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Book Review
| King Tiger: The Religious Vision of Reis López Tijerina. By Rudy V. Busto. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xii + 260 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
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Rudy Busto's King Tiger examines the commingling of religion and politics in the life of Mexican-American land activist Reis López Tijerina. Tijerina is best known for his championing of Hispano land rights in New Mexico through the Alianza Federál de Mercedes Reales (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) founded in 1956. In 1967, Tijerina led a raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse where a jailer and state patrolmen were injured. He served twenty-one months for the siege. Although the formation of the Alianza and the courthouse raid have been lauded as central events in the origins of the Chicano movement, especially for their influence on Chicano demands for a return of portions of the U. S.-Mexican borderlands, Tijerina has increasingly occupied a peripheral place in Chicano history books. Understanding Tijerina's displacement from the axis of the movement to its margins underlies much of King Tiger. Through Busto's careful examination of the politics of historical memory and literary canonization in Chicano studies we see that it was a displacement engendered in part by Tijerina's unorthodox religious views. |
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