Urban Borderlands

This chapter begins a constructive response to the question of ecclesial community in difference by turning to St. Mary of the Angels, an urban Catholic parish in Egleston Square, a racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood in Boston’s Roxbury. Through the lens of English- and Spanish-language welcome rituals during Mass announcements and parishioners’ accounts of their arrivals at St. Mary’s, the chapter traces the evolution of parish and neighborhood through the century of local, national, and international migrations that shaped them both. The chapter situates these movements within the larger story of twentieth-century Catholicism in the urban Northeast. The chapter proposes an understanding of the parish as a waystation in an urban borderland, a community whose practices have been shaped by the confluence of cultures, migrations, and histories.