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by
Ana Campoy ("The San Francisco Chronicle," January 5,
2003)
When the doorbell rings, Daniel Denton rises from the
couch.
"Ah, Martin!" he says, opening the door a crack.
"Babe, Martin is here," he shouts to his wife, who rushes to
get
her veil and fits it around her face tightly, so none of her wiry black
hair
shows. The couple hasn't seen Martin in months. He is Daniel's cousin
and has
just arrived in Stockton after a day's drive from Rosarito, Mexico.
Roxanne approaches the door, smiling reassuringly.
"How are
you Martin? Come on in."
"Fine," Martin says, but he stays put, out there
in
the November cold, his heavy boots not budging, no matter how many times
Roxanne invites him in.
Five hundred miles of driving and still nothing can
convince him
to enter their warm living room, decorated with colorful Mexican
sarapes. His
discomfort is palpable, as is Roxanne's frustration.
They both know the problem. If he were to come in, he would
have
to take off his boots. He'd have to leave his dignity and manhood at the
door
next to his niece's tiny pink sneakers and Roxanne's flip-flops, and
then
feel naked in his socks, holding the glass of water or tea that his
cousin's
wife would offer him.
No, he stays outside, his feet bound in well-worn leather,
in
the chilly wind, and chats with his shoeless cousin about the traffic on
the
highway, the workload of a traveling mechanic, but not the single most
important thing in Daniel's life: Islam.
Once upon a time, Daniel -- like Martin, like 93 percent of
the
Mexican population -- was Catholic. Growing up in Tijuana, his mother
taught
him to go to church, but when he was 22 years old, Daniel walked away
from
the Catholic doctrine and embraced a faith virtually unknown in his
world.
For years, the Vatican has struggled to keep its Latin
American
sheep from dispersing into less "acceptable" folds of
Christianity
-- evangelical Protestant sects, Mormonism and the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Islam, with its veiled women and monthlong fasting, has not
even
been on the priestly radar screen. But its numbers are growing.
Thousands of Hispanics -- estimates range from 50,000 to
75,000
-- now attend mosques all over the United States, according to the
American
Muslim Council, an Islamic advocacy group.
Daniel's departure from the church is in line with a much
older
tradition of anti-Catholic sentiment in Mexico. Liberals and church had
been
antagonistic since the establishment of the Mexican republic in 1823,
says
Alex Saragoza, professor of Mexican history at University of California,
Berkeley.
From Benito Juarez, the president who declared the
separation of
church and state in 1857, to the Cristero war from 1926 to 1929, when
armed
Catholics revolted after the government suspended many of their rights,
certain sectors of Mexican leadership have discounted religion. Now,
after
more than two decades of intermittent economic crisis and political
scandal,
belief in all Mexican institutions, including the church, is diluted,
and
traditional and cultural practices that had long dominated life are
replaced
by imports, from music to faith, says Saragoza.
"Mexican youth are looking toward spirituality that is
not
tied to any institutional form of religion," he adds.
Transfer this situation across the border, where instead of
a
cohesive religious system there is a myriad of options, and cases like
Daniel's will start emerging from places like Stockton and Los Angeles,
New
York and San Antonio.
In a sense, their journey is no different from that of
other
young Americans, exposed to the limitless lifestyle choices available,
says
Saragoza.
"It's almost like a buffet. You take what you
want,"
he explains. "It's like guacamole in a sandwich. I'm sure the
Aztecs
never thought of putting it on white bread with luncheon meat." But
in a
country like the United States, where new and old cultures are in
constant
flux, that's what ends up happening.
Daniel's is the story of one man's conversion. It wouldn't
have
happened in Mexico, where Islam is virtually unknown, but his new
country
provides the freedom to pick and choose among diverse belief systems.
Being Muslim involves intensive juggling to meet secular
and
religious obligations -- especially hard during Ramadan, when Muslims
commemorate the revelation of the Koran to prophet Mohammed by setting
aside
from dawn to dusk all their worldly desires and wake up before 5 a.m. to
eat.
Changing spiritual stations can be a challenge. As we shall
see,
it has had profound effects on Daniel's thinking, his family, his
lifestyle,
his career and even his view of his heritage.
Islam calls
Black curls still crushed from bed, Daniel trudges to the
kitchen to fix the only food he will taste until darkness falls again:
tea,
cereal and dates. Then he subdues his unruly mane under a turban and
prays.
His black eyes close again as he recites in Arabic lines memorized from
the
Koran.
With his tall frame, olive skin and thick black beard,
Daniel
looks like one of the conquistadors, maybe not a Catalonian or a Basque,
but
an Andalusian -- his intense dark eyes inherited perhaps from the
Islamic
Moors who once conquered Spain. By the time they headed for the New
World,
Andalusians and other Spaniards had repudiated any Islamic or Judaic
religious influence, and sailed with Catholicism as their banner.
But 500 years later, after growing up around impoverished,
dangerous Tijuana, Daniel slowly pulled away from Catholic doctrine,
which
had not met his spiritual needs.
By the time he attended high school in San Diego -- after
his
father died, his mother remarried an American citizen, who adopted
Daniel --
he was already following another tradition his father and his
grandfather
before him had practiced assiduously: drinking. He drank every night he
spent
in the U.S. Army, which he entered as his best shot at getting through
college. After three years of combat training, he walked out of his
Arkansas
base carrying a green duffel bag and the resolution to reform his
drinking
habits and search for the morality he felt he'd lost.
He found it in Stockton, 80 miles east of San Francisco,
where
many of his relatives had settled years before, lured by agricultural
jobs.
It was just not in the expected place. After some failed attempts to
re-enter
Catholicism, he inadvertently stumbled onto Islam.
It is an unlikely mecca, but there were many Middle Eastern
immigrants in blue-collar Stockton, field workers like his family;
Daniel
learned about Islam mostly through their children, who attended
community
college classes with him. When he first heard about Ramadan, as a
several-meals-a-day-plus- snacks-eating Mexican, he was shocked at the
idea
of going without food for hours. But he agreed to fast from sunup to
sundown
for a week anyhow, and kept the promise. "I had already given my
word," he says. "I've always been poor, so that's the only
thing I
have."
Daniel found himself so enthralled with the revelations
that
came to him on an empty stomach that he fasted for the whole month, then
devoured the Koran, chapter by chapter, and started to secretly pray on
an
old sarape after his relatives went to bed.
In the teachings of Mohammed, he read of the justice and
equality the Catholic Church had visibly failed to give the poorest in
Mexico. "There's a saying in Islam: The right hand must not know
what
the left gives," he says. "It's not like in Catholicism, where
people inside the church give money during collection while people are
starving outside."
Daniel walks around King Elementary School in Stockton,
where he
teaches third grade, with his hair wrapped in white cloth, almost
inviting
rude comments from students. "Sometimes they stare at you and
laugh, but
then you reprimand them and they get the idea," he says.
Behind his desk, leaning against the wall, two worn-out
posters
show Mecca and Jerusalem.
To Daniel's mostly Latino and black students, the faces of
Che
Guevara and Cesar Chavez on the wall are as familiar as George
Washington or
Abraham Lincoln -- absent in this classroom -- are to other American
kids.
While students gulp down high-energy snacks in the
cafeteria,
Daniel works silently in the classroom; when they run to the playground
for
recess, he prays without missing a beat in the rhythm of his
recitations.
By the end of the school day, Daniel's cheek presses
against his
ungraded papers as he takes an involuntary nap. It's three hours till
dinner.
Family and Faith
With a veil on her hair and a brown baby with curly black
hair
on her hip, Daniel's Jamaican wife, Roxanne, is busy preparing the meal.
After shocking his relatives with his conversion, he shocked them again
less
than four years later by marrying a black woman. Interracial marriages
in the
United States still account for fewer than 5 percent of all couples and,
because of historically strained relations among blacks and Latinos,
weddings
between them are unusual.
Then again, so are Mexican Muslims -- or, for that matter,
Jamaican Muslims.
Roxanne's mother was also just digesting her daughter's
conversion to Islam;
now she, too, had to swallow the idea of her marrying a man
she
barely knew. "She didn't want to tell anyone," says Roxanne.
"She was worried what everybody else was going to think."
Given the raised familial eyebrows, the couple held their
wedding ceremony, not in a mosque or church but in a university hall and
had
both a pastor and an imam, each reading from their holy book.
The result was a little confusing for some guests. "I
didn't know what was going on," comments Daniel's teaching
colleague
Lilian Guerra.
Like her, Stockton's mostly white and Latino residents have
had
few dealings with Islam. Even though veiled women have strolled down
supermarket aisles for years, Stocktonians still stare. On a trip to
Safeway,
Daniel and Roxanne seem immune to the glares as they buy supplies for
Iftar,
a gathering to break the Ramadan fast. Roxanne and some Muslim friends
take
turns hosting such dinner parties; this week it's at her house. As soon
as
they get home, she sets big pots and pans over the stove to prepare a
dish
that would never be served in Mecca -- chicken curry with coconut milk,
a
recipe from her mother, with fried plantains, a Jamaican staple.
As the sun goes down, she has the crispy plantain fritters
frying in oil, scenting a house that fills with hungry women, who arrive
bringing different pieces of the culinary geography of Muslim Stockton.
Nagat, the daughter of a Mexican American and a Yemenite, brings a
platter of
chile con carne; a woman of Indian descent who was born in South Africa
carries in packets of puffed bread. The dishes sit alongside Somali
spaghetti
and defrosted fish sticks, baklavas and chocolate cake.
The veiled women talk loudly, joking and laughing about
fashion,
politics and marriage. "People have all these preconceived
notions," says Roxanne. "They think, 'Her husband is making
her
wear the scarf and stay at home,' (that) you're uneducated, oppressed .
. .
"
Self-confident and assertive, her personality sparkles in
her
hand gestures and her black round eyes, which open wide every time she
wants
to make a point.
Yet for all her self-assurance, she kept herself locked
inside
her house in the days after Sept. 11, when, as she was driving in full
Muslim
garb, someone in a speeding car yelled, "Go home!"
So she did.
"I thought it was cowardly that they didn't say it to
my
face. They were going so fast I couldn't even see the car."
Even before the attacks, Roxanne did not venture much into
the
outside world. She sells a line of cleaning products by phone and
computer
and takes care of her little girls. Islam teaches that if you raise
three
daughters as good Muslims, heaven is guaranteed. Daniel only has two but
he
has already taught Sahala, his eldest, to say Bismilah, in the name of
God,
every time they travel somewhere by car. But Sahala, who is only 2 years
old,
does not know that the Arabic proverbs hanging in her living room and
the
Christmas tree she sees at a conference her parents attended with her
recently belong to different worlds. She only knows that she likes the
lights
and shiny spheres on the tree.
Putting the pieces together
In many ways, the Dentons live the two-car suburban dream.
Their
daughters keep a normal toddler quota of colorful toys, from play
kitchens to
dolls, in their room, and the television set anchors the living room.
But Daniel faces the additional challenge of incorporating
his
identity, a credo made of pieces of political philosophies, religions,
national sentiments and consumer patterns, into the American dream, like
putting together a jigsaw puzzle that came with no picture on the box
and a
collection of mismatched pieces.
After years of study, he has found in the Aztec calendar
connections between Mexico's indigenous past and Islam. The Aztecs used
the
calendar, a 25- ton basaltic stone believed to have been sculpted in
1479, to
keep track of their agricultural and religious cycles. Into the
elaborate
carvings of jaguars, crocodiles and sacrificial knives, Daniel has read
the
coming of Islam to Aztec lands, focusing on Quetzalcoatl, a plumed
serpent
God who promised to return from the land of the sun wearing a beard and
a
robe -- the very image of Muslims.
In a manila folder, he collects evidence proving Islam is
the
natural course of spiritual life in Mexico: historical facts,
mathematical
equations and a stack of colored acetates of Mesoamerican figurines,
including one depicting a kneeling woman, resting her hands on her
thighs.
"To a Muslim, it's a woman in prayer," he says.
Such archaeological artifacts portray the people who,
Daniel
believes, were awaiting Quetzalcoatl, but received the conquistadors
instead.
"Were the Spanish the Quetzalcoatl?" he asks.
"No, not by a long shot."
"Were they the beautiful brother that came from the
land of
the sun?" he adds passionately. "Again, I'm going to tell you
no."
"Islam is our tradition as Latinos, Chicanos,
Mexicanos,
people from Latin America -- we are part of this, this is part of
us,"
he says. "Peace and justice -- that is what we want as Latinos.
Islam
presents this as an option."
Last summer Daniel and his family packed their sarapes and
Koranic scriptures, and moved to San Diego, where his mother lives. This
way
his two daughters can spend time with their grandmother and learn
Spanish
from her. The climate is also better, says Daniel. Although he refers to
Southern California's sun, he means the religious environment, too. Here
the
Dentons have found a Muslim community where they fit in better.
"Everyone we know is a convert. They all have families
of a
different religion, we're all going through the same things," he
says.
Daniel has also found a job where his search for a new grounding force
is
likely to reemerge: He teaches newly arrived Mexican
children.
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