Faith in action

This thesis is a case study of the Catholic Church's unprecedented involvement in the Immigrant Rights Movement in Los Angeles during the past three decades. Using interviews with religious and community leaders, individual and organizational archive searches, and participant observation this study critically examines the role of the Church in the movement for comprehensive immigration legislation. The thesis shows how the Church's hierarchic infrastructure and its religious values influence its strategies in the struggle for immigration reform. I find that the Catholic Church attempted to influence immigration policy in two ways. First, the Church targeted policy makers directly, advocating for immigrant rights and utilizing its federated infrastructure to enhance its political voice by calling on religious and lay leadership to lobby their respective legislators directly. Second, the Church targeted its membership directly, reaching out to them to participate in political activities by offering a Catholic assessment of immigrant rights and organizing actions in which parishioners could participate to indirectly influence policy makers. The Catholic Church was not coopted by the Immigrant Rights Movement, rather it was allied to the movement, participating independently or through coalitions. This dissertation adds empirically and theoretically to the social movement and immigrant and ethnic political incorporation fields of study. In exploring the Catholic Church's activities to "stand with" unauthorized immigrants, I expand the immigrant political incorporation model to include organizational advocacy and contentious politics as alternative methods for marginalized groups to articulate their interests and have those interests represented in the policy arena. In assessing the Catholic Church's involvement in the struggle for immigrant rights, I propose an alternative model of how religious institutions participate in social movements that links religious values with activity mediated through organizational structure.