Alberto L. Garcia Books

Alberto Martín has spent many years studying and practicing Christianity, Sufism, Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta (in that sequence) plus, at one time, the religion of the Crows (a native tribe of N. America). "For me, it has been universalism all along ever since I read Plato when I was 15 years old. Lately my attention has been focused on Shankara's Advaita Vedanta and non-duality." For this author, Plato and Shankara say practically all that can be said about reality and the way towards its assimilation and exemplification. In this work Martín answers many of the probing questions anyone of us is led to ask along our lives.

Abandoning Their Beloved Land  offers an essential new history of the Bracero Program, a bilateral initiative that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers from 1942 to 1964. Using national and local archives in Mexico, historian Alberto García uncovers previously unexamined political factors that shaped the direction of the program, including how officials administered the bracero selection process and what motivated campesinos from central states to migrate. Notably, García's book reveals how and why the Mexican government's delegation of Bracero Program–related responsibilities, the powerful influence of conservative Catholic opposition groups in central Mexico, and the failures of the revolution's agrarian reform all profoundly influenced the program's administration and individuals' decisions to migrate as braceros.

Proposes creative implications of the 500-year Reformation tradition for today As the global church assesses the legacy of the Lutheran Reformation, Alberto Garc a and John Nunes in this book reimagine central Reformational themes from black, Hispanic, and other perspectives traditionally at the margins of catholic-evangelical communities. Focusing on the central theme of justification, Garc a and Nunes delve into three interlinked aspects of the church's life in the world--martyria (witness), diakonia (service), and koinōnia (fellowship). They argue that it is critically important and vitally enriching for the whole church, especially Eurocentric Protestant churches, to learn from the grassroots theological emphases of Christian communities in the emerging world.