Lost Prophet Research Articles

King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza

Reviewed by: King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza Rosina Lozano King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement. By Lorena Oropeza. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 374. $32.50, ISBN 978-1-4696-5329-7.) Lorena Oropeza untangles the contradictory and often confusing actions of Reies López Tijerina (1926–2015) in King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement. In the process, she uncovers his rightful legacy. Tijerina rose to national fame on June 5, 1967, when, along with other members of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), he participated in an armed courthouse raid in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. He has been claimed as one of the "'Four Horsemen of the Chicano Movement'" (p. 3). [End Page 363] Oropeza's biography considers seriously Tijerina's beliefs and actions, no matter how crazy or unflattering. She concludes that while religion offers "the kaleidoscope" that encompasses "all of his shifting views," she also argues he cannot be separated from sexual violence, which was "central to understanding the politics" (p. 281). Rather than shying away from incredibly sensitive topics, including Pentecostalism, sexism and sexual assault, anticolonial historical takes, race making and identity shifts, and the role of militance and violence in activism, Oropeza deeply interrogates and puts these contradictory ideas in conversation with each other. She does so by drawing from a large array of sources, including Tijerina's papers, the memoirs and papers of his many admirers and detractors, oral history interviews conducted with Tijerina and his family members by the author, newspapers, and political documents. Her conclusions are never simple and never uncritically rely on a single source. King of Adobe is organized in ten chapters that each strike at the heart of Tijerina's shifting public political life. The chapter titles suggest his inconsistencies and altering persona. Four chapters get at his shifting racial and national identity. Tijerina was, at different points of his life, "Mexican," "American," "Indo-Hispano," and "Chicano." Looking to his religious incarnations, he was the "King of Kings," a "Prophet," an "Evangelist," and a "Martyr." His relationship to violence was examined more in the "Patriarch" and the "Gunslinger." Across these major, seemingly unconnected themes, Oropeza provides a history of how the land grant movement in northern New Mexico moved from a long-standing local struggle to a nationally recognized injustice. She also sustains an argument for how the Chicano movement, and Tijerina especially, intersected with the Black and Indigenous civil rights movements. While the reader leaves satisfied with the treatment of Tijerina from childhood through his arrest in 1969, there is less closure on the political lives of his family members. Oropeza demonstrates how Tijerina's daughter Rose and his first wife, Mary Escobar, did all the secretarial work and paid for the running of the organization in its early years. Did the women have no political voice or role after Tijerina lost power? Was their legacy tied to his? These questions cannot be considered a shortcoming of a biography of Tijerina himself. They are instead a testament to Oropeza's powerful and effective approach to studying the man through the family. Doing so makes these women invaluable to the story of the Alianza and makes them worthy subjects of historical inquiry in their own right. Oropeza's study is a masterful reclaiming of this lost prophet, who was the rightful initiator of some central tenets of Chicano movement ideology. Those include the concept of an American conquest of ethnic Mexican people in the Southwest and the injustice of the subsequent land theft, an embracing of the Spanish language and culture while pushing back against assimilation, and a strong connection with Indigeneity. Those are the messages he spoke most forcefully. While others had these ideas, Tijerina briefly had the platform to disseminate these key concepts broadly, which explains his enduring fame and legacy. [End Page 364] Rosina Lozano Princeton University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Review: The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement, by Lorena Oropeza

Review: The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement, by Lorena Oropeza

Lorena Oropeza, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement.

Reviewed by: The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza Michael Jimenez (bio) Lorena Oropeza, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement. University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 392. Lorena Oropeza’s new biography on Reies López Tijerina brings back the memory of the fiery orator of the Chicano movement. Tijerina, if referenced at all in a US history textbook, will forever be linked with the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid. However, Oropeza reveals he was more than the so-called Chicano militant alternative to the pacifist Cesar Chavez. She argues that his exposure of the history of the American West as principally one of conquest is his biggest legacy (4). In short, the idea that US providential manifest destiny was just another name for [End Page 207] land grabbed away from Mexico and then Mexican Americans is pretty common today, especially in the world of Chicano/a studies. Oropeza says of the complicated Tijerina: “Neither hero nor villain, the ‘King of Adobe’ was a man who from a lifetime of limited opportunities, dashed hopes, and strange, religious dreams promoted a new vision of land-grant justice and a new vision of the American West” (10). She illustrates this over ten chapters, each with a title that could be attributed to Tijerina: “The Prophet” and “The Evangelist,” for example. From his childhood to his last words, Tijerina showed a deep passionate faith in God’s calling and revealed his own messiah complex. In some ways this led to some seeing him as a religious fanatic or “weirdo” but Oropeza regards his faith as a lens for “the kaleidoscope containing all his shifting views” (281). All the grand gestures he made in his life were attributed to a personal calling by God. The book opens with his experience being visited by Jesus Christ when he was a young child suffering from poverty (13). This is important since Oropeza closes her work saying that Tijerina’s constant comparison of himself to Christ “stood out” to her (281). He would later train to be a preacher at a Pentecostal school, eventually leaving the school to open up a community called Valle de Paz isolated in the Arizona desert. It was in the desert that he was exposed to the history of the land grants, which motivated him to found the Alianza Federal de Mercedes. His framing of the land-grant battle as between “the forces of good and evil” was performed as a prophetic message to his religious Spanish-speaking audience (134). In fact, it was this binary struggle—especially with government bureaucracy, personified by local district attorney Alfonso Sánchez—that led to the raid and disastrous shootout at the courthouse. In every event recounted, Tijerina seems to be guided by the hand of God—and there is never a sign of regret for any of his actions. Oropeza’s book does an excellent job cataloging when Tijerina’s views shifted throughout his life without resorting to a condescending tone toward him or his followers. Not everyone was impressed with Tijerina. In fact, many Latinxs in the Southwest did not appreciate the negative attention that the Alianza brought to local politics nor did they like the way Tijerina included Indigenous groups in his activism. At one point, he began using the title Indo-Hispano as a means to challenge the respectability politics of whiteness that was normalized before the 1960s (163). The chapters “The Mexican” and “The American” illustrate the difficulty Tijerina had with his own identity and serve as symbols of Mexican Americans in general trying to navigate the social-political sphere in both countries. Only a few people with any political power took him seriously and the local government saw him as a charlatan and rabble rouser (258). The courthouse raid would lead to the “largest manhunt” in New Mexico’s history (208). The raid brought him to the attention of other civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr., yet Oropeza reveals that Tijerina’s views on race were at best complicated and at [End Page 208] worst essentialist and anti-Semitic...

The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza

Reviewed by: The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza Ignacio M. García The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement. By Lorena Oropeza. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 392. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) The last time I saw Reies López Tijerina was at a Chicano studies conference in the 1980s. He walked silently and unnoticed through the book exhibits, looking fragile and less imposing than he used to. Many young scholars were oblivious to the fact that a legend was among them. Ten years earlier, the first time I met him, he had been an imposing figure, commanding attention whether he spoke to a full auditorium or to students who sat literally at his feet while he discussed themes, such as Chicanos being part of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, more commonly heard at a religious revival than a political discussion. Even those, however, had sounded like a political rallying cry against an unfair system. Tijerina was always a complicated man, quite different from the other three members of the “Four Horsemen” of the Chicano movement, César Chávez, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, and José Ángel Gutiérrez. While Tijerina was less ideological than they were, his early scathing assessments of American society previewed the Chicano activist agenda as it related to stolen land, the use of the Spanish language, the Indigenous roots of Mexican Americans, the reality of white racism, and the need for ethnic alliances. Many Chicano activists and scholars gave his occasional contradictions a pass because he was the only one who had literally taken up arms against the system in 1967 with his Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants). [End Page 100] In The King of Adobe, Lorena Oropeza provides a nuanced biography of Tijerina, allowing readers to see how the man most would remember as a militant land grant activist and fiery Chicano leader constructed his own life. Extreme poverty, weak parental support, and the lack of significant education might have resulted in an insignificant life had Tijerina not found religion as a young man. Oropeza demonstrates how his embrace of a rigid form of Protestantism, his experience as a traveling Pentecostal preacher, and his effort to establish a utopian community all helped to mold his character into the shape of an activist. She points to his failure as a religious prophet being followed by his rebirth as a land grants advocate, a cause he learned about while preaching through New Mexico. His passion, she argues, dovetailed neatly with his bitter dislike of whites, whom he saw as exploiting his people, robbing them of their land, their language, and their culture. Oropeza’s work is meticulous in detail, incisive in analysis, and provides another facet of the rich history of Mexican people on the American side of the border. Studying Tijerina, Oropeza shows, helps readers understand the radicalization of the Mexican American civil rights agenda and its evolution into a human rights crusade. I wish, however, that the author had spent more time on his relationships with the other three “horsemen” of the movement because he helped radicalize them and provided a foundation for their politics. That omission notwithstanding, this welcome biography significantly contributes to our understanding of the Chicano movement and of the Mexican American struggle for liberation. Ignacio M. García Brigham Young University Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Three Lost Prophets: Macmurray, Smith, and Lambourne

John Macmurray, Ronald Gregor Smith, and R. A. Lambourne are three prophetic figures, whose theological work in the 20th century on the priority of interpersonal relationships and the meaning of community has been unjustifiably neglected. Their writings on the centrality of relatedness for faith demand to be rediscovered today when a relational theology is vitally needed to counter trends towards social dis-integration

Bridgend “Bebo Internet Suicide Cult” and ritual violence in Wales

IntroductionIn a small South Wales town 17 teenagers seemingly committed suicide through hanging in 2008 triggering national media coverage. In the same region, several “Satanist” offenders were successfully prosecuted since.ObjectivesThis paper raises awareness of this “suicide epidemic” and its possible links to ritual violence ideologies.AimsThe research explores how “mind control” through secret societies can lead to suicide and murder.MethodsThe research was prompted by client disclosures of a crime series that lead to a false “delusional” diagnosis. Review of the sparse literature and media coverage was used to ascertain themes.ResultsColin Batley, a self-styled Satanist high priest, was sentenced for child sexual abuse alongside 4 others. His son Damien had died through aspiration when filming himself in a “sexual stimulation game”.Ian Watkins, disgraced singer of “The Lost Prophets”, was sentenced for abusing two babies provided by two “super-fan” mums. Peaches Geldorf tweeted their names, got a tattoo of O.T.O, a Satanist “kinky sex” group and was found dead a year later.Albert and Carole Hickman were sentenced for sexually abusing an 11-year-old including “sucking blood”.Matthew Williams cannibalised his victim before being killed with a police taser.Conclusions“Hanging” and “Over-dosing” could be the result of suicide or of “being suicided”. The abuse crimes of all three Satanists convicted in the last 15 years in UK courts occurred in South Wales. Associated violent death in the vicinity of the cases and authority irregularities suggest the operation of an “Organised ritualised crime abuse network” posing challenges for psychiatry.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

Performing celebrity motherhood on Twitter: courting homage and (momentary) disaster – the case of Peaches Geldof

It sickens me to see just how far the cult of celebrity and super fandom has come when grown women are passing their own kids round. I hate the world sometimes. (@peaches-g) (cited in Halliday 2013) This quote was part of a Twitter message that Peaches Geldof published in November 2013. In the message she also named the two women who had allowed the Lost Prophets singer Ian Watkins to abuse their babies. What became key elements focused upon by journalists in the newspaper debate that followed her subsequent deletion of the message and apology were the purpose of Twitter as a form of communication, and the celebritisation of public discourse. This tweet was constructed as an empty-headed, gossipy, childish and hence feminised intervention into the public sphere.1 Also tied up with this debate was the ongoing narrative of the ‘non-functionality’ of celebrity culture and its ‘reflexive exhibitionism’ (Hyde 2013). Yet Geldof had, until this point, used a combination of Twitter and Instagram to enact a self-transformation from girlhood to motherhood that had drawn critical affirmation from both media pundits and female followers via the social media sites. It is this image of motherhood that has informed the reporting of her sudden death of a heroin overdose at the age of 25 on 7 April 2014.

EPA-1684 – Ethical challenges posed by baby and toddler sexual abuse: ‘the lost prophets’ singer ian watkins

Extreme abuse poses extreme challenges to mental health professionals. Becker et al (2008) covered in their definition of Ideologically Motivated Crimes (IMC) those motivated by religious, political and criminal belief systems. The Welsh singer Ian Watkins of the band The Lost Prophets illustrates the spectrum of abuse perpetrated. He pleaded guilty in 2013 attempting to rape babies provided by two of his female ‘superfans’. Rumours about his paedophile tendencies had been circulating since 2004. Since 2008 his former girlfriend tried to alert the police authorities, and set up privately a successful ‘sting’ operation. Authorities only became active due to an unrelated drugs raid in 2012 that unearthed masses of evidence including self-produced porn videos and email exchanges outlining the hatched ‘baby rape’ plan. The child protection officer who ignored the case for several years is currently suspended and South Wales Police made a self-referral to the Police Independent Complaints Commission. Media cover is sketchy with more attention paid to Peaches Geldorf erroneously ‘tweeting’ the names of the mothers (mistakenly released by the court!) who provided their babies rather than substantial coverage and discussion of this taboo topic. This paper provides an overview of the extreme abuse scene and the ethical challenges posed. Pre-verbal victims cannot verbalise what happened to them – but hold the traumatic memories in their bodies. Family members collude with the abuser and are frequently abusers themselves. Older children are often disbelieved, and even adult reporting extreme abuse are frequently ‘pathologised’ as professional and organisational dissociation takes hold.

The Silhouette and the Secret Self: Theorizing Biography in Our Times

The Silhouette and the Secret Self:Theorizing Biography in Our Times Leonard Cassuto (bio) Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. By John D'Emilio. New York: Free Press, 2003. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 564 pages. $20.00 (paper). Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism. By Elizabeth Faue. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. 249 pages. $19.95 (paper). The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. By Jerome Loving. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 480 pages. $34.95 (cloth). Frank Norris: A Life. By Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse P. Crisler. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 492 pages. $38.00 (cloth). For a long time I never much enjoyed reading biographies. I'd start them with the highest of hopes and the best of intentions, but then I would bog down in the beginning chapters and put the books aside. My biographies would then drift from end table to end table until they washed up like bulky jetsam in my study. There they would languish, until after awhile I'd shelve them with mingled guilt and regret. Then I realized that I didn't have to plow through a biography straight from beginning to end. Now, because I like to locate myself in the life story right away, I usually start biographies in the middle and read the story out of chronological order. That way I begin with the part of the subject's life that presumably caused the biographer to be interested in the first place. Why don't biographers just start in the middle themselves? It turns out that this question points to methodological issues common to virtually all American studies scholars, including the problem of text and context, how they're related, and the problem of which is which. In the case of biography, the answer starts with the lingering influence of Leon Edel and the way that his model has been followed—often unthinkingly—by biographers paddling in his massive [End Page 1249] wake. Edel was not simply the author of the definitive, multivolume account of the life of Henry James. He was also the foremost theorist of biography of the last half-century. Beginning with the classic Literary Biography (1957) and extending through a series of books and articles on the subject stretching over decades, Edel outlined the biographer's craft and set forth its goal: to locate "the figure under the carpet." This conceit, whose phrasing winks at James, refers to the view of a person's outline (the visible self) in the form of bumps and lumps in the carpet. For Edel, the biographer's job is to infer what lies out of sight below, the "secret myth" that's causing that particular and individual pattern of bumps and lumps that's presented to the world. Simply put, the biographer searches for internal motivation.1 That search amounts to an excavation of the private self. Not surprisingly—given the way that he defines the task—and in keeping with the intellectual currents of his time, Edel's "most significant" digging tools are psychoanalytic.2 The biographer in Edel's mold (and there have been many who have climbed from it) accepts certain important assumptions, especially that inner motivation offers the best narrative through-line to span a life. That doesn't mean that all biographers style themselves as posthumous therapists in search of the elusive unconscious, nor that biographers didn't look for personal motivation before Freud came along, but rather that the biographer's work in the age of Freud has been governed by the general assumption, conveyed by psychoanalysis, that the truth lies beyond the rational, proceeding from the subject's distant past. This assumption generates a particular sort of biographical apparatus. The Freudian worldview assumes that the adult subject has been decisively shaped by childhood events. Freudian case studies—which Richard Ellmann calls "biographies without heroes"—center on the search for those early-life events that did the shaping.3 Certain conventions long ago became ritualized, obligatory parts of the biographical narrative in our time, and they've become frozen in place. These days we expect...

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (review)

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (review)

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. By John D'Emilio. (New York: Free Press, 2003. viii, 568 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-684-82780-8.)

In the recent biographies by Jervis Anderson and Daniel Levine, and in Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer's documentary film ther Outsider02), Bayard Rustin, major adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. during and after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956 and the prime organizer of the March on Washington in August 1963, has also been revealed as a leader in the pacifist movement and a major proponent of nonviolent direct action protest to challenge war, militarism, racism, and social and economic injustice in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In Lost Prophet, John D'Emilio chronicles Rustin's domestic and international political exploits, but, rather than viewing him as a black social activist who happened to be gay in an era characterized by blatant homophobia and legalized repression, D'Emilio presents Rustin as a Christian man who happened to be gay and of African descent but who also was committed to the advancement of human rights globally.

Lost prophet: the life and times of Bayard Rustin

One of the most important figures of the American civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin taught Martin Luther King Jr. the methods of Gandhi, spearheaded the 1963 March on Washington, and helped bring the struggle of African Americans to the forefront of a nation's consciousness. But despite his incontrovertibly integral role in the movement, the openly gay Rustin is not the household name that many of his activist contemporaries are. In exploring history's Lost Prophet, acclaimed historian John D'Emilio explains why Rustin's influence was minimized by his peers and why his brilliant strategies were not followed, or were followed by those he never meant to help.

Why are There No Austrian Socialists? Ideology, Science and the Austrian School

The Austrian School of Economics has long been branded as a sort of radical laissez-faire wing within the economics profession, even much more “right-wing,” in fact, than Milton Friedman, the profession;'s most recognized “preacher” of the free-market. The economic journalist Alfred Malabre, Jr., for example, in his recent critical book on modern economics, Lost Prophets, argues that “the monetarism that Friedman and his followers were preaching was not quite as conservative as advertised. In fact, the University of Chicago professor was treading not far from the middle of the economic road, flanked on the left by the likes of Galbraith and Leontief and on the right by Hayek, along with such other Austrian-school luminaries as Hans Sennholz, chairman of the economics department at Grove City College in western Pennsylvania, and Ludwig von Mises, transplanted from Austria and finishing out a distinguished academic and writing career at New York University” (Malabre 1994, p. 144).

Lost Prophets: An Insider's History of the Modern Economists.

An impossible dream back to the Home Front Keynes redux the new confusion the monetarists, rising and falling supply-side economics - a not-so-free lunch looking ahead, seeking a role.

Lost prophets: An insider's history of modern economists

Lost prophets: An insider's history of modern economists

Lost prophets: an insider's history of the modern economists

Lost prophets: an insider's history of the modern economists

The Lost Prophet. The Book of Enoch and Its Influence On Christianity by Margaret Barker, SPCK, London. Pp. xi, 116. £4.96.

The Lost Prophet. The Book of Enoch and Its Influence On Christianity by Margaret Barker, SPCK, London. Pp. xi, 116. £4.96.

The New Jerome Biblical Commentary edited by Raymond E. Brown S.S.; Joseph A. Fitzmyer S.J. and Roland E. Murphy O. Carm. Geoffrey Chapmen. 1989, £60.

Book reviewed in this article:THE NEW JEROME BIBLICAL COMMENTARY edited by Raymond E. Brown, S.S.; Joseph A. Fitzmyer S.J. and Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm.STEPPING STONES: Joint essays on Anglican Catholic and Evangelical unity. Ed. Christina Baxter, Consultant eds. John Stott and Roger Greenacre.REDEEMING THE DREAM: FEMINISM, REDEMPTION AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION by Mary Grey.WOMEN AT THE WELL FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON SPIRITUAL DIRECTION by Kathleen Fischer.THE PAPAL PRINCE. ONE BODY AND TWO SOULS: THE PAPAL MONARCHY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE by Paolo Prodi.DEITY AND DOMINATION: images of God and the State in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by David Nicholls.THE LOST PROPHET. THE BOOK OF ENOCH AND ITS INFLUENCE ON CHRISTIANITY by Margaret Barker

The Lost Prophet: The Book of Enoch and its influence on Christianity by Margaret Barker (London: SPCK, 1988. 116pp. pb. £4.95)

The Lost Prophet: The Book of Enoch and its influence on Christianity by Margaret Barker (London: SPCK, 1988. 116pp. pb. £4.95)

Book Review: The Lost Prophet

Book Review: The Lost Prophet