Thursday, September 24, 2009
By MARIFELI PEREZ-STABLE
Miami is an immigrant city. Heartland Americans often come here full of excitement. “So near and yet so foreign,” said a 1940s promotion by the Cuban Tourist Commission to attract American tourists. Not a bad motto for today’s Miami.
What heartland Americans would not find at all foreign are Miami’s vibrant immigrant parishes. That is if they make time after going to the beach, sipping a cortadito or enjoying the city’s night life. Average Americans and Miami’s immigrants both draw strength from their faith and their faith-based communities.
“Churches and Charity in the Immigrant City” is an anthology edited by Alex Stepick, Terry Rey and Sarah J. Mahler. Stepick, Mahler and I are colleagues at Florida International University. Civic social capital — the non-economic, community resources and networks that immigrant parishes generate — is their template. Haitian, Cuban, African-American, Nicaraguan, Mexican and West Indian churches all get chapters. I’ll highlight two.
Refugee Catholicism in Little Haiti tells the moving story of Notre Dame d’Haiti. In the waning days of the Duvalier dictatorship, thousands of Haitians arrived here. They were not received with open arms.
Ethnicity
Thomas Wenski then headed the Miami Archdiocese’s Haitian Apostolate. In his words: “As a kid, I was always the Polack. I wore my Polishness as a badge of honor.” His strong ethnicity gave him a natural understanding of Haitian culture. He learned Creole and fought for the creation of Notre Dame d’Haiti.
Haitian refugees were particularly open to “prophetic” leadership. In the 1970s, the Catholic Church in Haiti embraced a “preferential option for the poor. Priests confronted the poverty and injustice that ravaged their flocks.” That’s the Catholicism Haitians brought to Miami. Amid their traumatic transition, they found Wenski. Sermons denouncing human-rights violations in Haiti or defending Haitians’ rights here were not unusual.
Transnational ties with Cuba have not been easy for Cuban Americans. Diaspora-island relations have been fraught with political divides and deep-seated emotions. Yet a robust back-and-forth between Cuba and Cuban Miami has developed in the past two decades.
Katrin Hansing’s Unidos en la Fe (United in Faith) introduces us to the bonds established between Westchester’s St. Agatha and eastern Cuba’s Guantanamo-Baracoa diocese. After Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, Miami’s Archbishop John Favalora proposed that parishes here establish ties with parishes there. Though Cuban-American Catholics resisted the idea, St. Agatha’s parishioners — also conservative — eventually welcomed it. Why?
Auxiliary Bishop Felipe Estevez led St. Agatha. Known for his closeness to the Cuban Catholic Church, Estevez used homilies and parish activities to explain why Favalora’s proposal reflected Jesus’s fundamental message of love and fraternity.
Contagious energy
Most parishioners began to see the church in Cuba as theirs as well. Estevez founded a ministry — Unidos en la Fe — to forge relations with Guantanamo-Baracoa and put Gabriela Rodriguez in charge. Her energy proved contagious.
St. Agatha made a commitment to send the Cuban diocese at least $6,000 annually. Fundraisers were organized throughout the year. Unidos asked Cuban restaurants and other businesses to make in-kind contributions, involving the community beyond the parish.
Haitians and Cubans had quite different experiences in Miami. Yet, these two parishes created civic social capital by exercising their faith.
X Marifeli Perez-Stable is vice president for democratic governance at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, a professor at Florida International University and a columnist for the Miami Herald.