“Martial Ritual and Transnational Migration.” A reflection by Valentina Napolitano.

Unique yet similar stories constellate the embodied experience of the devotion of the Lord of the Miracles across the world. Many years ago a ‘troublesome’ fellow Peruvian was standing by at the annual procession in Rome, dressed casually. The man was asked on the spot by the capataz (the head of the procession) to join in carrying the Lord of the Miracles; this because some of the carriers were at their wits’ end, balancing the heavy sedan (anda) supporting the image. Facing the procession of the Brotherhood in their purple garments, the Peruvian hesitated to take his place among them. Afraid to carry Him, he felt indigno (unworthy) of carrying the Lord because of his history of petty thefts. But again the capataz called him in, and urged him to carry the sedan with the others, even without wearing a proper vestment. Finally, the man joined in and he wept throughout the whole procession, his face changed, his body ‘gave in’ to the Lord. From then on, he became part of the Brotherhood, leaving his ‘problems’ and his habitual thieving behind. The Lord ‘had changed’ him, and he became digno; he could from then on hold down a job and help his family back in Peru.

There is a clearly a proliferation of different civil and religious Latin American migrant associations in Los Angeles, yet for many men and women belonging to the Brotherhood of the Señor de Los Milagros is often about a different form of being altogether, in association. It is not just an opportunity to be and share with others a common faith, but a cherished way to ­­­ estar bien con uno mismo (be well with oneself). When you wear the garments, el hábito, and touch the Lord’s vestments, when you finally carry the Crucifix, the Lord helps you in your life. Though to understand this ‘being together’ we need to go beyond the analytics of a study of religious movements, toward a study of the movement of the religious through history, time and place[i] and to better grasp the complexities of the post-Vatican II strengths and weakness of the priestly role of mediation in the Catholic Church. As elsewhere, in the Archdioceses of Los Angeles the Catholic Church has stressed the importance of the involvement of the laity in the processes of catechism, rituals and evangelization. This shift has opened new possibilities of engagement, but also new problems concerning the role of lay leadership.  So on the one hand carrying the sedan of the Lord of the Miracles reflects affects of shame and dignity in the process of migration, on the other it also rehearses a Catholic, embodied regime of martial and exclusive investment with power. The obsessive, almost marshal air of order and discipline apparent in this lay, Peruvian based Catholic organization provides a complex expression of precisely the kinds of problems that this shift cultivation of lay leadership entails.

Moreover, if, as Pope Francis has recently suggested in his trip in Paraguay, we cannot be forced to accept immigrants yet “no one can tell us not to accept and embrace the lives of our brothers and sisters”, these religions in movements are clearly a field of ethical and aesthetic politics of struggle over territorial state/Church sovereignty. Tensions around transnational, ritual aesthetics such as in the Señor de Los Milagros are indeed about the power shift between laity and cleric, but they are also about an ethical renegotiation of spatial sovereignty. Hence the Brotherhood of the Lord of the Miracles needs to be understood as a ritual, aesthetic form that signals a larger ethical politics on immigration that cannot stop at a rehearsed and ‘clearly defined’ division between the Church and the State. Ethical and marshal ritual politics may be in a nutshell a complexity worth studying through the Lord of the Miracles in Los Angeles.

[i] Napolitano, Valentina (2015) Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church. New York: Fordham UP.