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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Paul Barton. Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas. (Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture, number 18.) Austin: University of Texas Press. 2006. Pp. x, 246. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.
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| Paul Barton's book is a significant contribution to a small but growing literature on the history of Latino/a Protestantism in the United States. Barton provides one of the very few comparative studies of older but lesser-known Protestant traditions in the Hispanic communities. The Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists were the first Protestant denominations to send missionaries to Texas to try to convert the Tejano/as from Catholicism. While the missionary purpose was to convert the Spanish-speaking population of newly held territories of the United States to English language and culture as well as Protestant Christianity, Barton explores the complex dynamics of this Protestant engagement with the worldview and ethos of Tejano/a Catholicism in the last hundred and fifty years. He inquires into what led to people's decision to convert, and how these new converts constructed identities as los Protestantes. He goes on to show how los Protestantes negotiated the changes within Protestant culture in the United States during this period, and how they developed ways of identifying as Protestant in an essentially Catholic cultural ethos, and as Latino/a in the essentially Anglo ethos of the Protestant denominations. As in other parts of the American Southwest, nineteenthcentury Anglo Protestant missionaries were unsuccessful in converting most of the people from Catholicism, and those they did convert did not all adopt the missionaries' cultural project along with their religion. |
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