This story explores an intervention conducted in a Catholic parish community in New York City. The intervention, conducted by the author and a Jesuit priest, focused on issues of unity and diversity among the various Chinese immigrant subgroups in the parish (primarily Cantonese- and Mandarin-speakers). Issues of class, power, and a history of colonialism in the Catholic Church are explored as central to the relations among culturally diverse Chinese American community members and between the members and the practitioners and the church authority. The author especially focuses on how the dynamics that played out in the intervention reflected wider issues of economics, labor practices, and political elitism in the wider Chinatown community. A central part of the author's argument is about power relationships between this parish community and Chinatown and how these power relationships are embedded within broader racial and economic oppression within the United States.
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Notes
The distinction between Chinese and Chinese American is important because it moves us away from the stereotype of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners (Said, 1978; Tung, 2000). In this paper, the term Chinese Americans will be used to describe the members of this parish referring to both the recently arrived Chinese immigrants and more assimilated Chinese parishioners. Therefore, the term Chinese American will be used to indicate that members of this population exist along various points of the process of acculturation to U.S. society.
Several studies describe frameworks for levels of acculturation (Berry, 1992; Hong, 1989; Hong & Ham, 2001; Sue, 1989); though these vary somewhat, the process has often been described along a continuum moving from immersion in one's traditional culture through a bicultural or “dualistic” orientation to immersion in or accommodation to the host culture. Current conceptualizations of acculturation, however, are based on the bicultural/multicultural model that allows for a consideration of immersion in both the culture-of-origin and the host culture. Accordingly, immersion in the host culture does not necessarily mean a loss in the culture-of-origin (Chun, Organista & Marin, 2003).
Enactment, as we use the term, describes system-level dynamics or interaction patterns (familial, community, and societal) as they are played out among individuals or groups (Borg, 2003). Enactment refers to the behavioral playing out, in interaction between and among individuals and groups, of community- and society-level dynamics that are shaped by the beliefs, taboos, prohibitions, desires, and expectations specific to given cultures, and set up the implicit rules and regulations, the “do’s” and the “don’ts,” of interaction.
This is a pseudonym, as are all the names in this paper except for Dr. Borg. We have followed ethical guidelines for the protection of research participants and confidentiality of the clients. Our procedures have been reviewed and approved by the board of directors of the Applied Research Center of the William Alanson White Institute, as well as by the pastor and parish council of Ascension Church. However, upon discussion of this proposal, all of those who reviewed it (most specifically the pastor and the parish council) indicated that they feel that it is acceptable to specify the geographical location of the parish—New York City. All identifying information of individuals has been masked.
This paper is written in the third person plural (i.e., we), reflecting that Dr. Gately (also a pseudonym) participated in writing this paper, including the formulation of many of the observations and interpretations to follow. However, Father Gately has declined second authorship on this paper, feeling that it would bring him into conflict with his loyalties to both his own order the members of the parish.
Although this economic factor, no doubt, impacted significantly upon the relationships between the two groups, this level of reflection was virtually absent in all of the many encounters that we participated in. In hindsight, it is striking that neither consultant ever raised these wider issues in the context of the intervention.
At the time that the project groups were conducted, we discussed possible effects related to the fact that members of the project group seemed to have self-selected partly based on being English-speaking.
Because many of the recent immigrants were “illegal aliens,” it also seemed that a dynamic was at play regarding covert fears among the undocumented individuals about the possibility of being reported to INS by their “legal” counterparts. This also seemed to feed into the power hierarchy between the recent immigrants and the established immigrant members (as will be discussed throughout this study).
The fact that the pastor's position in Ascension had been threatened was not revealed to the parish general membership until after it had passed.
Kwong challenges what he sees as Zhou's overly optimistic view of how the established members of Chinatown deal with the newer immigrants. He challenges their willingness to let go of and share their hard-won resources (e.g., foreign capital, real estate, their elite status) as well as the newer immigrants capacity to tolerate and accommodate to the harsh labor/economic conditions based on their “cultural characteristics” or the compensatory benefits of the ethnic enclave community (Kwong, 1996, especially Chapter 10).
Virilio and Lotringer (1997, p. 91) have described this dynamic as “endocolonization,” whereby individuals unknowingly identify with oppressive forces and consequently colonize their own communities with aspects of the oppressor's value system.
For a more thorough evaluation of Asian cultural characteristics vis-a-vis Western cultural characteristics, see Kim-Ju and Liem (2003), who suggest that ethnic self-awareness has different meanings for European Americans and Asian Americans and for Asian Americans with different ethnic orientations.
This style of parish leadership was part of the organizational model that was challenged and found to be ineffective during the Vatican II Council in the 1960s. Vatican II set in motion a progressive movement in the Catholic Church that sought to empower the laity. However, with its very survival being threatened the Catholic Church has increasingly reverted to older and more authoritarian organizational models (Cozzens, 2002).
Father Gately's dual role of both being an intervention consultant and rendering pastoral services to parishioners raises important questions about its effect on the intervention itself. We wondered how this impacted their view of Dr. Borg as well. For example, parishioners had difficulty seeing Dr. Borg as anything other than a church authority, often calling him “Father Borg.” We can speculate that this might have impacted their comfort—increases as well as decreases—with being candid in the project group.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author would like to thank Jennifer McCarroll, Eve Golden, and Jon Lindemann for their invaluable contributions to this piece.
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Borg, M.B. Engaging Diversity's Underbelly: A Story from an Immigrant Parish Community. Am J Community Psychol 37, 191–201 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-006-9014-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-006-9014-y