??Gracias a la vida!

Cowboys toil in dust and grime in an old beer commercial, bringing in a herd of cattle from the range. Only when the last calf has been corralled, roped, and branded does the foreman shout, "Miller time!" In American culture, celebration has to be earned. You celebrate if you finish the job. People often wonder then why Mexican Americans can be so happy when they often have so little to celebrate.

Father Daniel Gerard Groody, C.S.C. was struck by this he interviewed immigrants in the Coachella Valley for a recently completed doctorate in theology. He discovered that the ability to celebrate life in the face of struggle, disappointment, sickness, or even death is one of the gifts that Mexican Americans bring to the church.

"It is in our fiestas that our legitimate identity and destiny are experienced," says Father Virgil Elizondo, the leading Mexican American theologian. "They are not just parties. They are the joyful, spontaneous, and collective celebrations of what has already begun in us, even if it is not recognized by others or verbalized even by ourselves.... In the fiestas, we rise above our daily living experiences of death to experience life beyond death." No matter how difficult it is, life is to be lived, appreciated, celebrated.

Hope and loyalty

Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez observes that Mexican Americans do not lose hope in God or in the conviction to create a more just and humane world. One senses that kind of hope in many Masses in Spanish: the excitement, the palpable devotion, the emotion in the singing, and an all-pervading sense of community.

Such a parish is Sacred Heart in Othello, a farming community in central Washington State. In 1998 when I visited there, the church was filled to overflowing for its two Sunday Masses in Spanish. There were old faces and middle-aged faces, but the majority were young couples with children. Father Heliodoro Lucatero, the pastor--himself an immigrant from Mexico, like most of his parishioners--says: "They have a lot of vitality." In a society where couples often avoid having children because they fear what the future will bring, the children are their vote of confidence that God will not abandon them.

"There are many Baptisms in Spanish each month, very sporadically one in English," Lucatero says. "Since I came here [in 1996] I have not had a single wedding in English, but I am always witnessing weddings in Spanish."

Loyalty is another enduring value of Mexican Americans, Elizondo says. "In many U.S. Catholic parishes, my people were made to sit in the rear of the church or barred from entering at all. It was not uncommon to be told, `Go to the Mexican church. This is not your church.' Pastors and others often made us feel like dirty and unwanted foreigners. That we remained in the church has to be a tribute to the very deep faith of our people and our acceptance of the human sinfulness of our church."

Historian Carey McWilliams has written: "Waves and still more waves have passed over the Spanish-speaking people, but they are still as firmly rooted in the Southwest as a forest of Joshua trees." And they are similarly rooted in the church. No other ethnic group has remained so steadfast. Even now, despite inroads in recent years by Pentecostal and evangelical churches, 65 percent are loyal to the faith of their fathers and mothers.

Gracias, Guadalupe

At Tepeyac in Mexico City, one can see pilgrims with bloody knees inching forward on the plaza toward the entrance of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The scene proclaims the strong penitential spirit of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

New Mexico has a lay society called Los Penitentes, much criticized by outsiders for its extreme penance in the past. But the late Fray Angelico Chavez, a Franciscan who studied Los Penitentes, wrote: "We New Mexicans are all penitentes in some way, through blood origins and landscape and a long history of suffering."

For a few years in the 1980s, I accompanied people who walked a 120-mile

Lenten pilgrimage to the shrine at Chimayo, New Mexico, famous for miraculous healing. Hundreds of pilgrims converged on the shrine from the north, south, east, and west. They trudged up valleys, climbed hills and mountains, and crossed barren plains. After the first day, blisters covered the feet of many, but they persevered through the five-day march.

The ability to acknowledge sins and the willingness to atone for them are other marks of Mexican American religiosity.

It would be difficult to find a people more devoted to the Mother of God than Mexican Americans--especially, of course, to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Elizondo calls her one of the most important living symbols of the Catholicism of the Americas.

"If Our Lady of Guadalupe had not appeared, the collective struggles of the Mexican people to find meaning in their chaotic existence would have created her," Elizondo writes. "The cultural clash of 16th-century Spain and Mexico was reconciled in the brown Lady of Tepeyac in a way no other symbol can rival. In her, the new mestizo race, born of the violent encounter between Europe and indigenous America, finds its meaning, uniqueness, and unity. Guadalupe is the key to understanding the Christianity of the New World and the Christian consciousness of the Mexican Americans in the United States."

The future is mestizo

Of course, the Mexican Americans' greatest gift--and the one least appreciated--is their mestizo character. As the U.S. Census Bureau points out, Hispanics can be of any race and, most often, they are a mix of several. Unfortunately, in a society--and even in a church--where being white is considered the desirable norm, to be mestizo is seen as a curse rather than a blessing. But because of who they are, Mexican Americans have the opportunity and mission to help build a new society that will not be riven with the divisions of the current one.

Mexican Americans bring many other gifts to the church. In his book The Buried Mirror (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes writes that Hispanic Americans offer not only Catholicism "but something more like a deep sense of the sacred, a recognition that the world is holy, which is probably the oldest and deepest certitude of the Amerindian world."

Then there is the care and respect for elders. "In a basically oral culture, the old are the ones who remember stories, who have a store of memory," Fuentes writes. He adds that one can almost say that when an old person dies, a whole library dies, too.

Finally, Hispanics bring the gift of commitment to family, struggling to keep it together, in Fuentes' words, "perhaps not avoiding poverty but certainly avoiding a lonely poverty. The family is regarded as the hearth, the sustaining warmth. It is almost a political party, the parliament of the social microcosm, and the security net in times of trouble. And when have times not been troubled?"

MOISES SANDOVAL, longtime editor of Maryknoll and Revista Maryknoll magazines.