I. Guild Introspection

To begin, I would like to revisit some presidential musings of the past, some of which offered the scholars’ best foot forward in terms of their specialty, and others that took the guild's pulse, provoking introspection over the very vocation of church history. In 1985, David Steinmetz took us up and down Jacob's ladder to heaven with Martin Luther, as the great Reformer wrestled several medieval commentators over their interpretation of that Hebrew Bible story. Luther's contribution of a psychological layer of analysis rendered a more three-dimensional subject, according to Steinmetz, something that historians should consider emulating.Footnote ⁶ In 1992, George Marsden called for a reexamination of the bifurcation between scientific detachment and scholars’ faith and other commitments, a bifurcation wrought by the American Association of University Professors early in the twentieth century and adopted by many ASCH members. Ironically, Marsden found in emerging feminist scholarship a critical ally when it came to transparency concerning scholars’ positionality.Footnote ⁷ In 1994, Nathan Hatch puzzled over the declension in Methodist studies, given that movement's immense paper trail.Footnote ⁸ A decade later, in 2006, Mark Noll mused on the declension in Canadian Christian identity vis-à-vis the United States. In 2007, Jan Shipps, against the backdrop of impressive national and global Mormon growth, traced the transition from an ethnic sense of peoplehood to a more transcendental one of spiritual membership.Footnote ⁹ Finally, in 2009, Grant Wacker offered a glimpse of his forthcoming magnum opus on “America's pastor.”Footnote ¹⁰

And now to the introspective addresses. In 2011, Richard Heitzenrater, in a clever allusion to the new Powerpoint technology, offered an “imagination-assisted presentation” (slides), in order to speak about “the invention of Church history” that was at once credible, appropriate, and helpful, especially for “the needs of the people who are trying to make sense of the whole story.”Footnote ¹¹ In 2013, Laurie Maffly-Kipp reflected on the “Burdens of Church History,” asking what the scholar should do—in an age of increased interest in atomized spirituality (“this flight from organized religious life”)—with the historical subaltern, namely, African Americans, who founded and found in old (and new) denominational structures the means to mobilize liberatory energy and vision.Footnote ¹² Maffly-Kipp's question, like that of Heitzenrater, evidenced a concern for guild ethics vis-à-vis the subjects of guild research. Her musings—engaging those of Church History editors gathered in a 2011 roundtable and provoking a robust response by other colleagues in a 2014 forum—reflected one of those perennial extended guild discussions captured in the ASCH's journal.Footnote ¹³

Of course, by the late twentieth century, many in the guild had come to an understanding of vocation that was well removed from that one proffered by ASCH founder Philip Schaff in 1858 in the General Introduction to his multi-volume opus, History of the Christian Church. For Schaff, a historian should be faithful in mastering the sources, artistic in interpreting the sources, and religious, in other words, “guided by a sound moral and religious, that is, a truly Christian spirit [. . .] filled with universal Christian sympathy [. . . .] It is the duty and privilege of the historian to trace the image of Christ in the various physiognomies of his disciples, and to act as a mediator between different sections of his kingdom.”Footnote ¹⁴ That chartering vision continues to register for some of us. Presumably, most would agree to the charge about faithfulness to sources and expert and artistic interpretation of these. In terms of artistry and composition, Schaff offered a striking metaphor: “This is an art. It must not simply recount events, but reproduce the development of the church in living process. History is not a heap of skeletons, but an organism filled and ruled by a reasonable soul.”Footnote ¹⁵ Let us keep the image of the skeleton heap in mind; I would like to ask later whether the bones can live. While many may believe that the historian and guild no longer serve as handmaidens to the church, I do think there is merit to the concern for studying what we now call pluralism and diversity and for studying it with a clear sense of ethical commitment and even sympathy as we re-arrange and seek to re-vivify the bones.

Pluralism and diversity were in the very air breathed over a century later by Sidney Ahlstrom, whose 1972 A Religious History of the American People reflected unfolding events on the ground in New Haven and elsewhere. In light of continued social change, Ahlstrom bared his soul further in the preface to his fourth edition two years later:

Ahlstrom's words resonate eerily today. Clearly, there is still a need to expand and complicate the story, to address redactions and refractions, and to help our readers and students make sense of it all. In what follows, I propose to take the pulse again, to test the balance of our collective work, and, in anticipation of ASCH 2088 (the Society's bicentenary) or even 2038 (the Society's century-and-a-half point), to imagine what the students of our students will have to say about, and to, an even more diverse church, especially one of increasingly browner hue and one maintained and anchored by global South constituencies.

I offer as a starting point the 1971 ASCH presidential address by Martin Marty. Like his contemporary, Sidney Ahlstrom, Marty was responding to a decade of “‘religiocification’ of a black revolution” and to parallel articulations of “peoplehood” by minority groups. And that emerging sense of peoplehood, according to Marty, had “caught many Americans off guard [. . . .] and left many members of the [ASCH] fraternity ill-prepared to tell the stories of those who shared new styles of ethnic consciousness.” The time had come, according to Marty, for focused attention on “Ethnicity: The Skeleton of Religion in America.”Footnote ¹⁷

The guild's flat-footedness obtained especially in the case of two groups, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans (the “first airborne migrants”). Ahlstrom quoted directly from Armando Rendon's recently published Chicano Manifesto:

I am tickled to imagine the always dapper, gentlemanly, bow-tied Marty deploying such a charged nomenclature in the august setting of an ASCH dinner speech. I am sobered, however, to find only two Hispanic surnames on the 1,380-plus membership roster for that year—a Venezuelan and a Spaniard.Footnote ¹⁹ Apparently, missiologist Orlando Costas’ 1982 lament about US Hispanic churches as the “absentees of American religious consciousness” was as true about the church historical guild as Costas’ own.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, Marty's subsequent survey in 1993 of the previous decade's (1980–1989) 573 publications in the field of American religious history yielded up a paltry paragraph in a 42-page Church History article entitled, “American Religious History in the Eighties: A Decade of Achievement”:

While we can appreciate Marty's summons, it must be received critically against the backdrop of the patient bibliographic project undertaken by Paul Barton and David Maldonado that resulted in their 1998 bibliography, Hispanic Christianity Within Mainline Protestant Traditions.Footnote ²² Of their 975 monograph-length resources, Barton and Maldonado listed 82 primary and secondary sources in the field of history published up to that point (again, not including Catholics and non-Mainline Protestants and others). How did these evade Marty and his colleagues’ impressive bibliographic excursion? It is quite simple really, and comes down to a matter of guild filters. To be included in Marty's survey, a book had to have been reviewed in at least two of five periodicals: Church History, Catholic Historical Review, Religious Studies Review, the American Historical Association's American Historical Review, and the Organization of American Historians’ Journal of American History. Clearly, the previous decade's works listed in Barton and Maldonado's bibliography did not pass muster with guild gatekeepers. Published by the upstart Association for Hispanic Theological Education (one of historian Justo González's visionary projects), the substantive bibliography about a peripheral population remained, at best, in the guild's peripheral vision.

We can think about this persistent problem of inequitable knowledge production by returning to Phillip Schaff's long-ago metaphor of the skeleton heap. Marty unwittingly repeated the metaphor in 1971 and wondered how long the skeleton of ethnicity would remain, like a secret source of shame or pain, in the closet; or how long it would remain seated at the banquet as “a reminder of serious or saddening things in the midst of enjoyment.” On a more hopeful note, Marty suggested that the skeleton of ethnicity might provide the scaffolding for a new framework of American religion.Footnote ²³ Indeed, to his great credit, in 1993, as he was finalizing the survey, Marty keynoted the launch of a new, organic effort, APHILA, the Academy for the Study of Latino Church History (he lamented the “very few widely-reviewed works on Latino/Hispanic or Asian American religion” uncovered in his survey). The gathering at McCormick Seminary attracted the participation of such notables as Justo González, Luis Rivera Pagán, and Samuel Silva Gotay. In his talk, “Filling the Gaps: A Church Historian Encounters Latino Church History,” Marty sanguinely heralded the event as “a symbol of a transfer of power, a shift of focus, a broadening of resources, an enlargement of agenda, in American religion.”Footnote ²⁴ Unfortunately, APHILA was short-lived. Fortunately, Marty was about to send forth his last doctoral student, the inimitable Daisy Machado.Footnote ²⁵

Staying with the metaphor of the skeleton—in the closet, at the banquet or as new scaffolding—at a distance of 50 years from Marty's 1971 presidential address and almost 30 years from his 1993 APHILA keynote, perhaps the more pertinent question now is the one that echoed around the prophet in the valley in Ezekiel 37: “Can these bones live?”

II. The Teaching of American Religious History—A Persistent Canon

In 2009, under the auspices of the Wabash Center for the Teaching of Religion and Theology, I began a study of forty-plus syllabi developed in the field of US Religious History over the prior seven years by a cross-section of university, college, and seminary instructors. As reworked or new courses, these represented vanguard thinking within the religious studies guild. About one-fourth of the syllabi represented courses taught or developed for delivery in public universities and colleges. The vast majority described curricular offerings in private sectarian and non-sectarian institutions, with two of these offered in seminaries tied to graduate religion programs. Five Catholic institutions were represented in the offerings. Nearly half (17) of the courses carried a religion or religious studies enumeration, indicating a departmental or program unit home; two additional ones were offered in the mentioned seminaries. The second highest (12) designation indicated sponsorship by History departments, with American Studies a distant third (4). Six courses indicated cross listing between Religious Studies and cognate disciplines: history, sociology, American studies, gender and women's studies. One paired sociology and anthropology and another history and gender studies in the cross-listing. In terms of period, roughly half took up the course subject from the time of colonial encounter (with indigenous populations) or pre-contact up to the present day (or end of the twentieth century). Only one limited the scope to early North America. Three followed the traditional demarcation of post-1865 or post-Civil War. Two began with the establishment of the Republic. Seven explored the twentieth century, with one of these ending the course at the onset of World War II.Footnote ²⁶

My findings made clear to me that, Tom Tweed's long-ago call to retell US religious history notwithstanding, the meta-narrative—at least in terms of pedagogy—remains roughly intact, albeit constantly tested and tweaked.Footnote ²⁷ Included in a perennial reconfiguration of the courses is the basic tension between chronology and synchronic theme. In the case of the most general courses (Religion in America, History of Religion in America, etc.), the majority of the syllabi continued to privilege a diachronic approach, understandably so.Footnote ²⁸ But one wonders what is lost, overlooked, or eclipsed in that choice. To be sure, all the assigned textbooks evidenced a broader multicultural sensibility than that of, say, Sidney Ahlstrom's long-ago A Religious History of the American People. The bulk of the courses’ multicultural freight was borne, however, by documentary readers, all of which proffered a range of voices. “Bulk” may be a misnomer, however; and the range remained limited and the voices truncated.

The problem of the absence or still-thin presence of scholarship on Latino/a religious history and experience was most glaring at this juncture.Footnote ²⁹ Given Chicana/o fiction's early incursions into religious territory, it was not surprising to find Ana Castillo's So Far from God listed as a required text and Arturo Islas’ The Rain God and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima as optional final project texts in a syllabus for American Literature and Religion. Otherwise, the meager list of readings consisted of the following: “Credo,” a chapter in Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez; “Companion in El Exilio,” a chapter in Timothy Matovina's Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present; a single chapter from Tom Tweed's Our Lady of the Exile; Pope Alexander VI's 1493 “Inter Caetera” papal bull to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella; “El Otro Lado,” a chapter in Ruben Martinez's The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond; the film “Cabeza de Vaca”; “César Chávez and the Religion of Revolution,” an essay by Luis León in Gastón Espinosa's co-edited Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States; “Mujerista Theology: The Struggle for Liberation,” a redacted excerpt included in Timothy Matovina and Geraldo Poyo's co-edited documentary collection, ¡Presente!: U.S. Latino Catholics from Colonial Origins to the Present; a chapter from Peggy Levitt's Transnational Villagers (on Dominican migration); and a journal article by Kristy Nabhan-Warren on contemporary Guadalupana apparitions.Footnote ³⁰

The syllabi limited readings on Latino/a religion to journal articles or single chapters, which were usually redacted in documentary collections. The requisite abridgement effectively truncated the selections, resulting in what Rudy Busto has characterized as “banal multiculturalism.”Footnote ³¹ Perhaps more importantly, the readings were usually relegated to the final weeks of the courses. Placed in this additive fashion, they were illustrative of new pluralism—usually reinforcing themes of immigration and diversity—but rarely of paradigm shifts and even less so of foundational paradigms. The Puritan core story continued to dominate in terms of the European-indigenous encounter. The anxieties of Allan Bloom and Samuel Huntington notwithstanding, we are not yet adrift in a sea of particularities; the Puritans are still about their errand.Footnote ³² For example, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's [1542] Naufragio (Shipwreck or Castaways) and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's [1610] Historia de la Nuevo México remain historical ciphers rather than constitutive elements in the story of European-indigenous encounter in the United States, although they date from an earlier period and span a much larger territorial swath than the English Puritan story in New England.Footnote ³³ The American Puritan colonial imaginary still stands as a lightly interrogated tabula rasa, in spite of colonial English readers’ avid consumption (via English, Latin, French, and polyglot translations) of the preceding century's accounts of Spanish and Portuguese discovery, exploration, and encounter.

Clearly, more Latina leaven is needed. The problem is not one of scarcity, however. Scholars have been busily stocking the pantry over the last decade. The teaching and study of US Latina/o religious history have entered a new era of plenty with the publication of many monographs and documentary anthologies. Running the gamut from comparative treatments of ethnic origin groups to regional, local, and organizational histories to biographies and to histories of confessional and devotional traditions, the new works expand the bibliographic resources available to teachers of US religious history (and, for that matter, teachers of Latina/o history).Footnote ³⁴ The pantry is full, at least if the metrics provided by the Hispanic Theological Initiative Consortium at Princeton Theological Seminary are any indication. Over the 25 years of HTI's impressive doctoral pipeline work, HTI scholars have produced over 180 books, with about one-third of these in the orbit of religious history. The veritable feast of fresh scholarship remains outside of our grasp, however, since the table has been set too narrowly. And it is not just a matter of extending the table with an additional leaf (much like my parents did when guests joined our ten-member household for dinner). Rather, it is a problem of the table's very configuration.

III. Foundational Paradigm Shifts

I would like to expand on this point by, first, rereading Cabeza de Vaca and related discovery and colonial-era texts for a long-silenced subaltern voice, and second, by tracing the imprint of such texts on the colonial English imaginary. We can work our way backward from the mid-sixteenth century in northern New Spain and forward from there to New Mexico and New England.

To begin, let us consider the record left by the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza, to whom New Spain's viceroy entrusted, along with Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, the exploration of Cíbola, or the seven cities of fabled wealth in mysterious northern lands.

Later in the chronicle, Fray Niza relates the important advance work performed by Esteban, who by this point was traveling leagues ahead of the party and relaying back messages per pre-arranged signals via Indian messengers:

Where have we met this Esteban before? If you were a student in my Religion in America course, you would remember him from our first assigned reading, Cabeza de Vaca's harrowing saga of his 1528 shipwreck in Florida and eight-year journey in the company of three other survivors around the Gulf of Mexico through Texas, Coahuila, and Sonora to Culiacán, Sinaloa, then the northernmost outpost of an expanding New Spain. Upon returning to Spain, the intrepid explorer delivered his account of the failed Pánfilo de Narváez expedition to Florida and his “Naufragio” to the royal court. The heroic account certainly helped him press his case, ultimately successful, for the governorship of Rio de la Plata.

Following convention, Cabeza de Vaca concludes his Relación with the requisite note about pedigree:

Note the difference in naming. While the others' family names are included (and Cabeza de Vaca and Jerez de la Frontera denote a major theme of Reconquista in Iberian history), we are told only Esteban's given name, and a diminutive form of it at that. Cabeza de Vaca's account makes clear the reason for Fray Niza's rendering of Esteban de Dorantes; he was a slave of Andrés Dorantes. We are also told of Esteban's provenance from Morocco. Here is part of the pedagogical payoff with my students. We have, arguably, not only the first African American on future US soil (nine decades before the 1619 arrival of Africans to Jamestown) but also possibly the first Muslim, or first American with Muslim roots.Footnote ³⁸

As with other subalterns in history, we must read the accounts authored by hegemonic actors against the grain. Historians of Judaism have learned to do this with Spanish Inquisition records; and who can forget the irrepressible Mennochio recovered from Italian Inquisition records by Carlo Ginzburg!Footnote ³⁹ In the case of Cabeza de Vaca, scholars have wrestled with the tension between creative literature and historical writing, with the violence, and with the veracity of Cabeza de Vaca's accounts of his newly discovered healing arts, which he credits with making possible their movement or transfer from native group to native group. The survivors' sheer nakedness forces them to rely on wits and indigenous sympathy and customs of reciprocity in order to survive, a vastly different picture than that usual one of armored conquistadores reading incomprehensible versions of the Requerimiento backed up by phalanxes of soldiers and cross-wielding friars.

But Cabeza de Vaca also unwittingly clues us in on another explanation for their survival, namely, Esteban's prodigious talents:

The intelligence gathered by Esteban over eight years not only facilitated their movement but also, once they reconnected with New Spain, fired the colony's imagination and provoked Viceroy Mendoza's commissioning of the Coronado expedition, the one whose vanguard Fray Niza led. With Cabeza de Vaca on his way to the Southern Cone and Dorantes settling down to married life in Mexico City, Esteban led the way north toward Cíbola, enticing the good friar onward, many kilometers behind in his wake. New Spain's first foray into Arizona, New Mexico, and Kansas, although unsuccessful, opened up conduits for information about, among other things, buffalo and sedentary Pueblo groups. The legacy of marooned and martyred Franciscan friars would later be recovered by the successful expedition led by Juan Oñate in 1598, as heralded in Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's epic Historia de la Nuevo México.Footnote ⁴¹

The unrecorded words of Esteban, then, proved catalytic for an empire's expansion into the future US Southwest. Unfortunately, his voice was stilled by skeptical Pueblo leaders, who did not believe that he was truthfully speaking on behalf of the White men in his trail, and who thought that he was demanding too much turquoise and too many native women. The details of his unfortunate demise are provided in the subsequent (to Niza) account by Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera. Nevertheless, even Castañeda's unflattering description of Esteban's avarice and pride—“he craved to gain honor and fame in everything and to be credited with the boldness and daring of discovering, all by himself, those terraced pueblos, so famed throughout the land”—can be read as an assertion of subaltern agency and chutzpah. So too can Castañeda's speculation that Esteban's fall from favor with the friars was more than just a matter of appetite, but also of envy over his growing popularity: “Besides, the Indians of the settlements they crossed got along better with the negro, since they had seen him before [as Cabeza de Vaca's interlocutor].” The familiarity also projected a sense of safety; the members of Esteban's retinue, who numbered about sixty at the end, believed that “by going under his protection, they could traverse the whole country without any danger.”Footnote ⁴²

Clearly, the entrepreneurial geographer-linguist Esteban deserves more than the one sentence accorded him by Catherine Albanese in her impressive textbook, America: Religion and Religions (the textbook I assign for my Religion in America survey course): “To the north, in the sixteenth century Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan friar sent to explore Arizona, used ‘Istfan the Arab’ as his guide.” Notably, the cameo appears in her thematic sub-chapter, “Middle East: Islam,” and not in her robust chapter, “Black Center: African American Religion and Nationhood,” which begins with the 1619 arrival of 20 Africans on a Dutch ship in Jamestown, Virginia.Footnote ⁴³ The cameo is the only mention of Esteban in any of the textbooks, readers, and collections under review.

IV. Puritan Imaginaries

To be sure, recent archeological finds at Jamestown have revealed exciting new evidence of persistent Catholic ritual and material culture in an ostensibly Anglican colony. But there is other Catholic residue to consider here, namely the imprint of Spanish and Portuguese experience on the English colonial imaginary, including the Puritan one. Let us consider the following genealogy of ideas and ideological scaffolding. If we work our way backwards from Governor John Winthrop's iconic 1630 sermon aboard the Massachusetts-bound Arabella, we can begin to see how the “City on the Hill” had pre-shaped contours derived from the very literate Puritans’ bookshelves. Like other Englishmen in Holland or England, religious and not-so-religious, the Puritans would have read important texts of English exploration and discovery or promotion of discovery: e.g., Walter Raleigh's 1596 Discovery of Guiana and Richard Hakluyt's 1584 Discourse of Western Planting and 1609 Virginia Richly Valued. In turn, these accounts borrowed heavily—often lifting long block quotes—from the definitive compilations or digests of Spanish and Portuguese exploration, compilations written by, among others, Peter Martyr and Francisco López de Gómara. Several primary accounts were widely available in Latin and translation. In fact, Hakluyt's Virginia Richly Valued represents an English rendering of the Hernándo de Soto expedition of Florida, the Carolinas, and Mississippi (1539–1543). The second half of López de Gómara's 1554 Historia General de las Indias was translated into English in 1578 by Thomas Nicholas as The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the West India, now called New Spayne.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, while John Winthrop's “A Model of Christian Charitie” was principally about the covenantal relationship among Puritans and between them and God, that relationship was not cast in isolation from surrounding watchful nations, including European Catholic and Indian ones.

Against the backdrop of intensified colonial competition, other texts by Spaniards left a deep impression on the Anglican and Puritan mind about rapacious and fanatical Spaniards—the Black Legend. These included exiled monks Antonio del Corro and Casiodoro de Reina's 1567 Exposition of the Arts of the Spanish Holy Inquisition. Notably, Del Corro and (Bible translator) Reina's exposé was published in Latin in Heidelberg, which made it widely accessible and available for subsequent vernacular translations into English, French, Dutch, and German. The work was obviously not meant for Spanish readers, as it was not translated into Spanish until the nineteenth century. The most damming book of all was Bartolomé de las Casa's 1552 Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a text he published in preparation for his great debate with humanist Juan Inés Sepulveda in Valladolid over the rationality of Indians and the question of conversion by force or persuasion. De las Casas’ denunciation was published in French in Antwerp in 1579 (Tyrranies et cruautez des Espagnols, perpetree e's Indes Occidentales) and in English in London in 1583 (The Spanish Colonie, or briefe chronicle of the acts and gestes of the Spaniards in the West Indies). The more timely English version—for the Puritans—would have been the 1625 abridged account included in Purchas His Pilgrimes as “A briefe narration of the destruction of the Indies by the Spaniards: written by a frier Bart. de las Casas a Spaniard, and Bishop of Chiapa in America.” The pathos was ratcheted up even further by the titles of subsequent English translations: in 1656, The tears of the Indians: being an historical and true account of the cruel massacres and slaughters of above twenty millions of innocent people, and in 1689, Popery truly display'd in its bloody colours: or, a faithful narrative of the horrid and unexampled massacres, butcheries and all manner of cruelties, that hell and malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish party on the inhabitants of West-India.Footnote ⁴⁵ Clearly, the Puritans' wilderness was not a religious tabula rasa. Neither were the indigenous populations. And in terms of unfolding geography, the highways forged by English and Spanish boots, in fact, followed the pathways carved out over time by thousands and thousands of moccasins, sandals, and feet, in directions that hewed more closely to natural topography than constructed national borders.

V. Shifting Perspectives in Borderlands Religious History

I would like to return to New Mexico to consider the question of perspective, borders, and borderlands. Let me illustrate this with the case of Padre Antonio José Martínez of Taos, New Mexico. This obscure nineteenth-century curate entered the popular American consciousness decades after his death thanks to Willa Cather. The celebrated Nebraska-born writer's brutal caricature of Martínez supplied a villainous contrast for her hagiographic portrait of Santa Fe Apostolic Vicar and founding Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy (“Father Latour”) in her wildly successful 1927 historical novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop. A single paragraph from Cather's devastating prose will suffice to show how she fleshed out the previously sketchy image of Martínez (available only in a daguerreotype):

Such is the power of the pen. In a single imaginative stroke, Cather evoked for her readers—consciously or unconsciously—the Black Legend of rapacious and capricious Spaniards, in order to provide a sinister foil for the heroic Latour/Lamy, who had arrived to New Mexico after the US war with Mexico with an apostolate of domestication of bad Catholics (“Mexicans were children who played with their religion”) and heterodox priests. Cather, a self-admitted Francophile, also seems to have borrowed from early Catholic legends about heretics’ deathbed scenes in her portrayal of Martinez's fellow priest Mariano Lucero's convulsive death scene, where he curses Martínez's ghost: “Cómete tu cola, Martínez, cómete tu cola!”Footnote ⁴⁷

It is not certain whether New Mexico Hispanos or other Mexican Americans read Cather as assiduously as other Americans. Some did. And they objected strenuously. Over against such devastating caricature, several historians have sought to restore Martínez to his rightful place as a founding pioneer of the Territory of New Mexico, or, as Juan Romero has argued, as the political, cultural (and biological) “father of the Mexican American.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Leaving aside the question of the relative strength of imaginative versus historical (scholarly) writing, the project of revindication still remains captive to a perspectival limitation—Martínez as regional hero or villain. The point, however, is not to seek only to place him on an equal status with his contemporaries Kit Carson (over whose marriage Martínez officiated) and Stephen Kearney and other celebrated southwestern pioneers. Rather, when Martínez is viewed in the context of the three empires and republics of which he was a citizen, New Spain, Mexico, and the United States, the equation changes dramatically.

Born to a land-holding family on New Spain's northern frontier (a frontier established decades before New England), Martínez was widowed at a young age, studied at the diocesan seminary in Durango, and returned to minister among his own. After Mexican Independence, he participated actively in the new republic's affairs, introducing the first printing press and newspaper, coeducational school and seminary (1833) in the northern territory. He lived out his later years as a citizen of the New Mexico Territory and as a peace broker on the southwestern frontier of the United States. How, then, do we accurately render a history of the man and his times? As a recalcitrant parish curate in a distant redoubt of an expanding US Catholic Church? As a victim of or collaborator with Manifest Destiny? As tragic hero? These are the choices available to us if we view him solely in light of nineteenth-century US expansionism.

A hemispheric view, however, allows us to locate Martínez in the pantheon of other liberal priests of his era. Clerics such as Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753–1811), José Mora (1794–1850), and Felix Varela (1788–1853) imbibed the heady wine of Enlightenment and liberal thought and strode into and shaped public squares as progenitors of nations and national consciousness. Hidalgo sparked Mexico's fight for independence; Mora, a legislator and journalist, inspired the Mexican Republic's eventual embrace of liberal ideas and its decoupling from the Church; and Varela helped to incubate a national Cuban (albeit diasporic) consciousness during long years of exile in New York City and Philadelphia, during which he provided Irish and other Catholics with a spirited apologetic defense and pastoral ministry against a backdrop of Protestant intolerance and violence.Footnote ⁴⁹

The Durango diocese in which Martínez studied and ministered was at the center of theological education and political events in New Spain and Mexico by virtue of history, geopolitics, and leadership. The diocese, founded in 1620 (ten years before the Massachusetts Bay Colony), originally included Chihuahua, Sonora, Sinaloa, New Mexico, and parts of Coahuila. The seminary to which Martínez arrived in 1817 represented the crowning achievement of criollo bishop Juan Francisco de Castañiza Larrea y González de Agüero, scion of a leading family that also produced a Jesuit Provincial. In 1807, prior to his arrival to Durango, Castañiza assumed the rectorship of the important Colegio de San Idelfonso in Mexico City. He also served as rector of the Royal and Pontifical University and held key appointments within the Archdiocese, the viceregal court, and, by royal appointment, the office of the Inquisition.Footnote ⁵⁰

Castañiza's 1816 elevation (via the Patronato—the pact whereby the Crown appointed bishops and religious orders) to the episcopal seat of Durango also coincided with the return of the Jesuits to New Spain after nearly a half-century of Bourbon-imposed exile; he was able to officiate the return of San Idelfonso to their hands in the person of his brother José María, the new Jesuit Provincial. The new faculty of the Durango seminary consisted primarily of teachers from San Idelfonso, including Castañiza's successor, José Antonio Laureano López de Zubiría y Escalante (Martínez's bishop during most of his pastorate). Castañiza was at the seat of political and religious power, Mexico City, when the Church considered the case of the revolutionary priest from Guanajuato, Miguel Hidalgo. The Inquisition and Archdiocese affirmed and circulated the Michoacan bishop's condemnation of Hidalgo for embracing the heresies of Luther and Rousseau and for concubinage and sedition. Castañiza's predecessor in Durango, peninsular bishop Francisco Gabriel de Olivares y Benito, who assumed the diocese in 1795, oversaw the Church's final condemnation of Hidalgo upon the rebel's March 1811 capture in Coahuila and imprisonment in Chihuahua (which, together with New Mexico and Durango, comprised the diocese).Footnote ⁵¹

Castañiza's successor, the Sonora-born Zubiría y Escalante, was educated at the Colegio de San Idelfonso in Mexico City, and taught philosophy and moral theology at the Durango seminary from 1815 to 1819. Zubiría's elevation to bishop in 1830 began to fill an episcopal vacuum that had existed throughout the country due to strained relations between the Vatican and the new Republic, which sought unsuccessfully to appropriate for itself the appointment prerogatives of the colonial Patronato. The diocese required pastoral attention. Zubiría undertook an episcopal visit to New Mexico in early 1834. In April of 1850, he undertook another pastoral visit to New Mexico to destroy “the schism introduced into several of its towns” and to visit (in northern Chihuahua) the Mexicans who had opted not to remain in the expanding United States.Footnote ⁵² Like other prelates, Zubiría jealously guarded the Church's interests in the face of growing Liberal encroachment. Accordingly, he welcomed general Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana's assumption of power in 1834. In 1849, he and others successfully pressed president Valentín Gómez Farias to resist legislation allowing religious freedom. A decade later, Zubiría and other prelates threw their weight behind Conservatives in a three-year civil war precipitated by Benito Juárez and other Liberals’ 1857 Constitution and the accompanying Reforma legislation expropriating the Church's considerable property. Zubirías’ enthusiastic support of filibustering Spanish general Domingo Cajén in the Durango war theater led to his clandestine exile at a private hacienda upon the Liberals’ ultimate triumph in that state in November 1860. The exile lasted for the final three years of his life.Footnote ⁵³

Clearly, the Durango diocese was not a backwater. The seminary and diocese served as a major bulwark of the Church of New Spain and Mexico. The seminary in which Martínez studied was haunted by the memory of rebellious priests and revolutionaries. It had to guard its young charges against liberalism's strong appeal in order to avoid the fate of, for example, the Mérida seminary in southeastern Mexico; Yucatán-Tabasco bishop Pedro Agustin Estevez y Ugarte's entire student body was swept away in the new current of thought, causing the prelate to dissolve the seminary.Footnote ⁵⁴ Clearly, Martínez's superiors strode confidently on the historical stage. So too did Martínez, this young admirer of Hidalgo, who later in life authored a panegyric to the sacrificial savior of the Mexican nation. This historical context casts Martinez's remarkable vision, actions and obstinacy in sharp relief. It is small wonder, then, that Martínez, the audacious “father” of New Mexicans lacked the obsequiousness expected by the younger Lamy from far-off France, or that Martínez's biological progeny (his son Vicente) would be counted among the first generation of Presbyterians in New Mexico.Footnote ⁵⁵ The historical stage looks quite different and presents a rearranged order of protagonists and supporting cast when viewed from the front seats of the borderlands or illuminated by hemispheric lights. Perspective matters.

VI. Shifting Perspectives in Historiografía Pentecostal

The problem of truncated voice, perspective, and paradigm also obtains in the case of twentieth-century Pentecostalism. The story of early US Pentecostalism, the one that centers around and stems from the historic 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, has been rendered largely in Black and White. Early protagonists variously straddled, reinforced, or ignored the racial divides of early twentieth-century America; yet all who recorded the revival's events and interpreted its meanings did so in English. This redaction skewed the arc of the story early on. Historiographical debates over points of origin and the relative weight of agential contributions have been carried out, among other sites, in the pages of Church History.Footnote ⁵⁶ Set against the Revival's celebratory claims of xenolalia, however, the linguistic redaction is ironic. My work and that of others seeks to recover the oft-ignored diacritics of the grammar of Azusa Street, in order to hear the other (non-English) voices that were present at the Revival and that were as constitutive of early Pentecostalism's sound (or cacophony) as English ones. In line with the restored inflection and new semiotic approach, we have proposed a new cultural history that examines the sonic, visual, lyrical, corporeal, and migratory dimensions of early borderlands Pentecostalism in order to understand the broader movement's still considerable proselytizing charms.Footnote ⁵⁷

While much can be said about the incomplete and unfortunate framings set in place by sociologists in the last quarter of the twentieth century—the ones that spoke of “social strike” and “havens for the masses” and the more sanguine ones that celebrated the explosion of proto-Wesleyan “tongues of fire” throughout the hemisphere—I will focus here on the historiographical debate.Footnote ⁵⁸ I am thinking here of Swiss historian Jean-Pierre Bastian, to whom we owe the biological metaphor of “the mutation” of Protestantism to describe Pentecostalism.Footnote ⁵⁹ The author of an important book on the ideological and strategic contribution of Mexican Protestants to the downfall of the Porfirio Díaz regime in 1911, Bastian lamented the abandonment of a liberal and pro-democratic dissident project and its replacement at century's end by a Pentecostal religiosity that replicates or reproduces male chauvinism and caciquism and that recovers the magical practices of popular Catholicism.Footnote ⁶⁰ In both social scientific and historical approaches, Pentecostalism is seen then, if not in tabula rasa terms or as opiate light, as a problematic mutation of an older Protestant project.

But let us revisit the missionary archives to see if we have missed something. For our purposes, the proceedings of the 1916 Congress on Christian Work in Latin America, held in Panama and convened by the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America are revealing. The Committee was formed and the Congress held in response to the historic 1910 World Missionary Conference of Edinburgh and that conference's exclusion of Latin America. (Note the location of the Panama gathering and its convergence with the US geopolitical program of the era.Footnote ⁶¹) The congress was divided into several committees. The Literature commission dealt with the issue of Bible, hymnal, and tract distribution and was the only one chaired by a Latin American, Mexican normal school leader and Methodist Andres Osuna. The report—read in Osuna's absence, owing to his duties in the Revolutionary government—hints at a problem:

Barcelona delegate Guillermo Delgado de Vargas weighed in further that the “lack of linguistic efficiency” presented a “foreign Christ and a foreign religion” to Latin Americans: “The Spanish hymn books used in churches throughout Latin America exemplify even better [than other publications] the inferior linguistic equipment of many of the missionaries at work in these countries. Most of them are translations in which the most elementary laws of poetry and even of rhyme have been outrageously trespassed.” And then he put his finger on the problem: “More than half the members of this Congress speak neither Spanish nor Portuguese, have never lived in the countries which we are studying and therefore have never had an opportunity to become acquainted with the moral, social and racial conditions and the peculiarities of the people they want to Christianize.”Footnote ⁶³ In truth, Delgado was merely echoing his compatriot (and eminent classicist) Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo's derisive judgement that “in general the Spanish Protestant muse is one of deplorable and drowsy monotony and insipidity” and Mexican anthropologist (and Franz Boas student) Manuel Gamio's view that Mexican immigrants in the United States would be “unable to respond to the cold, intellectual, moralistic quality of Protestantism, and lack of color and artistic impression.”Footnote ⁶⁴ To their credit, the missionaries expressed hope that a new generation of Latin American translators and composers would see to the aesthetic alignment. To their discredit, they failed to see that a possible solution rested on the conference table: the Reina y Valera Bible, the very subject of their impressive report on Bible distribution, and whose 1909 “Antigua” version by the United Bible Societies would take the hemisphere by storm and acquire an iconic status akin to that of the King James version in English. Converted monks Casiodoro de Reina and Ciprano Valera's translation (1569 and 1602) is widely considered a literary jewel that marks the beginning of the Golden Age of Spanish letters, albeit a jewel forged in exile. Menéndez y Pelayo judged Reina's 1569 Biblia del Oso to “greatly supersede” the modern authorized Catholic Spanish translations by Felipe Scio in 1790 (“very miserable”) and by Felix Torres Amat in 1823, owing to its appearance in and reflection of the “best era of the Castilian language.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Indeed, Delgado quoted translator Scio's estimation of the Reina y Valera:

This is where infant Pentecostalism comes in in interesting ways. Proletarian and peasant Pentecostals not only embraced the Reina y Valera text; they taught themselves to read it, and along the way they musicalized it, thereby expanding the repertoire of the inherited and translated hymnody of US and European Protestantism. The early and now ubiquitous Pentecostal corito, “Alabad a Jehovah,” for example, is lifted word-for-word from Salmo 117 in the 1909 Reina y Valera text. Other musicalized Salmos included 23, 30, 42, 91, 119, 121, and 150.

The missionaries, in obsessing over lyrical content, did not realize another problem: how to frame the content in equally native musical genres (versus received tune indices). The new poetic and musical contribution—framed in popular Mexican and Latin American musical genres and performed with previously disdained instruments—reinforced, along with notable practices such as glossolalia, ecstasy, miracles, healing, visions, etc., Protestantism's enchantment and viability among the social classes heretofore slightly reached by mainline missionaries and churches.

In essence, early Pentecostals had a romance with the biblical text of the sixteenth century and adorned it with a new musical dress. Thus, we can appreciate in this run-around the way they arrested the mutations evident in the Anglo-Saxon and European Protestantisms that missionaries sought to transplant to las Américas. In other words, it was the Pentecostales who returned to the original well of Spanish Protestantism to extract and drink refreshing waters. Following such constitutive elements like the Reina y Valera Bible back through history—its nineteenth-century distribution by the British and Foreign and American Bible Societies, its indexing by the Spanish Inquisition, its heroic creation by converted Heironymite monks in exile in northern Europe and England, its imprint by the Spanish Jewish story and the Ferrara (Hebrew-Spanish) Bible, its genesis in Seville's San Isidoro monastery and in Erasmian Humanism—helps to anchor Latin American Pentecostal history in the soil of Iberian dissent, a soil contemporaneous to that of Luther's Germany, the Huguenots’ France, and Calvin's Switzerland. The study of the staggered reception of this exilic and wandering text of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also helps us to see it as an example of the globalizing processes that affect the religious phenomena we study today.

VII. Conclusion

The question of absence, perspective, and paradigm has haunted me ever since my long-ago enrollment in Sidney Ahlstrom's course at Yale College. At that time, A Religious History of the American People was still fresh, and his lectures proceeded along the contours of the chronology and themes laid out in that magisterial tome. The scope was truly breathtaking for a first-generation college student from California. But it was also alienating. I remember searching in vain for substantive mention of Mexican Americans—I found it in a brief discussion of ethnic Catholic groups. Of course, there was even less on Chicano Protestants and nothing on Pentecostals. I remember wandering the stacks of the Sterling, Undergraduate, and Divinity libraries, looking for the topic in books or even chapters in books (paragraphs would have sufficed!). Students wandering Yale's library stacks today can now pull down many titles. American religious historians can no longer argue the absent archive when it comes to the Latina church. The skeletons keep piling up around us. A little emancipation from epistemic boundaries, a few perspectival shifts, and an interrogation of knowledge production systems is in order. Let the new scaffolding begin. Let these bones live!