Issues in Applied Linguistics

This study describes narrative activity in a doctrina class (children's religious education class in Spanish) composed of Mexican immigrants at a Catholic parish in Los Angeles. During the telling of the narrative of the apparition of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe) doctrina students and their teacher collaboratively construct a multiplicity of identities in an ongoing narrative version. These past and present identities are represented as Mexican, de aquí (from here), and dark-skinned against the backdrop of the description of an oppressive colonial past in Mexico. The paper compares a doctrina class with a racially mixed religious education class conducted in English (catechism) at the same parish to illustrate differences in the way social identities are created in both classes.