EIHS Lecture: "Reies López Tijerina, the Apocalypse, and the Religious Origins of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement"

In Mexican American history books Reies López Tijerina is heralded as a radical, revolutionary, cultural nationalist who putatively took up arms against the American state during his 1967 “raid” on the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse in northern New Mexico. Starting in 1957, Tijerina began organizing Mexicanos to recuperate the communal lands they had lost after the US-Mexico War, blaming Anglos and their courts, offering searing critiques of the Mexican American poverty that followed, as well as the denigration of Mexicano culture and the systematic eradication of Spanish-language instruction. All of this occurred between 1957 and 1970, or thirteen of his eighty-eight years of life. This lecture explores the longer trajectory of his life and thought, particularly as shaped by his education as a Pentecostal preacher, the apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, the detonation of atomic bombs over Japan, and his quest for the Antichrist.

Ramón A. Gutiérrez is the Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor in United States History and the College at University of Chicago. A native of New Mexico, Gutiérrez received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Latin American history at the University of New Mexico in 1973, and his PhD in Colonial Latin American history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1980. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Pomona College, and the University of California, San Diego, where he founded the Ethnic Studies Department and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and served as the campus Associate Chancellor.

His themes of his research and publication include race and ethnic relations in the Americas from 1492 to the present; religion and spirituality in the hemisphere; ethnic Mexican culture and politics on both sides of the border; immigration and adaptation in the United States; and inequality and diversity in American society. His works include: When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, 1991); The Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993); Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage (Arte Público Press, 1993); Festivals and Celebrations in American Ethnic Communities (University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Mexican Home Altars (University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush (University of California Press, 1998); and, Mexicans in California: Emergent Challenges and Transformations (University of Illinois Press, 2009). His work has been recognized with a number of honors and awards, including a Mac Arthur Prize Fellowship. He has just finished a book entitled, The Fire of the Ire of God: The Religious and Political Thought of Reies López Tijerina and the Origins of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.

Free and open to the public.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.