Migrating Faith

Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century

Daniel Ramírez, Daniel Ram?rez

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469624075
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Daniel Ramirez's history of twentieth-century Pentecostalism in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands begins in Los Angeles in 1906 with the eruption of the Azusa Street Revival. The Pentecostal phenomenon--characterized by ecstatic spiritual practices that included speaking in tongues, perceptions of miracles, interracial mingling, and new popular musical worship traditions from both sides of the border--was criticized by Christian theologians, secular media, and even governmental authorities for behaviors considered to be unorthodox and outrageous. Today, many scholars view the revival as having catalyzed the spread of Pentecostalism and consider the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as one of the most important fountainheads of a religious movement that has thrived not only in North America but worldwide. Ramirez argues that, because of the distance separating the transnational migratory circuits from domineering arbiters of religious and aesthetic orthodoxy in both the United States and Mexico, the region was fertile ground for the religious innovation by which working-class Pentecostals expanded and changed traditional options for practicing the faith. Giving special attention to individuals' and families' firsthand accounts and tracing how a vibrant religious music culture tied transnational communities together, Ramirez illuminates the interplay of migration, mobility, and musicality in Pentecostalism's global boom.

Chapter 1: Pentecostal Origins in the Borderlands

Vida eternal Él prometió, Él prometió
Al que en Él, al que en Él
Quisiere creer.
Y estará allá con Él;
Porque así fué el anuncio que dió

//Ven a la luz que te da Jesús//
Y vivirás allá con él
Y para siempre tú no morirás

Eternal life He promised, He promised
To the one who, To the one who
In Him chooses to believe.
And such will dwell there with him;
For thus was the announcement given

//Come to the light that Jesus gives you//
And you shall live there with him
Never more to die

Marcial de la Cruz’s well-traveled “Ven a la Luz” provided early Pentecostales with an attractive tool for evangelistic enchantment. Framed, like “Aleluya al Señor,” in an upbeat 4/4 rhythm and easily strummed on guitar, mandolin, or banjo, the hymn cast its invitation in the soteriological and eschatological terms broadly shared by postmillennial evangélicos.¹ The song would have been welcomed by the far-flung recipients of J. P. Cragin’s 1933 Melodías Evangélicas hymnal, which included it and two others of De la Cruz’s authorship. The first musical scoring of De la Cruz’s music occurred posthumously (1952), under Church of God missionary auspices.² The imprimatur by a flagship denomination ensured even wider dissemination of the troubadour’s song. However, its title and chorus hint that the spiritual illumination claimed by certain Pentecostals was also leading them down long-obscured pathways. This chapter charts that expedition into heterodox terrain. It also explores other border crossings, namely, cultural and aesthetic ones.

Although he remained monolingual in Spanish, De la Cruz was an avid student of the music he encountered in fellowship with black congregations and with African American members of Latino Apostolic churches. Pioneer Antonio Nava, who took up the mandolin to create a duet with De la Cruz, recalled his colleague’s immediate recall of rhythms and chords he heard in such settings.³ The antiphonal opening lines of the verses of “Ven a la Luz” suggest a borrowing of the call and response of early black gospel music. In performance of the song, however, Apostolics favored the collective singing of both call and response; the repetition is marked only with a comma in early nonscored hymnals. The flattening out of this distinctive feature of African American religious music can be seen, or heard, as an adaptive broadening of a shared musical tradition. It also reminds us that the cradle of Latino Pentecostalism was rocked by African American hands, music, and affects.

Borderlands Pentecostalism

While modern Pentecostalism bubbled and flowed out of several originary points in Wales, South India, and the United States, its course through Los Angeles (via Topeka, Kansas, and Houston, Texas) took it from that northern point of “greater Mexico” to proximate regions. The locus of the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 ensured a spillover onto the contiguous “Sonoratown,” a section immediately north of downtown Los Angeles populated by Mexicans and Mexican Americans and anchored by the city’s historic plaza.⁴ Mexicans may have been present, though, at the very first perforation of Azusa’s revivalism well. The first reported spirit baptisms at the Azusa Street site occurred on April 13 or 14 among construction workers brought in to clean up the abandoned (and arson-damaged) building that had served first as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and later as a horse stable. The employees of the McNeil Construction Company—a racially mixed crew—were met by women of the Bonnie Brae Street group (the revival began in a home there, in what is today the mid-Wilshire area). According to McNeil foreman Arthur Osterberg, the Catholic workers’ spirit baptisms were instantaneous. If “Catholic” is code for “Mexican,” then we can assume that Latinos were among the first to taste Azusa’s spiritual waters.⁵ It is important to note that the praying hands that dug the spiritual well—and that were laid on the unsuspecting laborers—belonged mostly to African American women.⁶

Polyglot Los Angeles and borderlands society eagerly packed itself into the Azusa Street venue. In the first issue of the five-month-old mission’s Apostolic Faith magazine (September 1906), a leading layman of the city’s First Methodist Church celebrated the downscale revivalism: “I bless God that it did not start in any church in this city, but in a barn, so that we might all come and take part in it. If it had started in a fine church, poor colored people and Spanish people would not have got it, but praise God it started here.”⁷

The periodical’s second issue (October) carried the Spanish and (awkwardly) translated testimony of Abundio and Rosa López, who had begun preaching about their new experience. The couple had visited the mission on May 29 and dated their Holy Spirit baptism to June 5 in the plaza.⁸ The third issue (November) included an update on the evangelists, who were “being used of God in street meetings and in helping Mexicans at the altar at Azusa street” and whose efforts in Los Angeles were being complemented by those of young Brígido Pérez’ (another Azusa convert) in San Diego (where the couple joined him by year’s end).⁹ Longtime Los Angeles resident Juan Navarro also found his way to the meetings.¹⁰ His ties to William Seymour’s coworkers link the Apostólico movement to the revival.

Ultimately, however, Azusa’s multicultural and multilingual promise proved illusory.¹¹ Frank Bartleman obliquely decried the disenfranchisement of “some poor illiterate Mexicans” from the “old” Azusa mission in late 1909. The eyewitness historian likened the expulsion to “murdering the Spirit of God.”¹² Bartleman’s dispiritedness proved premature, however, at least in terms of prospects for growth among that population (we should not discount his lament concerning the loss of racial harmony and doctrinal sufferance). By that time in Otay-San Diego, Luis López had been baptized in Jesus’s name.¹³ Construction job opportunities in that growing region—the site of Pérez’s and Abundio and Rosa López’s earlier work—had attracted several believers from Los Angeles. Both before and after his brief stint in 1912 as pastor of Margaret Mitchell Hallquist’s Star of Bethlehem Spanish Mission in Los Angeles, Juan Navarro evangelized in San Diego and the Riverside-San Bernardino area. In 1912, in the former city, he baptized a young immigrant from Acapulco, Mexico, Francisco Llorente. In turn, two years later, Llorente baptized his countryman Marcial de la Cruz, who hailed from Torreón, a robust industrial city in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila.¹⁴ In 1916, De la Cruz converted Antonio C. Nava. Meanwhile, the longer-lived pastorate of Genaro Valenzuela at 627 Alpine Street anchored the embryonic movement in Los Angeles.¹⁵

Born October 4, 1892, to Simón and Roberta Nava of Nazas, Durango, Antonio Nava sought to enlist in the insurrectionary forces at the start of the Mexican Revolution. His father’s firm opposition and the restive youth’s desire to save face with peers prompted Nava to seek a paternal blessing in 1915 for travel northward instead. He secured employment in Riverside, California, and the surrounding Imperial Valley, where he met De la Cruz and, with the latter’s persistence, finally relented to visit Los Angeles.

At this point, Robert Anderson’s characterization of early U.S. Pentecostal leaders bears reiteration:

The composite picture of the Pentecostal leader that emerges from our analysis is that of a comparatively young man of humble rural-agrarian origins. Often a victim of physical as well as cultural and economic deprivation, he nevertheless managed to secure a smattering of advanced education of relatively low quality. Peculiarly subject to the loss or estrangement of those closest to him, his primary relationships deeply tinged with melancholy, cut loose from his roots in the soil, highly mobile and unstable in residence, occupation and religious affiliation, hovering uncertainly between working class and middle class life, he sought a resolution of the anxieties stemming from his social experiences, not by clinging to the faith of his fathers but by the intensification of the pietistic, emotional, and world-rejecting elements of that faith.¹⁶

I do not take issue here with Anderson’s description of uprootedness and marginality. Indeed, revolutionary upheaval in Mexico uprooted Antonio Nava and one million of his compatriots in the early twentieth century. Also, an expansive imperial and capitalist project carried laborer Juan Lugo, the future “apostle of Pentecost to Puerto Rico,” from one newly acquired territory (Puerto Rico) to another (Hawaii) at the turn of the twentieth century. There, he joined the proletarian mix of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and natives on the island’s plantations.¹⁷ Anderson’s template seems, however, inadequate for cases of radical conversion to a faith not of one’s fathers and mothers. These historical subjects claimed distinct, additional motives, and they did so in poetic ways. Take, for instance, Nava’s accounts of his conversion, which reportedly occurred (on a weekday) in an empty church in Los Angeles:

I refused to enter the temple, but at his [De la Cruz’s] insistence I relented, and, much to my surprise, as I entered the place I felt touched by the power of the Lord, and after ten minutes or so I was filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gave me to speak. In all my prior life I had never felt such a thing.… Oh, unforgettable moment when I experienced the Power of God manifested in my being! By means of the warmth of the Holy Spirit, that immediately subdued my passions, I felt a new life in all my being. This change was effected through the love of the Lord who controlled my soul. My heart was enlightened to love others with the perfect love that is God’s. When we left to go home it seemed that Nature had been transformed, and when I heard music in the streets, my heart was saddened, for I wished that all could feel what I was feeling.¹⁸

Nava did not remain in a state of ineffable rapture—not for this intrepid prophet the hushed blush of romantic religion. Nava’s subsequent vocational vision arrived wrapped in motifs possibly lifted from the Mexican Revolution. The young would-be insurgent was once again summoned to battle, albeit in a different corps. The 1918 episode began with Nava in prayer and meditation:

A vision came upon me in which I was taken by a power away from that place. I felt my body to be the same, but since I was praying, I could not tell if my body was able to react until that power carried me to a very different place, where a sun shone—not like the sun we know, but similar to the moon—and sat me upon on a rock that seemed beautiful to me. At that point a great thirst came over me, and I had no way to slake it. Then I saw to the side of the rock a well in which the water was visible about three meters down. I felt a desire to move and drink that water, but I had no abilities to do so. Then there appeared to me two men in military dress, who asked me if I was thirsty. I responded that I was. They lifted me, and I went to drink the water, as there was a way to descend into the well. The water I drank was truly very sweet.

Afterwards they transported me to a white building and carried me inside where a man was seated in a chair (I was unable to see his face as my faculties were very weak). He asked me, “Did you drink the water?” I answered, “Yes, I drank.” “Now go and preach the gospel, and do not fear, for I will be with you.”¹⁹

The epiphany left Nava in a state of anxiety for the next several days as he tended to his tasks as the ranch’s sole hand and delivered tracts in the nearby town during his spare time. Marcial de la Cruz brought along a (white) minister to confirm De la Cruz’s ready interpretation of Nava’s calling. The visitor had inquired after Nava, to whom he was supposed to relay—in quintessential Pentecostal fashion—an urgent commission: “I have come with the purpose to deliver the message the Lord gave me for you. He has called you to preach His Word and to preach it right away. I have now fulfilled my mission, and may the Lord bless you and may you obey that which the Lord has commanded.”²⁰ The messenger and De la Cruz conducted Nava’s ordination the following Sunday. (Francisco Llorente ratified—by repeating—Nava’s ordination in September 1919.)

Although subsequent denominational history glossed over it, Nava’s may be the first account of ministerial calling in the United States wherein the celestial messengers were garbed in military dress. Eusebio Joaquin González, founder of the (also Oneness) Luz del Mundo church in Mexico reported a similar experience in Nuevo León—a decade after Nava’s—at the moment of rupture with his erstwhile patrons, the prophets Saulo and Silas (see discussion below).²¹ The former soldier’s narrative immediately took up a restorationist discourse (in which God rechristened him as the prophet Aarón and called him to restore the faith after twenty centuries of divine silence and religious apostasy) and passed into church folklore. Nava’s st...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures, Maps, and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Pentecostal Origins in the Borderlands
• Chapter 2: Pentecostal Origins in Northern Mexico and Southern Texas
• Chapter 3: Persecution and Expansion: Repatriado Histories
• Chapter 4: Borderlands Solidarity
• Chapter 5: The Texture of Transnational Apostolicism
• Chapter 6: Can the Pentecostal Subaltern Sing?
• Conclusion: Can the Pentecostal Subaltern Speak?
• Appendix: Hermanos Alvarado Discography, Volumes 1–5
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index