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Mexicans and Mexican Americans eagerly joined the Azusa Street Revival and soon thereafter carried a heterodox (non-Trinitarian) variant of Pentecostalism to border zones and agricultural valleys (Imperial, Coachella, San Joaquin, Ventura, Salinas, Maricopa, etc.) and mining towns in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Baja California. This chapter sets the early growth of this self-denominated Apostolic movement against the backdrop of Mainline precursors (mostly Methodist), Pentecostal competitors (mostly Assemblies of God missionaries), and distant African American sponsors (Pentecostal Assemblies of the World). The minutes of pioneering conclaves (1925-1927) led by, among others, Francisco Llorente, Marcial de la Cruz, and Antonio Nava in southern California and Baja California reveal a developing self-understanding in terms of doctrine and social and gendered practice. On the Mexican side, the movement's practices provoked governmental alarm over charlatanism, public health, and transgressive behavior between sexes. The Archivo General de la Nación has yielded up valuable sources that document Pentecostals' resolute insistence on constitutional rights and prerogatives and Mexican officialdom's suspicion of undesirable "gringo" and "negro" influences in this evangélico upstart.

This chapter traces Pentecostal growth in central northern Mexico from 1914 to 1930. Like chapter 1, it appraises the pioneering role of women (Romana Valenzuela) as well as an ambivalent proto-evangélico identity open to Pentecostal seduction (Rubén Ortega). Missionary retreat in the face of revolution and clumsiness in the face of nationalistic sensibilities also facilitated Pentecostal advance. That advance began to register in academic sources in the late 1920s. Manuel Gamio's pioneering study of Mexican migration captured traces of social and elite opprobrium evident in epithets and monikers like "Aleluya". The loosening of anchoring ties to historic orthodoxy also facilitated a deep drift into heterodoxy and heteropraxis. By 1930, Apostolicism in Mexico had split into three distinct variants. The most sui generis one, the Luz del Mundo, leveraged founder Eusebio Joaquin's military connections to the governing regime to carve out an important niche in Guadalajara. The more institutional variant, the Iglesia Apostólica led by Felipe Rivas, clung fast to its U.S. counterpart, the Apostolic Assembly.

The subaltern Pentecostal response to macro events represents a prescient case of "transnationalism from below." In 1945 Pentecostal repatriates joined their counterparts in ratifying charter documents (a Constitution and Treaty of Unification) that bound two emerging flagship denominations, the Iglesia Apostólica of Mexico and the Apostolic Assembly of the U.S., tightly together. The transnational consolidation coincided with the start of the Bracero guest worker program. The intensifying labor migration flow—including an undocumented one—and the structure codified by the accords grew Apostolicism in both countries. The retrieved records of bracero evangelism and borderlands hospitality cast mid-century studies of the bracero experience (Julian Samora) and proselytism (Donald McGavran) in vastly brighter shades. This chapter also takes stock of the repatriates' impressive musical fecundity, including that of the Hermanos Alvarado, a trio of U.S.-born brothers who, although exiled as children, returned to Los Angeles in adulthood and, through a fortuitous encounter with a cluster of Hollywood evangelical actors, achieved prominence in the 1960s as the hemisphere's most widely heard evangélico musical group.

This chapter examines the movement's periodical record, especially the Iglesia Apostólica's Exegeta magazine, in order to texturize our understanding of subaltern religious life during the time period of the Bracero program (1942–1964). This optic, however, foregoes the usual data for the study of Pentecostalism—healing, conversion, and tongues speaking—in favor of reports that reflect taken-for-granted contexts of migration and transnational life. This perspective places in sharper relief practices of fellowship, hospitality, healing, evangelism, and bereavement that spanned the border and reached deeply into both countries and beyond, as well as the centrifugal pressures (e.g., strongman caudillismo) that stymied them. The periodical and hymnodic record also reveals a pattern of Pentecostal pugilism in the face of residual cristero-inspired intolerance and in defense of the tentative turf previously carved out by evangélicos, liberals, and Masons. Finally, the chapter flips over Mainline and Catholic critiques of Pentecostal methods, in order to test the argument for Pentecostal success.

This chapter reflects upon the changes that the town of Sanford, North Carolina has undergone. It notes that there are Latinos all over the town engaging in all sorts of labor, even having an iglesia on the main street of Sanford. It adds that the proliferation of the Latinos in Sanford is just one indicator that Southern race relations may come into play in the future.

Chapter Two opens with an apparition tale that betokens a new representational capacity of Mary, especially as she is linked to the much revered and beloved figure of Inang Bayan (Mother Country). At a time when other ideologies of value associated with capitalist production emerged as a challenge to the economies of Imperial Christiandom, mestizo reformists wrote poetry and essays that cast their discontent with Spanish rule in an ambivalent allegory of maternal relations. Such reimaginings of the relationship between mother and child paved the way for a double translation that rendered “Filipino” (in the new national-cultural sense of the term) both the figure of the Virgin Mary and the global circulating concept of “motherland.”

Examines legal mechanisms whereby the Catholic church sheltered spousal murderers and other criminals and the King acted as God’s proxy to extend pardon to criminals during the Catholic Holy Week. It also shows the central role of the church in the alleviation of punishment and the accompaniment of those marching to the gallows. It establishes that forgiveness was thus also critical to the legitimacy of the Church and its hegemony, both a complementary and competing force relative to the monarchy.

This chapter focuses on the role of food in the religious life of migrants. It expounds on the ways in which the adaptive spirit of faithful Filipino migrants helps them negotiate the complexities associated with migration to multicultural San Francisco. The chapter also demonstrates how the American, Latino, and Asian elements embedded within Filipino culture facilitate migrants' absorption and accommodation of San Francisco's culturally diverse environment. Adaptive kasamahan in two sites—Iglesia ni Cristo in Daly City and Saint Patrick's Catholic Church in downtown San Francisco—illustrates how Filipino faithful accommodate and adapt to the many practical challenges of migrant life, such as locating work, as well as the emotional pitfalls, such as homesickness and loneliness.

This chapter provides evidence from San Francisco disputing the premise of Robert Putnam's critically acclaimed book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, that social capital, especially the bridging variety, has declined all over the United States. It presents evidence that describes how the Filipino migrants' adaptive spirit, mediated through San Francisco churches, allows them to balance the competing social and civic responsibilities of new migrants, which include religious obligations and civic duties in both the United States and the Philippines. It uses two bayanihan case studies to illuminate more clearly how the adaptive spirits (or esprit de corps) of migrant faithful at Saint Patrick's Catholic Church in San Francisco and the Iglesia ni Cristo in Daly City are cultivated and channeled for the betterment of American society.

This chapter introduces the films of Álex de la Iglesia, as they are inspired by Hitchcock's oeuvre. De la Iglesia has not been able to make the leap yet to Hollywood, but his characteristic genre mix, which in the spirit of Hitchcock is always underpinned by a unique sense of humour, has proved commercially viable and increasingly attractive to European and Latin American audiences. And although his own authorial style is now well developed and easily recognisable, certain elements of Hitchcock's artistry remain part of de la Iglesia's stock and trade, none more so than their shared obsession with heights in iconic settings.

This chapter explores what the author calls ‘the middlebrow erotic’ in Spanish cinema. It argues that after the abolition of censorship in 1977, eroticism in Spanish film ‘extended beyond subject matter and became the very grammar by which a new film language was constructed’. In turn, that new language was used to express the new freedoms afforded by democracy. The author illustrates this theory with a fresh reading of an important film of this period, Eloy de la Iglesia’s El diputado/Confessions of a Congressman (1978), demonstrating how the erotic is used to didactically explain previously forbidden political and sexual tendencies and, indeed, how these go hand in hand with each other.

This chapter is a study of the erotic content of Eloy de la Iglesia’s quinqui films. Informed by senses-receptor-based film theories, the author reflects on the importance of the visual erotics of touch and skin, using the body of de la Iglesia’s actor fetiche José Luis Manzano as a productive and very fitting case study. The chapter proposes that the aesthetic roughness, the post-synch sound, and the delinquent narratives characteristic of this type of film, make it ideal to illustrate the kind of visual immediacy that sensually engages the viewer with the image on the screen. Manzano’s skin is often shown in close-up, pierced and tattooed. Through his work in de la Iglesia’s quinqui films, the actor became iconic of a genre fascinated with ‘the fragile glamour of male youth’ as a memorable example of what the press at the time referred to as the ‘estética de calzoncillo’,

This chapter investigates why so many erotic scenes involving sex between men in contemporary Spanish cinema are often interrupted. While these interruptions are perhaps to be expected in erotic – as opposed to pornographic – films, the frequency and sometimes violence with which they occur is intriguing and troubling. The chapter identifies different strategies of interruption that go from the classic ellipsis with fades to black to literal concealment achieved with distance, poor lighting or visual obstructions such as doors, window blinds or props. In some other cases, other characters enter the scene. These include family members (often female – wives, girlfriends, mothers) but also (often male) strangers that halt the sex act quite suddenly and aggressively mid-way. Importantly, these violent interruptions prevent the kinds of pleasurable identification that are often encouraged in heterosexual erotic scenes, even when the sex act is left to the spectators’ imagination. The study revisits some classic and well-known films by directors including Pedro Almodóvar, Cesc Gay, Eloy de la Iglesia or Gerardo Vera, as well as more recent and lesser-known work including Juanma Carrillo’s short film Fuckbuddies (2011). The analysis of the final case study, Almodóvar’s Los amantes pasajeros/I’m so Excited (2013), suggests that the erotic content of films can sometimes be hidden (and found) in surprisingly conspicuous places.

This chapter explores how American writers described the Spanish friars as imperial models. Like Jacques Marquette and Junípero Serra, the friars were cast as benevolent civilizers but were particularly lauded for what many Americans believed to be their ability to maintain social order. It describes how the Spanish friars preserved existing state of affairs by upholding orthodoxy against Philippine transformations of Roman Catholicism, religiously inspired anticolonial rebellions, and establishing the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, a nationalist Catholic church. The chapter also talks about the many Americans that embraced the idea of Americanist Catholicism, which was embodied by U.S.-trained priests, as a tool for ensuring order while promoting religious liberty. It points out the lessons American writers and officials imagined the Catholic history of the Philippines might provide for the advancement of the U.S. colonial state.