Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio by Felipe Hinojosa

Abstract

Reviewed by: Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio by Felipe Hinojosa Kristy Nabhan-Warren Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio. Felipe Hinojosa. (Austin: University of Texas Press. 2021. Pp. xvi, 238. $45.00. ISBN: 978-1-477-32198-0.) Felipe Hinojosa’s Apostles of Change is a game-changer in how we view U.S. Latina/o history. In this meticulously crafted and researched book, the author urges his reader to move beyond the single-origin narratives that historians tend to embrace and retell about movements, in favor of a more complex, multi-layered story of “the thousands of small moments that gave birth to the Latina/o freedom movement” (p. x). Rather than focusing on one movement and a handful of mostly male leaders, Hinojosa shows us that “small but politically vibrant moments” form the impetus and stuff of a broader freedom movement (p. x). Apostles of Change is a must-read for anyone interested in U.S. Latina/o history and in how Latinas and Latinos worked to raise awareness of the entanglements of [End Page 821] racism, white privilege, and institutional churches’ complicity in perpetuating broken systems. Hinojosa’s book is a call for revisionist histories that runs parallel with his interlocutors’ calls for concrete changes in their institutions and communities. The stories that Hinojosa shares with his reader are about “the struggle to wholly transform the sacred space of the church, to move it into an embrace with its community, and to liberate it from its own strictures” (p. x). The book opens by quoting a statement from the 1969 Armitage Methodist Church in Chicago on its willingness to engage with grassroots anti-poverty measures rooted in social justice. White, liberal congregations such as this one, Hinojosa shows throughout the book, were spurred by Latina/o-led church occupations and protests by that directly challenged churches’ racist theologies and actions. Hinojosa begins the book with this particular vignette, and with 1969 as the start date, when churches “became strategic sites, indeed sacred places, where radical groups staged their movements and proclaimed their message of community control and power to the world” (p. 3). As many historians have chronicled, the late 1960s and 70s were decades of protest as Black Americans across the United States called attention to the inhumane, violent, racist treatment of nonwhite people, and churches were epicenters of the grassroots and widespread Black Civil Rights movement. But what scholars have not spent nearly as much time on, as Hinojosa convincingly argues, are the parallel Brown-led religio-spiritual protests of systemic racism and oppression and of oppressive institutional religion. The four core chapters of the book are deeply researched and compelling case studies of moments and components of what Hinojosa terms the “Latina/o freedom movement” which initiated a coming together of Brown, Black, and White social justice-focused individuals in a rainbow coalition of activists. Hinojosa offers four case studies of U.S. cities that were sites of Latina/o freedom movement protests and occupations. This freedom movement gained momentum in the late 60s and early 70s, and was comprised of young radical Latina/o leaders who deployed church occupations and disruptions in order to challenge the ways that the societal status quo seeped into churches and church politics. Hinojosa convincingly shows the reader that each of these moments, while on their own seemingly small and considered by some to be insignificant, built upon each other to form a pan-American Latina/o freedom movement. Hinojosa’s first case study is the Lincoln Park, Chicago seminary occupation by Puerto Rican, Mexican, Black and White allies in the Young Lords, where de jure “urban renewal” qua de facto urban removal was directly challenged by the young activists who occupied McCormick Theological Seminary, then a bastion of white liberal Protestantism. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles Latinas/os were organizing their own protests of institutional racism and negligence of nonwhite Catholics and people. A peak moment for Los Angeles Latina/o freedom movement was Católicos por la Raza’s gathering outside LA’s wealthy St. Basil Catholic Church...