[PS 12.1 (2013) 5–7] PentecoStudies (print) ISSN 2041-3599 http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/ptcs.v12i1.5 PentecoStudies (online) ISSN 1871-7691 Editorial Allan Anderson University of Birmingham Birmingham B15 2TT UK
[email protected] As the new editor of this interdisciplinary journal, in my first editorial six months ago I lamented the lack of social scientific articles. As if to make up for that, we have five thought-provoking articles for you in this issue – two from religious historians and three from social scientists. They cover four continents, and their subjects, though different, are related in the ways I will indicate. The first two articles are revisions of the Walter J. Hollenweger Occasional Lectures given at the University of Birmingham in June 2012. Both provide us with historical accounts of Pentecostals and Charismatics in comparatively little-known regions of North America and Australia, respectively. Dan Ramírez, social historian from the University of Michigan, has a fascinating account of early Mexican Pentecostals in the borderlands between the southern United States (mostly southern California) and Mexico, people displaced and marginalized in Pentecostal historiography. This article really forms a prolegomena for a ground-breaking book that will appear in a year or so. The “perennial xenophobia” of some sections of the US white population (and, for that matter, the erstwhile US governments) has recently been vividly demonstrated in the presidential elections, but the plight of Mexicans and Mexican Americans has been largely hidden. Ramírez’s particular research among Oneness Pentecostals of the Apostolic Assembly (in the US) and the related Iglesia Apostólica in Mexico brings this hidden history to light.