a research question

[dragonlady7]

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a friend offline is looking for Black and Brown Catholics for a portrait series, and is stumped as for how to find them. He’s exhausted his local connections (he is himself a member of the local Latinx community) and is looking for people beyond his personal network, as part of a really big project he’s doing that’s beyond the scope of this question.

I know how to find churches, but how do you find out which churches serve specific congregations?? 

I assume you can just kind of… look up churches and … figure out… what neighborhoods… they serve? But how do you tell what ethnicity/race a neighborhood is? Literally I have no idea how you know that.

My only lead so far is that you could find out what languages they offer services in.

We Northern whites are so segregated that when I asked my dude, raised as part of a very active Catholic family, he said “I literally didn’t know there were any non-white Catholic congregations.” Like… zero awareness. And that’s how it is, with whites from segregated places: we literally just don’t realize we’re missing anything. I pointed out that Latin America is overwhelmingly Catholic, and he genuinely did not know that. Twelve years of Catholic school and he did not know that.
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Comments

[dine]

yeah, churches offering Spanish-language masses would be a starting place. depending on the size of a community, there likely is a part of town that's historically been minority, which longer-term residents would likely be able to identify. but that means asking where the black (or whatever) population lives, which may not the best approach.

[unicornduke]

I've seen churches around that have Spanish names and offer Spanish language masses and appeal to the local Latinx population, I'm assuming most of them are Catholic, but I have no idea. I'm sure most of the major cities have them, it's just that they might not be super noticeable. I can't say off hand where I've seen them though other than two in rural MD that I remember.

I want to say there was a Korean church in State College, but I couldn't tell you if it was Catholic or not.

[mosylu]

I don't know how much help this is but my parish is very, very black and brown due to being in a Southwestern city that's also a first stop for refugees, mostly from Africa. I believe a lot of refugees get sponsored by Catholic orgs. Maybe check in with some refugee orgs where they are?

Language may not be helpful in this case because there are a LOT of different languages represented in the folks who come here.

[oracne]

My colleague pointed me here: http://officeforblackcatholicsadphila.org/

[dragonlady7]

Oh fantastic! Thanks!