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WORK TITLE: Migrating Faith
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Claremont
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.cgu.edu/people/daniel-ramirez/ * http://ns.umich.edu/new/experts-list/23522-daniel-ramirez * http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2015/09/migrating-faiths-5-questions-for-daniel.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1958.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A.; Duke University, M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Claremont Graduate University, associate professor, 2016–. Former assistant professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, Board vice chair, Wesley Foundation; board chairman, Lewis Stallworth Charter School.
WRITINGS
Also contributor to books, including Pilgrim Churches in Search of Identity: Portraits of Latino Protestantism in the United States, edited by Lindy Scott and Juan Martínez, Wipf & Stock (Eugene, OR), 2008; Religión y Culturas Contemporáneas, edited by Antonio Higuera, Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes (Aguascalientes, Mexico), 2011; The Cambridge History of Religion in America, Volume 3, Religions in America, 1945 to the Present, edited by Stephen Stein, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2012; The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism, edited by Cecil M. Robeck and Amos Yong, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2014. Contributor to periodicals, including PentecoStudies.
SIDELIGHTS
Daniel Ramirez holds a position as associate professor of religious studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. “His research interests,” declared the contributor of a biographical blurb to the Claremont Graduate University Web site, “lie primarily in American religious history and Latin American religious history both within and outside the United States.” He is the author of the monograph Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century. In it, he writes about the spread of evangelical Christianity among Hispanics in the borderlands between the two countries.
Migrating Faith, the Claremont Graduate University Web site contributor explained, “begins in Los Angeles in 1906 with the eruption of the Azusa Street Revival and follows the trajectory of the Pentecostal phenomenon in the United States and Mexico throughout the century.” The event marked the beginning of the Pentecostal movement in the Americas. Many of the attendees were Hispanic—marking a break with the largely Catholic tradition of Latin America, and beginning a process that helped transform the appearance of the Christian Church. “The center of Christianity,” wrote Amos Yong in the Pneuma Review, “has now shifted from the Euro-American West to the global South; … because of the so-called `browning’ of the North American church such that the its vitality is currently being sustained, and is projected to be increasingly carried over the next few decades, by migration from the rest of Latin America; and because, for the North American Pentecostal movement in general and the Assemblies of God denomination specifically, one third of all adherents are non-white and one-fourth … are Latino.” “Migrating Faith proposes to chart the flow of one early Pentecostal current,” Ramirez wrote in the introduction to his monograph. “Like the hydrological basin that shapes the course of the river known on its northern bank as the Rio Grande and on its southern bank as the Rio Bravo, early borderlands Pentecostalism can provide clues about patterns and flows downstream and in other regions. In particular, the history of its immediately subsequent transnational flow, with salient features of migration, mobility, and musicality, can help us chart more precisely the seemingly muddled waters of contemporary global Pentecostal effervescence.”
Because Hispanic Pentecostalism was largely migratory, Ramirez points out, the traditions of the religion were preserved in the music of the movement. “Migrating Faith,” Ramirez said in an interview with Arlene Sanchez Walsh appearing in Religion in American History, “addresses the tone deafness in our several guilds and argues that we can no longer beg the absent or silent archive. This is especially important when considering subaltern religious traditions and communities that do not inhabit ‘textual’ worlds, that is to say, that have been denied the opportunity to leave deep textual archives. By privileging written texts or traditional archives over others, we skew the narrative arc away from certain groups like migrating proletarians and uprooted peasants.” “The musical archive provides an analytical window through which we can peer into early Pentecostals’ souls and communities,” Ramirez told Sanchez Walsh. “When we juxtapose the several musical traditions—and these often complemented as much as competed with each other—we can see some remarkable processes underway. Apostolics took great license in shaping evangélico hymnody to their needs and in sacralizing musical genres and instruments that their evangélico precursors and missionaries had previously dismissed as profane. Guitars and banjos were simply more practical and mobile than pianos and organs. It would have been hard to install an organ around a labor camp fire.” “Those interested in Pentecostal religious expression in other migrant ethnic groups,” stated E. Thompson in Choice, “will find the questions posed here relevant.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Ramirez, Daniel, Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2015.
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, E. Thompson, review of Migrating Faith, p. 1203.
Journal of American History, December, 2016, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, review of Migrating Faith, p. 788.
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, April, 2017, Allan Heaton Anderson, review of Migrating Faith, p. 438.
ProtoView, April, 2016, review of Migrating Faith.
ONLINE
Claremont Graduate University Web site, https://www.cgu.edu/people/ (April 5, 2017), author profile.
Pneuma Review, http://pneumareview.com/ September 23, 2016, Amos Yong, review of Migrating Faith.
Religion in American History, http://usreligion.blogspot.com/ (May 1, 2017), Arlene Sanchez-Walsh, “Migrating Faiths: 5 Questions for Daniel Ramírez.”
University of Michigan Web site, http://ns.umich.edu/ (April 5, 2017), author profile.*
Migrating Faiths: 5 Questions for Daniel Ramírez
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Posted by ARLENE SANCHEZ WALSH
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It is my great pleasure to interview my dear friend Dan Ramírez for my post this month. If it is possible to have friends in this business who are in the same field, who have probably competed with you for the same jobs, grants, and accolades, and still come out as friends....Dan and I are an example of how academia is supposed to work. Perhaps because through all the noise of academic prestige, Dan is committed to something beyond his own publicity, and you can't always say that about academics. Dan and most of the Latino/a religion scholars I consider friends, are committed to insisting that Latino/a Religion not be a sideline, a blip in the narrative of "American" religion.
photo courtesy of Evans Koukios
I know once you read Dan's exceptional book, Migrating Faith, and assign it in your classes, you will also agree--This work can no longer be relegated as Dan mentions below, to the "silent archive." Enjoy!
Hey, Arlene, always great to continue our tertulia of many years. Thanks for the questions.
Q1. . “Migrating Faiths” makes many arguments about the nature of faith & Latino/a religious communities, one of the more understudied is the role of music in Apostolic faith life, can you tell us more about that?
Migrating Faith addresses the tone deafness in our several guilds and argues that we can no longer beg the absent or silent archive. This is especially important when considering subaltern religious traditions and communities that do not inhabit "textual" worlds, that is to say, that have been denied the opportunity to leave deep textual archives. By privileging written texts or traditional archives over others, we skew the narrative arc away from certain groups like migrating proletarians and uprooted peasants. The long day in the cotton or vegetable field or fruit orchard and the long night of testifying and preaching around campfires did not leave much time for the writing of sermons, diaries, and theology. What they did carve out time and space for, however, was music, much music—translated music inherited from missionaries, translated and original compositions by evangélico precursors, and music of Pentecostals' own creation. The musical archive provides an analytical window through which we can peer into early Pentecostals' souls and communities. When we juxtapose the several musical traditions—and these often complemented as much as competed with each other—we can see some remarkable processes underway. Apostolics took great license in shaping evangélico hymnody to their needs and in sacralizing musical genres and instruments that their evangélico precursors and missionaries had previously dismissed as profane. Guitars and banjos were simply more practical and mobile than pianos and organs. It would have been hard to install an organ around a labor camp fire. The new corito tradition wrapped Scripture in popular musical forms. These simple and easily repeatable and mobile musical fragments allowed evangelicalismo finally to burrow deeply into the soil of popular religiosity (like Luther's hymns and Calvin's psalms). Instead of converts and would-be converts having to learn the repertoire of tune indices (early Spanish-language Protestant hymnals included these), they simply had to recognize familiar chord sequences and musical forms: polkas, valses, huapangos, boleros, etc. Apostolics also took great license in hymn translation, subverting metaphors and performing bricolage. We can also see (or hear) an appropriation of African American music. The new sonic scape helps to explain how Apostolics earned the early moniker or epithet, "Aleluya" (like the English "Holy Roller). There are clear traces of this in the extant scholarly and official record of the 1920s, for example, in anthropologist Manuel Gamio's study of Mexican immigrant life stories. Anticlerical mayors and governors in Baja California reported up the official chain to Mexico City their suspicion that this new evangélico upstart was "una cosa de negros, traido de los Estados Unidos" (a thing of Negroes, brought over from the United States). There is even evidence of aleluya influence in the early career of César Chávez; he credited Apostolic farmworkers with inspiring his decision to make music central to his future labor organizing. Like faith, belief, and doctrine, Apostolic music migrated wherever bodies and hearts did. When those bodies were pushed out of the U.S. by xenophobia (e.g., the Great Repatriation of the 1930s and Operation Wetback of 1954), so too was the music. So, I guess the book is as much about migrating music as it is about migrating faith.
Q2. I think the book, like much of the literature on Latino/a religion, makes a rather explicit case that American religious lenses trained on the East coast and South are missing a huge story out in the Southwest. Where does your book fit in the larger “Religion in the West” story?
Whose West are you speaking of? For many of the historical subjects I write about the region in question was their North. Put another way, we can see Latino USA as the northernmost Latin American nation. In other words, not only do I propose an expedition through the long border swath from San Diego to Tampico, I also invite readers to follow the movement's expanding transnational circuits deeper into both countries. So, the borders are quickly scrambled in Migrating Faith. In the spirit of the many coritos and hymns about rain and water, may I suggest a hydrological metaphor? By examining the headwaters of the river we know on its northern banks as the Rio Grande and on its southern bank as the Rio Bravo and by tracing the topography of its course, we may have something to say about its flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly, the long-overdue study of early Latino Pentecostalism emanating from the Azusa Street Revival can help us understand the effervescence and strength of contemporary revivalism in the hemisphere. So, yes, Migrating Faith seeks to help to fill the lacuna in scholarship on "Religion of the West," but by spending an equal amount of time south of the border, it also seeks to help to fill the lacuna in scholarship on Latin American religion.
Q3. One of Apostolic Pentecostalism’s more well known characteristics are the dress codes, to what extent did Latinos/as adapt or modify those codes? How do you deal with the material culture of the movement in your book?
Well, it's evident from the photographic evidence that most hermanas paid a lot more attention to their hair than Kim Davis…. Sorry. Cheap shot. But it is striking how the search for respectability or the representation of respectability can be seen in the record: individuals, youth groups, congregations, convention ministers and attendees, and even congregations working together in agricultural fields (temple construction fundraising projects). Hats on men and women were very common in the beginning. I'd call it a stylish modesty. Of course, as in most Pentecostal movements, women bore the burden for "santidad" (holiness). So, the female body became the site of signification. One of the fascinating and telling markers is the veiling one. Male pioneers imposed this symbol of piety, in order to distinguish Apostolics from their white and black counterparts. Of course, women were complicit in this arrangement. Thanks to pioneer José Ortega's obsessive photography, we have a decade-by-decade record of the evolution of this telltale marker of gendered Apostolic identity. They began looking like other post-Victorian Evangelicals, but by the second decade began to take on uniform bonnets and outfits. The influx of poorer immigrants in the 1940s resulted in a standardized veil, black for married women and white for unmarried women. (Some leading pioneer women never relinquished their modest church hats; this suggests a class distinction.) Then things took an unexpected turn when enterprising women, cued into the glut of Spanish mantillas caused by Vatican II's reforms for Catholic women, took velo aesthetics to a different level, creating a cottage industry in the process. Color dyes followed. Now, women purchase velos to match their clothing and accessories. So much for the sanctified machismo of the early years. There's a dissertation to be written here. There is also one to be written about Apostolic foodways, fellowship, and hospitality.
Q4.As I like to tell all up and coming academics, and to quote my favorite t.v. show, “The Sopranos,” You’re only as good as your last envelope. So, what are you working on next?
Migrating Faith takes the story up to the late 1960s, owing to important generational transitions in leadership in both countries and important macroevents like the expiration of the Bracero guest labor program (1942-1964) and the 1965 immigration reform. Pentecostalisms of Oaxacalifornia will take up the story from that point, when the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca began to figure prominently in the flow of labor migration. This unique migration flowed through the agricultural regions of Sinaloa and Baja California states, up to the border cities of Mexicali and Tijuana, and over into California and beyond (I've enjoyed delicious oaxaqueño mole negro in New Jersey!). The new geographic coinage reflects activists' views of the expanse of territory from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico to northern California. The 2000 and 2010 censuses of Mexico revealed a relatively high percentage of Pentecostals and evangélicos in Oaxaca and other southern states. I think circular labor migration had a lot more to do with this than missionary enterprise; certainly, proximity to the U.S. can't explain this. So, this second book takes up where Migrating Faith leaves off, and adds an additional layer of analysis, in order to examine the intersection between indigenous identity and cambio religioso (religious change). Methodologically, I borrow heavily from ethnography.
Q5. Most people who read this blog have little idea about who we are, so I guess it's time to mention that we have known each other for nearly 20 years! I believe it was the 1997 American Academy of Religion meeting? For the longest time, we have had lunch or dinner at one of these convos for nearly that long! So I feel comfortable in asking you the following questions:
Favorite color:
Pet peeve:
Favorite Movie:
and most importantly: Flour or corn tortillas
Favorite color: Blue, navy and light. That's probably why I chose Yale and Duke.
Pet peeve: There must be a special corner in Hell for that person who first tossed cheddar cheese on top of a plate of Mexican food and then passed it off as authentic. Favorite movie: Young Frankenstein (We had no TV at home, and never went to movies. This was one of the first movies I saw in college. It made breaking the taboo very enjoyable. Never tire of it. My younger brother Jonathan and I can mute the movie and perform the entire dialogue.) Flour or corn tortillas: Depends if they're handmade or not. Corn for menudo and most guisados. Flour for chorizo con huevo burrito. We were raised with mostly handmade flour tortillas (a precious childhood memory that my older sisters do not share), although our roots were in western Mexico, where corn predominates. There's another dissertation that awaits writing: the transition from corn to flour (to manufactured) tortillas in Mexican American society. What happened?!
Gracias!
Dan
Daniel Ramírez brief bio
Daniel Ramírez (Ph.D., American Religious History, Duke University) is an Assistant Professor of North American Religion at the University of Michigan, and author of 16 publications in the field of American, Latino, and Latin American religion. His forthcoming book, Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina, October 2015) examines the transnational and cultural dimensions of revivalism within a migrating labor diaspora. His second monograph project, "Pentecostalisms of Oaxacalifornia," continues the analysis through the more contemporary time period of oaxaqueño migration and through the added prism of indigenous experience and identity.
In December 2013, the Hubbard Library of Fuller Theological Seminary inaugurated the Apostolic Archives of the Americas, a project convened by Ramírez to create a repository for Latino and Latin American Pentecostal historical collections. Dr. Ramírez serves as Board Vice Chair of the Wesley Foundation, the college chaplaincy program based at the First United Methodist Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He also serves as Board Chairman of the Lewis Stallworth Charter School, a largely African American and Latino primary-through-middle school in his hometown of Stockton, California.
Daniel Ramirez, Ph.D.
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Daniel Ramirez
Appointments
College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
Expertise
American religious history, Latin American cultural studies, cultural anthropology
Contact Information
Office Phone: 734-615-6474
Email: dramire@umich.edu
Web: https://lsa.umich.edu/ac/people/faculty/dramire.html
Daniel Ramírez
Associate Professor of Religion
Portrait of Daniel Ramirez
EMAIL
daniel.ramirez@cgu.edu
DEGREES
PhD, American Religious History, Duke University
MA, Religion, Duke University
BA, Political Science: American Government, Yale College
RESEARCH INTERESTS
American religious history; Latin American religious history; Religion, migration, and transnationalism; Religion in borderlands; Contemporary theories of religion
Daniel Ramírez joined Claremont Graduate University’s Religion Department in July 2016. His research interests lie primarily in American religious history and Latin American religious history both within and outside the United States. Ramírez has taught a vast range of courses within these broad fields, including American Evangelicalisms and Fundamentalisms; Religion, Migration, and Transnationalism; History of the Hispanic Heterodox: Latina/o Religious History; Religious Pathways of the Borderlands; and Film and Religious History, among others.
Ramírez received his BA in Political Science at Yale College before going on to receive his MA and PhD from Duke University in American Religious History. At Duke, Ramírez received many awards and fellowships, including the Duke University Latin American and Caribbean Studies (DULACS) Program Foreign Language and Area Studies Dissertation Research Fellowship, Duke Graduate School International Research Award, and the Duke Graduate School A. Webb Dissertation Research Technology Award.
During Ramírez’s career, he has published numerous book chapters and articles, most often on Latin American religious history, traditions, and challenges. His recent book, Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), begins in Los Angeles in 1906 with the eruption of the Azusa Street Revival and follows the trajectory of the Pentecostal phenomenon in the United States and Mexico throughout the century.
Ramírez is working on several projects, including Pentecostalisms of Oaxacalifornia, which examines the growth of Pentecostalism in the heavily indigenous transnational expanse of the Oaxacan homeland and labor diaspora and explores the challenges the new religious pluralism poses to ancient religious, cultural, and political folkways; and another book, Alabaré a Mi Señor: Latino and Latin American Sacred Musics, which takes up the ethnomusicological method and questions embedded in Migrating Faith, and applies these to a comparative study of Catholic, historic Protestant, and Pentecostal religious musics.
SELECTED WORKS
Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
“Pentecostalism in Latin America.” In The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism, edited by Cecil M. Robeck and Amos Yong, 112–31. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
“‘No Me Olvides’/’Forget Me Not’: Pentecostal Praxis and Solidarity in Xenophobic Times.” PentecoStudies 12, no. 1 (2013): 8–35.
“Religion in Mexico, 1945 to the Present.” In Religions in America, 1945 to the Present. The Cambridge History of Religion in America Vol. 3, edited by Stephen Stein, 57–81. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
“Usos y costumbres (¿y mañas?): Cambio religioso y cultural en Oaxaca.” Religión y Culturas Contemporáneas, edited by Antonio Higuera. Aguascalientes, MX: Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, 2011.
“Alabaré a mi Señor: Culture and Ideology in Latino Protestant Hymnody.” In Pilgrim Churches in Search of Identity: Portraits of Latino Protestantism in the United States, edited by Lindy Scott and Juan Martínez, 151–72. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008.
Ramirez, Daniel. Migrating faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico, 1906-1966
E. Thompson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1203.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Ramirez, Daniel. Migrating faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico, 1906-1966. North Carolina, 2015. 283p bibl index afp ISBN 9781469624068 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9781469624075 ebook, $24.99
53-3562
BR1644
CIP
In consultation with leading Latino scholars from Mexico and the US, Ramirez (American culture and history, Michigan) conducted 20 years of extensive research into Pentecostal religious expression among Mexican migrants originating in Mexico, transient in the US, and repatriated to Mexico. This volume is the interim report of that Pew Foundation-funded research, posing questions for further study and questioning the competence of academicians outside the Pentecostal movement to define the methodologies of analysis that might more authentically arise from within the body of Pentecostal believers. A useful preliminary repertoire of Spanish-language lyrics as used in Pentecostal song is the most complete aspect of this research to date, and the signal contribution of the present volume. Substantial notes and an up-to-date bibliography on Latinos and Pentecostalism are appended. Those interested in Pentecostal religious expression in other migrant ethnic groups and in African American evangelicalism will find the questions posed here relevant, but without comparative analysis at this point. For borderlands history courses and southern California regional studies programs. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Most levels/ libraries.--E. Thompson, University of Maryland University College
9781469624068
Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century
Daniel Ramirez
University of North Carolina Press
2015
283 pages
$29.95
BR1644
Among the issues Ramirez raises are the academic predilection for text-centered approaches to American religious history, and the understanding and expectations for political engagement among the religiously mobilized. In the case of Apost licos and other Pentecostales, the engagement perforce has to unfold in legal shadows, owing to the high percentage of non-citizens in the pews and pulpits. He covers Pentecostal origins in the borderlands, Pentecostal origins in northern Mexico and southern Texas, persecution and expansion: repatriado histories, borderlands solidarity, the texture of transnational Apostolicism, whether the Pentecostal subaltern can sing, and whether it can speak. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
Journal of Ministry Resources and Theology for Pentecostal and Charismatic Ministries &
Latino Pentecostalism, a review essay by Amos Yong
| September 23, 2016 | no comments
Gastón Espinosa, Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), xi + 505 pages.
Daniel Ramírez, Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), xix + 283 pages.
Why should readers of The Pneuma Review look up these books under review? Although the answers to this question may seem obvious, they nevertheless need to be reiterated: because the center of Christianity has now shifted from the Euro-American West to the global South; consistent with the foregoing, because of the so-called “browning” of the North American church such that the its vitality is currently being sustained, and is projected to be increasingly carried over the next few decades, by migration from the rest of Latin America; and because, for the North American Pentecostal movement in general and the Assemblies of God denomination specifically, one third of all adherents are non-white and one-fourth – and growing percentage-wise as well as in aggregate – are Latino (see, e.g., Pew Research Center demographics from July 2015). Beyond other rationales that might motivate the present constituency, the above ought to prompt curiosity at least, if not a sense of urgency about becoming more acquainted with what Espinosa and Ramírez have to say. To be as pointed as possible: despite their “Decade of Harvest” initiative in the 1990s, the Assemblies of God would be in no less severe of a decline compared to mainline Protestant denominations if not for growth in Latinos within its ranks over the last two decades!
Gastón Espinosa is Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.
The authors and their books covered in this review are quite distinct. Ramírez is a more recently established academic who is shifting, at the time of this writing, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (their Department of American Culture and Latino/a Studies) to Claremont School of Theology (Claremont, California). This is his first book, his Duke University PhD thesis, which has been substantially revised and extended, appearing after almost a decade. Espinosa, meanwhile, began his scholarly work on the origins of Latino Pentecostalism in the first half of the twentieth century (completing his PhD on this topic in 1999 at the University of California, Santa Barbara) and has become renowned as one of the foremost specialists on Latino religions with more than a half dozen books from Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, and other prestigious scholarly publishers. From his post at Claremont McKenna College, since 2009 as the Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies, Espinosa’s Latino Pentecostals in America builds on his research trajectory going back more than two decades, carrying forward to the present the more historically focused coverage of his preceding monograph, William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History (Duke University Press, 2014). Both have been participants at least in some respects of the histories they are narrating and thereby provide superb and complementary guidance to anyone interested in understanding further the Latino side of North American Pentecostal history.
Why read these books under review? The center of Christianity has shifted from the Euro-American West to the global South.
Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action proceeds via a case study – quite focused considering the extant over 225 Pentecostal groups – of the Latino Assemblies of God (AG) movement, even denominational tradition (as much as churches like the Assemblies of God resist the “denominational” appellation). Among its many fine qualities, scholars of Pentecostalism and aficionados of Pentecostal history especially will be engaged with Espinosa’s straightforward efforts to set the record straight, as it were, with regard to prior histories, analyses, or presentations that have either ignored or minimized and subordinated the agency of Latinos to that of white AG ministers, administrators, and ecclesial leaders. Each of the twelve chapters to the book thus clearly specifies how antecedent scholarship and ecclesial memories or narratives have marginalized or distorted what happened: from Mexican involvement at the Azusa Street revival to their role in the Texas region and at and around the Southwest borderlands areas, to Puerto Rican agency on the island and in the Eastern Spanish district from New York state down to Florida. The last two chapters also take up one-fifth of the book’s space to tell about the much more palpable – compared to their white counterparts – presence and activity of Latino AG ministers in the American political landscape particularly since the turn of the new millennium. Espinosa’s book is important here not just for countering stereotypes about apolitical Pentecostalism but also since it explicates the how of Latino leaders having had “direct access to national political leaders and American presidents” (p. 365) and the why of such prominence within the dynamics of Latino religiosity in the contemporary socio-historical context. This material will certainly be of interest to those within and those outside of North American Pentecostalism looking to understand the movement in relationship to the religious politics of the 2016 election year.
Category: In Depth, Summer 2016
About the Author: Amos Yong is Professor of Theology & Mission and director of the Center for Missiological Research at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena. His graduate education includes degrees in theology, history, and religious studies from Western Evangelical Seminary and Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, and Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, and an undergraduate degree from Bethany University of the Assemblies of God. He is the author of numerous papers and over 30 books. fuller.edu/faculty/ayong/ amosyong@fuller.edu