The Reverend Guillermo Ibarra: A Legacy of Accommodation and Resistance through Religion and Education in the Brazos Valley

Reverend Guillermo Ibarra, c.1925. Church Records, Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana, Bryan, Texas.

On August 14, 2012, members of Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana de Bryan petitioned the Parks and Recreation Department of Bryan, Texas, to change the name of San Jacinto Park to Ibarra Park to recognize the legacy of the Reverend Guillermo Ibarra. Ibarra founded one important institution for Mexican Americans in the Brazos Valley, Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana de Bryan (1922), and his legacy led to the establishment of a second one, Ibarra Primary School (1935).¹

Well known as a champion for the local Mexican American community and for his dedication to education, Ibarra’s life, leadership, and activism shed light onto the roots of political activism for the Mexican American Generation in Central Texas, a region often understudied by scholars interested in Mexican Americans in the twentieth-century U.S. Southwest.² The development of Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana de Bryan through Guillermo Ibarra’s leadership and Mexican American students and parents’ encounters with Americanization in Ibarra Primary School demonstrate how Mexican American Baptists and other Mexican Americans in the Brazos Valley used their experiences and resources to both accommodate the dominant culture and resist racial subordination.³

Although scholars of Mexican American history have acknowledged the prevalence of religion in the lives of Mexican Americans, the ways in which religion explicitly informs the political strategies and identities of its followers remains understudied. Mario T. García, among others, has noted the striking paucity of religion-focused works in Mexican American historiography, and he has been at the forefront of the effort to analyze the influence of religion on the lives of Mexican Americans.⁴ Within this movement to understand Mexican American religiosity, the historiography of Latino Protestants has generally focused too narrowly on church history, denominational developments, and Anglo Protestant missionary efforts before the twentieth century.⁵ Thus, this article’s twentieth-century perspective on Latino evangelicals, of Southern Baptists in particular, at the beginnings of the Mexican American Generation challenges a traditional focus on nineteenth-century rural developments and has the potential to demonstrate that Mexican American Baptists have their own history apart from the work of Anglo missionaries and institutions.

Guillermo Ibarra was born in Matamoros, Mexico, in 1876, and his aunts and uncles took turns raising him after his parents died when he was young. He arrived in Texas around 1890 as a fourteen-year-old seeking new opportunities in the small town of Martindale. Ibarra’s family had raised him as a Catholic, but just a few months after arriving in Martindale, he converted to Protestantism.⁶ Although the record for Ibarra’s life between 1890 and 1903 is relatively sparse, he appears to have spent several years at a trade school learning the skills of a printer, barber, and plumber.⁷ City records from Austin and missionary correspondence show that from 1903 until 1907, Ibarra worked as an editor and a barber with an address near downtown Austin. In 1906, he began participating in local Baptist organizations and even served as one of more than one hundred messengers to the Austin Baptist Association.⁸ After passing a rigorous ordination examination on March 3, 1907, Ibarra became an ordained Baptist minister under the Reverend Marcus Castillo, pastor of Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana de Austin, and he began working as a missionary in the Rio Grande Baptist Association funded by the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) State Mission Commission.⁹

Ibarra’s first assignment was a small Mexican Baptist church in Cotulla, Texas, ninety miles south of San Antonio, where he served as pastor. He also established another church in neighboring Pearsall in 1908 and served as pastor of both churches for a few years.¹⁰ While in Pearsall, Ibarra met and married Heriberta Gallardo. Ibarra also spent time with a Mexican Baptist theologian to learn more about leading a congregation according to the Baptist...