Use soft words and hard arguments

Identity, and what shapes it, is a modern quest for belonging. It is increasingly difficult to identify and separate people according to previously accepted delineations. Antiquated theories and wide-held beliefs are now thought to be malleable; race doesn’t equate culture or visa versa, language doesn’t always match nationality and ethnicity doesn’t always link one’s culture.
Religion, one of the primary evidences of culture, helps define a community based on shared values and allegiances. But it also is an example of the shifts, flexibility and adaptations a religious institution goes through in reaction to other cultural signifiers; language, location, heritage and the unique identities that form a religious community.
Spanish-speaking Pentecostal churches stand out as a strikingly grass-roots phenomenon, particularly in New York, when in the 1930’s a Pentecostal movement began in the city. Juan L. Lugo, a Pentecostal pioneer in New York, confronted structural racism that was being put in place against the increasing number of Puerto Ricans. The lack of response from the Anglo Protestant and Catholic churches prompted Lugo to build an indigenous base of support and leadership based around the new Pentecostal churches (Villafane, 53).
The establishment of these churches in the early 1950’s continued in larger numbers as a result of a large migration of Puerto Ricans to New York and the Northeast. The Catholic and other churches weren't welcoming- and more importantly didn’t speak Spanish. Many of the Catholic churches were historical Irish or Italian, therefore didn’t reflect the language or culture. The Pentecostal churches, often begun in storefronts, combined the Hispanic language and culture with a religion (Urciuoli, 94-97).
To this day, the diverse branches of the Pentecostal church play an important role in New York's Latino community because of their history and the way they reflect Latino culture. They are a place in which the Spanish language is performed with authority and have expanded due to the need of more Spanish speaking immigrants to the New York City area. Just as Latino identity is no longer synonymous with the Catholic religion, the Pentecostal church in New York now encompasses not only Puerto Ricans, but also generations of Mexicans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, Cubans, as well as new immigrant members. According to a study conducted by the The Pew Forum on Religions and Public Life, two-thirds of Latino worshipers attend churches with Latino clergy, services in Spanish and heavily Latino congregations. While most predominant among the foreign born and Spanish speakers, Hispanic-oriented worship is also prevalent among native-born and English-speaking Latinos. That strongly suggests that the phenomenon is not simply a product of immigration or language but that it involves a broader and more lasting form of identification.
Pentecostalism makes a far more immediate connection between the public and the private than do institutions like the Catholic Church. Pentecostalism embraces, defines, and allows one to transform one’s fundamental persona; the Catholic Church provided an institutional frame of life-events. Pentecostals actively and successfully recruit through friends and relations by appealing to the kind of person one wants to be or should be. According to Eldin Villafance in The Liberating Spirit Toward a Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic, “the construction of a social ethic for the Hispanic Pentecostal Church in America both coheres with the Hispanic American socio-cultural experience and remains consistent with Hispanic Pentecostalism's self-understanding of ethics emerging from its experience of the Spirit.” Pentecostalism has become an important way to enact, in public, a Latin identity through the language of a defining institution, unlike Catholicism where the institution defines one’s life.
However, even though Pentecostal organizations were founded based on the need for services to be in Spanish, that component is shifting based on the generations of Latinos that speak more English than Spanish. According to an article in the New York Times, attendance at many Pentecostal churches in the New York metropolitan region is dropping, church officials say, as more young people insist on speaking English, despite maintaining an intense relationship to Hispanic culture (DePalma). Older worshipers, and the ruling body of the Pentecostal church, worry about the loss of the language that had offered a safe harbor for newcomers half a century ago. Younger pastors are perfectly comfortable in English and Spanish. They look at declining memberships and realize they need to do something. However, the top local TV newscast in the New York City area was Noticias 41, a Spanish-language broadcast. And Noticiero Univision, the newscast of a national Spanish-language network, beat out the big three-network news shows. There are an equal number of Spanish and English speakers in the world, 322 million, respectively (Delgado/Stefanic).
There is a fear that increasing globalization will lead to diluting “authentic” indigenous culture to a mono-society dominated by the ruling classes, however there is evidence to the contrary that globalization also vitalizes cultures, and broadens it’s territory. In forming communities that reflect identity and belonging, national origin no longer takes precedent, nor does perpetuating the myth of an “American melting-pot.” Rather, creating, claiming, and retaining a space in the United States that is uniquely American, further defines what Americanness means.