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 Mario T. Garcia Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio. By Felipe Hinojosa. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 219. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In fifty years of incredible productivity in Chicano history, surprisingly few studies of religious history were written. One of the exciting new changes in this historiography is the increased study of religion, especially the link between religion and community activism. A new generation of historians is leading the way, and Felipe Hinojosa is a key member of this vanguard. Building on his first major contribution in this effort, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith and Evangelical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Hinojosa has followed with an even more innovative second book about what he calls “Apostles of Change.” Who are these Apostles? They are lay activists who, influenced by the Chicano and Puerto Rican civil rights struggles, recognized that churches were a major institution within the barrios that needed to be challenged along with political, economic, and educational systems. They ministered to the spiritual needs of their congregations but failed to address poverty, unemployment, inferior schooling, and urban displacement. Some Chicano/Latino activists said basta (enough), and they took the churches on. Hinojosa’s study concerns four cases where activists linked religion to civil rights and community empowerment issues. Based on thorough research, Hinojosa studies the takeover of three churches, and the intervention of a fourth one, in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston. In Chicago, a coalition of Chicano and Puerto Rican youth activists, including the militant Young Lords along with Black and White supporters, occupied Presbyterian-operated McCormick Theological Seminary for five days in May 1969. Their main concern was urban renewal. While the takeover did not stop this assault on the area, it did help to initiate a larger struggle that forced both Protestant and Catholic churches to deal with material conditions in the barrios. In Los Angeles, Chicano movement activists organized Católicos Por La Raza, which called on the Catholic Church to do more for its Mexican American parishioners. Shunned by Cardinal James McIntyre, the group forced a confrontation with him during his Christmas Eve Mass in 1969. The intervention led to McIntyre’s resignation and to the Church becoming more responsive to Latino needs. In East Harlem in New York City, the Puerto Rican-led Young Lords occupied the First Spanish United Methodist Church in December 1969 for eleven days and transformed it into a people’s church by providing a variety of social services. Although arrested, the Young Lords inspired others to reconsider church priorities. Finally, and of particular importance to Texas history, Hinojosa examines the occupation of Juan Marcos Presbyterian Church in Houston’s northside barrio in the spring of 1970 for twenty days by the Mexican American Youth Organization [End Page 328] (MAYO). Its efforts to transform the church into a social service agent, while limited, likewise pressured church leaders to reexamine their relationship to the Mexican American community. These takeovers and interventions in churches during the civil rights era reveal that religion was not absent in Chicano/Latino freedom movements and that secular activists more often than clergy led the way in linking churches to the social needs of people. Acting as “apostles of change,” these activists transformed the meaning of church. In successfully resurrecting these histories, Hinojosa has written a significant addition to the growing historiography of Chicano/Latino religious history. Well-written and organized, it should be welcomed by historians of the Chicano/Latino experience and by those interested in American religions. Mario T. Garcia University of California, Santa Barbara Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association