Research Assistant Professor
School of Social Work & Institute for Studies of Religion
Director, Program on Religion and Latin American Studies
Institute for Studies of Religion
Email Juan Carlos Esparza Ochoa
Juan Carlos Esparza Ochoa joined Baylor in February 2019 as Research Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and the Director of the Program on Religion and Latin America Studies in the Institute for Studies of Religion. He has researched and taught about religion in Latin America for the past eighteen years and is co-director of the Project on Religion and Economic Change (PREC). As part of PREC, he attempts to measure the impact of Protestant and Catholic pastoral care, missionary activity, and humanitarian work on education, health, economic development, and political outcomes around the world over the past two centuries. This required developing techniques to link consistent data from diverse historical sources over such a long period of time – something that stymied previous scholarship on long-term development. As part of this project he also linked 120 years of Mexican census data to understand what factors influenced the life conditions of poor and marginalized communities over the long term. For seven years he managed data for global religious demography projects at the Pew Research Center. Prior to earning his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, he did ethnographic research about Afro-Caribbean religious movements in Cuba and worked with Mexican indigenous communities in the Sierra Papanteca, the Huasteca Potosina & the Nayar.
