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The wide white canopy in the parking lot of Chula Vista’s Promise Church in California is set up to receive and dispatch a steady stream of people fleeing war and destruction and migrating to the United States. The church’s name denotes a deep history and hopeful future.

Pastor Mario Alas remembers the day several decades ago when his mother returned from Mexico City to San Salvador, documents in hand, to extract him from El Salvador’s deadly civil war. Weeks earlier, he and a companion had been caught in the middle of a firefight. A bullet ended his friend’s life. Now, the documents his mother secured promised him a scholarship to study law at the storied National Autonomous University of Mexico. These sufficed, together with new passports, to secure an exit for his family and entrance into Mexico, and then migration to the United States. Alas and his wife, Anna, met and married in Colorado, and then secured refugee status in Canada. Soon, they began working in refugee resettlement while pastoring. Since 1990, the couple have been involved in the ministry of the Apostolic Assembly, the denomination to which the Promise Church belongs.

Today, the decades-old memories are flooding back. In response to an appeal from Light of the World Church, a nearby Slavic Pentecostal church, Alas’s congregation — composed mostly of Mexicans and Mexican Americans — has opened its doors and hearts to a stream of Ukrainian refugees crossing into California from Tijuana. A mere 15 minutes from the border, the church is hosting a respite center that provides facilities to help refugees rest, gather their thoughts and prepare for the road ahead.

At a time when the idea of right-leaning Pentecostals and Charismatics is quite visible in the public and when political strategists are making a play for the Latino evangelical vote, it could be tempting for this congregation to have passed on this project. But the congregation’s response is congruent with a deep history of hospitality. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, Apostolic congregations have modeled solidarity and accompaniment toward sojourners.

Today’s alliance between Ukrainian and Hispanic Pentecostals carries echoes of the church’s beginnings in the Azusa Street Revival of 1906. Contemporaneous accounts of those services noted and sometimes mocked the interracial, interethnic and even multilingual dynamics at play in the “tumbledown shack” in downtown Los Angeles.

Its leaders claimed the biblical proof of the new Pentecostal revival lay precisely in the revival’s downscale demographics, including African Americans, Native Americans and Mexicans. Historians consider Los Angeles the cradle of global Pentecostalism. Spreading the movement from L.A., migrants carried the revival to agricultural valleys in California, mining towns in New Mexico, border regions, and towns and cities in north-central Mexico.

When migration pathways were constricted or rerouted by xenophobia, Pentecostal churches adapted their tactics but not their mission. For example, U.S. elites and others settled on Mexicans as scapegoats for the Great Depression and expelled a third of the U.S. Mexican population in the 1930s. Believers caught up in the Great Repatriation and sent to Mexico set about shoring up the weak Protestant presence in their communities of origin, while remaining closely tied to their coreligionists north of the border.

Then when the U.S. and Mexican governments established the Bracero guest-worker program in 1942 to fill the immense agricultural labor gap created by World War II, Apostolic churches along the border served as trampolines and hostels for the circulating workforce. Soon, Bracero labor camps provided nearby congregations lonely bodies and souls for fellowship and conversion. The Bracero program proved abusive and porous, often by design, and allowed for the same workers to drift over into precarious undocumented status.

When the federal government made a show of “cracking down” through harsh enforcement measures such as “Operation Wetback” (1954), the congregations provided safety and anonymity from officialdom’s raids. Immigration authorities largely avoided entering churches. In that anxious period, denominational president Benjamin Cantú reassured undocumented members of his flock: “This is not an immigration office. It’s the house of God and doorway to heaven!” The declaration of Jacob, a Hebrew patriarch and one of antiquity’s celebrated refugees, certainly resonated in the hearts of persecuted pilgrims.

The church also converted the Christian practice of letters of recommendation, which it issued for believers in transit. This allowed for people to transfer membership between congregations and ensured a welcoming reception into new church communities when the larger society may not have been as accepting. The letters also softened the blow when members were deported to Mexico, by providing people a ready introduction to Apostolic churches in Mexico.

The church continued to serve migrants without questioning their documentation status. These acts helped carve out spaces of hospitality and integration for thousands of Central Americans, like Alas, who fled U.S.-induced civil wars and conflicts in the region in the 1980s. While the Sanctuary Movement among Mainline Protestant churches of that period (and its current revival) has received considerable scholarly and journalistic attention, the story of Latina/o Pentecostal hospitality remains relatively unknown or unappreciated even as it continues to move entrails of compassion.

Both the Promise Church and the Light of the World Church are part of the Oneness Pentecostal movement, which is considered heterodox by most. This shared sectarian identity has allowed for unexpected bonds across ethnic and language lines. The movement developed in the Los Angeles area in 1913 and resulted in a branch of Pentecostalism that rejected a trinitarian notion of the godhead. This theological distinctive drew apologists and believers that spanned several ethnic and racial constituencies and folks of different national origins. Importantly, Oneness churches were the broader Pentecostal movement’s final holdouts (until the 1930s) against the encroaching shadows of Jim Crow.

The ties that bind radiate across the region. The Slavic church subleases facilities from an Apostolic church in Poway where Alas pastored before his call to the Promise Church. When the Slavic church needed facilities near the border and in a more hospitable area, they knew they could trust brothers and sisters in the faith. The welcome from the church’s neighbors and friends reflects the deep reservoir of goodwill they have dug out in the community.

The sight of vans unloading and picking up migrants at a borderlands Latina church is not a common one. The practice of ferrying sojourners in the past has often been a clandestine one, given Apostolics’ historical ministry among the undocumented and scapegoated during periods such as the Great Repatriation and Operation Wetback. But the expanded legal channels afforded Ukrainians has allowed a renewed and widened solidarity, this time above ground but consonant with the church’s historical practice of receiving and loving the stranger.

The saints of the Promise Church hold to that biblical tradition and believe that in receiving strangers, some may entertain angels unaware. With the increased attention to Latino evangelical electoral potential, the Promise Church’s story represents an opportunity to press political leaders of both parties to humanize and extend welcome for Central Americans and other populations seeking aid and to remind fellow believers that the yearning for a restored Great America, evident in many political rallies, carries too much weight for the pilgrim road.



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