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p art ii a look at latina/o religious historiography this book is about the construction of subversive counterdiscourses within the historical field. Latina/o religious historiography can be considered a subversive enterprise since it uncovers themes, voices, and stories hidden by the dominant U.s. religious historical discourses examined in the first part. While the field of Latina/o religious history has been growing in the last decade, it is still marginalized and absent from major academic institutions and projects that still see this literature as a footnote within the larger narratives. A simple look at the literature within this field is enough to see the diversity of material scholars have been able to put at the forefront of their research that may have been left outside the traditional narratives about U.s. religious history. They are mostly guided by denominational, regional, or national interest and the themes of marginalization, paternalism, prejudice (racial, religious , and ethnic), and “Americanization,” themes that are present and exposed in most of the literature. On the other hand, a deeper look at these multiple projects provides an opportunity to understand what approaches and paradigms scholars have been using and developing as they read the data and write their narratives. This second part of the book is interested in this deeper analysis. The field of Latina/o religious history has been divided into two major areas, Catholic histories and Protestant histories. While i explore each area separately in the next two chapters, it is important to acknowledge that both have followed similar developments. in the first stages of the field, the interest of authors (scholars and church leaders alike) was to find faces, names, and stories of Latina/o people—especially Mexicans and Mexican Americans—in order to 51 52 made in the margins prove the presence of this community within the larger religious communities. Once some of these stories had been uncovered, there was an interest in proving the agency of the Latinas/os by positioning them not merely as recipients of missionary enterprises or paternalistic attitudes but as subjects of their own stories. in many cases the setback of this approach was that while these works provided glimpses of that agency, it was still seen through the perspective of those in power and not through the people themselves. Over the last decade or so, the literature has been able to show the agency of these communities through the eyes of the people since much of this work has been developed through ethnographical and other sociocultural historical approaches. it is within this stage, where we find ourselves today, that i feel we should be talking about methods and theories of analysis that would increase the capacity of the field to create projects that follow a postcolonizing perspective, the topic i will be discussing in the third part. in the next two chapters, i look at some of the major literature within the field of U.s. Latina/o religious history, not all, in order to examine the production of these projects. My analysis consists in exploring the methods and theories being used by scholars within this field as they construct their discourses. i will not, of course, examine each of the available projects, nor am i interested in an in-depth review of this literature as it pertains to its content. An analysis of the approaches and hermeneutical keys behind the construction of the discourses allows us to understand the trajectory and state of the field in order to attempt to move it forward through the development of new theories and methods. each chapter includes a historiographical survey of the literature that offers an overview of the development of the respective area within the field of U.s. Latina/o religious history. After that survey, i offer an analysis of the major trends and paradigms. it is important to restate that i focus my analysis on historical material, so many other theological and sociological works that are crucial in the development of the larger field of Latina/o religious studies are not examined here. While i recognize the importance of these studies, i wanted to concentrate my own analysis within the field of history, even if i know that the boundaries of these disciplines are fluid, especially as pertains to Latina/o religions. ...

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