Predicadores: An Ethnographic Study of Hispanic Protestant Immigrant Preachers

The Hispanic Protestant population of the United States has grown dramatically in recent decades, yet scholars have paid little if any attention to the preachers or the preaching within Hispanic Protestant congregations. The thesis of this project is that the unique transnational experiences, immigration stories, bicultural identities, and contextual hardships of Hispanic preachers actually shape their calling, praxis, and proclamation in significant ways. The primary methodology employed within this dissertation is collaborative ethnography as described by Luke Eric Lassiter in The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. This study involved a multiyear period of participant-observation as well as several rounds of interviews and focus group sessions with twenty-four individual subjects engaged in preaching ministries within Hispanic Protestant congregations.

This dissertation highlights the ways in which the sermons of Hispanic Protestant preachers who are recent immigrants echo the particular concerns of immigrant communities while also focusing strongly on the importance of spiritual conversion. It also demonstrates the role of testimony and the power of the preaching platform for female preachers within this demographic. My collaborators revealed, through their stories and proclamation, the incredible homiletical importance of the preacher’s ability to understand and to speak from within the culture of his or her congregation. This bears significant implications for the way in which future ministers engage in both vocational discernment and theological education. It also highlights the encouraging possibilities of ethnography for pastoral practice. Furthermore, the practice of the collaborators featured in this dissertation reveals the sustaining power of preaching within marginalized communities. Finally, the aims of the predicadores involved in this work reveal their hopes for the future of their congregations, which do not easily fit within the typical categories assigned to them in sociological analyses.