Lloyd Daniel Barba’s Sowing the Sacred is a pathbreaking book on many levels. In his exquisitely detailed and written history of Mexican farmworkers, faith, and labor from 1920s to 1960s California, he shows his reader how Mexican Apostólico farmworkers not only survived within the oppressive racist structures of the state’s agricultural industry and society but also how they thrived, against many odds, with dignity and grace. Barba provides an overview of the well-documented exploitation of Mexican-descent people and draws on early twentieth-century astute chroniclers such as Carey McWilliams. However, unlike McWilliams, who featured farmworkers’ exploitation, Barba focuses on farmworkers’ agency. He provides compelling pictorial, historical documentation that shows Mexican American Pentecostal farmworkers’ religiously inflected acts of resistance to structural racism. By focusing on farmworkers’ self-determination and agency, Barba provides invaluable, fresh insights into the ways Mexican-descent Apostólicos sacralized what were considered profane material things.
Sowing the Sacred introduces the reader to material, embodied, and lived ways Pentecostal farmworkers transformed difficult everyday realities into sacred realities. Barba provides numerous examples throughout the book to demonstrate how material objects like photographs taken by the farmworkers themselves showed how Apostólicos carved out and scripturalized a socioreligious existence in the places that were designed to deny them one (17). This is a major scholarly contribution that offers fresh and much-needed insights into histories of the American West, Mexican farm labor, and American religious history. Sowing the Sacred is a significant revisionist history on multiple levels. Barba shows his reader that a history of Mexican American religion is one that is transgressive, diasporic, and materialist, and in doing so shows solidarity with recent revisionist Latino/x/a religious histories by Felipe Hinojosa, Jacqueline Hidalgo, Daniel Ramírez, Maggie Elmore, and others. He builds on Thomas Tweed’s theory of translocative borderlands aesthetics as well as Rachel McBride Lindsay’s and Colleen McDannell’s religious studies inflected analyses of the use of photographs in American religious history.
Yet the people and their photographs Barba chronicles are unique in the sense that they “constitute essential elements of the stories of migration, baptism, material culture, gender, and church life” (7) and make pesticide-laden fields, brackish canals and ditches, and dirt floors and tents sacred spaces. These photographs were purposeful actions that documented experiences and reinscribed the harsh realities of farmworkers’ existence as holy. Barba develops his own concept of what he terms the “sacralized profane” to “describe the photographs taken and stories told by Mexican Pentecostal farmworkers as they carved out sacred space in the profane context of industrial agriculture” (7). Places and things that were considered unclean were made pure; taking the photos was acts of purification and scripturalization.
Barba showcases compelling and moving photographs that sacralized profane spaces in the core chapters of the book: Sacred Routes; Sacred Waters; Sacred Fields; Sacred Talents; and Sacred Nostalgic. These photographs effectively counter, he argues, the numerous histories that have erased Mexicans’ presence and/or relegated them to footnotes. The photos are the essential primary source documents that tell today’s reader and interpreter that a history of California must include these histories and reckon with the many-layered sins of oppression, commission, and omission. Whether is Baptism in the San Joaquin River (92), Carpas (tents) on riverbanks and in fields (118), or Apostólico wearing crisp white tunics (215), the black and white photographs diffused throughout the book show a community of women, men, and children who praised Jesus, ate, worked, and prayed together. The photos inverted the discourse and mainstream beliefs that Mexican people, their labor, and their homes were impoverished. By sacralizing what was widely viewed as deplorable, Mexican farmworkers exhibited a kind of holy, divinely inspired agency. Small labor camp houses became sites of prayer and study (231), colorful hand-crocheted doilies brightened makeshift worship sites, and the white, bleached and ironed clothing lended holiness to places otherwise considered dirty and forgettable.
Apostólico’s practice of taking and preserving photographs can be interpreted as an earlier, grassroots version of the contemporary research method photovoice. Popular with scholars in the health sciences disciplines, this method asks research interlocutors to document what matters to them with a camera that is provided to them. The scholar engages in the process of contextualization, historicization, and interpretation after receiving the photos. And yet, unlike contemporary researchers and their interlocutors who engage in discussions of the photos and the possible interpretations, historians do not have this opportunity. Historians like Barba have a harder task as their people cannot always talk back to them. I could not help but think of the challenges of excavation, especially as it is one metaphor Barba employs throughout the book. These Apostólicos provided the photos in an earlier, grassroots version of photovoice; Barba does his due diligence in amplifying their voices and agential acts of sanctification.
Barba’s conscientiously crafted book is a testimonio to his community and to the labors of love that led him to his current vocation. It was an honor to read this beautifully written book and to review it, and I am grateful to Barba for writing Sowing the Sacred. It is one of the best books on Mexican American religious history I have read and offers an innovative methodology for providing fresh interpretations of the past.
