Dominican Girls Join the Puerto Rican Hijas De María: New and Old Devotions at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Parish, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, 1970s

In the 1970s, the Irish Catholic parish Our Lady of Lourdes in Jamaica Plain, MA became La Lourdes, the new home of a recent wave of Puerto Rican and Dominican migrants. Although these new communities shared Catholicism, Spanish language, the neighborhood, and their poverty, they were also quite different from one another: the Puerto Ricans, US citizens, the Dominicans, ilegales; the Puerto Ricans, from a rural interior, the Dominicans, from cities. In many ways, the story La Lourdes follows the arc that has been sketched by scholars of American religion; immigration streams from Central America and the Caribbean entered the urban American Catholic parish by way of the church basement and the neighborhood. La Lourdes slowly added Spanish-language Masses to its Sunday schedule and Puerto Rican and Dominican devotions to the liturgical calendar. It also schooled its new members in a distinctively American Catholicism anchored in parish events, sacraments, and the parish hall. What does this story of Dominican girls joining a Puerto Rican devotional society in an Irish parish add to this narrative? Immigrants also brought devotions and practices that bulked up the distinctly parish-centered American Catholicism. La Lourdes in the 1970s also provides the occasion to examine how multiple, simultaneous migration streams interacted with each other in the context of American Catholic parishes and how immigrants became Americans. Finally, this is a history that first surfaced as family stories. It provides the occasion to ask, what can family history bring to historical scholarship?