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Felipe Hinojosa
Professor of History, Texas A&M University
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Felipe Hinojosa
Professor of History, Texas A&M University
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BIO
Felipe Hinojosa is Professor of History and serves as Assistant Provost for HSI Initiatives at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on Latinx freedom movements and religious politics in twentieth century America.
EXTENDED PROFILE
Born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, Felipe Hinojosa is Professor of History at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. He serves as Assistant Provost for HSI initiatives and is Director for the Carlos H. Cantu Hispanic Education & Opportunity Endowment at Texas A&M. From 2020 – 2022 he served as Editor for the interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, and online moderated forum Latinx Talk. His research areas include Chicanx and Latinx Histories, American Religion, Race and Ethnicity, and Social Movements. Professor Hinojosa’s work has appeared in Zócalo Public Square, Western Historical Quarterly, American Catholic Studies, Kalfou, and in multiple edited collections on Latinx Studies. He is the author of two book length monographs, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), winner of the 2015 Américo Paredes Book Award, and Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio (University of Texas Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 Outstanding Book Award by the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education.
RESEARCH
I am a Latinx civil rights historian whose research is focused on how communities harness the power of faith to improve their daily lives. My research lies at the intersections of faith and politics, where I examine how non-religious people organize movements in religious spaces, and how they engage religious leaders in democratic work.
While the core of my work focuses on single authored monographs, I have published articles in the Western Historical Quarterly and American Catholic Studies. Most recently I published an essay for a special issue in Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies on essential laborers during the COVID-19 pandemic. My research has been recognized and funded by the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University, the Louisville Institute, and an Arts & Humanities fellowship at Texas A&M.
My first book manuscript, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (2014), traces the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites who, beginning in the 1930s, joined an ethnically German denomination rooted in sixteenth-century Anabaptism. In 2015 the book received the Américo Paredes Book Award, given every year by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College.
My second book, Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio (2021), explores the deep and profound clashes between Latino radicals and religious leaders in an urban drama that shook some of the most powerful religious institutions in the United States. The book tells four stories in America’s four largest cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston) where some of the sharpest fights against urban renewal took place between Latino radicals and religious leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. While much has been written about how large-scale events such as Vatican II and the rise of liberation theology shaped religious politics, this book flips the script by examining four relatively unknown church occupations as a way to relearn the ties that bind religion, revolutionary politics, and the urban crisis of the post-World War II era. By calling attention to the ways Latino radicals and religious reformers clashed, negotiated, and collaborated, I argue that religion and radical politics fueled the engines of the Latino freedom movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 2022, the book was awarded an Outstanding Book Award by the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education.
PROJECTS AND EXHIBITIONS
I am currently working on a book length manuscript that examines the multiple Latinx freedom movements that emerged in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s.
AWARDS
INTERVIEWS
The Way to College Podcast, 2022.
Podcast Interview, Fronteras, Texas Public Radio, 2021.
Radio interview with Felipe Luciano of WBAI, NYC, on the crisis at the U.S. / Mexico Border, March 27, 2021.
New Books in Latino Studies Podcast, on Apostles of Change, 2021.
Radio interview with David Whettstone of WPFW FM, on Apostles of Change Washington DC, March 10, 2021.
Classical Ideas Podcast, on Apostles of Change, 2021.
Interview with KBTX, January 2021 (Texas A&M Diversity Report).
Quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Brittany Mejia, “To change the church 50 years ago, first they had to break in,” Jan 26, 2020.
Quoted in Religion News Service, Alejandra Molina, “50 years later, Chicano Catholic activists recall their midnight Mass clash with police,” January 16, 2020.
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