he had died in a car accident the
week before.
Adela says she knew then that consecrated life was her true call, her true
love; that death had strengthened her deed. But she has been praying for
him since—every day of her life, she says. Nuns are, of course, not immune
to earthly love. Loves left behind, loves met in prayers every day with an
Archimedean precision; loves of distant lands and homely hearts. Pero no son
tontas (but they are not stupid). With another nun, Ricarda, I discuss what
the intimate root of love is and whether a missed earthly love is the root of
el amor en que te pisotean (the love in which they walk over you). She replies
that the root of that love is fear, it is like a “fear of your parents” when one
was living in the pueblo. But out of that fear can also be born the opportunity of a vocation. Love is not that simple, and sometime you need to cortar
raices (cut roots).
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Consecrated life is also a land of discovery and maletas (suitcases). Some of
the nuns’ female friends, from the time they were growing up together in the
villages, have married but gone backward. Those friends hoped for a better
life, in bigger urban centers, with an education, and some found themselves
tied down by difficult husbands, many children, and in ranchitos. Not the life
of seeing different parts of the world that these nuns, in their way, live. This
is a real option for women who have grown up in humble, rural, and semiurban parts of Mexico. It is a vocation, and to them it is a liberation from the
flimsy dream of a secular marriage. Although Mexican nuns are from relatively humble origins, their male diocesan counterparts in Rome often are
not. Some of these men are escogidos de sus diócesis (chosen in their dioceses),
and the most brilliant are the renewing blood of the “Club de Roma”—the
crème de la crème of the Mexican church in Rome. If Mexican nuns of different orders mainly come to Rome to care for the priests or for older (often
Italian) nuns, priests and seminarists come to care for their vocation, education, and career—gendered divisions of religious labor.
Nuns also have learned to wear el hábito earlier on their journey, though
they may have shed some tears in the acquisition of such habits when they
entered the order—tears of frustration. You have to learn to wear el hábito,
Madre Consuelo repeats. It is all white, with a light cotton crinoline underneath, a tunic on the top, and then another tunic on top of that, open on the
sides and kept together by two laced ribbons on each side. Their veil is black
with white trim, and kept in place with some wiring that they pass underneath the trim. The heavy dress garment, with a collar that wraps around
part of the neck, is the same in winter and summer. It’s demanding to keep
the hábito white and spotless. The nuns now are relieved, since the general
of the order has recently allowed them to wear a gray dress when they travel
or go on visits. However, their everyday life is married to this handmade,
deceptively simple garment. Matilda explains that you need to learn to wear
it and move accordingly. You learn to stir the food at some distance, to wash
your hands so that you do not wet the sleeves. Consuelo, who entered the
convent when she was fourteen and is now thirty-six, remembers that she
used to wear short sleeves before entering, and liked flowered patterns.
If you stain it, you quickly rinse it—skills learned for a never-ending
reproduction of an earthly grace. The white dress is also a source of pride.
Of another order of nuns they know, who wear gray, they say,
It is easier for them to get around, and appear to be in order, you do not see
the dirt on their dress, but if you get close to them you pick up sometimes
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the smell of fried cooking. It is a labor [tienes que batallar] to keep our dress
clean and suffer the heat [aguantar el calor] in the summer, but we do not
smell of cooking [as other nuns in gray or black clothes may].
The control of bodily smells and fluids is an acquired technique of a gendered body. Smell is an index of grace, too, although, historically, it was
not always so.37
Hence in this place, walls and boundaries of gendered affective labor
point to material details of everyday and heroic wars. Walls, religious habits, the circulation of odors become the material and affective struggles of
servitude and the production of love(s) that stick to migrant women. If
affects circulate between bodies and signs/objects, they also stick to the
surface of certain religious bodies.38 Their articulation involves histories
of gendered labor too, of absence of recognition, of abjection of histories,39
when reread in some clerics’ perspectives as forms of “heroism.”
In previous chapters, I have explored the transnational reproduction of
the Mexican Catholic Church in Rome through traces of the affective
reemergence of a history of the Cristiada and a church under attack, so to
speak. In this chapter, I have shown ways in which (lay) immigrant female
bodies—with a particular attention to the subject of skin(s) and walls—are
racialized not only vis-à-vis a hosting Italian society but also in subtle ways
within their same Catholic, migrant community. And I also have emphasized a reproductive gendered labor that nuns perform and a form of Mexicanness they embody.
These Mexican nuns pray for the well-being and vocation of the priests,
for their strength in carrying on in the path, but with their affective labor
and prayers they are also supporting a tumbling, national Mexico as well
as the reproduction of the Roman Catholic metropolitan center. Although
religious vocations of Italians are dying out, this transnational labor constitutes the reminder of a process of ruination of the traditional Roman
Catholic core.
This female affective labor has different aspects. Praying is a conscious
“respiration of the soul,”40 but it is also the transnational reproduction of
Mexicanness in Rome. This essentially affective labor of reproduction
takes the form of, among others things, a hope to turn away evil spirits
from Mexico, which had been attacked as the cradle of an outbreak of
swine flu.41 Affective labor is also a regimentation of the body as a technology of the self that is shaped by the gaze of other orders’ stylistic choices—
Rome has its religious Fifth Avenues after all! Moreover, the contractual
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labor negotiations that take place within the O.S.C. order (at least between
the Roman house and the mother house in Mexico City) and between it
and the male order of the M.E.S. that hosts them require an immaterial
component. What is required of these women is not only the physical
handling of the household chores but also daily prayer for the well-being
of the male order.
If a study of the transnational reproduction of the Mexican and Latin
American Catholic Church and its Latin American missions in Rome
demands an anthropological inquiry into the situated unfolding of affective traces of histories, it also requires a refinement in our understanding
of gendered subjectivity and the complexity of parallels, continuities, and
tensions between fields of religious and lay transnational migration that are
too often artificially divided. If the convent’s walls defend those sisters
from some of the riddles and racialization of current Italian and Roman
policies on migrant citizenship, they nonetheless also reflect long histories
of affective and immaterial labor that is today, perhaps more than ever,
required by a care labor market that has become the common niche for
female lay Latin American transnational labor in Rome.
If an ideal form of lay Latin American transnational caring labor is professed by the church missionary discourse as a female “heroic journey” in
Rome, it is constantly interrupted by ambiguity, strategies of concealment,
and stretching the time taken to carry out tasks between the walls of the
convent. If religious transnational female vocations require a constant
affective material and immaterial labor for both female and male orders’
reproduction at the metropolis, they are also, as Father Hector would have
it, heroic journeys. As such, they are marked by subtle wars over the division of labor. With this I refer to everyday modes of living and interaction
carried out through delaying, deflecting labor, and animated by wrong and
right loves: the amores tontos and de verdad (stupid love and true love).
By now I hope it has become clear that the labor of love required and
often performed by Latin American lay female workers is in continuity and
counterposition to that of some Mexican religious nuns in Rome. More
than a decade ago, Bridget Anderson noted that domestic work is key to a
productive and affective social reproduction, and that transnational migrant
care work should be examined via biopolitical registers where intimacy,
invisibility, and “intimate anonymity” are painfully woven together.42
However, as we have also seen, care work can also become the affective
platform for renewed and creative forms of subjectivity.43 More than one
story is often at stake.
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Labor associated with guilt has made some Latin American migrants in
Europe invest and spend little on themselves and focus much on remittances. Reproductive and productive capacities in care work positions also
often kept together by a sense of loyalty, not so much to the employers’
family, but to the tradition of mother-care in the Catholic imaginary.44
Mexican nuns in Rome also perform a labor of love, which is resisted and
negotiated in resounding ways by their lay counterparts outside the convent walls. If church networks seem to provide a sense of belonging for lay
migrants, especially where Catholicism is a minority religion in their own
country,45 at the geopolitical center of Catholicism, and today more than
ever, pedagogies of santification, purification, suffering, and the cultivation of family are complied with as well as challenged by migrants’ lives
and their devotional rituals.
To conclude, I turn to a final short history, that of a woman who crossed
between these imaginaries and labor worlds, which are legally kept apart
by a Catholic Church that is still very much a state within a state in Italy,
and therefore benefits from a different migrant legal status. This crossing
signals an anxiety to be born again and to acquire a “new skin,” which, as
Lorinda suggested, is still an index of class inscription for Mexican women
in Rome, but it is also a potential for transnational gendered explorations
and affective openness.
Se Quitó el Hábito: She Dropped the Habit
Julia, once a nun living in a convent in Rome, has a warm smile and is
good looking. I notice that the thick black eyeliner, drawn to emphasize
her beautiful brown eyes, matches her shining, long, raven hair. From
Guanajuato and in her later twenties, she had been in Rome for more than
four years at the time I visited her at her house in the spring of 2007. She
is among the few Mexican women I know who share a home with Italian
friends—in her case, a colleague from work and the woman’s disabled
boyfriend. The flat is simple, on the ground floor of a 1950s-era building
in a popular working-class neighborhood of Rome. Her room is tidy,
decorated with colorful Mexican textiles, some small pieces of pottery,
pictures of her mamá, and some makeup lying on one shelf. Julia learned
about eyeliner two years ago. One winter back in Irapuato, in Guanajuato,
and just after having left the order, her niece helped her choose the right
earrings, matching clothes, and new mascara. She recalled crying at that
time, since she did not know what to expect to see in the mirror. She still
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works as hard as she did when she was in the order, which sent her to study
catechism and communication at the Gregorian University in Rome.
However, a lingering thought to leave the order had become stronger and
stronger. So she could not stay any longer, and finally she left.
She recalls that the vitality she had felt on entering the convent at fourteen had vanished by the time she left, leaving a ghostly sense of misunderstanding and a sense of awkwardness, mixed in with a fear of how her
older sister, who was still in the order in Guanajuato that Julia had left,
might have been intimidated. There is much shame that flows over nuns
and priests who decide to leave their order; it is an uphill battle for a while.
The strength Julia found to make this shift came in this way:
My strength is due to the devotion to the Sacred Heart, but not in the
manner of the nuns where I was [who were dedicated to the Family of
the Sacred Heart], who kept on telling me don’t do this, this is bad, or if
you do this, this other will happen. But for me no, the Sacred Heart gave
me joy, not fear. It gave me the strength to overcome fear.
And Julia has remained steady as she pushes to have her religious visa
changed to a study visa. She is committed to completing her studies in
nursing. She has been working in one of the private clinics that underpay
irregular immigrant labor in the health sector, but she is happy and has a
plan. She is also sending money back home to build a little house in
Irapuato. Her Italian friends are caring for her; her flatmates share food
brought back from their families in the south of Italy and help her fill out
the never-ending papers that, she hopes, will legalize her status.
Julia is witty and bright and has been one of the pillars of the Comunidad Católica Mexicana. She realizes that there are friends there who have
been here for longer, but they live behind their little shields. Their Italian
is still not good, and even if they are hard-working and admirable, in her
mind, they have never taken advantage of the opportunities that life in Italy
offers. Here is a very deceptively fine, anxiety-ridden, solid, and exciting
wall. It is clear that, for Julia, you are either on one side or on the other.
Two years later, she has earned her diploma, received a contratto indeterminato (permanent contract) in a private hospital in the center of Rome, and
married Arnulfo, a Mexican man working reception in a hotel, whom she
lives with in a tiny one-bedroom flat. The house in Irapuato is nearly finished; the eyeliner is still carefully penciled; and Rome has opportunities.
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Epilogue
As one of millions around the world glued to their screens in the early
evening of Wednesday, 13 March 2013, I watched Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio
step onto the Vatican balcony facing Saint Peter’s Square in his new role as
Pope Francis. After a relaxed salutation to the crowd, his first move was to
ask the multitude there and around the world for their blessing. In his new
white attire, the tall man bent down gently, closed his eyes, and stayed
silent. Only after that did he bless the masses. This gesture was historically
unprecedented, the media rightly suggested later. While watching, I could
not stop thinking of Father Joselito and the impromptu blessing and the
laying on of hands that he received from the female migrants in Santa
Maria della Luce.
Nor could I forget the awkwardness that some of those women expressed
afterward; they worried that they had done something out of place. This
awkwardness may or may not melt away in the transformations that this
current and new papacy of Francis seems to promise, under the leadership
of a man who has been chosen from “the ends of the earth.” Hence the
moment at the balcony, read by many as representing the humility of the
new pope, also tells a larger story of the church as a passionate machine and
the renewing apostolic wave of the Catholic Church through the first
Jesuit pope, Francis.
One book’s end is another book’s beginnings. Researching and writing
this book over more than a decade have challenged my thinking that the
Catholic Church could be defi ned in terms of clear-cut camps. What
appeared instead were multiple often not easy-to-read forces, which
Gramsci called, in 1924, insidiosa e inafferrabile (guileful and ungraspable).1
Growing up in northern Italy in a household at once Catholic and anticlerical and then living in a colonia popular (low-income barrio) in Guadalajara in the early 1990s near a Jesuit house for seminarians, I have learned
174
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to hesitate when tempted by quick conclusions and to query the complexity of Catholicism—and migration. More than ever before, the Catholic
Church is a key political subject in matters of mobility and ethics, and the
multilayered experience of being Catholic today illuminates the conditions that shape transnational migration worldwide. This applies not only
in the forms of practical interventions on migration that the Catholic
Church, as an institution, articulates in national and local jurisdictions
around the world. It also reflects the ways in which the Catholic ethics of
service and refuge, homely and unhomely, shape localized and simultaneously global responses to transnational migration and politics. If I have
shown how Catholic humanitas is both a principle and a practice at the
heart of the Roman Catholic Church, then I have illustrated how the
church fosters a duplicitous, often patronizing, pedagogy toward transnational migration and immigration in Italy—and possibly, I would argue,
elsewhere. And by using the word pedagogy, I have stressed the role—often
framed as a teacher/pupil, parent/offspring one—that the Catholic Church
has had in shaping migrants’ personhood.
On one hand, the Atlantic Return to the historical and geopolitical
heart of the Catholic Church, especially by segments of its Latin American
clergy, reignites a passion for Catholicism based on papal directives, the
culture of life, truth versus relativism, and the importance of morals in
Catholicism. To speak of a Catholic humanitas in this sense is to emphasize
a unitary humanitas. This position conceives of migration through the prism
of a heteronormative family and sexuality within wedlock as well as through
a certain nervousness about non-Catholic immigration in Europe. This
perspective on being Catholic is part of a long tradition that has married
Roman civitas to Catholic liturgy. Championed clearly by Benedict XVI’s
interventions, and resonating with the orientation he has promoted in the
church, this is a powerful and political understanding of Catholicism harbored in the timeless transmission of grace through the liturgy—beyond its
transformation through historical encounters. To counterpose this perspective to the forms and the stakes promoted by Vatican Council II exposes the
challenging role that migration—as a sign of the times—has played in this
most recent and ongoing chapter of the church’s history. In sum, one way
of thinking about the contemporary church through the figure of an Atlantic return entails addressing the challenge that migration and immigration
raises not only theologically but as a political ontology.
On the other hand, although this return is also apostolic and central
to the current Catholic Church’s project of the New Evangelization, it is
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176 Epilogue
indeed a pedagogical challenge and a challenge for church governmentality. Through the church’s ambiguous political and symbolic investments
in Latin American migrant imagined communities, migrants become a
vessel for new blood in a Europe perceived as having cooled to the Catholic faith. Here transnational Latin American Catholic migration is a vital
dynamism that can unify the church in its diversity—a new afán apostolico
(apostolic eagerness).2 This is a church perceived as composed of different
cultures and modes of being Catholic but within the unified framework of
the Catholic liturgy and sacraments. It is an emphasis on the multiple
expressions of humanitas in a same Catholic Church.
Nonetheless, Catholic Latin American migrants in Rome struggle to be
recognized, caught in the politics between diocesan territorial jurisdictions and the praxis of religious orders (Scalabrinians mainly, but Jesuits
too). As Archbishop Marchetto remarked, the road to successful implementation of Erga Migrantes Caritas at the diocesan level is still a long one.
What is at stake in this unfi nished project is a distinctly Catholic politics
of visibility and the counterbalancing of the weight of gendered and racial
histories, which get “stuck to the skin” of migrants. In some instances,
these histories cannot be contained, pacified, or even addressed, by a perspective of the church that puts a culture of life at the center of a migrant
catechesis. If this culture of life has been deployed theologically as a moral
axiom beyond and above histories, it falls short of addressing the ethical
encounters between differently gendered and racialized people and the
affective and erotic transmissions that haunt the church.
This divergence is still part of a central tension in Catholicism. A debate
on the nature of life has a long and dense history within the Catholic
Church, one that can be conceived in terms of an ongoing tension between
modus operandi (as the form of living) and modus operatum (the structured
form, in the sense here of the given liturgy). The legacy of Benedictine
and Franciscan monasticism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw
the primacy of a regula vitae, where rule and life came together. In these
expressions of monasticism—centering the nature of ethics in forms,
rhythms, and the temporalities of living rather than in the sphere of
action—life had to be applied to the norm and not the norm to life.3 As
Agamben has suggested, this form of monastic living (associated with a
radical rejection of property rights and the embrace of the “highest” poverty, as the right of use) was in continuous opposition to the “liturgical
paradigm” championed by Pope John XXII4 —the opus operatum of the
divine economy, of the Heavenly Church, so to speak.5 So papal interven-
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177
tions on the importance of liturgy, to which Benedict XVI has contributed, have a long history of framing labor, faith, and property. This is
because to favor a modus operatum over a modus operandi is to privilege
“the” truth of the Catholic Church, the timelessness of its teaching and the
centrality of the pope to the church.
Nonetheless, we can see that contemporary transnational expressions of
faith do not fully “fit” into liturgy—as an opus operatum. In fact, as I’ve
argued, lay and religious works create, in very different ways, affective
spaces that are in turn racialized and gendered in ways that complicate
received notions of Catholic family and love. More than ever in Rome,
and among the heavily female and feminized labor force, there is a struggle
for recognition of a heterodox model of family. Betrayals within and of the
family are central to many migrant itineraries in Rome, so often generated
out of a need for erotic attention, touch, and a sense of the familiar; these
are often in confl ict with the church’s axiomatic conceptions of the family.
Twenty-first-century migrants are not thirteenth-century monks, of
course; but I argue in this book that it important to understand transnational migration and the Catholic Church within this long history of
Catholicism and labor. In short, for the Catholic Church this is embedded
in a long-time tension between the modus operatum (as the given liturgy)
and the modus operandi (as the form of living) of Catholicism.
This is why I have favored migrant itineraries rather than a study of
migrant communities. I have argued in this book that we need to move
beyond studying how religious memberships are tied to particular national
immigrant groups and associations as well as the waxing and waning of
those memberships. Instead, I have explored how a long history of local
and national narratives, affects, fantasies, and material devotions orient our
understanding of migration as a multilayered articulation of the homely
and the unhomely. In this sense, I have sought to apprehend migrant itineraries in terms of Catholicism’s problematic intersection of bodies, histories, labor, and devotion. Based on this analysis, I hope migrant itineraries
can further our analysis of migration, whether in relation to religion or
not, beyond an unhelpful divide between the psychology of agency of
migrants and the economic and political contexts of migration.
Carnality is a key theological hinge in Catholicism and in Catholic
migrant itineraries. It has been part of a long durée of the afán apostolico:
Although central to being Catholic, as the history of Jesus reminds us,
carnality has also been feared by the clergy as the site through which
earthly emotions might come to rule us (see the Sacred Heart). Being
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Epilogue
Catholic in migrant itineraries is less about being converted by listening to
the word of the Gospel or the conundrum of making the divine present—as is the case in different forms of evangelical Christianity—but
more about being touched by, being harbored in, and fi nding the homely
(or the unhomely) in the materiality of devotions to, for example, the
Virgin of Guadalupe, the Señor de los Milagros, and the Sacred Heart.
Carnality encompasses the mystery of the divine nature of Christ’s human
body, as it is a force that produces and contains affects and attachments
between people.
Transnational migration highlights different almas (souls) of the church,
which overlap and contrast at times. I have traced the way that notions
of migrants as sacrificial carriers of the Catholic faith expose the heavy
influence and investment of the Roman clergy in the collective identity of
migrants. Beyond the obvious problems, the church also often fails to recognize the diversities and tensions within the migrant churches. Groups
such as the Comunidad Católica Mexicana, though deeply Catholic, refuse
to rehearse the sacrificial and in practice enhance a sense of Catholic as the
festive national. And the religious Mexican national also becomes, as I
have shown, a terrain of political contention in Rome.
Pontifical, diocesan, and religious orders’ responses to migration and
immigration are often more critical of each other than it appears at a first
glance, especially in relation to the church’s position vis-à-vis changing
state legislation on migration in Italy—immigration policy that still privileges jus sanguinis over jus soli. A part of the church, which is close to a
sensibility of Catholic humanitas as Roman civitas, tends to align with
those who champion aspects of anti-immigration and legislation that
criminalizes immigration. Interestingly enough, this soul of the church,
given concrete form in figures such as Cardinal Angelo Sodano, has also
been immersed in the less then legal fi nancial economy of the IOR (Instituto per le Opere Religiose), the Vatican financial institution. This book
mentions this aspect of Vatican involvement in parallel economies only in
passing; another whole book would be needed to address that issue.
Against the background of a Catholic Church that emphasizes the sanctification of the migrant on a suffering journey, gendered migrant stories are
often about betrayal. Many histories of women associated with the MLA
who have left Peru, Ecuador, and other Latin America countries point to an
affective betrayal. Migrant itineraries unfold on a note of betrayal of love and
families and nations, nations that struggle to contain the fantasies of possibilities for (new) labor and gendered life.
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179
Thus, fieldwork that engages the realm of religion and migration needs
to go beyond what Robert Orsi has called the “meaning-making subject.”6 Orsi suggests a study of a tragic religious subject that emerges in a
space of in-between, where different ways of being Catholic should be
understood as responding to psychological and physical sufferings.7 Instead
of this approach, I have tried to model a study of being Catholic that steps
away from the psychological domain of suffering to examine the laboring
of faith in which affects get stuck to particular bodies and forms of labor
in specific spaces, situations, and narratives. This work shows that people
flourish or live diminished lives depending on the affects to which they get
attached.8 In other words, there is a politics of unequal circulation of
affects that a study of the intersection of Catholicism and migration should
bring to light.
Betrayal, Adam Phillips reminds us, is an impossibility of return, a
forced field of transformation of intimacies.9 Betrayal and desfase—as an
unacknowledged disappointment with the experience of migration, which
is manifested through a sense of suspension instead of living in the here
and now—interrupt neat narratives of transnational migration that portray
linear accumulation and the maternal sacrificial effort for the stayingbehind families. Affective impasses such as desfase emerge at the conjuncture of particular economies of caring labor, ideas of migration as sacrifice,
and the disruptions to national fantasies of accumulation through transnational migration. If desfase and betrayal are part of transnational migrant
itineraries, then a pedagogy of the church that emphasizes the nuclear,
heterosexual family and family reunification struggles on two fronts. One
struggle is for the church to embrace spaces and degrees of abjection; the
other is that the church ought to enhance the potential for the emergence of a renewed, gendered female subjectivity that can, and should, be
expressed in the process of migration. This is an ongoing process, and we
have yet to see how the papacy of Pope Francis will affect this recalibration
of the Catholic Church, within and without.
One path of resistance to some of the church pedagogies on migration
is to claim citizenship in growing pluricultural Roman and Italian society.
Transnational returns of Mexican histories to Rome, especially those condensed in the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, show some of the wounds
as well as the potential affective transformations of a national psyche. They
reawaken early twentieth-century church-state confl icts and interrupt
current church pedagogies that long for a pan–Latin American Catholic
community and read the migrant’s path as ultimately a universal one.
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180 Epilogue
A rhetoric of the suffering migrant and a common Catholic humanitas
often struggle with rooted and at times divisive national impulses. Paradoxically, migrant pedagogies of the Catholic Church foster, yet ultimately
fail to contain, the affect of the nation(s). To paraphrase Márquez’s words
from the beginning of this book, the lingering drives and unfinished histories of Catholicism are still very much here. The limbs of Marquez’s
character, Margarito, are both animated by and entangled in these histories, and so too are the migrant itineraries that are so essential for the
reproduction of flexible labor in Europe and of the Catholic Church as a
passionate, apostolic machine.
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Lord of Miracles (El Señor de los Milagros)
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Notes
Introduction: Catholic Humanitas
1. El Santísimo is the adoration of the body of Christ in the Eucharist,
which is normally kept physically within a sacred niche in the altar of the
church and kept in a precious urn. No particular historical event is associated
with the emergence of this adoration, but the institution of the Corpus Domini,
and the beginning of its calendrical celebration in 1264 is considered to be the
time that this adoration became central to Catholic faith in monasteries and
convents across Europe. The adoration of the body of Christ is different from
the veneration of the relics of saints.
2. See Statement by Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi to the 22nd Session of
the Human Rights Council for the Application by the Holy See for Membership
in the International Migration Organization. 5 December 2011. See http://www
.zenit.org/article–33963?l=english, accessed 1 March 2013.3. See Tsing 2005.
4. The fieldwork for this book took place in multiple yearly field trips of up
to two months each between 2004 and 2011—and shorter follow-ups in 2012 and
2013. Fieldwork periods often coincided with major Marian and other Catholic
festivities. Although the Latin American Mission is hosted in seventeen different
parishes in Rome dedicated to different nation-states, I focused my research on
five churches: Santa Maria in Trastevere, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Santa Lucia,
Santa Maria in Via, and Oratorio del Caravita. I also attended celebrations, such
as the annual celebration of the Festa dei Popoli or Day of the Migrants in San
Giovanni in Laterano, and the Days of the Dead and the Day of the Mexican
Independence organized specifically by the Comunidad Católica Mexicana. In
2004–7, I also closely followed the radio program “Hola mi Gente,” during
which time the program was relocated from the Gregorian University to the
premises of Vatican Radio. I made extensive use of ARSI, the Secret Archives of
the Company of Jesus in Rome and the Pontifical Vatican Library. I spent time
with migrants in their homes and lived in a Mexican convent for more than a
month. Throughout this work, I enjoyed Sunday ice-cream strolls with (migrant)
friends in Piazza Risorgimento, hanging around in Piazza Mancini, and following migrants in often lengthy trips on urban public transport.
5. This is, of course, the vector of my own mobility that brings into this
book’s analysis other dimensions of desire and longing. Disappointments and
183
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betrayal, as I engage them in this book, are also part of the migrant itineraries I
have come to navigate and have been informed by.
6. See De Certeau 1984, 174.
7. I use here the term public secret to evoke Taussig’s usage, which indicates
the violent nature of the tension between logical possibilities of enunciation and
the possibilities of enunciation by defacement and negation (Taussig 1999, 50).
8. Badanti from the root badare, meaning to look after, is a now a constitutionally recognized labor figure in Italy connected to the care of children, the
elderly, and the sick.
9. For an informed feminist perspective on this in medieval times, as well as
in particular relation to U.S. debates, see Castelli 2004, 2005, 2007.
10. Catholic pedagogies also evoke a particular field of Augustinian theology
that sees the horizon of “walking together” as an inner path. Christus docens is
the object of that orientation, not so much as a model to be imitated, but as an
internal source of perennial revelation.
11. I refer here in particular to the work of Lauren Berlant 2011, and to some
of its anthropological engagements, see, e.g., Muehlebach 2011, 2013.
12. The concept of living blood is used here to address a form of relationship
among soul, faith, and movements. Blood has been read within a Christian
medieval analysis as compassion and repentance, especially regarding the blood
of Christ as an ambiguous vessel of divine justice and judgment (Duff y 2005,
108). Anthropological analyses of the notion of blood have been focused on
practices of relationality, descent, and nationalism, but also its complex role in
different forms of vitalism and flows: “The uniquely animated properties of
blood are associated with the properties of flow and movement that connote
vitality” (Carsten 2011, 29). I read this concept of living blood here as opening
up the interfaces between the historical conjuncture of the New Evangelization,
the desire for a revivification of local churches, migrant brotherhoods, and the
mystery of the blood of Christ. See the evocation of blood, brotherhood, and
diaspora in Paul VI’s Lumen Gentium: “In them the faithful are gathered together
by the preaching of the Gospel of Christ, and the mystery of the Lord’s Supper
is celebrated, that by the food and blood of the Lord’s body the whole brotherhood may be joined together. In any community of the altar, under the sacred
ministry of the bishop, there is exhibited a symbol of that charity and unity of
the mystical Body, without which there can be no salvation. In these communities, though frequently small and poor, or living in the Diaspora, Christ is present, and in virtue of His presence there is brought together one, holy, catholic
and apostolic Church. For the partaking of the body and blood of Christ does
nothing other than make us be transformed into that which we consume.”
Finally for an illuminating work on blood and its reverberations in Christianity
see Anidjar 2014.
13. This is also a phrase much loved by Mons. Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer
(who also wrote a book with the same title), the founding father of the Spanish
Catholic movement Opus Dei.
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185
14. See Goldberg and Quayson 2002.
15. Mignolo 2011, 179.
16. Napolitano and Norget 2011.
17. I refer here to the rich debate on the anthropology of Christianity both
in its missionary global sites and in its historical Dutch and Central European
centers of power. See, among others, the work by Joel Robbins, Matthew
Engelke, Webb Keane, Ruth Marshall, Kevin O’Neill, Girish Daswani, and
Simon Coleman.
18. Napolitano and Norget 2011, 252.
19. Cannell 2006, 7.
20. Povinelli 2006, 16.
21. For a discussion on the relation between the Holy Trinity and economics
see Agamben 2013.
22. On this and evangelical congregations in the United States, see Harding
1987, 2000.
23. I refer here too at the relations of the body, flesh, migration, and place
making in the work by Sayad (2004). Sayad is particularly interested in the suffering that emerges in ways in which migrant bodies are permeated and become
the knots of colonial histories.
24. For a debate on this in modern Zimbabwe see Engelke 2007, 27.
25. De Certeau 1986, 4.
26. Pandolfo 2007.
27. See Holmes 2000.
28. Muehlebach 2009, 498.
29. Schmitt 1996, 7.
30. Ibid., 8.
31. See Brennan 2004.
32. Berlant 2011.
33. Berlant 2008, 6. Specifically, I am interested in the historical sensorium,
as Berlant puts it, but with a partly different take on affective histories than her
analysis. I explore in this book the present as an affective symptom of the past,
but I also explore Berlant’s sense of affect as a generative crisis of the present. So
if a visceral possibility for another present(s) can never be fully encompassed in
neatly shared and fully understood narratives/events, I nonetheless acknowledge,
more than Berlant would, a “weight of the past” into an affective present and
future that can or cannot be.
34. See Navaro-Yashin 2012.
35. See Bynum 2005.
36. Ex-centric anthropologies have developed important insights into the
relation between anthropology and Catholicism; see, for example, the work of
Ernesto de Martino and his work on the Italian south, and if not ex-centric, but
defi nitely in a minority, the Oxford school of Catholic anthropology, for example, the work of Mary Douglas and Julian Pitt-Rivers (Fardon 1999). See also
Mayblin, Napolitano, and Norget 2016.
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37. See Orsi. 1985, 2005; Tweed 1997.
38. See Tweed 1997 and 2006; Galvez 2010; Orsi 1996.
39. See Stepick, Rey, and Mahler 2009 on Catholicism and immigration in
Miami, Florida. Within a North American debate I fi nd more compelling and
analytically inspiring approaches such as the one by Alicia Schmidt Camacho
(2008). Reflecting on the importance of ex-votos and saints’ protection for
Mexicans in the southern United States, she explores how migrants occupy a
place and no place at once (2008, 311) and how that is central to what she calls
“migrant melancholia.”
40. See Hondagneu-Sotelo 2008, 8.
41. Orsi 2007.
42. On the unsettling politics of the gendering of humanitarianism see
Ticktin 2011.
43. See in particular the work of feminist medieval historians of Christianity
such as Caroline Walker Bynum, Amy Hollywood, Rachel Fulton, Elizabeth
Castelli, and Bettina Bildhauer.
44. See Ginzburg 1972; De Certeau 2000. The engagement with Ginzburg
and de Certeau is a genealogy that pays particular attention to the relation
between religious history and spatial and juridical politics. A plurality of histories can create a type of space where the performance of religious devotions
shows a vitality of pasts into a present—for an excellent example see Palumbo
2004, on the “War of Saints” in rural Sicily.
45. Imitatio Christi is a very powerful configuration of mimetic processes
around the figure of Christ and his perfection, and the nature of divine incarnation. Thomas à Kempis has been considered the author of the manuscript, titled
Imitatio Christi, published anonymously in 1418. The book is divided into four
parts and develops admonitions and consolations about the nature of spiritual
life and devotions. It has had a great impact well beyond the time in which it
was published.
46. I discuss this in chapter 2, but for now I wish to point out that this is a
term coined by John Paul II and particularly inspired by missionization in, and
from Latin America, and taken up by Benedict XVI as a central point of action
for the church. Benedict XVI established a New Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization in September 2010 and held a major synod of
bishops in October 2012 on this theme in Rome.
1. Migrant Terrains in Italy and Rome
1. The mayorship of Ignazio Marino (from the Democratic Party), mayor
since 12 June 2013, is not analyzed here.
2. Policies implemented by the fourth Berlusconi government have been
very detrimental to existing and renewed budgets for local authorities. The
abolishment of the IRPEF (Imposta sul Reddito delle Persone Fisiche), for
instance, a municipal tax on the fi rst house ownership has de facto curtailed one
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187
of the most important local forms of tax revenue without introducing any particular new federal support. Hence even right-wing city mayors, including Alemanno, have openly complained about the lack of funding for implementing
vital local authorities services.
3. The Lega Nord, or Northern League, is an Italian “neo-nativist” party
created in 1991 in northern Italy to promote forms of federalism (fi scal, administrative, and cultural) and (de facto) anti-immigration policies (especially when
Roberto Maroni, one of its leaders, was minster of Internal Affairs between
2008 and 2011). Against broad notions of national belonging, the Northern
League has maintained a strong focus on local activism and concerns, and it was
rather successful in defending and fostering local entrepreneurial interests in a
changing global economy (Baldini and Cento Bull 2010). However, since 2013
the Northern League has lost ground to a new movement called Movimento 5
Stelle, led by an ex-comedian named Beppe Grillo; Movimento 5 Stelle champions a politics against the state and established political forms of representations. I cannot go into details here about how this political constituencies has
shifted across these two parties, but both share anti-state and localist impulses.
4. I need to emphasize again that this book takes into account a period
before the end of the fourth Berlusconi’s government in 2011 and the establishment of a new “technical” government led by the economist Mario Monti.
Strong countervoices have begun to emerge against this Decreto Sicurezza
within Monti’s government as well in later PD governments led by Enrico Letta
and Matteo Renzi, but this is within a period that I do not analyze in this book.
5. In 2008, criminal acts carried out by migrants diminished by 7.6 percent
and in the Lazio Region by 15.3 percent during the previous two years even
though the overall migrant population increased by 15 percent (caritas/
Migrantes 2009).
6. Piazza Mancini is in the north-center of Rome close to Ponte Milvio and
a large bus and tram terminal, which makes it a very good meeting place for
migrants who often do not own their means of transport, but depend on public
transportation.
7. For an analysis of the Scalabrinian order, see chapter 4.
8. This is a type of police in Italy dealing with local public safety and security.
9. Later in 2007, Madisson Godoy became consigliere aggiunto for the
American continent the in the municipality of Rome. Consigliere aggiunto is
one of five administrative posts to represent broadly five different migrant communities, related to the five different world constituencies in the municipality of
Rome. These councillors take part in the work of the municipal council, but
have no right to vote. Their institutionalization was seen also as a potential step
toward the right for legal, resident migrants to vote in municipal elections in
Italy, a shift in legislation that has not happened yet.
10. I refer here to a very important book, Cuore (1886), by Edmondo de
Amicis, which is a classic in the formation of the new Italian national identity
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after unification (1860). The book celebrates, in a rather paternalistic way, Catholic values of honesty, obedience, and the newly imagined role of labor in overcoming class differences at play in the utopic formation of the new Italian
national consciousness. In the book, migration from the south of Italy to the
Americas begins to unsettle the picture and threatens to undermine the core of
these national and gendered values. Needless to say, there are important resonances here with the twenty-fi rst-century setting of migration to Italy and the
utopic ethical landscape of shared values across migrant and citizen divides.
11. I refer here to Sarah Ahmed’s notion of affective cultural politics of emotions, which I read very much as an interpretation of affective politics (Ahmed
2004), and Jaqueline Rose’s notion of resistance of the mind to fruitful inquiry
within too easy affective politics of ( Jewish) national hate and love (Rose 2007).
I particularly fi nd fruitful Ahmed’s understanding of affect as shaping people’s
body and skin.
12. Bouchard 2010, 105.
13. Ibid., 108. A range of sociologists has written in an insightful way about
the process of othering and migration in Italy. Among those whose work I
would highlight, see Dal Lago 2004 on migrant representations in the media
and denial of personhood, and Ambrosini 2007, 2008, 2013.
14. See Gramsci 1967, 84.
15. In the words of Pius XI:
Now there are three necessary societies, distinct from one another and
yet harmoniously combined by God, into which man is born: two,
namely the family and civil society, belong to the natural order; the
third, the Church, to the supernatural order. In the first place comes the
family, instituted directly by God for its peculiar purpose, the generation
and formation of offspring; for this reason it has priority of nature and
therefore of rights over civil society. Nevertheless, the family is an
imperfect society, since it has not in itself all the means for its own complete development; whereas civil society is a perfect society, having in
itself all the means for its peculiar end, which is the temporal well-being
of the community; and so, in this respect, that is, in view of the common
good, it has pre-eminence over the family, which fi nds its own suitable
temporal perfection precisely in civil society. The third society, into
which man is born when through Baptism he reaches the divine life of
grace, is the Church; a society of the supernatural order and of universal
extent; a perfect society, because it has in itself all the means required for
its own end, which is the eternal salvation of mankind; hence it is
supreme in its own domain. (Encyclical Divini Illius Magistri, 1939)
16. See Brandi and Todisco 2006.
17. Since 2000, caritas and the “Observatory of Migrations,” a Catholic
NGO, have produced a yearly Dossier Statistico sulle Migrazioni, and since
2004 also a Report on Migrations specifically on Rome.
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189
18. See Conti and Strozza 2006, 39. Dossier Caritas 2010 reported the following numbers for legal migrant residents in Italy: Peruvians—87,000; Ecuadorians—85,000. Mexicans are demographically a much smaller community: In
2010 the legal number of residents was more than 3,500, but there is a significant
number of unrecorded migrants who have not legalized their status yet via
Italy’s cumbersome procedures, or who are entering on a tourist Visa and overstaying. As such, the CCM (Comunidad Católica Mexicana) leaders’ estimate of
Mexican migrants in Italy is closer to 6,000, with the majority living in Rome
and in the northern province of Milan. In 2013 the population of Peruvians had
reached 110,000, of which more than 60 percent was female; the number of documented Mexicans on Italian soil was more than 5,700, and in the Roman province around 2,500. Moreover, the majority of women attending the MLA are in
their thirties or older, and they have come to Italy mainly on their own, following relatives, friends, or acquaintances. Many have dependents in their place of
origin, although the group of the Hermandad del Señor los Milagros, which is
an increasingly active part of the MLA, shows an older immigration trend and a
more nuclear family–oriented migrant demography.
19. See Bodo and Bodo 2005, 29.
20. See http://www.romamultietnica.it/.
21. This is a pejorative word in Italian to indicate migrants coming from
outside the EU and from the global South.
22. Another initiative introduced by Veltroni’s government and then undercut and only briefly revivified in 2011 by the Alemanno’s municipal council was
the Rete Provinciale delle Comunitá Straniere, with the aim of creating social
networks and liaisons across the province between local migrants and Italian
institutions; see http://www.migranews.it/rete.htm.
23. See Bodo and Bodo 2005, 52.
24. The case of the Roma people stands out during the Alemanno’s government. For instance, in one case among many, in April 2011 a fi re broke out in a
camp, which stirred a significant municipal response to evacuate many of the
inner city camps, and this in turn created debate about what to do with the
Roma population and where they should live. It also prompted an outcry from
human rights organizations.
25. There is a vast literature on female transnational migration and the labor
of love that goes into raising a family in the country of arrival at the expense of
the country of origin. Here I am building on this literature to discuss the particular angle of the subjectivity fostered by the Catholic Church. See early work by
Finch and Groves 1983; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, 2001, 2008; and England 2010.
See also the work on Italy by Quiroza 1991; Andall 2000; Fullin and Vercelloni
2009; and Fullin 2010.
26. See the work of Queirolo Palmas 2004; Torre and Queirolo Palmas 2005;
Ambrosini and Queirolo Palmas 2005.
27. See Boccagni and Piperno 2010, caritas/Migrantes 2009. Although
sociologically very informative, this literature only minimally engages with the
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idiosyncrasies and the abjections of migrant itineraries and asks different types of
questions than those I ask here.
28. See Grilli and Mugnaini 2009. Badanti is both a legally defi ned and a
commonly used word to name those who work as caretakers of the elderly and
people in need.
29. caritas is a confederation of Catholic organizations present in more
than 200 countries that organizes relief, social justice work, and humanitarian
intervention. It is directly connected to the Holy See for the promotion of
Catholic forms of humanitarian intervention.
30. caritas/Migrantes 2009, 190, my translation.
31. See http://www.comune.roma.it/wps/portal/
pcr?contentId=NEW268270&jp_pagecode=newsview.wp&ahew=contentId:jp_
pagecode.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. The head of this observatory is Massimo Introvigne, an Italian sociologist and a good friend of Silvio Berlusconi’s; he is also connected to the MP,
Alfredo Mantovano, whom I discuss in chapter 3 in relation to his support of
the Legionaries of Christ. Both Mantovano and Introvigne have launched a
(Catholic) campaign to support “the family”; see http://www.siallafamiglia.it/.
35. Balibar 2010, 315.
36. See Sayad 1975, 1993.
37. See two abstracts of his public interventions:
Lastly it will be appropriate to ensure that nobody forgets that Catholicism, although not anymore “the official religion of the State,” is still
nonetheless the “historic religion” of the Italian nation, on top of being
the principal source of its identity and the key inspiration to most of its
authentic greatness [grandezze]. Therefore, it is out of place to assimilate this to other religious or cultural forms, to which, yes, we have to
guarantee full freedom to be and to operate, without though the implication that this creates a fashioning of an unnatural leveling, or even an
annihilation of the highest values of our civilization. (Biffi 2000, my
translation)
In another public speech the same year:
A consistent admission of foreigners to our peninsula is acceptable and
can be beneficial, but only if we take care seriously to defend the character of one’s own nation [ fi sionomia della propria nazione]. Italy is not a
deserted or semi-inhabited moor, without history, without live and
vital traditions, without an unmistakable cultural and spiritual character, to be populated without a rule, as if there was not a heritage of
humanism and civilization that does not have to be lost. (Biffi 2000;
my translation)
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191
Interestingly, despite the open transgression of political boundaries, at
the time no Italian political party really opposed or criticized Biffi’s
request for this selective policy on migration (Romano 2005, 140–41).
38. In the words of Cardinal Martini of Milan in 2000 at the annual vigil
devoted to St. Ambrogio, the patron of the city of Milan:
From here some points of contrast could emerge with our civil code.
Therefore, on this front we need today particular attention. Marriage
and the family are the heart of civilization; this is the most intimate
nucleus of a culture and of a tradition that are all one with our collective identity. The necessary and friendly openness to pluralism of cultures and family models has to live with the attention to the custody of
universal principles and values—inheritance of our Western and European tradition. Only the use of this particular attention, within the
multicultural society that will be more than ever our own, can help us
and protect us from syncretic relativism, on the one side, and the drawbacks of an ethical state, on the other. (Martini 2000, my translation)
39. Migrantes is a foundation based in Rome created by the CEI (Conferenza
Episcopale Italiana) in 1987 as a service and support for pastoral care for “human
mobility,” not only of immigrants in Italy but of migrant Italians abroad. Via
IDOS, a research center on migration, the CEI is also involved in the publishing
the annual Dossier Statistico sull’Immigrazione.
40. Cody 2011, 47.
41. See Jenkins 2007.
42. See Marchetto 2005; Sodi 2007.
43. I am referring here to the hermeneutic of discontinuity in the interpretation of Vatican II by the Bologna School, championed in particular by the late
Italian historian Giuseppe Alberigo (see Alberigo 1999).
44. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 1981.
45. For a great analysis of the Romanization of some strands of the Catholic
Church in the United States and the demonization of liberals and Jews in the
nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, see D’Agostino 2004.
46. Edwards 2012, 23.
47. Ibid., 40.
2. The “Culture of Life” and Migrant Pedagogies
1. As I mentioned in the introduction, this chapter and book engage with
material up to Benedict XVI’s resignation of the papacy in 2013. I will address
only a few shifts emerging after the election of Pope Francis, which happened at
the time the book was already in press.
2. Exsul Familia is an encyclical written by Pope Pius XII in 1952, which in a
World War II climate opened the Catholic Church to a reflection on migration,
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especially through the experience of Italian emigration at the turn of the twentieth century. This encyclical pivots on the role that the church played in caring
for migrants through Catholic hospitals, dioceses, and hospices, as well as how
the strengthening of the family becomes the privileged model in helping
migrants in host societies.
3. The term governmentality refers to the work of Michel Foucault on ways
in which power works through and in turn constitutes institutions directed
toward the right conduct of the population and with the goal of the well-being
of the population. But in contrast to Foucault, I use the term less with the
emphasis on rationality of conduct that is explicit in his work, and more as way
of naming the system of passionate conduct that the church engenders, especially in the context of a parish such as the Latin American Mission, which
relies so heavily on a pedagogical practice of promulgating the “good” for the
transnational migrants. For an informed discussion on govermentality and its
articulation in ethnographic explorations, see T. Li 2007. For a critique of passionate rather than cold forms of governmentalities and bureaucracies, see
Navaro-Yashin 2012.
4. The Comunità di Sant’Egidio is a lay movement founded in 1968 by
Andrea Ricciardi. It currently has more than 60,000 members in 73 countries
with headquarters in Trastevere. The core of this movement includes the transmission of the gospel, a focus on prayer, attention to the poor, and ecumenical
dialogue within the Catholic Church. Politically, the movement was close to
John Paul II and to the government of the premier Mario Monti (2011–13), during which time the same Ricciardi was nominated minister for International
Cooperation.
5. The PRI is the Revolutionary Institutional Party that ruled Mexico from
the postrevolutionary time from 1929 (as the National Revolutionary Party) to
2001, when Vicente Fox became the fi rst candidate of an opposition party (in his
case the PAN, Party of National Action) to win the presidential election. In
2006, Fox’s successor Felipe Calderón Hinojosa won (a rather contested) election; see chapter 4. However, in the July 2012 elections the PRI candidate
Enrique Peña Nieto won and marked a return of the PRI to power.
6. Las Marias in Mexico City are the women street sellers of indigenous origin, fi rst studied by Lourdes Arizpe (1975).
7. Since the Mexico City mayorship of Andrés Manuel López Obrador
(2000–2005) and Marcelo Ebrard (2006–)—both members of the liberal party
(PRD)—Mexico City has promoted some important juridical changes, often
in open contrast to both the national government and the Roman Catholic
Church in Mexico. The most contested case has been the legislation of samesex unions, which was ratified by the municipal government of Mexico City
in 2010.
8. Tomasi and Rosoli 1997, 309.
9. Ibid., 278.
10. Rosoli 1989.
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193
11. Tomasi and Rosoli 1997, 68; my translation from the Italian.
12. Graziano Battistella is an Italian Scalabrinian priest, a former director of
the SIMI- Scalabrinian Institute for Migration Studies in Rome, who then
became the director of the Scalabrini Migration Centre in Quezon City, Philippines. This was a personal communication.
13. Scalabriniani 2005, 293; my translation from the Italian.
14. Ibid., 323.
15. See Battistella 2006.
16. F.L., the Jesuit priest who for a while was the spiritual head of the CCM.
17. The Pontifical Mexican College is the official residence for diocesan
priests coming from Mexico to Rome in order to study in one of the city’s religious universities. It hosts the yearly celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe that
I discuss in chapter 5.
18. Speech given on 30 September 2000; http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/
articolo/7283, my translation.
19. Forza Nuova has been analyzed as a renewed defense of national subaltern working classes in Italy at a time of challenges due to globalization (Caiani
2011).
20. See for Alleanza Cattolica http://www.alleanzacattolica.org and Totustuus Network http://www.totustuus.it/index.php; for Il Timone see http://
www.iltimone.org/.
21. John Paul II 2003.
22. In the words of Benedict XVI (2009): “Human freedom is authentic only
when it responds to the fascination of technology with decisions that are the
fruit of moral responsibility.”
23. Garza Medina 2008, 17.
24. Garelli 2006, 68.
25. By scriptural economy I refer to de Certeau’s understanding of the tension between textuality and experience. When what takes shape as an account,
written text, or in this case (Catholic) pedagogical orientation toward immigration is transmitted away from its own phenomenological and contextual space of
production, then there is a violence done to the richness of an experience (what
de Certeau calls orality) in an act of written translation. Acts of writing can be
part of a violent economy of disavowal and poaching, because they select details
away from the multitude of the experience itself.
26. This is one aspect of a long, complex, and ongoing debate among Italian
intellectuals (including Eugenio Scalfari, the founder of the liberal newspaper
La Repubblica, or Giuliano Ferrara, a conservative politician and intellectual
founder of a much smaller newpaper, Il Foglio) and vaticanisti ( journalists that
specialize on covering Vatican news, such as, for instance, Sandro Magister,
Matteo Mattiuzzi, Giuseppe di Leo, Andrea Tornielli) on the role of the Catholic Church and the pope’s interventions not only on everyday Italian politics,
but worldwide.
27. See Zagrebelsky 2008; Remotti 2008, 161, 257.
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28. Conceptually, we could say that Sameness is then destabilized by migrant
heterologies—“altered feminine discourse” emerging in reaction and at the
margins of a given scriptural economy. Heterologies, as de Certeau teaches us,
are the inconsistency between emplaced and embodied lives and their representations; they linger at the edges of what is recognized and spoken—they are a
thorn in the side of hermeneutic closure (1986, 165).
29. Asad 1996, 267.
30. Keane 1997a.
31. Bartolomeo de Las Casas (1474–1566) was a missionary and a colonial
chaplain, but he was also a social activist, a writer, and a speaker, and his thinking built on the neo-Thomism of his Salamancan confreres. He went to Española in 1502 as a colonial adventurer, participated in various expeditions, and
received an encomienda, land with indentured Indians. Perhaps the fi rst person
ordained in the Americas, he became a priest about 1512 and took part as chaplain in the conquest of Cuba. Having fi rst resisted the critical preaching of the
Dominicans, he was converted on the feast of the Assumption, 1514, and soon
announced he was setting free the Indians and working to end the encomienda
system. See Lavalle 2009 for a recent critical reflection on Las Casas; see Von
Vacano (2012) for an interesting reading of the long history of Latin American
philosophical responses to the idea of humanity in the writings of Bartolomeo
de Las Casas.
32. O’Meara 1992, 573.
33. Cornish 1996, 112.
34. See Locke [1764] 1946; Squadrito 1979.
35. Pope John XXII entered a theological dispute with the Franciscan order
over the relation between the correct interpretation of the gospel and the exercise
of poverty. It was William of Ockham who, in defending the Franciscans in
1328, first began to defi ne a notion of humans possessing natural rights: “The
right that the Franciscans had renounced, he argued, was every kind of worldly
right, every right to sue in court, or to own property. But there was also a natural right to use external things that was common to all men and that was derived
from nature, not from any human statute; and no one could renounce this right
since it was necessary to maintain life. By virtue of this right, Ockham argued,
the friars could use justly without having any right derived from human law.
‘The friars do have a right,’ he wrote, ‘namely a natural right’” (Tierney 2004, 9).
36. Cornish 1996, 112.
37. See the work by Todorov 1984; Greenblatt 1991; Pagden 1982, 1994;
Hodgen 1971.
38. See Brah 1996; Brah and Coombes 2000.
39. She also argues, reading through Coronil’s work, that embodied hierarchization of cultural differences is a concern of Atlantic (and global) politics, as I
defi nitely argue here too (Silverblatt 2004, 16).
40. I am referring here to the doing “otherwise” (of gender performativity)
developed conceptually by Judith Butler (2006), but also to its dimension of
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melancholy, in its impossibility to ever being fully (Butler 1997). However, as
are her later critics, I am aware that the potentiality of affectively reinscribing
gender and subjectivity is always orchestrated in complex fields of interpellation
and at particular conjunctures of political economies, that make often given fantasies of identification still palatable to many, even if clearly detrimental to their
emancipatory positions (Berlant 2007).
41. See Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant
People 2004.
42. See Cipriani 2004, 449; Hamao 2005.
43. Albahari 2006, 107.
44. Benedict XVI 2006.
45. Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People
2004.
46. Albahari 2006.
47. In promoting the banning of the death penalty in the UN forum, the
Roman Catholic Church is also promoting life as a moral value and as a right
that connects humans universally, irrespective of their cultural, racial, and class
genealogies. Consequently, this Roman Catholic discourse can easily turn the
culture of life into an ethical, universal, anti-abortion stance. For a wonderful
and calibrated debate on this and its repercussions in Italian politics see Hanafi n
2007.
48. Agamben 2002, 16.
49. Asad 2003, 129.
50. Agamben 2002, 24.
51. See in the words of de Certeau the lingering of the beneath: “Normally,
strange things circulate discreetly below our streets. But a crisis will suffice for
them to rise up, as if swollen by flooded waters, pushing aside manhole covers,
invading the cellars, then spreading through the towns. It always comes as a surprise when the nocturnal erupts into broad daylight. What it reveals is an
underground existence, an inner resistance that has never been broken. This
lurking force infi ltrates the lines of tension within the society it threatens” (de
Certeau 2000, 1).
52. Every year since 1991, the Scalabrinians have organized a Day of the
Migrant called La Festa dei Popoli on a Sunday in May. This is a celebration in
front of San Giovanni in Laterano with an array of stalls that sell food and handicrafts or provide information from different countries. The majority of associations that participate in the event (and pay for space rental) are connected to
immigrant associations within Rome. Before the festival begins, a solemn mass
takes place in the Basilica, then in the afternoon a concert takes place with the
display of folkloric national bands. Some of the women in the MLA have complained that the concert starts too late in the afternoon; by that time they have
to head back to look after the elderly who are in their care. For three years I
helped the CCM to set up its stall and staffed it throughout the day and enjoyed
the banter and the laughter with the others.
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53. This violence may not be new or limited to new migrants, but in some
places in Rome it echoes multiple histories of social alterity. In the Valley of
Hell (Valle dell’ Inferno), a neighborhood in Rome, which I have written about
elsewhere, there was an eruption of violence in the Casa del Popolo, where
Latin American squatter families now reside; the violence resonates with histories of anarchic outbursts present in that same place during the fascist regime. A
social alterity embodied by anarchists, socialists, and now migrants is condensed
in the Casa del Popolo, a building that has become a material trace of different
but related histories (Napolitano 2015).
54. See Giordano 2008.
55. Mahmood 2005, 2009, 2012; J. Butler 2009.
56. For a good mapping of these debates in historically Protestant countries,
see Cannell 2010; for key (different) positions on the analytical purchase of secularism and postsecularism, see Connolly 1999; and for philosophically nuanced
takes on it, see Taylor 2007. For recent critiques and takes on Taylor’s position
on secularism as a multifaceted historical, affective and embodied process, see
Warner, Van Antwerpen, and Calhoun 2010.
57. Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008, 17.
58. Coleman 2010, 805; Robbins 2010.
59. Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008, 28.
60. Ratzinger 2000, 165. See also the influence of the twentieth-century
Italian German priest and theologian Romano Guardini (1885–1968) and his
work on the relation between the Catholic people and the Catholic Church
(Guardini 1935) on the thinking of Benedict XVI.
61. Personal written communication; my translation and emphasis.
62. André 2011.
63. Corriere della Sera 2009.
64. Reynolds 2008.
3. The Legionaries of Christ and the Passionate Machine
1. Following the allegation of abuses and misconduct of its founder and the
collusions he had with Mexican priest members at the head of the order, the order
was put through an Apostolic Visit by Benedict XVI from June 2009 to July 2010,
which ended with the nomination of a pontifical delegate, the Scalabrinian Velasio de Paolis, to coordinate a revision of the order from within. In 2011, a further
apostolic visit was carried out in the Regnum Christi, the movement connected
to the order. In January 2011, de Paolis nominated Juan José Arrieta Ibarrechebea
and Jesús Villagrasa Lasaga, Spanish Legionary priests—both of whom I met and
interviewed in Rome—to enlarge the general council of the Legionary order,
which previously constituted a group of Mexican and Italian members closely
allied to the order’s controversial founder, Maciel. In this chapter, I discuss the
transformation of the order up to this election, but no further.
2. This posture pivots around a defense of the pope’s teaching and the
integrity of traditional Catholic teaching. Moveover integralism refers to a belief
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that Catholicism is not only a private religion, but that it should play an important political and moral role in the public sphere (Krogt 1992).
3. There are obviously exceptions, see Yeates 2011.
4. Regarding Father Artaud, Michel de Certeau (another Jesuit) wrote,
“The same insistence on the ‘motion of the heart’ and purity of intention is
present in the chapter ‘Ministeria zelusque animarum utrum langueant vel efflorescent,’
which upholds the primacy of the affectus over the effectus, that is, the priority
of an obedience to the inner movements of the spirit over the objective interest
presented by social activities” (de Certeau 1992, 246).
5. Consider, for instance, the fate of the Jesuit Achille Gagliardi, the spiritual counselor of the Italian mystic Isabella Berinzaga. Gagliardi developed a
brief and clear compendium to reform the Jesuit order along more mystical lines
(Schulte van Kessel 1993, 160). He was soon “forgotten.”
6. See Bynum 1987; de Certeau 1992; Hollywood 2002.
7. De Certeau 1992, 259.
8. Molina 2008.
9. Barthes 1976, 72.
10. Ibid., 73.
11. However, there was exactly such an inconsistency within the Jesuit
order in the way in which Quietism was regarded. Jesuits such as Lois Lallemant and Jean-Joseph Surin were inspirational to Jean-Pierre Caussade
(1675–1751), one of the key players of eighteenth-century Quietism, who
interestingly wrote about the heart as sacred and as a cradle of inspiration
where no language was needed. In his words: “[The purely heart-charged
prayer of simple recollection] cuts away the superfluity of our meditations,
readings, and vocal prayers to substituted assets, that is to say, attention to the
heart, saviour of the heart, peace and rest of the heart, which many people
hardly think of ” (Caussade, in Choudhury 2009,167). This connects to the
next chapter, where I analyze the affective dimension of the devotional heart
via the discursive and visual emergence of the Sacred Heart in the Latin
American mission.
12. Choudhury 2009, 1.
13. I wish to thank General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach for granting me special
permission to consult material in the Archivium Romanum Societatis Iesu
(ARSI), which ordinarily would not have been possible because the documents
were too recent.
14. La Bella 2007, 853.
15. Ibid., 854.
16. Ibid., 862.
17. Ibid., 880.
18. Alberigo 2005.
19. John Paul I’s letter to the General of the Jesuit, 30 September 1978. My
translation from the Italian and my emphasis. A copy of the letter was also in
Latin, and both were consulted in the ARSI, the Jesuit archives in Rome.
20. July 15, 1963. My translation from the Spanish and my emphasis.
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21. Marcial Maciel was born in 1920, in Cotija de la Paz, a small town located
in the state of Michoacán, Mexico.
22. It was through the intercession of Cardinal Canali that, on 25 May 1948,
Maciel received Pius XII’s endorsement for his congregation. Immediately upon
his return to Mexico, he arranged the founding of the congregation for the date
of the feast of Saints John and Paul, 29 June. Although more research would
need to be carried out in the archives of the Legionaries, which are currently
closed to the public, it seems that Maciel received information that there would
be a change of heart about his proposed order, and he, together with Bishop
Gregorio Araiza, called the Legionaries of Christ officially into being on the
evening of 13 June 1948. By the following Monday, 14 June, the bishop of Cuernavaca, Espino y Silva, received a telegram delaying the canonical election of
the new order. However, it was too late: The order was already born, although
through murky official back channels.
23. I fi rst heard of the “racial” politics of affi liation within the Legionaries
of Christ during an interview with Father Juan, a Mexican diocesan priest from
Zacatecas, who was studying in Rome for his degree. Father Juan referred to
the Legionaries as “the blond ones with impeccable hair cuts”; he said, “There
are no morenos like me there.” In Rome, I often heard comments about the
expensive clothing and the impeccable presentation that Legionaries make in
public.
24. This should be understood not only within Vatican geopolitics but also
as part of a long process of Atlantic “coloniality of being” that promotes forms
of liminality of being(s) that operate as enduring and present forms of racial
dehumanization (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 257). However, I do not agree with
Maldonado-Torres’s confl ation of decolonization with a “restoration of the gift”
economy (260). Anthropologists have analyzed the complexity and pitfalls of
such an economy (Coleman 2004), and again we need, through a postsecular
analysis, to query these forms of generosity and to debunk some of the underpinnings of “the unconditional.” I am reminded here of the debate on Catholic
voluntarism and gratuitous giving, which is of decisive importance for particular
forms of labor relations and the compensation for a partial lack of national welfare. I think that a way to limit some of the colonial thinking, which Maldonado-Torres engages in, is to ethnographically situate the complexity and the
symptomatic returns of the nation within this process.
25. The Legionaries are behind ZENIT, a thriving multilingual Catholic
news service on the internet (http://www.zenit.org/), that until recently was
coordinated by the Spanish Vatican journalist Jesús Colina. He resigned in 2011
because of the control the Legionaries have over the governing body of the association, and the impossibility, in his view, of initiating genuinely innovative
projects, given the extent of the order’s oversight and control.
26. “Primary capital to be safeguarded and valued is man, the human person
in his or her integrity” (Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI, 2009). This is part of an
important debate on the Catholic Church’s position on labor, sociality, and the
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199
common good, which since Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) have
been important in Catholic social thought. The same nature of “freely given”
love and labor, as it is promoted by a concept of gratuitá (free charitable giving
with no reciprocity, seen as a labor-foundation of society) in Benedict XVI’s
thinking, is actually paradoxically an endorsement of an increased “catholicization of neoliberalism” (see Muehlebach 2013). Legionaries’ ideals and practices of
homo relationalis are very much part of this Catholicization of neoliberalism, rather
than a moving away from it.
27. Holmes 2000, 15.
28. Mahmood 2009, 859–60.
29. During the period of the Cristiada, the Catholic Church lost part of its
juridical character in Mexico, and the state gained greater control over its internal organization; for example, only Mexicans who were citizens by birth were
allowed to become priests. Moreover, priests could no longer exercise the right
to vote, participate in political movements, or form any political party. Catholic
education was curtailed in state schools, and secular teaching was made paramount. Religious primary and secondary schools went unrecognized by the
state, as did degrees granted by religious seminaries. Finally, multifaith freedom
was enshrined in the constitution, and religious cults and practices were officially forbidden outside churches. most important, these laws abolished property
rights for the church, rendering it illegal for the church to acquire, administer,
or possess real estate in the Republic.
30.
31. Paradoxically, the beatifications of Cristiada’s martyrs in 2000, championed by John Paul II, were of those who had not actively taken up arms during
the Cristiada War. Instead, they were the “active pacifi sts in it” (González Ruiz
2004, 282). Paradoxically again, those Jesuits who had spearheaded some of the
violent confrontations of the war have not been beatified, corroborating the idea
that the Catholic Church is still inclined to portray its allegedly “neutral” position at the time of that war.
32. Translated from the Spanish by the author.
33. Mantovano 2007.
34. More recently the Università Europea has seen a direct involvement by
Roberto Mattei, one of the organizers of the October 2011 conference titled
“Institutions and Charisma in the Evangelization of the Americas.” An expert in
modern history, Mattei is another notable intellectual connected to Alleanza
Cattolica, a Catholic conservative association. His other institutional affi liations
include the Catholic apologetic journal, Il Timone, and the prestigious Italian
National Research Council CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), for
which he has served as a subsecretary since 2003. In the 2011 conference, a continuity between the “new evangelization of the Americas” professed by John
Paul II and embraced by Benedict XVI, and the evangelization of the sixteenth
century was repeatedly made, as a sign of hope for a renewed orthodoxy and
integralism of the Catholic Church.
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200
Notes to pages 000–00
35. New institutes have sprung from this right-wing Italian think tank,
including the Centre for the Study of New Religions (CESNUR) and the Institute for the Doctrine and the Social Information (IDIS).
36. 17 November 2005. My translation. http://www.interno.it/mininterno/
export/sites/default/it/sezioni/sala_stampa/interview/Interventi/_sottosegretarioxprecedenti/intervista_397.html_1375993311.html.
37. Abraham 1987.
38. See Navaro-Yashin 2012, 17.
39. See Freud 1955; Rashkin 2008, 94–95.
40. See Skrbiš 2005.
41. Cordoba 2006.
42. From a letter by Father Xavier Baeza, rector of the Jesuit College of
Comillas, to the General of the Jesuit order (21 January 1949).
43. Father Enrique Carvajal, S.J., in a letter to the General of the Jesuit order
(27 September 1950).
44. The following material has been gathered through conversations with
diocesan and Legion priests, participant observation of their meetings and celebration of the Comunidad Católica Mexicana, at events of the Regnum Christi,
and through the emerging literature on the Legionaries in the printed press. As
well, I have used available and later obscured material that has appeared in
cyberspace. The last source is, of course, questionable, but I use it here to corroborate aspects that emerged in participant observation.
45. Legionaries of Christ 2009, 41–42.
46. Massumi 1995.
47. Translated from the Spanish by the author.
48. The Regnum Christi is a lay counterpart movement of the Legionaries
of Christ in which women can be consecrated to a religious life without taking
religious vows. This movement was the subject of an Apostolic Visitation after
the demise of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ; the visitation ended in
2014.
49. Legionaries of Christ 2009, 134.
50. Translated from the Spanish by the author.
51. Legionaries 2009, 144–76.
52. But also Mexico, Spain, and Chile.
53. In March 2009, the news broke that Maciel had a daughter living in
Spain, at the time in her twenties; later it emerged he had also fathered a son of
more or less the same age in Mexico.
54. “It seems to me that his [Michelangelo’s] method of inquiry is closely
related to the technique of psycho-analysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine
secret and concealed things from despised and unnoticed features, from the
rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observation” (Freud 1989, 530).
55. Agamben 2009 (English edition), 102.
56. Williams 1977.
57. Ahmed 2004.
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201
58. See the work of Massumi 2002, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. For a
discussion of this genealogy of affects, see Gregg and Seigworth 2010. As
explained in the introduction, I read these affective terrains from a different
genealogy that comes also through the work of Freud and Lacan, via Jacqueline
Rose, Michel de Certeau, and Carlo Ginzburg.
59. Regnum Christi is one of the lay movements of the Legionaries of Christ.
Its aims are baptismal commitment, personal holiness, and apostolic action, all
inspired by the charisma received from God through its founder Marcial Maciel.
In February 2012, the director of the consecrated women of this group, the Spaniard Malen Oriol, resigned after the completion of an apostolic visit carried out
in the movement.
60. John Paul II supported the founder of the Legionaries of Christ against
the accusations of pedophilia, which were reviewed by then Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger in his capacity as head of the Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith.
61. Guerrero Chiprés 2004, 88.
62. Ibid., 172.
4. Migrant Hearts
1. Eloisa, with whom I opened this book, is a woman in her early forties,
and with no children. She was a teacher with a degree in her country of origin
and arrived in Italy in 2003, where she lived as a live-in-maid for a few years
in the home of a well-to-do Roman family. I have decided to withhold more
biographical information about her for reasons that will become clearer in the
text.
2. I refer here to the generative, ground-breaking work of Teresa Brennan
on affects as the physiological shifts that accompany judgment: “I am using the
term ‘transmission of affect’ to capture a process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect. The origin of transmitted affects is social in that
these affects do not only arise within a particular person but also come from
without. They come via an interaction with other people and an environment.
But they have a physiological impact. By the transmission of affect, I mean simply that the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing
energies these affects entail, can enter into another” (Brennan 2004, 3). This is
why, following Brennan, I consider the relation between skin and affects very
important.
3. For critical studies on transnationalism and anthropology of Catholicism
see Vásquez and Marquardt 2003; De Theije 2011; Napolitano and Norget 2011.
4. See Orsi 1985, 1996; Tweed 1997; and Lorentzen et al. 2009.
5. De Certeau and Giard 1997, 134, my emphasis.
6. This emerged in an interview with Dr. Franca Cohen, the head of the
Assessorato alla Multietnicitá (Council for multi-ethnicity) in Walter Veltroni’s
municipal government. She articulated her viewcontrasting the archaeological,
artistic, and touristic cultural heritage (beni culturali) of Rome with the “lack of
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culture” of incoming Latin American migrants, and for that matter of other
economic migrants to the city. Interview with the author, October 2005.
7. Fanon 1968, 4. See also McClintock 1995.
8. Mayblin and Course 2014.
9. Freud 1953, 1961.
10. Dalia took care of a string of elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease and
dementia, and two of them died while in her care.
11. Ryan 2002.
12. I refer here in particular to celebrations I participated in the CCM
(Comunidad Católica Mexicana) on the day of the Fiesta Patria in 2004, 2005,
and 2007, as well as the Via Crucis being carried out of Santa Maria della Luce
by the MLA at Easter in 2006 and 2008.
13. I attended celebrations of the Altar de los Muertos in November 2005
and again in 2009. In 2005, the celebration I attended was hosted in a church
near the periphery of Rome and run by a group of Trappist monks; in 2009, at
the Oratory of the Caravita, a small Jesuit church close to the main one of St.
Ignatius, hosted the celebration. In the fi rst instance, the altar was set up in the
hall connected to, but outside of the church itself. In the second instance, it was
arranged inside. The Oratorio del Caravita is not normally open to the public
for regular masses, so it is not a regular neighborhood church. Thus, unlike the
celebration in 2005, there were no problems in having the altar set up “within”
the church. Issues of politics and folkloric expressions of Mexican indigeneity in
Rome and the Catholic Church emerged clearly in these celebrations; I return
to this topic in the following chapter.
14. Morgan 2008, 2009.
15. See the Amy Hollywood reflection on Beatrice of Nazareth’s text, about
expanding the loving heart and its bursting veins, away from a perspective of
enfleshed martyrdom’s reflection of the life of Jesus (Hollywood 2002, 263). See
also de Certeau’s work on the possession of Catholic nuns in Loudon and their
incomprehensible excesses of speech (2000).
16. Within Catholicism mystical aspects can also be read as a narrative of
spiritual histories of female suffering (and death) with a purpose to inspire, cultivate, and instruct away from “what really happened.” In a beautiful study of a
mid-sixteenth-century orphanage home for young women (Casa della Pietà) in
Florence, Nicholas Terpstra shows how female deaths, critically accounted for in
many cases in mystical and near-hagiographic tones, should be reread in terms
of the conditions of young female dispossession, abandonment, and illnesses
affl icting particular group of women at specific moments of social and economic
transformation (Terpstra 2010).
17. I refer here to a historicization of the study of the flesh, praying, and aesthetic and ethical modes of apprehension coming from interesting medievalist
perspectives. See Largier 2008, 2010.
18. O’Neill 2010b.
19. Jonas 2000.
20. Harvey 1989.
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203
21. Ibid., 222.
22. Mitchell 2005, 10.
23. Pozzi 1993.
24. Molina 2008.
25. Zambarbieri 1987, 339.
26. Orsi 2005, 111–12.
27. See also chapter 2.
28. Consider also Benedict XVI’s meditation on the Sacred Heart as a gift of
love, keeping in mind a political economy of free giving in Catholic pedagogies
of citizenship, which I have stressed in the introduction, that corroborate rather
than undermine a form of moral neoliberalism:
Starting with this interior attitude, one sees that the gaze fi xed upon
his side, pierced by the spear, is transformed into silent adoration. Gazing at the Lord’s pierced side, from which “blood and water” flowed
(cf. John 19:34), helps us to recognize the manifold gifts of grace that
derive from it (cf. “Haurietis Aquas,” Nos. 34–41) and opens us to all
other forms of Christian worship embraced by the devotion to the
Heart of Jesus. Faith, understood as a fruit of the experience of God’s
love, is a grace, a gift of God. Yet human beings will only be able to
experience faith as a grace to the extent that they accept it within
themselves as a gift on which they seek to live. (Benedict XVI 2006)
29. Benedict XVI 2010.
30. Bataille 1998, 17.
31. Ibid., 23.
32. Bynum 2011a, 35.
33. Ibid., 33.
34. I am referring here in turns to the work of Morgan 1998, 2005 (fi rst),
Keane 1997a, 1997b, 2007, 2008, and Engelke 2007 (second), and Taussig 1992,
1997 (third).
35. Bynum 2011a, 32.
36. See Bataille’s take on discontinuity and eroticism: “The whole business
of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart
stands still. The transition from the normal state to the one of erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity” (1998, 17).
37. Lilli 2001; De Stefano 2001.
38. Menjivar 1999.
39. Paerregaard 2008.
40. Ibid.; Paerregaard 2010.
41. They are El Señor de los Milagros, El Señor de la Justicia, El Señor del
Cachuy, La Virgen del Chapy, and the Cruz de Motupe y Santo Madero. All are
part of a loose group called El Cabildo de Hermandades Peruanas of Rome. The
fi rst two Hermandades are of Penitents, the last three are of Glory.
42. Stevens 1997, 275.
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5. The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Nexus of Affects
1. Freud 1993, 274.
2. Symptoms register “past failures to respond to calls for action or even for
empathy on behalf of those whose suffering belongs to the form of life of which
one is a part. They hold the place of something that is there, that insists in our
life, though it has never achieved full ontological consistency” (Santner 2005, 89).
3. Ibid., 107.
4. Wolf 1958.
5. “The Guadalupe Virgin, produced by a sign and a sign herself, was the
‘portrait of an idea,’ a mental, then figurative representation; the Christian supernatural in the sense of a collection of signs endowed with their own life, capable
of regulation and autoregulation. . . . Immaterial image that existed in space and
time without apparent intervention, the representation of the Tepeyac Virgin was
enough to stupefy and fascinate the baroque gaze” (Gruzinski 2001, 129).
6. Ibid., 220.
7. Brading 2001, 11.
8. Sánchez 1648.
9. Wright-Rios 2004, 57–58.
10. Traslosheros 2002, 113–14.
11. Bantjes 2006, 140.
12. Elizondo 2000, 516.
13. See Elizondo 1997, 28.
14. Matovina 2005, 176–77.
15. Gálvez 2010.
16. Pérez 2007, 267.
17. Anzaldúa 1987.
18. Tweed 1997.
19. By social imaginary I refer to the realm of fantasy and desires that emerges
out of and often exceeds a given symbolic order,while engaging with particular
sociohistorical worlds. See Moore 2007, 60.
20. Napolitano 2002, 9–10.
21. Moore 2007, 14–15.
22. I use the word materiality in Navaro-Yashin’s sense (2007). Discussing
“make-believe” papers in the realm of law and order, she writes: “Material
objects of law and governance [are] capable of carrying, containing, or inciting
affective energies when transacted or put to use in specific webs of social relations. . . . Documents, then, are phantasmatic objects with affective energies
which are experienced as real” (Navaro-Yashin 2007, 81). The Virgin of Guadalupe is not, of course, a document, but it has a materiality that is constantly,
transnationally reproduced and ethnographically performed, whose affective
energies are experienced as embodied and real.
23. See Aretxaga 1995.
24. Head of the Salesian order from 2002 to 2008.
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Notes to pages 000–00
205
25. Similar remarks about the diversity of status of religious migrants as
opposed to lay migrants (as clericals and nuns) in Rome emerged in discussions
with other members of religious congregations in Rome.
26. Garduño, Mendez, and Perez Silva, 2006.
27. Schedler 2007, 94.
28. Álvarez Béjar 2007, 14.
29. Žižek 2000, 238.
30. The two embassies are to Italy and the Holy See.
31. During their 2001 visit to Rome, Vicente Fox and his new wife, Martha
Sahagún, were received separately by John Paul II. They both remarried without fi rst obtaining an annulment, which provoked no little disapproval within
the Catholic hierarchy.
32. This ambiguity, especially about the relation between Mexico as a secular
state and the Catholic Church, was still strongly felt in debates leading up to the
2012 presidential election, and for Benedict XVI’s visit to Mexico in March 2012.
33. Alvarado 2007; González Ruiz 2004.
34. I participated in the same procession in 2007. The December 2007 celebration had again a display of indigeneity. Once within the college, some priests
performed the Danza de los Abuelitos in costumes typical of the region of
Michoáchan in Mexico. The sermon was given by Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, and the focus was on Catholic inculturation through the Virgin of Guadalupe. In comparison with previous years, and since Pope Benedict XVI’s call
for a return to Latin in the mass, more than half of the masses in the Church of
the Nostra Signora di Coromoto were sung in Latin chants.
35. Cadena and Starn 2007, 12.
36. The mobile headquarters of the EZLN were named after Guadalupe
Tepeyac, and the image and the power of the Virgin of Guadalupe have been
called upon by the EZLN as a symbol for the defense of indigenous rights.
37. Norget 2004, 166–69; Judd 2004, 218
38. Judd 2004, 212; Norget, 2004, 167.
39. This was the case of 2001 canonization of Juan Diego in the Basilica of
Guadalupe by Pope John Paul II, when “the mise-en-scène of the event reduced
the Indian contribution to a spectacle of feathers and drums that was far from
‘inculturated evangelization’ and even further form the syncretic indigenous
theology espoused by certain groups outside the tent of orthodoxy” (Beatty
2006, 329).
40. In 1993, Jesús Posadas Ocampo, archbishop of Guadalajara, was made
cardinal. From that point on, this church was assigned to the cardinal of Guadalajara in Rome. After Ocampo’s controversial murder at Guadalajara’s airport in
1993, the church was assigned to the elected cardinal of Guadalajara Juan Sandoval Iñiguez. It is clear that, at least symbolically, this church is very important in
the connection between Guadalajara and Rome.
41. Saint Toribio Romo was born in 1900 in the Altos of Jalisco and was
killed in 1927 by agraristas in the Cristiada clashes. There is now a temple and a
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206 Notes to pages 000–00
reliquary dedicated to him in his native village, Santa Ana de Guadalupe, and it
has become an important pilgrimage destination.
42. In the words of Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ,
“There is no direct, demonstrable relation between the religious persecution in
Mexico and the Legion of Christ, but my faith tells me that the Legion is in a
certain sense the fruit of those martyrs’ blood, because blood shed for love of
Christ always bears fruit. I do believe that in his wisdom and providence God
has wished that blood to bear fruit through the apostolate of the Legion of
Christ and Regnum Christi” (Colina 2003, 4).
43. Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa (National League for
the Defense of Religious Liberty) is an organization founded in 1925 in Mexico
City to organize against a perceived opposition of the Mexican state at the time
toward public practices of religion, and particularly Catholicism. This organization was crucial in the Catholic activism during the Cristero War.
44. M. Butler 2004, 160.
45. Ibid., 163.
46. Bantjes 2006, 151.
47. Aretxaga 2005b, 87.
48. We could also read this as a transnationalization of a national paradox—
“the effect and the condition of possibility of Mexican culture’s sacral-secular
design”—where the mestiza Guadalupe, in a Lacanian interpretation, is oscillating between being the Self and Other, a double evocation of what is affi rmed as
Self and what is negated as Other (Feder 2001, 237).
49. Focolare is one of the fastest-growing lay movements in the Roman
Catholic Church. Founded by Chiara Lubich in the late 1940s in Italy but now
spreading worldwide, the Focolare group advocates a return to community living as well as direct experience of the message of the gospel, while remaining
critical of more intellectual mediations of Catholicism.
50. See Benedict XVI 2011.
51. This interpretation does not, of course, exhaust all the facets of contemporary Guadalupe celebrations in Rome, but it highlights a focus on affect and
historical traces that needs ethnographic and anthropological attention.
52. Tweed 2006, 54
53. See de Certeau 1986, 1992.
54. Levitt 2003, 852.
55. See Vásquez and Marquardt 2003; Alicia Galvez 2009; Peña 2011; Tweed
2006.
56. Orsi 2009, 216.
57. Mookherjee 2011.
6. Enwalled: Translocality, Intimacies, and Gendered Subjectivity
1. Important work has been done on the biotechnology of militarized
walls and contested borders, and the historical shifts that occurred at the end
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Notes to pages 000–00
207
of the Cold War that have resulted in an increased militarization of the control of illegal migration (at least on the U.S.–Mexican border), but also an
increased affective artistic emergence (Montezemolo, Peralta, and Yépez
2006; Kun and Montezemolo 2012). This research has paid attention to the
migrant biopolitics and “ethopolitics” that emerge through the presence of
surveillance, militarization, and the spatial politics of borders and the reifications of states of security (Andreas 2006; De Genova 2005; Inda 2006; Rosas
2006). This work is rooted in a Foucauldian way of thinking about modern
forms of governmentality and discipline, a conceptualization of migration
forging and being forged as a state of exception, and particular forms of ethical cultivation of the subject (De Genova and Peutz 2010). Others studies
have fruitfully looked at the threads that animate stories at the border and at
the border from multiple but interconnected registers of analysis (see Lugo
2008; Schmidt Camacho 2008). I here write implicitly in conversation with
these debates on border studies.
2. Foucault 1984, 83.
3. Ibid., 80.
4. Napolitano and Pratten 2007.
5. For work on religion, migration, and adaptation in the United States,
see in particular Portes and Rumbaut 2006; Portes and DeWind 2007; Lorentzen et al. 2009.
6. As I discussed in the introduction, heterologies as “altered feminine discourse” make us reflect on how writing about a migrant Other is fi xing and
streaming some of the complexity of migrant subject formation.
7. Zambrano [1955] 2008, 229.
8. Lomas de Polanco is one of the most exclusive and posh neighborhoods
in Mexico City. Not only Mexican but diasporic elites live in this area.
9. A legal system of anticipated retirements of state employers with at least
nineteen and half years of service, so-called “baby pensions” allowed workers to
retire early, sometimes when they were still in their forties. This clearly fi nancially unsustainable system was fi nally scrapped, after repeated amendments, by
the Dini centrist government in 1996. However, its fi nancial impact is still felt
in present-day state pension provisions.
10. Latin American migrants have difficulties in getting their qualifications
recognized. This has been documented both in Italy and in Spain. See Fullin
and Reyneri 2011; Ambrosini 2011.
11. Stoler 2008.
12. See chapter 2.
13. From http://www.fondazionerisorsadonna.it.
14. Hirsch 2003, 8–9.
15. See Ahmed 2004; Ahmed and Stacey 2001. Transnational migration stirs
not only the unity of a national ideal in Catholic migrant pedagogies but also a
fantasy about personhood to be maintained through the process of transnational
migration.
18650-Napolitano_MigrantHearts.indd 207
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208
Notes to pages 000–00
16. Consider, for example, the call for the best literary expression on the
migratory phenomenon, promoted by the Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior, el Consejo Nacional de Población y el Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las
Artes, and titled “Historias de Migrantes.” The call was publicized as well by the
Comunidad Católica Mexicana in Rome. For details about the circulated call, see
http://www.ime.gob.mx/ime2/images/concursos/2009_historia_migrantes.pdf.
17. Ahmed 2004, 140. For a discussion of the popular understandings of
national identity in relation to places and sites, real and imaginary, see Radcliffe
and Westwood 1996.
18. Striffler 2007, 685.
19. This also signals the collapse of a singular, unifying national identification.
20. Povinelli 2006, 8.
21. Ibid., 178.
22. Deguili 2007.
23. Sanatoria was a national and legally endorsed amnesty for a quota of illegal migrants holding specific jobs and mainly already employed by Italians.
24. Nervios is a culturally constructed ailment emerging at particular political
conjunctures, much written about in anthropological analysis of Latin America.
I recall here the work of Scheper-Hughes (1992) in the case of north east Brazil.
25. McDonald’s is where migrants attending the LAM, meet, not only
because it is cheap, but because you are allowed to sit as long as you wish without reordering. The pressure put on public spaces for sociability away from
Catholic institutions is a challenge especially for, but not only for, live-in
migrants in Rome.
26. Italian society is cradled in a long history of Catholic culture that privileges a particular relationship between mother, father, and child, which has been
read by some as a myth of omnipotent masculine activity and omnipotent
female passivity (Accati 1998, 269). This can be seen as central to a beauty/beast
“syndrome” that the media fostered during the Berlusconi era.
27. Pratt 1999, 164.
28. Varley 2008, 58.
29. Pratt 2009, 7.
30. Akalin 2007.
31. Lan 2006.
32. Burikova 2006.
33. I have chosen to withhold the names of all orders and their founders for
obvious reasons of confidentiality.
34. Napolitano 2002, 43.
35. Evangelisti 2008.
36. Agamben 2008.
37. This is a case of some mystical apprehension of the embodied world, as
in the case of St. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, which I discussed in chapter 4
(Morgan 2008).
38. Ahmed 2004, 117–18.
39. Ibid., 120.
18650-Napolitano_MigrantHearts.indd 208
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Notes to pages 000–00
209
40. Lester 2005, 205.
41. While I was living in the convent in May 2009, the H1N1 flu outbreak
erupted in Mexico. The misinformed international press at the time called it a
swine flu epidemic and traced the outbreak to Mexico. Travels to and from
Mexico were greatly disrupted, as was, for a while, the image of Mexico as a
tourist destination for people in Italy. At the time, the sisters received a special
prayer from Norberto Rivera, the cardinal of Mexico City, that was, to my
understating, distributed to other Mexican nuns, seminarians, and priests in
Rome. This prayer was also recited during the evening prayers that took place
in a smaller chapel, and exclusively for the nuns, in another section of the convent. An abridged version/reminder of the prayer was put at the bases of the
altars in the major, shared chapel of the convent, which read “Let’s pray for
Mexico and its governments.” It was left there for over a week.
42. Anderson 2000.
43. See Anderson 2000; Pratt 2005, 2009; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2007.
44. .Gregorio Gil and Ramírez Fernández 2000.
45. Raijman, Schammah-Gesser, and Kemp 2003.
Epilogue
1. “Insidious and ungraspable” (Gramsci 1967).
2. Pope Francis has also referred to this apostolic zeal. In his fi rst Apostolic
Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (2013) he describes it as a burning force of joy
against growing defeatism and pessimism with the church. In a morning homily,
given in May 2013 at Santa Marta, where he normally lives, he also preached
apostolic zeal as a form of “healthy madness”:
[It is] not an enthusiasm for power, for possession. It is something that
comes from within, that the Lord wants from us: Christian with Apostolic Zeal. And where does this Apostolic Zeal come from? It comes
from knowing Jesus Christ. Paul found Jesus Christ, he encountered
Jesus Christ, but not with an intellectual, scientific knowledge—which is
important, because it helps us—but with that fi rst knowledge, that of the
heart, of a personal encounter. (http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/
05/16/pope_at_mass:_an_apostolic_nuisance/en1–692628 [accessed 10
February 2013])
3. Agamben 2013, 61.
4. Ibid., xiii. The theological dispute between property as ownership versus
the right to use had it apex in the confrontation between the Franciscan order
and Pope John XXII between 1316 and 1329.
5. Agamben 2013, 24.
6. Orsi 2005, 170.
7. Ibid., 173.
8. Ahmed 2010, 39.
9. See Phillips 2012.
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