“Two Churches in One Building”: Holy Cross Catholic Church, Latino Immigration, and New Geographies of Resistance, 1988–1997

“Two Churches in One Building” contextualizes a Latino walkout in Durham, North Carolina, from a historically Black Catholic church in 1996. Holy Cross Catholic Church, like so many other spaces of social interaction throughout the US South, became a critical site of contestation and resistance as southerners reacted to the arrival of Latino immigrants. This chapter shows that while the walkout was chronicled publicly in terms of conflict between two racialized groups, accounts ignored the pervasiveness of white institutions and their leaders who established the foundations for such tensions to arise. Moreover, though the Latino parishioners were viewed as a homogeneous “Hispanic” group, this chapter also demonstrates that many were in fact Indigenous Mexican immigrants who recognized the prominence of “Mexicanness” in the 1980s and 1990s US South and asserted that identity over indigeneity as a way to exercise power in a local struggle for space and belonging.