California’s Cross: A Cultural History of Pentecostalism, Race, and Agriculture.

Abstract

California’s Cross explains how Okie and Mexican Pentecostalism came to be in the Central Valley, a site marked by ethnic labor flows into the fields of industrialized agriculture. I argue that the simultaneous processes of the racialization of Okies and Mexicans and the marginalization of Pentecostals in the context of Depression, New Deal, and Bracero Era industrial farming provided oppositional forces that ultimately strengthened Mexican and Okie Pentecostals’ resolve to assert their cultural and religious mandates. California’s Cross demonstrates how these migrants, which I refer to as “schismatic strata,” endured different processes of social discrimination, religious marginalization, and historical erasure, but nevertheless prevailed to become a conservative religious force in the Central Valley. Their zealous efforts to maintain distinct social identity markers offered sense of group belonging, and their successful evangelism/conversions allowed them to play active social roles. They used these pronounced socio-religious identity markers (backed by charismatic preaching and enthusiastic worship) of a distasteful religious movement in order to resist cracking or crumbling under the pressure of denominational respectability and the era’s dire economic circumstances. Mexican Pentecostalism took root in the Central Valley despite the nation’s implementation of xenophobic laws (the Great Repatriation and Operation Wetback) and unfavorable representations as stoop laborer subsumed into the landscape; Okie Pentecostalism flourished despite the characterization of Okies as the state’s problem and the caricatures of Pentecostalism as a “Holy Rollerism” of disinherited folks. The Central Valley, in reality, offered a social soil arable for the cultivation of religious fervor. Throughout California’s Cross I show how this “schismatic stratum” emerged as a crosscutting (socially transgressive) religious force that later comprised the bedrock of Pentecostalism and formed a cornerstone of a larger “conservative ethnic migration.”