Race, Religion, Region: Landscapes of Encounter in the American West (review)

These eight essays seek further to enrich historical analysis of the American West with what the editors term the "three R's" of race, religion, and region. The first three chapters explore religion and community formation in early twentieth-century Los Angeles. William Deverell and Mark Wild examine Social Gospel minister G. Bromley Oxnam's Church of All Nations in Los Angeles, which served a diverse working-class population but also came under fire from conservative defenders of Americanism in the 1920's. Michael E. Engh's essay focuses on a liberal Catholic Americanizer, Mary Julia Workman, who established the Brownson Settlement House in Los Angeles in 1901. With a clientele composed primarily of Japanese and Mexican laborers, Workman also faced a growing chorus of 100 Percent Americanism after World War I. Daniel Cady, in a study of Robert Shuler and the Ku Klux Klan, argues that historians have not been as cognizant of the cultural impact of white transplants from the South, particularly upon Midwesterners living in southern California. This helps explain the success of Shuler's Trinity Methodist Church, South, and the Klan as examples of a "general appropriation of southern social strategies by non-southern whites" (p. 42). Together, these three essays demonstrate the prodigious challenges that faced those seeking to resolve racial and religious tensions by advocating tolerance of diversity.

Chapters four through six explore "how physical bodies shaped religious and racial encounters in the West" (p. 12) and includes the strongest piece in the collection, Laurie Maffly-Kipp's essay on how late nineteenth-century Americans viewed Chinese religions. While impressed with the trappings, Americans were dismissive of Chinese idols, rituals, and temples as being genuinely religious, an attitude that echoed Protestant perceptions of Catholicism. Another good point in Maffly-Kipp's piece has to do with American Protestants' dismay at the Chinese work ethic, which was frightening because of its seemingly "inscrutable" motivation. Pablo Mitchell shows that African Americans and Penitentes in New Mexico, while numerically small, were assailed in the popular press for "performing strange and abnormal acts with their bodies" (p. 91). Sharing an interest in demeaning and persecuting these "Others" may have aided in creating a measure of unity based on social and racial superiority among Anglos and Hispanics. Tisa Wenger concludes this section with her examination of early twentieth-century modernists, like John Collier, whose interest on behalf of Pueblo Indians in particular and the reform of federal Indian policy in general was motivated by primitivism. Paradoxically, the modernists' desire to aid the Pueblos by freezing them in time limited their ability to see native peoples as themselves changing and modern.

The final two essays concentrate on contemporary communities. Armand L. Mauss summarizes Mormon ideas about the positions of Native Americans and African Americans as they pertained to lineage. He attends primarily to how the troublesome policy (rescinded in 1978) of denying blacks eligibility for the Mormon priesthood was gradually undermined as preoccupation with "lineage rankings" collapsed during the twentieth century. Mary Jane O'Donnell considers the Islamic Center of Southern California, established in 1953, and how both its leadership and members have struggled to fashion a Muslim identity that allows congregants to "participate in American society while holding firm to their Islamic ideals" (p. 126).

The infusion of religion into the discussion of race in the West is a timely and welcome development. Although the work in this volume is almost exclusively concerned with Southern California and New Mexico, it is nonetheless a useful beginning to deepening the scholarly discussion, in both historical and contemporary terms, of cultural encounters in the American West.