EDITION 90

AUGUST 2008

The Religions of Mazatlan

By Enrique Vega Ayala
Official

The original sins

There is extensive proof that the first inhabitants of the port of Mazatlan showed little interest in building churches or in giving the dead Christian burials. On March 14, 1792 authorities first decided to place permanent guards to oversee the port; however, the first church, the Temple of San Jose, was only erected in 1842, a half century later.

Until then, Mazatlan´s faithful belonged to the parish of the Presidio, or Pueblo of Mazatlan, today known as Villa Union. The Municipal Historical Archive contains testaments of the parish priests, who were in charge of the spiritual needs of the port´s residents, that reveal a population that was not particularly religious, or at least not particularly Catholic. The priests describe the inhabitants of the period as people of poor faith. With indignation and anguish, they informed their superiors of the locals´ numerous spiritual deficiencies: they buried their dead on the beach instead of in sacred ground, they didn´t baptize their children or consecrate their marriages, they didn´t celebrate the Catholic feast days, and only few attended the occasional masses offered from a portable altar in a open lot in the middle of the incipient hamlet.

Of course, when analyzing parish correspondence we need to consider the characteristics of a good part of the original inhabitants of the port. Most men were adventurers, who perhaps called themselves merchants but were really smugglers. Furthermore, they came from different nations; they probably were not Catholics and did not even practice their own religions. What´s more, the first demographic statistics suggest that a large number of single women shared living spaces with other women who were not their relatives. Most were registered as "washing women," which is paradoxical since water was so scarce that it would have been rather difficult to sustain a business washing other people´s clothes.

Such a relaxed ambience of the town, which lived practically on the margins of the law and the habitual formalisms of civic coexistence, could hardly have engendered a socialization fit for religious severity.

Ecumenicalism of the nineteenth century

The consolidation and expansion of the town did little to modify these liberal habits of sociability; they perhaps became more tenuous as time passed, as the empire of laws expanded, and as the population itself increased. The early customs certainly left their mark and were passed from generation to generation in the form of religious tolerance. In his 1877 Historical, Geographic, and Statistical Compendium of the State of Sinaloa, Eustaquio Buelna noted that: "In accordance with the Reform Laws, there is religious tolerance in the state; however, the Catholic faith predominates. Mazatlan has a large number of followers of other religions though they have not established any temple at all."

In effect, the social relations in Mazatlan were not based on religious separation or discrimination. The memories left by long-time foreign residents in the nineteenth century, a well as the accounts written by occasional visitors, suggest a certain gregarious nationalism. In 1864, Ignacio Ramirez "El Nigromante" regarded the "foreign colonies´" lack of integration into the community as an obstacle to the port´s progress. Yet the origin of this atomization seems to have been commercial rather than religious. As long as non-Catholic practices remained in the realm of private life and foreign residents did not openly try to propagate their beliefs, religious tolerance prevailed.

There is telling evidence that religious differences did not pose obstacles to marriage and the formation of family networks. Perhaps the most extreme case comes from the elite, with the union of the Hass and the De la Vega families. According to descendents, Hass, a German Lutheran, was forced to publicly adjure his religion in order to marry Miss De la Vega. The anecdote tells of the derision the Protestant Hass faced. Accounts have him leaving his house dressed in a coarse, hooded robe and riding bareback on a donkey that carried him on an ignominious trip to the church. When he arrived, the church was closed. Inside, the priest asked, "Who knocks at the Lord´s church?" After several wrong answers, Mr. Haas identified himself as an infidel who renounced his heretical beliefs in order to embrace Catholicism. Yet, after all, such penitence was worth it: he married into the De la Vega family, which was among the wealthiest and most prestigious families in Sinaloa.

On the other hand, there are many examples of religious ecumenicalism among the social life of Mazatlan: the existence of a Protestant cemetery next to the Catholic one in the second half of the nineteenth century (even before the secularization of ecclesiastical properties); the advertisements of funeral companies that guaranteed the fulfillment of death rites of any religious belief; the construction and unimpeded functioning of the Congregational Christian Church in 1888; and finally, the organized presence of a Protestant church from 1908 on.

The impact of the creation of a catholic diocese in Mazatlan

During much of the twentieth, as in the nineteenth century, statistically, Mazatlan contained the smallest percentage of Catholics in the state of Sinaloa. According to the censuses of the first half of the twentieth century, the municipality included clearly-identified Protestants, Buddhists, and Jews, in addition to other groups classified simply as followers of "other religions." Mazatlan also had the state´s largest number of residents who declared they did not follow any religion at all.

This situation may well have led the Catholic Church to create the Diocese in Mazatlan in 1958 in order to curb the growing presence of other religions and to avoid the loss of followers in the region. Such was the context in which the first bishop Monsignor Miguel Garcia Franco launched a campaign against the Pacific College, founded in the 1930s and directed by the Congregational Christian Church. Although the campaign did not produce quick results-indeed, the bishop did not slow the school´s educational activities and the campaign was considered a total failure-the tactic did give fruit later. Under the guidance of new bishop, the Catholic Church certainly grew stronger in the port and in the region in general.

The creation of a diocese seminary, new parishes, schools, hospitals, and a more direct and close attention to the spiritual orientation of the faithful clearly has influenced the history of religious affiliation in Mazatlan. Census data from 2000 show that Catholicism in the region is no longer loosing ground but rather has begun to grow.

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Parish church with no square

The San Jose church in 1910

 

 

 

Congregational Cristian Church located on 5 de Mayo street