The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza (review)

Lorena Oropeza’s new biography on Reies López Tijerina brings back the memory of the fiery orator of the Chicano movement. Tijerina, if referenced at all in a US history textbook, will forever be linked with the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid. However, Oropeza reveals he was more than the so-called Chicano militant alternative to the pacifist Cesar Chavez. She argues that his exposure of the history of the American West as principally one of conquest is his biggest legacy (4). In short, the idea that US providential manifest destiny was just another name for land grabbed away from Mexico and then Mexican Americans is pretty common today, especially in the world of Chicano/a studies. Oropeza says of the complicated Tijerina: “Neither hero nor villain, the ‘King of Adobe’ was a man who from a lifetime of limited opportunities, dashed hopes, and strange, religious dreams promoted a new vision of land-grant justice and a new vision of the American West” (10). She illustrates this over ten chapters, each with a title that could be attributed to Tijerina: “The Prophet” and “The Evangelist,” for example.

From his childhood to his last words, Tijerina showed a deep passionate faith in God’s calling and revealed his own messiah complex. In some ways this led to some seeing him as a religious fanatic or “weirdo” but Oropeza regards his faith as a lens for “the kaleidoscope containing all his shifting views” (281). All the grand gestures he made in his life were attributed to a personal calling by God. The book opens with his experience being visited by Jesus Christ when he was a young child suffering from poverty (13). This is important since Oropeza closes her work saying that Tijerina’s constant comparison of himself to Christ “stood out” to her (281). He would later train to be a preacher at a Pentecostal school, eventually leaving the school to open up a community called Valle de Paz isolated in the Arizona desert. It was in the desert that he was exposed to the history of the land grants, which motivated him to found the Alianza Federal de Mercedes. His framing of the land-grant battle as between “the forces of good and evil” was performed as a prophetic message to his religious Spanish-speaking audience (134). In fact, it was this binary struggle—especially with government bureaucracy, personified by local district attorney Alfonso Sánchez—that led to the raid and disastrous shootout at the courthouse. In every event recounted, Tijerina seems to be guided by the hand of God—and there is never a sign of regret for any of his actions. Oropeza’s book does an excellent job cataloging when Tijerina’s views shifted throughout his life without resorting to a condescending tone toward him or his followers.

Not everyone was impressed with Tijerina. In fact, many Latinxs in the Southwest did not appreciate the negative attention that the Alianza brought to local politics nor did they like the way Tijerina included Indigenous groups in his activism. At one point, he began using the title Indo-Hispano as a means to challenge the respectability politics of whiteness that was normalized before the 1960s (163). The chapters “The Mexican” and “The American” illustrate the difficulty Tijerina had with his own identity and serve as symbols of Mexican Americans in general trying to navigate the social-political sphere in both countries. Only a few people with any political power took him seriously and the local government saw him as a charlatan and rabble rouser (258). The courthouse raid would lead to the “largest manhunt” in New Mexico’s history (208). The raid brought him to the attention of other civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr., yet Oropeza reveals that Tijerina’s views on race were at best complicated and at worst essentialist and anti-Semitic...