I was 7 years old the first time I put on the vestments. White surplice over red cassock, the fabric stiff and foreign against skin that was more accustomed to sweat and South Texas dirt. I had been born on East Hackberry Avenue in the McAllen labor camps. I was delivered at home, not in a hospital. The world I came from smelled of my mother’s handmade flour tortillas and arroz con pollo with little salted shrimp rehydrating in the rice, of honeysuckle and pomegranates growing wild in the back alley, of dust devils spinning in the summer heat. My father drove a GMC truck and hauled oranges for a produce warehouse called Griffin & Brand. We were farmworker people. We were poor. And on Sunday mornings, I carried the cross.
I served at that altar through baptism, catechism, confirmation, and Communion. I believed what I was taught. I rang the bells at the elevation of the host and meant it. But even then, even as a child who did not yet have the language for what he was seeing, I watched my community from that altar and I wondered. The families in those pews—farmworkers, migrants, the working poor of South Texas—came every Sunday carrying burdens the Church preached about but did very little to lift. The suffering around me was concrete. The poverty was concrete. The Church’s response, as best as I could tell, was to pass the collection plate and promise a better world somewhere else.
