Baquedano-López -- Creating social identities through doctrina narrative
Creating Social Identities through Doctrina Narratives
Overview
Patricia Baquedano-López's study examines how teachers and students in a doctrina class (religious education in Spanish) at a Catholic parish in Los Angeles construct social identities through the narrative of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe).
Doctrina teachers use discursive and interactional resources to represent multiple identities within a collective narrative, linking them to traditional Mexican world views.
The narrative organizes collective experience in a temporal continuum, connecting past experiences to the present.
Narrating the Collectivity
Narratives relate events, stances, and dispositions toward those events.
Narratives shape experience and explain past, present, and possible experiences.
Collaborative narratives are co-told and designed with audience input, addressing present and future concerns.
Stories of personal experience evoke present emotions for both narrator and audience.
Collective narratives organize diversity within a group and can express resistance to dominant narratives.
Doctrina narratives create explanations for the social worlds of teachers and students as a community with past experiences of oppression.
Narrated events influence ongoing class discussions, showing how past experiences shape the present.
Traditional religious narratives affirm and contest the community's past, present, and possible stories.
The Narrative of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe
The narrative is widely present in Los Angeles with a large Mexican population.
It tells the story of Juan Diego, a Mexican peasant who had a vision of the Virgin Mary at Mount Tepeyac in 1531.
The Virgin appeared as an Aztec, speaking in Nahuatl, and asked for a shrine to be built in her honor.
She aimed to restore dignity and hope to native people oppressed by foreign colonizers.
Juan Diego spent 17 years repeating her message of hope and liberation.
Millions of Native Americans converted to Christianity because of this message.
While the main story remains constant, details are elaborated upon in different versions.
Teachers emphasize certain events in doctrina classes, maintaining the message that a Mexican Indian was chosen as the recipient of an important message.
Versions are based on sixteenth-century texts in Nahuatl and Spanish.
Poole (1995) argues that manipulations of the narrative have served to politically define and redefine Mexican identity.
Doctrina narrative practices support Poole's conclusion as neither the Nahuatl nor the Spanish written text versions are mentioned during doctrina instruction; instead, a particular local version emerges from collaborative narrative activity.
Language Socialization in Religious Institutions
Socialization is the process of becoming a competent member of society by internalizing norms, roles, and values.
Language socialization involves socialization through language and socialization to use language.
The study focuses on discourse and interaction in doctrina classes.
A child's first exposure to literacy can occur in churches.
Churches reinforce socialization practices learned at home.
Bible lessons socialize children to formal registers of language and cultural norms.
Immigrant groups use the church as a link to their culture.
Doctrina is a culturally significant space for language and religious instruction.
Teachers link students' present experiences to those evoked in the narrative of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.
Language Socialization at Doctrina
Doctrina instruction dates back to the Spanish conquest, conducted in native languages in colonial Mexico.
The term "doctrina" was used to describe entire towns of newly converted indigenous groups.
In 1680, Castillian Spanish was declared the language of doctrina instruction to enforce the colonizers' language, which extended Spanish use to other aspects of public life.
In 1770, a Spanish royal decree mandated the teaching of Castillian in Mexico to eliminate native languages.
Religious instruction socializes children to religious tenets and dominant languages.
Religious Instruction at St. Paul's
Catholic parishes with Spanish-speaking Latino members offer doctrina and religious services in Spanish.
St Paul's Catholic church began offering doctrina classes in 1979 as a parallel to catechism classes in English.
Spanish is used because it is considered the "language of the heart."
Children are socialized to use Spanish for religious practice.
In April 1996, the parish council voted to eliminate doctrina because it fostered an image of separate parishes within a single religious unit.
Poor race relations and intolerance towards Spanish-speaking practices were cited as reasons.
English is being instituted as the language of instruction.
The decision echoes the 1680 mandate in Mexquitic, replacing Nahuatl with Spanish.
Catechism
Religious instruction at St Paul's occurs on Saturday mornings in the classrooms of St Paul's Elementary School.
Approximately 150 children participate.
Doctrina is locally managed and community-oriented, blending religious and cultural practice.
Catechism follows a uniform curriculum focused on teaching Catholic precepts.
Doctrina
Student ages range from 6-15, mostly from working-class families attending public schools.
Children are bilingual in Spanish and English, with some more competent in English.
Most are recent immigrants from Mexico, with a few US-born Latinos.
Teachers are of Mexican descent, monolingual Spanish speakers, and long-time residents of Los Angeles.
All interaction is in Spanish, including religious services.
Catechism vs. Doctrina
English catechism classes meet before doctrina, limiting interaction between the groups.
Catechism students represent various ethnic backgrounds.
Latino children in catechism are often second- and third-generation immigrants more proficient in English.
Children's ages range from 6-9, a younger population than doctrina.
Catechism students generally come from a higher socioeconomic level.
Catechism teachers are European American and conduct classes in English.
Data Base
Data collected from video and audio recordings of doctrina and catechism classes, interviews, field notes, and conversations from September 1994 to May 1996.
The doctrina class comprised 42 students, taught by Teresa, a monolingual Spanish speaker from Mexico.
The catechism class had 15 students, taught by Nancy, a monolingual English speaker from Los Angeles.
The study analyzes excerpts from the narrative of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Teresa's class, illustrating the construction of identities of dark-skinned Mexicans with a history of oppression.
A catechism excerpt demonstrates a different ideology about Our Lady of Guadalupe and ethnicity.
Constructing Social Identities through Doctrina Narratives
Narratives are collaboratively told and socially organized, with participants taking roles as teller and listener.
Telling the narrative of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe serves as a locus of identity construction.
Classroom interaction encourages identification with the place of the apparition and the Virgin Mary.
Narratives describe colonial Mexico as a setting of past oppression, reflecting the lives of doctrina children as ethnic minorities in the United States.
Narration leads to questions about the students' lives.
Teresa's teaching contextualizes the narrative, relating it to the students' experiences through pauses, questions, repetitions, predication, and temporal dynamics.
Narrative Construction of Mexican Identity
Teresa and her class collaboratively construct a Mexican identity by situating the story in colonial Mexico.
She determines how many students are from Mexico, including them as part of the narrative.
The activity is affiliative, allowing students not born in Mexico to claim participation through their parents' heritage.
Example (1) illustrates this process:
Teresa begins by describing the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Mexico: "Hace muchos años que se apareció la Santísima Virgen de Guadalupe en el cerro del Tepeyac, en la capital de México."
She asks, "¿Quiénes son de México?" (Who is from Mexico?), and students raise their hands.
Teresa acknowledges those from Mexico and then asks, "¿Quiénes somos de México?" (How many of us are from Mexico?), including herself.
Carlos, a student presumably not from Mexico, states, "Mis pa- mi madres son de México" (My fa- my mothers are from Mexico).
Teresa responds, "A-Oh ↑ sí" (Oh yes), including Carlos in the collective identity because of his parents' origin.
The interaction socializes children to identify as Mexican, distinguishing between those "de México" (from Mexico) and those "de aquí" (from here, the United States).
The narrative connects the past (the apparition of the Virgin Mary) to the present (the students in the class).
Narrative Construction of Oppression
A history of oppression in colonial times is discursively constructed.
The class collectively recounts its colonial history.
Example (2) illustrates how temporal dynamics in Spanish, particularly the imperfective aspect, guide the class through a historical revisitation of colonial Mexico.
The imperfective aspect (-ía-, -aba suffixes) portrays actions in progress, creating a vivid description of oppressive acts by Spanish conquistadores.
Specific phrases highlight the oppression:
"En México había mucha opresión por los españoles" (In Mexico there was a lot of oppression by the Spaniards).
"Que a-oprimían mucho al indígena" (Who oppressed the Indians a lot).
"Querían tener sometidos a la gente más pobre" (They wanted to have subjugated the poorest people).
"La trabajaban mucho" (They worked them hard).
The switch to past tense with "ésto no le pareció a la Virgen" (this didn't seem [right] to the Virgin) signals the Virgin Mary's intervention.
The grammatical resources make the description of Mexico's colonial setting more vivid and affiliative.
The unfolding of oppressive events after the class identifies as Mexican is a powerful means of affiliating with that past.
The teacher quizzes students on the acts that motivated the Virgin Mary's appearance.
Example (3) shows this emphasis:
Teresa asks, "¿Y por qué se quiso aparecer la Virgen en México?" (And why did the Virgin want to appear in Mexico?).
Enrique responds, "Para cuidar a México" (To take care of Mexico).
Teresa reformulates it as "Para rescatar a los indígenas" (To rescue the Indians) and adds, "De la opresión de los españoles" (From the oppression of the Spaniards).
The class identifies as Mexican in the present and as Indian in terms of the oppressive past.
Narrative Construction of Skin Color
Teresa describes the color of the Virgin Mary's skin, establishing two skin colors for two groups of people.
Example (4) shows how a switch from the narrated past to the moment of the telling creates a collective identity based on skin color.
Ethnic identity at doctrina is based on skin color.
Teresa explains that Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is "morenita como nosotros" (a little dark like us), including the doctrina class in a collectivity of dark-skinned peoples.
She contrasts the Virgin of Guadalupe with the Virgin of Carmen, who is white and the patroness of Spain.
The description emphasizes that the Virgin of Guadalupe
Patricia Baquedano-López argues that social identities are constructed through the narrative of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in a doctrina class at a Catholic parish in Los Angeles. Teachers use this narrative to link multiple identities to traditional Mexican world views, organizing collective experience and expressing resistance to dominant narratives. The materials used include video and audio recordings of doctrina and catechism classes, interviews, field notes, and conversations collected from September 1994 to May 1996. The study analyzes excerpts from these recordings, focusing on classroom interaction and narrative construction to illustrate how identities of dark-skinned Mexicans with a history of oppression are formed.