Where should we go next? A call for the critical investigation of possible racial encounters between Anglo-American and Mexican-American Baptists in Texas during the pioneer period.

Chaves, Joao Paulo Bezerra

Historian E. H. Carr properly pointed out that "[t]he facts only speak when the historian calls on them." (1) Not a lot of historians have called on the facts concerning the Mexican-American experience within Baptist circles. (2)

But overlooking Mexican-American groups is not a privilege enjoyed only by Anglo-American Baptists. As Hjamil Martinez-Vasquez demonstrated, United States religious historiography as a whole has been constructed on the basis of a tradition that left many groups muted. (3) The fact that minorities have many times been left without a voice in the narratives of American religious history, however, does not represent a necessary condemnation of U.S. religious historians. History has its own story. The story of the appropriation of what Foucault called the "abandoning (of) the irruption of events in favor of stable structures" (4) is still unfolding, and not all historical discontinuities have yet been discovered. The experience of Mexican-American Baptists is one example of largely unexplored historical discontinuities.

This paper is a modest attempt to suggest a fruitful direction for the study of a central aspect of the Mexican-American Baptist experience: the issue of race in the interaction between Anglo-American and Mexican-American Baptists. I will focus on early encounters between Anglo Americans and Mexican Americans in Texas, the place where the greatest number of Mexican Americans lived. This preliminary examination comes with the awareness that counterhegemonic pieces produced in ivory towers are usually characterized by what Spivak referred to as epistemic diagnosis dressed in a discourse of "concrete experience." (5) Nevertheless, there is still much that needs to be said about the interaction between Anglo-American and Mexican-American Baptists.

Although Anglo-American Baptists first considered their role in the evangelization of Mexican Americans in the 1800s, to this day no critical analysis of the potential racial tension between these two groups has been produced. Therefore, the historian's double task of appropriating compelling interpretive frameworks and applying them to primary sources is not the focus of this piece. Instead, I will focus on identifying potential directions in which the study of the racial tension between Anglo-American and Mexican-American Baptists should go.

This paper will progress in a few steps. First, I will show the general lack of attention given to Mexican-American Baptists in American religious historiography. In this section I will also talk about the shortcomings of some works that deal with the subject. Second, I will give a brief narrative of early Mexican-American Baptists in Texas in the context of the wider interaction between Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Anglo Americans in the southwestern territories. The chronological limit of the study will be 1920 due to the fact that historians consider this year to be the end of the "pioneer period" of Baptist work among Mexicans in Texas. (6) Finally, I will present a few issues that must be taken into account in studies that attempt to understand the Anglo-American Baptist attitudes toward Mexican-American Baptists.

The main purpose of this piece is to raise questions and initiate conversations rather than provide definite answers. As it is often the case with projects that investigate largely unexplored issues, this piece presents a number of generalizations and speculative assertions that may be particularly vulnerable. Nevertheless, historical work progresses with the confrontations necessarily implied in the exercise of sharing opinions.

Historiography of Mexican-American Baptists

The main difficulty in providing a historiography of Mexican-American Baptists is the scarcity of works pertaining to the subject. The popularity of terms such as Hispanic or Latino represents yet another obstacle for the identification of their voice for, whereas such labels apply to Mexican Americans, Mexican-American history precedes those of other Hispanic or Latino groups.

Leon McBeth, in his Baptist Heritage, considered in passing with what he calls "Hispanic Baptists." While acknowledging a distinction between Mexican Americans and other Hispanic groups, he includes Mexican Americans in the wider Hispanic umbrella. (7) McBeth seems to use the terms Mexican, Mexican American, and Hispanic interchangeably, something that makes his narrative confusing for those who are not used to the differences between these groups. But despite McBeth's potentially misleading terminology, his brief inclusion of Hispanics in general and Mexican Americans in particular is a welcomed exception.

Bill Leonard's Baptist Ways is another exception that mentions Mexican-American Baptists. Leonard is much like McBeth in his interchangeable use of "Hispanic" and "Mexican." Although Leonard's work represents a significant contribution to the history of Baptists in America, it does not explore sufficiently the history of Mexican Americans within the denomination. (8)

In The Story of Baptists in the United States, Pamela Durso provides a narrative of Mexican-American Baptists. (9) However, she talks about Mexican Americans in two pages of the chapter where she examines denominational varieties in the twentieth century.

In A Capsule History of Baptists, Bruce Gourley deals with the racial tension between Anglo-American and African-American Baptists. (10) As in the case of a great number of Baptists histories, Gourley does not mention Baptist work among Mexican Americans.

A more pronounced example of the invisibility of Mexican Americans in U.S. Baptist historiography is William Brackney's Baptists in North America. (11) Curiously, Brackney only mentions Mexico sporadically, and Mexican Americas are nowhere to be found in his 300 pages of Baptist history. Brackney neglects the fact that most people think Mexico is in North America. He mentions German, Welsh, Swedish, and Scotch Baptists in America, but Mexican Americans remain largely unnoticed.

The volumes above do not represent an exhaustive list, and additional examples of the general omission of Mexican-American Baptists in Baptist historiography can be easily reproduced.

If among denominational histories the interaction between Anglo-American and Mexican-American Baptists has not yet been critically analyzed, the works of historians of southern religion are no less dichromatic. The few works that discuss the social attitudes of Anglo-American Baptists toward racial minorities focus almost exclusively on white-black interaction.

John Eighmy's Churches in Cultural Captivity covers Anglo-American Baptist attitudes toward African Americans in general, but does not deal with Mexican Americans. (12) Paul Harvey's Redeeming the South frames religion in the South as a bicultural phenomenon. While Harvey provides a welcomed modification of the cultural captivity thesis, he does not tackle the Mexican-American element of Southern Baptist life. (13) Finally, Alan Willis's According to God's Plan pays some attention to the attitudes of Southern Baptists toward Mexicans, Latinos, and Native Americans, but Willis's main focus is, as in the case of Eighmy and Harvey, on Anglo-American attitudes toward African Americans. (14)

The scholarly works that are concerned particularly with Mexican-American Baptists focus on providing a general narrative of the group's existence and do not emphasize tensions with Anglo Americans. This is the case of William Miller's 1931 dissertation Texas Mexican Baptist History, Martha Remy's 1970 dissertation Protestant Churches and Mexican Americans in South Texas, Joshua Grijalva's 1982 book A History of Mexican-American Baptists in Texas, Moises Rodriguez's 1997 dissertation The Cultural Context of Southern Baptist Work Among Mexican Americans in Texas, Albert Reyes's 2005 article on the Hispanic Baptist Convention of Texas, and Paul Barton's 2006 book Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas. Although some of these works mention instances of racial tension in the wider culture, they neither focus on them nor offer a framework for interpreting such situations. (15)

The lack of attention given to the potential racial tension between Mexican-American and Anglo-American Baptists, however, may have a number of potential reasons. The production of scholarly historical work depends on factors such as interest, leisure, formal education, and availability of material. Academic studies are produced when such factors collide. The lack of works concerned with the subject of racial tension between Anglo-American and Mexican-American Baptists may speak as much of Mexican-American silence as of Anglo-American omission.

The Mexican-American World and Mexican-American Baptists: A Tentative Narrative

The history of Mexican-American Baptists is the history of a double minority. Since their beginnings, Mexican-American Baptists have negotiated their identity between an Anglo-American Protestant world and a Mexican-American Catholic community. This double-minority status is partially responsible for the gaps in the narrative of Mexican-American Baptists--gaps that are manifested especially in the lack of attention given to the way in which racial tensions pervasive in wider society may have shaped Mexican-American Baptist life. The following narrative, therefore, is characterized by a tentative nature caused by the scarcity of known primary sources that deal with aspects of Mexican-American Baptist history beyond the group's growth within the denomination--a fact that further illustrates the need for the critical investigations this paper seeks to call forth. (16)

The religious options presented to Mexican Americans who found themselves on Texan soil in the 1800s allowed them to mitigate only selected aspects of their otherness. They had to choose between becoming Protestant and hoping to be more accepted by those in power or remaining Catholic and avoiding awkward family reunions. This is not to say that conversions of Mexican Americans were the result of equations of pleasure over pain--at least not necessarily. But it is significant to acknowledge that the first Mexican Americans were living in a time of multi-level instability. Regarding the production of history, the double-minority status of Mexican-American Protestants produces an interesting result: Histories of Protestantism in America tend to overlook Mexican Americans, and histories of Mexican Americans tend to overlook Mexican-American Protestants. (17)

The first Mexicans became part of the U.S. not by immigration but by conquest. (18) By the time the southwestern territory was incorporated into the U.S., the people at the borderlands had been through the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821), the Texas Revolt (1835-1836), and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). (19) The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848 and an estimated 100,000 Mexicans who lived in the region received U.S. citizenship. (20) Among Anglo-American Protestants there was some resistance to the Mexican-American War; however, the mentality of cultural conquest was embedded in their missiology. (21)

Mexican-American Catholics in the southwestern territories lived in an environment antagonistic to what had become their native religiosity. Missionaries and Mexican Americans many times assumed that Protestantism was a necessary agent of assimilation. (22) The fact that many third- and fourth-generation Mexican-American Protestants retain their membership in distinctively Mexican-American churches, however, shows that full assimilation has not happened--as in the case of many immigrant groups of European descent. (23) It is not uncommon for Latino religious scholars to use the Mexican-American experience as one example that the idea that the U.S. is a melting pot is a myth--and one that comes with the expectation of the abandonment of ethnic identities. (24) A major caveat in Mexican-American Protestantism, however, is the potential effect of transnational migratory patterns in religious identity and affiliation. (25) Migration is a significant aspect of Mexican and Mexican-American life, and Mexican-American Protestant communities operate in the intersection between migration, culture, and religious practice.

In the nineteenth century, Protestant missionary efforts in the Southwest were first directed toward white inhabitants. Listing the reasons for what seems to have been a purposeful avoidance of Mexican Americans in Texas, Moises Rodriguez wrote:

   First, prejudice existed as a result of the feeling of racial
   superiority of the Anglo newcomer. The Anglo newcomers came into
   Texas with a slavery mentality based on the perspective that blacks
   and Mexicans were inferior to them. Second, a clash of cultures
   exacerbated by the difference in language caused conflict between
   Mexican Americans and Anglo newcomers. A feeling of animosity had
   surfaced because of the two religions coming face to face. Anglos
   felt Catholicism was a superstitious religion while Mexicans felt
   that Protestantism was a false sect. Finally, the war for Texas
   independence caused both sides to harbor an intense hatred for one
   another. (26)

Martinez argues that most Anglo Americans did not want Mexican Americans in their churches even if English was their first language. (27) Nevertheless, some exceptions were made based on socioeconomic status. (28) In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, race was a considerable and conscious element in the Anglo-American imagination. The attitudes toward African Americans and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 are but two examples that racism was endemic in the period. Manuel Gonzalez--who is convinced that contemporary Anglo-American attitudes toward Mexican Americans were shaped during the last decades of the nineteenth century-points to the fact that hundreds of Mexican Americans were lynched between 1850 and 1935. (29) In Texas, many Mexican Americans were illegally dispossessed while anti-Mexican rangers watched with a measured amount of pleasure. (30) The culture of animosity toward Mexican Americans, therefore, was already well established before Baptist work took root among them in the Southwest.

Among Baptists, the first long-lasting Mexican-American works were only established several years after the civil war. The first Mexican-Baptist church in Texas was founded in 1883 in Laredo. (31) Although it is not clear who started the church, John Westrup, a Southern Baptist Convention missionary who was British by birth, started to preach in Laredo during the 1880s in conjunction with his missionary efforts in Mexico. (32) In 1882, Westrup was assassinated. (33) The reason for his murder is not known, but Mexican historian Alejandro Trevino says that "the identity of the aggressors was never established. The authorities did not investigate who killed Protestants. Some declared that Indians from New Mexico killed them. Others said, and this is more probable, that they were fanatic Catholics who believed that by doing that they were serving their church, as others had done many times." (34) The person appointed to investigate Westrup's murder, William Powell, was the founder of the second Mexican-American work in Texas: Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana de San Antonio. (35)

The wall outside the library of Primera San Antonio has the picture of all its pastors, past and present. Above the pictures of the Mexican and Mexican-American pastors--all male (many with impressive mustaches)--there are two pictures: William Powell's and Mina Everett's. In a visit to San Antonio, Powell preached in revival meetings and a number of Mexican Americans became Baptists because of his efforts. Manuel Tfevino, a former Methodist deacon, became a member in 1888. T Yevino was ordained in October and became the first pastor of the church. (36) Other early Mexican-American Baptist churches include Primera San Marcos (1889), Primera El Paso (1892), Primera Austin (1899), Primera Beeville (1900), and Primera Bastrop (1903). (37)

In 1910 the Mexican Baptist Convention of Texas was formed in a meeting held at Primera San Antonio. (38) Although the minutes of the 1910 meeting do not indicate the intention of the creation of an institution that was separate from the BGCT, historians treat the formation of the Mexican Convention as such until their effective unification in the 1960s. (39) The alleged reason for the formation of the Mexican Convention was stated in the fifth article of the 1910 report, which says:

   We believe that since many of our people do not speak English, we
   do not always profit from the English-speaking associations and
   conventions and for that reason we resolve: First, that through the
   organization of this body there will come, without a doubt,
   progress to the work of our blessed Savior. Second, that, since
   there is the urgency for our churches to become self-supporting,
   this can best be achieved within the organizational context of a
   convencion. Third, that this organization in no way constitutes a
   separation from Baptist General Convention of Texas, but will serve
   as a means of helping with the task of evangelizing, which at
   present now does alone. Fourth, it is our opinion that the churches
   which will constitute this convencion be legitimately represented
   through its elected officers to carry on with regular order of
   business of the Gospel. (40)

The report does not explicitly mention any significant tension and although it seems that Mexican Americans were moving toward a higher measure of institutional independence, they benefited from funds raised by Anglo-American Baptists and the Home Mission Board. (41)

The following decades witnessed gradual growth. In 1912 the first Mexican-American president of the convention, B. C. Perez, was elected. (42) During the rest of the decade Mexican-American Baptists engaged in intense evangelistic activities. The pioneer period of Baptist work among Mexican Americans finished in the convencion meeting of 1920. Then, twenty-five churches were present in the meeting that took place in Laredo. (43) One decade after the establishment of the Mexican Baptist Convention of Texas, it had become clear that the Baptist presence among Mexican Americans was consolidated. From that point on, the Mexican-American Baptist experiment would grow and eventually evolve into the Hispanic Baptist Convention of Texas in order to represent a significant part of Baptists with a Latin-American heritage.

Questions of a Tertium Quid: A Call for a Critical Investigation

Although historians of Mexican-American Baptists have provided a general narrative of the group, there is a significant level of dissonance between the history of Mexican Americans produced by scholars who do not focus on Protestant Mexicans and the denominational histories that deal with Mexican-American Baptists. Whereas the first group portrays an American Southwest characterized by white prejudice against Mexican Americans, the latter group focuses on general narratives that make no strong connection between the wider culture and the way in which Anglo-American Baptists treated their Mexican-American sisters and brothers. (44) This dissonance may be the result of a combination of factors. On the part of the denominational histories, such factors may include the need to produce an account of the largely unknown general narrative of the group as a whole, the particular focus of the direction taken by scholarly works that dealt with the subject, and the level of denominational involvement of those who produced such works.

The fact that most of the denominational documents regarding Mexican-American Baptists during the first decades of their existence were produced either by white missionaries or by Mexican-American ministers who were observed by white Baptist counterparts may account for the lack of explicit treatment of potential tensions on the basis of Anglo-American, Mexican-American, or mutual prejudice. Whereas prejudice is exacerbated by power, it is unlikely that it was an exclusive possession of white males. Furthermore, many Mexican-American communities maintained only oral memory of their history. (45) The presence of prejudice in the South, however, was so ubiquitous that it is nearly impossible to imagine that it did not directly affect the interaction of Anglo and Mexican-American Baptists. The question then becomes the way in which Anglo-American Baptists in general reflected or challenged wider cultural trends in their interaction with Mexican Americans.

As mentioned above, a few interpretive paradigms that may shed light on the attitudes of Anglo-American Baptists toward racial minorities have been produced. John Eighmy's Churches in Cultural Captivity, for instance, argues that the study of Anglo-American Baptist social attitudes is primarily "an examination of how the prevailing secular values gained confirmation from a denomination that lacked institutional leadership capable of independent judgment and action." (46) Using Eighmy's thesis for the study of the Mexican-American Baptist experience would mean presupposing that Anglo-American Baptists vastly appropriated the social values of wider culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Paul Harvey complicates Eighmy's thesis by providing a dynamic account of African-American agency in the post-bellum South, but he does acknowledge that "[t]he cultural captivity thesis highlights the moral failings of white southern religion, as it was originally designed to do." (47) Harvey succeeds in demonstrating that in the post-bellum South there was a measure of interracial cooperation in ecclesiastical settings that was paired with a white commitment to racial "subjugation and humiliation." (48)

Alan Willis's work on Southern Baptist missions and race in the mid-twentieth century shows the persistence of Anglo-American prejudice in the denomination. (49) Willis also seems to generally agree with Eighmy's cultural captivity thesis and applies it to the period and context he assesses. What Baptist historian Doug Weaver wrote seems to encapsulate the academic consensus on the issue of Anglo-American Baptist racial attitudes in the South. According to Weaver, "From the outset, Southern Baptists found unity in a commitment to a cultural identity. To be a Baptist was to be Southern. To be Southern was to defend and contend for a racial orthodoxy of white supremacy that prevailed in the antebellum period and continued in the segregated laws of the Jim Crow South." (50) The difficulties of applying such models to the specific question of Anglo and Mexican-American interaction, however, are noteworthy.

The studies mentioned above help establish that the general tendency of Anglo-American Baptists in the South was of appropriating, shaping, and reinforcing the prejudices reflected by the wider culture. The fact that such works focus almost exclusively on the attitudes of Anglo-American Baptists toward African Americans, however, circumvents the particularities of the Mexican-American experience. For the study of Mexican-American Baptists, therefore, this means that an assessment of the white attitude toward Mexican Americans in particular is of central importance and that the particularities of such attitudes must be taken into account. One prominent example of such particularities is the complex matter of racial classification and perception.

The program of American territorial expansion that resulted in the appropriation of the American Southwest was heavily informed by the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which "justified the conquest of Mexico as a divine Anglo-Saxon racial right." (51) But classifying Mexican Americans on the basis of race was not always as clear-cut as in the case of blacks. George Martinez's study on the legal racial status of Mexican Americans shows the complexity of the issue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the court case In re Rodriguez (1897), for instance, a Texas federal jury decided that Mexicans are white for immigration purposes. (52) Martinez shows that whereas mixed-race applicants from other backgrounds often failed to establish their whiteness, Mexicans were most of the times considered legally white regardless of the color of their skin. (53) In addition, Independent School District v. Salvatierra (1912) treated Mexican Americans as whites and allowed segregation of Mexican Americans in Del Rio, Texas, solely on the basis of alleged linguistic difficulties. (54) This points to the complexity of racially classifying Mexican Americans in an environment where socioeconomic potential and personal worth were largely measured by both Anglos and non-Anglos on the basis of race. (55) Mexican Americans could become whiter than African Americans, and some Mexican Americans could become whiter than others. (56)

The fluidity of Mexican-American potential whiteness calls for a theoretical framework that may account for Mexican-American social mobility based on the possibility of their perceived approximation to the white ideal. A case in point is the presence of Angela Maria de Jesus Navarro--daughter of Jose Antonio Navarro--in the founding charter of First Baptist Church in San Antonio, organized in 1861. (57) As in the case of Angela Navarro the more immediate connection to the lighter-skinned Spanish heritage, formal education, and middle-class status could have softened the otherness of a number of Mexican Americans. Education and social class, however, are not always predictors of cultural assimilation as a number of San Antonio high officials, unlike Angela Navarro, attended the Mexican Baptist Church in San Antonio. (58) Nevertheless, whiteness--be it authentic or perceived--is a challenge for the understanding of the Mexican-American Baptist experience that has yet to be studied. (59)

A study about racial tension between Anglo-American and Mexican-American Baptists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, therefore, must be sensitive to the fact that Mexican Americans do not constitute a racially monolithic group either in the way in which Anglos perceived them or in the way in which they perceived themselves. Therefore, issues of racial classification and perception may present historians with the additional difficulty of assessing the degree of racial assimilation of the producers of the selected primary sources. But here are other important considerations that must be taken into account.

Historians must not assume that the documents produced by Mexican-American Baptist officials in English provide an accurate portrait of what they actually thought about their Anglo-American counterparts. The first generations of Mexican Americans in general communicated among themselves primarily in Spanish. As the case of Manuel Trevino shows, Anglo-American Baptist officials could be by and large unaware of what happened in the Mexican-American communities that they supervised. Trevino, who was pastor of Primera San Antonio from 1888 to 1893, was Campbellite in doctrine and preached that baptism was necessary for salvation until C. D. Daniel, a former missionary to Brazil who spoke Portuguese and Spanish, was able to understand Trevino's non-Baptist teachings and confront him. (60) The ability to use Spanish and English gave many Mexican Americans in Texas an effective tool for "double-speaking." Therefore, primary sources in Spanish should be consulted alongside those in English due to the greater amount of freedom enjoyed by Mexican Americans when they were communicating in Spanish.

Also, historians who may be interested in the topic must take up the task of collecting oral information. This has a measure of urgency, given that the number of sons and daughters of the Mexican Americans who lived through the early period of interaction are gradually passing. In addition, further work must be made in order to better understand religious affiliation. Grijalva and Barton seem to believe that Mexican Americans who first became Baptists enjoyed a moderate education and good economic status. Furthermore, Barton argues that the typical Mexican-American convert to Protestantism already had a marginal relationship to Catholicism on the basis of class or political affiliation before changing religious affiliation." (61) This is an important aspect for the study of race among Mexican Americans due to the fact that lighter-skinned Mexicans in general have historically enjoyed better education and economic status than darker-skinned Mexicans. Therefore, beyond the case of Anglo-American potential racial prejudice toward Mexican Americans, one must also be aware of the possibility of intra-Mexican prejudice based not only on skin color but also on the correlation between physical features and class status.

Conclusion

The magnitude and complexity of the issues in the interaction between Anglo-American and Mexican-American Baptists are considerable. This piece is an attempt to call attention to some of the difficulties involved in these matters so that future research may analyze the important factors in the study of Mexican-American Baptist history. Furthermore, the history of the interaction between Anglo-American and Mexican-American Baptists in Texas needs a study that takes the issue of race under serious consideration. As this paper argued, the historical narratives of Mexican-American Baptists are few and those that were produced did not take race to be a central concern.

The lack of attention to the issue of race represents a significant gap in the history of the interaction between Anglo and Mexican-American Baptists. Since studies of this nature have not yet been produced, those who do take up the task of investigating potential racial tensions between these groups should start in the pioneer period. During that period--which ends with the 1920 meeting of the Mexican Baptist Convention--Texas was a place where white supremacy ideology was rampant. Yet, the way in which this context affected the Mexican-American experience within Baptist circles is largely unknown. If historians are those who uncover the past for the sake of a better understanding of the present, then this may be a past worth uncovering.

Notes

(1) Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961), 11.

(2) I realize that there is not only one "Mexican-America experience" or, for that matter, a "Mexican-American" way of being. Providing an exhaustive definition of these terms, however, is beyond the purpose of this article. I am using the term "Mexican-American" here to refer to the groups of Mexicans who became U.S. citizens as a result of either the appropriation of Mexican territories, birth, or immigration. The term "Mexican-American experience" here refers to the common experiences of these groups based on the response they received from the dominant culture as a direct result of their ethno-linguistic characteristics.

(3) Hjamil A. Martinez-Vazquez, Made in the Margins: Latina/o Constructions of U.S. Religious History (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 11-12.

(4) Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge; and the Discourse on Language, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 6.

(5) Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 275.

(6) Joshua Grijalva, A History of Mexican Baptists in Texas 1881-1981: Comprising an Account of the Genesis, the Progress, and the Accomplishments of the People Called 'Los Bautistas de Texas' (Dallas: Baptist General Convention of Texas, 1982), 34.

(7) Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987), 702.

(8) Bill Leonard, Baptist Ways: A History (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2003).

(9) Pamela R Durso, The Story of Baptists in the United States (Brentwood, TN: Baptist History and Heritage Society, 2006).

(10) Bruce T. Gourley, A Capsule History of Baptists (Atlanta: Baptist History and Heritage Society, 2010).

(11) William Henry Brackney, Baptists in North America: An Historical Perspective (Malden: Blackwell, 2006).

(12) John Lee Eighmy and Samuel S. Hill, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987).

(13) Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities in the South, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

(14) Alan Scott Willis, All According to God's Plan: Southern Baptist Missions and Race, 1945-1970 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004).

(15) William Miller, "Texas Mexican Baptist History" (Ph.D. diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1931); Martha Caroline Mitchell Remy, "Protestant Churches and Mexican Americans in South Texas" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1970); Grijalva, A History of Mexican Baptists; Moises Rodriguez, "The Cultural Context of Southern Baptist Work among Mexican-Americans in Texas" (Ph.D. diss., Baylor University, 1997); Albert Reyes, "Unification to Integration: A Brief History of the Hispanic Baptist Convention of Texas," Baptist History and Heritage 40, no. 1 (December 2005): 44-56; Paul Barton, Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

(16) Although there is considerable mention of mission to Mexicans in the Annuals of the Southern Baptist Convention and of the Baptist General Convention of Texas produced between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, these documents tend to portray a harmonious relationship between Anglo missionaries, pastors, and Mexican people that runs counter to the general attitude of Anglo Americans toward Mexican Americans in society at large-something that, as I argue in this article, warrants a measure of suspicion. Histories of churches reflect a similar tendency, such as in the case of Becky Elliott's Crossing at San Vicente. A History of First Baptist Church, Midland, Texas, and Their Commitment to the Mexican People across the Rio Grande River (Austin: Nortex Press, 1998). When it comes to histories of Mexican-American Baptist churches, the purpose of these very histories, which were generally produced by leading members of such congregations, is one of the factors that do not allow for potential ethnic-linguistic tensions to be presented. The unpublished history of Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana en San Antonio, for instance, downplays the importance of the church's first pastor, Manuel Trevino, and does not mention the tensions between Trevino and C. D. Daniel despite the fact that the church's historian, who I interviewed, is aware of such controversies. In the case of the history of Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana de Laredo, an indication of the struggle for a Mexican-American identity may be illustrated by the author's introductory comment: "It must be noticed that although the name of this church uses the distinction 'Mexican' in all the references in the archives of the state and national conventions, which also use it, Laredo, Texas was independent from Mexico since 1836. This declaration serves to dissipate the equivocated concept that the congregation was composed of Mexican nationals when, in fact, the majority of its members were born and raised in the United States of America. In other words: we were and are Mexican Americans, citizens of the United States of America, but at the same time conscious and proud of our Mexican roots" (my translation). This statement was written in 1983, one century after the church began, and it illustrates the continuous struggle for Mexican-American identity within the Baptist realm to which this piece seeks to call attention (see Esterina Samudio Pulido, 100 Ahos: Historia de La Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana de Laredo, Texas, 1883-1983, Un Centenario de Historia [Laredo, 1983] and Orfa Esquerda's unpublished piece Breve Historia de la Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana en San Antonio, Texas, 1888-2013).

(17) Juan Francisco Martinez, Sea La Luz: The Making of Mexican Protestantism in the American Southwest, 1829-1900 (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2006), x.

(18) Juan Francisco Martinez, "Acculturation and the Latino Protestant Church in the United States," in Los Evangelicos: Portraits of Latino Protestantism in the United States, ed. Juan Francisco Martinez and Lindy Scott (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 105.

(19) Barton, Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, ch. 2.

(20) Martinez, "Acculturation and the Latino Protestant Church," 105.

(21) Barton, Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, 6.

(22) Among Baptist missionaries, for instance, one can witness a conflation of Protestantism and civilization in official denominational reports of missionary work in foreign lands in general and in Mexico in particular. Denominationally-sponsored educational institutions in Mexico also required Mexican students to adapt to American educational standards. The Madero Institute of Saltillo, for instance, was expected to have educational standards equal to those of the public schools of the state of Virginia. For a few examples of such phenomenon in Baptist circles, see the Proceedings of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1882, 33-34; 1883, 23-32; 1884, 37.

(23) Barton, Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, 4-5.

(24) Martinez, "Acculturation and the Latino Protestant Church," 105.

(25) Juan Francisco Martinez, Los Protestantes: An introduction to Latino Protestantism in the United States (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 16-18.

(26) Rodriguez, "The Cultural Context of Southern Baptist Work," 131.

(27) Martinez, Los Protestantes, 120.

(28) Ibid.; Gregory Rodriguez, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 122.

(29) See Manuel G. Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 83-85; Richard Delgado, "The Law of the Noose: A History of Latino Lynching," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 44 (2009): 298-299. Delgado argues that the number of lynchings of Mexican Americans was equivalent to that of African Americans.

(30) Gonzales, Mexicanos, 108-109.

(31) Reyes, "Unification to Integration," 45.

(32) Ibid. It is important to acknowledge that the actual border between Texas and Mexico was a matter of dispute for many years. From the perspective of some Mexicans, Laredo may have been part of Mexico in the 1880s.

(33) Grijalva, A History of Mexican Baptists, 13. Here I am following Grijalva's account. Not all accounts agree on the exact year of Westrup's death.

(34) Alejandro Trevino, Historia de los trabajos Bautistas en Mexico (Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, 1939), 32.

(35) Grijalva, A History of Mexican Baptists, 13-14.

(36) Ibid., 14.

(37) Ibid., 14-22.

(38) Reyes, "Unification to Integration," 44-46.

(39) See Grijalva, A History of Mexican Baptists, 124. Grijalva talks about the unification of the conventions and the subsequent success of the work among Mexican Americans in Texas after he assumed the presidency of the Mexican Convention. He says that "[t]he clouds of uncertainty and struggle had finally passed when Joshua Grijalva became president of the Convencion in 1964."

(40) Grijalva shows a copy of the official report of the meeting in Grijalva, A History of Mexican Baptists, 25.

(41) Ibid., 28-30.

(42) Mexican leadership, however, would soon be intercalated with the election of Washington Westrup, who was president for the 1914-1915 term. See the proceedings of the Mexican Baptist Convention of Texas-Actas de La Convencion Bautista Mexicana de Texas, 1958.

(43) Grijalva, A History of Mexican Baptists, 34.

(44) For secular histories of the Southwest that show examples of widespread Anglo-American discrimination, see Gonzales, Mexicanos; Rodriguez, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

(45) Juan Francisco Martinez and Lindy Scott, "Introduction: Portraits of Latino Protestantism in the United States," in Los Evangelicos Portraits of Latino Protestantism in the United States, ed. Juan Francisco Martinez and Lindy Scott (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), xix. Many Mexican Americans have expressed to me the importance of oral history in any investigation of aspects of Mexican-American Baptist history.

(46) Eighmy and Hill, Churches in Cultural Captivity, 20.

(47) Harvey, White Baptists, Black Baptists, 4.

(48) Ibid., 257-258.

(49) Willis, All According to God's Plan.

(50) C. Douglas Weaver, In Search of the New Testament Church: The Baptist Story (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008), 147.

(51) Juan F. Perea, "Race and the U.S.-Mexican Border," in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 334.

(52) George A. Martinez, "Mexican Americans and Whiteness," in Critical Race Theory, 488-489. Martinez's original article was published by the Harvard Latino Law Review in 1997.

(53) Ibid. The specific cases used by Martinez are of the son of a white Canadian father and an Indian mother and of the son of a German father and a Japanese mother who were unable to establish their whiteness.

(54) Ibid., 489.

(55) Regarding the issue of social prejudice, it is important to acknowledge that class was also a significant measure of worth in the New South. See Wayne Flynt, Dixie's Forgotten People: The South's Poor Whites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

(56) Ian Lopez argues that since the early twentieth century the majority of Latino leaders have been white in terms of how they see themselves and are seen by wider culture. See Ian F. Haney Lopez, "White Latinos," in Critical Race Theory, 801-805.

(57) Barton, Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists 47.

(58) Grijalva, A History of Mexican Baptists, 39.

(59) For the complexities of the legal taxonomies of whiteness in America, see Ian Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

(60) Grijalva, A History of Mexican Baptists, 15-16.

(61) Barton, Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, 40-50.

Joao Paulo Bezerra Chaves is a Ph.D. student in religion historical studies at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and an adjunct faculty member at the Baptist University of the Americas in San Antonio, Texas.