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Political Padre: Raymundo Chávez Vázquez and Illegal Immigration

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García Alonzo — herself a Mexican-American from the Rio Grande Valley — has struggled with many of her brethren over the changes at Santa Teresa. "The longtime Hispanics felt marginalized by Father Raymundo at first," she says. "The church has been around since the 1940s and these people feel as American as apple pie. Some have been around for four generations and feel like they own the church."

Many of the old-timers have left Santa Teresa for other parishes. Bryan's Catholic churches were originally organized along national or ethnic lines. Santa Teresa is the town's only traditionally Hispanic church, but many of the Tejanos now attend the traditionally Italian church, St. Anthony's, or the Polish and Czech church, St. Joseph's. Gloria Quintero estimates that some 300 people have left the church because of Father Raymundo.

Some of the people who have left the church declined to comment on the record about why they left. Many families are split, with some members continuing to stick it out. Off the record, they cite a perceived hostility on the part of Father Raymundo toward Hispanics who've lost their Spanish. Others, like Quintero, have stayed but made it clear that they want to see changes.

One of the main objections to Father Raymundo stems from his activism on immigration. García Alonzo helped start a branch of the Catholic Church's Justice for Immigrants Campaign at Santa Teresa shortly after the priest arrived. The campaign works for comprehensive immigration reform, emphasizing the legalization of undocumented workers already here. Father Raymundo admits it's not a popular position and the campaign has caused him some problems. "People think it's politics," he says. "It's not politics. It's social justice — the application of the word of God to the problems of the people."

But people like Quintero don't understand the priest's activism. "If they don't like the way things are running here, maybe they should go back to Mexico," she says. "Mexico wouldn't change its laws for us."

Like many other parishioners, García Alonzo wasn't too involved in the church before Father Raymundo arrived. She says that she and her husband went to the church on and off through the years, but it wasn't their home parish.

Like other parishioners, she was disgusted by the behavior of the previous priest, Victor Robles. His demeanor towards immigrants was condescending. "He would raise his voice at the immigrants like they were little children," she says.

By all accounts, Robles ran the church as if it were his own personal fiefdom. The oldest — and perhaps most powerful — church group at Santa Teresa is a group of Hispanic ladies known as the Guadalupanas. The Guadalupanas do charity work and sell religious artifacts. They also wield power behind the scenes. There are three women named Mary in the Guadalupanas, and each one of them has a story to tell about Father Robles. Each one claims he mistreated them and stole money from the church when he thought they weren't looking.

Still, it was 14 years before Father Robles was ousted from the church. The bishop called for an audit and discovered that the priest had been skimming money from a fund collected during weddings and funerals, to pay his credit card bills. In 2004, he was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to reimburse the Church for $110,000.
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The English mass at 10 a.m. on Sundays is barely half full these days, and Father Raymundo often relies on an English-speaking deacon to deliver the homily. It's pretty standard fare for a mass. Stand, sit, kneel, take communion.

Two hours later, however, the scene at the church changes dramatically. The 12:30 Spanish mass is overflowing with immigrants. Some are vaqueros who hold their stiff cowboy hats in their hands during the service. There are young mothers whose kids roll around on the floor while they try to catch a glimpse of the handsome priest. All are in rapt attention as Father Raymundo orchestrates the mass.

It's standing room only in the lobby and in the halls leading to church offices. Approximately 1,500 people are crammed into a space meant for hundreds fewer. When it comes time to kneel, a group of kids in oversized T-shirts and baggy jeans with spiky, dyed hair finds a little space outside a hall leading to the bathroom. They cross themselves and bow their heads as Father Raymundo leads the congregation in prayer.

During the homily — the sermon — Father Raymundo steps down from the pulpit, carrying an open Bible. He starts to preach, applying Bible verses to troubled relationships, problems on the job and topics such as domestic violence and gender roles. He walks up and down the aisle, working the crowd and feeding off its energy. Like an evangelical preacher, he can thunder his message one minute and then change to a whisper to emphasize a particular point.

After mass, Father Raymundo stands in his white robes near the street in the sweltering central Texas sun. As the church­goers file out, he patiently blesses the objects they bring to him. They crowd around him like he's a star quarterback who's just won a big game.

In a sense, Father Raymundo wasn't that different from any other Mexican immigrant when he arrived in the United States seven years ago. He was a young man on his own who barely spoke a word of English. ("My English is still broken," he admits in Spanish, which he still prefers for interviews.)

At the time, he didn't know much about politics, immigration laws or the deep racial divisions in Texas. He only knew he wanted to preach the Word of God in his native Spanish. "I didn't want to come here, to be perfectly honest," he says. "I love my country. I love my family. I always imagined myself as a priest on a Mexican ranch, ministering to rural people."

In a country deeply divided between rich and poor, Father Raymundo grew up in a large, middle-class household in the central Mexican town of Celaya. His father was a farmer who also ran a successful taxi business in the city. Celaya didn't have the rampant violence and drug trade of many Mexican cities, but the stark division between the haves and have-nots made an early impression on him.

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