Ivan Illich's Politics Of Carnival: A Priest In Puerto Rican Ny

[Era Might]

Good article about a hero of mine and his central role during the great migration of Puerto Ricans to New York in the 1950s. Article is written by a professor at Christendom College.

 

 

Cosmopolitan, urbane, and theologically orthodox, in Rome Illich found himself being groomed for service in the Vatican diplomatic corps. He decided instead to go to New York City. Stories circulated that he went to New York on a dare from the American seminarians; for all his intelligence and erudition, they teased, Illich would never survive in a tough, urban American parish. Illich himself later insisted that he came to America primarily to flee a career in the Vatican bureaucracy. In 1951, while studying in Rome, he received an invitation to postdoctoral study in medieval philosophy at Princeton University.

 

As a condition for the freedom to pursue his studies, Illich accepted an assignment to Incarnation parish, a historically Irish-American enclave in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Illich quickly discovered that his assignment had placed him at the center of the single most significant ethno-demographic upheaval in postwar America: the massive influx of Puerto Rican immigrants into New York that would come to be known as the Great Migration. Between 1946 and 1964 over half a million Puerto Ricans came to New York.

 

But while the American clergy tried to incorporate Puerto Ricans into the Church according to models of assimilation developed through the pastoral care of earlier European immigrant groups, Illich looked to the indigenous traditions of Puerto Rican Catholicism as the basis for an alternative not simply to Americanization, but to modernization in general.

 

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In the spring of 1961, Illich introduced himself to Bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo with the pronouncement: “I would like to start, under your auspices, a center of de-Yankeefication.” Bishop Mendez Arceo enthusiastically embraced Illich’s project, which would become the “Center of Intercultural Documentation,” or CIDOC.

 

This rather inelegant title belies the institute’s dynamic role as a center for radical thinking in the 1960s. Initially conceived as another intercultural training center for priests, the CIDOC quickly became a clearing-house for a wide range of countercultural thinkers searching for alternatives to modern industrial society.

 

http://solidarityhall.org/ivan-illichs-politics-of-carnival/

Edited March 7, 2013 by Era Might