Trevino, Roberto R.

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Trevino, Roberto R.

PERSONAL:

Education: Stanford University, Ph.D., 1993.

ADDRESSES:

CAREER:

Writer, historian, and educator. University of Texas at Arlington, associate professor of history and assistant director, Center for Mexican Studies.

WRITINGS:

The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in Houston, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2006.

(Editor, with Richard V. Francaviglia) Catholicism in the American West: A Rosary of Hidden Voices, introduction by Steven M. Avella, Texas A&M University Press (College Station, TX), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Roberto R. Trevino is a writer, historian, and educator at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he is an associate professor of history and assistant director of the Center for Mexican Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University. As a scholar, he conducts research on the effects of religion and ethnicity throughout the history of the United States, according to a biographer on the University of Texas at Arlington Web site. He concentrates his research on the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the history of Mexican Americans and other Latinos in the United States. Trevino encourages his students in the study of the interaction of religion and other elements of U.S. life and culture and how these aspects have affected national development in the country.

Trevino is the editor, with Richard V. Francaviglia, of Catholicism in the American West: A Rosary of Hidden Voices. The essays contained in the book are derived from the 2004 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures. The contributors offer work that considers the variety of Catholic experiences in the West, and also the problems and hardships experienced by churches and practitioners in a rugged and sometimes lawless region. The travails of the American West, however difficult, did not extinguished the church's drive or traditions, and it eventually emerged stronger and assumed its place in the history and culture of the West.

In The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in Houston, Trevino "makes a welcome contribution to Chicano history with his fine study of Catholic religious belief, practice, and institu- tion building among Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Houston," commented reviewer Mary E. Odem in the Journal of American History. With this work, Trevino "has written a meticulously researched, engaging social history of Mexican Americans in Houston. This is an excellent case study, one that provides an intimate portrait of lived religious experiences in a particular urban locale, and that allows the reader an in-depth view into the daily lives of Mexican Americans," remarked Kristy Nabhan-Warren, writing in Church History.

Trevino "offers a regional study of community formation, with religion as the driving social force," observed Jose F. Aranda, Jr., writing in the Journal of Southern History. He looks at the period from 1911 to 1972 and concludes that faith and religion had a significant influence on the civic development and evolution on Houston's Mexican-American community. He considers religion and its effects in areas such as labor, civil rights, and the emerging Chicano movement. For the Mexican-Americans of the time period, their religious faith and practice was vitally important, and it allowed them to "mold and preserve their cultural identity and played a crucial role in the family, community and institutional structure," observed a reviewer in Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

John H. Barnhill, in a Canadian Journal of History review, commented that The Church in the Barrio is "comprehensive within its self-defined limits. The style is lucid and interesting, making the work accessible to scholars and lay people alike." Barnhill further remarked that the book "does all that a good work of scholarship should. It deserves examination by those who are interested in the ways in which minorities adapt to majorities and alter majorities in the process."

"Overall, this is a finely wrought portrait of Mexican American lived religion that makes important and substantial contributions to scholarship on U.S. Catholicism, Mexican American history, ethnic and urban studies, and American religious history," Nabhan-Warren remarked. Odem concluded: "Trevino's study makes a compelling case for the centrality of Mexican Americans in U.S. Catholic history and of Catholicism in Mexican American history in the twentieth century."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 2007, Michael P. Carroll, review of The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in Houston, p. 214.

Canadian Journal of History, autumn, 2007, John H. Barnhill, review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 358.

Catholic Historical Review, July, 2007, F. Arturo Rosales, review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 727.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, January 1, 2007, L.J. Quintanilla, review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 911.

Church History, December, 2006, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 942.

Diverse Issues in Higher Education, January 26, 2006, review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 31.

Journal of American History, June, 2007, Mary E. Odem, review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 243.

Journal of Southern History, February, 2008, Jose F. Aranda, Jr., review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 224.

Pacific Historical Review, May, 2007, Carlos Kevin Blanton, review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 311.

Reviews in American History, December, 2006, Richard A. Garcia, "Religion as Language, Church as Culture: Changing Chicano Historiography," review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 521.

Southwestern Historical Quarterly, April, 2007, Gene B. Preuss, review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 563.

Western Historical Quarterly, autumn, 2007, Todd M. Kerstetter, review of The Church in the Barrio, p. 402.