Neftali Torres

I first met Neftali Torres — a Puerto Rican Mennonite pastor and civil rights icon — in 2003 in Matamoros, México, where he was the keynote speaker at a conference. During a lunch break, we sat and talked about his life, ministry and religious activism.

This summer, when Neftali died on Aug. 11 at the age of 82, I recalled the time I spent with him that afternoon 22 years ago. He provided for me a more expansive and inclusive picture of Anabaptism, one that few Mennonites know about.

Neftali was one of the most recognizable Latinos in the Mennonite Church in the 1970s. His leadership roles extended from his service from 1969 to 1972 as a pastor and activist with the Minority Ministries Council, a multiethnic group of Mennonite church workers.

After leaving the church for many years, he returned in the late 1990s to join his good friend John Powell on a new church plant in Buffalo, N.Y.

Born in a working-class neighborhood of Santurce, Puerto Rico, Neftali migrated at age 7 with his family to New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood in 1950.

“I don’t know when I ever got over that, because the contrast was so great,” he told me in 2007 during an oral history interview. “So here I am in New York City — it’s cold, it’s winter, and Noche Buena [Christmas Eve] is no longer being experienced in the same way.”

The Pentecostal church where he attended with his family was the first place he felt welcomed.

“Church was good for us kids,” he remembered, “for us non-English speaking kids, this was the one place where communication was in Spanish, and it was a safe place to play. Church gave us continuity. It kept the family traditions a little further. There was a lot of social action helping people finding a room, an apartment, finding a job. Church became a bridge for people coming from Puerto Rico.”

In his teenage years he drifted away from the church and into drug addiction. But his life completely changed when he met Altagracia A. “Gracie” González Ramos. Raised in the Bronx, Gracie was already a gifted singer in the church and street preacher when she met Neftali in 1967.

Meeting Gracie changed Neftali’s life. He recommitted his life to Christ, enrolled in seminary and married ­Gracie not long after they met. Theirs was a love story rooted in community, the church and a love for Puerto Rico.

Seminary Introduced Neftali to the revolution brewing in the streets of East Harlem: the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Black Panthers and the Black-Brown coalitions forming across the city as young people took to the streets demanding an end to police brutality, access to health care and affordable housing.

The revolutionary movements of the 1960s reoriented his understanding of ministry and set him on a path to do the work of justice. Those movements inspired him to join a drug rehabilitation ministry led by Sammy Santos in the Bronx.

There he met two young White Mennonites who lived out the Anabaptist ethic of service: John Smucker and John Freed.

“The minister image I was acquainted with did not match these guys,” he told me. “These guys were carpenters, and they would roll up their sleeves and come in their coveralls with work boots. . . . It wasn’t long before I said: This is the kind of ministry that I want to do.”

Meeting Santos, Freed and Smucker opened new possibilities for Neftali. In 1969 he was invited to preach at Lawndale Mennonite Church, a predominantly Mexican American Mennonite church in Chicago. Neftali and Gracie would later accept the role as pastors of that church, which put them in touch with young and passionate Latina/Latino church leaders from Texas to the Quad Cities (Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa; Moline, Rock Island and East Moline, Ill.) to New York.

Not long after beginning his ministry in Chicago, Neftali joined the Minority Ministries Council, a multiethnic cadre of ministers and church workers whose church work was shaped by the Black and Latino freedom movements of the late 1960s.

In a photo from the mid-1970s, Neftali Torres leads worship for the inter-Mennonite program “In Search of Peace.” — Mennonite Church USA Archives

The MMC worked to make the Mennonite Church — and, by extension, the entire Anabaptist family — a more welcoming and inclusive space. Made up of Black and Brown men, the MMC forged coalitions (a few White Mennonites joined them) as they organized for farmworkers’ rights and diversifying church leadership.

The MMC’s politics framed Neftali’s ministry within an Anabaptist vision of peace and justice. It also broadened his notion of Latina/Latino identity.

At the 1972 Cross-Cultural Youth Convention at Epworth Forest, Ind., he spoke about the need for Latinos — Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in particular — to understand their shared histories of colonization, immigration and racial formation.

Neftali believed in interdependence. He believed justice movements must form broad coalitions: Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian and White. He believed communities as far apart as East Harlem and Puerto Rico shared a desire to be free.

Neftali’s words in 1972 still ring true as Latinos, regardless of national origin, continue to be maligned as threats to the nation, “bad hombres” and perpetual foreigners.

Neftali was a wise, soft-spoken and courageous Anabaptist leader who challenged the church to see the culture, music, poetry and full humanity of Latinas/Latinos who were searching for a place to call home and who carried Mexico, Puerto Rico and all of Latin America in their hearts.

Neftali Torres was an Anabaptist role model. His ministry and activism left us a roadmap for how to navigate the intersections and clashes of ministry, missions and radical politics in the United States and across Américas.

Neftali Torres, ¡Presente!

This information was written by Felipe Hinojosa, the John and Nancy Jackson Endowed Chair in Latin America and professor of history at Baylor University. First published here and reprinted with permission.