For the last 20 years, Dr. Felipe Hinojosa has dedicated his life to the study of history. But early on in his Baylor career, he actually helped make it. In July 2023, the South Texas native was appointed the first John and Nancy Jackson Endowed Chair in Latin America, a milestone that made him the university’s first historian of Latino history. It’s an especially remarkable accomplishment when you consider that Hinojosa nearly talked himself out of the job… twice.
After delivering a keynote address in February 2023 at a conference for the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education, Hinojosa was approached by Baylor administrators who wanted to encourage him to apply to the newly opened endowed chair position. At the time, he had been a professor of history at Texas A&M for 14 years and had published two books on the intersection of faith and Latino activism.
“When they told me the position was in Latin American studies, I immediately stopped them and said, ‘Well, I don’t do Latin American history, I do Latino history in the U.S., and those are two very distinct fields,’” he said, recalling that he even offered to send along a few names of colleagues who might be a better fit. Still, he was encouraged to apply anyway. “They were quite adamant, and even over email, I told them that I wanted to be clear that I do Chicano history.”
Born and raised in Brownsville, Hinojosa wasn’t always drawn to the subject of history, but he was surrounded by it. His father was a Mennonite pastor who founded the city’s Iglesia Menonita del Cordero in the 1970s. Throughout his childhood, that meant his family would often embark on road trips to attend conferences in Kansas, Oklahoma, or Indiana. The church also played host to Black ministers from St. Louis and Chicago, or Latino pastors from Puerto Rico or New York City, and, in the 1980s, they offered sanctuary to Central American refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala.
In their predominantly Catholic, Mexican-American community, Hinojosa said his upbringing exposed him to a world apart from the one most of his friends knew. “I grew up with a very clear idea that I was not white,” he said. “I think I had a bit more of an understanding of my heritage and who I was in the world because of my experiences growing up in the Mennonite church.”
But it wasn’t until graduate school that these revelations built into something bigger — first a spark, then a total transformation. When Hinojosa arrived at the University of Texas-Pan American as a first-year graduate student, he already knew his English major wasn’t the right fit. He wanted to transfer to history but needed to take 12 hours of undergraduate coursework to catch up. So, at 22 years old he took his first Mexican-American history class, and he can still remember the exact moment everything changed: a classroom screening of a documentary about the 1968 East L.A. Walkouts — a groundbreaking display which saw thousands of Chicano students protest unequal conditions in L.A. high schools.
“Sal Castro, a teacher from Los Angeles, was talking about the walkouts with such a deep sense of pride about what it meant to be a Chicano,” Hinojosa recalled. “Even now, as I’m talking about it, I can visualize myself in that classroom, watching him say that. It was like a switch went off in my head.”
At that moment, he was overwhelmed with a rush of memories and emotions — the sense of embarrassment he felt when his family would travel to other parts of the country, the idea that they somehow came from somewhere inferior, the shame others imparted on him for being Mexican-American. “I don’t think I’ve ever looked back,” he said. “I knew at that moment my responsibility was to learn my history, so that I could educate and work alongside my community, so that they wouldn’t have to put up with the kind of exclusionary politics and racism that we faced as kids.”
Upon changing his major Hinojosa combined his interests, studying the links between religion and Chicano activism, a topic he explored in his 2021 book, Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio. Throughout his career, he’s been inspired not only by his father’s profession but also his skills as a communicator. “As a minister, my dad was a storyteller,” he said. “He would tell these great stories from the pulpit every Sunday, and I think I inherited that trait. I see my work as the story of how Latinos have fought for their place in America, and how they’ve worked to hold this nation accountable to live up to its principles and democratic values.”
During the spring 2024 semester, Hinojosa taught two undergraduate courses: The United States in Global Perspective — a common course for most Baylor undergraduates — and another focused on the history and impact of the 1960s Chicano Movement, which marked the first time such a course has been offered in Baylor’s history department. Over the years, the professor has often encountered students, and even adults, who admit that history was one of their worst or least favorite subjects. As he prepares to tackle a brand new semester, he’s hoping to help change their minds.
“It will probably be different from any history class they’ve ever taken before,” he said, explaining that each class will be organized differently. Some days, that might mean starting with poetry; other days, it might mean hearing directly from scholars or activists who witnessed history happening in real time. “They’re not going to walk into my class and just hear me lecture for 50 minutes.”
Hinojosa poses with scholars who visited Baylor to present Hispanic Heritage Month lectures, Dr. Sergio Gonzalez and Dr. Johanna Fernandez.
Hinojosa takes his inaugural appointment as endowed chair seriously, and he wants to use his position to push his students and encourage them to think critically, and challenge their preconceived ideas. Focusing on Latino history, he says, is a great way to do that. “If you think about the history of Latinos, it’s a story of loss, of displacement, of colonialism, but it’s also about resistance,” he said. “History forces us to see the good and the bad. It gets people thinking about what it means to be an American. How do we understand oppression? How do we understand democracy? Historians engage with all of our senses, and I want my students to feel that in my classroom, they’re historians, too.”
Latinos now make up the largest share of the state’s population, and as Texas becomes increasingly diverse, Hinojosa believes that placing importance on the study of Latino history isn’t just critical, it’s long overdue. “With Baylor’s focus on serving the state of Texas and the population it brings in from across the country, it’s important that even as it lauds its work in Latin America, that it not forget about the people in its own backyard,” he said. “Students often think that Latinos are a new population, that these conversations about immigration or the border are new. As a historian, it’s my job to remind them that we have a long history in this country of fighting for civil rights and making this nation what it is today. We need to think about an education that’s going to prepare young Baylor undergraduates for a multiracial, multiethnic world.”
The reality of our multicultural world means that many of Hinojosa’s students are growing up in a world where artists like Peso Pluma, Bad Bunny, and South Texas’s own Grupo Frontera are at the top of the charts. In theaters, there are Latino superheroes like Miles Morales or Blue Beetle. For Hinojosa, this pop cultural revolution has opened the door, giving him the chance to connect with his students and take them from the familiar environment of the present into the past. There, he can introduce them to new icons and heroes along the way.
“I want to make sure that people remember our place in American society,” he said. “It’s what inspires me every day to get up and work hard to tell the stories of people who often get forgotten.”
