She also tried to bring in creative instructors, facilitated weekly teacher meetings and encouraged small student groups. Soon the school started to turn around. After five years May went to work as director of Guadalupe Area Social Services, a diocesan-run direct-service agency that tried to meet the needs of the poor in the community.

May kept the same approach that had worked at the Guadalupe school, and she didn't mince words when it came to dealing with city bureaucracy. In 1993 she made the Houston Chronicle when she complained about the way the city handled a community development grant that was supposed to go to Guadalupe. While May claimed she had to fight for three years to get the $100,000 grant that had been awarded to the agency, Houston's then-housing and community development director Margie Bingham argued that the plans for the money had not been clear and called May "totally unethical."

May fired off in the newspaper's story, and was quoted as saying, "What they do to us is what society does to the poor — they try to put you in a dependent position since they control the resources you need."

"Someone called and asked me to comment on that," says May, remembering the piece. "I'm not about bashing people, but I think we need to open our eyes at how really out of touch with people the system can be."

And the system, says May, is desperately out of touch with the community in the Second Ward. Local residents agree.

"The city ignores us," says longtime resident Mary Medina, who has owned and operated a flower shop on Navigation Boulevard since 1949. "These sewer lines have been here since 1924. We need the city to fix our streets, to fix our drainage. It's a large fight."

The 83-year-old Medina, nicknamed the Godmother of the Second Ward, befriended May while Medina was serving on the parish council for Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. "We were a gringa and a mexicana!" she laughs. "But she's a hard worker. And she's not afraid to speak her mind."

May decided to leave the sisterhood in 1995. She says the Diocese of Galveston-Houston decided to place Guadalupe Area Social Services under the direction of Catholic Charities. Some sisters who had been working there were given little warning before being told to leave. May says one nun in her late seventies who had been devoted to Guadalupe was told by the diocese to turn in her keys — she wouldn't need to return the next day.

"I feel strongly about how women are treated," May says. "For someone who had given a whole life to the service of the church to be treated like that, it was something I could not tolerate." Soon after, May left Guadalupe and her vocation.

But May also speaks of growing less interested in religion, which she says often leaves the needs of the people behind in favor of rules. She speaks about women who would come to Guadalupe worried because they didn't want to have any more children, but who felt as Catholics that they could not use birth control.

"I would tell them, 'Tell God if it's a sin, I'll take responsibility for it,' " says May. Other sisters joked that she would be spending lots of time in hell.

May also had grown disillusioned with the hierarchical structure of the church. Perhaps that is the very reason El Centro operates without such a ladder of authority.

"Hierarchies don't work," she says. "People ask me if I would want to be a priest, and I say, 'Why would I want to be a part of that mess?' "

She says she still attends services but doesn't have a home church. In her free time, she goes fishing and reads anything she can get her hands on. Still in search of answers to the great questions, she spends lots of time outdoors.

"If you really want to know the deep mysteries, I would go to nature," she says. "I've always felt everything we need to know would be found in nature. Otherwise, it wouldn't be fair, because then only those who were educated could know them."

When asked, the Diocese of Galveston-Houston has only kind words about May. Spokeswoman Annette Gonzales Taylor would only say, "She has a great commitment to the poor. We commend her, and we pray for her success."

After leaving Guadalupe, May says, she still felt a commitment to the Second Ward and its residents. One day she called her friend Margaret Daly, a former Guadalupe volunteer who was studying in Washington, D.C. She asked Daly about the possibility of getting her help to start El Centro.