The Creation and Demise of the Academia Para la Historia de la Iglesia Latinx (APHILA), 1990–1993

This article reconstructs the brief history of the Academia para la Historia de la Iglesia Latina (APHILA), a short-lived but revealing experiment in Latinx Protestant historiography in the early 1990s. Drawing on archival sources from the Justo L. González papers, it contextualizes APHILA within the boom of Latinx theological education that followed González’s booklet The Theological Education of Hispanics, as foundations invested heavily in new Latinx initiatives. The essay first narrates the network-building and grant-writing processes that led to APHILA’S creation and its only major conference at McCormick Theological Seminary in 1993. It then analyzes the organization’s internal tensions over methodology, language policy, institutional location, and lay versus professional participation, together with the external pressures of donor expectations. Finally, it argues that APHILA’S collapse exposes both the possibilities and the structural fragilities of Latinx Protestant projects seeking to craft an autochthonous historiography in the United States.