Biographical Note
Dr. Felipe Hinojosa is an Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. His interests include Latina/o and Mexican American studies, American religion, social movements, gender, and comparative race and ethnicity. His publications include, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (2014) and Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio (2021).
Hinojosa was born in the border town of Brownsville, Texas. He grew up as a Mennonite in the church his parents founded in South Texas. Throughout his upbringing as a Mexican American evangélico, Hinojosa was faced with questions not only about his own religion but also about broader issues of Latino evangelicalism, identity, and civil rights politics. In the late 1990s, Hinojosa met Neftali Torres, a Puerto Rican Mennonite pastor, at a gathering of Mexican Mennonite pastors. At the gathering, Torres discussed the Minority Ministries Council (MMC), a small multi-ethnic group of Latino and African American Mennonites, who operated in the Mennonite Church from 1968 to 1973. Hinojosa became interested in the narrative of black and brown Mennonites who worked to open the doors of the church to minorities. For the next 15 years, Hinojosa began to reconstruct the history through a series of oral histories in South Texas, Puerto Rico, Kansas, and Indiana, and Chicago.
Hinojosa received his PhD in history from the University of Houston in 2009, MA in history from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (2004), and a BA in English from Fresno Pacific University (1999). In 2015 he won the Américo Paredes Book Award by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College.