Lloyd Daniel Barba is Assistant Professor of Religion and Core Faculty in Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. He is the co-editor of Oneness Pentecostalism: Race, Gender and Culture (2023), and editor of Latin American and U.S. Latinx Religion in North America (2023). His scholarship on Pentecostalism, Catholicism, the Sanctuary Movement, and material religion has been published in journals such as Journal of the American Academy of Religion, American Religion, Perspectivas, and MAVCOR and various edited volumes. including The Oxford Handbook on Latinx Christianity, Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics since 1945, and Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts, to name a few. He serves on the council of the American Society of Church History and co-chairs the History of Christianity Unit of the American Academy of Religion.
A terrific glimpse into previously untold histories, Sowing the
Sacred is a beautiful, moving, and an important work of scholarship
on the material and spiritual lives of ethnic Mexican farmworkers
and church leaders in California. Please read this book.
*Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Professor of Latina/o/x Studies and
Religion, Williams College*
With a beautiful mix of photographs, oral histories, and archival
research, Barba gracefully uncovers the tragic and resilient worlds
of Mexican Pentecostal farmworkers as they labored in the fields,
created sacred spaces, and lived dignified lives in the American
West. Sowing the Sacred more than fills a significant gap in the
literature on Latina/o religion and labor, it changes the field
entirely. Simply put, this book is groundbreaking.
*Felipe Hinojosa, author of Apostles of Change: Latino Radical
Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio*
Sowing the Sacred impressively reframes the history of proletarian
religion in California's harsh agribusiness. Lloyd Barba deftly
demonstrates how subaltern Pentecostal farmworkers sacralized the
very soil and water of their labor and fired the imaginations of
key Chicano/a Movement leaders.
*Daniel Ramírez, Associate Professor of American Religions,
Claremont Graduate University*
Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California by
Lloyd Daniel Barba is a beautifully told and rigorously researched
history of a subaltern religious denomination in California's
agricultural farmlands.
*David Flores, Department of Ethnic Studies, Sacramento State
University, Sacramento, CA, USA*
Sowing the Sacred is more than a history of Mexican Pentecostal
farmworkers in California. It is an excavation, unearthing a
religious tradition that's been buried beneath social prejudice and
scholarly neglect.
*Christian Century*
An important contribution Sowing the Sacred gives us is the way it
adds to the historical texture of the United States' design of
labor laws and practices regarding farmworkers and capitalistic
production of the fields.
*Yara González-Justiniano, Journal for the Study of Religion,
Nature, and Culture.*
Sowing the Sacred successfully places the sacred stories and
laboring bodies of Apostólicos front and center, offering the
reader not just a window into the past, but entirely new sets of
lenses through which to examine, uncover, and admire the fruit of a
completely different kind of "labor" that left a permanent mark on
U.S. and Mexican history.
*Gaby Viesca, The Perspectivas*
Barba's prose is lovely. The book is not beach reading, but for a
volume that seamlessly blends so many distinct
disciplines-religion, ethnicity, immigration, agriculture, and
economic history-it is remarkably fluid.
*Grant Wacker, The Christian Century*
Lloyd Daniel Barba's Sowing the Sacred is a rich historical
analysis that can be approached from multiple different historical
contexts. As a work of religious history, for instance, Barba
illuminates much about Mexican Pentecostalism in the mid-twentieth
century. Historians interested in Mexican immigration and farm
labor--perhaps more numerous in the profession than scholars of
Pentecostalism--will also find much to admire in Barba's fine
book.
*Timothy Bowman, H-Environment*
Lloyd Daniel Barba has written an original and thoughtful study.
The strength of the book rests on the analysis of Mexican
farmworkers in California and their socioreligious practices to
transform agricultural land into a place for them to belong. His
work connects three distinct historiographies-labor, religion, and
resistance movements-to underscore the vibrant cultural production
of Mexican Apostólicos. Barba's book providesan appealing
discussion of farmworkers' contributions in shaping California and
should beassigned reading to any scholar or student interested in
knowing more about the twentieth-century American West.
*Tiffany Jasmin González, AGRICULTURAL HISTORY*
Undergraduate courses concerned with Mexican and migranthistories
will be well-served by this text. Scholars seeking tointegrate
histories or religion and work (especially in ruralspaces) will
find in Barba's argument an exemplary model onwhich to draw both
methodologically and theoretically.
*Emily Morrell, Religious Studies Review*
Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California
provide a fresh perspective on how religious identity, religious
resistance, sacred space and reform measures are manufactured,
re-imagined, and wielded by people and larger bureaucratic
institutions.
*Alison Collis Greene and Matthew Avery Sutton, Church History*
Sowing the Sacred beautifully captures important milestones of the
journey that brought Mexican Apostolicos from socio-religious
marginalization into denominational respectability in the
borderlands. It effectively highlights the cultural distinctives of
the movement and its influence on ecclesial rituals andindividual
spirituality while also describing its humble origins in the
landscape of North American Pentecostalism.
*Harold A. Gutierrez, Pneuma*
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