Ada María Isasi-Díaz would have become a Roman Catholic priest, she told friends, if not for the church’s ban on ordaining women. Instead, she became a dissident theologian who spoke for those she considered the neglected spiritual core of the church’s membership: Hispanic women like herself.

Dr. Isasi-Díaz, who died of cancer in New York on May 13, was widely known in North and South America as the chief theorist behind Mujerista theology — she published a book of the same name in 1996 — which extols the role of Hispanic women, especially the poor, in personifying Christian faith in the everyday struggles of life. She was 69.

Her death was announced by Drew University in Madison, N.J., where she was a professor of ethics and theology from 1991 until her retirement in 2009.

In part, Dr. Isasi-Díaz conceived of Mujerista, or “womanist,” theology (from the Spanish word mujer, for woman) to distinguish her ideas from those of feminism — a term “rejected by many in the Hispanic community,” she wrote in 1989, “because they consider feminism a preoccupation of white, Anglo women.” She hoped that “Mujerism,” which she considered a spiritual branch of the reform movement known as liberation theology, would help delineate the special identity shared by poor, Hispanic, Catholic women.