H-What did the position involve? You said you went to different placesP-I went to, OK, in Texas there was a I think at the time sixteen dioceseH-Uh huh.
P-so I had to go visit those. It was in Houston, it was in Brownsville, there was Corpus, there
was in um, different places.
H-And you were assessing?
P-I would go and talk to the bishop then he would assign someone to take me to the Hispanic
area, and that took place for the first three dioceses. Then I did one where I wanted to go. So then
what I did is I rented a car and I asked ‘where is the barrio?’ Where-and they would show me, I
mean everybody knows where the barrio is, so I would go there and I would ask questions from
the people in the grocery store, or in the bakery, or at the laundry mat, and at the parishes. Every
city where there was a lot of Hispanics had a La Virgen de Guadalupe Catholic ChurchH-Uh huh.
P-that was not-it was not a diocesan run parish. That was another thing that I had learned. I
thought a priest was a priest. I didn’t know about Jesuits and Redemptorist and all the different
orders. So I found out when I was doing my analysis again that in the Hispanic areas, the
Hispanics had very few diocesan pastors or parishes. They were all religious orders. And the
Guadalupe Church, they would say ‘Esta parroquia la fincaron con hojas de tamales.’ ‘this
parish was built with tamale H-Chunks.
P-schunks’, you know. And I always wondered-and sure enough, in other words the diocese
would not allocate funds to have a Guadalupe parish built so the folks would-fundraising until
they got enough money to have-and it was never a big church, but it was a church for Our Lady
of Guadalupe. So these were the little things that I was learning. I went to-I went to Arkansas, it
was a bishop there, I forget what his name is right now, but he said, ‘I don’t know why you’re
here.’ He said, ‘We don’t have any Mexicans here, no Hispanics.’ So I said, ‘Uh, well I’m glad
that you’re aware that there are none here, but I’m hear for the weekend so I’m just gonna look
around bishop, if you don’t mind.’ Bishop, ah what was his name, and I-Salatca, Bishop Salatca.
Was it Oklahoma? It was either Oklahoma or Arkansas. Anyway, he said that ‘There’s no’-well I
ran across a sister, a Mexican American sister and she’s ‘Oh, oh there’s a lot of them.’ And she
took me to a place where there were farm workers, a bunch. And I started talking with them, he
says, and I remember one saying very wisely, he says, ‘Mira, tontios, sí, pero pendejos, no.’ And
I said, ‘como dice?’ ‘What do you mean?’ Here we’re undocumented, ‘Somos ilegales. Solo no
vamos andar allá, pa’que nos mire la chota, los policies. No vamos andar ‘onde nos van a
conocer, so aquí nos quedamos. Hacemos nuestro trabajo, mandamus… ‘we’ll send our money
back home, but it’s not about exposing ourselves.’
H-Uh huh.
P-So no wonder they don’t know that they’re there. That was one instance, you know. And then
in other ones, movement,s like the Cursillo, grabbed a whole community.
H-Uh huh.
P-And there were very elitist-if you made the Cursillo, fine you were in the in group, if you
didn’t make the Cursillo, you’re out of there you know? And the Cursillista became very pious; I
mean if you were not a Cursillista man they would really-talk about condemning I mean guys
that used to drink a lot all of a sudden made the-they stopped drinking, then they would go into
the beer joints and condemn the guys that were there you know. So it started-not everywhere but
I mean in a few places that I went to.
H-Did you yourself make the Cursillo?
P-Yes. I made the Cursillo as I was elected, selected to be the-I figured well I might as well you
know get into the structure. I made the Cursillo, Bishop Flores as a matter of fact was directing
it, and then I made a retreat with the Oblates on Holy Week where it was spiritual retreat. All
they did was pray, and food-you got a piece of bread and soup, not my kind of retreat, you know.
It was a very rude awakening. In other words, what I was seeing, the institution is an institution.
If you come into it-thank God I came into it-like I remember they gave me this title, I was an
organic theologian that was hermeneutically privileged.
All Laugh
P-You know. I didn’t exactly know what hermeneutically privileged was, but I understood the
organic theologian. I mean I learned about theology from the ground up, you know. I didn’t read
about it and what have you. So I think that made a big difference for me working inside the
institution. So by the time I got to MACC, I was very adamant about not being institutionalized
and focusing on the laity.
H-What states did your area cover?
P-It covered Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. That was region ten.
Colorado didn’t belong to any region and I knew some folks over there. One of the guys was an
Oblate and he had a lady that was in charge of the Office of Hispanic Affairs. And he wanted me
to invite her to the conferences that we would have. So I said, ‘sure’. So then we-Colorado came
into region ten, not formally, but, hey, were there by invitation. SoH-And you started out your visits by visiting with the bishop.
P-I had to.
H-To tell him you were the.
P-Every time I went into any diocese I had to go to that bishop and let him know that I was there,
let him know I was from the Office for Hispanic Affairs, out of the Bishops’ National
Conference for Catholic Bishops, and CCB.
Sr. F-And CCB
P-And CCB and then there was another one.
H-It changed the name a couple of times.
P-Yeah anyway, that I was legal or you know that I was part of the institution.
H-How were you received?
P-At first, with a lot of doubt. ‘Who are you’ and I would tell them, ‘And what is that?’ They
were not aware of the office.
H-Uh huh.
P-They didn’t even know we had one in Washington. And I remember Brownsville, because they
had had this little run in with Lupe Anguiano. I’m mentioning names, I hope this thing doesn’t
go out and create any problems.
H-Well you know, let’s not worry about it.
P-Oh OK. Well she was a religious sister and I admired her for what she did. I mean she was
taking a stand saying, ‘Look this is-ninety percent of the population are Hispanic, Mexican
American. And we’re bringing in an Irish priest and making him a bishop here. Fitzpatrick?’
You know, and um, so anyway the staff though, one of them was the brother of Raul Gonzalez,
the Supreme Court Judge, well here I am making another name. Anyway, they were very nice
the first time I got there, talking to them. But then the first time we had a meeting, man ‘What
the heck was I doing there?’ And I said, ‘Well, we’re trying to bring in the resolutions of the
Primer Encuentro’ We had had a national conference. Out of the national conference we had
come up with some resolutions and some solutions and what have you so we wanted to
implement these things. And then they’d tell me, ‘Why do you come here and tell us what to
implement?’ So-and I didn’t know. I mean, again, I’m not part of-I was not-I did not see myself
as part of the institution. I saw myself as someone who had just ironically gotten in. I mean I
wasn’t-I didn’t have the qualifications. What got me in was the letters of recommendation. By
the way I had twenty six of them, twenty six letters of recommendation. That’s the most that
Bishop Flores said that he had ever gotten, and they were from different places. And that was his
main reason for hiring me.
But the idea is that I was hired and I was hired again by who they knew me as. They
didn’t know me as a theologian or they didn’t know me as someone else. But they knew me as a
person that really loved the Church, loved the community, and saw that there was a tremendous
need to get the laity more involved.
H-What was your involvement with that Primer Encunentro?
P-The Primer Encuentro I think it was the Primer Encuentro when they invited something like
three hundred delegates and uhH-Were you already working for the bishops?
P-No, no.
H-That was before?
P-Yeah. Then-because the office was a creation of some of the recommendations that were
made.
H-Uh huh.
P-And I don’t know if it was the Primer Encuentro or the Segundo Encuentro, but all I know is
that at the Primer Encuentro they invited, like the structure was, invited so many people to go to
Washington for this encuentro.
H-Uh huh.
P-And it was going to be a dialogue. siendo Mexicano, hell if you’re inviting someone from the
parish, I mean I’m going too. Six hundred and some odd people showed up, when there was only
room for three hundred and some odd. So they were sleeping out in the lawns and what have
you, but it made an impact. And then they hadH-Who invited you? Who invited you or did you get invited? HowP-I really believe that was part of the Marriage EncounterH-OK.
P-they were having and they invited movements, Cursillo, the Marriage Encounter, and all this
other kind of stuff.
H-What was your experience at encuentro?
P-Shocked. I had never seen so many Mexicanos, you know? Not just Mexicanos, there were
Cubans-the Cubans-I remember that’s when I first got a little aggravated because they tried to
run the whole thing. ‘Porque están Ustedes aqui y porque esta aquí y porque no se forman aquí,
haga grupo. You know and it-hey man.
H-Laughs
P-Up yours, you know, haha, I mean we came here to learn. We didn’t need to be told. I mean
we have enough priests telling us what to do now you’re telling us what to do? But again it was
the unity that was there in a way and it was a celebration because I remember, digan lo que
digan,-towards the evening after all the little sessions were-man they had the music. And you
had Puerto Rican music, we had Mexican music, and it just like integrated you know. And I
forget now what all the topics were but there was evangelization, there was political
responsibility, there was human rights, there was integration, as opposed to separate-I forget
what it was but it was five or six topics that came out that I really didn’t get to understand until
the Segundo Encuentro. And then after the Segundo Encuentro is when I got-I came in.
H-Uh huh.
P-But again, it’s just like the Chicano Movement, all of a sudden you got people that don’t know
beans about it, but they’re getting organized, there’s people that are angry, they got stories to tell,
they’ve been offended, they’ve been discriminated, their rights have been, I mean, just ignored.
Now here comes the Church and for the fist time we have-we define it. We are the Hispanic
Church. And there was a lot of argument about that, we’re trying to divide the Church, we’re you
know because we were asking for Spanish in the mass, in the liturgiesH-Uh huh.
P-So it was a time of-it was a time of unity but through division.
H-Uh huh.
P-One group against the other group, and even within groups, like the Puerto Ricans against the
Cubans and what have you. But again, it was the beginning of organizing. I had never really
understood organizing the way I was beginning to see it. I remember after I had gotten to work in
the office, Willie Velasquez, um, Jose Angel, the guy, that lawyer that killed himself, what was
his name? SandovalH-Uh huh.
P-that he defended-no he prosecuted a guy that killed some young kid in Hondo and then buried
him I don’t know where. And-police brutality. Now here for the first time we didn’t have a
national voice, like LULAC was not our national voice, Southwest Voter Regis..was not our
national voice. There were different organizations, but we were not the voice of the people, but
for the first time we came together as a group for a cause. We were all together and we were all
looking at police brutality. And we were identifying cases in different places.
H-Uh huh.
P-You know? So for the first time, we began to see each other making sense and it was, um, it
was an anger-I remember one person identified as internal-it’ll come to me-but it’s like, you
know, like when you’re driving and a cop drives by, there’s an internal reaction to you.
H-Uh huh.
P-‘Uh oh, what did I do?’ You know? When you go to Mexico, the immigration, when they stop
you and they start asking you questions. All of a sudden you get this little, right in the belly you
know, what’s wrong?
H-Uh huh.
P-So it was an internal oppression.
H-Uh huh.
P-We had built into us an internal oppression that we don’t know what brings it up. But it’s an
incident you see something being done wrong to someone.
H-Uh huh.
P-I remember Olga Villaparra, her internal oppression happened when-she had gone to the
grocery store and they had a strike against the lettuce and the cops came in and arrested anyone
that was Mexican. Olga Villa was a community organizer, had nothing to do with the Cesar
Chavez-but they arrested her. And she said out of that she involved with the Hispanic movement
you know. So for a lot of us it was just-
H-This coming together to protest police brutalityP-Yeah.
H-that you’re talking aboutP-In Dallas we would.
H-What was that? Was that a meeting or what?
P-I-what I remember was that most of us-there was about eight of us that were at Southwest
Airlines, we took a plane to Dallas. We went to some conference some placeH-Uh huh.
P-and what we had for the first time was, OK-and I remember they call it an, um, what do they
call it when a group of people get together? A caucus, we had caucuses, you know a caucus for
police brutalityH-Oh yeah.
P-in this area, a caucus for police brutality in this area. So, again, we were organizing ourselves,
and I had never even heard the word caucus you know?
H-Yeah.
P-But there we were and then we were writing things down, we were putting them on the walls
and we were looking at them and we would see, ‘God this makes sense’ or ‘God, hey man who
wrote this’ you know. All of a sudden we were finding people who really knew how to write,
how to put words in a certain perspective-in a certain way. So it was a discovery about ourselves.
H-Uh huh.
P-Not only our oppression, but the fact that that oppression had been internalized so that we
didn’t visibly react to it until something happened that triggered that internal-which was
something that happened to us either with the police, with a teacher, with our parents, the
neighborhood, whatever it was. Then we began to identify all these different emotions and what
have you. SoH-In the Office of Hispanic AffairsP-Yeah.
H-you said that you travelled around and the reception was varied? On the one hand you talk
aboutP-Yeah uhH-this one in Arkansas that didn’t really know that there were any MexicansP-Oklahoma and Arkansas.
H-Yeah.
P-In Arkansas they didn’t even have an Office for Hispanic Affairs, there was a priest there,
Robert Rios, Robert Riverra, I don’t know, and he was just the only Mexican American priest in
that diocese. So he had all the titles that there were forH-Who did you make a report to? When you finished doing your round-the assessment of
everythingP-OK, not knowing exactly how-I would send all my information to Paul Cedillo.
H-Uh huh.
P-Paul Cedillo then put it together and rewrote it or told me how to rewrite it, and to document it
and send it you know.
H-What was your overall picture of the way the Church was serving Mexican AmericansP-Oh itH-Hispanics in district ten?
P-It was devastating. I was so angry because here I-here was the institution I had grown up in,
the one that my grandmother was so devoted to, the one that my parents also just, how could I
say it, tried to follow the commandments and all that. And in a sense we were being betrayed by
the same institution. And I found out, because I went out. My task was to find out where it’s not
happening or where it’s happening. I remember in Oklahoma I went and there were some sisters
and I stayed in a convent and there were some sisters there that they asked to talk to me but onby myself. And then they started telling me about some of the things that were being-not
anything uh-it was oppressive. The priests would tell them what they could do, what they
couldn’t do, and all that kind of stuff, you know? And I was shocked at that. And I remember-I
remember several times going to a parish where they said a certain priest would-there was one
parish, I forget right now what city it was but there was this priest-what was coming out-there
was a lot of Catholics converting over to Protestant churches.
And I remember one lady said, ‘los que, el que los está hacienda protestantes es el padre
católico,’ ‘the one who’s making all these problems is a Catholic priest.’ ‘nomás como el habla
a la gente.’ And I remember that I went to a parish, a mass, and this priest came right on and
said, ‘ah, allí vienen toda la bola de vacas’ He called them all a bunch of cows, come in later,
don’t know when to come in, where to sit, ‘con todos los huerquitos llorones,’ real bad. And I
got up, ‘Oiga, padre, yo no vine a oir quejas, vine a oir la misa’ ‘Y quien es Ud?’ You know,
‘Who are you?’ ‘Después hablo con Ud.’ ‘Vale más’ You know, like, you better. So I waited till
after the church service was over and he, of course, came to me and he started scolding me first
of all for about five minutes. And then I told him, you know, that I represented the bishops, and I
showed him you know my name. And at that time, Pablo had made some little badges that
provided identification for us. So I showed him that, and he calmed down but he was still angry.
So I, again, I was very disillusioned, for lack of a better word, with the system. There was no
structure; there was no office, like for Hispanic Affairs. We had an office for laity in San
Antonio, but we had-even Bishop Flores, I remember him saying, ‘Well, we have too many
Hispanics, we don’t need an Office for Hispanic Affairs,’ because there were too many
Hispanics. ‘We have an office for the laity, which includes everyone.’ So este, that was my
disillusionment.
H-Did you see some things the Church was doing right?
P-Yes.
H-Like what?
P-The religious ordersH-Uh huh.
P-the Jesuits, the Redemptorists-they were really having catechism or catesismo.
H-Yeah.
P-And they were developing lay people. They were having-and they were also-the ones that were
moving the-the movements, the Cursillo movement, the Marriage Encounter movements, there
were certain priests-and the ironic thing is that the majority of the ones that were doing
something were Irish, they were Anglo, and Jesuits, and Franciscans. And there was a few other
orders also but, they were really focused on the community. They were doing things the diocese
had not given permission to. But they were doing those things, and those were the things that
really got me excited. And then the fact that I recruited, oh I’d say at least fifty to a hundred
priests to come to MACCH-Uh huh.
P-to come to take the mini pastoral, and they would come, you know.
H-Oh so you went after-you went to MACC and then in your role, haha, as director you went out
recruiting for MACC?
P-Well my office was at MACC.
H-Oh I see.
P-The office was held there at MACC.
H-Uh huh.
P-So I was involved in the whole unfolding of MACCH-Uh huh.
P-and then I came in and gave reports of what was happeningH-Uh huh.
P-in those different places. I got to where I was part of the mini pastoral.
H-Uh huh.
P-And mine was region ten, where I talked about, regionH-Uh huh.
P-and then we started getting Rogelio Mondríguez would come in-and that was the other thing,
the diocese. We had Rogelio Mondríguez who was the one for the Midwest I think. Then we had
a guy, he was from Chile, the guy who was in New York, then there was Mario Parerrez, Cuban,
there was-in other words, I was the only Mexican AmericanH-Uh huh.
P-in a state that was predominately Mexican American, we had a few…..
H-OK. That’s good.
P-OK.