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Latino Pentecostal Identity Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society by Arlene M. SÁnchez Walsh Columbia Univ. Press, 2003 264 pp. $22.50, paper

One of the chief purposes of scholarly publications is to fill gaps in our knowledge of the world, and Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh's Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society does that admirably. Most scholars of religion know next to nothing about Latino Pentecostalism, and this book will serve as an important guide for future study. That said, it should also be pointed out that the book's title unnecessarily claims too much. This is not a study of Latino Pentecostalism in general, but an analysis of the Mexican American Pentecostal experience in Southern California—and that specificity does not weaken the text. In fact, it strengthens the book by implicitly acknowledging how difficult it is to make intelligent statements about Latino Pentecostalism that apply everywhere and to all Hispanic groups. So this book ultimately fills only a small portion of the gap in our knowledge of Latino Pentecostalism, but the gap it fills is important, and anyone interested in understanding Hispanic Protestantism in the United States ought to read it.

For those who might be wondering why they should care about Latino Pentecostalism, a few demographic facts should make that case. Latinos are now the largest minority group in the United States, having recently surpassed African Americans. In terms of raw numbers, there are more than 30 million Hispanics living in the United States, 13 percent of the total U.S. population.

The Latino world of North America is a mosaic of cultures rather than a uniform community. Mexican Americans, like those described in Sánchez Walsh's book, are the largest group, making up roughly 60 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population. Puerto Ricans, the next largest subgroup, constitute about 15 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, Cuban Americans account for a little over 5 percent, and the remaining 20 percent trace their roots to a variety of other Spanish-speaking countries (especially those of the Caribbean and Central America). In contrast to the caricatures that still predominate in Anglo culture, most Latinos in the United States are fluent in English. More that three quarters are bilingual; about 10 percent speak only Spanish, and a similar number speak only English. Almost three-quarters of Latinos are native-born U.S. citizens.

Religiously, a sizeable majority of U.S. Latinos (70 percent) are Catholics; flipping those categories around, the American Catholic Church itself may soon become a predominantly Hispanic church. Right now Latinos make up one-third of all U.S. Catholics; by mid-century fully half of all American Catholics will be Hispanic. Taken at face value these statistics may, however, overstate the influence of Catholicism within the Latino community. The majority of Hispanics clearly are Catholic in a cultural sense, but estimates of weekly church attendance range as low as 12 percent, and the religiously inactive percentage of the Hispanic Catholic population may be as high as 50 percent.

Finally, about 25 percent of the U.S. Latino population is Protestant in one form or another, and the great majority of these Hispanic Protestants—more than three-quarters of them—are Pentecostal. In fact, it might be more accurate to identify the two main variants of Latino Christianity as either Catholic or Pentecostal rather than as Catholic or Protestant. Besides reflecting the actual numbers, this also acknowledges the many similarities that exist between non-Pentecostal Latino Protestants and their Pentecostal neighbors in terms of worship, conceptions of faith, and concern for the social ills that plague the Latino community in the United States. It is also worth noting that Hispanic Pentecostals, for the most part, are much more religiously active than their Catholic counterparts. On any given Sunday it is thus possible that there might be as many Latino Pentecostals in church as Hispanic Catholics. Hispanic Pentecostalism is a force to be reckoned with, and its influence will grow exponentially in the years ahead.

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