Event Date
Dr. Lorena Oropeza, Professor of History at UC Davis will give a talk based on their new book titled, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina: Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
This biography offers a fresh and unvarnished look at one of the most controversial, criticized, and misunderstood activists of the civil rights era. Most famous for leading an armed raid on the Rio Arriba courthouse in 1967, Reies López Tijerina demanded that Americans attend to an overlooked part of the country’s history: the United States was an aggressive empire that had conquered and colonized the Southwest and subsequently wrenched land away from border people—Mexicans and Native Americans alike. Basing her work on painstaking archival research and new interviews with key participants in Tijerina’s life and career, Lorena Oropeza traces the origins of Tijerina's revelatory historical analysis to the years he spent as a Pentecostal preacher and his hidden past as a self-proclaimed prophet of God. Confronting allegations of anti-Semitism and accusations of sexual abuse, as well as evidence of extreme religiosity and possible mental illness, Oropeza's narrative captures the life of a man--alternately mesmerizing and repellant--who changed our understanding of the American West and the place of Latinos in the fabric of American struggles for equality and self-determination.
This talk will be introduced and moderated by Dr. Lorena Marquez, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o/x Studies at UC Davis. You can RSVP for the Zoom webinar here: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lVxke0LoSk-T_PrS116Clg