Lloyd Daniel Barba - Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California

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Oxford University Press 2022

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barba, Lloyd Daniel, author.

Title: Sowing the sacred : Mexican Pentecostal farmworkers in California /

Lloyd Daniel Barba.

Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University

Press, [2022] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021057808 (print) | LCCN 2021057809 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780197516560 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197516584 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Pentecostal churchesCaliforniaWascoHistory20th century. |

Foreign workers, MexicanCaliforniaWascoReligious life. |

Agricultural laborersCaliforniaWascoReligious life. |

Wasco (Calif.)Church history20th century.

Classification: LCC BX8762.A44 W37 2022 (print) | LCC BX8762.A44 (ebook) |

DDC 289.9/40979488dc23/eng/20220128

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021057808

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021057809

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197516560.001.0001

The book is dedicated to the farmworkers who have broken their bodies, atoning for the nations sin of starvation.

Sowing the Sacredis a historical inquiry influenced, shaped, and received by many wonderful people. While many of my closest family and friends imagined me cloistered away and writing feverishly in a cubicle, the reality is that the process of researching and writing this book opened up my world, giving me the opportunity to meet and share ideas with great minds and kind souls. Many of the individuals acknowledged here do not know each other, but even as strangers to one another they have collectively impacted my work. This has been done en conjunto.

Even this acknowledgments section raises a contested origins story for myself: Where did this really begin? Most directly, the earliest foray into this topic began as a senior capstone paper guided by William Swagerty at the University of the Pacific. Thanks to the care of three professors, I reached that point in the first place. The late historian Caroline Cox sparked in me an insatiable curiosity to understand American history, and Alan Lenzi and Carrie Schroeder took me to the deeper past while also providing a first-generation college student the best mentorship to navigate this foreign world of higher education and academia.

I took the next major step into this journey of inquiry when I matriculated at the University of Michigans Program (now Department) of American Culture along with a delightful cohort: Garrett Felber, Katie Lennard, Jasmine Kramer, Jenny Kwak, and Eric Shih. I am also appreciative of the broader intellectual community of fellow students during those years: Steve Arionus, Yamil Avivi, Carolyn Dekker, Frank Kelderman, Natalie Lira, Alex Olson, Jen Peacock Garcia, and Joo Young Lee. A special thanks goes out to fellow Latina/o studies scholar Hannah Noel for your invaluable collegiality. CaVar Reids friendship and support started in grad school but continues unabated to this day. Fellow Wolverines Jared Kane and Amir Magshoodi spent many hours writing and studying with me in many of Ann Arbors coffee shops. At Michigan I was fortunate to learn from teachers and mentors who taught me to ask critical questions about history, race, religion, and cultural studies: Matthew Countryman, Greg Dowd, Gregg Crane, Colin Gunkel, Kristin Hass, Martha Jones, Mary Kelley, and Matthew Stiffler. Even though only a fraction of the dissertation has made it into Sowing the Sacred, I owe a special thanks to my dissertation committee which guided me through a study that compared the historical trajectories and narratives of Mexican Pentecostals to their white (Dust Bowl/Okie) counterparts.