Another Village Church, Another Love Triangle

In the 1930s a pentecostal preacher headed for the Mezquital plain in Hidalgo where he had little success in gaining converts. Traveling out to the villages, the populace rejected him (at times with violence) and he found himself in the town of Ixmiquilpan - what passes for a "big town" in the area. There he had some success gaining converts and, with the help of the army, he built a chapel and started a religious colony - Colonia Evangelica. The Summer Language Institute supplied Otomi bibles, and the congregation was set.

Jobs in the colony were parceled out to members only, and such an offer brought in converts from the pueblos that had previously rejected the preacher. Once migrants were converted and given jobs, missionaries easily penetrated their home pueblos and gained more converts in the area. Of course, the PRI was the political patron of the Pentecostals, and with institutional support, Pentecostalism throve in the area.

Flash forward to 2005. When a prominent Pentecostal preacher died, Catholics refused to allow him burial in the local municipal cemetery - mostly because they claimed he had never contributed to the upkeep of the place. Evangelical Christians in Hidalgo organized a protest in response, blockading the highway to Pachuca and shutting down trade and business along the route until the governor of Hidalgo offered to meet with them. However, in elections just a short time later, PRIistas were handed their heads - on plates - by an Evangelical voting bloc that sent a message to the parties - support our causes or find yourself on the loosing end of the vote.

With presidential elections two years away, and evangelical christian growth in Mexico growing steadily, we may be looking at a new player in Mexico's national elections - not just on the regional level.

For more on the topic, see Guillermo de la Pena's "El Campo Religioso, La Diversidad Regional." See also Joseph Contreras' In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Mexico, chapter 12 called "The Evangelical Challenge." Contreras, as a reporter, gets a little melodramatic at times, and could certainly use a history lesson or two, but it is an interesting book to chew on.

Religious Violence Continues in Chiapas: The Other Rights

Demonstrators in San Cristobal de las Casas entered their seventh day of protest for expulsions and violence done to them by local Catholics in Chiapas since mid January and earlier. Some families have been expelled from communities while others have been detained for failure to participate in Catholic community festivals.

Such violence is not new - we've seen Catholic on Protestant expulsions for twenty years now as well as pro-government Protestant on Catholic violence since the Zapatista revolution started. I once read in well regarded book by an even better regarded author of Mexican history that the local and the sacred had been replaced by the national and the liberal. Horse hockey. Evengelicals and Protestants in Chiapas, Luz del Mundo in Guadalajara, Nueva Jerusalen in Michoacan ... all of these show that the intersection of the sacred and the citizen are alive and well in Mexico and not relegated to a distant mid-nineteenth century past.

At any rate, while Mexico City frets about the rights of gays to marry, fundamental right of association and property are violated every day in the mas alla for religious reasons without much attention from DF. Most certainly the local and the sacred have not been relegated to the dustbin of Mexican history.

Religion in Latin America

As a member of the Religion in World History group headed by David Lidenfeld that works to promote the discussion of religion in world history, I compiled a list of ten books on Latin American religion that world historians might find useful.

Why ten? I admit to using the “cutesy list” approach, and it seemed to fit the nature of the H-World list that I had sent it to.

I picked most of these works for two reasons: Either they serve as overviews for those looking for an introduction (such as the Creole Religions book) or they serve as specific cases in Latin America that I’ve noticed make good connections to similar processes elsewhere in the world (such as Diacon’s book on Brazil). Also, while Gustavo Gutierrez's book is the founding Bible of liberation theology for scholars, I chose the Boff brothers for readability.

If nothing, perhaps there will be some comments on the books selected that will prompt some to think of Latin American history as a place to look for comparative cases for their own interests.

• Creole Religions of the Caribbean by Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. New York University Press, 2007.
• Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America, edited by Timothy Steigenga and Edward Cleary. Rutgers University Press, 2008.
• The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World by John Leddy Phelan. University of California Press, 1970.
• Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprisings of 1835 in Bahia by Joao Jose Reis. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
• Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality: Brazil’s Contestado Rebellion, 1912-1916 by Todd Diacon. Duke University Press, 1991.
• The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia by Elizabeth Brusco. University of Texas at Austin Press, 1995.
• Peru’s Indian People and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest by Steve J. Stern (SECOND EDITION). University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
• God and Production in a Guatemala Town by Sheldon Annis. University of Texas at Austin Press, 1987.
• The Church in Colonial Latin America, edited by John F. Schwaller. Scholarly Resources (now Rowman and Littlefield) Books, 2000.
• Introducing Liberation Theology by Leonardo and Cleodovis Boff. Orbis Books, 1987.