Latino Mennonites? Yes, they do exist, and Associate Professor at Texas A&M University Dr. Felipe Hinojosa is one of them.

On Thursday Sept. 16, Hinojosa delivered a lecture to Elizabethtown College’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.

Hinojosa is a historian focusing on the Civil Rights era but that wasn’t his first intended line of work.

“I was [originally] an English major in college,” he said.

The reason he pursued literature is the same reason he ended up gravitating to history instead.

“I come from a family of storytellers,” Hinojosa explained. “History gives you the tools to tell stories that are significant.”

In college, he also learned that much of his own culture’s history was overlooked by society.

“Here I was a Mexican American kid, growing up on the border…I literally could walk to the border as a kid…and I knew nothing about the contributions of Mexican American and Latinos to the United States. How does that happen?” he said.

While he continued to love stories, instead of analyzing fictional ones, he chose to focus on telling true ones.

The story Hinojosa had for the Young Center was a speech about Latino Mennonites in the 60s and 70s called “Quiet Riots: Latino Mennonites and the Politics of Belonging.”

The event was a hybrid affair with people around the country tuning in to watch via Zoom. Some of the in-person crowd were well acquainted with the subject matter—they helped Hinojosa publish a book about it back in 2014.

“The publication process is a long one,” Hinojosa said, “but the Young Center has a series where they will say ‘look, if you write about Anabaptists in any way, pitch it to us.’ It’s got to go through peer review and there’s a lot of things involved but at least you have a home.”

The publication of “Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture” was also in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University.

Hinojosa looks pleased to meet some of his first book’s supporters face-to-face for the first time as Interim Director of the Young Center Dr. Steven Nolt provided an introduction for his speech.

While a good chunk of the book recounted the history of Mennonite missions which brought Latinos into their fold, Hinojosa said, “The real thrust of the book is about the Civil Rights era.”

Latino Mennonites were active with the Minorities Ministry Council, a group of worshippers from multiple races working collectively to increase racial minorities’ representation within church leadership.

Hinojosa noted that these activists were reformists, not revolutionaries.

“They believed in the church,” he said.

They just wanted more of a voice in its goings on. 

Hinojosa believes that the “coalition building” between minorities of different races fighting for rights and representation is a lens which more scholars should be using to view the Civil Rights era.

For instance, the professor explained that Menno-Latinos (“I don’t know if that term’s used anymore but it was popular in the 70s”) played a role in the Cross-Cultural Youth Convention of 1972. This event furthered ties and understanding between minority Christians across racial lines as well as launched the careers of several talented Latina singers.

In 2017, Hinojosa took it upon himself to organize a reunion of the convention, this time in a rest home instead of a Goshen, Ind. convention hall. From these interactions, Hinojosa had the opportunity to archive and digitize many important Civil Rights era photographs as well as collect stories 

One aspect of his study which Hinojosa seemed proud of was finding little gems of history in a place many people find dull. Much of Latino Mennonite Civil Rights history takes place in the Midwest—”a place where most scholars say nothing much happens.”

“Who would ever think that a book on Latino Mennonites would ever be written?” Hinojosa chuckled. “I was surprised. My dissertation advisor was surprised.”

While he’s proud that he got to tell the story of a rich but overlooked subculture, Hinojosa admitted, “I just scratched the surface. There’s lots of work still to be done.”

“I hope someone takes up the challenge of writing part two,” he said.

After the speech, the young Latino stood in a circle with a group of white-haired White scholars, discussing their shared field of study.