Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas and Sea la Luz: The Making of Maxican Protestantism in the American Southwest, 1829–1900

While the two authors focus their respective works on the Mexican-American Protestant experience in the American Southwest (Barton limits himself to Texas), the two studies not only make a valuable contribution to American religious history and the history of the Southwest, but also to interdisciplinary Latino/a studies, especially valuable to scholars interested in the history of immigration, the complexities of cultural assimilation, and the formation of cultural identity. Previous research on Latino/a Christianity in the American Southwest has tended to focus on particular confessional communities, whether Roman Catholic or specific Protestant denominations, but Barton chooses to compare and contrast the development of various Latino/a Protestant denominations in Texas, in order to demonstrate that Mexican-American Protestants were not merely passive recipients of Anglo missionary efforts but were instead forging a distinctive form of North American Protestantism in contrast to both the mainline denominations and the pervasive Mexican/Catholic cultural milieu.