Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio

2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-9576891

1558-1454

Max Krochmal,

Latin American and Latino Studies

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, radical Latina/o activists across the United States pioneered a bold new strategy to bring visibility to their often-localized justice struggles: the occupation of churches. The targets ranged from flourishing newly built cathedrals to crumbling neighborhood chapels, but in each case, the occupiers seized the hallowed edifices to gain the moral high ground in their battles for self-determination. Social movement scholars have frequently gestured to such acts alongside similar movimiento takeovers of welfare offices and other government buildings, or in other periods, of interstate highways or sit-down strikes. Many texts list the church occupations on laundry lists of direct-action protests, on a continuum somewhere between orderly marches and full-scale rebellions.Yet as Felipe Hinojosa argues, neither historians nor religious studies scholars have taken a hard look at how seizing a church proved qualitatively different from other forms of more traditional, secular activism. Hinojosa, the author of Latino Mennonites (2014) and an award-winning article on the Chicano movement in South Texas, zooms in on four widely known takeovers in 1969 and 1970 to unearth the hidden connections between, as he puts it, the sacred and the profane.Then, as now, churches represented some of the most visible, durable, symbolic, and frequently well-resourced institutions in US cities, and especially in Latino/a barrios in the age of urban renewal. Yet radical Latino/a activists—whom scholars have long assumed to be irreverent if not wholly secular—chose to launch their protests within both Protestant and Catholic churches for less pragmatic reasons as well. As Hinojosa demonstrates, they reclaimed churches precisely because of their deep religious meaning, and not just as antagonists to organized religion. Hinojosa takes seriously both the religiosity of seemingly secular activists and the politics of organized religion; at the nexus, he charts a new Latina/o religious history that took its cues directly from the streets. His radicals become proponents of a new thread of ecumenical theology that built on other currents of social gospel and liberation theology but was undoubtedly forged in the cauldron of US barrios and designed to propel US-based freedom dreams.The book's four chapters take readers on a tour of the most impactful church occupations of the period in what are now the nation's four largest cities: Chicago, Los Angeles (St. Basil's Catholic Church), New York (First Spanish United Methodist Church), and Houston (Christ Presbyterian Church). In each case, Hinojosa explores the dynamics of the Chicana/o or Puerto Rican radical movements in the city, the specific dynamics of the relevant barrios, and the nature of the target church's structure and leadership. He paints vivid portraits of the major real-world issues that the radical activists confronted, in all instances an unholy cocktail of institutionalized racism in the forms of police brutality, unequal schooling, food insecurity, mass underemployment, and—critically—housing discrimination, urban renewal, and displacement.In Chicago, for example, Hinojosa follows the celebrated Young Lords, led by José “Cha Cha” Jiménez, who had emerged as community-wide leaders in the Lincoln Park neighborhood's struggle against overpolicing and scarce affordable housing. The former street gang embraced a form of Latina/o cultural nationalism while simultaneously building a Poor People's Coalition with Black Power and white radical organizations. Along with the López brothers in the Latin American Defense Organization, Young Lords activists called on the McCormick Theological Seminary to fully integrate their student body and to provide free facilities and social services to the barrio's residents. When the seminary's Presbyterian leaders balked, activists took over the school and its chapels and renamed the administration building in honor of a movement martyr recently slain by police. They covered the seminary's walls in Brown pride slogans, pledges of revolution, and community art. Yet they also showed reverence to the sanctuary and other hallowed symbols, not wanting to inflict damage on sacred ground. As the occupation wore on and tensions rose, the activists sent an emissary to the denomination's national meeting, where he issued a Brown Manifesto that seconded and extended the Black Manifesto's demands for equity in the church that were put forward by James Forman, a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The activists ended the occupation after being promised some incremental reforms. Yet, more important in Hinojosa's eyes, they also provided crucial leverage and visibility to Latino/a clergy and lay leaders within the Presbyterian church, a group that had long battled for recognition and resources but had been eclipsed by the occupiers. In Chicago and elsewhere, Hinojosa shows, this “radical flank effect” gave the moderates unprecedented influence, an enduring legacy of the activists’ intervention. Meanwhile, the occupation also helped the Young Lords win broad support for a bottom-up, expanded affordable housing project in Lincoln Park (though it ultimately couldn't defeat the intransigent Daley machine).As this last point suggests, in addition to reconnecting Latina/o radicalism and religiosity, Hinojosa repositions his actors as central figures in the history of urban renewal and, more broadly, in the fate of US cities and the late twentieth-century working class. Responding to a historiography that often remains Black and white, Hinojosa joins scholars such as Lilia Fernandez, Llana Barber, Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, and Eduardo Contreras in recasting these seemingly familiar tales through new eyes. This emerging scholarship promises to upend commonplace assumptions of postwar urban history and should be on the desks of all labor historians.Indeed, for Hinojosa, church occupations signaled both the vitality and promise of grassroots urban revival efforts in neighborhoods long understood in terms of deficit and decline. There is no sugarcoating here, as the effects of police brutality and other forms of racism remained quite literally deadly. Yet Hinojosa's occupiers offered radical visions for their community's liberation, breathed new life into their barrios, and remade their spiritual universes in both theological and practical terms. They were true apostles of change. Hinojosa's account of their exploits is a must-read for historians of social movements, religion, and working-class studies alike.