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The granddaddy of U.S. Latino Protestantism, Jesse Miranda, grew up in a poor barrio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, among junk cars and, when he was older, marijuana and gangs. Miranda stayed away from the pot and the street mischief, but those junk cars helped him learn his first lesson in leadership as a small child.

"We'd sit in the cars and say, 'Let's go to California'—wherever that was," Miranda says. "One would say, 'I see the mountains,' then 'I see the desert.' Finally somebody'd say, 'I see the ocean—I guess we got there.' It was imagination: the energy, the excitement as a child." Miranda always sat in the driver's seat.

Then government urban renewal programs cleaned out the scrap-metal hulks. Miranda and his five siblings—children of a sawmill worker from the Mexican state of Chihuahua and a Spanish-descent mother with a third-grade education—had a cleaner neighborhood. But there was nothing left to challenge their imagination.

"The lesson of leadership for me was that leadership starts from within [the community] and not from without," Miranda says. "They told us what we needed and what the solution was rather than working with the community to see how we could work it out. I think we would have had a playground, had they asked what we needed."

Miranda has not forgotten how acutely he felt the needs of his native barrio, even after a lifetime of building coalitions across religious, ideological, and cultural lines. Now seven times a grandfather and founding president of the National Alliance of Evangelical Ministries (AMEN, Alianza de Ministerios Evangélicos Nacionales), Miranda is regarded as the primary visionary uniting disparate U.S. Hispanic evangelicals. He has a reputation as a sharp listener and bridge-builder who has put his vision, imagination, and wit to the service of the Latino church.

It was the Latino church, after all, that served him. He describes his journey of trust in Christ as beginning at age 8, when members of the neighborhood Pentecostal church heard that his mother was ill. "They came and they prayed for her, and she was healed," Miranda recalls. "So I saw it with my own eyes what God was doing, and I saw the change in my family."

The church had already begun reaching out to him two years earlier. "This little Pentecostal church would come in an old broken-down bus, pick us up, and take me to church—that made the difference," he says. "I was six or seven years old. They taught me how to write. They were the only ones that would give us toys for Christmas, because our parents would buy me socks or pants—but toys, that was the church. That stuck very close to my heart."

Patriarch though he may be, Miranda's impish, high-octane manner recalls the scrappy barrio kid who always wanted to be in the center of the action: the pitcher or catcher in baseball, the quarterback in football—or, more recently, the consultant to three U.S. presidents on Hispanic affairs.

Eventually Miranda really did make it to California, where he earned a doctor of ministry degree from Fuller Theological Seminary. He was the Assemblies of God supervisor of the Pacific District from 1984 to 1992, overseeing 400 Latino churches. He continues to serve as an executive presbyter with the General Council of the Assemblies of God. His belief in homegrown vision for solving problems has meant developing and connecting Hispanic leaders as the distinguished professor of urban and ethnic leadership and director of the Center for Urban Studies and Ethnic Leadership at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, California.

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September 9 2002, Vol. 46, No. 10