This manuscript, Los Aleluyas: Faith, Activism, and Identity Among Latino/a Mennonites, explores Latino/a religious identity within the interethnic organizing efforts of the Minority Ministries Council (MMC). In doing so, I trace the changing relationship between faith, activism, and identity from 1932 to 1982. Like African Americans, Latino/as merged their biblical understandings of justice with their own experience of marginalization. But while scholars have noted the importance of religion for African American civil rights, we know very little about the historical development of Latino/a religious activism, especially as it relates to the American pietist/Mennonite tradition.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the MMC was the only religious group that organized African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans for ecclesiastical and social change. My research explores the varied trajectories of each group as they separately engaged white Mennonites on issues of church missions in the 1940s and 1950s and as they merged their concerns around race and racism in the 1960s and 1970s.

But while the civil rights movement helped shape Latino/a religious identity, it was the emergence of religiously conservative groups, like the “Moral Majority,” which moved Latino/a Mennonites to begin defining their theology and politics, especially with regards to immigrant rights. In this manuscript, I argue that Latino/a Mennonites employed multiple strategies across time to carve out a space for themselves within the Mennonite church. However, it would not be until the 1970s, after the direct activism of the 1960s, that Latino/as began to define themselves as different from their white and black religious counterparts as they more directly engaged immigrant rights and expanded their connections in Latin America.