Latino Mennonites Quotes

“Because of his aggressiveness and outspokenness,” Ted Chapa remembered, “he was labeled by some of the Mennonite big wheels as very insensitive, as a rebel [and] instigator.”
― Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

“By equating the “race crisis” with “war,” Harding appealed to the moral underpinnings of Mennonite theology and presented a challenge to white Mennonites that they could not turn down.”
― Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

“Vincent Harding, an African American Mennonite, who in 1959 called on white Mennonites to “break down the wall of German-Swiss-Dutch backgrounds … [and] lose the cultural stereotype of Mennonitism … for there are some baptized here who are my color, whose parents or grandparents never came near Germany or Switzerland or Holland or Russia.”
― Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

“Harding left the Mennonite Church altogether, citing his frustration with white Mennonites, who he felt were not ready to commit fully to the black freedom struggle.3”
― Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

“Mennonite missionaries organized workshops that focused on child care and hygiene for Puerto Rican women, whom they characterized as “dirty and unkept.…”
― Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

“They were wearing good shoes, blue jeans and white T-shirts.”72 This appearance of “status” and the sense that the institutional Catholic Church was irrelevant led Ortíz to “give his life to Christ” and join the Mennonite Church in 1952 at the age of thirteen.”
― Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

“The VS program prohibited white Mennonite women from coming too close to Mexican American boys and instituted a policy that advised young women to “be friendly to everyone, but single boys.”59”
― Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

“The new “social arrangements of the farm order,” were clearly reflected in the substandard working and living conditions of many Mexican Americans, a reality that Mennonite missionaries saw as a consequence of living a Godless life.”
― Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

“more than a decade before the marriage between a black and white Mennonite, the church’s response to a marriage between a Mexican American and a white Mennonite was to suggest the couple relocate to a faraway place like Argentina where they would be out of the purview of most Mennonite communities.”
― Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

“The requirements of personal change, as historian Paul Barton has shown, reflected a moral code that was based on an Anglo cultural worldview perceived to be inherently necessary for the religious conversion of ethnic Mexicans to Protestantism.”
― Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture