Project Verdad and the Presbyterian Border Ministry
***Harmful Content Alert: This story contains outdated and offensive language.***
For more than 50 years, the Presbyterians of Mexico and the United States have partnered in ministry in the US-Mexico border region. Navigating barriers of history, economics, and language, unearthing and redressing racism, church workers in the borderlands continue to labor in serviglesias—servant churches.
In the late 1960s, the towns of Mexico’s northern border rapidly industrialized, drawing millions of people to jobs in the maquiladoras. Cities like Laredo, Nuevo Leon and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua were unequipped to make life bearable for the rural people flooding in. Malnutrition and drug use among children spread. Worse still in the eyes of some pastors, there rose the specter of international Marxism—despite the depredations of Mexican power against poor people in the Guerra sucia. To Presbyterians in the border towns of the USA, these problems cried out for solutions, but traditional mission work—which deployed Anglos southward to mission to a populace of willing subjects—was prohibited by the national church of Mexico. Local rather than national resources and an ethos of accompaniment without domination would take the place of old-style missions in the face of the missionary moratorium.
Today’s Presbyterian Borderlands Ministries, a local joint ministry effort of PC(USA) and INPM churches, is the latest iteration of local border partnerships that date to the late 1960s.
In January 1967, 150 representatives of more than 20 Protestant denominations of the USA and Mexico gathered at different sites in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez as the Consulta Internacional Fronteriza.
A collaborative spirit was in the air, and the first germ of cross-border Presbyterian ministry was in the churches of El Paso. First Presbyterian Church had been one of the hosts of the Consulta, and Meneely Memorial Presbyterian Church was among those who followed up on the event in 1968, calling a young man from Albuquerque to serve as pastor-director of an El Paso Larger Parish, built on joint ministry by Delta and Divine Savior Presbyterian Churches. In a letter from Glenn Bixler of Meneely to Carlos A. Lopez, we see the first hints of collaboration among the UPCUSA, the PCUS, and eventually the IPNM.
By 1972, national-level interest in supporting cross-border mission work led to production of a feasibility study, written for the UPCUSA Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations by a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center. The report recommended funding two staff of the IPNM and the UPCUSA to work jointly in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. Their jobs initially amounted to interpretation and outreach, learning from the people of the cities and the barrios about their needs and reporting back to the affluent churches of El Paso, with the ultimate aim of bridging “the chasm of two cities so interrelated economically but with no human ties.”
It’s strange to think of any of the twin towns of the Mexico-USA border—Nogales and Agua Prieta, the two Laredos—as having “no human ties,” but the phrase encapsulated reality for the oppressed people of the border regions. The 1967 Consulta includes passages by Hugo Flores of Mexico City D.F. on the multiple identity crises and regimes of discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican Americans, deriving from hundreds of years of layered settlements, migrations and transits. These included pre-Anglo settlers of Texas; generations of braceros allowed temporary crossing, “looked upon as poor, idle, drunkards, robbers, gamblers, etc.”; and a third generation that’s neither/nor—“Among the middle class residents and rural sector the segregation that their ancestors suffered causes a phobia: he knows he is not a Mexican and he knows that he is not an American—he is called a ‘greaser’ or ‘pocho’. This makes him feel as if he had no country or nationality, yet he identifies himself with the United States.”
Faced with these barriers, a local council of churches, with support from the PCUS Presbytery of Tres Rios, funded two ministerial positions and called Juanleandro Garza, a UPCUSA mission coworker in Mexico and Colombia, self-described as “minister, lawyer, poet, and musician,” to serve in El Paso, and Baltazar Gonzales, of IP Principe de Paz, to serve in Juarez.
The Project Verdad of the 1970s focused on the conditions of the poor—they were concerned with migration, workers’ rights, farm labor, malnutrition and public health. Through Project Verdad, Principe de Paz church in Juarez ran a clinic for mothers and children, children’s feeding rooms, and a food dispensary. Ongoing “conversation between church people and Chicano radicals” led to the organization of the cultural center Chicano Light and Power.
Progress towards a truly binational project, of people working in mutual relations, was not direct. The first evaluation of Project Verdad, written by the local Committee of Churches overseeing the program, held that the directors were directionless, that Gonzales’ work was confined to his home church in Juarez, and that Garza seemed to flit from one El Paso non-profit board meeting to another—“While that may be helpful in serving as a channel of communication, it appears to accomplish little else.” The co-directors had made some connections, but in the words of one reviewer: "Bridges have been built, but there is no traffic over the bridges."
Garza and Gonzales gradually developed the model of the serviglesia—a compound word for servant churches—new worshiping communities that were twinned with an economic operation. By 1984, the team had built eight serviglesias in Ciudad Juarez’s colonias—informal settlements where poor migrants built housing out of whatever they could.
Among them was the serviglesia Verdad y Esperanza, where for five days a week women seamstresses recycled scrap cloth into tote bags, braided rugs, and other household goods. Project Verdad sponsored local co-operative businesses, including a woodworking shop and laundromat in El Paso and a bakery in Ciudad Juarez. The ministry also issued microloans of $300 to $500 to local workers “of the periphery—‘shade tree’ mechanics, taco vendors, vegetable sellers, etc.”
Project Verdad’s work also sought to address the crises of identity among the people of the border regions, compounded by racism. In a passage on Chicano art and literature written for Project Verdad’s supporters in 1975, Richard Sanchez of El Paso writes: “What images we do see of ourselves in the media via television, magazines, cinema, and newspapers are usually caricatures of ourselves, or at best surrealistically subservient roles which further diminish us in our own mindsouls. Even though it is argued that the Frito Bandito is 'quaint, exotic, and cute,' the fact remains that it does damage to the self image of the Chicano child.”
To declare that we are Chicanos does in no way negate the validity or humanity of others—IT MERELY AFFIRMS OUR UNIQUENESS AND HUMAN-NESS!
“Our having to constantly explain and justify our reasons for wanting to name ourselves also forces us· to become pawns in an unconscious chess game that socially and psychologically further distorts our definition of life, creating more apertures cresting on anomie and alienation. To declare that we are Chicanos does in no way negate the validity or humanity of others—IT MERELY AFFIRMS OUR UNIQUENESS AND HUMAN-NESS!”
Project Verdad staff and their families were not immune to the endemic bigotry faced by Mexican Americans in the U.S.A. In 1974, Elizabeth Garza, Juanleandro’s daughter, got a piece of hate mail from a girl in her history class, with epithets directed at her and the class’s Black teacher—“you have no right to sit in the same room with us superior white ladies learning about the glorious history of the US before you lazy darkies got here. they ought to take all you filthy mexicans and that chimpanzee nigger to the zoo […] go fuck frito bandido [sic].” Elizabeth was in eighth grade. Juanleandro wrote the school, moderately, saying “In a multicultural nation let’s have multicultural education.”
Project Verdad’s mission emphases in some regards reflected latent cultural conservatism. In a 1975 briefing book for PV’s governing council, Juanleandro Garza wrote that the project’s target audience was: “People that want to accomplish the American Dream, that definitely are pro USA and anti-Marxist.” In a 1976 packet, the project directors proposed an area council to take on the problem of “Mexican illegals” and identified one of the drivers of the crisis as “the Marxist movements increasingly dedicated to the elimination of governments, economies, and churches as we have now.”
Project Verdad succeeded in breaking down denominational barriers between the IPNM, the UPCUSA, and the PCUS, helping to end the Mexican church’s missionary moratorium. The idea of a missionary moratorium was first established in January 1971, at the World Council of Churches-sponsored Symposium on Inter-Ethnic Conflict in South America, held in Barbados. The accompanying Barbados Declaration held that the missionary endeavor was inherently discriminatory, and had become “a great land and labor enterprise, in conjunction with the dominant imperial interests.” The group called for the cessation of mission work among indigenous people in South America. Their declaration became a world-wide topic for evangelizers, was discussed at a missionary conference in Asunción, Paraguay in 1972, and the concept of a missionary moratorium was adopted by a WCC conference in Bangkok that year. The INPM likewise called for the end of missionary work in Mexico, recognizing its own sufficiency as a national church. PCUS Board of World Missions workers were redeployed elsewhere in Latin America.
Having just celebrated its own centennial in 1972, the IPNM sought to honor the bicentennial of the USA in 1976 by staging its general assembly in both the USA and Mexico. In 1980, the UPCUSA and the IPNM organized a Joint Commission on Mission to govern a newly-styled Presbyterian Border Ministry, Inc., formally organized by the sibling churches in 1984 to “bring the message of God to this uncommon international community, a region immersed in Mexican culture but dominated by the U.S. economy.”
Initially staffed by Saul Tijerina in Monterrey, Nuevo León, and Gerald Stacy in San Antonio, Texas, PBM would operate out of two sites by 1989—the ongoing Project Verdad, and Laredos Unidos, run out of First Presbyterian Church (Laredo, Tex.). The 1989 five-year plan for PBM ambitiously proposed an $800,000 annual budget, and held four arguably traditional mission emphases: new church development, community health, community education, and economic development. By 2003 it would operate out of seven places on the border from Tijuana to Reynosa.
Church workers in the Border Ministry, far from being bound to their five-year plans, would demonstrate responsiveness to their communities and context. Catherine May describes the ordinary business of a church worker as encompassing work as varied as accompaniment with migrants, early childhood education, community medical care, and confrontations with the U.S. Border Patrol. “Each day was full of the unexpected beauty of faith at work as the participants encountered each other, those they served, and the community they worked in.”
This unique binational ministry continues, a testament to the power of people working in mutual mission to overcome racism and classism, unbothered by ink lines on a map.
Learn more:
Presbyterian Borderlands Ministries
Catherine May, Mutual Mission: The Presbyterian Church in the Mexico - USA Border Region, 2021.
Archives 996.119; 93 0902b; 23-0106. Presbyterian Border Ministry records, 1980-2019.
