When the Spirit Is Your Inheritance: Reflections on Borderlands Pentecostalism

Pentecostalism, one of the fastest growing global religious movements, counts Latine people among its earliest adopters. Drawing on US-based and migrant traditions, Latine Pentecostals today continue to reinvent themselves in creative and adaptive ways. While Pentecostalism initially drew attention for its ecstatic practices, participants maintain a spirituality of deep interiority that has sustained Latine Pentecostals in the borderlands for generations.  When the Spirit Is Your Inheritance explores Latino Pentecostalism from an intergenerational, insider perspective. As a sociologist born and raised in Latino Pentecostalism, Jonathan Calvillo curates an autoethnographic journey through the converging sociocultural streams shaping his Latino Pentecostal lifeworlds. Focusing on lived religious practices, sociological perspectives, and grounded theological reflection, Calvillo paints a critical and caring picture of Latino Pentecostalism. Through snapshots of Pentecostal belonging in social and geographic borderlands, the book addresses issues of migration, Latinidad, race, and social justice. Ultimately, Calvillo considers what the empathetic Spirit-centric practices he has observed within Pentecostalism might teach others.

About the Author :
Jonathan Calvillo is assistant professor of Latinx communities at Candler School of Theology. His work examines how Latinx people jbuild communities of belonging through faith and creativity, in the face of systemic exclusion. His current projects focus on how churches shape Latinx civic engagement, how religion influences Latinx ethnoracial identities, and how Latinx creatives respond to urban inequalities through artistic resistance.

Review :
This is one of the best, most illuminating and engaging of the many books I have read on Latino Pentecostalism. It is deeply appreciative and committed to Pentecostal faith and tradition, but not uncritical of it. It includes valuable comments and examples of that typical Pentecostal genre known as "testimonios." But--and this is what I find most engaging--it itself is a brilliant, lifelong, and heartfelt testimonio! --Justo L. González, author of Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective and The Story of Christianity Calvillo's When the Spirit Is Your Inheritance is a brilliant, insider's perspective of Latino Pentecostalism at the borderlands. Sharing his own family's powerful narratives and employing his sociological imagination, he portrays and analyzes the ways that borders have shaped his Pentecostal spirituality while also offering spaces to create and establish new callings and ministries. This autoethnography provides keen insights on how the Spirit moves at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and empire. --Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American studies, San Francisco State University A compelling narrative at the intersection of borderlands and Pentecostalism that demonstrates how these interact to refashion each other, providing insights, illumination, and inspiration for pneumatology, finding the divine in the human, and blazing new ways to traverse the borderlands. A reading for scholars, immigrants, preachers, everyday pilgrims, and prophets. --Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, practical theologian, Association for Hispanic Theological Education When the Spirit Is Your Inheritance opens a new de-centering vista in the study of Pentecostalism and borderlands. Jonathan Calvillo has expanded what is usually a scholar's footnote or introductory sentence into a full-fledged model of self-reflexivity, turning the ethnographic gaze inward, as well as outward toward the community that shaped and is being studied by the scholar. With the descriptive power of a James Baldwin and the introspection of a Richard Rodríguez, Calvillo offers a deeper understanding of the personal and social dimensions of spirit-empowerment among the ostensibly peripheral and disempowered, beyond glossolalia or other usual markers of Pentecostal identity and practice. --Daniel Ramírez, author of Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century For the first time, in this important new book by noted Latinx religion scholar Jonathan Calvillo, I find my own lived experience of borderlands spirituality and culture reflected in the genre of memoir. With the analytic eye of a leading sociologist of religion, combined with the engaging prose of an artist, Calvillo movingly captures how the "Spirit in the borderlands" has been a source of strength and resilience for so many of our Latinx families in the face of cultural dislocation and ongoing change. --Robert Chao Romero, associate professor, Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles In When the Spirit Is Your Inheritance, Jonathan Calvillo delivers excellent and nuanced insights about contextualized Pentecostalism through the lens of both literal and conceptual borderlands, weaving together big stories and little stories that also provide insights for other faith-based communities. Drawing on his research and the experiences of transnational testimonios across many generations, Calvillo presents a sweeping nonbinary analysis well-grounded in particular accounts as well historical and sociological realities. It helps us examine the workings of power at micro and macro levels through the experiences of borderlands Pentecostals. --Edwin David Aponte, dean of the Theological School, and professor of religion and culture, Drew University