Editor’s Note: Anamarie Guardado Dwyer is a woman of deep devotion and service in the kingdom of God. Married to Bill Dwyer, who is the senior pastor of Valley Vineyard Christian Fellowship and the longest-serving pastor in any Vineyard church, Anamarie lives a cross-cultural and cross-racial daily reality. In this article, interviewer Marian Flandrick explores how Anamarie Guardado Dwyer’s Mexican American heritage has informed, shaped, and challenged her experience of God. Dwyer is a professor of theater at California State University, where she has been teaching for twenty-five years.
For Anamarie, growing up was harsh as the Tucson desert she lived in, yet such a life was common for young Mexican Americans.
“Life was very ‘black’ and ‘white,’” she says. She played with Barbie dolls on the steps of the local bar while her father was inside enjoying himself. Men in cowboy boots climbed the steps and walked through the saloon-style doors, swinging them open and closed as she made houses for her dolls out of empty beer cases. Sometimes there were bar fights. As day slid into night, Anamarie’s mother said, “It was not a place for a child.” So she asked Anamarie to go in, get her father out of the bar, and bring him home. Once she did, Anamarie knew there would be blowup between her parents. Life was very difficult and “black.”
Then on Sunday mornings the family went to church at Mission San Xavier del Bac on the Tohono O’odham San Xavier Indian Reservation in Tucson. Founded as a Catholic mission by Father Eusebio Kino in 1692, the congregation’s building is now a national historic landmark. Partly because the gorgeous, ornate building is shining white (and is called The White Dove of the Desert), Anamarie thought of church as a good “white” place.
Anamarie believed she had to be a good girl to stay in that good “white” place. God, as she understood him, was judgmental. Because so much talk was about sin and confession, she worried that God would judge her. On the other hand, she wondered why God didn’t come down and yell at her father for his drinking and infidelities.
For Mexican Americans, the Virgin Mary was revered for her purity and a central part of her cultural experience. What she knew about Jesus was pain and suffering. Just looking at a crucifix told her that—something that looked very grim to her. She didn’t think she could be as pure as Mary or as willing to suffer as Jesus was. So to cling to that impossible “white” space of church, she just had to be good in order to be accepted by God. And, of course, that was impossible.
01. The “White” Space Could Be Scary
As time passed, Anamarie realized there was more underneath the do’s and don’ts of her religious experience—something drastically different from her black-and-white life. She experienced a persistent feeling that Someone or Something was out there that she could safely put her faith in. Somewhere there was a place that went beyond the black and the white she experienced in her daily life. “I didn’t know what that was as a child,” says Anamarie, “but now I realize that the Lord had his hand on me.”
Anamarie loved her grandmother very much, but her father forbade the family to see her grandmother because he didn’t get along with her. Still Anamarie and her mother continued to visit her grandmother, and Anamarie longed for her grandmother’s approval. One day as she waited at her grandmother’s house for her to come home from work, she pulled out the giant Bible her grandmother kept under the coffee table. Since Anamarie loved to read, she thought: I’m going to read it. I’m going to impress my grandmother. Anamarie had it timed so that when Abuela walked in the door, she would see Anamarie reading the Bible. Sure enough, Abuela walked in and saw this, but Grandmother’s face changed into disbelief. She yelled, “What are you doing?” Grandmother took the Bible and put it away. She told Anamarie, “Only priests can read the Bible. You’re not supposed to read that. It’ll make you go crazy!”
Anamarie was shocked and hurt by her grandmother’s reaction. The black-and-white dichotomy seemed to arise even within the cultural-religious experience of the home. For Anamarie, this story embodies the black and white on a page of text; she was enjoying the “white” space of reading when the “black” space of anger reared its ugly head.
At the same time, the good “white” side of life—church—could be scary. Anamarie felt frightened as she walked through the elaborately carved and scrolled entrance of the church building. Her eyes were drawn up to two famous but frightening figures above the doors. On the left was a carved cat, and on the right was a carved mouse. Separated by several feet, the cat was about to pounce on the mouse. She had been told that when the cat caught the mouse, the world would end. So she searched diligently for any indication that the cat had gained ground on the mouse. She wondered, How much more time do I have before the world ends? She worried that the cat would move while she was inside church. What if the world ended and she wasn’t in that white, good place?
02. Jesus in the Classroom
Since Anamarie grew up in a disadvantaged home, college didn’t enter her mind. When her high school boyfriend asked her what college she was attending, she laughed scornfully. She was an honor society student, but she had to face reality: there was no money for college. Her teenage self thought that she could be only one of three things: a wife, a secretary, or a nun. Of course her grandmother wanted her to be a nun. No way was she going to do that! A wife? No, her parents had finally divorced when she was fourteen. She had enough of that chaos in her life. So the only thing left was to be a secretary.
But her boyfriend introduced her to the guidance counselor, saying, “Anamarie needs to go to college.” Because he was the valedictorian, the counselor listened to him. Anamarie got the information she needed and received a four-year scholarship.
Anamarie went on to become a high school teacher in Phoenix, Arizona. She loved her students. They liked to come into her classroom between classes, but she had to get work done, so she locked her door during lunch. The students banged on the windows and door calling, “Miss G, Miss G, we know you’re in there! All we want is to eat lunch in there. We won’t bother you.” Finally she let them in.
As the students sat at the table in the other end of the room, eating lunch and chatting, Anamarie heard them say the words God, church, and Jesus. She was curious, so she rolled her chair over to listen, then rolled back and graded more papers. One day, while on her forty-five-minute drive from school to home, she said to the Lord, “I want to know what those fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds have.” Then she added, “God, if you’re really real, prove it!” There in rush-hour traffic, she felt something hit the top of her head. “It felt like honey and poured all the way down to my toes,” says Anamarie. “I discovered it was peace. I had never ever experienced peace like that before. The feeling was real; it was thick; it was palpable. Peace. Total and utter peace. It lasted about two weeks.” She began figuring out who this God was who did this to her by going to Christian bookstores and reading everything she could find about God, Jesus, Holy Spirit. She also remembered an old paperback book that her mom had given her years before: a New Testament written in modern language. Her mother had written in it, “Mi’ja [my daughter] I hope this helps you in your life. I love you. Mom.” Of course when Anamarie had received it, she had put it away because she and her mom didn’t have a positive relationship. But after her experience with God, she pulled it out and started reading.
As Anamarie found that Jesus was not just about pain and suffering, she also saw that God was more than judgment. God was trustworthy, unlike her earthly father. God didn’t lie or cheat. God is who he says he is.
03. Beyond Black and White
As she opened herself to the Lord, she discovered that life with Jesus wasn’t black and white anymore! It wasn’t about trying impossibly to be a good girl. It went beyond obeying the Ten Commandments or keeping up the façade that most people put up to look good. She decided that black-and-white thinking wasn’t right because people weren’t all good or all bad. Jesus seemed to be in the gray area for her, and she wanted to go there with him. As she learned more about Jesus that gray area yielded color—the brilliant hues of trust, love, kindness, forgiveness, and all the things of the Spirit. Though reading the Word, praying, and meditating, she was pulled into the world of God. Problems didn’t vanish, but she was able to tap into God in the midst of them. As she sought God, she discovered that God had been seeking her all that time, even when she was a little girl, scared and confused in that beautiful but frightening white church. She experienced that beautiful, colorful thread that was God drawing her.
Not long afterward, Anamarie went back to the Catholic church with her much-loved grandmother. During Mass she wanted to shout, “Do you hear what the priest is saying? Do you hear the words of the Lord under it? He really gets it!” She wondered why everyone wasn’t jumping out of their seats yelling, “Praise be to God!”
Years later she took her grandmother to church with her to The Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California. Her beloved abuela was sick with cancer, and Anamarie wondered whether her grandmother understood who Jesus really was. As the pastor spoke, Anamarie knew that her grandmother understood little of the English words—not just because of the language barrier but also because her grandmother just wasn’t there spiritually.
Yet her grandmother turned to Anamarie and said with tears in her eyes, “What is happening? Why don’t I understand this? I feel the truth inside me now.” During the service everyone broke into little circles to pray for one another. Even though this was outside her grandmother’s experience, Abuela turned to the strangers, held their hands, and listened to them pray for her. Tears were streamed down Abuela’s face. “My grandmother was so moved,” says Anamarie. “She had understood—really understood—that God was there and loved her.”
04. Riches of the Mexican American Heritage
Anamarie now sees that she absorbed many good things from the Catholic tradition, which was so intrinsic in her Mexican American upbringing. In particular, she feels that she has a sense of awe and reverence for God and the things of God that finds its roots in Catholicism. Though she isn’t attending a Catholic church now, she says, “Even now I still go into church with a sense of awe.”
In her quest for a church home, she found she needed a church that wasn’t so large, and one with other Mexican Americans. She wanted to hear preaching in the Spanish language and explored that but soon realized that a Spanish language church wasn’t for her either. As a second generation Mexican American, she was somewhere in the middle of the two worlds. She eventually became part of Valley Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Reseda, California.
The Mexican American world, says Anamarie, is wrapped up in the supernatural, and so she always knew that the spirit world was real—a deep gift of her heritage. She also never doubted God was real and evil was real. “I learned from stories I heard and believed that the devil is real,” she says. “I also knew that if you needed help in the supernatural, the curanderos [healers] could help you. In my upbringing, this was sometimes used to keep children in line. We were told the devil would get us if we didn’t behave. I was told, ‘Spirits like La Llorona [the Wailing Woman] will get you!’”
But this spirit-world talk has been helpful to her. Because of her heritage, she says, “I am open to anything the Holy Spirit has, including giftings of the Spirit.” She loves that the Holy Spirit is real and greater than a ghost crying along riverbanks searching for her drowned children or greater than any healer dabbling in the spirit world (as she had heard).
Mexican American culture also understands the importance of family and community. “Think of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus and how revered the Holy Family is,” she said. Latin families tend to stay tied together, often with multiple generations living near or even with one another, which helped to make families secure and strong.
05. Art as a Latin American Heritage
As part of Anamarie’s Mexican American experience in the Catholic Church, she learned as a child how stained glass, decorations, banners, even the very buildings of church spoke to her about God. Because of the economics of her childhood, she didn’t see art outside the church. There were no museums or art supplies. Except for the beauty in church, life was as barren as the sand and cacti of the surrounding desert. As a result of her experiences with the beauty inside the church, she now finds that art speaks to people’s spiritual inner world—the sanctuary of their soul.
As a result, artistic pursuits have become a spiritual discipline for Anamarie. “It’s a way of thinking, a way of knowing one’s self, and a way of thinking about the world and God. Art is intimately tied to knowing Christ. God is a creator, and in art journaling one gets to be co-creative with God by putting onto pages what you are thinking and experiencing. I like focusing on God during art projects and talking to God in the midst of being creative,” she says. She has moved into art journaling and playing with color through paint, ink, markers, and other art supplies.
Whenever Anamarie teaches a workshop at church or speaks from the pulpit, she tries to incorporate art in one shape or another. “It might be visual art or music, but some kind of hands-on art seems to reach hearts,” she explains. She has also led art journaling workshops at church, some of which even include Bible journaling so people are actually creating in the margins of their Bibles, a kind of revival of the ancient practice of illuminating.
06. Being an “Other”
I call myself Latina because I’m not happy with the word Hispanic,” says Anamarie. “Somewhere in the formation of my identity I could not relate to Hispanic.”
She notes that the word Hispanic became a political label from the Nixon administration to link the entire population of Latin America (South America and Central America) as part of the colonial heritage from Spain, even though these areas encompass many different nationalities and cultures. Much of Latin America does not even have Spanish heritage—rather, it descends from indigenous peoples. “Would we say an Irishman was the same as a Welshman? Of course not!” says Anamarie. So she prefers the term Latina (the feminine term; the masculine term is Latino) because it is more general, not referring only to Spanish heritage. And because her family came from Mexico, she also refers to herself as a Mexican American woman.
Anamarie is opposed to stripping out various racial identities. Since we are human vessels, we shouldn’t get rid of that, nor does the Lord expect that, she believes. Many times she is “other,” as she has had to often check that box when filling out papers. “I’ve always been an ‘other’, so I’ve had to learn how to operate in the white world,” she says. “It has been challenging, but it has also given me skills such as being flexible as well as qualities such as empathy.”
She began to learn how to understand people who don’t think like she does. Since she knows what it is like to have a foot in one world and then in another, she can understand other people struggling with the same thing. She likes to see herself as a good role model for others and hopes that it helps open doors for other Latin people.
Anamarie suggests that when people don’t understand one another, they should look not only at culture but at economics as well because class is important. “A lot of racial problems have roots in class. We don’t talk much about privilege, but poverty is huge. It affects spiritual practices. When people find it hard to make a living, how do we ask them to take time to reflect, to pause, to take retreats? A full-day or even half-day retreat takes up their precious time and costs them money they don’t have to spend. How do you explain to someone in that difficult situation the importance of hearing the Lord? What does that look like when you aren’t in a privileged class?”
Perhaps being caught between two worlds isn’t such a bad thing after all, she says. “As Christians aren’t we all caught between this life and the kingdom of God? We may be very different from one another, yet in Christ the Spirit manages to pull us together in our blended worlds to walk with Jesus.”
Marion Flandrick grew up along the border of East LA and lived for twenty years in various barrios of Santa Ana, making friends with gang members. She then moved to New Mexico for thirteen years and loved the Spanish culture. Her daughter and granddaughter still live there. Often she writes children’s and YA fiction about Hispanic characters. She now lives in the foothills of the Sierras above Fresno with her Colonial Spanish horse.