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Latino Mennonites

Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

Felipe Hinojosa

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The first historical analysis of the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites.

Winner, 2015 Américo Paredes Book Award, Center for Mexican American Studies and South Texas College.

Felipe Hinojosa's parents first encountered Mennonite families as migrant workers in the tomato fields of northwestern Ohio. What started as mutual admiration quickly evolved into a relationship that strengthened over the years and eventually led to his parents founding a Mennonite Church in South Texas. Throughout his upbringing as a Mexican American evangélico, Hinojosa was faced...

The first historical analysis of the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites.

Winner, 2015 Américo Paredes Book Award, Center for Mexican American Studies and South Texas College.

Felipe Hinojosa's parents first encountered Mennonite families as migrant workers in the tomato fields of northwestern Ohio. What started as mutual admiration quickly evolved into a relationship that strengthened over the years and eventually led to his parents founding a Mennonite Church in South Texas. Throughout his upbringing as a Mexican American evangélico, Hinojosa was faced with questions not only about his own religion but also about broader issues of Latino evangelicalism, identity, and civil rights politics.

Latino Mennonites offers the first historical analysis of the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites. Drawing heavily on primary sources in Spanish, such as newspapers and oral history interviews, Hinojosa traces the rise of the Latino presence within the Mennonite Church from the origins of Mennonite missions in Latino communities in Chicago, South Texas, Puerto Rico, and New York City, to the conflicted relationship between the Mennonite Church and the California farmworker movements, and finally to the rise of Latino evangelical politics. He also analyzes how the politics of the Chicano, Puerto Rican, and black freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movements captured the imagination of Mennonite leaders who belonged to a church known more for rural and peaceful agrarian life than for social protest.

Whether in terms of religious faith and identity, race, immigrant rights, or sexuality, the politics of belonging has historically presented both challenges and possibilities for Latino evangelicals in the religious landscapes of twentieth-century America. In Latino Mennonites, Hinojosa has interwoven church history with social history to explore dimensions of identity in Latino Mennonite communities and to create a new way of thinking about the history of American evangelicalism.

Reviews

Reviews

He has not only contributed to the scholarly understanding of the way ethnic identity intersects with faith and politics, but has done so by telling the previously unknown story of Latino Mennonites in the United States

[Latino Mennonites] can help us understand a bit better not just important streams within American evangelicalism but some of Iowa's present and future religious landscape as well.

A detailed and fascinating history of the Mexican and Puerto Rican experience in the Mennonite Church... Latino Mennonites documents the unique way in which Latino Mennonites straddle the border of evangelicalism and Anabaptism, and it also illustrates the intersection of civil rights, faith, and evangelical culture... Hinojosa has an engaging style, and the depth of the historical context he provides allows the personalities o his informants to shine through.

Hinojosa has an engaging style, and the depth of the historical context he provides allows the personalities of his informants to shine through.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
328
ISBN
9781421412832
Illustration Description
20 halftones
Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Interethnic Alliances, Sacred Spaces, and the Politics of Latino Evangelicalism
Part I: Missions and Race
1. Building Up the Temple: Mennonite Missions

Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Interethnic Alliances, Sacred Spaces, and the Politics of Latino Evangelicalism
Part I: Missions and Race
1. Building Up the Temple: Mennonite Missions in Mexican and Puerto Rican Barrios
2. Missionary Motives: Race and the Making of the Urban Racial Council
Part II: Black, Brown, and Mennonite
3. The Fight over Money: Latinos and the Black Manifesto
4. "Jesus Christ Made a Macho Outta Me!": The 1972 Cross-Cultural Youth Convention
5. Social Movement or Labor Union? Mennonites and the Farmworker Movement
Part III: Becoming Evangélicos
6. Mujeres Evangélicas: Negotiating the Borderlands of Faith and Feminism
7. "Remember Sandia!": Meno-Latinos and Religious Identity Politics
Conclusion: Latino Mennonites and the Politics of Belonging
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author Bio
Felipe Hinojosa
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Felipe Hinojosa

Felipe Hinojosa is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Hispanic Theological Initiative Dissertation Fellowship and a First Book Grant for Minority Scholars from the Louisville Institute.
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