the New Pantagruel

Carnival in New York

by Christopher Shannon

he Puerto Rican Day parade is second only to the St. Patrick’s Day parade as the biggest privately sponsored public event in New York City. One of the earliest expressions of what would come to be known as identity politics, the parade achieved its current prominence in the Puerto Rican community only after supplanting one of the last successful attempts to revive an earlier cultural tradition, that of the fiestas patronales, or the patron saint’s day festival. The story of that transition reflects in microcosm the imposition of a rationalized modern existence on formerly tradition-minded American ethnic minorities.

During the 1950s, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York attempted to reach out to the Puerto Rican immigrants who flooded New York as part of the Great Migration by inaugurating a Fiesta de San Juan in honor of the patron saint of Puerto Rico, St. John the Baptist. The mastermind behind this missionary tactic was Ivan Illich, a Catholic priest who would later gain fame in secular circles for his radical critique of modern capitalist society. Illich saw his countercultural star fade in the late 1970s when the traditionalist basis of his critique of modernity became more apparent. But for those who refuse to accept the nostalgia police’s equation of tradition with fascism, Illich’s early career offers a genuine model for a politics of carnival, one in which symbol, myth, and ritual serve less as tools of resistance than as the vocabulary of an alternative way of life.

Father Ivan Illich arrived in New York City in 1951. Born in Vienna in 1926 to a minor Dalmatian Catholic noble and a Jewish mother, and educated in the highest European tradition, Illich was hardly an immigrant priest in the typical nineteenth-century mold. Still, Illich came of age intellectually at a time in the Church when academic training was more likely to reinforce than subvert orthodoxy. At the University of Salzburg, where he received a doctorate in the philosophy of history, Illich was profoundly shaped by the triumphant medievalism that served as the Church’s official response to modernity in the years prior to the Second Vatican Council. But his study of the history of liturgy led him to develop his own particular view of Catholic antimodernism. Anticipating the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, Illich came to see the decline of ritual—not the moral (i.e., sexual) laxity routinely cited by the clergy in the preconciliar American Church—as the greatest threat to the survival of the faith in the modern world.

Cosmopolitan, urbane, and theologically orthodox, in Rome Illich found himself being groomed for service in the Vatican diplomatic corps. He decided instead to go to New York City. Stories circulated that he went to New York on a dare from the American seminarians; for all his intelligence and erudition, they teased, Illich would never survive in a tough, urban American parish. Illich himself later insisted that he came to America primarily to flee a career in the Vatican bureaucracy. In 1951, while studying in Rome, he received an invitation to postdoctoral study in medieval philosophy at Princeton University. As a condition for the freedom to pursue his studies, Illich accepted an assignment to Incarnation parish, a historically Irish-American enclave in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.

Illich quickly discovered that his assignment had placed him at the center of the single most significant ethno-demographic upheaval in postwar America: the massive influx of Puerto Rican immigrants into New York that would come to be known as the Great Migration. Between 1946 and 1964 over half a million Puerto Ricans came to New York. But while the American clergy tried to incorporate Puerto Ricans into the Church according to models of assimilation developed through the pastoral care of earlier European immigrant groups, Illich looked to the indigenous traditions of Puerto Rican Catholicism as the basis for an alternative not simply to Americanization, but to modernization in general.

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