On Easter Sunday 1966, César Chávez and a cadre of renegade priests, nuns, rabbis, and Protestant ministers celebrated ecumenical “mass” on the steps of California’s state capitol building in Sacramento for a crowd of ten thousand revolutionaries. When Chávez entered the capitol, he was leading several hundred “pilgrims” who had embarked on what they deemed a “peregrination,” or pilgrimage, both in the spirit of “penance” and as a “revolution.” In effect, his entrance set the path for Chicana/o civil rights: the movement to liberate Mexican Americans from the persistent effects of colonialism would have a spiritual grounding that was based largely – though not exclusively – in reimagined Catholic ideals, symbols, and doctrine. But, in addition, a reimagined Mesoamerican fantasy and both Protestant liberalism and Pentecostalism informed and shaped Chicano power. Yet by far it was Catholicism that loaded the cultural grab bag for Latinas/os who waged postcolonial liberation struggles across the Americas.

The annals of American history record a conflicted relationship between Chicanas/os and the Catholic Church, characterized by the dual impulses toward resistance and affirmation whereby, ironically, even the discourses of opposition are indelibly stamped by a Catholic moral imagination and worldview uncontainable within the boundaries of the catechism alone. Chávez and other Latino political leaders deployed Christian – especially Catholic – narratives and symbols as a sometimes ironic strategy to gain moral terrain, begging the question of the extent to which Chicanismo was then and now a religious movement itself.