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Book Review
| King Tiger: The Religious Vision of Reies López Tijerina. By Rudy V. Busto. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xii, 260 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8263-2789-3.)
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| Reies López Tijerina is known for his leadership of the Federal Alliance of Land Grants, a grass-roots movement that was part of the Chicano movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. In King Tiger, Rudy V. Busto portrays Tijerina as a religious visionary who has been misrepresented by early movement scholars as a Chicano nationalist and by later Chicano scholars as more of a presence than a substantive leader. Busto is particularly vexed by what he describes as willful neglect by Chicano scholars of Tijerina's memoir and writings as a Pentecostal minister that identify Tijerina's comprehensive beliefs and illuminate his religious vision. He believes they should recognize that Reies Tijerina forthrightly expressed his vision as emerging from Pentecostal training and mission activity. That religious vision is the center of the land grant movement (or certainly Tijerina's understanding of that cause and his leadership in it). According to Busto, Chicano scholars have ignored or dismissed Tijerina's Pentecostal experience, his dreams, and the historical role of religious or spiritual life and meaning in the Mexican American community. Unfortunately, as Busto offers valuable evidence to support his interpretation, he also presents an uneven and somewhat disjointed compilation of chapters that undermines what seems to be his own "calling" to relocate Tijerina and his place in Chicano history. |
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