NEWS FEATURE: Hispanic Catholics Flourish in the Heart of Dixie

c. 2000 Religion News Service DALTON, Ga. _ The preferred language is Spanish, with four masses in the language every weekend compared to three in English. The pastor is bilingual, the associate Mexican. Somewhere near Los Angeles? San Antonio, maybe? No, Dalton, Ga., deep in the heart of Dixie. The parish is St. Joseph’s in […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

DALTON, Ga. _ The preferred language is Spanish, with four masses in the language every weekend compared to three in English. The pastor is bilingual, the associate Mexican. Somewhere near Los Angeles? San Antonio, maybe? No, Dalton, Ga., deep in the heart of Dixie.

The parish is St. Joseph’s in Dalton, about 90 miles north of Atlanta. Faced with a burgeoning Hispanic population, St. Joseph’s is nearing completion of a new facility on the outskirts of town costing $4.5 million, according to architect and building committee chair Mary Herd.


The new 30,000 square-foot facility is two-and-a-half times bigger than the existing one downtown, where Hispanic latecomers have to watch mass on closed-circuit TV in an overflow upstairs.

The new facility is just part of an effort to meet the challenge of North Georgia’s quick conversion into a Hispanic hub. “Georgia is a new immigrant population,” explained Rafael Sanhueza-Bazaes, executive director of Dalton’s non-profit Centro Latino.

With maybe two or three Hispanic families two decades ago, the major influx began about five years back, Sanhueza-Bazaes said, adding, “nobody was prepared.”

The present church was built in 1957, when St. Joseph’s had between 150 and 200 families, said the church’s pastor, the Rev. Bill Hoffman. About 1,500 are now registered in the parish, with around 1,000 Hispanic parishioners.

“We have a lot more around here than what we have registrations for,” Hoffman added.

Hoffman and others familiar with Dalton’s Hispanic community say jobs have brought throngs of Hispanics to north Georgia. Known as the “carpet capital of the world,” Dalton’s carpet mills and other employers seem insatiably hungry for workers.

“They just are always looking for additional people to hire,” Hoffman said. Sanhueza-Bazaes even boasted that if a thousand people showed up for jobs, he could place them in a week. Centro Latino helps Hispanics adjust to the local culture as well as serving as an information advocacy center for the Hispanic population.


Still awaiting the results of the 2000 census, Sanhueza-Bazaes cites a 1997 University of Georgia study that put Dalton’s Whitfield County Hispanic population at 46,222. But he estimates the population as high as 55,000. Sanhueza-Bazaes said the county school system is 45 percent Hispanic and that Dalton has 130 Hispanic-owned businesses. There are three local Spanish-language newspapers.

The ethnic transformation of St. Joseph’s has brought more than outgrown facilities. With a Hispanic spirituality fond of religious celebrations, Good Friday processions in Dalton have turned into major events attended by thousands, Hoffman said.

And the cultural contrast takes less dramatic forms. The way children behave at mass shows differences between traditional Southern parenting and Hispanic approaches to family. The commotion of little ones unnoticed by Hispanic worshippers, Hoffman said, “drives the Anglos really into orbit.”

The Rev. Abel Guerrero, St. Joseph’s new associate pastor, signals a linguistic divide between newcomers and natives. Guerrero also observed that a work ethic favoring weekend hours differed from a more traditional Latin American timetable that guaranteed a chance to attend mass on Sunday.

Parishioners sometimes”work with exaggerated schedules,”he said, adding this sometimes distances them from the church.

Sanhueza-Bazaes believes the Hispanic growth in Dalton will continue. While immigrants still come directly from Mexico and Central America, he sees a new trend in Hispanics moving from other places in the United States, drawn to north Georgia by its abundant jobs.

“Here in Dalton a person can live better than in other states,” said St. Joseph member Amado Barragan, who moved from New York. Barragan has lived in the area a year and a half and knows people from a variety of places in the United States, including California. Rent is Dalton is reasonable, he said, compared to the “incredibly high” housing costs of the northeast.


While the old St. Joseph’s is wedged downtown, the new church lies on a nearly 20 acre spread beside a peaceful reservoir to the north of Dalton. The old building is a sharply triangular red brick structure, its chalet-like roof pointing up like a rocket ready for lift-off. Wanting “something that was churchy,” planners for the new building secured the services of an architecture professor from the University of Notre Dame, Hoffman said.

Building committee chair Mary Herd described the new church as “very classical.” The soft-orange brick of the traditional rectangular design overlooks the reservoir, the emerald water of the lake itself ringed with thick tall trees. Latin phrases mark three arches on the facade of the church, which lies perpendicular to the new parish hall.

Three sets of windows provide a visual echo to the arches, with the Latin “porta caeli” _ “gate of heaven” _ of the third arch inscribed beneath the reflection of Georgia clouds in the window panes above.

Alonso Martinez, a painter who has worked on the church for about a year, is impressed with the structure. “It’s bigger in everything,” Martinez said, comparing the new building to the old. A native of Nayarit, Mexico, Martinez now attends St. Joseph’s.

Church secretary Angelina Forde, a transplant from Brooklyn, believes the new church will provide a welcome accommodation for the parish’s growth. A native of the Caribbean island of Curacao and trilingual in English, Spanish, and Curacao’s Papiamento, Forde embodies north Georgia’s newfound multi-ethnic identity.

Referring to her fellow Spanish-speaking parishioners, Forde said,”I think they will feel at home”in the new church.


KRE END PARKS

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