Narrating Community in Doctrina Classes

While narrative focuses on particular protagonists and events, narrative also situates tellers and their audiences within a web of historical and cultural expectations, ideologies, and meanings, more broadly. As such, narrative creates shared understandings and community among those participating in narrative activity. Moreover, the narrative process extends beyond the boundaries of the here and now to embrace people and places in a cultural past. This article examines the religious narrative accounts of the apparition of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe told in children’s religious education classes called doctrina at a Catholic parish in Los Angeles. The children that attend these classes are of Mexican descent and their lessons are taught in Spanish. The article analyzes the linguistic and interactional means through which narrative renditions of the story of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe construct Mexican identity. The narrative renditions tell the story of the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Tepeyac, near Mexico City, in the year 1531, thirteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire to the Spanish conquest. These diasporic narrative accounts transcend time and space, as they continue to be told by Mexican Catholics at places beyond the geopolitical borders of Mexico. Moreover, these narrative tellings are instrumental for positioning teachers and students in a postcolonial moment that revisits the hierarchies of Mexico’s colonial regime vis-à-vis their current experiences as immigrants in Los Angeles.