A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Historian Robert Chao Romero traces a five-hundred-year tradition of Latino Christian social justice across colonization, missions, labor, civil rights, immigration, and contemporary church life. He names this tradition Brown Church, centering figures, movements, and theologies through which Latina and Latino Christians have resisted racial hierarchy while drawing on Scripture, Catholic and Protestant faith, community memory, and public action.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
The book corrects narratives that cast U.S. Christianity as primarily white or frame Latino identity as peripheral to Christian history. It gives travelers a lineage in which faith, cultural belonging, and justice are intertwined rather than mutually suspicious. The Library includes it as an accessible historical and theological synthesis that opens further study. Brown Church names a diverse tradition; it does not make Latinidad, Christianity, politics, or colonial history uniform.
Good starting place if…
You want an accessible history of Latino Christian justice traditions and a framework connecting faith, racial identity, immigration, organizing, and public discipleship.
Know before you begin…
A five-century synthesis necessarily compresses nations, races, denominations, Indigenous and African ancestries, political disagreements, gender, sexuality, and conflicts within Latinidad. Christian institutions appear as both sources of resistance and agents of conquest, assimilation, and abuse; celebrating a liberative lineage must not hide that history. Romero writes as a Christian scholar and advocate. Readers should follow particular movements and communities into their own sources rather than treating one narrative as representative of all Latino experience.