When the Spirit Is Your Inheritance

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Jonathan Calvillo's When the Spirit Is Your Inheritance is both an innovative exploration of how and why Pentecostalism took off along "the superhighway of spiritual exchange" of the US-Mexico borderlands, and an intensely personal reflection on Pentecostalism itself as a borderland religion. Calvillo's detailed work shows how the movement thrives in liminal spaces, wherein people of the Spirit create sustaining, resilient communities of joy and healing in spaces of disruption and change. Calvillo's lovingly crafted work yields critical insights and moments of beauty in equal measure.”

Leah Payne