Anything but Aleluyas: From Madera, CA to East LA
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Tracing the Impact of Non-Catholic Religions on the Historic Chicano Civil Rights Struggle Part One: by Felipe E. Agredano, MTS & Milca Montañez-Vizcarra, MA, The Apostolic Archives of the Americas In 1954, along the dusty Madera, California fields surrounding a little home church, a young Catholic organizer with Saul Alinsky’s Community Service Organization (CSO) worked alongside the town’s Pentecostals. “In that little Madera church,” he recollected two decades later, “I observed everything … useful in organizing.” Cesar Chávez recalled in his autobiography La Causa , “Although there were no more than twelve men and women, there was more spirit there than when I went to mass where there were two hundred.” Chávez also remembered how the power of music and singing impressed him: “I think that’s where I got the idea of singing at the meetings. That was one of the first things we did when I started the Union. And it was hard for me because I can’t carry a tune.” Chávez