Sowing the Sacred: Mexican

Pentecostal Farmworkers in California

Lloyd Daniel Barba
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Sowing the Sacred
 Sowing the Sacred
Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California
LLOYD DANIEL BARBA
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
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 churches—California—Wasco—History—20th century. |
Foreign workers, Mexican—California—Wasco—Religious life. |
Agricultural laborers—California—Wasco—Religious life. |
Wasco (Calif.)—Church history—20th century.
Classification: LCC BX8762.A 44 W37 2022 (print) | LCC BX8762.A 44 (ebook) |
DDC 289.9/40979488—dc23/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 nation’s sin of starvation.
 Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Sacralized Profane

1. Sacred Routes: Mapping Churches
2. Sacred Waters: Baptizing Churches
3. Sacred Fields: Building Churches
4. Sacred Talents: Maturing Churches
5. Sacred Nostalgia: Remembering Churches
Conclusion: Beyond the Sacralized Profane

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 List of Figures

Figure 1.1. Map of Obras Apostólicas in Sowing the Sacred. Mexican

Pentecostalism flourished in rural California, most notably
in Southern California’s Citrus Belt, the Imperial Valley
(even crossing borders into adjacent agricultural centers
in Arizona and Mexico), the San Joaquin Valley (the
southern portion of the larger Central Valley) as well as in
the coastal valleys such as Salinas, Pajaro, Santa Clara,
and the Oxnard Plain. This map spans from the northern
part of the Central Valley to the southern border with
Mexico. Map designed by Eva M. Díaz and the author.
Figure 1.2. The Sixth General Convention, San Bernardino California,
1930. The newly chartered denomination celebrated its
first convention officially as the AAFCJ in 1930 after
already meeting for conventions for half a decade.
Another photograph of the same building earlier that year
reveals the sign atop the church, “Iglesia Cristiana de la
Fel Apostólica Pentecostés P.A.W. Inc.,” reflecting both
the older name of the fellowship as well as its nominal
affiliation with the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World.
To date, this is the oldest Apostólico temple still standing
though it is now decommissioned. Photographs courtesy
of the José Ortega Photograph Collection.
Figure 1.3. Pedro Banderas with the San Jose Choir, 1932. Here
Pedro Banderas poses with his church’s choir just one
year prior to his first falling out with the newly formed
AAFCJ. Banderas built the earliest Apostólico temples in
Northern California (described more at length in chapter
3). Despite his pioneering efforts with the denomination,
 the break with the AAFCJ overshadowed his larger story
when he was only briefly mentioned in the
denomination’s 1966 commemorative volume.
Photograph courtesy of the José Ortega Photograph
Collection.
Figure 2.1. Dunking near the Derrick. The budding congregation of
Calexico (ca. early 1920) celebrated a baptism by posing
atop a derrick, a ubiquitous symbol of irrigation.
Photograph from Cantú et al., Historia, 8c.
Figure 2.2. Baptisms in El Canal Xochimilco. South of the border in
the Mexicali Valley, the use of canals for baptisms was
common. Many of the first converts of the Mexicali region
were baptized in this canal. Photograph from Wiki
Historia de la Igelsia Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús.
Figure 2.3. The Irrigational Waters of Baptism. In this baptism near
Patterson ca. 1950, Reverend Miguel Marrufo exemplified
forms of subaltern arts by repurposing grower-controlled
waters. Photograph courtesy of Milca Montañez-Vizcarra.
Figure 2.4. Low-Water Baptism near Los Angeles. Very few
conditions hindered Apostólicos from baptizing. Reeds,
pesticides, and low-running muddy waters were common
in the sites they chose to baptize. In this 1930
photograph pioneer Guadalupe Lara baptizes Ramona
Chavarín in the “Pico River” (San Gabriel River) amid the
orchards near Pico Rivera. Photograph courtesy of Esther
Amaya Ares.
Figure 2.5. Baptisms in the River Every Sunday. Before they could
afford their own temple and baptistery, members of the
Sanger congregation were baptized in the Kings River in
the early 1930s. The importance of baptisms as a ritual
of high soteriological significance and memory making is
evident in the way that that the Sanger church chose to
commemorate baptisms in its commemorative volume on
60 years of the local congregation’s history. Photograph
 from Trujillo et al., Precious Memories, courtesy of Marta
Bracamonte Valdez.
Figure 2.6. Jesús Valdez Baptizes in the San Joaquin River. This
photograph captures the important moment when a
baptizee is drawn out of the water. Rather than highlight
the collective nature of baptisms, this photograph sheds
light on the importance of the ritual for the individual.
Because it was the preeminent ritual, Valdez likely did not
second-guess stepping into the San Joaquin River near
Patterson in his full suit and tie. This river, as well as the
Kings, Kern, and Stanislaus rivers, held a place in
Apostólico memory in the San Joaquin Valley. Photograph
courtesy of Milca Montañez-Vizcarra.
Figure 2.7. Collective Rituals of Baptisms. Regardless of outdoor
environments, witnesses at baptisms typically wore their
“Sunday best” to acknowledge the sanctity of the
moment in their sacralization of space. In these sites they
read from the Bible and sang hymns to the tune of
guitars. This 1933 photograph at the “Pico River”
captures the spectacle of the baptism and how
Apostólicos seemed to be out of place, with Bibles in
hand and dressed in either suit and tie or white tunics.
The state of the collapsing fence captured in the
foreground of this photograph suggests that Apostólicos
regularly trespassed to access baptismal waters.
Photograph courtesy of Esther Amaya Ares.
Figure 3.1. The Isaac Sánchez Labor Camp. Irma Pérez drew a
diagram of the spatial arrangement of the agricultural
labor camp managed by Isaac Sánchez in Patterson. The
carpa functioned as the centerpiece of the camp, and
families, including the Pérezes, lived near it and attended
services there. Workers at the camp remembered it as
the “Isaac Sánchez Farm Labor Camp” though Sánchez
only oversaw the camp. The spatial arrangement of the
camp embodies the kinds of alternative religious
 communities forged in the social margins. Schematic
layout hand-drawn by Irma Pérez and digitally enhanced
by Eva M. Díaz.
Figure 3.2. Cantando en la Carpa. The carpa in Patterson brought
together farmworkers from the far-flung reaches of the
borderlands. As this photograph of cantando en la carpa
(singing in the tent) captures, an adult, or even a child,
could very well be sitting next to another who might have
journeyed hundreds to thousands of miles to work for a
portion of the summer. The carpa, rather limited in size,
brought worshipers into close quarters. Here we see the
Dorcas (the married-women’s auxiliary) performing for
the congregation. In the more transitory conditions
uniforms were harder to come by and much less to keep
consistent, and one can thus see the variation of dress
styles and standards in the carpa. These variations in life
and customs notwithstanding, the hymnals in their hands
facilitated a shared expression of worship. Photograph
Courtesy of Milca Montañez-Vizcarra.
Figure 3.3. The Carpa in Riverbank. The carpa in Riverbank (ca.
1949) offers a glimpse of a sturdier tent whereas the
carpas in Patterson and Sanger match the description of
tents suspended by guy ropes and anchored by stakes.
The tent served as a semipermanent transitional house of
worship for two years. Photograph courtesy of Eugenia
Manzano.
Figure 3.4. The Makeshift Baptistery. In this photograph Felipe
Manzano baptizes in the makeshift baptistery in the
Riverbank carpa. Because baptism counted as the most
important ritual in Apostólico doctrine (as noted in the
previous chapter), a baptistery factored in as a key
feature of some carpas and all temples. Photograph
courtesy of Eugenia Manzano.
Figure 3.5. Sanctifying San Jose’s Soil. Pastor Juan Amaya (center)
kneels to consecrate the ground upon which the new San
 Jose church would be built. He, along with pastor Pilar
Moreno (left), layman Marcelino Castillo (right), and
others, raise their hands, signaling both surrender (of
their physical labor) and victory (of their spiritual travails)
as they gather to sanctify the ground of the Mayfair
District where they would dedicate a new temple.
Photograph courtesy of the José Ortega Photograph
Collection.
Figure 3.6. Breaking U.S. Soil in Sanger. Epifanio Cota, fellow San
Joaquin Valley pioneer and bishop of Northern California,
led Jesús Valdez’s congregation in the groundbreaking
ceremony in the early 1930s. At a time of intense
xenophobia toward Mexicans, Apostólicos built
permanent structures in the United States with U.S. soil.
Photograph from Trujillo et al., Precious Memories.
Figure 3.7. Building with U.S. Soil in Delano. Pilar Moreno (seated,
second from left) oversees the construction of the temple
in Delano. Outside of the frame we do not see the
agricultural fields that surrounded the temple built and
dedicated in 1947. Photograph courtesy of Suzie
Zaragoza-Florian.
Figure 3.8. The Delano Temple. The temple in Delano boasted a
design distinct from its Pentecostal counterparts in the
cities and farming regions of rural California. Without
deep denominational coffers to draw from, the
congregation financed and built it under the supervision
of its pastor Pilar Moreno. Moreno designed and built
similar temples in Bakersfield, Otay, Soledad, and
Phoenix. From Yearbook, Northern District Apostolic
Assembly of Faith in Christ Jesus, unpublished, 1965.
Courtesy of its coeditor, Manuel Ares.
Figure 4.1. Making Tamales in Sanger. Church matriarchs are
remembered for making tamales. That the Sanger
congregation chose to memorialize tamaleras in its 60th
anniversary yearbook speaks to the importance of the
 practice and its centrality in shared memory. Pictured
here are women making tamales in the 1950s.
Photograph from Trujillo et al., Precious Memories.
Figure 4.2. Women and the Tamales Delivery Truck. Apostólico
congregations transformed the tamales fundraiser into
local cottage industries, complete with a streamlined
production and clientele bases. In this 1940s photograph
from Salinas, tamaleras pose proudly next to an early
1940s Chevrolet Carryall, which they customized and
later came to know affectionately as the “tamales truck.”
Photograph courtesy of Milca Montañez-Vizcarra.
Figure 4.3. Artisanal Decor in the Patterson Carpa. Women even
decorated the pulpits with tejidos as shown in this late
1940s picture of a children’s choir in the Patterson area.
The congregation started here in a carpa and by the
early 1960s moved into a temple in Grayson. Photograph
courtesy of Milca Montañez-Vizcarra.
Figure 4.4. Artisanal Decor in the Grayson Temple. In this
photograph longtime presiding bishop, Antonio Nava, led
a service in Grayson near Patterson (ca. mid-1960s);
Jesus Valdez sat behind him. From fresh flowers to
embroidery, the various kinds of artisanal decor filled the
space and lent it a sense of sacredness. Photograph
courtesy of Milca Montañez-Vizcarra.
Figure 4.5. Estandarte de “Esfuerzo cristiano de señoras de la Iglesia
de San José Calif.” Before the Dorcas ministry was
formally organized and named, women’s auxiliary groups
gathered under the name “Esfuerzo Cristiano” (“Christian
Endeavors”) within their respective congregations.
Banner courtesy of Martha Romero and photograph by
the author.
Figure 4.6. Dedication of the Church in Salinas, 1966. This full page
from the unpublished 1966 yearbook of the AAFCJ
Northern District displays multiple photographs taken of
the temple dedication in Salinas. The celebration included
 a parade of all members of the church and those from
surrounding Apostólico churches. Two Dorcas led the
procession with their handmade banner followed, by
ministers, the band, and more Dorcas. Even the choir
“Voces Apostólicas” from Los Angeles directed by Paul
Ares made its way north to participate in the march and
dedication service. Photograph from the Papers of
Manuel Vizcarra.
Figure 5.1. Tulare Orchestra. An orchestra from Tulare at their 1934
performance in Otay, a small town on the U.S.–Mexico
border. The Tulare church later rose to regional
prominence under the pastorate of Epifanio Cota, an
itinerant farm laborer and evangelist (migration made
both occupations possible). Local church bands
performed at special services throughout the state.
Several movement leaders occupy the second row,
showing the importance of these kinds of performances
and showcasing denominational maturation. Photograph
courtesy of the José Ortega Photograph Collection
Figure 5.2. Youth Band from Gonzalez. The periodical that
highlighted this 1946 youth band from Gonzalez (Salinas
Valley) stressed how the small congregation in a small
city strung together an orchestra. These sorts of
disadvantaged circumstances became sources of pride.
Photograph from “La Nube y El Fuego,” Reportero Juvenil
(julio y agosto, 1946), in the Antonio Nava Collection,
Apostolic Assembly Historical Archives.
Figure 5.3. First Youth Choir in Calexico. Between the year of the
budding denomination’s first meeting in 1925, when
leaders informally met under the tentative organization
name of La Iglesia de la Fe Apostólica Pentecostés, to the
securing of a denominational charter in the state of
California as the AAFCJ in 1930, the photographic record
attests to a parallel organization of musical groups and
cultures. Pictured here is a 1928 choir from Calexico
 comprised of twice as many women as men (perhaps
reflecting different vocal ranges). As in figures 5.2 and
5.5, the musical group is pictured at its local context,
unlike the traveling troupe of Tulare (figure 5.1) and the
regional youth choir (figure 5.4). Choirs, such as the one
pictured here, would have been fully expected to perform
in other churches. Apostólico choirs played the dual parts
of propagating their doctrines through performances of
music (an aural experience) as well as through the visual
sights of seeing holiness codes enacted and inscribed as
shown here in the sashes worn by the women
proclaiming “La Divinidad” (“Holiness/Divinity”). Such
aural and visual attestations ran counter to the idea of a
culturally vacuous migrant proletariat and
dehumanization in the profane context of industrial
agriculture, chiefly at the time of this photograph, in the
Imperial Valley. Photograph courtesy of the José Ortega
Photograph Collection.
Figure 5.4. Youth in Uniform. This memorable photograph of women
at the inaugural annual youth convention in 1934 in Otay
serves as a past reference point of holiness dress and
purity as well as a profound statement of the
denomination’s idealized material past. Interviewees
would remember how “women used to dress in long
white tunics.” The photographic evidence strongly
corroborates their memories. The expectations of such
dress standards, however, often goes uncritically
mentioned. Photograph courtesy of the José Ortega
Photograph Collection.
Figure 5.5. Salinas Apostólicos Harvesting. Members of the Salinas
church gather for a quasi-staged photograph in the mid-
1940s. The church familia remembered and kept names
of their fellow believers in a practice which betrayed that
of portraying Mexican as mere laborers. Standing to the
 far right is the eventual presiding bishop of the AAFCJ.
Photograph courtesy of Milca Montañez-Vizcarra.
Figure 5.6. Women Workers at the Driscoll Strawberry Camp, ca.
1948. The Driscoll Strawberry Camp launched a five-year
project in Escalon, just east of Modesto. Apostólicos—
such as Helen Esqueda and Eva Montes pictured here—
comprised the majority of the workers and used the small
labor camp houses as places to host church prayer and
study until they were able to cobble together resources
to purchase a small plot of land offsite in nearby
Riverbank to raise up a carpa. The house pictured here is
a reminder of the many forms that sacred space assumed
and the dire impoverished conditions in which Apostólicos
carved out a socio-religious existence. Photograph
courtesy of Eugenia Manzano.
Figure 5.7. Josie and Jeannie at Work. Eugenia “Jeannie” Manzano
recalls her days on the Driscoll family farm as a
strawberry sharecropper in Escalon where her family
lived among several other Apostólico families. Apostólicos
comprised the majority of workers at the farm. Manzano
remembered the many ways in which the families rallied
to raise up a carpa in nearby Riverbank and later a
temple in Modesto. Photograph courtesy of Eugenia
Manzano.
Figure 5.8. Apostólicas at the Isaac Sánchez Labor Camp. As shown
in this photograph taken by Irma Pérez, the church
familia was comprised of multiple layers of kinship. From
left to right are Irma Pérez’s mother, an acquaintance
who would travel to the camp for church and work, and
Pérez’s aunt. The church familia included the nuclear,
extended, and spiritual family, and its bonds were forged
in the shared work and worship environments.
Photograph courtesy of Irma Pérez.
Figure 6.1. Youth Convention in Phoenix, 1945. Convention
attendees often filled temples well beyond capacity. In
 this photograph and others in the collection, the
aesthetics of worship that characterized temples in
California (as documented in the previous chapters) are
observable. Women in the choir wore the white tunics,
flowers filled the altar area, and banners flanked the
congregation. Lest anyone boast in their work, the
scripture (Ephesians 2:20) painted on the wall in Spanish
in blackletter read, “Built upon the foundation of the
apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the
chief cornerstone.” Below that, the painted ribbon
declared, “God Is Love.” Photograph courtesy of the José
Ortega Photograph Collection.
Figure 6.2. Sowing the Sacred in Salinas. This 1940s photograph
appears to be hardly different from many of the
photographs taken by the alphabet agencies of the 1930
and 1940s, and it is one that captures yet another group
of so-called stoop laborers. Pictured here, the women of
the Salinas church bear the burden and heat of the day
to sustain their own families and to build up the church.
It is perhaps these kinds of intensive labor moments,
inter alia, that former farmworker José Ortega (quoted in
the epigraph) had in mind when he described those “who
knew how to strive and work in difficult times and who
sowed with their sufferings and efforts in the work of
God that which our own eyes now behold and hands now
feel.” Photograph courtesy of Milca Montañez-Vizcarra.
 Acknowledgments

Sowing the Sacred is 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 Michigan’s 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 Reid’s 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 Arbor’s 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. Daniel Ramírez (of whom I will say
more) chaired this dream team committee with a clear end in mind.
Silvia Pedraza pushed me to bring together historical and sociological
studies on immigration and race. Phil Deloria stretched my questions
(and mind!) in directions I didn’t know were possible. Ed Blum made
clearer to me the potential of my archival sources. This book
represents an expanded use of those studies, questions, and archival
sources.
Colleagues at Williams College provided tremendous support for
this project when it was just taking shape as a book proposal in the
2016–2017 academic year. Deep gratitude is in order to Zaid
Adhami, Denise Buell, Ondine Chavoya, Maria Elena Cepeda, Jason
Josephson Storm, Mérida Rua, Carmen Whalen, and Saadia Yacoob.
No one is to be thanked more than Jacqueline Hidalgo, who took an
interest in my project and whose sage advice is unmatched and . . .
dare I say of “scriptural” quality?
Amherst College has offered generous support for research,
travel, and writing. A yearlong sabbatical provided by the Louisville
Institute and Amherst College afforded me the much-needed time to
compose an almost whole new manuscript based on merely two
chapters of the dissertation and to finally send it off to Oxford
University Press, where Cynthia Read has provided excellent editorial
leadership to see this manuscript through. (Thanks are in order as
well to the anonymous peer reviewers.) The Louisville Institute’s
leadership, Edwin Aponte and Don Richter, offered invaluable
direction during that year. My colleagues in the Religion Department
at Amherst have proven most kind and generous: Andrew Dole,
Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos, Maria Heim, Tariq Jaffer, and Susan
Niditch. I count myself lucky to have briefly overlapped in the
department with Michael Amoruso, Robert Doran, Jason Jeffries, and
David Wills. Along the way, Lisa Ballou ensured that I settled into my
new role at Amherst and provided much needed technical support
with all things teaching and research. An unexpected treat of
teaching at Amherst has been the opportunity to work with
colleagues in Latinx and Latin American studies: Sony Coráñez
Bolton, Mary Hicks, Rick López, Solsi del Moral, Paul Schroeder
Rodriguez, Leah Schmalzbauer, and Eva M. Díaz, who not only ran a
smooth program for us all but also provided a few graphics for this
book. Colleagues both here at Amherst and in the larger Five College
network have offered critical feedback on my work along the way
and provided a thriving intellectual environment to discuss all things
religion and American studies: Felicity Aulino, Amy Cox Hall, Bill
Girard, Colin Hoag, Lili Kim, Jallicia Jolly, Mona Oraby, and Kiara Vigil.
Finally, research assistants provided support by transcribing
interviews, tracking sources, and sifting through data: Tatyana
Castillo- Ramos, Olivia Doyle, Obed Narcisse, Manuel Rodriguez, and
Ana Vieytez.
Working as a historian across various academic fields and
disciplines has been rewarding. I became accustomed to switching
gears from presenting and collaborating with colleagues in U.S.
history, American studies, Latinx studies, religious studies, and more.
Michigan, Williams, and Amherst provided generous funds to attend
numerous academic conferences and seminars, providing the means
to establish important, lasting connections. To this end, I am
especially thankful to those who have provided feedback or have
asked me to share early drafts of chapters: Sammy Alfaro, Jonathan
Calvillo, Morgan “Ted” Cassady, Priscilla Cortez, Dara Delgado, Roy
Fisher, Erika Helgen, Brett Hendrickson, Felipe Hinojosa, Deborah
Kanter, Candace Lukasik, the late Luis León, Nestór Medina, A. G.
Miller, Jose Montes, Richard Newton, Leah Payne, Aida Ramos, Jorge
Busone Rodriguez, Benjamin Rolsky, Roberto Lint Sagarena, Arlene
Sanchez-Walsh, Ekaputra Tupamahu, and Donald Whitt III. Erica
Ramirez and I began and finished our respective programs right
around the same time; her friendship and willingness to share work
has meant so much to me. My work on Pentecostalism would not be
where it is without Andrea Johnson’s friendship and timely feedback.
I owe her a great debt.
I could not have foreseen so early into this journey how it would
lead to a greater public history project: the founding of the first-ever
interdenominational Latino Pentecostal archival collection. Under the
direction of Daniel Ramírez, I worked with a creative team to process
extensive archival collections donated to the David Allan Hubbard
Library at Fuller Theological Seminary. I especially wish to thank the
families of Manuel Gaxiola and Manuel Vizcarra, who all graciously
entrusted us with materials that are now available for study.
Archivist Adam Gossman offered the necessary support to bring the
dusty records to life that Felipe Agredano, Ben Lopez, Hannah
Lopez, Milca Montañez Vizcarra, Claudia Rosales, Abraham Ruiz,
Mark Vizcarrra, and I processed. Milca’s unwavering dedication to
the project helped bring this vision to fruition. Ismael Martin del
Campo II and Ismael Martin del Campo III at the Apostolic Assembly
Historical Archives facilitated my visit there and brought out key
collections and documents for me to consult. Herminia “Minnie”
Martinez’s historical sleuthing through public records on the early
histories of Pentecostal leaders and churches yielded priceless
historical documents. My 24 interviewees for Sowing the Sacred
entrusted to me their stories and reflections of living during hard
times and provided copies of material and leads that proved
essential to many of the chapters in this book. Manuel Ares
graciously provided me with historical materials and offered critical
interpretations of Pentecostal history, as did Milca Montañez Vizcarra.
They set up the necessary introductions to earn the trust of my
interviewees.
These acknowledgments would be incomplete without expressing
my deepest gratitude to the one who directed me on the path to
accomplish this work. In the acknowledgments of his book, Migrating
Faith, Daniel Ramírez noted that if he could be half of the mentor
that Grant Wacker was to him, he would have accomplished a great
thing. Dan, you’ve accomplished more than a great thing as a result
of your unwavering support from day one at Michigan, your
mentorship at the numerous conferences we attended together, the
feedback you provided me on my scholarship, and the invitation to
participate in the Latino Pentecostal archive project at Fuller
Theological Seminar. As a doctoral advisor you have brought out the
best in my work. I humbly admit that I could not have chosen a
better mentor. Míl gracias and a hearty “PdC” to you.
I have saved my immediate family for last since they know best
what the completion of this journey symbolizes. My sister Fatima
showed endless love and motivated me to accomplish this for the
family. My brother Arlis was my biggest fan, always enthusiastic to
listen to my report of great nuggets I found in the archives. Ruth
Leon Barba, author, historian, and my abiding love, offered a world
of support throughout the entire process, moving with me to
Massachusetts and taking up a new career as a teacher. I write this
with our four-month-old on my lap; Daniel Francisco rarely takes a
break from smiling, squirming, and laughing. May this book make
my family proud.
Finally, these last few sentences are hard to write. I’ve put it off
until the end of writing this manuscript. Almost every time I would
call Francisco Barba (my dad) he would ask, “When’s the book
coming out?” Dad, I deeply regret that you never got a chance to
see this book published. You saw the process and the long days of
writing on (and damaging) your dining room table, and you always
prepared a place for me when I’d visit from Michigan or
Massachusetts. You were my rock all along. When I packed up your
belongings, I found copies of a few articles I wrote. While some of
that work hints toward the topics in this book, it’s just not quite the
same. You celebrated with me when I signed the contract for this
book at your house. Nobody in the world was prouder of me than
you, the very one who gave me a love for history, languages, and
world cultures in the first place. I have written this in honor of you
and Candelaria (mom), who passed on many years before you did.
Today I have reaped the benefits of the decades of hard work you
sowed. Your dedication to our family was something sacred.
 Introduction
The Sacralized Profane

There are ten Christian churches for whites alone in the community, not
counting a small Mormon group and the one or two unorganized religious
groups which meet in private homes. Besides these, there are three Negro
Organizations and there was at one time a Mexican Pentecostal group. . .
The schismatic Pentecostal church represents a still lower level on the scale
of formality, a higher one on the scale of emotional appeal.

This schismatic Pentecostal group is made up entirely of laborers, of whom

82 percent are unskilled. Its ministers have always been lay people—farm
laborers in fact. At first they met in a tent; now they have a dingy frame
building.1
—Walter Goldschmidt, on churches in rural California in the 1940s

La tarea no era fácil y el proceso resultó lento y doloroso. Al principio la

mayoría de los convertidos eran trabajadores del campo, familias enteras de
emigrados que seguían las cosechas de California. Trabajaban todo el día
en el campo y en la noche tenían un culto de cuatro o cinco horas.
Cantaban y predicaban con todo el fervor y entusiasmo que sólo puede
tener el hombre recién convertido. Componían sus propios himnos y los
cantaban con acompañamiento de guitarra y hablaban en lenguas y oraban
con toda la fuerza de sus pulmones. Los inconversos que vivían en el
mismo campo, o se les unían o se retiraban. El verano era “tiempo de
pizca” en más de un sentido. Toda la familia se acomodaba en un
dilapidado “Fordcito” y se iban a cosechar frutas, vegetales y almas. A los
niños no les molestaban las inconveniencias, aprendían a amar a la Iglesia y
crecían en medio de una familia que hallaba en la nueva religión todo lo
que necesitaban, mimados y atendidos no sólo por los parientes sino por
todos los miembros de la Iglesia, que eran ahora una nueva familia.

(The task was not easy and the process unfolded slowly and painfully. In
the beginning the majority of the converts were fieldworkers, whole families
of immigrants that followed the harvests of California. They worked all day
in the fields and at night had church services that lasted from four to five
hours. They sang and preached with all fervor and enthusiasm that can
 only be possessed by a recent convert. They composed their own hymns
and sang them accompanied by guitar, and they spoke in tongues and
praised with all the strength of their lungs. The unconverted that lived in
the same camps either joined them or retreated. The summer was a “time
of picking” [the harvest] in more than one sense. The whole family would
pack into a little, dilapidated Ford and they would go to harvest fruit,
vegetables, and souls. The inconveniences did not bother the children, they
learned to love the Church and they grew up amidst a family that found in
the new religion everything they needed, mothered and cared for by not
only their parents but also all the members of the Church, which was now
to them a new family.2 )
—Manuel Gaxiola, on Mexican Pentecostal fieldworkers in California

Enter the religious landscape of California’s industrial agriculture in

the 1940s. Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt’s early 1940s
reconnaissance tour of the social scene in the little town of Wasco
offers us a composite picture of religious institutions in a typical
industrial-agriculture town in the state. Anthropologists and
sociologists of the day pointed to the proliferation of Pentecostal
churches as evidence of industrial farming’s undesirable social
outcomes. In particular, they noted the enthusiastic and emotional
expressions of Pentecostal services and how the recently
dispossessed Dust Bowl or “Okie” migrants flocked to these
churches.3 By the 1940s, Dorothea Lange’s photograph of the Okie
Migrant Mother capturing the pathos of white plight had surfaced
and caught the national spotlight. California, many noted, had a
migration problem, as many “undesirables” flooded into the state.
Women such as the one captured in Lange’s photograph Revival
Mother, standing and worshiping with eyes closed and raised hands
in a makeshift garage church, typified the poverty of Pentecostals
described by academic researchers.4
To understand the dynamics of class, race, and religion at play in
rural California, Goldschmidt advanced the “denominational
stratification” model in which Congregationalist, Methodist, Baptist,
and Seventh-day Adventist (listed in order of rank from highest to
lowest) churches formed the upper strata of the town’s elite nuclear
churches. Professionals, business owners, farm operators, clerks,
white-collar workers, and skilled laborers overwhelmingly filled the
pews of these established churches. Nazarene, Holiness, and
Pentecostals comprised the lower strata, with “schismatic
Pentecostals” occupying the base. With over 82% of members as
unskilled farm laborers, the various groups that comprised the
“schismatic Pentecostals” refused fellowship with other Christians
and even Pentecostals from the Assemblies of God. These
“schismatic Pentecostals,” in many cases “Oneness Pentecostals,”
drew lines between themselves and others over matters such as
formalities, letting the Holy Spirit have “the right of way” during
church services, compromising on doctrines pertaining to salvation
and holiness dress codes, and even the validity of the Trinity.5 These
lower-strata churches welcomed white community outsiders. In fact,
Goldschmidt’s entire model reflects the place of whites in the
denominational stratification. “The outsiders were Mexican, Negroes
and whites,” with the first two tucked away into subcommunities of
their own.6 If white Pentecostals lay at the very bottom of society,
Mexican Pentecostals remained yet further below. But where do we
find Mexican Pentecostal farmworkers? Mexicans, after all, predated,
outnumbered, and outlasted Okie migrant workers in the fields.7
Manuel Gaxiola clues us in to the texture of this very bottom
stratum. Counter to Goldschmidt’s disinterested outsider perspective,
Manuel Gaxiola knew intimately what schismatic Mexican
Pentecostals were up to and where to find them. Gaxiola had joined
the Mexican Pentecostal ranks as a farmworker and labored in
California until his 1944 deportation to Tijuana.8 He returned to the
United States decades later to complete a master’s thesis published
in 1970 by Pasadena’s William Carey library as “La serpiente y la
paloma: Análisis del crecimiento de la Iglesia Apostólica de la Fe en
Cristo Jesús de México” (The Serpent and the Dove: Analysis of the
Growth of the Apostolic Church of the Faith in Christ Jesus of
Mexico). In its conclusion he painted a portrait of Apostolic Mexican
Pentecostals in the United States, a portrait upon which the epigraph
that begins this chapter draws. And although he only rendered a
sample description of U.S. Mexican Pentecostals, historians can
detect where to begin looking and digging.
Buried under the denominational strata, we can find the Mexican
Pentecostals if we use the right tools for excavation. Goldschmidt’s
reference to their church services in private homes and short-lived
presence in Wasco offers us a potential starting point, and Gaxiola
tells us what to look for. My inquiry into Pentecostalism has found
that because Pentecostals met in private homes, tents, and “dingy
frame buildings,” they are elusive in the written records. Mexican
Pentecostals are yet harder to locate, as they often failed to appear
in public sources such as city newspapers and county directories.
Christian denominations fell along very clear axes of socioeconomic
status and racial differentiation in Goldschmidt’s sociological model.
In this book I examine the longer historical roots and culture of a
group buried far below Goldschmidt’s geological model. Although he
knew about their presence, Mexican Pentecostals did not even
constitute a stratum in his model of denominational stratification.
Gaxiola and his fellow Pentecostals fared far too poorly. Here we
begin our excavation.

Pentecostal Nomenclature: Trinitarian and

Oneness Pentecostalism and Apostólicos
The people under study in this book are Apostólico (Apostolic)
farmworkers in California. During the time period under
consideration (1910s–1960s), Apostólicos in California were
overwhelmingly of Mexican descent. Most only spoke Spanish (with
bilingualism becoming increasingly more common and acceptable in
the late 1960s); thus, I have elected to use the Spanish term
“Apostólico” rather than “Apostolic” so as to avoid a linguistic
anachronism and to differentiate them from various other
Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal religious bodies in the United States
that also took on the term “Apostolic.” Moreover, “Apostólico” was
their preferred term of identification. While the book mostly focuses
on The Apostolic Assembly of the Faith in Christ Jesus (La Asamblea
Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús), the term Apostólico here is
better suited to also encompass those who maintained similar beliefs
but left the denomination.
Apostólicos are in the minority of Christians in the United States.
The majority of Christians in the United States maintain a belief in
the Trinitarian nature of God and perform baptisms “in the name of
the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit” as part of their
denominational creeds. Interrogations of these doctrines split the
early Pentecostal movement. The Assemblies of God, the largest
predominantly white Pentecostal denomination in the United States,
for example, maintains these historical Christian doctrines. But in
1916 about 27% of its ministers defected and organized the early
Oneness Pentecostal movement.9 Hostilities between the two groups
ensued for decades. Most Oneness Pentecostals point to 1913 as the
definitive year of the modern-day restoration of their ancient beliefs
and practices. At the World Wide Camp Meeting in Arroyo Seco,
California, Canadian evangelist Robert McAlister suggested that the
phrase “in name of Jesus” (as read in the Acts of the Apostles 2:38)
should be invoked at baptism instead of the traditional formula of “in
the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (as read in Matthew
28:19). This precipitated three years of debate over the proper
(read: “more biblical”) performative language at baptism, which, in
turn, pointed to larger doctrinal implications about the very nature of
God. Jesus’ name baptism proponents began to rethink the nature of
the Trinity. Eventually they proffered explanations for the oneness
(modalist) doctrine in which God expressed himself in three modes
but was one person. Unlike Trinitarians, who have maintained that
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are coexistent, coeternal, and
coequal, they propounded that God manifested himself as the Father
in creation, the Son in redemption, and the Holy Spirit who deals
with humanity today. Oneness Pentecostals did not deny that the
Trinitarian baptismal formula was a historical ritual, but they rejected
the idea that first-generation and first-century Christians baptized
accordingly. The difference in the proper baptismal formula caused
the initial rift, but the rejection of the Trinity created a gulf too deep
and wide to bridge.10
Mexican Oneness Pentecostals forged an almost entirely
autonomous trajectory. In fact, they still point to a different origin
point of Jesus’ name baptism, which predates the 1913 World Wide
Camp Meeting at Arroyo Seco. The semi-centennial history (1966) of
La Asamblea Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús (AAFCJ) points to
1909 as the first known baptism of a Mexican in Jesus’ name. By
1912 others had been baptized accordingly. A significant watershed
moment occurred in 1916 when migrant laborer Marcial de la Cruz
baptized Antonio Nava, the eventual patriarch of the movement.
That milestone has long been declared as the genesis of the U.S.
Apostólico movement. The date as to when Apostólicos began to
articulate a modalist/oneness position is unclear, but their early
Jesus’ name baptisms certainly placed them within the Jesus’ name
camp well before 1916 when their black and white Oneness
counterparts defected from the Assemblies of God ranks.11 As
Mexican Oneness Pentecostals, Apostólicos held a religious position
that could hardly be more on the margins of ethno-religious
orthodoxy and respectability: their heterodox Oneness position
placed them in the miniscule minority camp of Christians who the
rejected the classical Trinitarian godhead formula; their heterodox
position was doubly compounded by their practice and embodiment
of holiness Pentecostalism, a denigrated early-20th-century
movement often written off by observers as “superficial
philosophies,” “fanatical,”12 “cultish,” “heresies,”13 “unstable,”
“chaotic,”14 and “disgusting . . . delusions and insanities,” as well as
“the last vomit of Satan.”15 Rather than fighting for respectability in
mainstream society, they incubated alternative religious communities
in industrial agricultural fields. Those communities are the topic of
this book; how I approach them is the topic of the next sections.
 Cultural History in California: Documenting
Farmworkers in the Profane Fields

Photography and the Sacralized Profane

Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph, Migrant Mother, symbolized the
zeitgeist of Depression-era America and the calamitous fall of
Midwestern white-stock Americans into the lumpenproletariat in the
fields of California. Agriculture in mid-20th-century California is
generally associated with looming and lasting images of the Dust
Bowl, the Okie migration, and the coterminous Great Depression, all
captured largely by government photographers working for President
Roosevelt’s “alphabet” agencies: the Resettlement Administration
(RA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and the Office of
Wartime Information (OWI). Popular documentary and literary works
published in 1939, such as federal government photographer
Dorothea Lange and University of California Berkeley economics
professor Paul Taylor’s American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion
and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, placed white workers
indelibly at the forefront of the migrant workers’ struggle.16
In Sowing the Sacred, I ask: What stories are portrayed about
Mexican religious life if we examine the photographs taken by the
farmworkers themselves? I answer this by using photographs taken
by Apostólicos themselves from the 1920s to the 1960s. The work of
historian Richard Steven Street, especially his extensive analysis of
photographs of farmworkers, is particularly useful here. In his books
Photographing Farmworkers in California and Everyone Had
Cameras, Street examines how images of farmworkers produced
national narratives about the place of ethnic laborers in the fields.17
He notes in the former the rarity of photographs taken by
farmworkers themselves, and it is precisely these kinds of
photographs that Sowing the Sacred brings to light.18 Sowing the
Sacred also reflects concepts from literary scholar Marianne Hirsch’s
Family Frames in order to see how images inform extended kinship
networks and vice versa.19 Furthermore, Apostólico photographs
build upon Depression-era photographs of farmworkers and religious
lives, as examined by historian Colleen McDannell’s work Picturing
Faith.20 Photography, as suggested by historian Rachel Lindsey,
“actively shaped imaginative, intellectual, political, and theological
worlds,” and photographs “brokered the religious world their
beholders inhabited.”21 The photographs in Sowing the Sacred are
neither “commonplace” or “vernacular photographs” as the ones
explored by Lindsey; nor do they lie in the vein of real (as opposed
to propagandistic) pictures as taken by Depression-era government
photographers and studied by McDannell.22 I develop my own
concept of 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. The photographs themselves constitute essential
elements of the stories of migration, baptism, material culture,
gender, and church life.23 In these photographs the sacred is evinced
in conditions of decades of exploitation and hard labor.
My notion of what constitutes the “profane” is not simply based
on the classical dichotomy of the sacred and the profane. Rather, it
rests on my understanding of Mexican American workers in the
worst (exploitative, dirty, sickness-inducing, fatal, dispossessed,
stigmatized, etc.) line of labor in California and the physical and
social repercussions of their involvement in this kind of work.24
Social critic Carey McWilliams’s description of California’s
agribusiness as a “peculiar institution” further informs my concept of
the profane. He diagnosed the brute realities in the fields as the
“cancer which lies beneath the beauty, richness, and fertility.”25
Throughout this book, the term “profane” is used as a euphemism
for the abundantly documented and notorious conditions that
Mexicans faced in industrial agriculture in California during this
period: dehumanization, biological reductionism, delousing, DDT
fumigation, pesticide exposure while out at work, wage exploitation,
relegation to the status of replaceable laborers, squalid housing,
polluted water, denial of cultural and legal citizenship, and
deportation along with its constant threats. Such a formulation of
the profane allows us to better understand the gravitas of
Apostólicos’ consecrated undertakings as the “sacralized profane.”

The Profane in California: Mexican Labor in History

and Historiography
Sowing the Sacred draws from scholarship on the broader topic of
Mexican agricultural work in the American Southwest. Efforts to
highlight the plight of Mexican workers were largely obscured by the
presumed misplacement of Okies in the fields; the empathy that
whites garnered made it unequivocally clear that white-stock
Midwestern Americans did not belong out in the fields next to
Mexicans, Filipinos, Blacks, and other racialized bodies. Politicians
and industrial agriculturalists had argued since at least the 1920s
that the kind of hard farm labor in the Southwest was unsuitable for
white families.26 The swift response from the federal, state, and
local government to remedy the “Okie problem” with various forms
of government assistance attests to this privilege. Historian Devra
Weber argues that Okies’ “citizenship and white skin . . . were
ultimately more important in propelling them out of the fields than in
changing the conditions in the fields.”27 Whites’ duration in the fields
was short-lived with postwar economic opportunities assuaging their
plight. By the 1950s they had largely left the fields.28 Despite the
fact that the United States deported Mexicans in the 1930s and
growers sought out Okies to fill the labor vacuum, the heavy
presence of Mexican workers not only preceded Okies, it also
remained a staple of fieldwork long after Okies left the fields in favor
of greater opportunities provided by relief programs. This long arc of
Mexicans’ obscured presence in this labor sector contributes to the
deeply rooted profane nature of their work.
The Mexican Revolution of the 1910s set into motion the exodus
of over one million Mexicans into the United States, or about 10% of
the Mexican population, qualifying them the largest ethnic group of
farmworkers in the Southwest by the 1920s.29 Scholars such as
economist Paul Taylor and anthropologist Manuel Gamio began to
document the experiences and exploitation of Mexicans in the fields
as early as the late 1920s.30 Their observations were followed by
trenchant critiques of California’s own “peculiar institutions” or
“factories in the fields” leveraged by Carey McWilliams.31 But with
the 1960s rise of the Chicano Movement (as part of the larger civil
rights movement)7, a new wave of critical scholars launched the first
of several historical surveys to inscribe Mexicans into U.S. history.32
Much of that history for many years dealt with Mexican farm
laborers,33 and, not surprisingly, books about farm labor in the state
would focus largely on Mexican workers.34 The beginning of this
historiography coincided with the terminus of the Bracero Program in
1964 and the rise of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta’s United Farm
Workers movement.35
The role of federal and state governments with respect to
immigration control and the management of growers’ “cheap” labor
forces has been taken up by economists, sociologists, and historians
alike. Studies on the Mexican Repatriation of 1929–1939 (in which
anywhere between one-fourth to one-third of Mexicans were
repatriated to Mexico), perennial immigration raids, and Operation
Wetback of 1954 (a U.S. program to deport undocumented
Mexicans) have shown the long-term effects of deportation on rural
and urban communities. In these sweeping repatriation efforts, law
enforcement agents rounded up children, women, and men in
massive raids.36 According to historian George Sánchez, every
Mexican family during the years of the Mexican Repatriation had to
confront the decision to leave.37
Most monographs on Mexican farmworkers examine the narrative
of male workers, in large part owing to the fact that the Bracero
Program, a guest worker program that only legally contracted men,
assumes center stage in histories about farmworkers. It is a misstep,
however, to treat Braceros as an atomized unit of labor, as they were
embedded in family units that may or may not have traveled with
them.38 Furthermore, many Mexican laborers understood themselves
to be braceros in the more general sense of workers, even if it
meant that they had not been officially contracted. Therefore, I
differentiate between Bracero Program workers (always spelled with
a capital “B”) and those who worked in the same camps but were
often referred to as bracero laborers (another case in which the
working Mexican body is subsumed as a particular kind of laborer).
Indeed, aside from the official program in the larger context of
industrial agriculture, a rich narrative of women workers, or
braceras, took shape, and their own histories provoke a
reconfiguration of labor in the domestic sphere, the field, and the
church. Chapters 4 and 5 of Sowing the Sacred take up these issues
precisely with a consideration of the material world that women
created and curated. More locally, Sowing the Sacred gleans much
from the seminal work of historians of Mexican labor in places such
as the Imperial Valley, the Oxnard Plain, the Citrus Belt of Southern
California, the Central Valley, Salinas, and San Jose.39 (A study on
Mexican life in the Central Valley is long overdue.) Their subjection
to harsh conditions and their placement in the fields are directly tied
to the meaning and making of race in the United States.40

Race and Representation in California

Against this backdrop, Sowing the Sacred examines the moments of
resistance, self-determination, and flourishing of a racialized,
autonomous Mexican American denomination. The shifting and
intersecting contexts of race, immigration, and labor were always at
play in this era for the people under study and manifested
themselves in a variety of ways. The process of the racialization of
Mexicans follows a longer historical arc that extends beyond the
advent of industrial agriculture in the state. When Mexicans entered
the fields in mass numbers, their “racial script” had partly been
written.
The racial views of U.S. leaders regarding Mexicans came into
formation during the 1846–1848 U.S.–Mexico War. The United
States’ expansion was firmly anchored in the notion of Manifest
Destiny, which itself relied on a racist logic about the superiority of
one race of people over another. The looming conflict led notions of
Anglo-Saxonism to further assume explicitly racial overtones.41
Military might buttressed the racial logics at play. At the conclusion
of the war, former Vice President and Secretary of State, Senator
John C. Calhoun of South Carolina argued against the incorporation
of Mexico because of inevitable racial problems. He argued, “I know
further, sir, that we have never dreamt of incorporating into our
Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To
incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of
incorporating an Indian race.”42 Others upheld similar views after the
annexation of the Southwest. In the famous presidential race
between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglass, the latter pointed
to Mexicans as proof of the lamentable results of whites mixing with
others, for Mexicans were “the amalgamation of white men, Indians,
and negroes.”43
Whites legislated and regulated the social structure and cultural
representation for entire populations in the Southwest. Ideas about
race come to bear especially when they are “publicly articulated and
institutionalized.”44 For the remainder of the 19th century and well
into the 20th century, the ratio of land possession switched hands
entirely as permitted by legalized discrimination; Mexicans
throughout the borderlands from Texas to California faced an array
of legal, economic, political, and social forms of racism:
disenfranchisement, disqualification from citizenship, usurious taxes
(properties then sold pennies on the dollar to Anglos), usurpation of
land grants, segregation, relegation to the lowest paid and most
opprobrious work, and in many sites, lynching, police violence, and
vigilante rule. From Texas to California, the dominant white Anglo
class set in place “Juan Crow” laws segregating many public and
private institutions (schools, restaurants, churches, worksites, etc.),
upholding policies such as “No Niggers, Mexicans, or Dogs
Allowed.”45 Mexicans (including those granted citizenship by the
1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), according to historian David
Gutiérrez, “would not be afforded anything near equal rights in
American society” and for the rest of the century were “relegated to
an inferior caste-like status in the region’s evolving social system.”46
In California, “White male immigrants became farmers, proprietors,
professionals, and white collar employees, while the Mexican,
Japanese, Chinese, and Indian male populations were securely
ensconced at the bottom end of the class structure as unskilled
manual workers.”47 A paradigm of white domination and supremacy
marked racial dynamics among Mexicans: those who were viewed as
Spanish (read: white) enjoyed more robust civil and property rights
under the 1848 treaty while mestizo, Christian Indians, and
Afromestizos faced greater degrees of disenfranchisement.48 The
biological formulations of race and their accompanying structural
racism would continue well into the 20th century.
By WWI, Mexicans comprised the majority of farmworkers in parts
of California. In the United States, the biological and cultural
arguments about race shaped how Mexicans were viewed as a
temporary workforce that posed racial threats to whiteness but
offered abundant benefits to the economy. The first Mexico–U.S.
guestworker program launched during WWI and extended until 1922
at the behest of growers, setting into motion a decades-long trend
of a loosely regulated Mexican agricultural labor migration.49 This
move coincided with decades of heightened surveillance of Mexicans
more generally, increased border enforcement, ramped-up
deportation sweeps and threats, an inexorable stigmatization of
Mexicans who took on the brunt of the criminal nature of “illegality”
tied to immigration, and a swelling number of backdoor tête-à-tête
deals between growers, politicians, and border security.50 “The
formation of the migratory agricultural workforce,” according to
historian Mae Ngai, “was perhaps the central element in the broader
process of modern Mexican racial formation in the United States.”51
By the late 1920s proponents of industrial agriculture argued that
Mexicans constituted an inherently hypermobile class of people,
ideally and racially suited for toilsome labor.52
The growing immigration conundrum was based on racist
formulations about biology and culture. The term “stoop laborer”
was never a neutral term, as it was used to describe Latino and
Asian workers’ innate and “natural” ability to perform long hours of
work stooped over.53 Some dehumanized Mexican workers more
explicitly. One late 1920s statement by a prominent eugenecist
presented to the House Committee on Immigration viewed Mexicans
as possessing “minds [that] run to nothing higher than the animal
functions—eat, sleep and sexual debauchery.”54 Such common
sentiments can be traced to the early years when Mexican workers
came to fill the labor vacuum caused by WWI. One California farmer
forthrightly confessed, “We want Mexicans because we can treat
them as we cannot treat any other living men. . . . We can control
them at night behind bolted gates, with a stockade eight feet high
surmounted by barbed wire. . . . We make them work under armed
guards in the fields.”55 A late 1930s opinion of a deputy sheriff of
Kern County is particularly revealing. When reporting to the La
Follette Committee hearing (convened to investigate abuses of
farmworkers and the suppression of collective bargaining), he
praised farmers as “our best people” who “keep our county going”
and in the same statement disparaged Mexican farmworkers: “But
the Mexicans are trash. They have no standard of living. We herd
them like pigs.”56 In the same breath, the deputy sheriff uttered a
sentiment that many held: Mexicans’ labor was desired but their
lives were disparaged.
In reality the racialization of Mexicans went hand in hand with
their containment, as evident in the enforcement of the border and
debates about restricting Mexican immigration. Exemptions were
lifted at times for Mexican workers, thus creating the long trope of
Mexicans as bodies for labor (later implicated for “taking American
jobs”). The federal government, to be sure, ramped up immigration
enforcement mostly after the early 1920s in several sweeping
immigration policies that have continued well into the 21st century
but all along implemented immigration sweeps and deportations, at
times in collaboration with growers.57
California as a place of convergence (à la historian Patricia
Limerick’s conceptualization of the American West) has made for
varied constructions of race, labor, and immigration throughout the
state’s history.58 In California especially, the process of racialization
was inseparable from work in the lowest sectors of a highly
segmented labor economy. Natalia Molina’s How Race Is Made in
America demonstrates how the long immigration regime from the
1920s to the 1960s (the time period within this book) deployed
“racial scripts” to understand the “place” of minorities in the country.
Racial scripts demonstrate that “racialized groups are linked across
time and space.”59 With regard to Mexicans, racial scripts ensured
that their place in the field would be perceived as natural. Molina
maintains that one of “the key ways to establish Mexican
immigration as a problem was to use racial scripts to compare
Mexicans to racialized groups already familiar to Americans” and
further shows how the legacy of slavery and black sharecroppers in
the South provided the framework for the racial script of nonwhite
Americans as the primary doers of hard agricultural labor.60 The
“vast, repetitive cycle of recruitment, employment, exploitation, and
expulsion” of one group (usually nonwhite) after another
characterizes California’s agricultural labor system.61
Mexicans came to the foreground as the clear majority of
agricultural laborers during a period of what Molina describes as an
“immigration regime” (1924–1965).62 During this time the United
States witnessed an unprecedented debate about immigration,
ethnicity, race, and eugenics. A rigid system of racial classification
that consistently kept whites obstinately at the top survived this era.
So, too, did a stubborn matrix of racism that excluded many from
legal and cultural citizenship, access to decent jobs, educational
institutions, housing, and a host of assumed basic rights and
privileges.63 The plasticity of race would continue to center on who
could access whiteness and its accompanying privileges.
The justification for racism gradually moved away from arguments
grounded in eugenics and instead focused on differences in class,
culture, and national background. The racist arguments against
Mexicans persisted, informed mostly by the large number of
Mexicans working for meager wages. Mexicans in the United States
have largely comprised a working class in the fields through the
different stages of “racial formation” from the 1920s to the 1960s.
They lived in a political, social, and economic structure dominated by
white growers who held in their hands (almost exclusively) the keys
to social mobility (law, finance, policy, etc.). This dynamic gave white
growers the power to influence cultural representations and the
platform to frame popular portrayals of Mexican illegality and
criminality.64 The formation of the U.S. Border Patrol in the 1920s
and its policies depended on nativist notions founded on a wretched
irony of desiring Mexican labor in large numbers while despising
their presence outside of the fields. Threats of deportation remained
constant and continued in waves throughout the 1920s, swelled in
the 1930s during the Mexican Repatriation, and crested during the
“wetback era” of the 1940s and 1950s in which newly strengthened
immigration and border enforcement agents expelled nearly one
million Mexicans from California. Deportations continued in the “post
wetback era,” as did the narrative of Mexican illegality and
undesirability.65 Such deportation campaigns and long-standing
discrimination remind us of how Mexican farmworkers during the
entire period covered in this book were thought to be laborers of an
“inferior race,” suited for “hard labor,” always temporary, and were
never to become citizens.66 This context of racism and labor
exploitation comprised a major aspect of the “profane” conditions
under which countless Mexican toiled.

Power and Resistance

The millions of Mexican laborers in the social periphery should
behoove us to consider the ample room for moments of resistance in
the highly asymmetrical power balance between growers and
farmworkers. Although growers in California created a vast labor
system—backed by a powerful legal apparatus and law enforcement
—to maintain a disempowered workforce, farmworkers resisted in
their attempts to mediate transformation and opportunity. Resistance
takes on many forms in this context of migrant labor in which
industrial agriculture was specifically designed to keep farmworkers
on the move. Thus, resistance can assume the form of striving for
permanency, using of water for unauthorized purposes (e.g.,
baptisms), forging of communities and a larger denomination,
building of houses of worship, and thriving as a racialized and
stigmatized religious community of laborers. In Sowing the Sacred, I
excavate multiple forms of religious resistance, self-determination,
and survival that in their context invite socially and politically
resistant readings.
Sowing the Sacred draws from the work of anthropologist James
Scott in thinking about the long “hidden transcripts” recorded by the
acts of farmworkers. His concepts of the “infrapolitics of the
powerless” (low-profile acts such as gossip) as well as the “moments
of political electricity” (“when, often for the first time in memory, the
hidden transcript is spoken directly and publicly in the teeth of
power”) constitute the breadth of the spectrum of resistance.67 The
way in which I see how the “strategies” of those in power were
relentlessly interrupted by “tactics” and quotidian practices of
farmworkers is informed by the work of philosopher Michel de
Certeau.68 My reading of hidden transcripts is further anchored in
historical work both in religion and ethnic studies to see the ways in
which people written out of history can not only be re-inscribed but
also reclaim space.69 Historian Hjamil Martínez-Vázquez argues with
respect to Latina/o religious history that “praxis acquires subversive
qualities” and that “analysis and interpretation need to focus on the
representation of these activities as subversive actions.”70 Sowing
the Sacred lays out forms of religious resistance that cannot be
decoupled from the context in which structures of power lay deeply
in the soil.
Disproportionate power marked California’s landscapes. Laborers
toiled in “factory farms,” gigantic sites of production that, according
to Carey McWilliams’s trenchant critique, legally “masquerade[d] as
farms . . . enjoy[ing] complete immunity from virtually every form of
state and federal social legislation.”71 In 1929, for example, while the
state only accounted for 2.2% of the nation’s total number of farms,
farms grew to such enormous sizes that California accounted for
36% of large-scale farms in the United States. The state boasted the
“most diverse agriculture, the most productive and profitable farms,
the longest irrigation canal, the biggest winery, and the largest
agricultural cannery.”72 By then the state also boasted the largest
cotton ranches in the country.73 California agriculture and industry
were one and the same. An interlocking network of farming
associations, cooperatives, bureaus, and organizations fought to
regulate their employees’ working conditions and wages, eschewing
state and federal government efforts to establish fair and fixed wage
policies for farmworkers. They colluded with state actors, banks, and
law enforcement to wield power over proletarian lives. Among the
most insidious of their strategies was their use of undercover agents
and provocateurs as strike breakers.74 The possibility for attaining
any power seemed bleakest in the state’s labyrinthine fields, groves,
and vineyards. Subaltern farmworkers resisted in many creative
ways, finding some semblance of reprieve. Throughout this book I
demonstrate how photographs offer us a window to look into how
Apostólicos, to borrow from Thomas Tweed, “made homes” and
“crossed boundaries” in their rituals and creation of sacred space in
the profane fields.75 These photographs captured resilient acts. They
force a rereading of sites of exploitation, call for an alternative
interpretation of the natural and built environment, and necessitate
a reconceptualization of sacred space. This reading of Apostólico arts
offers a fresh way of reading hidden transcripts, resistance, and the
corresponding power dynamics in the fields.

Religious Theory, Material Approaches, and

Sacred Space
Recent interventions in the field of religious studies make up the
theoretical scaffolding in this book. The migratory context in Sowing
the Sacred draws from Thomas Tweed’s fluid metaphor of movement
in his definition of religion as noted in Crossing and Dwelling.76
Migrant workers built sacred homes and crossed numerous social
boundaries. Even the most migratory and the most schismatic
groups found ways to carve out sacred space in the midst of
opprobrious conditions. As we will see in chapter 1, Mexican
Pentecostals built a denomination by connecting their growing
network of borderlands congregations and drawing on available
human forces and resources while often understanding their
undertakings as divinely orchestrated. Tweed’s metaphorically
apposite definition provides theoretical footing for historians to
locate religious agency among the state’s dispossessed migrating
Pentecostals.
The book also draws from the study of material religion: visual
arts, objects, and photographs. Sociologist Manuel Vásquez’s theory
of religion, anchored in materiality, provides an excellent interpretive
springboard. He also draws from Tweed’s spatial and aquatic
metaphors and assesses religion’s mobility and embeddedness. His
advancement of a “non-reductive materialist approach” in which
space is intertwined with time, mobility, contestation, and
interconnectedness, expands the aperture through which we can
view the production and legacy of the Apostólico material world.
Vásquez’s materialist theory, based on relentless interconnectedness
between mobility, networks, and ecology, offers suitable metaphors
to explore the “embodiment, emplacement, and practice”77 of a
network of Mexican migrant workers whose distinct doctrine was
embodied and practiced within the contextual metaphors of their
environment.
The photographs I share in this book represent only a sample of
the many contained in private collections and commemorative
volumes. My consideration of these photographs hews closely to the
operational principles of visual art outlined by religious studies
scholars David Morgan and Sally Promey. They maintain that

images establish the social basis of communion by consolidating and

reinforcing a range of allegiances, large and small . . . they help create and
organize memory . . . and fuel constructive, synthetic acts of imagination in
the kind of meaning-making practices that form a basic aspect of religious
experience.78
I ask, as other theorists of visual and material culture have, “how do
material objects participate in the practices that make up religious
lives?”79 Accordingly, Morgan and Promey further posit that

because images operate as vehicles of communication between the human

and the divine they visualize the parameters of individual and communal
identity, because they embody recollection, because they construct and posit
worlds of meaning, they elicit a range of responses. In fact, images may be
said to have power precisely because they elicit our response.80

Tweed’s study of Cuban exiles resonates with the material

dimensions of other diasporic religions. I maintain that the world of
arts created by Apostólica women signified a borderlands aesthetic
that was, as Tweed terms, “translocative” and, given the politics of
religious and ecclesial respectability of denomination at the time,
transgressive.81 Images function at multiple levels of relationality for
individual and collective memory. In the profane context of migrant
farm labor, which supposed the bodily unit of labor to be culturally
vacuous and without communal roots, such memory making through
photographs assumed transgressive, sacralized dimensions.
Farmworkers, in other words, were not meant to partake in
structured social life outside of the farm. Their physical deracination
was supposed to stymie any semblance of social belonging. The
photographs I have collected and reproduced herein attest to the
idea that immigrants not only brought their bodies to bear upon the
landscape, but they also brought their values, resources, materials
and “migrant imaginaries,” resisting at times assimilation and
attendant ideas of acculturation.82
Photographs of the “sacralized profane” elements of life in the
context of industrial farming show how Apostólicos attempted to
carve out a socio-religious existence in sites designed to deny them
one. In the world of hard physical labor, it is no surprise that the
religion of Apostólicos assumed very material dimensions. The same
land worked with their skin, hair, hands, and dirt-filled nails was
carried into their spaces of worship, constructed in the same fields of
exploitation. I borrow from anthropologist Elaine Peña’s notion of
devotional piety and capital to conceptualize the material world of
performances.83 Religious studies scholar S. Brent Plate’s work is
instructive for understanding how the visual, aural, and tactile (in
this context photographs, music, and temple decor) are all material
and, in many cases, sacred processes.84
The construction of sacred space in this milieu considers the
views of multiple theorists who advanced the “spatial turn” in the
study of religion.85 I draw from what religious studies scholars David
Chidester and Edward Linenthal designate “situational sacred space.”
Their assumptions about the term stand in contrast to Mircea
Eliade’s conceptualization about the inherent, substantial nature of
sacred spaces (e.g., axis mundi) and instead follow in the line of
sociologist Émile Durkheim’s formulation of the social construction of
sacred space and Jonathan Z. Smith’s emphasis on the centrality of
ritual. Drawing from the latter two, Chidester and Linenthal posit
that in situational sacred space, “nothing is inherently sacred” but
that sites or objects become sacred “through human consecration . .
. as the result of the cultural labor of ritual, in specific historical
situations, involving the hard work of attention, memory, design,
construction, and control of place.”86 These formulations of sacred
space remind us of how the sacralization of ostensibly profane space
is contingent, depending on practice and belief.
Many cameras, especially those of documentary photographers,
captured the nonreligious flows and processes. The photographs
taken by Apostólico farmworkers afford us an opportunity to view
sacralization as moments in which they took control of place,
memory, and cultural labor of ritual in the profane fields. They show
how campesinos (farmworkers) created sacred space to orient
themselves in spite of the disorienting and innumerable challenges
faced daily by individuals in la lucha (the struggle).87 Their
photographs shed light on ideas of sacred space called for by
Vásquez’s materialist theory of sacred space which “document[s]
how local religious practices are embedded in, connected to, and
reflective of translocal religious and nonreligious flows and
processes.”88 Apostólico farmworker frames capture a
counternarrative: their cameras, while aimed at similar people and
places, took in vastly different worlds.
We can also think of collective memory making through
photographs as a type of scripturalization. My interdisciplinary take
on “scriptures” draws mainly from works by religious studies scholars
Vincent Wimbush (as seen in chapters 1, 2, and 5) and Jacqueline
Hidalgo (as shown in chapter 5), both of whom have expanded the
conventional meaning of what and how scriptures come to mean.
Hidalgo’s formulation of scriptures as “centering texts used by and in
order to define communities”89 to describe Chicano communities is
useful in my exploration of the material world of photographs and
their accompanying oral histories. Moreover, photographs, their
careful curation, and the meaning imputed to them fall within
Wimbush’s call to reconceptualize how scriptures come to mean
across (or how they are signified upon and acquire meaning) various
contexts by paying attention to the “textures, gestures, and power—
namely the signs, material products, ritual practices and
performances, expressivities, orientations, ethics, and politics
associated with the phenomenon of the invention and uses of
scriptures.”90 The textures, gestures, and power are legible in these
photographs. The material world of Apostólicos, their ritual practices
and performances, and expressivities are especially demonstrated
throughout this book. The importance of photographs in telling these
collective histories evidences a robust tradition of scripturalizing via a
visual medium.

U.S. Religion in the American West

Mexican farmworkers toiled in conditions of starkly imbalanced
power created by a large-scale transition from ranching to industrial
farming in the American West. The processes indeed relied
enormously on the extraction of racialized laborers from the Global
South to sustain capitalistic growth. While there is much debate as
to exactly when, where, and how modern notions of race came
about, many scholars maintain that modern constructions of race are
intimately tied to religion and a theological explanation for the
presence and purpose (read: exploitation) of the “other.” These ideas
were shaped during the Renaissance and the age of trade between
Europe, Africa, and the Americas, where a radical sense of “other,”
unlike that in any other context, sparked debates about race,
slavery, and (the extent of) humanity according to a biological and
theological order.91 The United States is especially fraught with
histories of race and religion. Religious life in the past (and even
today) cannot be understood without a careful consideration of the
processes of ethnic and racial formation defined in everyday
relationships and major national events.92 Particular regions within
the United States, most notably, the South, harbor deep and
troubled legacies of race and religion.93 Albeit differently, the
American West, too, bears the marks of racial and religious
stratification. I borrow Limerick’s concepts of New Western History
from her book Something in the Soil to demonstrate the U.S. West
as a place of racial and religious complexity, convergence, conquest,
and continuity. I also see the American West as “one of the great
meetings zones of the planet.”94 Largely complicating this history is
the context of conquest, domination, and ethnic convergence in the
fields, a story with major implications for studies on race, religion,
and resistance.
Studies of religion anchored in the American West also lay bare
the historiographical biases of the canon of U.S. religious histories.
Just before the turn of the century, Thomas Tweed’s edited volume
Retelling American Religious History provoked members of the guild
to reconceptualize the field in terms of sites, cites, and sights.95 In
that volume, historian Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s chapter called for a
retelling of U.S. religious history from the perspective of the Pacific
Rim, as opposed to the received chronology of westward expansion
from the East.96 Scholars maintain that to read from the Latino West
is necessarily a “subaltern” reading of the U.S. religious history
canon.97 Martínez-Vázquez argues that “in targeting the production
of knowledge, counter-discourses need to focus on the
deconstruction of the canon, so that the larger picture it created is
Another random document with
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 “Nevada! You shall not be so bold,” she cried in Pahute. “Take
away your hand from the white man.”
The girl turned her head and answered sharply in the same
tongue and afterwards smiled across at Rawley, meeting his eyes
with perfect frankness.
“Yes, my name is Nevada. I’ll save you the trouble of asking,” she
said calmly. “El Dorado Nevada Macalister, if you want it all at once.
Luckily, no one ever attempts to call me all of it. My parents were
loyal, romantic, and had an ear for euphony.”
“Were?” The small impertinence slipped out in spite of Rawley; but
fortunately she did not seem to mind.
“Yes. My father was caught in a cave-in in the Quartette Mine
when I was a baby. Mother died when I was six. I have a beautiful,
impractical name—and not much else—to remember them by. I’ve
lived with Grandfather and Grandmother; except, of course, what
time I have been in school.” She gave him another quick look behind
Johnny Buffalo’s back. “And your autobiography?”
“Mine is more simple and not so interesting. Name, George
Rawlins King. Place of birth, a suburb of St. Louis. Occupation,
mining engineer. Present avocation, prospecting during my vacation.
My idea of play, you see, is to get out here in the heat and snakes
and work at my trade—for myself.”
“And Johnny Buffalo?”
“Oh, he just came along. Hadn’t seen this country since he was a
kid and wanted to get back, I suppose, on his old stamping ground.
He lived with Grandfather. But Grandfather died a few weeks ago,
and Johnny and I have sort of thrown in together. Now, I suppose our
prospecting trip is all off—for the present, anyway.”
“This country has been gone over with a microscope, almost,”
said Nevada. “I suppose there is mineral in these hills yet, but it must
be pretty well hidden. The country used to swarm with prospectors,
but they seem to have got disgusted and quit. The war in Europe, of
course, has created a market—” She stopped and laughed with
chagrin. “Of course a lady desert rat like me can give a mining
engineer valuable information concerning markets and economic
conditions in general!”
 “I’m always glad to talk shop,” Rawley declared tactfully.
But Nevada fell silent and would not talk at all during the
remainder of the journey.
 CHAPTER EIGHT
“HIM THAT IS—MINE ENEMY”
Their progress was necessarily slow, and Nevada’s “mile or so”
seemed longer. Johnny Buffalo remained no more than half-
conscious and breathed painfully. Nevada invented a makeshift
sunshade for him, breaking off and trimming a drooping greasewood
branch and borrowing the squaw’s apron to spread over it. This
Rawley held awkwardly with one hand while he steadied the swaying
figure with the other, and so they came at last abruptly to the river he
had left at sunrise.
The trail dipped down steeply to a small basin that overlooked the
river possibly a hundred feet below. The canyon walls rose bold and
black beyond,—sheer crags of rock with here and there a brush-filled
crevice. Around the barren rim of the basin two or three crude
shacks were set within easy calling distance of one another, and
three or four swarthy, unkempt children accompanied by nondescript
dogs rushed forth to greet the newcomers.
The old squaw waddled forward and drove the dogs from the
heels of the burro called Pickles, which lashed out and sent one cur
yelping to the nearest shack. The children halted abruptly and stared
at the two strangers open-mouthed, retreating slowly backward,
unwilling to lose sight of them for an instant.
Rawley stole a glance at Nevada, just turning his eyes under his
heavy-lashed lids. A furtive look directed at his face was intercepted,
and the red suffused her cheeks. Then her head lifted proudly.
“My uncle’s children are not accustomed to seeing people,” she
explained evenly. “Strangers seldom come here, and the children
have never been away from home. Please forgive their bad
manners.”
“Kids are honest in their manners,” Rawley replied, “and that’s
more than grown-ups can say. I reckon these youngsters wonder
what the deuce has been taking place. I’d want an eyeful, myself, if I
were in their places.”
Nevada did not answer but led the way past the shacks, which did
not look particularly inviting, to a rock-faced building with screened
porch that faced the river, its back pushed deep into the hill behind it.
Rawley gave her a grateful glance. He did not need to be told that
this was the quietest, coolest place in the basin.
“We’ll make him as comfortable as we can, and I’ll send for Uncle
Peter,” she said, as they stopped before the door. She called to the
oldest of the children, a boy, and spoke to him rapidly in Indian. It
seemed to Rawley that she was purposely emphasizing her bizarre
relationship.
A younger squaw—or so she looked to be—came from a shack, a
fat, solemn-eyed baby riding her hip. Her hair was wound somehow
on top of her head and held there insecurely with hairpins half falling
out and cheap, glisteny side combs. A second glance convinced
Rawley that she had white man’s blood in her veins, but her
predominant traits were Indian, he judged; except that she lacked
the Indian aloofness.
“Mr. King, this is my Aunt Gladys—Mrs. Cramer,” Nevada
announced distinctly. “Aunt Gladys, Queo shot Mr. King’s partner,
who had discovered him lying in wait for Grandmother and me and
was trying to protect us. Mr. King ran down to the trail to warn us,
while his partner crept up behind Queo. He fired, after Queo had
shot at us, but he thinks he missed altogether. At any rate Queo shot
him. So Grandmother and I brought him on home. He saved our
lives, and we must try to save his.”
Aunt Gladys ducked her unkempt head, grinned awkwardly at
Rawley, who lifted his hat to her—and thereby embarrassed her the
more—and hitched the baby into a new position on her hip.
“Whadda yuh think ol’ Jess’ll say?” she asked, in an undertone.
“My, ain’t it awful, the way that Queo is acting up? Is there anything I
can do? It won’t take but a few minutes to start a fire and heat
water.”
They had eased Johnny Buffalo from the burro’s back to the broad
doorstep, which was shaded by the wide eaves of the porch. Now
they were preparing to carry him in, feet first so that Nevada could
lead the way. She turned her head and nodded approval of the
suggestion. So Aunt Gladys, after lingering to watch the wounded
man’s removal, departed to her own shack, shooing her progeny
before her.
Rawley had never had much experience with wounds, but he went
to work as carefully as possible, getting the old man to bed and
ready for ministrations more expert than his. In a few minutes
Nevada came with a basin of water that smelled of antiseptic. Very
matter-of-factly she helped him wash the wound.
“I think that is as much as we can do until Uncle Peter comes,”
she said when they had finished. “He’s the one who always looks
after hurts in the family.” She left the room and did not return again.
With nothing to do but sit beside the bed, Rawley found himself
dwelling rather intently upon the strangeness of the situation. From
the name spoken by Nevada, he knew that he must be in the camp
of the enemy. At least, Jess Cramer was the name of Grandfather’s
rival who figured unfortunately in that Fourth of July fight away back
in ’66, and there was furthermore the warning of the code, “Take
heed now ... on the hillside ... which is upon the bank of the
river ... in the wilderness ... ye shall find ... him that ... is mine
enemy.” Rawley had certainly not expected that the enemy would be
Jess Cramer, but it might be so.
He was repeating to himself that other warning, “He that keepeth
his mouth keepeth his life,” when Nevada’s voice outside brought his
attention back to the immediate exigencies of the case. He had
already told her his name—she had repeated it to that flat-faced,
hopelessly uninteresting “Aunt Gladys.” Nevada had taken particular
pains, he remembered, to tell her aunt all about the mishap and to
stress the service which he and Johnny Buffalo had rendered her
and her grandmother. Was it because she wished to have some one
beside herself who was well-disposed toward them? Partly that, he
guessed, and partly because the easiest way to forestall curiosity is
to give a full explanation at once. In Nevada’s rapid-fire account of
the shooting, Rawley fancied that he had unconsciously been given
a key to the situation and to the disposition of Aunt Gladys. He
grinned while he filled his pipe and waited.
 Presently the deep, masculine voice he had heard outside talking
with Nevada ceased, and a firm, measured tread was heard on the
porch. A big man paused for a few seconds in the doorway and then
came forward; a man as tall as Rawley, as broad of shoulder, as
narrow hipped. He was dressed much as Rawley was dressed,
except that his shirt was of cheaper, darker material and the
breeches were earth-stained and old, as were his boots. He carried
his head well up and looked down at Rawley calmly, appraisingly,
with neither dislike nor favor in his face. He was smooth-shaven, and
his jaw was square, his lips firm and somewhat bitter. Rawley rose
and bowed and stood back from the bed.
“My niece has told me all about the shooting,” he said, moving
toward the bed. “I’m not a doctor, but I’ve had some experience with
wounds. In this country we have to learn to take care of ourselves. Is
your partner unconscious?”
“Dopey, I’d say. I can rouse him, but it seemed best to let him be
as quiet as possible. He had over an hour in the heat, and the
joggling on the burro didn’t do him any good, I imagine.” Rawley
hoped Uncle Peter would not think he was staring like an idiot, but
he could not rid himself of the feeling that somewhere, some time, he
had seen this man before.
Uncle Peter bent and examined the wound. When he moved
Johnny Buffalo a bit, the Indian opened his eyes and stared hard into
his face.
“My sergeant! I did not think to—”
“Out of his head,” Rawley muttered uneasily. “It’s the first
symptom of it he’s shown.”
Johnny Buffalo muttered again, pressed his lips together and
closed his eyes. After that he did not speak, or give any sign that he
heard, though Uncle Peter was talking all the while he dressed the
wound.
“It’s going to take some time,” he said. “The bullet broke his
shoulder blade, but if the lung is touched at all it was barely grazed.
Nevada spoke of my taking him down the river to Needles, but it
can’t be done. The engine in the launch is useless until I can get a
new connecting rod and another part or two.” He stared down at
Johnny Buffalo, frowning.
“Well, from all accounts the two of you saved the women’s lives
to-day,” he said, after a minute of studying over the situation. “Queo
was after the grub, probably—and he’s no particular love for any of
us. He undoubtedly knew who was coming down the trail—he may
have watched them go up, just about daybreak. Common gratitude
gives the orders, in this case. You can stay here until this man is well
enough to ride, or until I can take you to Needles.”
A little more of harshness and his tone would have been grudging.
Rawley flushed at the implied reluctance of the offered hospitality.
“It’s mighty good of you, but we don’t want to impose on any one,”
he said stiffly. “If he can stay for a day or two, I can get out to
Needles and bring up a boat of some kind. It’s the only thing I can
think of—but I can make it in a couple of days.”
The other turned and regarded him much as Nevada had first
done, with a mixture of defiance and pride. His jaw squared, the lines
beside his mouth grew more bitter.
“We may be breeds—but we aren’t brutes,” he said harshly. “You’ll
stay where you are and take care of your partner. The burden of
nursing him can’t fall on the women.” He stopped and seemed
debating something within himself. “We’ve no reason to open our
arms to outsiders,” he added finally. “If folks let us alone, we let them
alone—and glad to do it. Father’s touchy about having strangers in
camp. But all rules must be broken once, they say.”
“I think you’re over-sensitive,” Rawley told him bluntly. “You’re self-
conscious over something no one else would think of twice. It’s—”
“Oh, I know. You needn’t say it. Sounds pretty, but it isn’t worth a
damn when you try to put it in practice. Well, let it drop. I’ll send over
some medicine to keep his fever down, and the rest is pretty much
up to nature and the care you give him. It’s cool here—that’s a great
deal.”
“We’ll be turning out your niece, though, I’m afraid. I can’t do that.”
For the first time Rawley was keenly conscious of the incongruity of
his surroundings. Here in a settlement of Indians (he could scarcely
put it more mildly, with the dogs and the frowsy papooses and the
two squaws for evidence) one little oasis of civilized furnishings
spoke eloquently of the white blood warring against the red. The
room was furnished cheaply, it is true, and much of the furniture was
homemade; but for all its simplicity there was not one false note
anywhere, not one tawdry adornment. It was like the girl herself,—
simple, clean-cut, dignified.
“My niece won’t mind. I shall give her my own dugout, which is as
comfortable as this. I can find plenty of room to stretch out. Hard
work makes a soft bed.” He smiled briefly. Again Rawley was struck
with a sense of familiarity, of having known Uncle Peter somewhere
before.
But before he could put the question the man was gone, and
Johnny Buffalo was looking at him gravely. But he did not speak, and
presently his eyes closed. After that, the medicine was handed in by
a bashful, beady-eyed boy who showed white teeth and scudded
away, kicking up hot dust with his bare feet as he ran.
After all, what did it matter? A chance meeting in some near-by
town and afterwards forgetfulness. Uncle Peter evidently did not
remember him, so the meeting must have been brief and
unimportant.
 CHAPTER NINE
“A PLEASANT TRIP TO YOU!”
Rawley chanced to look out of the window. He muttered
something then and strode to the screened door.
“Hey! You aren’t going back up that trail, surely?” He went out
hurriedly and took long steps after Nevada.
The girl turned and looked at him over her shoulder, flinging back
a heavy braid of coppery auburn hair. She had Pickles by his lead
rope and was plainly heading into the trail to Nelson.
“Why, yes. There’s a load of grub beside the trail where Deacon
upset. I’m going after it.”
Rawley rushed back, seized his hat, sent an anxious glance
toward the bed and then ran. He overtook Nevada just at the edge of
the basin and stopped her by the simple method of stopping the
burro with a strong hand.
“You go back and sit beside Johnny,” he commanded. “I’ll get that
grub, myself. And if you’ve got a rifle, I’d like to borrow it.”
“That’s utter nonsense—your going,” Nevada exclaimed. “I meant
to take one of the boys—I just sent him in to wash his face, first.”
Rawley laughed. “Do you think a clean face on a kid will have any
effect on Queo? You’ll both stay at home, please. I’m going.”
“If you’re determined, I can’t very well stop you,” she said coldly.
“But I certainly am going. I always do these things. There’s no
possible reason—”
Rawley looked over at the nearest shack, where Aunt Gladys
stood watching them, the baby still on her hip. “Mrs. Cramer, I am
going up after the grub we left by the trail. Will you see that Johnny
Buffalo is looked after? And will you call Miss Macalister’s
grandmother, or whoever has any authority over her?” His voice was
stern, but the twinkle in his eyes belied the tone.
 Aunt Gladys giggled and hitched the baby up from its sagging
position. “There ain’t nobody but Peter can do nothing with Nevada,”
she informed him. “Her gran’paw, maybe—but he don’t pay no
attention half the time. You better stay home, Nevada. Queo might
shoot you.”
“How perfectly idiotic! Do you suppose he would refrain from
shooting Mr. King, but kill me instead?”
“Well, you can’t tell what he might do,” Aunt Gladys observed
sagely. “He’s crazy in the head.”
Rawley laid his fingers on Nevada’s hand, where she held Pickles
by the bridle. He looked straight into her eyes, bright with anger. His
own eyes pleaded with her.
“Miss Macalister, please don’t be obstinate. To let you go back up
that trail is unthinkable. I am going, and some one must be with my
partner. I can make the trip well under two hours; there is heavy stuff
in that ditch which needs a man’s shoulder under it, getting it back
into the trail. Please stay with Johnny Buffalo, won’t you?”
Nevada hesitated, staring back into his eyes. Her hand slid
reluctantly from the bridle. Her lip curled at one corner, though her
cheeks flushed contradictorily.
“Masculine superiority asserts itself,” she drawled. “Since I can’t
prevent your going, I think, after all, I shall prefer to stay at home. A
pleasant trip to you, Mr. King!”
“Thanks for those kind words,” Rawley cried, his voice as mocking
as hers. “Come on, Pickles, old son!”
A boy of ten, with his face clean to the point of his jaws, came
running from the shack with a rifle sagging his right shoulder. Rawley
waited until he came up, then took the rifle, spun the boy half around
and gave him a gentle push.
“Thanks, sonny. Ladies and children not allowed on this trip,
however. You stay and protect the women and babies, son. Got to
leave a man in camp, you know. Wounded to look after.”
The boy whirled back, valor overcoming his tongue-tied
bashfulness. “Aw, he wouldn’t come here! Gran’paw’d kill ’im.
Gran’paw purt’ near did, one time. I c’n shoot, mister. I c’n hit a rabbit
in the eye from here to that big rock over there.”
 “Yes—well—this isn’t going to be a rabbit hunt. You stay here,
sonny.”
“Aw, you’re as bad as Uncle Peter!” the boy muttered resentfully,
kicking small rocks with his bare toes. “I guess you’ll wish I’d come
along, if Queo gets after you!”
Rawley only laughed and swung up the trail, leading the burro
behind him, since he was not at all acquainted with the beast and
had no desire to follow it vainly to Nelson, for lack of the proper
knowledge to halt it beside the scene of Deacon’s downfall.
As he went, Rawley scanned the near-by ridges and the brush
along the trail. There was slight chance, according to his belief, that
the outlaw Indian would venture down this far, especially since he
could not be sure he had failed to kill Johnny Buffalo. On the other
hand, he must have been rather desperate to lie in wait for two
women coming home with supplies. Rawley wondered why he had
remained up on the ridge; why he had not waited by the trail and
robbed them of such things as he needed. Then he remembered
Nevada’s very evident ability to whip wildcats, if necessary—
certainly to meet any emergency calmly—and shook his head. The
old squaw, too, would probably do some clawing if the occasion
demanded, and she knew just who and why she was fighting. On the
whole, Rawley decided that Queo had merely borne out Johnny
Buffalo’s statement that he was a coward and had taken no chances.
And from the boy’s remark about his grandfather nearly killing Queo,
he thought the outlaw had not wanted his identity discovered.
As for his own risk, Rawley did not give it a second thought. Queo
had been well scared, finding two men on the job where he had
expected to deal only with women. He had been headed toward the
river when Rawley last saw him. It was more than probable that he
would continue in that direction.
But it is never safe to guess what an Indian will do,—much less an
Indian outlaw who must become a beast of prey if he would live and
keep his freedom. Rawley remembered Johnny Buffalo’s pack and
tied Pickles to a bush directly under the spot where the shooting had
taken place, while he climbed the ridge to retrieve his belongings. He
brought canteen and pack down to the trail and hung them on the
packsaddle, feeling absolutely secure. The ridge was hot and
deserted, even the birds and rabbits having taken cover from the
heat.
He went on around the little bend and anchored the burro again
while he carried up a sack of potatoes, bacon, flour and a package
wrapped in damp canvas, which he guessed to be butter. The tribe
of Cramer had what they wanted to eat, at least, he reflected. Also,
the load would have made a nice grubstake for the outlaw. Two such
burro loads would have supplied Queo for months, adding what
game he would undoubtedly kill.
Rawley had just finished packing the burro and had looped up the
tie rope to send Pickles down the home trail, when some warning (a
sound, perhaps, or a flicker of movement) caused him to look quickly
behind him. He glimpsed a dark, heavy face behind a leveled gun
barrel, broken teeth showing in an evil grin. Rawley threw himself to
one side just as the gun belched full at him. Something jerked his left
arm viciously, and a numb warmth stole into that side.
He dropped forward, his right hand flinging back to his holstered
automatic and drawing up convulsively with the gun in his hand.
“Thanks for packing the stuff!” chortled Queo, and the two fired
simultaneously.
Both scored hits. The leering, black face sobered and slid slowly
out of sight behind the rock. Rawley’s head dropped so that his face
lay in the blistering dust of the trail. Through his hat crown a small,
singed hole showed in front, a ragged tear opposite at the back.
Pickles, scored on the leg with the second shot from Queo’s gun,
kicked savagely with both feet and went careening down the trail
toward home, his pack wabbling violently as he galloped.
It was the sight of him trotting down the trail alone that halted
Nevada midway between her rock dugout and the shack where
Gladys was setting steaming dishes on the table for the three men
who were “washing up” at the bench under the crude porch. Nevada
gave a little cry and ran to meet Pickles, and the first thing she
noticed was the fresh, red furrow on his leg, from which the blood
was still dripping. Turning to call, she saw Peter coming close behind
her, wiping his face and neck as he walked.
 “Oh, Uncle Peter—he’s been shot!” she cried tremulously. “It must
be Queo again.”
Peter’s eyes turned to the trail, visible for some distance up the
side hill. There was no one in sight, and without a word he turned
back to his own house, dug into the hill near Nevada’s, and presently
returned, passing the girl with long strides. He carried his rifle and
struck into the hill trail bareheaded. Nevada looked after him, her
eyes wide and dark.
An hour later, Peter returned, walking steadily down the trail with
Rawley on his back. Without a word he passed the staring group at
the shack and carried his burden into the room where Johnny Buffalo
lay in uneasy slumber. A step sounded behind him, and he spoke
without turning.
“Have Jess and Gladys bring that spring cot out of my cabin,
Nevada. They’ll be more contented in the same room. He got Queo
—I found him behind a rock not fifty feet from this chap. Now Queo’s
cousin will take up the feud and get this fellow—if he pulls out of this
scrape.”
“Is he badly hurt?” Nevada was holding her voice steady from
sheer will power.
“Arm smashed and a scalp wound. All depends on the care he
gets. Well—” Peter straightened and wiped his forehead, looking
thoughtfully at Rawley, half lying in a big chair, his long legs spread
limply, his face white and streaked with blood, “—we owe him good
care, I guess. He must have killed Queo after he’d been shot in the
arm. And he’s saved this outfit some trouble. I didn’t tell you—but
Queo was laying for a chance at us. Well—run and get that cot
here.”
Nevada pushed back her craning family and sent them running
here and there on errands. Her grandfather and Jess, the husband
of Gladys, looked at her inquiringly from the porch of the shack.
Rawley might have thought it strange that they remained mere
bystanders during the excitement. But Nevada did not seem to
notice their indifference.
“Queo shot him twice—but he killed Queo,” she told them. “Uncle
Jess, you’re to get his spring cot, Uncle Peter says, and fix a bed in
there.” Her eyes went challengingly to her grandfather. “Uncle Peter
says we owe them the best care we can give,” she stated clearly.
“He says they have saved some lives in this family.”
The tall, bearded old patriarch looked at her frowningly. He
glanced toward the rock cabin, grunted something unintelligible to
the girl, and went in to his interrupted dinner.
 CHAPTER TEN
A FAMILY TREE
It seemed as fantastic as a troubled dream. To be lying there
helpless, to look across and see Johnny Buffalo staring grimly up at
the ceiling, his face set stoically to hide the pain that burned beneath
the white bandage, held no semblance of reality. Was it that morning
only, that they had left the car and started out to walk to the “great
and high mountain”? Perhaps several days had passed in oblivion.
He did not know. To Rawley the shock of drifting back from
unconsciousness to these surroundings had been as great as the
shock of incredulous slipping down and down into blackness. He
moved his head a half-inch. The pain brought his eyebrows together,
but he made no sound. Johnny Buffalo must not be worried.
“All right again, are you?” Peter moved into Rawley’s range of
vision. “You had a close squeak. The thickness of your skull between
you and death—that was all. The bullet skinned along on the outside
instead of the inside.”
“I’ll be all right then,” Rawley muttered thickly. “Don’t mean to be a
nuisance. Soon as this grogginess lets up—”
“You’ll be less trouble where you are,” Peter interrupted him
bluntly. “I’ve done all I can for you now, so I’ll go back to my work.
The Injun’s making out all right, too. Head clear as a bell, near as I
can judge. I’ll see you this evening, and if there’s anything you want,
either of you, just pound that toy drum beside you. That will bring
one of the women.”
Rawley looked up at him, though the movement of his eyeballs
was excruciatingly painful. Again that sense of familiarity came to
tantalize him. What was it? Peter’s great, square shoulders, his
eyes? He made another effort to look more closely and failed
altogether. His vision blurred; things went black again. Perhaps he
slept, after that. When he opened his eyes again a cool wind was
blowing; the intolerable glare outside the window had softened.
 He was conscious of a definite feeling of satisfaction when
Nevada appeared with a tray of food such as fever patients may
have; tea, toast, a bit of fruit—mostly juice. Behind her waddled her
grandmother; Rawley could not yet believe in the reality of the
relationship between this high-bred white girl and the old squaw. In
the back of his mind he thought there must be some joke; or at least,
he told himself, looking at the two closely, Nevada must be one of
the tribe by adoption. He had heard of such things.
And there was her Uncle Peter, who was a white man in looks, in
personality, everything. Yet Uncle Peter had flared proudly, “We may
be breeds—but we aren’t brutes.” He could only have meant himself
and Nevada. He looked at her, his eyes going again to the squaw
with her gray bangs, the red kerchief, her squat shapelessness.
Her fear of him seemed to have evaporated upon reflection. Her
curiosity concerning him had not, evidently. She set down the tray
and stared at him with a frank fixity that reminded Rawley of the
solemn regard of the sloe-eyed baby riding astride Aunt Gladys’
slatternly hip.
“You feed Johnny Buffalo, Grandmother,” Nevada directed. “He
used to live in this country when he was a boy. You can’t tell—you
might be old acquaintances.” She smiled, patted the old woman on a
cushiony shoulder and approached Rawley, who was suddenly
resigned to his helplessness.
“Grandmother rather holds herself above full-blood Indians,” she
whispered. “She’s only half Indian, herself. I don’t want her to snub
your partner; he looks so lonely, somehow. What is it?”
“He’s grieving over my grandfather’s death,” Rawley told her, his
own voice dropped to an undertone that would not carry. “Until I
proposed this trip he didn’t want to live. He’s better, out here.”
“I do hope—”
A shrill ejaculation from the squaw brought Nevada’s head
around. “What is it, Grandmother?”
The old woman started a singsong Indian explanation, and
Nevada smiled. “She says they do know each other. She remembers
him when he was a boy and was lost. So that’s fine. He can hear
about all his old playmates and his family.” She turned her back on
them as if the duties of hostess sat more lightly on her shoulders,
since one of the patients could visit with her grandmother.
“I’m wondering what happened, up the trail.”
Nevada thoughtfully cooled the tea with the spoon and looked at
him speculatively. “Uncle Peter can tell you better than I can—since I
was not permitted to go along. Besides, the less talking you do now,
I believe, the less danger there is of complications. Neither wound is
so bad of itself, Uncle Peter says. It’s having your head hurt, along
with the broken bone in the arm. Unless you are very quiet for a day
or two, there may be fever; and fevered blood makes slow healing.
That’s Uncle Peter’s theory, and it must be correct. He has books
and studies all the time—when he isn’t working. Then, of course,
there’s the danger of infection from the outside; but he has been very
careful in the dressings. Johnny Buffalo,” she added after a minute,
“is worse off than you are. His shoulder blade is badly smashed. And
then he’s so much older.”
She was talking, he knew, to prevent him from doing so. And
since his head felt like a nest of crickets, all performing at once, he
was content to let her have her way. Across the room he could hear
the intermittent murmur of the two Indians, the voice of the
grandmother droning musically, with sliding, minor inflections as she
recounted, no doubt, the history of the old man’s family and friends.
He watched Nevada pour and sweeten a second cup of tea and
did a swift mental calculation in genealogy. Jess Cramer, he knew,
was a white man. The husband of Gladys, bearing the name of
Grandfather King’s enemy, must be a son of the old man and of this
half-breed squaw. Very well, then, old Jess Cramer’s children would
be one quarter Indian—Peter, Jess and Nevada’s mother (granting
that Nevada was a blood relative). Nevada’s father must have been
white,—a Scotchman, by the name, and by Nevada’s clear skin and
coppery hair. Well, then, Nevada was—A knife thrust of pain stabbed
through his brain, and he could not think. Nevada set down the cup
hastily and laid cool fingers on his temple. He lifted his right hand
and held her fingers there. The throbbing agony lessened, grew
fainter and fainter. After all, what did it matter—the blood in those
fingers? They were cool and sweet and soothing—
 He thought Nevada had lifted her hand and was gently removing
the bandage from his head. But it was Uncle Peter, and Nevada was
not there, and it was dark outside. In another room a clock began to
strike the hour. He counted nine. It was strange; he could not
remember going to sleep with her fingers pressed against the pulse
beat in his temple. Yet he must have slept for hours. He closed his
eyes and then opened them again, staring up with a child-like candor
into the man’s bent face.
“I know. You look like Grandfather,” he said thickly. And when
Peter’s eyes met his, “It’s your eyes. Grandfather had eyes exactly
like yours. And there’s something about the mouth—a bitterness.
Gameness, too. Grandfather had his legs off at the knees, for fifty
years. Called himself a hunk of meat in a wheel chair. God, it must
be awful—a thing like that, when the rest of you is big and strong—
but you’re not crippled that way. Oh, Johnny! Are you awake?” He
heard a grunt. “I’ve got it—what you meant at first, about seeing your
sergeant. Uncle Peter looks like—”
A hand went over his mouth quite unexpectedly and effectually.
He looked up into the eyes like Grandfather King’s and found them
very terrible.
“Fool! Never whisper it. Am I not the son of Jess Cramer? It had
better be so! Better not see that I am like his enemy—and rival.” He
leaned close, his eyes boring into the eyes so like his own. “One
word to any one that would slur my mother, and—” he pressed his
lips together, his meaning told by his eyes. “She came to me to-day,
chattering her fear. Old Jess Cramer lives with other thoughts, and
his eyes are dim at close range. Never come close to him, boy.
Never recall the past to him. It would mean—God knows what it
would mean. My mother’s life, maybe. And then his own, for I’d kill
him, of course, if he touched her.”
Rawley blinked, trying to make sense of the riddle. Then his good
hand went out and rested on Peter’s arm, that was trembling under
the thin shirt sleeve.
“Uncle Peter!” His lips barely moved to form the words, and
afterward they smiled. “The blood of the Kings! I’m glad—”
“Are you?” Peter bent over him fiercely. “Proud of a man who went
away and left my mother—”
 “He had to go,” Rawley defended hastily. “He meant to come back
in a month’s time. But he was shot through the legs, and in hospital
for months, and then sent home a cripple. After that he lost his legs
altogether. How could he come back? Johnny can tell you.”
Peter pulled himself together and redressed the long, angry gash
on Rawley’s head. Johnny Buffalo, having slowly squirmed his body
to a position that gave him a view of Rawley’s cot, watched them
unblinkingly, his wise old eyes gravely inscrutable. When he had
finished, Peter strode to the door and stood there looking out.
Rawley had a queer feeling that he was looking for eavesdroppers.
“What you say will make my mother happier,” he told Rawley,
coming back and speaking in his usual calm tone of immutable
reserve. “She seemed very bitter to-day when she talked with me.
She has always thought your grandfather went away knowing he
would never come back. And she has proud, Spanish blood in her
veins—”
“Anita, by ——!” Rawley’s jaw dropped in sheer, crestfallen
amazement.
“Did he tell you?” Peter eyed him queerly.
“It’s the diary. The beautiful, half-Spanish girl, all fire and life—he
described her like that. And—”
“Well, they change as they grow old.” Peter’s lips twitched in a
grin. “The beautiful Spanish señoritas get fat and ugly, and the Indian
women are more so. Your grandfather’s fiery Spanish girl had
nothing to pull her up the hill. Monotony, hardships—one can’t
wonder if the recidivous influences surrounding her all these years
pulled her down to the dead level of her mother’s people. Take this
Indian here—” he tilted his head toward Johnny Buffalo—“he was
taken out of it when he was a kid. Now, aside from certain traits of
dignity and repression, I imagine he’s more white than Indian.”
Rawley nodded. “Lived right with Grandfather all his life and has
studied and read everything he could get his hands on. He’s better
educated than lots of college men; aren’t you, Johnny?”
“Yes. I think very much, of many things which Indians do not know.
I do not talk very much. And that is wisdom also.”
 “Mother had nothing from books. When her youth went and she
began to take on weight, she dropped her pretty ways and became
like the squaws. I remember, and it used to hurt my pride to see her
slip into their ways. I was—white.” His mouth shut grimly.
Rawley lay looking into his face, trying to realize the full
significance of this amazing truth. His grandfather’s son, and Anita’s.
His own uncle. With Indian blood, but his uncle nevertheless. If
Grandfather King had known—
“He’d have been proud,” he said aloud, “to have a son like you.
He always wanted—and my father was a weakling, physically, I
mean. He died when I was just a kid. Grandfather called him a
damned milksop, because he wanted to work in a bank. Johnny can
tell you a lot about Grandfather—your—father.” He lowered his
voice, mindful of Peter’s warning. And then, “Does Nev—does your
niece know about it?”
“She does not. The fewer who know it, the better for all
concerned. There will be four of us, as it is. There mustn’t be five.
Why make the lives of two old people bitter? Old Jess—I’ve a
brother, Young Jess—thinks I am his son. He needs me, and
Nevada needs me. We’ve hung together, in spite of the mixed breed
you see us. Jess is Injun in looks and ways. Nevada’s mother was all
white. Jess married a mission half-breed girl, and their kids are Injun
to the bone. Belle, Nevada’s mother, married a Scotchman—good
blood, I always thought, from his looks and actions. Nevada’s—
Nevada.”
He said it proudly, and Rawley felt his blood tingle with something
of the same pride.
From the other bed Johnny Buffalo spoke suddenly. “Anita, your
mother, is my cousin. The daughter of my aunt. My blood is mingled
with the blood of my sergeant’s son. My heart is now alive again and
life is good. My sergeant has gone where he can walk on two feet,
and I am left to care for his son and his grandson. I now see that
God is very wise.”
“He is?” Peter pulled down his heavy, black brows and the corners
of his lips. “I’ve spent a good deal of time wondering about that.
There’s Nevada—and one-eighth Indian. Is that—”