MOVEMENTS

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Renteria and Hispanic "Rodney King" --
Latino Evangelicos Politicized Death of Undocumented Immigrant

By Mary Jo McConahay

Date: 10-24-96

Long-silent Latino Christian evangelicals -- the fastest growing sector of American Protestantism -- are shedding their political abstinence to protest issues closest to home. A prime catalyst is the 1994 death of an undocumented Mexican immigrant while in police custody in Lincoln, Nebraska. Like the Rodney King case in African American communities, the case of Francisco Renteria is sending waves of outrage through once-hermetic congregations. PNS associate editor Mary Jo McConahay is an investigative reporter who has worked for over a decade in Central America, Mexico and Hispanic California. This is the second in a series of reports on Latino evangelicals. FOR A PHOTOGRAPH OF FRANCISCO RENTERIA, PLEASE CALL PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE.

EAST PALO ALTO -- In 1994 a 28-year-old undocumented immigrant named Francisco Renteria was pronounced dead after being forcefully detained and, according to witnesses, beaten by police on a quiet residential street in Lincoln, Nebraska. Today, a quiet rage is spreading among the normally hermetic churches of Latino Christian evangelicals over his fate. Many say the case has made them question their long abstinence from secular politics.

"The Pandora's box of resentment is straining to burst open," says Daniel Ramirez, an ordained minister at East Palo Alto's Apostolica Evangelica church some 1000 miles south of Lincoln. When word arrived that a Grand Jury returned only misdemeanor charges against the officers, the Renteria case became a defining issue. The facts of the case "just hit too close to home," explains one woman congregant in East Palo Alto.

Renteria was walking home in Lincoln after spending the evening helping his widowed mother at a laundromat when a policewoman from the nearby University of Nebraska attempted to stop him. The campus officer was acting on a city police dispatch about an "Hispanic male" named Chico Martinez who was apparently intoxicated, obnoxious and knocking on doors. What outrages activists is that the only description matches between the two men were "Hispanic" and "male."

When Renteria attempted to continue, the campus officer called for city police. Renteria was "controlled by the weight of several officers," explains William Christensen, defense attorney for two police officers and a city fire department captain. Now the officers along with the city of Lincoln are defendants in a new trial scheduled for December which will decide whether Renteria's federal civil rights were violated.

Sandra Castillo, lead attorney for the Renteria family and a former Assistant Attorney General for Illinois, charges that the city's police training, "custom" and procedures resulted in excessive force which led to Renteria's death. She plays down the racial aspects of the case. "The city is being called upon to be accountable for how it trains police, which will benefit all the people of Lincoln," she says.

For other Latinos, the case is all about Hispanic identity. Ramirez says it has forged a new link between native-born, middle-class, educated Latino church-goers like himself and undocumented newcomers in the pews. "We're waiting on earth until Jesus calls, but at some point we have to look around at where we've landed and make the place livable for our brothers while we're waiting."

Church activists lament there are no video tapes to stoke public attention about Renteria as there were for Rodney King, the black motorist beaten by Los Angeles police in 1992. But a network of evangelicals is working feverishly to bring the Renteria case out of the shadows, writing letters, telephoning Justice Department officials, and passing the hat to defray legal costs. Among the nation's seven million Latino evangelicals -- the fastest growing sector of American Protestantism -- many are acting on a public issue for the first time.

"Maybe we've been spiritually lopsided," says lawyer and ordained minister Jorge Montes. "Our churches have a history not just of non-violence and incredible respect for law, but downright passivity."

Montes, who was president of Chicago's Latin American Bar Association when he heard about Renteria, contacted seminarians, college students and professionals such as Ramirez -- "a small group of individuals within the church who are more society-conscious, and want to make the rest of the evangelical community aware of our rights." He disseminated independent autopsy reports and other documents.

Untutored in political activism, church members sought advice from civil and human rights organizations. One layman, a Los Angeles-area Republican party activist whose "blood boiled" when he heard about Renteria at choir practice, sought more information, then quietly "buttonholed every Latino delegate I saw" at the party's convention in San Diego. He continues to "work the phone."

Montes himself traveled to Mexico City and met with officials in the Foreign Ministry's Department of Protection, which attends to the interests of Mexican citizens abroad, in another effort to raise the case's profile.

As news of Renteria has spread beyond the small Latino community in Nebraska, interest has begun to jump barrio lines and touch other born-again Christian minorities.

"I can pick up the torch for this with Latinos," says Rev. Joel Trout, pastor of the North Park Apostolic Church in San Diego, a 600-member fundamentalist Christian congregation. Trout, who is black, says he relates to Renteria. "Just because he doesn't fit the stereotype of mainstream citizen doesn't mean you can say, 'Who'll miss him? If he gets shot or hung--who cares?' No, you can't say that."