Ramón Gutiérrez's recent work on Reies López Tijerina traces the land reclamation leader's religious influences and their subsequent impact on his activism. Although many authors have discussed López Tijerina's time as leader of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, they have been less enthusiastic about delving into his past as a Pentecostal evangelist and in looking at the activism of his later years. The majority of this work is focused on his developing years, his time at an Assemblies of God bible college, and his work in ministry. His activism in New Mexico is not discussed until the eighth of nine chapters. The author selects as context the early post-World War II world in which López Tijerina began his ministerial studies and developed his sermons.
Influenced by Baptist and Methodist preachers as a young man in Michigan, López Tijerina attended a Pentecostal bible college which had been opened in Texas to train Spanish speakers as missionaries to Mexican American populations. At the bible college, he struggled, not finding the spiritual experience he expected. He was constantly frustrated with rules that governed student behavior, finding such rules were not equally applied at sister institutions attended by white seminarians. Although school officials kept him from attending the graduation ceremony, López Tijerina became an evangelist, often working with migratory populations, until he shifted away from ministry and tried a more activist path, a choice that ultimately resulted in the dissolution of his first marriage and his incarceration.
Happily, this is not a work of hagiography. Although the author was personally acquainted with his subject, Gutiérrez takes care to discuss López Tijerina's personal failures and struggles. In the ninth chapter, as well as occasionally throughout the book, the author addresses issues of mental health, demonstrating points at which such struggles, undiagnosed in the subject's early life, may have affected his ministry for better or worse. This is done without making claims that might tend toward psycho-historiography gone too far. As the field of disability history grows, such examinations of historical figures should become more commonplace, and this work serves as an example of the potential and limits of our scholarly abilities in this area. The author also exposes the moral and ethical failures of his subject and the consequences those had for his first wife and children.
The author's discussion of Pentecostalism, however, could use some expansion. Scholars of Pentecostal history will appreciate that Gutiérrez spends time explaining the rise of the Pentecostal movement in general and the Assemblies of God in particular. More use of the work of Daniel Ramírez and others in building a stronger discussion of borderlands Pentecostalism would have strengthened the sections of this work that address López Tijerina's ministry. In addition, the volume could have used a further examination of the ways in which López Tijerina's theology was distinctly connected to the theology promoted in the Assemblies of God bible college. There is some discussion of glossolalia; nevertheless, the reader is left wanting to know more about his views on eschatology and how they may have aligned with the broader movement.
The author does offer convincing evidence that many of López Tijerina's apocalyptic ideas are based on the Book of Revelations and were developed in a post-World War II context, but the discussion in the fifth chapter is grounded more in biblical studies than religious history. The discussion of his sermons in the sixth chapter dwells largely on his critiques of the Assemblies of God and other churches as increasingly materialistic and politicized rather than viewing their theology as problematic.
As a final note, this volume may appear encyclopedic in size. However, it contains a lengthy appendix with a reproduction (and translation) of a book of sermons preached by López Tijerina, which he published as a collection in 1955. This is a significant accommodation for scholars of American religion who might want to examine the sermons themselves.
