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A look into missionary life and the people that are affected by missionaries.
As I kneeled on the cold, concrete floor of the open-air chapel, I wondered, not for the first time, how a nice agnostic girl from western Massachusetts ended up as a Catholic missionary in Mexico. After all, my intellectual parents did everything they could to shelter me from the alleged dangers of organized religion.
Maybe this was my way of rebelling. But instead of leather pants and piercings, I’d donned a broad sombrero of petate (woven palm fronds) and a big wooden cross on a string around my neck.
When I arrived in Oaxaca to teach English, my involvement in the Catholic Church seemed a natural part of my integration into the community, where the infusion of ancient indigenous customs brings the faith colorfully to life.
Through Oaxacan friends I found the Jóvenes Resurreccionistas. Unlike the rest of the country, this group about 40 students and professionals, ages 15-30, doesn’t escape to the beach during the Semana Santa (Holy Week) vacation. Instead, they go forth into the wilderness – in actuality the Sierra Mixteca, about three hours northwest of Oaxaca city - on a mission to bring Holy Week celebrations to isolated indigenous communities.
In the US, the Easter holiday is just a long weekend, most religious significance lost in a tangle of day-glow Easter grass, eggs and bunnies. But in Mexico it’s common for schools and businesses to take off one, or even two weeks for Easter. Every day of Holy Week the streets are full of religious pomp and ceremony: Wednesday commemorates Judas’s betrayal, Thursday is the Last Supper, and finally there’s Good Friday’s gut-wrenching Vía crusis, a step by step reenactment of the passion, which makes Easter Sunday seem almost anticlimactic by comparison.
Due to a shortage of clerics in the Mixtec region, the Church trains select young men to perform services during Holy Week, so that even the most remote communities may participate. The job of the missionary team is to assist the minister in pascual celebrations, teach catechism and organize religious workshop. But the real mission, it quickly became apparent, was to expose us city kids to a simpler way of life.
My team of five missionaries was assigned to the community of Dolores, population 50, a dozen tin-roofed, clapboard shacks strung out along the pine-studded slopes of an eroded valley. A full-sized basketball court roughly marked the center of town. It was surrounded by a cluster of shacks used for communal purposes: a schoolhouse, kitchen, cantina and the municipal agency, which blared announcements in Mixtec language from a loudspeaker on the roof.
The children were the first people we met, materializing out of the rugged landscape to press their eager faces against the windows of the schoolhouse where we were staying. In Dolores you notice right away the scarcity of people between the ages of 15 and 40. Erosion caused by overgrazing (notably during colonial times) has left this traditionally agricultural region with little arable land. People are migrating to the state capital, Mexico City or the US in search of work.
The Mixtec are a reserved people by mainstream Mexican standards, which can come as a big culture shock for Mexican missionaries. The town elders greeted us with warm words and strong handshakes but none of the ecstatic embracing and cheek kissing that are customary in Oaxaca city.
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