Blurring Boundaries: Religion, Citizenship, and Race amongst Mexican Americans at Olvera Street

Josh Newton
History
UC San Diego

“Blurring Boundaries: Religion, Citizenship, and Race amongst Mexican Americans at Olvera Street” examined competing Catholic and Protestant attempts to impose visions of religion, citizenship, and race onto Mexican Americans and immigrants through Americanization programs, evangelization, and tourism in Los Angeles from the 1920s to the mid-1940s. Using a variety of primary sources including correspondence, institutional documents, religious regalia and literature, and photographs the grantee demonstrated that Mexican Americans and immigrants did not conform to traditional Euro-American understandings of religion, citizenship, and race, but instead created what David Gutiérrez has referred to as a “third space” at Olvera Street where religious, national, and racial identities were blurred. This had implications not only for Mexican American experience in Los Angeles and the Southwest, but also for the study of popular religion in the West and broader United States.