Sowing the Sacred
from HTI Open Plaza Hosted by Open Plaza
READ EXCERPT: Sacred Fields, Sacred Nostalgia
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What this episode covers
In this episode of OP Talks, Dr. Joao Chaves talks to Dr. Lloyd Barba about his new book Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (Oxford University Press 2022), which recasts the history of religion in the American West during the 20th century through the lens of the Mexican-American farmworker. Dr. Barba uses photographs, documents, and oral histories to chart the development of Pentecostalism among Mexican-American migrant laborers in California's agricultural industry from the 1910s to the 1960s. Dr. Barba explores how La Asamblea Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús managed to carve out “a robust socio-religious existence” despite the dehumanizing and substandard conditions migrant workers were relinquished to. The book tells an “intimate story of sacred-space making” while exploring the larger picture of U.S. labor and Chicano history. “This historical telling of this minoritized religious group,” says Barba, “it challenges some of our assumptions about who is included [in] the story of American religion.” Sowing the Sacred challenges “the perspective of everything in U.S. religious history [as starting] from the East…Let’s just center the West in this study. Let’s center a minoritized religious and racial group.”
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