King Tiger The Religious Vision

Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars

150

Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178

Rudy V. Busto, King Tiger: The Religious Vision of Reies López Tijerina (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press). vii + 260 pp. $29.95 hardback.

The construction of a master narrative that serves a particular group’s identity and history is based upon the silencing and erasure of other voices and stories. Master narratives ﬁx heroes in a particular space and time in history, and as much as they move away from those conceptions they are erased from the narrative or relegated to a footnote. In this book, Rudy Busto asserts that the voice and story of Reies López Tijerina is one those covered by the normative master narrative (canon) created within Chicana/o studies, and it is his task to break open the canon so that Tijerina’s voice may be heard and understood. Busto is clear that this book is not another narrative about Tijerina’s involvement in the famous raid of the courthouse at Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, but a re-interpretation of Tijerina’s life, especially the religious impetus behind his actions. Busto’s main argument throughout the book is that in order to understand the life of this Chicano leader, it is important to analyze his religious vision(s), both literal and metaphorically.

Structurally, the book is divided into six chapters. In chapter one, Busto lays out the foundation of his critique by analyzing the construction of a canon within Chicano/a stud- ies, and the deﬁnitive omission of Tijerina’s voice in more recent years. The second chapter provides a quick overview of Tijerina’s life, which gives readers without any knowledge about this ﬁgure an introduction to his life and social actions. Chapters three and four give insight into Tijerina’s religious vision and visions from his conversion and life as a preacher and evangelist to his utopian community experiment at Valle de Paz. T ese foundational years in Tijerina’s life shaped his religious ideology. In the last two chapters, Busto attempts to dis-cover Tijerina beyond what has been written, which focus mainly on the accounts of Tierra Amarilla, in order to establish not only Tijerina’s importance within Chicano/a his- tory, but mostly to provide guidelines about the re-reading of his life through a look at his religious vision. Tese two chapters are the core of Busto’s argument and are supported through detailed analysis of Tijerina’s writings and interviews, especially his forgotten mem- oir Mi lucha por la tierra (1978).

Busto not only goes on to re-read this text and put its content in the perspective of Tijerina’s religious vision(s), but also puts the text in a literary context. He re-reads this prophetic memoir not by imposing a particular categorization to it or by dismissing it as problematic and un-readable, but by locating it within the canon of Chicana/o studies. He suggests that Mi lucha por la tierra be seen in connection with other books like Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands (1987) and Richard Rodríguez’s Hunger of Memory (1982) that chal- lenge Chicano history and identity. Interesting enough, the religious content continues to be ignored in these books, and this explains why, Busto suggests, their arguments are not fully understood.

Putting this memoir in perspective gives us a better understanding of Tijerina, and how he was aware of his location. For example, the memoir was written within the Jubilee year, which promoted the return of the land, and that was one of his major arguments. Busto ﬁnds a progression within Tijerina’s thought from his early years as a preacher to his later comments regarding Empire. T us, while many have dismissed Tijerina’s thought as “crazy talk,” and blamed it on his time at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners

PNEU 29,1_f9_131-178.indd 150PNEU 29,1_f9_131-178.indd 150

33/30/07 8:48:25 PM/30/07 8:48:25 PM

1

Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178

151

in Spring ﬁeld, Missouri, Busto goes beyond those critiques to actually analyze it and put it into perspective. Tijerina should be understood in light of his dreams and visions, which challenge traditional forms of rationality. He sees no diﬀerence between sacred history and secular history, so he does not ﬁt the parameters established by Western epistemology. Hence, the presence of “magical thinking” throughout Tijerina’s writings and actions should be seen as a dis-continuation of modern thought. This locates Tijerina within the greater history of dreamers and visionaries in Latin America.

King Tiger establishes a conversation between religious studies and ethnic studies in order to grasp the importance of religion for minority groups in their struggle for justice. The problem Busto ﬁnds is that Chicano/a literature has not only forgotten about Tijerina, but when he is included it is only on the basis of his political activism in Tierra Amarilla. He ascribes this “silencing” to the lack of understanding of Tijerina’s religious vision(s). But his critique, and somehow confrontation, is not only directed towards Chicano/a studies, but also to the ﬁelds of U.S. religious history and even Latina/o religious studies. It was refresh- ing to read Busto’s description on Latina/o religions in the Southwest as fundamental to understanding Tijerina’s religious formation, but I was surprise by the lack of connection between aspects of Tijerina’s religious thought and U.S. Latina/o theology. For example, his understanding of “new breed” (mestizaje) puts him in conversation with U.S. Latina/o theologians such as Virgilio Elizondo and Ada María Isasi-Díaz. This kind of discussion and analysis would allow for a better relationship between this ﬁgure and the ﬁeld of Latina/o religious studies. While Eldin Villafañe in The Liberating Spirit: Toward and Hispanic Amer- ican Pentecostal Social Ethic (1993) talks about Reies López Tijerina in the context of Pen- tecostal leaders who worked within what he calls the “spirit of the oppressed,” I do not believe that we have any other text that addresses this important relationship, until now. While Busto does an excellent job breaking the canon of Chicano/a studies with his demand for a re-interpretation of Tijerina, this book is also a must read for those working in the ﬁeld of Latina/o religious studies, so we can start deepening our understanding of “the connec- tions between dogmas and personalities” among the Latina/o community (p. 6).

Reviewed by Hjamil A. Martínez-Vázquez

PNEU 29,1_f9_131-178.indd 151PNEU 29,1_f9_131-178.indd 151

3/30/07 8:48:25 PM3/30/07 8:48:25 PM

2