Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Drawing on oral histories, ethnomusicology, and numerous postcolonial theories, Daniel Ramírez has produced a study that offers fresh interpretations to Latino/a religious studies and American religious history. In Migrating Faith the author asserts that studies of Pentecostalism in the Americas, and of Latino/a Pentecostalism more specifically, tend to focus on worshippers' corporeality and embodiment. While he lauds such a focus, or what he prefers to call an “optic” of empowerment via embodied worship and release, Ramírez sets out to uncover and explore yet another source that has been unheard by scholars: the centrality of music for Latino/a Pentecostals (p. xiv). He argues that the transgressive and empowering aspects of the hymns lent feelings of hope and opportunity for Latino/as from the time of the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 to the latter decades of the twentieth century. Ramírez sets out to understand the complex reasons for the rapid rise of Pentecostalism for men, women, and children of Mexican descent in the twentieth century and determines that the congregations served as “migration trampolines and alternative transnational public squares, erected in the face and wake of xenophobia” (p. 134). Moreover, Pentecostal congregations presented “exciting sonic spheres” (ibid.). Ramírez's focus on ethnomusicological aspects and analysis of Pentecostalism among Latinos/as is the primary way to understand “Pentecostalism's bricolage, creativity, and emotive core, as well as its overflow into Catholic and mainline Protestant spheres” (p. 16). As he notes, “the dynamic globalized marketplace of contemporary Christian worship” can attain a greater degree of clarity when we examine Latino/a Pentecostal songs and their transmission in other religious spheres (p. 17). Pentecostal hymnodies in the early twentieth century, the author notes, also “redeemed the fiesta of Mexican and Latino culture” (p. 178). These Pentecostals