Blaming the Stranger: Parishes Must Resist the Myth of the Latino Threat

Americans appreciate order. We stand in tidy lines as children at school; exits along the interstate highways have sequential numbers; people stop for red lights in the middle of nowhere or in the middle of the night. Perhaps, to be more accurate, we fear and resent disorder. I remember hiking through a shopping mall in Guadalajara with a priest from the United States who was flustered by how difficult it was to find the movie theater. Where were the mall maps so common in the United States? At the Jesuit university where I teach, I remind students that, faced with cultural differences, human beings frequently make moral judgments. Nothing provokes such judgments among Americans like perceived disorder. My priest friend did not wonder about the logic of a Mexican mall but declared dismissively that Mexico itself was a disorganized mess. Unfortunately, our moral disdain for disorder often appears in concert with broader expressions of bias or prejudice.