Creating Social Identities through Doctrina Narratives

This study describes narrative activity in a doctrina class (children's religious education class in Spanish) composed ofMexican immigrants at a Catholic parish in Los Angeles. During the telling ofthe narrative ofthe apparition ofNuestra Senora de Guadalupe (Our Lady ofGuadalupe) doctrina students and their teacher collaboratively construct a multi- plicity of identities in an ongoing narrative version. These past and present identities are represented as Mexican, de aqui (from here), and dark-skinned against the backdrop ofthe description ofan oppressive colonial past in Mexico. The paper compares a doctrina class with a racially mixed religious education class conducted in English (catechism) at the same parish to llustrate differences in the way social identities are created in both classes. This study describes how teachers and students in doctrina class (a religious education class in Spanish) composed ofMexican immigrants at a Catholic parish in Los Angeles construct social identities in the course of telling the narrative of the apparition ofNuestra Senora de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe). During the telling of this narrative, doctrina teachers at the parish of St. Paul' employ several discursive and interactional resources to represent a multiplicity of identi- ties within a coherent collective narrative, establishing in this way links to tradi- tional Mexican world views. Like narratives of personal experience, this tradi- tional narrative organizes collective experience in a temporal continuum, extend- ing past experience into the present (Heidegger, 1962; Ricoeur 1985/1988; Polkinghorne, 1988; Bruner, 1990; Brockelman, 1992; Ochs, 1994; Ochs& Capps,