One evening in 1893, a young Jewish immigrant named William Bakst joined the New York mutual-aid association made up of his compatriots from the Lithuanian town of Oshmene. The strange ceremony that marked his induction made a deep impression on him. He found especially striking the regalia that seemed utterly to transform the presiding officer, whom Bakst knew by his familiar old-country nickname. “When the inside-guard led me to the president,” Bakst later recalled,

So spoke Padre Antonio Jose Martinez in 1832 in praise of Miguel Hidalgo on the tenth anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Mexico. That same year, Francis Gray extolled George Washington, the hero of another independence movement. Washington was the “Special instrument of divine providence for working out our political salvation, the cloud by day and pillar of fire by night which led us out of bondage.” Two new North American nations attempted to create a national identity and a useable mythology, side by side, if independent of each other. In this essay, I present a North American view of what could loosely be called civil religion.

The past thirty years have been a watershed in Mexican American literature, witnessing the proliferation of texts with increasingly diverse themes. For the most part, this literary production has been motivated by the impulse to narrate the stories that typify Mexican cultural history in the United States.

In the early 1970's, Americans noticed a striking group of people: young men and women who stood in crowded city areas, wearing T-shirts with the motto “Jews for Jesus” and distributing leaflets calling upon Jews to embrace Jesus as their savior. These people made such a strong impression and attracted so much attention that, in the eyes of many, Jews for Jesus became associated with all attempts to evangelize Jews in America, as well as becoming one of the better known groups among the Jesus Movement. Directing its attention to members of the new counterculture and adapting to the young people's style and manners, Jews for Jesus differed sharply from evangelizing organizations of the earlier period. Whereas the older generation of missionaries strictly adhered to mid-century norms of conservative evangelical propriety, the new organization believed that its more daring approach would prove more effective with the younger generation and would eventually gain evangelical approval.