Content area
Full Text
Feliz Cumpleanos, Barbie doll! This doll celebrates the time-honored Hispanic tradition of Quinceanera, which celebrates a girl's special 15th birthday. Doll comes with tiny presents and a picture frame. Available as Hispanic or Caucasian doll. Suggested Retail: $14.99. Available in May. (2001 Dolls: New Barbie(R) Doll Releases1)
It endures as the best-known metaphor for the United States: America is a melting pot to which people from diverse backgrounds come and meld into Americans. In this process of melding or assimilating, though, America's ethnic groups often lose their histories, customs, and languages-indeed, their very cultures and identities. This loss occurs, in part, because America as a host culture or dominant culture modifies its ethnic groups' religious traditions. Mindful of this phenomenon, I spent three years studying one American ethnic group and its religious practices: In 1996-971 worked full time at a large Hispanic Catholic church in San Antonio, Texas, and for the next two years I taught the predominantly Mexican-- American or Chicano students in that city's Catholic high schools. Throughout the study, I conducted a survey of my students' views and observed and talked with Latino Americans of all ages in the Hispanic or Latino-American neighborhoods where I lived, worked, and worshipped. In these settings, I witnessed the evolving spirituality of many Latino Americans as a result of their acculturation as Americans, particularly concerning la quinceanera,2 one prominent Latino socioreligious tradition that, according to Michele Salcedo, is gaining popularity in the United States.3
A Catholic term used in this essay may call for definition: sacramentals. "Sacramentals are associated with or imitate the Church's official rituals .... They include religious signs, symbols, public and private devotions, prayers, gestures, rituals, music, images, and natural or made objects .... In themselves they may not be religious .... They become sacramentals and, therefore, sacred, in their religious purpose and use."4 With this term in mind, we may investigate America as "spiritual benefactor"-a term I use ironically because a number of "beneficiaries" object to some "bequests," and because some other "bequests" actually harm the "beneficiaries."
Erich S. Gruen has introduced this "benefactor/beneficiary" metaphor to represent the power that a host culture wields over its immigrants and their descendents:
... the tracing of cultural influences from one society to another ......