Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945 ed. by Felipe Hinojosa, Maggie Elmore, and Sergio M. González

Abstract

Reviewed by: Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945 ed. by Felipe Hinojosa, Maggie Elmore, and Sergio M. González David A. Badillo Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945. Edited by Felipe Hinojosa, Maggie Elmore, and Sergio M. González. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 352 pp. $35.00. This lively collection of twelve lively essays, edited by historians Felipe Hinojosa, Maggie Elmore, and Sergio González is a well-designed and interesting, addition to the modern Latino religious studies literature. The authors' contributions are original, interesting, and valuable. Their aim is to reinterpret Latino religious studies by updating interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship with focused research studies adopting urban, social movement, and immigration perspectives. Topics include institutional Catholicism, popular devotionalism, ecclesiastical structures and church movements, male and female religious order clergy, and episodes in the historic transition from the old to the new U.S. immigrant church. These themes have been covered thoroughly in earlier works including, for example, the Notre Dame History of Hispanic Catholics in the U.S. trilogy edited by Jay Dolan, as well as case studies by Thomas Tweed, Robert Orsi, and Stephen Warner, among many others, and in recent works analyzing the histories of Latino evangelicals. Faith and Power seeks to re-envision earlier generations of scholarship by focusing on "Latino religious politics" from the vantage points of Catholicism, mainline and Pentecostal Protestantism, and Mormonism. The essays are organized into three sections with four chapters each: "place and politics," "freedom movements," and [End Page 87] "immigrant transformations" covering diverse Latino constituencies and religious leadership styles. The first essay by Maggie Gilmore explores how increasing religious pluralism during and right after World War II allowed Catholic agencies to provide needed services to Latinos and how, since the 1950s, church-state collaboration between Catholic organizations, especially involving important bishops and governmental agencies, demonstrated the merging of faith with political power. The next essay, by Lilia Fernández, offers an intricate examination of challenges surfacing in serving a multiethnic Latino population in the Archdiocese of Chicago during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Delia Fernández-Jones examines housing and other Latino adjustment patterns in Grand Rapids, Michigan from 1956 to 2000 and an essay by Sujey Vega examines how Latinos in the historic Mormon Corridor (running from Utah to northern Mexico) responded to changing congregational structures and language usage. The second section on social movements includes Lloyd Barba's essay on Pentecostal farmworkers in the 1950s; Jorge Juan Rodríguez's study of the Young Lords' takeover in 1969 and 1970 of The People's Church in East Harlem; Felipe Hinojosa's chapter on progressive religious movements—beginning with the California Migrant Ministry in the San Joaquín Valley and extending to faith-based organizations in New York City, which illuminates the rise of Latino activism in the civil rights era; and Lara Medina, who assesses innovative mujerista conferences and liturgies of the Catholic feminist organization Las Hermanas, which formed during the early 1970s, relating its work to subsequent movements. The third section begins with Sergio González's chapter on immigrant and refugee sanctuary movements from the 1980s to the present, which focuses on the Midwest. Then the chapter by Eladio Bobadilla turns to the role of the Catholic Church in debates leading to the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and Latino immigrant advocacy in its aftermath. Anne Martinez's essay revisits the expression of popular religion in the Vía Crucis in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. Finally, Yuridia Ramírez examines indigenous identity among Latinos in Durham, North Carolina. I have some reservations, however, about using the term "Latino religious politics" as a central organizing theme for the volume. Evidence presented in the chapters does not seem to warrant its predominance over an interpretation based simply on the interaction between religion, place, social movements, and immigration. In the essay on Mormonism, for instance, Vega develops a fascinating congregational analysis of Mexican American identity and participation within the Mormon Church which has little to do with immigration policy, the law, or politics. Few other chapters had any actual content [End Page 88] dealing with governance, democracy...