It is no surprise that a book entitled Latino Mennonites could aspire to be the premier (only?) account of Latino and Latina Mennonites in the United States. Felipe Hinojosa's accomplished history achieves that and much more. His nuanced telling of Latino/a challenges, ordeals, and victories in a denomination known for its white ethnic heritage allows Hinojosa to shed important light on the role of protestant minorities in the civil rights movement. Not only does the struggle for civil rights help define the identity of Chicanos and Puerto Ricans in the Mennonite Church, Latino/as—along with African American Mennonites—had a lasting impact on how this peace church would engage with questions of racism and social injustice. The white Mennonite majority had long embraced being “the quiet in the land,” but outreach and evangelistic successes among Latino/as and blacks in the mid-twentieth century demanded new, more dynamic and inclusive leadership structures and a re-assessment of Mennonite conceptions of peacemaking. A related argument Hinojosa makes throughout the book is that Mexican American and Puerto Rican Mennonites tended to embrace a much more evangelical identity and worship style than whites in the church. He convincingly shows that this tendency should broaden our understanding of American evangelicalism as well as Latino/a religious culture and community.

Covering the 1930s through the early 1980s, Latino Mennonites begins with a discussion of the first Mennonite evangelistic missions to Latinos, mostly in agricultural areas of south Texas and along the trails of migrant workers, but also in urban centers like Chicago. Initial growth depended on white missionaries and volunteers, but relatively soon, Mexican American and Puerto Rican leaders and pastors emerged. Hinojosa shows how this outreach to Latino people coincided with Mennonite gains among African Americans. Much of the book carefully explains the institutional and practical concerns that developed to address the over-lapping but not identical needs of Latinos and blacks in a majority-white denomination. As the civil rights movement emerged and grew, the Minority Ministries Council (MMC) was formed; in addition to supporting Latino and African American congregations, it also challenged the denomination to take a more robust political stance on racial injustices. For example, a chapter recounts the importance of the 1972 Cross-Cultural Youth Convention, which gathered Mexican American, black, and Puerto Rican Mennonite teens for worship and fellowship as well as opportunities for interethnic solidarity, exploration and radicalization around ethnic identity, and politicization. While participants generally found the conference to be empowering, many Mennonites struggled with the explicit political rhetoric of the MMC and the youth gathering.

At the heart of this growing point of contention between Latino/a Mennonites and their white counterparts, writes Hinojosa, was not only the sometimes overt racism of white church members but also the Anabaptist peace tradition. An outstanding chapter on the various Mennonite responses to the United Farm Workers highlights the reluctance of many white Mennonites to engage with even the non-violent civil disobedience of the UFW's boycott campaigns. As one white Mennonite theologian explained, “There is no difference in principle between so-called non-violent coercion and actual violence” (124). It also did not help that several of the growers were themselves white Mennonites. Latino/a leaders, who in this period were becoming increasingly radical and vocal about social injustices faced by brown people, recommended that the church join other protestant and Catholic groups who had supported the UFW's efforts. When the official response of the denomination was neutral, Latinos were forced to rethink what it meant to be both Mennonite and Latino/a.

Another strong point of the book is its treatment of Latina Mennonite women. Starting in 1973, Latinas started to organize national meetings where they could worship and pray together and discuss the unique issues and challenges that they faced. Hinojosa's fine-grained analysis of their meetings and statements reveals a group of women eager to enter leadership positions in their churches and be a force for positive change in their communities even while supporting and maintaining some of the gender hierarchies within their families. Moreover, they were not always comfortable with the feminism espoused by white women at the time that ignored the intersectionality of race, gender, and religion. The author helps the reader understand this complex field by situating the Latina Mennonites within the similar experiences of other protestant Latinas in this era.

Latino Mennonites expertly covers what it means to be a Latino/a in the Mennonite Church, but the book could say more about the particulars of the Mennonite and Anabaptist traditions and how those particulars appealed to Chicanos and Puerto Ricans. To be sure, Hinojosa rightly focuses on the struggles Latinos had and have within the Mennonite Church, but he perhaps could have provided more on why they first joined this denominational body and why many of them stuck with it, especially when adopting a greater evangelical identity within their own Latino congregations. But in balance, this book triumphs at its stated objectives: to deepen our understanding of the role of Latinos not only in the Mennonite Church but in other majority-white protestant denominations as well and to enrich our thinking about the position Latino/a protestants played in the civil rights movement.