How have communities of faith confronted displacement and maintained community ties even as they grappled with the loss of local landmarks? From the 1880s through the mid-20^th century, the US Southwest experienced massive demographic changes as Mexican-descent people migrated to cities in the United States such as Los Angeles, San Antonio, Dallas, and Chicago. Many White Americans considered the neighborhoods where migrants settled “undesirable” either because they were in industrial areas, exposing community members to environmental hazards or because they lacked basic community services and permanent housing structures. The urban challenges that Mexican-descent people faced in their efforts to build community were further complicated by the Black-White binary that defined US race relations. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) rendered Mexican-descent people legally White, they continued to be racialized as non-White across the United States.

In the face of extreme racial segregation and race-based violence, Catholic social groups and organizations provided a communal social outlet for Mexican-descent people and opportunities to reclaim their humanity amid racial strife. Many centered their communal building, secular education, and faith through activities held at or sponsored by their local national Catholic parish or parochial school. Over time, these communities experienced generational growth, as subsequent generations continued to maintain their collective ties to the Catholic Church.

As urban renewal projects, White flight, and economic revitalization efforts ignited across Southwestern cities such as El Paso, San Antonio, and Austin, Texas, Mexican and Mexican American Catholic communities faced displacement. State-sponsored initiatives such the inter-state highway system, environmental regulation laws, and urban revitalization projects resulted in the razing of entire neighborhoods and further economic dislocation.

As a result of transformed secular neighborhoods, the role of the Catholic Church as a communal meeting place has changed over the last century. This panel uses three urban case studies in the post-World War II period to answer the following questions: What do the multi-generational Mexican American Catholic communities look like after decades of forced displacement? With a changed secular landscape and parish, how do these ethnic communities maintain ties to their faith communities? How have people of color resisted and confronted state-sponsored projects designed to dislodge their communities from urban spaces? Expanding on the ethno-Catholicism framework of Roberto Treviño, Thomas Tweed, and Timothy Matovina, Ray Oldenburg’s classification of a third place, and Felipe Hinojosa’s use of churches as spaces of Latinx resistance, this panel intends to showcase examples of ethno-Catholic forms of faith through case studies of religious spaces impacted by forced displacement in Austin, Dallas, and El Paso.