New Mexico’s Moses: Reis López Tijerina and the Religious Origins of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. By Ramón A. Gutiérrez

Abstract

Historian Ramón Gutiérrez tells Tijerina’s story from the point of view of a Pentecostal preaching jeremiads against a racist, imperialist, cut-throat capitalist U.S. society that left Tijerina prophesying that he was part of a long line of messiah figures who were called to continue railing against a corrupt system. Using Tijerina’s collected sermons, translated for the first time in English, Gutiérrez contends that Tijerina’s jeremiads were rooted in the Pentecostal near-obsession with the “last days” as noted in the Book of Revelation. The book contains the sermons and the translations in a massive appendix that comprises half of the book. Gutiérrez traces Tijerina’s path from working in fields with his family as they made their way through the sugar beet trail from Texas to the Midwest. Tijerina converted from Catholicism to Baptist and Pentecostalism in one of these farmworker camps. In the 1940s-50s, Tijerina sought ordination in the Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God, but he was kicked out of their bible school for failing to live up to the school’s holiness standards. As Gutiérrez notes, Tijerina’s faith did not mean that he would be interested in living the kind of pious life required of Pentecostal ministers. Tijerina was an adulterous, abusive man who sexually abused his daughter and subjected his family to years of mental and emotional abuse. Tijerina’s hypocrisy hardly mattered because he was an activist who considered himself a messiah, thus reading himself back into the biblical text and shielding himself from criticism.