Related Papers
Gender and History article.
Kathleen M. McIntyre
Bulletin of Latin American Research
The Role of Protestant Missionaires in Mexico?s Indigenous Awakening
2007 •
Carolyn Gallaher
Protestantism has grown rapidly among Latin America’s indigenous population since the 1980s. Despite Protestantism’s attractiveness to indigenous people, the literature has historically regarded it as incompatible with indigenous culture. Recent scholarship has moved beyond this assertion, focusing instead on the complexities of conversion and the paradoxes associated with it. Most scholars now argue that Protestantism can be compatible with indigenous culture. It is unclear, however, how Protestant institutions came to have a compatible relationship with indigenous culture. Indeed, Protestant churches/clergy continue to eschew many of the practices associated with indigenous culture. In this paper I address this question by examining the work of Protestant missionaries. I choose missionaries as my point of analysis because they were crucial in establishing Protestantism in the region, and thus the base point from which it is defined, practiced, and altered. As a case study I examine mission work in Oaxaca, Mexico. I argue that missionaries have changed both their conversion strategies and tactics for dealing with indigenous traditions. These changes make it easier for indigenous people to convert to Protestantism without rejecting key parts of their culture, and in a few cases by even embracing it. I examine two conversion strategies—group targeting and church planting. I also analyze three tactics missionaries use to negotiate indigenous customs considered ‘pagan.’ I choose tequio, village fiestas, and language politics because they have historically been sources of conflict between converts and their Catholic neighbours.
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
‘Here, We Take the Indian out of Them’: Pentecostalism and Mestizaje in Mexico City
2018 •
Hedilberto Aguilar
‘But I don’t want to leave the Church, I like it!' Evangelical discourses and women's empowerment in an indigenous Huave community (Mexico)
Laura Montesi
This paper seeks to raise research questions about the complex relationship existing between women’s empowerment and Protestant, particularly Pentecostal, practices and discourses. Through the analysis of the plural religious field of an indigenous Huave community of Mexico, it is argued that although Protestant churches are characterized by an ideological conservatism, at the local level they are providing new spaces of leadership and agency for women. Drawing on the life story of Lory, a member of the Church of God in Mexico, the paper highlights how challenging it is for a woman to embrace Protestantism in a Catholic community and how rewarding this experience can be. These observations form the basis for a future analysis of the political and long-term implications of women’s religious activism.
Migrating Faiths or Transgenic Danger? : Pentecostal Growth in Oaxacalifornia
Mauro Sierra III
Class, Ethnicity, and Community in Southern Mexico Oaxaca's Peasantries
Betty Alvarado
A History of Guelaguetza in Zapotec Communities of the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, 16th Century to the Present
2015 •
Xochitl M . Flores-Marcial
The Expansion of Protestantism in Mexico: An Anthropological View
2005 •
James W. Dow
In the last three decades ofthe twentieth century, many people in Mexico andCentral America turned to Protestantism as a new religion. The greatest increase has been in rural and Indians areas. This article shows that Protestantism in these areas is not a reaction against the Catholic Church as much as it is a reaction against traditional Indian cargo systems generating political and economic power. These people are farmers who live in tight-knitted, closed communities that dominate their lives. It has been difficult for scholars of religion to understand these cultures because the communities are closed to outsidersand many ofthe people speak Indian languages. Anthropologists have been more successful than historians at finding the data and discovering why the people are converting.
Popes, Saints, Beato Bones and other Images at War: Religious Mediation and the Translocal Roman Catholic Church
Kristin Norget
This article explores new political practices of the Roman Catholic Church by means of a close critical examination of the beatification of the Martyrs of Cajonos, two indigenous men from the Mexican village of San Francisco Cajonos, Oaxaca, in 2002. The Church's new strategy to promote an upsurge in canonizations and beatifications forms part of a " war of images, " in Serge Gruzinski's terms, deployed to maintain apparently peripheral populations within the Church's central paternalistic fold of social and moral authority and influence, while at the same time as it must be seen to remain open to local cultures and realities. In Oaxaca and elsewhere, this ecclesiastical technique of " emplacement " may be understood as an attempt to engage indigenous popular religious sensibilities and devotion to sacred images while at the same time implicitly trying to contain them, weaving their distinct local historical threads seamlessly into the fabric of a global Catholic history.
The Pentecostalization of Latin America and U.S. Latino Christianity
Mauro Sierra III
