The Heathen at Our Door

We may never bear the message to some needy distant shore, But we can win the heathen at our very door. —Herbert Buffum, 19151 At the turn of the twentieth century, just as Mexican immigration to the United States began to surge, Anglo Protestant missionaries and moral reformers interacted with Mexicans and Mexican Americans along the U.S.-Mexico border. These interactions contributed both to the Anglo conception of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States as a pressing moral “problem” and to notions of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a distinct spiritual desert. Therefore, the religious labors of Anglo Protestants and the early civil rights strategies of Mexican and Mexican American activists both testify to the importance of religion in the shaping of Anglo-Mexican relations.

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