Abstract
This paper examines how a group of white ethnic, mostly Italian American, Catholics participate in ethno–religious place making in a predominantly Latino church. In light of a growing number of Latino parishioners, white ethnic church members engage in place making activities to ascribe a white ethno–religious identity to place. Drawing on participant observations, interviews, and archival documents, I examine the impetus behind, and strategies used, in making ethno–religious place. I find that place attachment and group threat drive white ethnics to make place. They do so by employing strategies of place making, place marking, and place marketing. The findings point to the importance of using place as a focal point of social analysis and understanding how people make place.
Introduction
In June of 2009, a contingent of mostly third and fourth generation Italian Americans successfully lobbied to have Our Lady of Pompeii Catholic Church 1 become one of the few Marian shrines in the United States. The church is located in Augusta, a suburb situated less than 15 miles outside of a major Midwestern U.S. city with a population of nearly 2.7 million residents, and has served as the center of religious and social life for many Italian American Catholics in the area since its founding in 1903. Although today the majority of parishioners attending weekly religious services at Our Lady of Pompeii are Latino, white ethnics 2 maintain a strong physical and symbolic presence in the church. In 2007, for instance, the front page of the trilingual (English, Spanish, and Italian) church bulletin began to identify Our Lady of Pompeii as the “The Only Italian American Parish” in the local archdiocese. The bulletin is often filled with announcements inviting its readers to join The Our Lady of Pompeii and Holy Name Societies, older parish–based religious organizations that almost died out a generation ago, but have experienced a notable reemergence over the recent years. There has also been a noticeable effort by white ethnic parishioners and church religious organizations to reach out to former and new Italian American Catholic parishioners. Parishioners are regularly encouraged to contact friends and families no longer residing in Augusta to participate in church milestones and attend religious events such as the annual Good Friday procession. Moreover, Italian American Catholic religious societies in the surrounding areas are urged to make the parish “their home.” Of particular significance is the Our Lady of Pompeii Festival (henceforth, “The Feast”), held every July. The Feast is a public demonstration of spiritual devotion to the church patroness and namesake but also serves as yearly reunion between generations of Italian American residents and parishioners. During The Feast, current and former parishioners reunite at the Novena, a nightly church service lasting for 9 days, reciting Catholic prayers in Italian while staring adoringly at the statue of the patroness brought from Italy to Augusta over a century ago. The streets surrounding the church are also turned into a festival ground. Though it is marketed as a religious event, The Feast combines elements of secular Italian and American culture. Italian and American flags fly along light poles while food vendors sell traditional Italian food and monogrammed red, green, and white shirts. Food vendors lean over their booths to embrace friends, many whom are former residents and no longer attend weekly services but only return to, and for, The Feast. In this sense, and despite neighborhood ethnic change, Our Lady of Pompeii Church functions as a social hub to link Augusta's white ethnics to place and across time.
The re–emergence of Italian Catholic ethno–religious organizations and Italian parishioners’ revitalization efforts over the last 10 years have occurred post–Latino neighborhood succession. As older generations of Italian Americans pass away and their children move out of the neighborhood, they are being replaced by Latinos, the majority of whom are first and second generation Mexican and Mexican American families. The Latino population began to grow in the 1980s and by 2000, transitioned into a Latino majority community. By 2010, nearly 70 percent of Augusta's residents were Latino, the majority being of Mexican ancestry (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2010). The second largest group consisted of non–Hispanic whites (22.7 percent), many of whom claimed Italian (11 percent), Polish (4.7 percent), German (3.5 percent), and Irish ancestry (2.5 percent; U.S. Bureau of the Census 2010). These changes are reflected inside the church. Since the 1980s, church leaders have made changes to accommodate Latino newcomers by hiring Spanish speaking priests, adding Spanish language masses, and integrating Mexican ethno–religious cultural symbols and traditions into the church. Today, weekly Sunday morning English and Italian masses fill less than a quarter of the church while the number of Italian Catholic religious societies have dwindled. Those who do attend weekly are white ethnics in their 40s and above, often accompanied by their adult children who have since moved from Augusta but return with grandchildren to visit. On the other hand, Sunday afternoon Spanish masses are filled to capacity. The pews are filled with Latino parishioners while individual late–comers line the back wall of the church. Although church leaders do not officially record parishioners’ racial and ethnic demographics, they estimate that 80 percent of weekly congregants are Latino. Yet, despite demographic changes and their small numbers, white ethnic parishioners remain influential, reflected in routine and collective efforts to codify Our Lady of Pompeii as an Italian American church.
This paper explores how a numerical minority of white ethnics collectively organize to ascribe an Italian American ethno–religious identity despite Latino succession. Specifically, I examine how Italian American Catholic parishioners of Our Lady of Pompeii engage in “place making.” Place making refers to “[t]he process of organizing or re–organizing the key elements of place” (Aguilar–San Juan 2005:43). In doing so, I endeavor to answer two questions. First, what factors drive white ethnics to make place? Second, what branding strategies do white ethnics use to ascribe ethno–religious identity to place? My findings reveal that strong levels of place attachment and group threat drive white ethnics to engage in collective place making. White ethnic parishioners do so through marking and marketing the church as a distinctively Italian Catholic ethno–religious site. Essentially, these factors and processes enable white ethnics to collectively organize to ascribe an ethno–religious identity to an organization.
Background
The general consensus among sociologists is that the entrance of ethnic and racial minorities into predominantly white neighborhoods in the U.S. engenders intergroup conflict (Anderson 1990; Hirsch 1998; Massey and Denton 1993; Rieder 1985). Specifically, white residents often perceive the growing numbers of non–white residents as a threat to neighborhood social and economic well–being (Kefalas 2003), which often results in white disinvestment in neighborhood–based institutions and white flight (Flippen 2001; Wilson and Taub 2006). Yet, in a few instances and despite being a numerical minority, remaining white residents continue to participate in neighborhood organizations. In these cases, neighborhood–based institutions, such as churches, often serve as anchors and links for white ethnics who have since moved and for a minority who remain (Orsi 1985, 1998). For instance, Robert Orsi's work on Harlem's Our Lady of Mount Carmel (1985) and Chicago's Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Churches (1996) describes how former and current white ethnic residents continue to participate in annual church functions long after neighborhood ethnic and racial transition. This suggests that analyzing specific neighborhood–based institutions, and in these cases religious organizations provides a unique vantage point to understand how particular places influence social attachment, investment, and action as U.S. neighborhoods become increasingly diverse.
Yet the significance of places as useful sites for analyzing social life has not been lost on scholars (Borer 2006; Gieryn 2000; Oldenburg 1999; Paulsen 2004). A place, according to Gieryn (2000), refers to a geographically bounded entity, material in form, that holds meaning for people. Thus, places are both material and social constructions that provide a window to examine the relationships between people and the built environment. To date, a number of studies have examined the social aspects of places through the lens of place attachment (Kovacs 2007; Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2004, 1993; Milligan 1998 place character (Paulsen 2004), place meanings (Gustafson 2001; Rabinowitz 2001), and sense of place (Kefalas 2003; Mazumdar et al. 2000). Yet, despite a growing interest in place, “the role of place in shaping social behavior is…uninvestigated” (Paulsen 2004: 246). Specifically, we know less about how and why social actors engage in place making. According to Aguilar–San Juan (2005), place making refers to “[t]he process of organizing or re–organizing the key elements of place” (43). Works that have examined place making have done so through analyzing how people construct territorial boundaries (Shlay and Rosen 2010), counter stigmatized identities (Wakin 2008), and use religion to preserve immigrant community (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009). What these studies uncover is that place making is a collective process in which social actors construct and reconstruct material and symbolic boundaries. However, we know less about the social forces that drive people to make place, or the strategies they draw upon to do so.
By focusing on the role of how social actors engage in place making, I am anchoring my analysis in the urban culturalist theoretical framework (Borer 2006). Rooted in urbanism (Wirth 1938), the urban culturalist approach accentuates the relationships between place and culture. Thus, places are then seen as worthy sites of analysis for which to examine social life. Michael Ian Borer (2006), a proponent of the urban culturalist approach, argues that dominant urban sociological theoretical frameworks such as urban ecology and political economy models underemphasize the relationships between people, place, and culture by explaining culture as a by–product of external forces. This differs from the urban culturalist perspective whereby culture is an independent force that can shape social behavior and drive social action. In addition, by privileging external forces in place making, both urban ecology and political economy frameworks omit the role of ordinary people, or nonelites, in constructing place (Gieryn 2000). As a result, we know less about how ordinary people, in the absence of materialistic or economic motives, engage in place making. The urban culturalist approach addresses this limitation by challenging overly determinist explanations of place making and situating nonelites as agentic actors in creating their social world.
Moreover, the urban culturalist model provides an opportunity to explore the micro–level processes associated with place making. Specifically, it allows us to identify place making through the processes of what I term place marking and place marketing. Place marking refers to the inscription of meaning(s) to a place. Place marking is often a collective effort to highlight the distinctiveness of a place or place character (Paulsen 2004). For instance, nation–states mark a number of historical sites as significant to national history by designating them a protective status. In addition, local governments and residents name streets, public parks, and community centers in honor of residents or to commemorate local history. Place marking often coincides with place marketing, or an effort by individuals and groups to communicate the existence of a particular place to others. Place marketing is done to increase awareness of a place and often aimed to induce patronage (visitation, social investment, and financial contributions) to support place vitality, and is often advertised via public events, flyers, mailers, e–mail, websites, and social media. Thus, the urban culturalist view provides a fruitful starting point from which to examine the processes central to everyday place making and the relationship between people and place.
Methods
This article is based on over four years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Augusta, a suburban town located in a Midwest metropolitan area with a population of just over 25,000 people in 2010 (U.S. Census 2010). The data come from participant observations, formal and informal interviews, and historical archives. Participant observations took place in the church and neighborhood. I attended weekly church functions, organizational meetings, and annual religious events. Church functions included weekly religious services, including English, Spanish, and Italian masses. In addition, I volunteered each Wednesday for 18 months at the church food pantry. I also conducted participant observations of the annual religious events, which included The Feast as well as other public religious events. My constant presence, both as an observer and volunteer, opened up further opportunities to observe various facets of parish life. These opportunities ranged from setting up and breaking down materials for church events to bagging rose petals that would be thrown at the Our Lady of Pompeii statue during The Feast Day procession. I also volunteered for the Our Lady of Pompeii Historical Society to collect information about the church's history for The Feast display. This entailed retrieving newspaper stories about the church (stretching as far back as the late 19th century), to coordinating group visits to the Italian American Collections housed at the University of Illinois Chicago Richard J. Daley Library.
My participation brought me into close contact with parishioners who shared their perspectives with me in formal and informal interviews. I conducted 30 formal interviews with respondents who lived or worked in Augusta for at least five years. My formal interview sample consisted of 12 whites and 18 Latinos between the ages of 18 to 68. The majority of white respondents indicated they had at least one parent of Italian ancestry with a few claiming German, Irish, Lithuanian, or Swedish heritage. Among Latinos, all claimed a Mexican ancestry, the exception being one Puerto Rican woman. All respondents indicated they periodically attended church functions or were members of a parish organization at one time. Though formal interviews allowed me to go in depth with respondents’ perspectives, dozens of informal conversations during observations provided equally rich insights—especially when hearing the perspectives of former parishioners and residents who return to The Feast every July. These conversations, along with observations, were recorded periodically in a notebook whenever I was alone or as soon as I returned to my car. Field notes were then typed up within 24 hours after leaving research sites. These field notes, along with formal interviews, formed the basis of ongoing research memos describing individuals, incidences, patterns, and themes that spoke in some way to my research focus. Writing these memos served both as a form of preliminarily data analyses and as a tool for generating new questions and were routinely revisited after I left the field. Field notes, memos, and transcribed interviews were then uploaded into ATLAS.ti, a qualitative data analysis software computer program. Data analyses proceeded along two stages, the first of which entailed open coding which included a line–by–line analysis of relevant themes and the identification of potential codes. This process generated numerous codes, which were then revised into a new code list. The second stage entailed focused coding whereby the data were recoded and analyzed for relevant themes. Coded data were then retrieved and analyzed, along with memos, for pertinent themes.
Research Site: Augusta and Our Lady of Pompeii Catholic Church
The Village of Augusta was incorporated in 1893. The earliest European inhabitants were of German and Swedish descent, many of whom worked in retail and agriculture. By the early 20th century, and due to its proximity to a large city and railroad stop, Augusta became home to a number of manufacturing and distribution firms, eventually earning itself a moniker as an “industrial suburb” (Harris 2005). Economic growth in the industrial sector drove the need for labor. Heeding the call were working class, first and second generation, white ethnics, and particularly, Lithuanian and Italian Americans. Augusta was especially attractive to Italian American immigrant families to settle. Many were farm laborers in Italy or worked in the agricultural industry in the United States and farming land in Augusta was relatively abundant and affordable to purchase, offering them the opportunity to grow food for personal consumption and commerce. By the first decades of the 20th century, word of opportunities to work and purchase cheap farm land in Augusta spread through primary and secondary social networks, leading to a constant flow of Italians to the area. However, European migration to the United States would eventually come to a trickle with the ratification of the 1924 Immigration act, curbing white ethnic settlement in Augusta Still, and by the 1930s, over half of Augusta's residents were either first (27.5 percent) or second generation (45.7 percent) European Americans.
The Italian American families who settled in Augusta during this period were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. In 1894, a small contingent of Italian American Catholics organized the Our Lady of Pompeii festival, a religious event in honor of a Catholic deity, which would ultimately give rise in 1903 to a church of the same name. The first festival was organized by Ana Marie Emilio, an Italian immigrant woman. According to life–long parishioners, Mrs. Emilio's husband fell gravely ill and she called upon Our Lady of Pompeii to intercede on his behalf. Should his life be spared, Mrs. Emilio promised to hold a yearly festival in honor of the “Blessed Mother.” Her husband recovered, and that following year, Mrs. Emilio raised $5,000 to purchase a statue of Our Lady of Pompeii from Italy for the first festival on her farm in Augusta. The statue still stands today, encased in glass, at the back of Our Lady of Pompeii's chapel.
Our Lady of Pompeii, though not formally designated a national parish by its local Roman Catholic archdiocese, drew a large contingent of Italians and Italian Americans from Augusta and the surrounding area when it opened. Catholic archdiocese officials assigned Italian speaking priests to the parish from a Catholic religious order dedicated to ministering to migrant communities. These Italian priests could identify and communicate with the local population and were well versed in Italian Catholic ethno–religious traditions and devotions. In turn, Italian Catholic immigrants not often well–received in Irish and German Catholic parishes found a place where they could worship in their native language and practice ethnically distinctive forms of Catholicism.
The biggest draw was (and continues to be) The Feast held during the first week in July. The Feast, though a local religious event, eventually grew in terms of participants and activities. By the beginning of the new century, thousands of devoted Italian Catholics from the surrounding areas traveled to The Feast, many in caravans of horse–drawn carts. The focal point of The Feast was the Sunday procession during which the statue of the Madonna was carried on the shoulders of men throughout the streets of Augusta. A 1905 newspaper article 3 noted the fervor and sacrifices of the devoted at the event:
“Ah, the blessed Virgin!” whispered the crowd as the snow white image, surrounded by sparking tapers, was brought forth. With the passionate light of devotions in their eyes, the women who knew well what a dollar meant, elbowed each other to pin paper money to the statue's vestments. The saint seemed to smile down at them, and to bless them for their sacrifice.
Climbing the stairways on their knees, the people laid their offspring upon the glittering altar of the church. Many a baby who had come to the fiesta in its finest dresses, departed with its old clothes on. Mothers who could give nothing else, kneeling among the candles and the incense, stripped their little ones of their fine garments and laid the bright clothes before the Virgins' feet. These garments will be sold some day to purchase a fine robe for Maria.
[…] Some of the trinkets were cheap little things but treasures, nevertheless. One woman, having nothing else to give, laid down her wedding ring. These souvenirs are to be melted so that the lady of Pompeii next year may wear a golden crown.
The Feast became one of the most popular religious events for Italian American Catholics in the area throughout the first three quarters of the 20th century. Local area newspapers estimated that between 2,000 and 15,000 people attended The Feast each year—a significant number during an era of relatively limited transportation options. Still, devoted Italian American Catholics made the trip, some from as far away as the Little Italy neighborhood located in a city fifteen miles away. One 67 –year–old Italian American Feast organizer remembered “the people used to come out with the horse and wagon…and walked here [from the city]” (Area newspaper, July 16, 1983). This man, who named his daughter after the church patroness, went on to say that forty people applied to carry the statue that year. To carry the statue in the procession was seen both as an honor and a sign of penance. Men had to be invited by church leaders to carry the statue. 4 Though some were chosen because of their participation in church organizations, it was not uncommon to auction off an opportunity to carry the statue. In 1904, one man paid $68 (a hefty sum at the time) to carry the statue in the mid–July summer heat (Area newspaper, July 25, 1904). According to one of my respondents, in the 1970s another man paid over $15,000 to church leaders to have the procession re–routed to pass in front of his ailing mother's home. Though only men were allowed to carry the statue in the annual procession, women were in charge of the Madonna's upkeep and often jockeyed with each other for the honor of washing her vestments.
Parishioners’ long–standing devotions were expressed during key Feast anniversaries and church milestones. For the 75th anniversary of The Feast in 1968, the church included information about its history, congratulatory messages from local businesses, and over one hundred pictures of parishioner families in a parish booklet. To mark the parish's 100th anniversary in 1993, the congregation raised thousands of dollars to erect a Centennial Bell “in honor of her many past and present followers.” Milestones also extended beyond anniversaries. To mark its dedication as a Shrine, the parish purchased a bronze commemorative book to be housed at the church. For a donation of $100, people could leave a personalized message or inscribe their family surname in the book. The persistent communal spiritual and material investments by Italian American parishioners relay a deep spiritual connection to the church patroness as well as to others and a shared history.
Between 1930 and 1970, Augusta remained a predominantly white ethnic, and mostly Italian American neighborhood. Though most of the original white ethnic immigrants had passed away, children and grandchildren took their place, remaining in the neighborhood, inheriting their parents' homes, and maintaining local ethnic and cultural traditions. Many second and third generation Italian Americans often worked local industrial and manufacturing jobs while a growing number obtained white collar employment. Whereas white ethnics of German and Swedish descent (the original settlers in the area) were overrepresented in Augusta's government and civic jobs for the first half of the 20th century, by the 1950s Italian American residents had replaced them in positions such as mayor, firefighters, police officers, and street and sanitation workers.
By the end of the 1970s, a small number of Latinos had begun to settle in Augusta. Despite growing trends of deindustrialization in the United States, “The Industrial Suburb” still housed a number of manufacturing, distribution, and transportation firms needing workers. Like the European immigrants before them, first and second generation, working class Mexican Americans migrated to Augusta for employment opportunities in the village and the surrounding area. Coupled with low–cost housing, Augusta became a place where Latino immigrant workers could settle and raise a family. Like the Italian Americans before them, the majority of “newcomers” were Catholic and began attending Our Lady of Pompeii's weekly church services. By the early 1980s, the church began offering Sunday masses in Spanish to accommodate Latino parishioners—the first and only Catholic Church in the area at the time to do so. Church leaders increasingly worked to integrate Latinos into parish and community life by tending to their religious needs. The archdiocese eventually assigned bilingual priests fluent in English and Spanish to the church while clergy incorporated Mexican ethno–religious devotions and traditions. The church began displaying a portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Mexican Catholic ethno–religious portrayal of Jesus Christ's Mother, along the back wall. Placed in front of her portrait were electric candles and a bench where her devotees could kneel and pray. Today, and during Spanish weekly services, her portrait is often brought to the front of the church where passersby often stop and give the sign of the cross after receiving communion. Moreover, church leaders eventually incorporated Mexican Catholic religio–cultural events, such as annual Las Posadas and Via Crucis (Good Friday) processions and holidays like Dias De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead).
How white ethnics, Italian and non–Italian American parishioners alike, viewed these accommodations varies. On the one hand, most acknowledged that the church must adapt to the needs of the “newcomers” in terms of linguistic (hiring Spanish speaking priests and offering Spanish masses) and religio–cultural needs (integrating religious traditions and holidays). In this sense, Our Lady of Pompeii could temporarily be a Latino space. On the other hand, such accommodations have not always been well received by white ethnics when interpreted as challenging normative practices and the church's symbolic identity as an Italian American place. This was the case whenever accommodations were seen as out of place, usurping white ethnic religio–cultural practices, or threatening the church's symbolic Italian American Catholic identity. For instance, priests’ attempts to include Mexican music in The Feast procession, conduct multi–lingual (English/Spanish/Italian) masses during holiday services, as well as integrate Mexican ethno–religious symbols into the chapel were often interpreted by white ethnics as a threat to long established church practices. Hence, accommodations interpreted as either being out of place or infringing on white ethnic ethno–religious identity and practices were met with resistance. This suggests that the church could function as a temporary Latino space so long as Latino practices did not disrupt place–based Italian American ethno–religious practices.
Place Making Mobilizing Factors: Place Attachment and Group Threat
Place Attachment
One primary mobilizing factor behind white ethnic place making was high levels of place attachment. Place attachment refers to “an affective relationship between people and the landscape that goes beyond cognition, preference, and judgment” (Riley 1992: 13). A number of community studies have examined residential attachments to their neighborhoods to varying degrees (Gans [1962] 1982; Hunter 1974; Kefalas 2003; Pattillo–McCoy 1999; Rieder 1985). Though not explicitly examining place attachment (for an exception see Hunter 1974), there is a general consensus that long–term residents have an affinity to the settlements in which they reside. Stronger levels of neighborhood attachment are often associated with higher degrees of neighborhood social organization, or, “the extent to which the residents of a neighborhood are able to maintain effective social control and realize their common goals” (Wilson 1996: 20). The degree of resident attachment is influenced by various factors such as length of residence, the extent of in–neighborhood social ties, and participation in neighborhood voluntary institutions (Hunter 1974). On this last point, those invested in local voluntary institutions, such as civic and religious organizations, are more likely to have stronger ties to the local area. Though the intensity of attachment varies by institutional type (Flippen 2001), this suggests that long–time residents with multiple social ties are more likely to participate in neighborhood social institutions than those who do not exhibit the same characteristics.
Although scholars have identified the role of place attachment in social life (cf. Low and Altman 1992), there is a dearth of research examining how voluntary organizations such as religious sites foster place attachment. Sacred places and religious rituals connect people to place (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 1993). Group narratives passed down through generations, social and material investment in sacred place–based artifacts, and routine pilgrimages foster a stronger sense of religious place attachment (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2004; Orsi 1998). Hence, people imbue religious places with spiritual and social significance. Such has been the case for Catholic Churches in urban areas. Previous studies on urban Catholic churches suggest that many parishioners maintain a strong affinity to these sites, evidenced by repeated participation in religious events across generations (McGreevy 1998; McMahon 1996; Orsi 1985; 1998; Sciorra 1999; Stanger–Ross 2010). Unlike Protestant churches, many early urban Catholic churches were established by a local archdiocese to be territorial parishes for Catholics residing within designated geographical boundaries. For instance, increased migration of white ethnics between the mid–19th and early 20th century to U.S. cities led to an explosive construction of Catholic churches. Buttressed by increasing rates of ethnic and racial segregation, neighborhoods often became ethnically and racially homogenous resulting in the creation of national (or ethnic) churches. In these contexts, neighborhood, ethnic, and religious identities often overlapped (Orsi 1992). For example, Eileen McMahon's (1994) aptly titled work, What Parish Are You From?, described how Chicago's Irish Catholics’ religious and neighborhood identities were often conflated. Further, as Orsi (1998) found in South Chicago, many white ethnic Catholics often retained their parents’ devotions to saints and consistently returned to neighborhood parishes to participate in religious activities despite Mexican American residential succession. Hence, for many white ethnic Catholics, neighborhood attachment and religious place affiliation can be inextricably intertwined and foster a shared place–based identity over generations and a sense of place attachment. As Charlie Gulianni, a white ethnic parishioner, indicated:
As Charlie infers, church life encompassed neighborhood life, linking parish and place. This relationship was solidified through spiritual and social aspects of organizational life. Many have a profound love of the Blessed Mother and it was not unusual for respondents to become visibly emotional when they mentioned her in interviews. During The Feast Day one year, I stood with a group of white residents in front of their home while waiting for the procession and statue to pass. I struck up a conversation with one of them, a woman who looked to be in her early 60s and lived down the street from the church. Like many long time parishioners, she explained her deep devotion to the Blessed Mother. With teary eyes, she expressed how the church patroness helped her cope with the death of her son. Such deep spiritual connections and devotions were visible in parishioners’ symbolic and material investments. Women compete with each other to clean the statue's vestments while men have been said to pay a considerable price to carry the Madonna on The Feast Day. In 2010, after the Feast Day service was televised on a Catholic cable station, one viewer in another state donated $2,000 to the parish in honor of the church patroness.
Strengthening the bonds between people, place, and parish were the social relationships maintained over (and between) generations. Of places, Orum and Chen (2003) write:
Just as individuals come to have a sense of themselves through their connections to places in their lives, so, too, social groups, ranging from families and friends to neighborhoods and communities, develop a powerful sense of affiliation and common identity based upon their connections to places. (12)
Our Lady of Pompeii served as a hub of ritual social activity over the past century for many Italian American residents. It was a place where grandparents first met, children were baptized, and where many planned to hold their funeral. Parishioners from the baby boomer generation reminisced of parish sponsored retreats and dances they attended during their teenage years. Such nostalgia was often reflected in collective efforts to recreate events (a 1950s Sock Hop Dance for instance) or organize an all class reunion for the Our Lady of Pompeii Elementary School, which closed its doors in the late 1990s. Hence, the church as a material site was a locus of activity for Augusta's Italian American Catholic residents. As Gieryn (2002) writes, “Buildings stabilize social life. They give structure to social institutions, durability to social networks, persistence to behavior patterns. What we build solidifies society against time and its incessant forces for change” (35). White ethnics saw the church as a physical structure that housed personally significant elements of material culture. For a century it housed the statue that they, as well as their ancestors, prayed to during their times of need and paraded annually through Augusta's streets every Feast Day. In housing religious artifacts, it created the conditions for ritual social interactions by operating as a social hub and social link. As a social hub, the church facilitated the maintenance of social relationships between members through routine religious and social gatherings. As a social link, it connected current and former Italian parishioners to each other and to a shared past. These conditions fostered the context for the creation of strong social ties and dense social networks that gave rise to a shared group identity and a strong affinity to place.
Thus, and despite the fact that Italian American parishioners are no longer the majority group at Our Lady of Pompeii, it was still described by members, as well as nonmembers, as an “Italian American” church. Andrew Deener (2010) identifies this as collective visibility, or “the construction of internal place attributes” (47). Deener contends “a group that achieves collective visibility becomes intertwined with the identity of the neighborhood, often overshadowing the presence of other groups” (47). This sense of Italianness emanates beyond the church. Italian flags fly on residents’ porches while nonresidents routinely refer to The Feast as “The Italian Feast.” In part, Italian American residents’ collective visibility can be attributed to negative ethnic stereotypes and a history of political corruption and organized crime—something nonresidents would bring up in conversations of Augusta (and often a sensitive topic among life–long residents). Yet, popular social media host pages entitled “Augustans,” “I once lived in Augusta,” and “Fans of the Italian Feast,” which are filled with pictures of residents who have since passed and jovial posts from former residents living in other states who miss the authentic Italian food sold at neighborhood festivals. Such sites serve as a forum for current, former, and nonresidents to connect over a shared history and sentiment. To this end, strong place attachment creates the condition for which people to connect and shore up shared identities.
Group Threat
A second factor driving white ethnic place making was group threat. Demographic changes in Augusta over the last 30 years, driven by white flight, attrition, and a growing Latino population, have heightened some white residents’ concerns about neighborhood stability and well–being. Others held more optimistic and embracing views of neighborhood change. Still, nearly every white resident I interviewed acknowledged the challenges or “growing pains” of a changing community. Within the church, white ethnics perceived that the growing number of Latinos posed a threat in two ways: the first as a threat to long–established ethno–religious practices and second, as a threat to the church's ethno–religious identity. The former refers to the long–established ethno–religious practices and primarily in regard to the content of various functions. For instance, white ethnics were often resistant to integrating Mexican culture into the Sunday Feast procession. Here, Frank, a life–long resident and parishioner, relays an incident regarding one Latina parishioner's attempt to include a mariachi band in the Feast Day procession:
The infusion of Mexican culture into the Feast Day procession incensed Frank, as well as other white ethnics, because, as he put it, it was “not part of our culture.” Thus, though many white ethnics often emphasized that the church was “open” to everyone, actual attempts to integrate non–Italian cultural practices into longstanding church traditions were often met with resistance. For Frank, the issue was resolved when the Mariachi band was put at the end of the procession and, in doing so, was a reaffirmation of the central status of Italian Catholic ethno–religious culture. Further, white ethnics interpreted such attempts to include Latinos into Italian ethno–religious festival traditions as usurping Italians’ symbolic ownership. Here another life–long parishioner, Theresa, describes the tensions between groups:
Group threat theory posits that feelings of threat emerge when a member of one group interprets themselves to be in direct competition with another group over social, economic, and/or political resources (Blalock 1967; Dixon 2006). In his classic work, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Blumer (1958) posited that individual prejudice is linked to group membership. He argued that prejudice arises when members of one group perceive members of another as encroaching upon the former's proprietary claims. Though group ownership claims may be material, they also may convey “what ought to be” (Blumer 1958: 5). In the case of Our Lady of Pompeii, white ethnic parishioners who were actively involved in place–making were adamant the church maintain its Italian American ethno–religious identity and practices. That is not to say that white ethnics were hostile to sharing the church with Latino parishioners. Many did acknowledge the importance of holding Spanish masses, recruiting Spanish speaking priests, and the incorporation of Mexican Catholic ethno–religious cultural events revealing the temporality of the church, at times, as an Italian or Latino space. Yet they were more openly critical about situations in which accommodations bled over into historically white ethnic social spaces. For instance, while white ethnics were fine with the separate weekly Spanish masses, many opposed church leaders’ attempts to conduct bilingual (English/Spanish) and trilingual (English/Spanish/Italian) services for Easter and Christmas. 5 For them, the celebratory masses should always be in English. Hence, the church could be, temporarily, a Mexican space, so long as accommodations for Latinos were not perceived as challenging normative practices or institutionalized normative forms.
The growing number of Latino parishioners also posed a threat to white ethnics’ perception of the church's ethnic identity. This became evident during a meeting I stumbled upon one evening with Frank, a third generation Italian American and life–long resident. Seeing me through the church rectory office window one evening, Frank waved and beckoned me to come inside. The impromptu meeting was set up by Frank and Tom, a parishioner who was also a member of the Our Lady of Pompeii Historical Group. They were joined by two other men and were discussing potential church renovation plans, one of which included adding another chapel onto the building. The chapel, they explained, would be a replica of the original structure built in 1903. When discussing ways to raise funds for the project, Frank mentioned a story of a priest from a neighboring parish who recently visited Our Lady of Pompeii. Given the large Latino population, the priest indicated that he was unaware that parish had a long–standing Italian American population. This disturbed Frank and he informed us that, “This is not a Hispanic church. This is an Italian church with a large Hispanic population.”
Such concerns extended beyond the mere perception of a growing number of Latino parishioners and were more about how their large numbers would alter the ethno–religious identity of the church. In large part, this issue revolved around concerns about the church patroness. One white ethnic parishioner (German American) indicated that rumors circulated within the church that church leaders were going to change the name of the parish to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Mexican Catholic ethno–religious depiction of Jesus's mother. Though he dismissed these rumors, others echoed these concerns in interviews. Gina, for instance, expressed:
I can understand the Hispanics being for Our Lady of Guadalupe, [but] what [we are] saying is this is Our Lady of Pompeii. This is not Our Lady of Guadalupe. People were afraid that they were going to make it more [like Our Lady of Guadalupe]. Our Lady is called so many things. You know, Our Lady of Sorrows? It's the same person with a different name to it. But you know, people feel like this is Our Lady of Pompeii and we want to keep it Our Lady of Pompeii because the blood sweat and tears for those statues in this church going up were pennies, nickels, and dimes from our ancestors.
Here, Gina articulates some of the concerns of white ethnic parishioners: that Latino parishioners harbored intentions to reconstitute the church as a religious place dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Latino parishioners acknowledged and were understanding of these concerns. Yet their interpretations of the situation varied. Some Latino parishioners rejected any attempts to modify events to be more inclusive. One example occurred one year where festival organizers changed The Feast's name, “The Italian Feast of Our Lady of Pompeii” by dropping the “Italian” from the title to be more inclusive of non–Italian attenders (and especially Latino parishioners). As one Latino parishioner, Carlos, remarked:
Here, Carlos is rationalizing why it should be called The “Italian” Feast. He echoes some Italian American parishioners’ resentment over changing the name of The Feast and justifies their claims. Most telling though is that he also acknowledged that the Italians have a valid symbolic claim to label this religious event as a distinctively Italian Catholic ethno–religious function despite the fact they were now a numerical minority not only in the church and neighborhood, but also at the festival. Previous studies on Italian American urban neighborhoods contend that such religious events also convey a sense of territorialism (Orsi 1992; Stanger–Ross 2010). As Stanger–Ross (2010) writes of Italian Catholics in Philadelphia, the religious procession “consciously recalled prewar urban Italian Catholic heritage and the practices that held Italian ethnicity together while proclaiming ownership of city territory” (73). Still, my observations of The Feast during the research period confirmed Carlos's assertion: The majority of those attending the festival carnival were predominantly Latino. Yet, other Latinos were more sensitive regarding how Latinos felt about Italians’ ubiquitous claims of symbolic ownership over the church:
Though Guadalupe and Carlos differ in how they viewed the relevance of place identity for Latino festival attenders and parishioners, they both indicated that Italians conveyed symbolic claim to the church and a major religious function. As Guadalupe indicated, Latino parishioners did see the church “marked” as Italian.
In line with the urban culturalist approach, these findings further point to the importance of identifying and delineating between the forces driving place–making. On the one hand, and in line with the classical urban sociological perspective, place making is often framed as a process that naturally evolves through residential settlement (San Juan–Aguilar 2005). Places emerge anachronistically and are then continuously reconstituted to align with the social and material interests of its consumers. Place making is then often framed as an unintentional and natural process. On the other hand, and in line with the political economy perspectives, places are intentionally made, and particularly so by place elites and shaped by powerful economic interests (Logan and Molotch 1987). Hence, places are intentionally constructed by people and strategically made. To varying degrees, in their responses both Carlos and Guadalupe reflect some elements of the classical urban sociological and political economy perspectives to discuss place identity and ownership. Yet both theoretical perspectives overestimate the roles of external power forces at the expense of underestimating the agency of white ethnics, as ordinary actors and agents in place making. Moreover, the impetus to make place and reaffirm place identity is driven not by group economic interests but by white ethnic place attachment and sense of threat. In what follows, I expand upon how white ethnics go about place making.
Place Making Strategies: Making, Marking, and Marketing
Place Making
Since 2000, there has been a concerted effort by Our Lady of Pompeii's white ethnic parishioners in making place. One way white ethnic parishioners went about making place was to codify the church's institutional identity. Beginning in 2006, parishioners collectively organized to have the church be designated as a Marian shrine. The local archdiocese defines a shrine as “[a] church or other sacred space used by the faithful for pilgrimages.” The decision to make the church a Marian Shrine was announced by an auxiliary Bishop at The Feast in 2006. The announcement was met with much fanfare and support from white ethnic parishioners. Organizers petitioned people to donate gold—much of which came in the form of family heirlooms and at least two parents' wedding rings—to be melted into gold crowns for the statue of the Madonna and baby Jesus she held in her arms. Meanwhile, parishioners sent letters to local archdiocese officials requesting permission for a papal blessing of the crowns. Their efforts paid off, and in May 2009, the head pastor of Our Lady of Pompeii and a contingent of 35 parishioners (all white ethnics, save one Guatemalan) traveled to Rome to watch the Pope bless the statue's crowns. After their return, the church held a coronation ceremony in which the statue was carried on the shoulders of women (the first time in church history that women carried the statue in a procession) to the original church location and the surrounding streets. Before a packed church, the event culminated with the coronation of the Madonna and Child. It is now one of five Marian Shrines in the United States.
Religious organizations inside the church were perceived as central to the social preservation of ethno–religious identities and practices. Over the years, dwindling numbers of participation in religious organizations—The Society of Our Lady of Pompeii, The Holy Name Society, the Woman's Sodality, along with others—were seen by white ethnics as one of the reasons why traditional Italian ethno–religious practices fell to the wayside. Some respondents attributed the decline of organizational participation to a general decrease in religious devotions among parishioners. Others placed more weight on changing demographics. Older generations of white ethnic parishioners died off while younger generations increasingly moved out of the neighborhood. As they did, Mexican residents and parishioners took their place. However, the growing numbers of Latino parishioners did not replenish the ranks of these organizations.
For Frank, Mexican parishioners did not “join” these religious organizations, either because they were not devoted to the church patroness or were unwilling to become members. However, in recent years there have been efforts to resurrect these organizations. One example has been the resurgence of The Society of Our Lady of Pompeii (henceforth, “The Society”). The Society was formed in the early years of the church to manage the religious aspects of The Feast. However, as the demographics of the church shifted, parishioner membership in The Society waned and it eventually ceased to exist. Beginning in 2001, white ethnic parishioners reformed The Society and its membership began to grow. Though The Society's original function was to oversee the religious aspects of The Feasts, it eventually consolidated the jobs of other religious organizations that no longer existed, and thus came to function as an umbrella organization. For instance, The Society began organizing church fundraising events to raise money for nonfestival events. The designation of the church as ethnically Italian, the codification of it as a shrine, and efforts to revive old religious organizations reflect the ways Italian parishioners engaged in place–making.
Place Marking
In making place, white ethnic parishioners symbolically marked its identity and practices as well. This process I label as place marking or the process whereby people ascribe meaning to place. Place markers can take the form of pictures, text, etchings, and architecture. Beginning in 2009, the front page of the church bulletin indicated that it was “The Only Italian American Church” in the area. Though I did not initially notice this insertion, the statement was missing from all the church bulletins prior to 2006. The church's ethno–religious identity as an Italian American religious place can also be seen in the landscape. Four Italian flags fly above the main entrance of the church year round. In front of the building are maroon patio legacy bricks, etched with (mostly Italian) surnames of individuals and families who purchased them through a church fundraiser after the patio was remodeled in 2000. Like the legacy bricks, bronze plaques attached to the Centennial Bell marble, benches, and the church wall bear the names of patrons and Italian American families. Outside the church near the west side entrance, stands a bronze statue of Padre Biaggio, an Italian monk and saint who lived in the 19th century. Dangling from his hands are dozens of Rosaries, put there by the throngs of mostly Italian Americans and other white ethnics who kneel and pray in front of him on any given day. To the casual observer, it was not hard to see the Italian American origins of Our Lady of Pompeii Church made apparent through ubiquitous place markings. Though there was a general consensus that the church was a shared space, and even at times a Latino space, place makings conveyed a proclamation of white ethnic symbolic group ownership of place.
Place Marketing
As a voluntary organization, Our Lady of Pompeii's livelihood is dependent on member participation and contributions. Many of Our Lady of Pompeii's Italian parishioners acknowledged this and sought ways to “reach out” to others to increase the number of Italian Catholics within the church's ranks. They believed that by restoring and cultivating an Italian Catholic ethno–religious identity and cultural practices they would attract former and new devotees. In this way, Italian parishioners engaged in place marketing. Place marketing refers to an explicit action to communicate the existence of a place. The intent of place marketing is to increase awareness of a specific place and in most cases, consumption of place–based amenities and services. One way to accomplish this was to recruit and invite former parishioners to participate in the collective process of place–making. For instance, The Our Lady of Pompeii Historical Society began soliciting current and former parishioners to submit pictures and memorabilia from the old church (leveled in 1967) to be included in The Feast's church historical display the following year. During the weeks leading up to the 2009 Feast, lime green fliers were placed at the back of the church to solicit from parishioners “historical memorabilia of the church, feast, or any parish organizations (past and present).” Announcements were also made after nightly Feast week religious services, asking attendees to “rummage through parents’ basements” for pictures, newspaper clippings, and banners related to the church. The initial drive was seen as a success and culminated in the creation of the 2010 church historical display. The display consisted of 15 bulletin boards bearing photographs, newspaper clippings, and stories related to parish history. Most bulletins were arranged by time period while others were devoted to people, monumental events, and candle houses. Accompanying each board were three poster cards, describing the contents of bulletin boards in English, Italian, and Spanish. However, donated memorabilia extended beyond photographs and clippings. At the end of one Novena, Charlie Gulianni walked me over to the shrinery to show me what he brought: a railing from the old church altar he found in his mother's basement.
White ethnic parishioners also actively recruited new parishioners they saw as bolstering the Italian Catholic ethno–religious identity of Our Lady of Pompeii, noted by explicit attempts to reach out to Italian American Catholic religious organizations and societies from outside the church. Among them were societies devoted to Italian Catholic saints such as Padre Lorenzo and St. Anthony. Over time, these societies and organizations increasingly participated in religious functions at the church. For example, in 2009 I attended a service in honor of San Beniamino, a saint revered by many Italian Catholics. The service, conducted in Italian, was organized by a religious society housed outside the church and consisted mostly of Italian immigrants. The service featured a statue of San Beniamino which was brought over from Italy weeks prior. At the end of the service, half a dozen men carried the statue ceremoniously down the center aisle, toward the rear of the church, and to its official new home: The Our Lady of Pompeii baptistery. 6 Other Italian Catholic religious organizations were also sought out and invited to participate in the church's processions. Like many of Our Lady of Pompeii's parishioners, they constructed their own candle houses and banners and marched alongside other Italian religious organizations during the Good Friday and Feast neighborhood processions. Extending the invitation to other Italian oriented contingents increased event participation while cultivating Italian ethno–religious place traditions.
The tools used by Italian parishioners to codify an Italian American church identity and preserve Italian ritual practices—making, marking, and marketing—revealed a concerted effort to construct a distinctively Italian ethno–religious place. Boyd's (2008) work on the neighborhood revitalization in Bronzeville, a historically Black community in Chicago, reveals how heritage and racial tourism work in overlapping ways to make, mark, and market its historical significance. In place of racial tourism, Italian parishioners worked to make place by encouraging ethno–religious tourism. Like religious pilgrims, ethno–religious tourists seek out sacred spaces to connect spiritually with a place. Yet not all who attend pilgrimage sites are faithful adherents or “believers.” One year at The Feast, I spoke with a former resident who informed me that despite being the only non–Italian, Protestant kid on his block, who never attended a service at Our Lady of Pompeii, he returns to The Feast every year to watch the procession.
Conclusion
Although the majority of Our Lady of Pompeii's parishioners are now Latino, the church maintains its Italian American Catholic identity and practices. My findings reveal how a group claims a place and collectively mobilizes to ascribe symbolic ownership to it. Place attachment and external threats create the conditions that drive social actors to engage in place making. They do so by employing a repertoire of place making strategies aimed at justifying and reinforcing claims to place. However, such claims are not only about who has the right to use a place. White ethnic parishioners understand that Our Lady of Pompeii is a religious institution that is (and should be) open to other groups, and in this case, Latino “newcomers.” Yet there is a prevailing sentiment that place identity needs to be constantly cultivated, place practices saved, and place ownership reiterated. As one Italian American parishioner (Theresa) remarked earlier: “It's our party. You're invited. We just want to throw the party.”
The findings have implications for understanding the relationship between people and place. “Starting from a place, then [emphasis original] moving outwards can yield important findings” (Borer 2006: 181). This means putting place at the center of analysis. Urban culturalists such as Michael Ian Borer (2006) argue that urban sociologists’ overemphasis on urbanization shifts focus away from urbanism and coincidentally the analysis of local people, place, and culture. Borer, as well as others (Firey 1945), call for us to examine “culturally significant” spaces in urban areas through understanding the relationship between place and people's collective memories, sentiment, interactions, and practices.
However, in doing so, we must acknowledge the unique characteristics of places. For urban sociologists, this means understanding the shared core aspects of all places while differentiating between them (Paulsen 2004). Though places—schools, department stores, museums, as well as churches—share some of the same characteristics, they hold different meanings for people. “Places drenched in religious and historic symbolic meanings,” Rabinowitz (2001) writes, “tend to invoke emotions the intensity of which far exceeds those generated by sites and territories of economic, demographic or strategic values” (93). With regards to place making, this suggests that scholars need to consider how various actors make place. As urban culturalists note, it is not only place elites or place professionals who make place but so do ordinary place people. Gieryn (2000) writes:
Places are endlessly made, not just when the powerful pursue their ambitions though brick and mortar, not just when design professional[s] give them form to function, but also when ordinary people extract from continuous and abstract space a bounded, identified, meaningful, named and significant place. (471)
Central to this critique are the types of place makers, “the people, industries, or social formations engaged in place making” (Aguilar San–Juan 2005: 43). Whereas the urban ecological perspective omits the role of powerful external forces and interests in making place, the political economic model overemphasizes the role of elites, or “upstream forces that drive the creation of place with power and wealth” (Gieryn 2000: 468), who also may work jointly with place professionals such as policy makers, developers, and architects, among others. Ordinary people, along with political elites and professionals, can be active in making place (Gieryn 2000).
Race, ethnicity, and religion scholars, too, should address the unique characteristics of place for institutions and groups they study. Though many studies examine the significance of race, ethnicity, and religion in collective action (Davis et al. 2010; Morris 1984), racial attitudes (Emerson and Smith 2000), institutional diversity (Christerson et al. 2005), and immigrant adaptation and incorporation (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Warner and Wittner 1998), there is relatively little research examining these relationships in the context of place. Those that do (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 1993, 2004, 2009) find that some ethnic religious minorities construct sacred spaces in noncongregational places such as homes and gardens. Yet, considering growing diversity in the United States, scholars of race, ethnicity, religion, and immigration should see how place shapes relations within religious congregations.
There are a number of limitations in this study and ways it can be improved. First, my formal interview sample was limited to parishioners who regularly attended church functions and were fluent in English. While I did conduct numerous informal interviews with those who periodically attended services (ranging from monthly to annually) as well as specific events (The Feast), at times I was not able to gain enough rapport to go more in depth on sensitive topics such as racial attitudes and feelings toward institutional changes. Further, my inability to speak fluent Spanish made it difficult to conduct in–depth interviews with Latino, mono–lingual Spanish speakers. As a result, I had to limit formal interviews to Latino respondents who spoke English, all of whom identified as English/Spanish bilingual. Second, an inherent limitation of qualitative research lies in the researcher sacrificing breadth for depth. Although a few studies have examined place making (Aguilar San–Juan 2005) and place attachment (Milligan 1998) using qualitative methods, the findings of this study can be better supported using quantitative measures to examine how place attachment and group threat drive ordinary people to make place. For instance, quantitative researchers can uncover the extent to which levels of place attachment and group threat drive ordinary people to engage in place making processes as well as how age, length of residential status, and racial and ethnic background shapes attitudes and behavior. In doing so, quantitative research can make these findings more generalizable to other contexts, and enable more robust explanations of how people make place.