Sowing the Sacred

Sowing the Sacred traces the development of Pentecostalism among Mexican-American migrant laborers in California's agricultural industry from the 1910s to the 1960s. At the time, Pentecostalism was often seen as a distasteful new sect rife with cultish and fanatical tendencies; U.S. growers thought of Mexicans as no more than a mere workforce not fit for citizenship; and industrial agriculture was celebrated for feeding American families while its exploitation of workers went largely ignored. Farmworkers were made out to be culturally vacuous and lacking creative genius, simple laborers caught in a vertiginous cycle of migrant work.This book argues that farmworkers from La Asamblea Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús carved out a robust socio-religious existence despite these conditions, and in doing so produced a vast record of cultural vibrancy. Examining racialized portrayals of Mexican workers and their religious lives through images created by farmworkers themselves, Sowing the Sacred draws on oral histories, photographs, and materials from new archival collections to tell an intimate story of sacred-space making. In showing how these workers mapped out churches, performed outdoor baptisms in grower-controlled waterways, and built and maintained houses of worship in the fields, this book considers the role that historical memory plays in telling these stories.

Winner of Winner, 2024 Pneuma Book Award for Best Book in the Study of Pentecostalism Winner, 2024 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise Finalist, Pnemua Book Award by the Society for Pentecostal Studies 2023.

A terrific glimpse into previously untold histories, Sowing the Sacred is a beautiful, moving, and an important work of scholarship on the material and spiritual lives of ethnic Mexican farmworkers and church leaders in California. Please read this book. Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Professor of Latina/o/x Studies and Religion, Williams College
With a beautiful mix of photographs, oral histories, and archival research, Barba gracefully uncovers the tragic and resilient worlds of Mexican Pentecostal farmworkers as they labored in the fields, created sacred spaces, and lived dignified lives in the American West. Sowing the Sacred more than fills a significant gap in the literature on Latina/o religion and labor, it changes the field entirely. Simply put, this book is groundbreaking. Felipe Hinojosa, author of Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio
Sowing the Sacred impressively reframes the history of proletarian religion in California's harsh agribusiness. Lloyd Barba deftly demonstrates how subaltern Pentecostal farmworkers sacralized the very soil and water of their labor and fired the imaginations of key Chicano/a Movement leaders. Daniel Ramírez, Associate Professor of American Religions, Claremont Graduate University
Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California by Lloyd Daniel Barba is a beautifully told and rigorously researched history of a subaltern religious denomination in California's agricultural farmlands. David Flores, Department of Ethnic Studies, Sacramento State University, Sacramento, CA, USA
Sowing the Sacred is more than a history of Mexican Pentecostal farmworkers in California. It is an excavation, unearthing a religious tradition that's been buried beneath social prejudice and scholarly neglect. Christian Century
An important contribution Sowing the Sacred gives us is the way it adds to the historical texture of the United States' design of labor laws and practices regarding farmworkers and capitalistic production of the fields. Yara González-Justiniano, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.
Sowing the Sacred successfully places the sacred stories and laboring bodies of Apostólicos front and center, offering the reader not just a window into the past, but entirely new sets of lenses through which to examine, uncover, and admire the fruit of a completely different kind of "labor" that left a permanent mark on U.S. and Mexican history. Gaby Viesca, The Perspectivas
Barba's prose is lovely. The book is not beach reading, but for a volume that seamlessly blends so many distinct disciplines-religion, ethnicity, immigration, agriculture, and economic history-it is remarkably fluid. Grant Wacker, The Christian Century
Lloyd Daniel Barba's Sowing the Sacred is a rich historical analysis that can be approached from multiple different historical contexts. As a work of religious history, for instance, Barba illuminates much about Mexican Pentecostalism in the mid-twentieth century. Historians interested in Mexican immigration and farm labor--perhaps more numerous in the profession than scholars of Pentecostalism--will also find much to admire in Barba's fine book. Timothy Bowman, H-Environment
Lloyd Daniel Barba has written an original and thoughtful study. The strength of the book rests on the analysis of Mexican farmworkers in California and their socioreligious practices to transform agricultural land into a place for them to belong. His work connects three distinct historiographies-labor, religion, and resistance movements-to underscore the vibrant cultural production of Mexican Apostólicos. Barba's book providesan appealing discussion of farmworkers' contributions in shaping California and should beassigned reading to any scholar or student interested in knowing more about the twentieth-century American West. Tiffany Jasmin González, AGRICULTURAL HISTORY
Undergraduate courses concerned with Mexican and migranthistories will be well-served by this text. Scholars seeking tointegrate histories or religion and work (especially in ruralspaces) will find in Barba's argument an exemplary model onwhich to draw both methodologically and theoretically. Emily Morrell, Religious Studies Review
Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California provide a fresh perspective on how religious identity, religious resistance, sacred space and reform measures are manufactured, re-imagined, and wielded by people and larger bureaucratic institutions. Alison Collis Greene and Matthew Avery Sutton, Church History
Sowing the Sacred beautifully captures important milestones of the journey that brought Mexican Apostolicos from socio-religious marginalization into denominational respectability in the borderlands. It effectively highlights the cultural distinctives of the movement and its influence on ecclesial rituals andindividual spirituality while also describing its humble origins in the landscape of North American Pentecostalism. Harold A. Gutierrez, Pneuma

Lloyd Daniel Barba is Assistant Professor of Religion and Core Faculty in Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. He is the co-editor of Oneness Pentecostalism: Race, Gender and Culture (2023), and editor of Latin American and U.S. Latinx Religion in North America (2023). His scholarship on Pentecostalism, Catholicism, the Sanctuary Movement, and material religion has been published in journals such as Journal of the American Academy of Religion, American Religion, Perspectivas, and MAVCOR and various edited volumes. including The Oxford Handbook on Latinx Christianity, Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics since 1945, and Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts, to name a few. He serves on the council of the American Society of Church History and co-chairs the History of Christianity Unit of the American Academy of Religion.

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