Francisco Olazábal

In 1923 a Mexican minister walked out of an American Pentecostal denomination. His name was Francisco Olazábal. Seven years earlier he had been ordained by the Assemblies of God, a young American Pentecostal church that also worked among Mexicans. Now he was leaving. He summed up his reason in one short sentence, later recorded by the historian Gastón Espinosa: “The gringos have control.” In Mexico, gringo is the word for a white American.

It was not a quarrel over doctrine. Olazábal went on believing what he believed: that the Holy Spirit still fills people today, and that God still heals today. The question was who would lead the Spanish-speaking congregations. A white missionary, or the Mexicans themselves?

That same year he began something new. Out of that step grew the Concilio Latino Americano de Iglesias Cristianas, according to the sources the first independent denomination of Latin American Protestants in the United States. The man who founded it would spend the following years traveling through Texas, California, Chicago, New York, Mexico and Puerto Rico. His followers called him El Azteca, the Aztec.

To understand why that one sentence carried so much weight, we have to go back to a mother in a Mexican port city.

A MOTHER IN MAZATLÁN

Francisco Olazábal was born on October 12, 1886, in El Venado, in the state of Sinaloa, on the west coast of Mexico. That date and that place come from the reference works that rely on Espinosa’s research.

In those years Mexico was a Roman Catholic country. There were Protestant missions, among them those of American Methodists, but they were small. Anyone who switched stood out.

In 1898 his mother, Refugio Velázquez, did exactly that. In Mazatlán, the port city of Sinaloa, she became a Methodist. According to the account of the Christian History Institute she even became an evangelist, a woman who traveled around telling people about Jesus. His father, Juan Olazábal, then left the family. Two independent sources say he left after his wife had become a Protestant. What exactly happened between them is not recorded.

Francisco was eleven or twelve at the time. He grew up with a mother who had paid for her faith with her marriage.

I keep coming back to that detail. We know not a single word she said, no letter, no photograph. We only know that she chose, and that her son would preach for thirty years in the language in which she had heard the gospel.

SIXTEEN, AND BOUND FOR THE SEA

In 1902 Francisco went to San Francisco, in California. He was sixteen and, so the Christian History Institute writes, wanted to live the life of a sailor. He stayed with relatives.

In San Francisco he came into contact with George and Carrie Judd Montgomery. Carrie Judd Montgomery was at that time a well-known American preacher on divine healing. She and her husband led the boy to give his life to Christ again. Again, because through his mother he had already grown up with the faith.

He did not go to sea. He went back to Mexico, and back to the Methodist church.

What went on inside him in those months, we do not know. There is no diary, no account of his own that I have been able to see. What is certain is the direction. A boy who wanted to get away came back.

SELLING BIBLES IN A LAND IN TURMOIL

From 1908 to 1910 Olazábal studied at the Wesleyan theological school in San Luis Potosí, a Methodist training college in the heart of Mexico. After that he spent some time selling Bibles in his country, as a colporteur. Only the Christian History Institute mentions that last detail.

In 1910 the Mexican Revolution broke out. For ten years armies and rebels fought for power. According to the Assemblies of God, more than a million Mexicans fled to the United States as refugees in those years. Many ended up in camps along the border, where disease was rife.

Olazábal went the same way. In 1911 he became pastor of a Spanish-speaking Methodist congregation in El Paso, the Texas city across from Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. He emigrated to the United States. His congregation spoke Spanish, as he did.

A SEMESTER UNDER TORREY

In that same year, 1911, he spent one semester at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. There he sat under the teaching of Reuben A. Torrey, one of the best-known American preachers and Bible teachers of the day.

Torrey taught that the baptism in the Holy Spirit is a separate experience, after conversion, that every Christian needs. According to the English-language reference work based on Espinosa, Olazábal rejected that at the time. He was a Methodist, and that was not what he had been taught.

Torrey saw something in him. He invited him to Los Angeles, to evangelize among Spanish speakers for the Church of the Open Door, the large church where Torrey was then working. After that Olazábal served as pastor and evangelist in Pasadena and in the San Francisco area.

In 1914 he married Macrina Orozco. They had known each other since childhood. Beyond her name and the year of the marriage I have found nothing about her, not even whether they had children.

TWO ORDINATIONS IN ONE YEAR

The year 1916 is the hinge of his life. That year Bishop A. W. Leonard ordained him as a Methodist minister. After years of work in the Methodist church he was now officially a minister as well.

And in the same year he left that church behind.

George and Carrie Judd Montgomery, the couple who had brought him to a decision in San Francisco in 1902, had meanwhile become Pentecostals. That happened in the years after the revival on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, where the modern Pentecostal movement was born from 1906 onward. Pentecostals taught what Torrey also taught, the baptism in the Spirit as a separate experience, and they saw speaking in tongues as its sign. The Montgomerys encouraged Olazábal to take the same step. He did. Efraim Espinoza, who coordinated Spanish-language work in the Assemblies of God, writes that he received the baptism in the Spirit in their home in California, and gives the year as 1917. The other sources keep to 1916.

He left the Methodists to preach what the English sources call the “full gospel”: conversion, the baptism in the Spirit, healing and the expectation of Jesus’ return. On September 24, 1916, he was ordained by the General Council of the Assemblies of God.

One reference work also mentions an ordination on February 14, 1918, by Robert J. Craig. How those two dates relate to each other, I was unable to establish.

What moves someone to receive ordination in a given year and then choose a different church anyway? As far as I could find, Olazábal left no account of his own about it. Have you ever let go of something at the very moment you finally had it in your hands?

“THE GRINGOS HAVE CONTROL”

Within the Assemblies of God, Olazábal found himself in a work that was very much on the move. The American missionary Henry C. Ball, first a Methodist and later a Pentecostal, began the church’s Latin work in 1915, according to Espinosa. According to the Assemblies of God itself, in 1918 Ball, together with the Mexican leader Isabel Flores, founded the Latin American Conference, which brought the Mexican Pentecostal congregations into the church. With the English missionary Alice Luce, Ball published a magazine and a hymnbook in Spanish.

The Texas borderland was a hard place in those years. In 1922 Ball wrote in the church’s magazine about a Mexican congregation near Edna, where Black Americans also sang along in Spanish. A white man could hardly preach there, he wrote, because of the race laws. These were the laws in the American South that kept white and Black people apart.

In that world Olazábal worked as an evangelist in Los Angeles, El Paso and further across Texas. In 1920 he started the Buenas Nuevas mission in El Paso, Good News. In 1922 he founded a Bible school there. He was tall and heavily built, Espinosa writes, and he drew people.

Then came the clash. According to Espinosa, the conflict between Olazábal, Ball and the white leadership of the Assemblies of God was about who would lead the Latin congregations in South Texas, and about forming a separate Latin district. Espinosa describes Ball’s attitude toward Mexicans as stubborn and paternalistic, and calls that attitude one cause of a major split. In her review of his book, Angela Tarango writes that Espinosa explains the motives on all sides.

I want to do the same. Ball had built up the Spanish-speaking work with great dedication, at a time when few white Americans cared about Mexicans. Olazábal saw that Mexican leaders remained under supervision, even when they were carrying the work themselves. Both things can be true.

In 1923 he left, with the sentence with which this chapter began.

A CHURCH WITHOUT A GUARDIAN

Still in 1923, Olazábal founded the Interdenominational Mexican Council of Christian Churches. According to Efraim Espinoza, this happened in Houston, together with other ministers. It was later renamed the Concilio Latino Americano de Iglesias Cristianas, the Latin American Council of Christian Churches. Both the Christian History Institute and the reference work based on Espinosa call it the first independent Latin American Protestant denomination in the United States. A church, in other words, that did not fall under an American mother church but was governed by Latinos themselves.

In Los Angeles Olazábal came into contact with Aimee Semple McPherson, the best-known female evangelist in America in those years and founder of the Foursquare Church. According to the English-language reference work, she called him the “Mexican Billy Sunday,” after a famous American revival preacher. In March 1927 he visited her Angelus Temple with his congregation. Those details come from one reference work.

What is better established is what happened next. McPherson proposed that the Concilio merge into her church. The Concilio said no. Two sources mention this. The man who had left because others had control did not now hand it over, not even to an admirer.

“THEY WERE HUNGRY FOR IT!”

His work in Mexico itself began with an invitation. According to the Christian History Institute, which relies on an American biographical reference work from 1938, a Mexican pastor invited him to preach in a large church in Mexico City. About fifteen hundred people came on the first night. By the end of the week the church was packed every night with about forty-five hundred.

Olazábal later said of it: “They were hungry for it!”

No year is given for that campaign. The numbers come from a source that appeared shortly after his death and that probably relies on his own circle. I pass them on as they stand there, with that caveat.

I find that short exclamation telling. He did not say how well he had preached. He said something about the people who came.

FROM CHICAGO TO SPANISH HARLEM

From the late 1920s Olazábal traveled with large evangelistic and healing campaigns through the Spanish-speaking neighborhoods of America. In the United States those neighborhoods are called barrios. Espinosa names Los Angeles, El Paso, Chicago, New York and Puerto Rico. The Christian History Institute adds San Antonio and Mexico City.

In 1929 he held a healing campaign in Chicago. In 1931 New York followed, in Spanish Harlem, a district of Manhattan where many Puerto Ricans lived. According to the English-language reference work based on Espinosa, more than a hundred thousand people came, and there were also services in a Baptist church in Brooklyn. I have not found that number in any second source. It is an estimate of attendance over a whole campaign, not a count of converts.

And the healings? They were the heart of his campaigns. Espinosa’s first major article on Olazábal already had healing in its title. But in the sources I was able to open, there is not a single concrete healing story with a name, a date and a witness. That is why I tell none here. Anyone who wants to read them will have to go to Espinosa’s work.

According to the 1938 reference work, Olazábal founded eighty churches in Texas. That figure, too, comes from one source. Efraim Espinoza gives, for his whole movement at the end of the 1930s, fifty churches and an estimated fifty thousand adherents.

AN ISLAND THAT HAD BECOME AMERICAN

Since 1898 Puerto Rico had been a territory of the United States, an island with Spanish-speaking inhabitants under American rule. There too a Pentecostal revival was under way in the 1930s, including one in 1933 in Bayamón.

His campaign was called “Puerto Rico para Cristo,” Puerto Rico for Christ. The sources disagree about the year. An article from the Hispanic Theological Initiative gives 1934. The English-language reference work gives 1936 and writes that the campaign was considered a failure. The Christian History Institute reports, using the word “reportedly,” twenty thousand converts and thirty new churches.

Twenty thousand converts or a failure. Those two reports do not fit well together. Perhaps there were two different campaigns, perhaps two ways of counting. I cannot decide, and so I leave it open. What does stay with me is a family memory. The author of that article heard her aunt tell of healing meetings on the island in the 1930s, and recognized Olazábal’s campaigns in them.

A ROAD IN SOUTH TEXAS

In 1936 Olazábal once again sought to join a larger church. On September 10 of that year he announced that he wanted to affiliate with A. J. Tomlinson’s Church of God, a Pentecostal church from Tennessee that later became the Church of God of Prophecy. According to Harold D. Hunter, who writes the history of the Church of God of Prophecy, this took place before the full annual General Assembly of that church. Olazábal had already led its annual healing service there in 1932. He was to bring with him a following of fifty thousand Spanish speakers. The union never came about.

Meanwhile he was making plans for campaigns in South America.

On June 1, 1937, he was badly injured in a car accident in Texas. Two sources give the place as “Alice Springs, Texas.” No place by that name is known in Texas. It is probably the small town of Alice, in the south of the state, but that is not what the sources say. The other sources simply say Texas. Eight days later, on June 9, 1937, he died in hospital of internal bleeding. He was fifty years old.

According to the English-language reference work, he was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles.

THE AZTEC AND THE BROWN MOSES

After his death Olazábal largely disappeared from view in English-language church history. Histories of the Assemblies of God told the story of the Latin work mainly through the white missionaries. Gastón Espinosa began to change that in the 1990s. In 1998 he wrote in Christian History about the “silent Pentecostals,” the Latinos who had helped shape the story of the Pentecostal movement but hardly appeared in it. In 1999 came his scholarly article on Olazábal, titled El Azteca.

Espinosa worked on a book with the working title Brown Moses. He sees in Olazábal what the German sociologist Max Weber called a charismatic prophet: someone who rises up at the edge of an existing religion and sets up a movement of his own over against it. According to Espinosa, his life helps explain why today more than five million Latinos in the United States call themselves Pentecostal. That figure comes from Espinosa, and the link with Olazábal is his interpretation.

I do not want to make the man bigger than the sources make him. Many of the numbers around his campaigns cannot be checked. Of the healings we mainly know that they were prayed for on a massive scale. About his marriage and his family we know almost nothing. And about the break of 1923 history gives you two sides, rightly so.

What remains is a line through a life that you can follow. A mother in Mazatlán who became a Methodist and lost her husband for it. A son who wanted to go to sea and came back. A minister who was ordained twice in one year and then chose another path. A leader who said that Mexicans could govern their own church, and who did just that.

He died after an accident on a road in South Texas, with the campaigns in South America still in his plans.