The Pastor of Little México

Night was falling in Music City as Carlos Uroza strode across the patterned carpet of Nashville International Airport. Baggage claim — and the promises of life in a new country — stretched out before him.

Carlos wasn’t entirely new in town. That evening marked his second trip to Nashville. During his first visit four years earlier, he’d taken shelter in a bookstore downtown as a tornado barreled through the city. Across the street, people huddled in a Greyhound station, fleeing ravenous wind and debris. A few tourists raced out into the open, seeking shelter at the strip club next door, where the bass kept booming.

Compared with the heart of a tornado, the airport appeared peaceful. But it shared the same post-apocalyptic feeling with that evening downtown. The place was silent, nearly deserted. The carpet swallowed the sound of Carlos’ footsteps. Menace and fear lurked beneath a fringe layer of calm.

As he rounded a corner, Carlos spotted guards on high alert. Their eyes latched onto everyone who walked past. Oh, he thought. Right. It was September 11, 2002, a year after 9/11. Carlos had been surprised by the affordability of his flight from Mexico City. Now he understood why.

The Rev. Carlos Uroza preaches two services every Sunday at Woodbine United Methodist Church, the first in English and the second in Spanish at the Primera Iglesia. Carlos moved from Mexico to the United States in his 20s and uses his experiences to bring his community together.

For the past two years, Carlos had plunged himself into mission work. He and his mother had hosted students from Nashville in their townhouse in Estado de México. He planned to pitch trips to local churches in Nashville, known for its powerful Methodist hierarchy. But a few weeks before he left, the organization he worked for shut down. He decided to make the trip anyway. He was 22, without a high school diploma, propelled forward by guts and desire and curiosity.

A family whose son had stayed with Carlos on a mission trip waited just outside security. The Jordans drove him to their three-bedroom ranch house in Crieve Hall, south of town.

Carlos flopped onto his new bed and stared at the ceiling. He felt overwhelmed by the changes that lay ahead. As thoughts hurtled across his mind, smashing into one another like bumper cars, a single question began to crowd out everything else.

Two years earlier, noise had filled Carlos’ life. It was hard to hear. It was hard to think. La Talacha throbbed with ska horns and snare drums. Upstairs, Panteón Rococo, a 10-piece band, stomped across the bar’s tiny stage. As midnight approached, the crowd quieted, but no one stopped drinking. They ordered buckets of beer, bottles of tequila or brandy if they felt rich, cans of Fresca as chasers. Long past last call, Carlos, the bar's dishwasher, scrubbed their empty mugs.

Downstairs, in his spot at the edge of the bar, Carlos mindlessly reached for another mug. He felt a sharp pain. He looked down. Blood poured from his hand like Cheerwine from a broken tap. He’d grabbed a shattered mug.

As he tried to stanch the flow, Carlos paused and looked around. Wrenches and license plates lined the walls. Rustic stools circled the bar. He felt little connection to the party. He only worked at La Talacha because his friends did.

Carlos floated along in Izcalli, in suburban Estado de México. He could feel the contours of his life narrowing. Twenty years old, washing dishes, no education, living with his mother, Lucy, who worked constantly to support them, despite the rheumatoid arthritis affecting all her joints.

Bar, home; bar, home; bar, soccer, home. Every day was the same, except Sunday, when he and Lucy went to church.

That night at La Talacha, as the blood flowed and the party swirled, Carlos considered himself. The bar around him felt like a mission statement for a certain type of carefree existence. Dancing, drinking, ska music, comfort in desiring nothing more. A good life, sure, but not one he’d consciously chosen.

In the distance, he could make out a sliver of light, the fuzzy outlines of a dream, a life beyond Izcalli. He had no idea how to get there.

***

The day after Carlos cut his hand at La Talacha, he left on a mission trip. His local church hired him to pick up a group from a U.S. church at the airport and take them to Huitzapula, a town seven hours south of Izcalli in the mountainous state of Guerrero, where he would work alongside them for two weeks.

Carlos had grown up in the Methodist Church. Every Sunday before service, Lucy took him to Vips, their favorite diner, for a rare, shared sit-down meal. Mother and son caught up over huevos divorciados, coffee, and molletes — bread topped with beans, cheese, and pico. Then, Lucy gave Carlos a few pesos, which he spent at the café with his youth group after their 5 p.m. meeting.

Carlos always felt like he lived a double life. When he dropped out of high school at 17, he lingered with old friends from the neighborhood. Every day, they made their own fun, watching TV, playing video games in the arcade, and moseying through a 20-pack of Camel Lights. On Sundays, Carlos surrounded himself with another crowd. He loved his friends from the block — whom he still calls his “brothers” — but his youth group provided a different support system, and he felt like he belonged. Church had always been a door that Carlos could walk through. But until the mission trip to Huitzapula, he'd never seriously considered a life in the church.

Three years earlier, in 1997, a youth group from a Methodist church in Nashville had traveled to Izcalli to build the foundation for a nursery at Carlos’ church. A boy named Andrew Jordan had stayed at Carlos and Lucy’s house. Carlos didn’t know English and Andrew knew only a bit of Spanish, but they bonded over The Offspring, Radiohead, and Nirvana. They played soccer in the street outside the apartment. Late at night, they swapped curse words, creating their own Spanish/English dictionary.

Carlos worked 15 trips in the two years after that night at La Talacha. He once took a group 70 miles southeast of Izcalli to Amecameca. The Popocatépetl volcano hovered over the town. Carlos had never seen anything like it. He’d grown accustomed to the stucco of Izcalli’s identical townhomes, La Talacha’s dim barlight. On his morning walks to the market, he looked up at the white peaks that topped the skyline. For a moment, he forgot where he was going.

Carlos loved meeting the students from the U.S. who went on these trips. He loved Hollywood and grunge. But he didn’t idealize the United States. He just liked interacting with people who’d grown up in different circumstances. He loved how these people talked about their daily lives, how they didn’t seem fanatical with their faith. More than anything, he loved swapping his culture, his language, with theirs.

“Language is justice,” he now says. “The idea of being able to communicate — it opens so many doors.”

When he returned to Izcalli after these trips, Carlos tried to relate what he'd seen and felt to his friends from the block. “But why?” they asked. Carlos gave up trying to explain. His friends felt content with working a bit, hanging out a lot, playing pool, smoking. But Carlos had discovered a broader world and the possibility of his role within it.

When he came home buzzing after mission trips, Lucy couldn’t help but smile. He’d left school for a dead-end job. His aimlessness weighed on her, too. She’d always wanted more for him. Her son, unlike her, would have the power to choose.

Lucy escaped from what Carlos calls a “Cinderella” childhood in Tlaquiltenango, Morelos. Lucy’s mother died when she was 4, and her father became destructive when he drank. So Lucy and her younger sister went to live with their aunt and uncle, where they quickly became unpaid help. They waited on the rest of the family and received the most threadbare of hand-me-downs. To pay their way, they wandered the streets, selling trinkets. Lucy never once received a toy.

Just as her son would, Lucy dreamed of the outside world, of new people and places. In her early 20s, she left for secretarial school in Mexico City, three hours and a universe away from Tlaquiltenango.

The capital was terrifying at first, shocking in its noise and scale. But Lucy valued her independence above all. Around every corner, within each block, the city teemed with possibilities that didn’t exist with her relatives.

Lucy met a man, and in 1980, Carlos was born. The family lived amid tree-lined boulevards in Colonia Roma. They stayed in a vecindad, a group of loft apartments that shared a rooftop patio. Carlos was 5 when his father disappeared. He would never see him again.

Lucy found a job as a secretary with the company that developed most of Estado de México, the land beyond the capital. They offered subsidized company housing, so she and Carlos packed up their life and moved to the suburbs. As Carlos grew, Lucy developed severe arthritis in her hands. She could no longer work as a secretary, so she found odd jobs assisting public notaries. While she learned to manage her disability, she sent 10-year-old Carlos to live with family in Morelos. By the time he was 15, her life had stabilized, and she brought him home.

Cruel ironies ruled Lucy’s life. The girl who dreamed of the city now lived in the suburbs. The girl who always wanted to travel now walked with a cane. And the mother so devoted to her only child didn’t see much of his teenage years.

She knew that Carlos roamed Izcalli unsupervised. Smoking. Idling. Not studying. So when he poured himself into mission trips, into learning English, Lucy felt pride. She loved that her son had found something he cared about, even if one day that something might take him away.

Eighteen years after his arrival in Nashville, the Rev. Carlos Uroza stands center stage at Woodbine United Methodist Church. When he speaks, he commands attention. When he tells a story about grocery shopping, he acts like he’s picking items from a shelf and putting them into his cart. Sometimes he reaches for his guitar, which he learned in Izcalli, playing songs like “Creep” by Radiohead.

“The ’80s were weird, man,” he says after singing a few lines of “Never Gonna Give You Up.” “I’ve seen pictures of a few of you all with hairspray.” The audience laughs.

Each Sunday at 9:45 a.m., Carlos speaks to a mostly white audience of baby boomers. At 11 a.m., in the same sanctuary, he shares the same message with the Primera Iglesia, a younger collection of Spanish-speaking families.

Some people call Woodbine “Little Mexico.” In the 1990s, migrant workers from Mexico moved into the neighborhood, drawn to affordable rentals. In 1992, La Hacienda, one of Nashville’s first Mexican market/restaurants, opened up next door to Woodbine UMC, cementing the Little Mexico nickname.

Soon after he moved in with the Jordans, Carlos felt homesick. The family drove him 10 minutes up Nolensville Pike to La Hacienda. They pulled into the parking lot, where the smell of lye and corn drifted in from the tortilla factory out back. La Hacienda was Carlos’ first glimpse of home. He left the store with all the chiles he could carry — bags of guajillos, cans of chipotles.

When he misses home and his mother, Carlos buys chiles and makes pozole rojo. He starts with hominy and chicken, a riff that his wife and son prefer to the traditional pork. He adds guajillo and ancho chiles, then red radishes, finely chopped lettuce, raw onion, and sliced avocado. He squeezes lime juice over the whole pot.

For Carlos, pozole is home in a bowl. It’s his favorite thing to cook and eat.

Woodbine UMC and Primera Iglesia weren’t Carlos’ first assignments as a pastor. Soon after he arrived in Nashville, he secured a religious worker visa and got a job as a Spanish-speaking pastor in Murfreesboro. He became a legal resident in 2009, got his GED, earned a master’s in divinity from Vanderbilt, and became a U.S. citizen in 2015.

He met his wife, Sarah, at that church in Murfreesboro. They married in 2010, the same year they moved to Nashville. A year later, he took the Primera Iglesia job, and their son Luke was born in 2014. When Woodbine’s English-speaking minister left in 2018, Carlos took his place.

Carlos loves his work, his city, his family. He’s made it in the Americas. But many people he speaks to, people with roots similar to his own, have not.

To understand what's at stake in Woodbine, and Carlos’ role in the neighborhood, you must understand its significance to Nashville’s migrant community. While the neighborhood is home to La Hacienda today, the land where Little Mexico sits has housed many different people and movements.

Folks in Woodbine tell a story about a place called Flat Rock, about half the size of a basketball court. It sat at what is now the intersection of Nolensville Pike and Whitsett Road. The surrounding forests were lush and green, and thickets of cane, tall and dense, engulfed the land. Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles made their living off the earth, and the tribes agreed to reserve the woods for hunting. They wanted to keep the area bountiful, with enough food to go around, so each tribe agreed to live farther out from the rock, leaving the woods raw and untamed.

When conflict arose, the tribes sent representatives through the woods to meet at Flat Rock. They sat on the rectangular stone, a bench in the middle of the formation. With the sun high above the woods, the tribes traded, debated treaties, and passed around a ceremonial pipe. They forged their United Nations, their courtroom, their Wall Street.

Revolutionary War land grants, big mansions, and railroads would crowd out the woods and the tribes, smoke and dust overpowering the area’s original scent of woodbine honeysuckle.

Today, if Carlos left Woodbine UMC, turned right and drove past the original site of Flat Rock on Nolensville Pike, he’d pass the headquarters of Workers’ Dignity, a nonprofit fighting for the rights of low-wage workers. He’d drive past construction trucks backing up into Woodbine, where peeling cottages share streets with newly built Craftsman houses. Past huddled-together dives and cooking that smells like San Salvador and Istanbul, Guadalajara and Raqqa. Past a tarot card and palm reader, who maintains a near-perfect Yelp rating. Past the turnoff to Glencliff High, where kids from Kurdistan, Egypt, Vietnam, and Mexico learn mariachi from a woman named Gaby. Past used car lots with names that range from no-frills (Carland) to overcompensating (Picasso Auto). Past gas stations, markets, and taquerías serving the best al pastor in the city, simmering in a pot with pineapple. Past a vape shop called Kountry Kloudz, which has a Kobe mural on the side wall. Past Little Kurdistan, where people are praying, eating, learning, and probably kicking around a soccer ball. Past a place formerly known as The Plug, where a man named Tin used to sell Jordans and throwback jerseys. Now, the sweet smell of pan dulce drifts out its doors and into the neighboring Dairy Queen. Eventually, Carlos would turn right toward Crieve Hall, where he and Sarah own a ranch house a few blocks away from the Jordans’ home, where he lived when he first moved to town.

When Carlos first arrived at Woodbine UMC in 2011, the average neighborhood home cost about $100,000. Now, some sell for four or five times that much. In the past few years, at least three families in the Primera Iglesia have been forced to move by opportunistic landlords or prowling developers. Carlos wants to help because he loves his congregation. He also feels a uniquely immigrant form of survivor’s guilt — guilt for making it here, and guilt for the way he’s made it.

“My story as a migrant is different from others’,” he says. “Everyone thinks the migrant story is someone who struggles financially. … I’m not saying I didn’t struggle financially, but I had stronger support. I hear stories of people in my congregation who had to cross the border in the most horrendous situations. I feel like my story is different. It wasn’t as tough as theirs.”

Carlos doesn’t believe his congregation judges him. But he knows that people who look at him and learn where he came from make certain assumptions. His story defies easy stereotypes.

To protect the neighborhood, Carlos has co-founded and is the executive director of an organization called Cosecha Community Development, which invites Primera Iglesia members and newer neighborhood residents to gather and share meals, put on farmers markets, and take language classes.

Cosecha hosted its first shared meal, named “Feast,” on a crisp October evening in the backyard of Humphreys Street Coffee, a couple of miles from the church. Families sat at picnic tables covered with paper bags full of food. Underneath the café’s front porch, a cooler iced down mandarin and tamarind Jarritos.

As the sun faded over the café, string lights switched on in the yard. Carlos sang a hymn with Brooklyn, the daughter of Courtney and Brian Hicks, the owners of the coffeehouse. Courtney is also a co-founder of Cosecha. People dug into barbacoa burritos, mole tamales, and conchas.

“For my theology, the most important thing we can do is when people come together around the table, the Lord’s table,” Carlos says. “We come with our disagreements, we come with our different backgrounds. But when we come to the table, we’re all the same. [Feast] needs to reflect who’s represented at the table and who isn’t.”

Carlos’ theology honors Woodbine’s original residents, the Native Americans who met at Flat Rock. He brings different tribes together around the table. The original tribes lost their land. Carlos hopes his congregation can hold onto theirs.

As Carlos strummed his guitar, he occasionally glanced down at his hand, where he could see the faintest outlines of a scar. He’s worlds away from the beer mugs at La Talacha. But the scar will always remind him of where he came from, and his willingness to choose a different life.

***

Carlos sits in his office at Woodbine United Methodist Church. Next door, the sanctuary lies empty and expectant, awaiting his voice.

Two thousand miles away, Lucy sits at her kitchen table in Morelos, where she too awaits her son’s voice. Carlos supports his mother financially and calls her often. He is as aware of his absence in Mexico as his presence in the States.

He still remembers the day he left home, almost 20 years ago. He lifted his life, contained within a few suitcases, into the trunk of his friend’s car. He turned back toward the house. Lucy stood at the gate, watching him go.

Carlos knew that his mother wanted him to stay, no matter what she said. But she also saw her reflection in his ambition. She knew he needed to go.

“I feel like, when she saw me leaving, as difficult as it was for her … ” Carlos pauses. He looks around his office, an emblem of all he’s gained by leaving home. “I feel like in a way, she was fulfilling some of her dreams through me.”

Wherever he goes, Carlos brings Lucy with him, like a talisman. Her dreams are his dreams. When she was Carlos’ age, she left somewhere small for somewhere that felt much bigger.

On that day 20 years ago, it was Carlos’ turn to do the same. He hopped into the passenger seat and shut the door. Lucy walked back into her townhome. And Carlos sped away from Izcalli, toward his story untold.