6 pm to 8 pm
Ramón A. Gutiérrez, University of Chicago Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of American History and the College
-Reies Tijerina, the Alianza, and the Apocalypse: The Biblical Sources of His Political Thought-
The La Canoa Legacy Series features talks by Hispanic/Latino academic and community researchers with long-standing and distinguished records of research and teaching about New Mexico and the region. Like la canoa—referring in New Mexican Spanish to several utilitarian objects used to receive and transport people and resources and thus provide a service to the community—these talks are meant to serve the community by presenting new or overlooked information about our region to interested audiences. We want them to transport us to new understandings of our region and its rich cultural and historical inheritance, and to move the conversation back and forth in rich dialogue between presenters and audience members.
Free public event
In Mexican American history books Reies López Tijerina is heralded as a radical, revolutionary, cultural nationalist who putatively took up arms against the American state during his 1967 “raid” on the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse in northern New Mexico. Starting in 1957, Tijerina began organizing Mexicanos to recuperate the communal lands they had lost after the US-Mexico War, blaming Anglos and their courts, offering searing critiques of the Mexican American poverty that followed, as well as the denigration of Mexicano culture and the systematic eradication of Spanish-language instruction. This lecture explores the longer trajectory of his life and thought, particularly as shaped by his education as a Pentecostal preacher, the apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, the detonation of atomic bombs over Japan, and his quest for the Antichrist.
Professor Ramón A. Gutiérrez is a leading historian in Chicano Studies. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Pomona College, and the University of California, San Diego, where he founded the Ethnic Studies Department and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and served as the campus Associate Chancellor. His themes of his research and publication include race and ethnic relations in the Americas from 1492 to the present; religion and spirituality in the hemisphere; ethnic Mexican culture and politics on both sides of the border; immigration and adaptation in the United States; and inequality and diversity in American society.