Lloyd Daniel Barba, assistant professor of religion at Amherst College, and Jonathan H. Ebel, professor and head of Religion at the University of Illinois, have written a pair of books that reframe the study of sacred space and the nature of religious communities while advancing the study of religion in the U.S. West. Each book does important theoretical and interpretive work on its own. Together, the books offer a rich picture of California’s Central Valley, a subregion that Kori Walker-Price notes has been “dismissed as a site of serious study” because of its factory farms, its mobile labor force, and its distance from the more iconic scenery of California and the west. But they do more than that. Both use their subjects to make larger arguments and claims about religion, methodology, power, race, and gender in the United States.
Barba’s Sowing the Sacred introduces several generations of Mexican and Mexican-American Apostolicos who arrived to work the Central Valley’s industrial farms in the wake of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Barba shows how Apostolicos “attempted to carve out a socio-religious existence in sites designed to deny them one,” both through the control of their labor and in the ways that they marked the spaces they crossed and dwelt as sacred, from tamale sales to irrigation ditch baptisms.
Ebel’s From Dust They Came examines the missionary work of the Resettlement Administration’s migratory farm labor camps from 1935 to 1943. The book’s innovative structure walks the reader through the camp as migrants would have experienced it, with chapters on the gate, the office, the tent platform, and so on. Maffly-Kipp focuses on a particularly powerful chapter-length visit to the Sanitary Unit, which “reveals the most deeply embodied moral assumptions that the reformers shared about salvation through cleanliness.”
Both books make creative and novel use of sources. Barba uses objects of material culture, music, and even food, in addition to oral histories, periodicals, and sermons. Ebel dove deep into government documents housed in the National Archives, finding in dry bureaucratic memos and reports the richness of Americans’ faiths.
Each author also moves religion outside of traditional church settings and into the real world. And, as Stephens notes, both analyzed how faith functioned in hostile settings. The religious communities at the center of these books were not among the mainstream, but those who took mainstream faiths and modified and adapted them to their contexts. They were often minorities within minorities, struggling under oppressive hierarchies.
Each review in this forum highlights a distinct interpretive strand that weaves through these two books about the Central Valley’s agricultural laborers. Andrea Johnson emphasizes the books’ teachability among her urban, often first-generation students at California State University Dominguez Hills, a world away from the Depression-era farmers in these texts. Tucker-Price focuses on methodology. These books, she explains, “provide new theoretical avenues in which to explore the relationship between religion and the racialization of space.” Stephens emphasizes sources. The books force us to “to think more expansively about the kinds of sources we use as historians of American religion, who we focus on, and how we narrate the past.” Finally, Maffly-Kipp cheers Ebel and Barba’s focus on the West. “These books reveal a great deal about California both as a site of religious coercion and resistance, while also drawing our attention to methods, sources, and ways of thinking about the interpenetration of traditionally ‘religious’ ideas and material objects with labor, capital, foodways, photography, office spaces, and domestic interiors.” As these reviews illustrate, Ebel and Barba’s creative use of sources, methodological sophistication, and narrative storytelling, highlighting communities that previous scholars overlooked or underappreciated, are certain to inspire much more work to come.
