Like Your Abuelos: Vernacular Belief, Tradition, and Change within Three GenerationsNew Event

Join us for the next installment in our "No More Than A Page" series. This series gives an opportunity for faculty and advanced graduate students to receive feedback on their research in process. Presenters provide attendees with a one-page summary of their current research and attendees engage in a lively discussion. 

This installment will feature Ciara Bernal, a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Studies. 

This paper explores vernacular religious belief and traditionalization as an integrated process that impacts the practices, beliefs, and stories of a family across three generations. Looking specifically at Mexican Catholicism, this paper explores how changing definitions of what it means to be "religious" can demonstrate how people understand religion and their own practices. In this case, these definitions point back to the oldest generation in the family, depicting religious belief and practice as a tradition that is passed down and changed within each generation. 

Like Your Abuelos: Vernacular Belief, Tradition, and Change within Three Generations 

This presentation is based on a chapter of my MA thesis that examines the ways in which my grandparents and two generations of their descendants define “being religious” and their own personal belief. I hope to rework the chapter for publication as an article. In this chapter I expanded on elements of vernacular religion within the private sphere of spiritual life. I analyzed the ways belief practices and personal belief have changed through the generations of my family. I incorporated work on tradition as a process to demonstrate the ways in which religious belief and practice have been passed down in my family through a meaningful process of tradition. I attempt a (fe)minist interpretation of my female relatives use and interaction with religion, where they’re centered as the driving force behind their own religious choices (Castañeda-Liles).

Folklorist Dell Hymes describes tradition to be, not an unchanging monolith passed from one generation to the next, but a process that involves the intention of doing tradition. Hymes’ term, “traditionalize” describes the seemingly universal need of any group of people, to create, maintain, and pass on certain aspects of their culture. The need to “traditionalize” is a human need and one we can find in nearly all aspects of human life (1975).  I use folklorist Leonard Primiano’s concept of “vernacular religion” defined as, “religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it” (1995: 44). Primiano explains that “the process of religious belief refers to the complex linkage of acquisition and formation of beliefs which is always accomplished by the conscious and unconscious negotiations of and between believers” (1995:44). I utilized the concept “(Fe)minism,” [“fe en mi mismo” (faith in myself)] from religious studies scholar María Del Socorro Castañeda-Liles. She defines (fe)minism as a type of feminist consciousness where agency and devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe intersect. This intersection allows women to develop strategies to transcend “oppressive situations and limiting belief systems” (2018:214). Through personal reinterpretation of religious doctrine and practices, women center themselves as powerful within a patriarchal religious tradition.

My grandparents both agreed that being religious meant having your sacraments, being baptized and confirmed, and praying to the saints. However, Bo’s (my grandfather) description of being religious started before he was aware of it and reflects an enculturation into Catholicism, beginning with his grandmother. My Abuela (grandmother) relates being religious to being a full member of the Catholic church, meaning having attained sacraments, attending mass, and performing prayer. Bo’s prayer practice is informed by official modes of religion, he prays to saints that priests have instructed him to pray to. My Grandmother prays to saints she’s had an experience with, either through healing, divine intervention, or miraculously receiving a prayer card. Their daughter (my aunt), Georgina recalled an expectation of being a good Catholic girl and lived up to those expectations without ever remembering her parents instructing her to do so. My aunt raised both her kids within the church. She currently doesn’t attend mass, but considers herself religious and prays daily, directly to God.  My grandparent’s son (my father), Bill, stepped away from religion after feeling like he spent so much of his young life in it and did not raise his kids in any religion. He considers himself a “non-practicing Christian.” My cousin Ariana (the first grandchild), plans on having her kids attain their sacraments because of the social aspect of religion and the difficultly not having sacraments can cause in the future (marriage within the church, becoming God Parents). Her family doesn’t attend mass, but they’re believers. 

In my interviews with my family members, my grandparents came up in each definition of “being religious” (direct quotes will be shared in my presentation). Prayer, another practice linked to Abuela, as a practice of religiosity and belief was prevalent in our interviews as well. Each descending generation is less involved in Catholicism then the previous, but each shapes their definition of “religious” and “belief” through my grandparents and the practices we’ve witnessed through them. 

This event is free, open to the public and welcoming to everyone. Co-hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion, the Department of Comparative Studies and the Humanities Institute.