CEHILA Publications

Sea la Luz: The Making of Mexican Protestantism in the American Southwest, 1829-1900

By Juan Francisco Martinez

University of North Texas Press
Hardcover ISBN: 1574412221 | Hardcover Price: $24.95
Physical Description: 6x9. 208 pages. 10 photos. 7 maps. Notes. Bib. Index.
Publication Date: September 2006

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Description:

Mexican Protestantism was born in the encounter between Mexican Catholics and Anglo American Protestants, after the United States ventured into the Southwest and wrested territory from Mexico in the early nineteenth century. Sea la Luz tells the story of Mexican converts and the churches they developed through the records of Protestant missionaries.

Juan Francisco Martinez traces Protestant mission work among the Spanish speaking of the Southwest throughout the nineteenth century. By 1900, about 150 Spanish-speaking Protestant churches with more than five thousand adult members existed in the region. They were rejected by their own people because they were Protestants, but Anglo American Protestants did not readily accept them either because they were Mexican. In spite of the pressures from both their own community and the larger society, they forged a new religious identity in the midst of conquest.

“Martinez has rendered an invaluable service to the history of the Southwest.”–Justo L. Gonzalez, Professor of Church History, Emory University

About the Author:

JUAN FRANCISCO MARTINEZ is Assistant Dean for the Hispanic Church Studies Department and Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Pastoral Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He is an active member of CEHILA USA.

The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in Houston
by Roberto R. Treviño

The University of North Carolina Press
Hardcover ISBN: 0-8078-2996-X Hardcover price: $59.95
Softcover ISBN: 0-8078-5667-3 Softcover price: $22.50
Physical Description: 328 pp., 51/2 x 81/2, 21 illus., 3 tables, 4 maps, appends., notes, bibl., index
Publication Date: Summer 2006

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Description

In a story that spans from the founding of immigrant parishes in the early twentieth century to the rise of the Chicano civil rights movement in the early 1970s, Roberto R. Treviño discusses how an intertwining of ethnic identity and Catholic faith equipped Mexican Americans in Houston to overcome adversity and find a place for themselves in the Bayou City.

Houston's native-born and immigrant Mexicans alike found solidarity and sustenance in their Catholicism, a distinctive style that evolved from the blending of the religious sensibilities and practices of Spanish Christians and New World indigenous peoples. Employing church records, newspapers, family letters, mementos, and oral histories, Treviño reconstructs the history of several predominately Mexican American parishes in Houston. He explores Mexican American Catholic life from the most private and mundane, such as home altar worship and everyday speech and behavior, to the most public and dramatic, such as neighborhood processions and civil rights marches. He demonstrates how Mexican Americans' religious faith helped to mold and preserve their identity, structured family and community relationships as well as institutions, provided both spiritual and material sustenance, and girded their long quest for social justice.

About the author
Roberto R. Treviño is associate professor of history and assistant director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is an active member of CEHILA USA.

Hispanic Methodist, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas
By Paul Barton

University of Texas Press
ISBN-10: 0-292-71291-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-292-71291-1
$50.00, hardcover, no dust jacket
Web Special: $33.50

ISBN-10: 0-292-71335-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-292-71335-2
$19.95, paperback
Web Special: $13.37
Physical Description: 6x9. 256 pp., 10 halftones, 2 tables, Notes. Bib. Index.
Publication Date: May 2006

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"Dr. Barton's book will provide an arena for significant dialogue among scholars, as well as between Catholics and Protestants, on the nature and significance of Hispanic Protestantism in the United States.... There is no question that this book is a significant contribution to the field. Indeed, there is no other book like it."
—Justo L. González, author of the highly praised volumes The Story of Christianity and History of Christian Thought and other major works

Description:
The question of how one can be both Hispanic and Protestant has perplexed Mexican Americans in Texas ever since Anglo-American Protestants began converting their Mexican Catholic neighbors early in the nineteenth century. Mexican-American Protestants have faced the double challenge of being a religious minority within the larger Mexican-American community and a cultural minority within their Protestant denominations. As they have negotiated and sought to reconcile these two worlds over nearly two centuries, los Protestantes have melded Anglo-American Protestantism with Mexican-American culture to create a truly indigenous, authentic, and empowering faith tradition in the Mexican-American community.

This book presents the first comparative history of Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas. Covering a broad sweep from the 1830s to the 1990s, Paul Barton examines how Mexican-American Protestant identities have formed and evolved as los Protestantes interacted with their two very different communities in the barrio and in the Protestant church. He looks at historical trends and events that affected Mexican-American Protestant identity at different periods and discusses why and how shifts in los Protestantes' sense of identity occurred. His research highlights the fact that while Protestantism has traditionally served to assimilate Mexican Americans into the dominant U.S. society, it has also been transformed into a vehicle for expressing and transmitting Hispanic culture and heritage by its Mexican-American adherents.

About the Author:
Paul Barton is Associate Professor of Hispanic Church Studies at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. He is the co-chair of CEHILA USA.

Reluctant Dawn
(A Biography of Padre Antonio José Martínez, the priest of Taos (1793-1867)
By Father Juan Romero

Description:
On July 16, a life-sized bronze memorial of the Padre A. J. Martinez is being unveiled at the Taos Plaza in northern New Mexico. The memorial is entitled "THE HONOR OF HIS HOMELAND," a title the Padre's peers in the NM Territorial Legislature inscribed on the his tombstone in 1867, and the NM State Legislature reprised in a commendation in 2002. On this occasion, Fr. Juan Romero--a native of Taos and ordained for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles--has published a second edition RELUCTANT DAWN, a biography of the Padre. To order your copy, please make a check out for $22 (includes tax and postage), and mail to THE TAOS CONNECTION -- 4741 East Palm Canyon Dr., C-135 -- Palm Springs, CA 92264.

The biography is solidly based on an 1877 biography located at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Dr. Timothy Matovina of the CUSHWA CENTER Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame wrote in the foreword to the second editon, "REUCTANT DAWN remains as viable and significant as it was on the occasion of its original publication thirty years ago."

CEHILA USA produced the first critical history of the U.S. Hispanic Church titled Fronteras: A History of the Latin American Church in the USA Since 1513, edited by Moisés Sandoval. The organization is currently working on a comprehensive history of U.S. Hispanic Christianity that takes into account contemporary scholarship.

Other works published by CEHILA USA members include:

Alberto López Pulido. The Sacred World of the Penitentes. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. ISBN: 1560983949.

Moises Sandoval. On the Move: A History of the Hispanic Church in the United States. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990. ISBN: 0883446758.

René Padilla and Lindy Scott. Terrorism and the War in Iraq: A Christian Word from Latin America. Ediciones Kairos, 2004. ISBN: 9879403681.

Juan Martínez and Luis Scott. Iglesias Peregrinas en Busca de Identidad: Cuadros del Protestantismo Latino en los Estados Unidos. Ediciones Kairos/CEHILA, 2004. ISBN: 9879403649.