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

By Felipe Hinojosa

This “important and well-researched” study of 1960s urban Latino activism and religion is “brimming with the ideas and voices of . . . Latinx activists” (Llana Barber, author of Latino City).

In the late 1960s, American cities found themselves in steep decline, with poor and working-class families hit the hardest. Many urban religious institutions debated whether to move to the suburbs. Against the backdrop of the Black and Brown Power movements, which challenged economic inequality and white supremacy, young Latino radicals began occupying churches and disrupting services to compel church communities to join their protests against urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, and racism.

Apostles of Change tells the story of these occupations and establishes their context within the urban crisis. It underscores the tensions they created and the activists’ bold, new vision for the church and the world.

Through case studies from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston, Felipe Hinojosa reveals how Latino freedom movements crossed the boundaries of faith and politics. He argues that understanding these radical politics is essential to understanding the dynamic changes in Latino religious groups from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781477322017

Book preview

Historia USA

A series edited by Luis Alvarez, Carlos Blanton, and Lorrin Thomas

BOOKS IN THE SERIES:

Perla M. Guerrero, Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place

Cristina Salinas, Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century

Patricia Silver, Sunbelt Diaspora: Race, Class, and Latino Politics in Puerto Rican Orlando

« FELIPE HINOJOSA »

Apostles of Change

LATINO RADICAL POLITICS, CHURCH OCCUPATIONS, AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE BARRIO

University of Texas Press

AUSTIN

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2021

Armitage Street, by David Hernandez, copyright © 1994 by David Hernandez; from Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Hinojosa, Felipe, 1977- author.

Title: Apostles of change : Latino radical politics, church occupations, and the fight to save the barrio / Felipe Hinojosa.

Other titles: Historia USA.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Series: Historia USA | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020027902

ISBN 978-1-4773-2198-0 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2200-0 (library ebook)

ISBN 9781477322000 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Radicalism—United States—Religious aspects—Christianity—History—20th century. | Hispanic Americans—Political activity—United States—History—20th century. | Protest camps—United States—History—20th century. | Church buildings—Secular use—United States—History—20th century. | Church and social problems—United States—History—20th century. | Urban renewal—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. | Christianity and politics—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HN49.R33 H55 2021 | DDC 303.48/4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027902

doi:10.7560/321980

For my students at Texas A&M University whose courage over the years has inspired and lifted our campus.

And for my students at Emory University, who during the 2018 spring semester made history by proclaiming loudly, for everyone to hear, that consciousness is power.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION. The People’s Church

CHAPTER ONE. Thunder in Chicago’s Lincoln Park

CHAPTER TWO. People—Yes, Cathedrals—No! in Los Angeles

CHAPTER THREE. The People’s Church in East Harlem

CHAPTER FOUR. Magic in Houston’s Northside Barrio

CONCLUSION. When History Dreams

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

The journey toward writing this book began in Chicago on the day that my good friend and fellow historian Lilia Fernández introduced me to her city. I saw Chicago through the eyes of a historian who knew the stories, the neighborhoods, and where the Armitage Methodist Church had once stood in Lincoln Park. The church is now gone, replaced by a Walgreens store. On that day some years ago, I knew that I wanted to tell the story of that church and others like it. It is a story that begins in the urban north, in the frigid midwestern city of Chicago, where Latina/o radicals first occupied a church.

I did not grow up in Chicago or in any of the cities that I cover in this book, but I did grow up surrounded by churches, preachers, and activists in South Texas. This story is close and personal to me. My father was a minister, and from the time I was in junior high school, we lived in a house behind the church. Summers were spent visiting other churches on both sides of the Texas/Mexico border and across the Great Plains and the Midwest. We began every road trip, meal, and football game with a prayer. I was taught that serving people, seeking justice, and showing mercy were all necessary to live a life of faith.

While I grew up as an evangélico, far from the ubiquity of Catholicism, my experience was nonetheless typical for most Mexican Americans in South Texas. Religion is central to Latina/os living in the United States: from festivals to church revivals, from altars honoring the dead to church or mass every Sunday, sometimes even more. Our knowledge of religion often comes from our upbringing, from our social experiences with God—good, bad, or nonexistent. We learn of the limits, or attempts to impose limits, inherent in religious institutions. The experience is so deep, so connected to our sense of self, our very identities, that we are often expected to discard or discount our affinities with the supernatural capabilities of faith in order to free ourselves from the trauma involved in institutional religion, from colonialism to sexual abuse.

This is at least part of the reason that studies on spirituality—on spiritual mestizaje, as Gloria Anzaldúa called it—tend to be more prominent within the field of Latina/o studies.¹ These studies focus on the non-institutional, non-Western, and non-Christian forms of faith that have sustained oppressed peoples across time and space. So I am keenly aware that to write about religion and the institutional church, as I do here, resurrects the trauma that is often associated with the institutional church. The Christian church in the United States is distant, cold, European, and rarely on the side of human liberation. The institutional Christian church is about boundaries and limits, do’s and don’ts. But my work here is neither to sidestep the disruption and chaos that religious trauma has created nor to give power and agency to religious institutions that have only hindered our opportunities.

Churches can be liberative spaces, but they can also be oppressive cages for those of us who support a freedom politics open to all: LGBTQ, black, brown, undocumented, and poor. In the following chapters, I tell stories of the struggle to wholly transform the sacred space of the church, to move it into an embrace with its community, and to liberate it from its own strictures.² I am interested in showing how we can reimagine the Chicana/o and Puerto Rican freedom movements, how we can focus on their specificities even as we draft a narrative of Latina/o activism during the late 1960s and 1970s. As the essayist Lewis Hyde argues, this work requires enacting a subversive genealogy, one that forgets the idealism of a single-origin story and instead remembers the thousands of small moments that made the movement in barrios, fields, factories, and churches and on the migrant trail—in those corners heretofore unexamined.³ We have many single-origin stories that we tell ourselves and tell our students: school walkouts, Los Cinco in Crystal City, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in Delano, a garbage offensive in East Harlem. Keeping our idealism focused on single-origin narratives thwarts our imagination and limits the possibilities, visions, and politics of the thousands of small moments that gave birth to the Latina/o freedom movement. In these pages I hope to reveal those small but politically vibrant moments that made up the Latina/o struggle for freedom.

Acknowledgments

This book is for the students: the Dreamers, radicals, artists, and liberal arts and STEM majors who have marched, petitioned university presidents, and called out racist oppression. Your commitment to the struggle—to the work against oppression and for justice—is a beautiful testament to the love you have for building a university where all students rise together.

Working on this book gave me the opportunity to be in the presence of some incredible people: activists, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers all sat with me to teach me about the moments when they changed the world. I sat with them at their kitchen tables and in their living rooms, in restaurants with loud music, and in quiet coffee shops where we were the loudest people in the room. I am thankful for the time they gave me, for the stories they shared with me, and for the grace they granted me as I stumbled my way through this project. Apostles of Change is a labor of love. And none of it would have been possible without the beautiful people who walked with me every step of the way—the people who provided critical feedback, encouraged me in moments of exhaustion, and believed in me in those moments when I did not believe in myself. I am thankful for each and every one of you.

I started my research with assistance from a number of organizations and intellectual communities. The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University provided the coins that paid the research tolls. Special thanks to Dr. Emily Brady (director of the Glasscock Center) and Amanda N. Dusek (Glasscock Center program coordinator) for their unwavering support of this project. An Arts & Humanities Fellowship from the Division of Research at Texas A&M University assisted me in finishing the project and introduced me to the brilliant research being done across the university.

But it was my time at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, that changed everything. During that year, I worked, laughed, shared delicious meals, and made community with a distinguished group of scholars: Ashley Brown, Derek Handley, Justin Hosbey, Taina Figueroa, Alexandria Lockett, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Alison Parker, Ashanté Reese, Kyera Singleton, Charissa Threat, Kali-Ahset Amen, Javier Villa-Flores, Gary Laderman, and Andra Gillespie, the director of the program. And a big thank you to my roommate, Greg Wickersham, for being such a gracious host and introducing me to the beautiful city of Atlanta. My experience teaching at Emory University also introduced me to smart and accomplished students. Teresa Apel Posadas and Jonathan Peraza—both gifted scholars and community leaders—provided key research assistance for this book as well as great conversations about the limits and possibilities of Latina/o politics and activism. Thank you so much, Teresa and Jonathan.

Writing this book took me to several archives across the country. In each place, I met incredible librarians and archivists who made my job so much easier. Special thanks to the good people at the United Methodist Archives and History Center at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey; the University of Illinois at Chicago Archives; the Rockefeller Research Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York; and the New York Public Library. I will forever be grateful to archivists who helped me gain permission for the amazing photos in this book. Thank you, Allison Davis, at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia; Brittan Nannenga, at DePaul University in Chicago; Matt Richardson and Mikaela Selley, at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center; Xaviera Flores, at the University of California–Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center; Calli Force, at the Special Research Collections at University of California–Santa Barbara; and Roisin Davis, at Haymarket Books. Special thanks also to the three amazing photographers with whom I had the privilege of working and whose photos are included in this book: Luis Garza (Los Angeles), Carlos Flores (Chicago), and Hiram Maristany (New York). I am also grateful to Samantha Rodríguez for sharing her deep knowledge of Chicana/o activism in Houston and for connecting me with activists from that era. Thank you so much, Samantha. And I’ll never forget that magical afternoon I spent in the faculty lounge at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. There I sat, going through three large boxes that Professor Ken Sawyer had collected as part of his work with the Young Lords in Chicago, as faculty members came in and out for coffee. What a moment! Thank you, Ken.

Tim Matovina, Lilia Fernández, Johanna Fernández, Rudy Guevarra Jr., Samantha Rodríguez, Roberto Treviño, Jimmy Patiño, and Jorge J. Rodríguez V. all read drafts of the manuscript. Each of these scholars well understood my passion for this project and helped me refine my ideas and clarify my points. My good friend Carlos Blanton believed in this project back when it was just a tiny idea in my head. And I have always appreciated Carlos’s willingness and readiness to talk politics, sports, religion, the writing process, and Chicana/o history in general. Thank you for being such a great colleague and mentor, Carlos. I also want to thank Luis Alvarez and Lorrin Thomas (who together with Carlos serve as coeditors of the Historia USA series for University of Texas Press) for believing so strongly in this project and my sponsoring editor at UT press, Kerry Webb, with whom I have enjoyed working on every aspect of this project. I’m thankful to Johanna Fernández, Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, and Jorge J. Rodríguez V., who each provided key insights into the Young Lords and helped guide me and introduce me to the multiple worlds of the Young Lords in New York City. Mario T. García, Anne Martínez, and Rosie Bermudez have on multiple occasions helped me think through ideas about this project, helped with source material, and copresented with me on a number of conference panels over the years. And many thanks to Jaime Pensado, who helped me to better understand Catholic youth activism in Latin America in the late 1950s and its connections to religion and radical politics in the United States. Mil gracias, Jaime.

I would not have made it this far without the strength provided to me by the friendships, the brotherhoods and sisterhoods, and the spaces where we meet to lift each other up as we do this work. It is impossible to name everyone here, but I will just say that I am blessed to know so many incredible people who everyday are teaching, writing, and marching to build a better world. My wonderful colleagues at Texas A&M have provided so much support over the years: Al Broussard, Carlos Blanton, Sonia Hernández, Sarah McNamara, Armando Alonzo, Angela Hudson, Brian Rouleau, Dan Schwartz, Side Emre, Evan Haefeli, April Hatfield, David Vaught, Hoi-eun Kim, Andrew Kirkendall, Jason Parker, Stephen Riegg, Olga Dror, Rebecca Schloss, Terry Anderson, Kate Unterman, Erin Wood, Kelly Cook, and Mary Johnson. And I am not sure where I would be without my wonderful colleagues in Latina/o studies, who constantly work to make Texas A&M University a welcoming place for all students: Nancy Plankey-Videla, Pat Rubio-Goldsmith, Sergio Lemus, Regina Mills, Marcela Fuentes, Gregory F. Pappas, Luz Herrera, and Cruz Ríos. I admire each of you so much. And a shout-out to the amazing current and former graduate students with whom I’ve had the privilege of working in the history department: Laura Oviedo, Tiffany González, David Cameron, Daniel Bare, and Manny Grajales.

Over the years I have been blessed to be surrounded by wise, smart, and compassionate scholars who inspire me: Raúl Ramos, Natalie Garza, Trini Gonzales, Jesse Esparza, Juan Galván, Carlos Cantú, Anne Martínez, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Sergio González, Maggie Elmore, Sujey Vega, Lloyd Barba, Lauren Araiza, Gordon Mantler, Lori Flores, Delia Fernández, Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Christian Paiz, Ernesto Chávez, Sandra Enríquez, Mario Sifuentez, Eladio Bobadilla, Yuridia Ramírez, Gustavo Licón, Deborah Kanter, Max Krochmal, John Mckiernan-González, Cary Cordova, Tobin Miller Shearer, Regina Shands Stoltzfus, Jerome Dotson, Tyina Steptoe, Adriana Pilar Nieto, Eric Barreto, and James Logan. I admire all of you for who you are, for the work you do, and for the grace you show to those around you. And much love to Rudy Guevarra Jr. and Michelle Téllez, who make me laugh, inspire me to do good work, and remind me to stay grounded and committed to the people and places I love. Shout-outs to Jimmy Patiño, Johanna Fernández, and José Alamillo, whose commitment to radical scholarship and community building brings out the best in all of us. And I cannot forget Glenn Chambers, whose friendship and mentorship saved me when I first arrived at Texas A&M. I’m not sure I, or for that matter my family, would have made it without the love we received from both Glenn and Terah Chambers during those first few years in College Station.

As always, I am grateful to my beautiful family. Words are not enough. Simply put, none of me and none of my work would be possible without my life partner, Maribel Ramírez Hinojosa. Te amo, mi amor. And my babies are now teenagers: Samuel Alejandro and Ariana Saraí. You are my vision, my hope, and the reason why I continue to believe, and will always believe, that a world where justice and love reign is indeed possible. May you always believe in the power that is inside of you.

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

The People’s Church

A cry for greater economic justice rises today from a million lips. Sometimes this cry falls into a murmur. In other occasions it reaches a thunder pitch, like in Cesar Chavez and La Raza Unida movements. But it can all be heard today across the nation: from Delano, California, to Division Street in Chicago; from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, to Spanish Harlem in New York.

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CHURCHES, 1970¹

In late 1969 leaders from the Armitage Methodist Church in Chicago gathered to draft a theological statement. In preceding months the church had become embroiled in a public fight against urban renewal. Its building had been occupied by the Puerto Rican revolutionary Young Lords Organization (YLO), and its pastors—the Reverend Bruce and Eugenia Johnson—had been brutally murdered, stabbed to death by assailants in their home. The case remains unsolved. Shaken by the loss and preparing for the fights ahead, church leaders drafted this statement:

As a church, we understand ourselves to be a people with a history. . . . We see that the process of urban renewal is directed by a few who oppress the majority for the sake of their own political and economic interest. Specifically we see the poor, especially the black and Spanish-speaking poor, are denied access to economic independence and security. As a church we are aware of the limits and possibilities in our community. . . . It is then with this Trinitarian understanding of life and our particular situation that we dare to be the church in Lincoln Park—in the midst of the limits and possibilities being forced to decide on behalf of all men to embrace the mission for the sake of humanness.²

The statement, which came from a largely white and liberal congregation, signaled the church’s public partnership in a grassroots movement to dream of new housing and community possibilities for a neighborhood on the brink. In Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, the dream was housing by and for poor people.³ It was a powerful message made even more urgent by the politics that engulfed it. When the members of Armitage Methodist Church penned these words, Chicago was a city reeling from its urban renewal binge, the assassinations of several radical activists, and a progressive religious community on the verge of being dismantled. The city that was once considered the center of liberal Christianity saw its foundations rocked by a new wave of Black and Brown Power activism—bold, imaginative, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist—not impressed with the church’s verbal commitments to the struggles of poor people. To make their point, Latina/o radicals started occupying and disrupting church services in 1969. First in Chicago and later in Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston, these young radicals transformed churches into staging grounds to protest urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, and antiblack and anti-Latina/o racism.⁴

Choosing to occupy churches was not a random act. Latina/o radicals were out to make a point about the symbolism and power of the church in neighborhoods across the country.⁵ In the process, they set in motion a transformative project that temporarily reconstructed the meaning of the church as a tactical act of resistance—they introduced us to a new church, the People’s Church. In each of the four cities covered in this book (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston), activists not only changed the name of the church or made bold statements like People—Yes, Cathedrals—No! (Católicos Por La Raza in Los Angeles). They envisioned a space where the social needs of the community could be met, where Sunday school rooms could be transformed into doctors’ offices and the church kitchen could be used to feed breakfast to kids before school. This program guaranteed that the church—the very building itself—was anything but neutral and was instead part of the larger project to push back against urban renewal, to push back against the feeling of displacement. In every conceivable way, they believed that another church was possibile.⁶

These occupations and disruptions, their context in the midst of an urban crisis, the tensions they created, and the worlds they imagined make up the central subjects of this book. In 1969 churches became strategic sites, indeed sacred spaces, where radical groups staged their movements and proclaimed their message of community control and power to the world.⁷ The occupations and disruptions took place against the backdrop of Black and Brown Power movements in the late 1960s that shifted civil rights rhetoric toward a class-oriented, revolutionary nationalism that challenged economic inequality and white supremacy. It was a moment when, as historian Carlos Blanton argued, radical ethnic politics eroded a basic underlying premise of twentieth century liberalism: pluralistic politics in which ideology and national interest subsumed ethnicity.⁸ By the late 1960s it was abundantly clear that the promises of liberalism—the hope that working within the system was the best way to change the system—had fallen flat. Nowhere was this clearer than in the American city, where the urban crisis had wrought despair, destruction, and displacement for poor and working families. The American city, which for much of the twentieth century and especially in the years after World War II had provided economic opportunities for Latina/o immigrants, found itself in steep decline.

As the historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz has shown, federal policies to transform the city and subsidize the suburbs resulted in an urban crisis that triggered population loss, economic decline, fiscal crisis, rising crime, and the racialization of all of the above.⁹ This toxic mix resulted in a lack of city services, housing displacement, and the continued criminalization of black and brown bodies. Caught in the middle of this urban drama were religious institutions that debated whether they should uproot and move to the suburbs or stay and join the fight to save the neighborhood. The choice was not always clear. Urban renewal policy and programs, as it turns out, posed a significant challenge to Protestant and Catholic churches, many of which found themselves in the crosshairs as neighborhoods changed. But religious institutions were also experiencing transitions of their own. The late 1960s ushered in an era of deep ecumenical awareness and activism that shifted urban religious politics from reconciliation to revolution.¹⁰ This created tensions between a cohort of religious leaders interested in studying theology against the backdrop of the urban crisis and others interested in closing churches and starting over in the suburbs. In the end none of that mattered. Whether churches stayed in the city or took the highways to the suburbs, they could not escape the fact that their buildings—and their space—offered hope and possibility for activists looking for a place to stage their movements.

On their own, these occupations and disruptions were dramatic instances that faded almost as immediately as they rose. Each occupation lasted no more than five to twenty days before church officials sought legal help to force the activists out of their churches. In the case of Católicos Por La Raza (CPLR: Catholics for the People) in Los Angeles, the disruption lasted one spectacular night. Yet each story not only gripped the headlines and frightened white religious leaders across the country but inadvertently buoyed the causes of Latina/o religious insiders (Protestant and Catholic clergy and laity), whose movements for more visibility within church structures had taken root but remained marginal. That is not to say that Latina/o religious insiders supported the occupations and disruptions (many did not), but these actions did move them to the center of the discussion on race and power, which until then had centered on black and white tensions in the church.

The brevity and sensational theatrics of these occupations, and what they teach us about the unlikely relationship