Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas (review)

2007Book Reviews121 element among the newly absorbed Latinos destined to influence their incorporation into U.S. society—their Spanish-Indian-African racial and religious hybridity. The next two chapters describe the experiences of Mexican Americans in San Antonio and ofPuerto Ricans in NewYork from the late nineteenth century to the 1 930s, pointing out ways in which Catholicism promoted community-building and ties to their homelands. An examination of four powerful figures between 1 940 and 1965—Archbishop Robert Lucey of San Antonio, Cardinal Francis Spellman of NewYork, and Cardinals Samuel Stritch and Albert Meyer of Chicago, who "assumed unprecedented powers in addressing issues brought on by Latin American migration and settlement beyond merely parochial concerns" (p. 91)—follows. In a chapter spanning 1959 to the present, Badillo explains the development of"exile Catholicism" (p. 92) among Cuban Americans in Miami, a blend of religiosity and fervent anti-Castro nationalism whose dominance has begun to weaken in the face of generational change coupled with Miami's more diverse immigration patterns of recent years. The last three chapters focus largely on globalization, religion, and ethnicity and how these have become increasingly intertwined in the post-1965 era. One chapter is a case study that examines these issues among Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago; here Badillo uses short ethnographies to good effect, putting a human face on the complexities and interrelatedness of Latino social mobility, transnational experiences, and faith traditions. Similar concerns are the focus of the next chapter, however, with an eye toward comparing and explaining the successes and failures of Catholic civic activism in San Antonio and New York. In the final chapter, Badillo extends his discussion to other cities and regions. The effects ofVatican II reforms, an increased and diverse Latin American immigration, the rise of Latino Protestantism, and the forces of urbanization and globalization, the author concludes, have created a new model of immigrant church within U.S. Catholicism, one which generally tends to regenerate homeland-specific ethnicities and resists "church policies designed to promote Latino 'panethnicity' for the sake of administrative and economic efficiency" (p. 201). Some readers will fault the author for giving so much play to what he himself calls "top-down episcopal leadership" (p. xx) at the expense of developing other perspectives, especially a more gendered one. Nonetheless, the author has synthesized importantscholarship and mined primary sources to produce a resource that will be useful to novice and specialist alike. University ofTexas at ArlingtonRoberto R. Treviño HispanicMethodists, Presbyterians, andBapthts in Texas. By Paul Barton. (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 2006. Pp. 256. Illustrations, figures, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 029271291X1 $50.00, cloth. ISBN 0292713355. $19-95. paper.) Much of the religious historiography of the Mexican-American borderlands naturally concerns Roman Catholicism. But of course this scholarly focus should 122Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly not divert attention away from Hispanic Protestants, who have suffered as a "double minority" (p. 2)—being religiously divergent from other Hispanics and ethnically and racially divergent from other American Protestants. Paul Barton's account highlights the attempts of Hispanic Protestants in Texas to construct an identity in the face of these dominant communities. This work complements the works of Daisy Machado, Mark T. Banker, Randi WalkerJones, and Susan M. Yohn in bringing light to this important, but neglected, subject. His story begins with Protestant missions to Texas in the 1 830s and ends in the iggos when declining animosity between Protestant and Catholic communities in the Southwest began to undermine Hispanic Protestant distinctiveness. Barton asks "how . . . the identity of a group of people from one culture changed when they adopt a religion ofanother culture" (p. 4). Specifically, he is interested in the role ofProtestantism in Mexican and Mexican American assimilation to Anglo American culture. While he finds that Hispanic Protestants "incorporated aspects ofMexican culture into their faith, and . . . appropriated certain aspects of Anglo-American culture and values," he shows that they never fully embraced Anglo American norms in terms of conforming to the language, culture, and institutions of the dominant society (p. 3). Barton shows that Hispanic Protestants appropriated the ethos of evangelical revivalism and "educationally oriented religion" from Anglo American culture (p. 76). Yet Mexican American congregations continued...