JACQUELINE M.

HIDALGO

Revelation
in Aztlán
SCRIPTURES, UTOPIAS, AND
THE CHICANO MOVEMENT

THE BIBLE AND

CULTURAL
STUDIES
The Bible and Cultural Studies

Series Editors
Hal Taussig
Union Theological Seminary
New York, New York, USA
Maia Kotrosits
Religion Department
Denison University
Granville, Ohio, USA
The Bible and Cultural Studies series highlights the work of established
and emerging scholars working at the intersection of the fields of biblical
studies and cultural studies. It emphasizes the importance of the Bible
in the building of cultural narratives—and thus the need to intervene
in those narratives through interpretation—as well as the importance of
situating biblical texts within originating cultural contexts. It approaches
scripture not as a self-evident category, but as the product of a larger set
of cultural processes, and offers scholarship that does not simply “use” or
“borrow” from the field of cultural studies, but actively participates in its
conversations.

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 Jacqueline M. Hidalgo

Revelation in Aztlán
Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement
Jacqueline M. Hidalgo
Williams College
Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA

The Bible and Cultural Studies

ISBN 978-1-137-59213-2 ISBN 978-1-137-59214-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59214-9

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No book is ever the product of one person alone, and no words can suf-
ficiently express my gratitude to the many amazing people who made my
book possible. Starting with family, I must thank Sourena Parham for
his continued support and constant willingness to discuss scriptures on
a daily basis; more than that, he bravely ventured into scriptural terrain
with me, traveling around California and Spain, photographing places we
went together (and sharing those photographs with me). I am inexpress-
ibly grateful to my mother, Judith Ann, who has always believed in my
work even when I didn’t. I am also grateful to my father, Jorge Gerardo,
who offered a change in location and a fresh set of eyes when I thought I
was too weary to continue. My elder brother Jorge and his great mind for
stories and sounds have shaped so much of my thought. I also owe much
to the love and support of my extended family, especially its matriarchs,
including my Aunt Lynn Zielinksi, mi Tía Anabelle, and my late grand-
mothers Estela González de Porras and Minnie Hirschbuhl. Sourena’s
family has supported me, especially his cousin Babak Azar who always
welcomed me into his home where I edited much of this book.
I am grateful to my many academic compañeras on this journey, and
I particularly wish to thank Neomi DeAnda and Valerie Bailey Fischer
who have persisted with me, through the wonders of cell phones and
the Internet, since I was a masters student. My colleagues at Claremont,
Simon Joseph, Velma Love, Sara Moslener, Quynh-hoa Nguyen, Robin
Owens, and Edward Robinson were wonderful conversation partners
when I started on this scholarly journey. Katie Van Heest especially stands
out, not only as a graduate school colleague, but, later through her work

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

at Tweed Editing, as an editor who helped me reorganize a large mess

of a book. My wonderfully supportive friends Rose Allen, Gary Corkill,
Lauren Espineli, César Gómez, and Eugene Myers also served as sounding
boards earlier in this project—gracias! Rebecca Berru Davis shared impor-
tant insights on the movement and introduced me to Elena and Rubén,
an introduction that provided a significant ethnographic texture to this
project. I also have to thank those interlocutors who gave so much time
and thought to me: thank you Alfredo Acosta Figueroa and family; Lydia
López, Alberto Juarez, Richard Martínez, Fernando De Necochea, Anna
NietoGomez, Roger Wood; and my confidential interlocutors Ramón,
Rubén, Alejandro, and Elena. I also wish to recognize Orlando Espín,
Sara Patterson, and David A. Sánchez in particular because they willingly
engaged in multiple serious conversations about my work and read signifi-
cant pieces of it; their research has also deeply inspired and shaped mine.
Peter A. Mena talked me through the last few years of this project, and
I thank him for bringing me to Occidental College to share part of my
second chapter with his students and colleagues. I also wish to give special
thanks to my colleagues who were writing group partners: Travis Gosa,
Allyson Hobbs, and I cannot thank Devyn Spence Benson enough for
being a friend and a writing coach since we first met in 2008.
Many of the primary texts that I examined were available to me thanks
to Claremont’s Honnold/Mudd Library; the Huntington Library in San
Marino, CA; UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center Library staff,
Lizette Guerra and especially Michael R. Stone, without whom I would
never have learned about the Church of the Epiphany and their archives;
and Lillian Castillo-Speed of the Chicano Studies Collection at the Ethnic
Studies Library at Berkeley. I also owe general thanks to UCLA’s Chicano
Studies Research Center, especially the staff: Chon A.  Noriega, Javier
Iribarren, Rebecca Epstein, Connie Heskett, Darling Sianez, and Elvia
Vargas; they helped provide a welcoming office and intellectual support
during my research leave there in 2013–2014.
The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and
Religion provided me with funds to work on chapter 3; thank you to
my colleagues in the 2012–2013 Teaching and Learning Workshop for
Pre-Tenure Latino/a Religion Faculty in Theological Schools, Colleges,
and Universities and our fearless leader Paul Myhre. I am especially grate-
ful for the intellectual support of workshop colleagues Elizabeth Conde-
Frazier, Miguel A. De La Torre, Ana María Pineda, Sammy Alfaro, Eric
Barreto, María Del Socorro Castañeda-Liles, Gregory Cuéllar, Oscar
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

García Johnson, Adriana Nieto, Santiago Slabodsky, Angela Tarángo,

and Christopher Tirres, who have all thought about different pieces of
this project with me. I am also grateful to institutional structures that
facilitated workshopping pieces of this book, including the Academy
of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States and the New
England Consortium of Latina/o Studies, and especially insights I took
from Carlos Alaimo, Ginetta Candelario, Jesús Hernández, Irene Mata,
Marisol Negrón, Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Gilberto Ruiz, and Israel Reyes.
I also know that this book could only be finished with Amron Gravett’s
indexing work and Maggie Smith’s proofreading. Thanks also to the
anonymous readers who provided invaluable insights along the way and
for the staff at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Phil Getz and Alexis Nelson,
who did not try to pigeonhole this project the way other presses might
have. I especially have to thank series editors Maia Kotrosits and Hal
Taussig, because they believed in what this book might be and were will-
ing to take on a risky, interdisciplinary project when I feared that I would
have to abandon the sort of work I set out to do. Thank you both! Hal
also talked me through this book’s revisions, and so he deserves credit for
when the reading experience is more pleasant, but all this book’s faults
are mine.
No word of this could have been written without the financial and
intellectual support of several institutions, including Claremont Graduate
University, the Ford Foundation (with special thanks to staff Christine
O’Brien and Pamela Tyler), the Fund for Theological Education,
the Hellman Family Foundation, the Hispanic Theological Initiative,
and Williams College. At Williams, there were crucial staff members
who made all my research possible: thank you Peggy Weyers, Megan
Konieczny, Rebecca Ohm, the late Sally Bird, Gail Burda, John Gerry,
and Chris Winters. I also have to thank my two student research assistants
who translated, pored over databases, and transcribed interviews: Nancy
G. González and Iman I. Lipumba. Stephanie Dunson skillfully ran sev-
eral writing retreats where I worked on pieces of this book. I have been
remarkably fortunate to have such good department and program col-
leagues in Religion and Latina/o Studies. Jason Josephson was always a
thoughtful conversation partner. María Elena Cépeda looked over an early
draft of my book proposal and shared hers; Mérida Rúa provided feedback
on later versions and was always a ready and available mentor. C. Ondine
Chavoya and Neil Roberts both supplied invaluable feedback as part of
an Oakley Center Manuscript review, and the Oakley Center was a great
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

resource during my fall 2014 leave when it was under the direction of
Leyla Rouhi and the excellent management of Krista Birch.
Finally, I cannot possibly convey how grateful I am to my exceptionally
hardworking mentors over the years, the ones without whom this book
would not exist. When I was an undergraduate, Elizabeth Castelli first
pointed me toward the study of home and utopia. I had many excellent
teachers and mentors in graduate school, but Jean-Pierre Ruiz stands out
for his long-term support of me from my first year of doctoral work to
the present, far exceeding the duties of his appointment as my HTI men-
tor. Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre also served as a manuscript reader and a
mentor, and I thank her for reminding me that scholars generally come to
intellectual ideas in worlds outside of the texts they write. Denise Kimber
Buell always talked with me about this project when I needed her and gra-
ciously read an early draft of chapter 6 in her last bout of free time before
becoming dean. Special thanks go out to all my graduate school profes-
sors, and I would never have gotten a Ph.D. without Janet Farrell Brodie,
Erin Runions, or Fernando F. Segovia. Of course, this book owes much
of its intellectual shape and direction to Vincent L. Wimbush, who sup-
ported and advised me throughout my entire graduate education and con-
tinues to do so even now. I can only meagerly express my gratitude to the
incomparable and immeasurably helpful mentor and Williams Latina/o
Studies colleague Carmen T.  Whalen, without whom this book would
never have been written. Thank you.
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction: Scriptures, Place, and No Place in

the Chicano Movement 1

2 “We Are Aztlán”: Writing Scriptures, Writing Utopia in

El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán 29

3 “The Holy City Which Has Been Written in This Book”:

The Utopian Scripturalization of Revelation 75

4 “The Spirit Will Speak for My People”: El Plan de Santa

Barbara and the Chicanx Movement as a Project
of Scripturalization 127

5 “Power and Dominance, Loyalty and Conformity”: Family,

Gender, Sexuality, and Utopian Scripturalization 171

6 “Faith and Social Justice Are So Connected in My Book”:

Scriptures, Scrolls, and Scribes as Technologies of Diaspora 213

ix
x CONTENTS

Coda: Scriptural Revelations and Reconquest 261

Works Cited 273

Index 295
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1.1 A view of Blythe, CA, from one of the geoglyphs studied by
Alfredo Acosta Figueroa 2
Fig. 4.1 This photo captures how important visual signifying traditions
were in relating an epistemology that incorporated nationalism,
politics, and Mesoamerican and Christian religious images.
Yet, certain words also held sway, here with the text “Viva la Raza”
on the cross as well as the text in the dove’s wake (“Pray for peace
in the barrios”) 155
Coda Looking down on Southern California from the Ronald
Wilson Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in
Simi Valley, CA. Photo by Jacqueline M. Hidalgo 262

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Scriptures, Place, and No

Place in the Chicano Movement

For Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, the small desert city of Blythe, California,
and the surrounding Palo Verde/Parker Valleys reveal the archaeological
remains of Aztlán, the mythical Aztec place of origin (Fig. 1.1).1 The the-
sis of his 2002 book, Ancient Footprints of the Colorado River: La Cuna
de Aztlán, argues that this lost history is quite easily visible in the shapes
and shadows of the mountains, viewed “from our home” in Blythe, on
the eastern edge of Southern California. The introduction of Figueroa’s
book situates his project as “a Pandora’s Box of unknown history that
remained lost for centuries.”2 When I met Figueroa in October 2013, he
promised me that our meeting “was the interview that will change [my]
life forever.” I had followed Figueroa’s story for years across various media
outlets, and in some ways, his ideas had already changed my research,
though not necessarily in the fashion he might have imagined. In 2006, I
first read about Figueroa in the Los Angeles Times in an article that would
partially propel me along as I shaped the research behind this project. That
article described Figueroa’s 2002 book and his ongoing work to promote
the thesis of that book.
As a child, Figueroa was told by classmates that he was a “boy without a
country,” but he would fire back, “This is my land. My father told us that
you stole our land from us.”3 As an adult, he came to see that the home
of the Mexicas (generally called the Aztecs in US4 English), many other
indigenous American peoples, and possibly all humanity, might be found

© The Author(s) 2016 1

J.M. Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59214-9_1
2 J.M. HIDALGO

Fig. 1.1 A view of Blythe, CA, from one of the geoglyphs studied by Alfredo
Acosta Figueroa (Photograph by Sourena Parham)

along the Colorado River at the California/Arizona border. Figueroa has

spent over fifty years participating in a much older quest for Aztlán, one
that dates back at least to the Mexica ruler Motechuzoma Ilhuicamina (c.
1398–1469), and Figueroa does not hesitate to locate the import of the
“Xicano movement”5 of the 1960s and 1970s as what “has motivated
the foundation of [his] book.”6 He has spent much of the past fifty years
researching Aztlán, while also working as an activist with farmworkers, for
Mexican American civil rights, in opposition to nuclear power and waste
disposal near Blythe, and for local Chemehuevi land rights. Of particular
import to Figueroa is that the lands around Blythe that he identifies as
Aztlán receive federal legal recognition as “sacred” lands.
Because Figueroa is a fifth-generation resident of Blythe, it might seem
strange that he has to do so much work to make it home. Yet the very ways
that Blythe itself has been a shifting and contested place may partially speak
to Figueroa’s scriptural labor. At present, Blythe is a nexus of transit, a good
town to stop for the night if you are driving on Interstate 10 between Los
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 3

Angeles and Phoenix. The area around Blythe, though a desert, was once
an agricultural and mining locale nestled between mountains and along the
Colorado River. Rather than originating in a utopian sense of joyousness,
the name actually comes from a late nineteenth-century English financier
who secured and controlled the area’s water rights in 1877, and its popu-
lation according to the 2010 census is a little more than 20,000.7 Now,
many residents of Blythe, including one of Figueroa’s sons, work for the
Chuckawalla Valley State Prison, opened in 1988. In his youth, Figueroa
had been a miner in the surrounding environment, like his father before
him, but he came to question the destruction of the land that mining
entailed.8 Figueroa sought a better relationship with the land and a better
world for his descendants. In the 1960s, he became a public activist with
the farmworkers and the Chicanx9 civil rights movement, protesting police
brutality in Blythe and working with friends and family members to found
the Escuela de la Raza Unida (School of the United [Chicanx] People),10
still an active day care facility down the street from Figueroa’s house.
Figueroa has spent decades moving between the Aztlán described in
modern and colonial texts and the remnants of Aztlán apparent to him
in the landscape of Blythe. Sitting at his dining room table in October
2013, he pulled out photocopies of varying Spanish colonial codices, sang
corrido selections from his days with César Chávez and the farmworkers,
and drew upon various maps that he had laminated and marked up so he
could show me how visible signs on local maps connected to descriptions
embedded in varying Spanish colonial era texts, mid-twentieth-century
Mexican historiographies of the Mexicas/Aztecs, and a prologue to El
Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a Chicanx manifesto written for the Denver
Youth Conference in March 1969. Though seventy-nine years old when I
met him, Figueroa still carried much of the energy and passion that must
have marked his activism in the 1960s. Hiking around local sites with me,
he talked for hours and showed me how one could perceive the outline
of the eagle from the Mexican flag in the mountain to the north of his
house, how the outline of the goddess Tonantzin could be found to the
southeast, and how many other important Mexican gods, goddesses, and
symbols infiltrate the local landscape; he saw these markers as clear “facts,”
visible to any eye that can see. He expressed hope that more scholars from
Mexico might bring their expertise to better interpret the surrounding
“sacred” landscape and the local indigenous geoglyphs. He has used his
work to delay solar power projects near his home, a fight he continues and
for which he adamantly seeks aid.
4 J.M. HIDALGO

Figueroa’s finding of sacred interconnections between texts, land-

scapes, and activism reflects the slippage between scriptures, utopia, and
place that defines this project. Figueroa’s sense of displacement and work
at belonging and self-determination, his dedication to Aztlán—Blythe—
and “Xicanismo,” and his thesis of imparting revelatory knowledge drawn
from the reading of texts and the reading of landscapes form an entangled
thematic web that speaks to the questions that drive this project. Trained
in the study of “scriptures,” especially “Christian scriptures,” I ask what
forces compel individuals and communities to create, read, write, engage,
challenge, and fight over scriptures at all? Rather than focus on textual
meaning, I am interested in understanding how scriptures function as loci
and tools of social power and belonging. Revelation in Aztlán considers
people who have been made to feel homeless or “unhomed,” people such
as Figueroa and other members of the Chicanx movement, and it asks
how, why, with what consequences, and with what limits have they come
to remake home, to reclaim space, in and through scriptures?
This project focuses on a conversation between various Chicanx move-
ment formulations of Aztlán and the book of Revelation as a way of think-
ing about the legacies of scriptural formations and transformations in the
USA. The import of scriptures, especially the Protestant Christian Bible,
in the making of people and place in this hemisphere has a long history in
the study of hemispherically American religious traditions. Of particular
focus has been the importance of certain material Bibles, biblical transla-
tions, and specific narrative “myths” in the Protestant Christian Bible as
loci through which many different Euro-descended and African American
populations have thought about themselves; this conglomeration of
mythic approaches to the Bible also ties into the Bible’s “iconic” role in
the US imagination. In 1987, US Christian historian Martin E.  Marty
argued, “The society draws security from the knowledge that an enclosure
or support exists, one that transcends mundane and practical living.”11
Even when people do not really read the Bible, they often respect it as
a stable and authoritative “homing device.”12 While many parts of the
Bible, many different material forms of the Bible, and indeed other tradi-
tions one might deem scriptural have been crucial to diverse people in
US self-imagination, traditions around Eden, Exodus, Babylon, and the
Apocalypse have especially impacted a plurality of imaginations about the
USA as a unique place with special, “chosen” peoples.
I understand the Bible as one piece of broader US processes of “scrip-
turalization,” as a making of people and place through a complex set of
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 5

power relations and significations practiced in relationship to texts. Central

to this project is scriptural theorist Vincent L.  Wimbush’s definition of
scripturalization: “scripturalization should be conceived as a semiosphere,
within which a structure of reality is created that produces and legitimates
and maintains media of knowing and discourse and the corresponding power
relations. Although this structure is not to be collapsed into texts, in the
modern period of history—on this side of Gutenberg—it revolves mainly
around issues having to do with texts.”13 This definition wrestles with
texts but does not rest on texts alone. Scriptures are the means by which
we make and contest social worlds. In this book I do focus on texts, and
I use scriptures to talk about textual loci through and around which a
people imagines, creates, and contests itself. Yet scriptures are more than
just objects, they are sites and processes for the making and remaking of
social power. I use scripturalization to discuss the practices, politics, and
discursive regimes that surround the taking up and reinvention of particu-
lar scriptures. Though scripture, as a term, is freighted with the weight
of its Christian past, scriptures are not only Christian projects, or even
specifically textual, but I deploy scriptures as a categorical “shorthand”
for the practices of power-making, negotiating, and discursive centering
that many different peoples have taken up and then upheld and reinvigo-
rated with some sort of aura of sacrality. At the same time, I work beyond
Wimbush’s definition by examining people’s ongoing contestation, as
utopian practice, of the very nature of scripturalization itself.
By focusing on Chicanx movement texts and their relationship to the
biblical Apocalypse, Revelation in Aztlán makes the case that peoples for
whom historical memories of displacement loom large engage scriptures as
utopian homing devices. Through an examination of the Chicanx move-
ment’s scriptural practices and especially its uses of Aztlán, in conversation
with reading the legacies of Revelation’s new Jerusalem in the Americas, I
show how scriptures, as human endeavors, are utopian practices bound up
with social dreaming and the making of people in place and the making of
place for people. Scriptures are practices that come out of and relate directly
to the world. Yet, scriptures are existentially ambivalent representations of
place, a place as scripturalizers want it to be. Minoritized14 communities
find ways to negotiate life within that “no place” gap because they have
been displaced and emplaced in certain ways. Often these displacements
include religious and spiritual dimensions, and thus, I would argue, one
can see in the many iterations of Chicanx Aztlán and many readings of
Revelation a desire to reconquer the sacred, to take back the very notions
6 J.M. HIDALGO

of the sacred, as well as physical sacred space, in an attempt to remake the

world into a better inhabitable place for dislocated peoples; hence, I once
considered “reconquest of the sacred” for this book’s title. The imperial
language of “reconquest” matters here, because of its historical roots in
Spanish imperial rhetorics, its use in certain Chicanx movement-era texts,
the way that the term itself plays with notions of time and space, and the
way the term encodes an imperial ambivalence that haunts even seemingly
resistant projects of sacred reclamation.

SCRIPTURES IN THE CHICANX MOVEMENT

Chicanx history as conquered racialized and religious other in the US
Southwest has necessitated a fraught relationship with scriptural iconicity
and scripturalization at large. By focusing on Chicanx uses of scriptures
during the civil rights era, I concentrate on a particular group who some-
how both belonged and did not belong to Mexico and the USA, a group
for whom a reconquest of self, identity, territory—and scriptures—come
to a pressing boil in varying historical moments. Although a full account-
ing of the tense, scripturally inflected and dynamically racialized relations
between ethnic Mexicans in the USA and dominating Euro-US power is
beyond the scope of this project, the power of scriptural imaginaries in
dominantized US rhetorical narratives, as well as the historical experiences
of being displaced and caught between places, shapes the analysis of this
book.
Much of what is now the southwestern USA, from Texas to California,
was once Mexican territory. While Texas seceded from Mexico in 1836,
in 1848, certain citizens of Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, gener-
ally just termed “Mexico” in English, technically became citizens of the
USA.  These citizens were from a variety of socioeconomic, racial, and
geographic backgrounds, but they happened to reside in the part of the
USA that would become known as the Southwest. The Treaty of Peace,
Friendship, Limits, and Settlement, generally known as the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceded Mexico’s Alta California, Nuevo México, and
northern parts of Sonora and Coahuila to the USA. Additional territory
was purchased from Mexico for $10 million through the Gadsden Treaty,
ratified in 1854.15 With the broader US legal code serving as one crucial
locus for scripturalization in dominantized power regimes, these treaties,
perhaps unsurprisingly, later became key touchstones for examination
among varying ethnic Mexican activists, when pressing the USA to recon-
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 7

sider their rights (as is the case of the land-rights activism of la Alianza
Federal and Reies López Tijerina) or challenging US territorial claims (as
in the Brown Berets’ occupation of Santa Catalina Island in 1972).16
Of the vast array of reasons that led to US involvement in a mid-
nineteenth-century conflict with Mexico—as well as the basis upon which
US citizens critiqued and resisted this war of imperial expansion—one
of the most lasting and poignant was a myth of Manifest Destiny, as
inscribed by journalist John Louis O’Sullivan in an 1845 essay regarding
Annexation.17 The very term “Manifest Destiny” speaks to a certain mil-
lenarian teleology about the apparent and mandated future.18 At the same
time, Manifest Destiny relies on a settler colonial reading of Exodus traced
in a dominantized US myth to the Puritans, wherein they were God’s
elect “new Israel,” delivered from an old oppressive Europe to a promised
land in which they will build a better world.19 In part because Revelation
as a text plays so much with Exodus motifs, it can also be hard to disen-
tangle certain settler colonial uses of Revelation from uses of Exodus. In
that vein, the myth of Manifest Destiny proclaimed that the people of the
USA, solidified especially around a sense of those people as descendants of
Protestant Western Europe, were providentially chosen to conquer and to
rule the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific (if not the entire hemi-
sphere) with their superior culture and form of governance. The myth
became a sort of apocalyptic and utopian scripturalized meme represent-
ing what the USA was and was supposed to be. When “civilization” and
“liberty” were brought to what is now the Western USA, Mexican and
Native populations needed to be converted, or driven into the ocean, as
John Gast’s American Progress (1872) visually captures with its depiction
of a blonde female liberty as guiding spirit for westward expansion, an
expansion that also drives native inhabitants running from her torch.20
Although Mexicans were technically granted citizenship as part of the
Annexation, US courts often worked to dispossess ethnic Mexicans of
their land, to circumscribe their rights, and to deny citizenship to people
who migrated from Mexico afterward. Under US law and practice, ethnic
Mexicans were generally treated, from the outset, as “second-class” sub-
jects for “discrimination, harassment, brutality, and land theft.”21 Even
during the war, much US rhetoric, including that of the poetic prophet of
US “multitudes,” Walt Whitman, focused upon debasing and dehuman-
izing Mexican peoples with respect to the USA: “What has miserable,
inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom,
her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the
8 J.M. HIDALGO

great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race? Be it ours,
to achieve that mission!”22 Whitman’s rhetoric exemplifies the racialized
sense of chosenness as religiously keyed Protestant (over Mexico’s Roman
Catholic “superstition”) as part and parcel of the destiny and “mission”
of “New World” dominance.23 These portrayals did alter as time passed;
yet such representations served to solidify a category of people in the
Southwest who were at once citizens but also somehow “less than” citi-
zens, with ethnic Mexicans cast as ever part of the USA and outside of it.
All ethnic Mexicans, regardless of how long their families had lived in the
southwestern USA, were reminded that they were not quite part of US
society even if some of them no longer felt a sense of belonging to Mexico;
at the same time, especially in light of circular migration patterns, connec-
tions with Mexico also persisted even if ethnic Mexicans also felt like part
of the USA. They experienced an “in-between condition,” belonging and
not belonging to multiple places.24
Since 1848, many different ethnic Mexicans politically fought for
expanded rights and recognition throughout the Southwest. Although
the tensions, enduring necessities, promises, and perils of Mexican and
Chicanx uses of indigenous tropes, ideas, and worldviews have been more
fully excavated elsewhere,25 and thus are not the focus of this book, this
import of reactivating26 native Mexican, especially Nahua and Mayan,
myths and practices persists as a crucial facet of how ethnic Mexicans in
the Southwest survive, resist, and remake their worlds in the face of a
Euro-Protestant-Christian inflected dominance. Figueroa takes up this
hybridity, seeking to challenge dominantized Euro-American narratives
of the Southwest with a reading of indigenous, especially Nahua, texts
and stories, as they have been remembered and retained within Spanish
colonial codices and local southwestern oral traditions. Although often
not examined until the movement era, notions of “reconquest,” of taking
back that which was once Mexican, also persisted as an important theme,
even before the 1960s. Reies López Tijerina, a Pentecostal minister and
later movement-era activist, as early as 1958 demanded the return of land
that had been taken from Mexican citizens of the USA after 1848. This
demand for reclamation of the Southwest as Mexican land would prove
potently imaginative for the Chicanx civil rights and student movements
of the 1960s and 1970s.27
Since facets of the Chicanx movement started well before the 1960s
and some persist long after the 1970s, no specific dates can be offered
for a “movement era,” though most histories tend to focus on the
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 9

period from 1966 to 1976,28 a period whose early years are marked by
crucial texts.29 Although the Chicanx movement tends to be named
and discussed in the singular (often simply termed in Spanish as el mov-
imiento), most scholars have pointed out that the movement was never
a singular movement but consisted of many different groups sometimes
fighting together in common cause and sometimes sharing a larger
identification but with different tactics, strategies, and ultimate aims.30
Major histories of the Chicanx movement underscore this diversity by
focusing on a plurality of activist organizations. While various organi-
zations might have overlapping members, they often pursued distinct
goals.31 Mexicans are already a socially, economically, racially, cultur-
ally, and religiously diverse people; their experiences and histories in
the USA have been quite regionally specific. Remembering el mov-
imiento as a singular movement tends to reify a heteropatriarchal and
strictly nationalist narrative when it is just as important to remember
that most Chicanxs participated in “multiple insurgencies.”32 Early his-
tories of the movement also reified the heteropatriarchal narrative by
focusing on four male leaders, often apocalyptically dubbed the “four
horsemen” of the Chicanx movement.33 I suggest that the movement’s
great plurality and diversity is a crucial part of how and why Chicanxs
often engaged in strategies of scripturalization that respected scriptures
and scriptural imaginaries, such as Aztlán, as sites of contestation, not
as stable singular loci but as spaces for the making of possibility, as
always open for plural reinterpretations and negotiations.
Because of my interest in the work of taking up myths and encoding
them into ritually engaged special texts, “scriptures” as it were, my study
focuses on the dynamic interactions between identity, place, and text that
get taken up in certain student and youth facets of the Chicanx move-
ment of the 1960s and 1970s. The conjunction of social activism, iden-
tity nationalism, utopian visioning, revelation, and scriptures, especially
among student and educationally oriented activists, may necessarily yield a
greater focus on written texts than a focus on other parts of the movement
would do. The two main texts that form the focus of my discussions of
the Chicanx movement, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (March 1969) and
El Plan de Santa Barbara (conference in April, text published in October
1969), are among the most written about and taught documents that
came out of the movement; some might even view these texts as too often
discussed, a critique which speaks to their scriptural power, the ways that
they became often circulated, read, critiqued, cited, and recited texts.
10 J.M. HIDALGO

Both texts come out of large gatherings of mostly youth and student
activists. In March 1969, activists from all over the country assembled for
a weekend in Denver, under the auspices of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s
anti-war and Chicanx-focused organization, the Crusade for Justice, a
name with clear religious overtones. With Chicanx nationalism the explicit
focus of the conference, its written product, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,
a “spiritual” manifesto from “Aztlán,” signaled its complicated recasting
of place as multivalent. Denver became the Aztec homeland, but it is a
homeland freighted with an added spiritual power. Excerpts from the text,
especially the prologue largely crafted by poet  Alberto Baltazar Urista
Heredia (nom de plume Alurista), were rapidly circulated, read, reprinted,
quoted, and interpreted in varying local Chicanx media such as newspa-
pers, activist circles, and performance groups, throughout the USA. As I
argue in Chap. 2, the textual play with utopia allowed for a creative slip-
page between people and place, across time and space, that became part of
El Plan’s persistent import as a central text for imagining Chicanismo and
remembering the Chicanx movement.
Inspired by the events in Denver, some of the Californian participants
went to a smaller, college-education-focused conference in Santa Barbara
in April. Seeing themselves as working within Aztlán, but also in order to
make Aztlán a reality, participants at this conference gathered in order to
prepare a set of ideals and model proposals for what Chicanx Studies cur-
ricula and institutionalization throughout the state might look like. Many
public higher educational institutions in California, especially in the wake of
Third World Student Strikes at San Francisco State University (November
1968) and the University of California at Berkeley (January 1969), had
already started work on varying forms of Chicanx Studies curricula and
institutional planning. While the conference hoped to supply a helpful
guide for others to work from, it also wound up bringing enough differ-
ent students together that they created a new student group, one that was
meant to transcend any local campus and have a more national following.
Emphasizing both the import of the Spanish language and the more radi-
cal and indigenous identification as Chicanx and belonging to Aztlán, the
conference named the student group el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano
de Aztlán (MEChA), a group that persists today on different college and
high school campuses. El Plan de Santa Barbara, which was written by
different authors, edited, and published in October 1969, also became a
central text for narratives about Chicanx Studies and for understandings of
the roles and goals of MEChA. As I argue in Chap. 4, El Plan de Santa
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 11

Barbara demonstrates an intentional interest not just in utopian visions

but in specifically creating an alternative scriptural tradition and practice as
a constitutive facet of making alternative Chicanx knowledge and a better
world possible.
Of the still far too few works that attend to religion in the Chicanx
movement, those works focus on the import of indigenous myths and
ideas, or on overtly Christian leaders such as César Chávez and Tijerina,
or on overtly Christian groups such as PADRES or Las Hermanas.34 This
project’s contribution is that it grapples with the fraught legacies of colo-
nizing Christian scriptural traditions as a context and matrix—among a
plurality of sources—for Chicanx imaginative flourishing; in this way, the
painful and constructive hybridity of movement logics is a main locus of
my examination. At the same time, I employ a broad and slippery defini-
tion of the “religious,” both because I think a slippery definition is truer
to spiritual and religious facets of Chicanx experiences and because think-
ing with the religious reveals the ways that play with sacred text and place
matter even to seemingly secular groups and practices.
By focusing on a relationship between the Chicanx movement and a
Christian scriptural tradition, I am not saying that the Chicanx move-
ment was specifically Christian; indeed movement activists’ relationship
to Christianity, especially Protestant and Roman Catholic institutional
forms, tended to be quite complicated. Divergent Christian practices are
at the focus of this book because of the ways that Christian scriptures have
been engaged as loci of power in this hemisphere; the ways that Christian
scriptures have been tools of conquest, colonization, and enslavement,
even while those who were conquered and enslaved, and those peoples
who came to exist in between the worlds of colonizer and colonized, have
often found ways to remake and redeploy Christian scriptures to their
own advantage. Though many Chicanxs came to reject Christian tradi-
tions because of the history of conquest, Chicanxs have had to engage and
challenge Christian scriptures and scripturalization—though Christian
scriptures already themselves represented hybrid and dynamic traditions—
while drawing on indigenous, African, Asian, and hybrid local traditions in
an attempt to make their own counter-scriptures and their own practices
of counter-scripturalization. While many activists came from Protestant
and Catholic families, many did not, and many more may have left their
sense of religious allegiance considerably more open. Christianity is not
the only source of an apocalyptic ethos or a scripturalizing mode; indeed,
precisely by sitting with apocalyptic and scripturalizing modes that respond
12 J.M. HIDALGO

to Christian traditions while drawing on founts outside those traditions,

I hope that I can blur some of religious studies’ conceptual borders of
apocalypse and scriptures along the way so as to include a greater plu-
rality of sources and contexts beyond narrowly Christian forms. What is
interesting to me is how both Manifest Destiny practices of scripturaliza-
tion and Chicanx movement ones rely on utopian orientations fueled by
spiritual and revelatory rhetorics, though those rhetorics are not exclu-
sively pointing toward or drawing upon Christian traditions.

A PERSISTENCE OF APOCALYPTIC, UTOPIAN,

AND SCRIPTURALIZING MODES

Through his back and forth between a plurality of texts and the world
he sees in his daily life, Figueroa has crafted his own epistemological
frame, a frame through which he challenges dominantized European and
Euro-North American understandings of the world, rewriting the histo-
ries with which they have “brainwashed” us. This knowledge system not
only recovers lost histories: it is a practice of world orientation that scripts
cosmic-level truths about what we know, how we know it, and where we
fit as human beings in a much larger story. Beyond thinking that he could
show me a utopian place available if one only peers behind the mask of
present-day Blythe, Figueroa was likewise certain that my trip to see him
on a warm California day would redefine my research and my life because
to recognize the ways in which Blythe’s physical features inscribe it as
Aztlán also reveals deep cosmological truths about the past and future
of Chicanxs and of humanity at large. He was concerned that he was
overwhelming me with knowledge, just as he thought his first book had
tried to reveal too much knowledge to the world: “This other book was
too vast, too much information for the ordinary person to understand.
How could an ordinary person know what we know right now? We can’t
because we’ve been fully brainwashed, not just by the Spanish govern-
ment but by the United States government.”35 He recognized that I am
deeply embedded within an epistemological regime shaped by dominan-
tized Spanish and US norms, an epistemology that is quite distinct from
the one he has spent decades remaking in Blythe.
Just as Figueroa reveals lost histories and truths behind the mask of
present-day Blythe, so too does Revelation present lost histories and
futures that exist behind the dominantized Roman scripts about how the
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 13

world worked in the first century. The last book of the Christian Bible, the
Apocalypse, has long been a troubling and challenging text for a plurality
of readers. Perhaps written by varying figures over years but connected
to one particular seer, “John of Patmos,” the book of Revelation also
presents itself as a play between place and text wherein the “unveiling” of
a higher-authority, cosmic narrative clarifies the here and now.36 Through
the frame of letters to seven different ἐκκλεσίαι (often simply translated
as “churches,” but the term has a wider range of potential meaning and
should not be confined by “Christian” imaginations of sacred gatherings),
John of Patmos recounts his visions of a heavenly court and earthly disas-
ter. Rome, imagined as the embodied “harlot” of Babylon, is violently
destroyed toward the end of the book, and so is the “Beast,” a cosmic
nemesis of the divine court. Then a utopian and “heavenly city,” a “new
Jerusalem” descends after the previous world has been washed away.
In this city, God dwells with humans forever. While the precise politi-
cal machinations and locations of the authors and communities who cre-
ated and first read Revelation are always open to debate, a sense pervades
scholarship that this text speaks to anxieties of diaspora and displacement,
broadly construed, under Roman imperial rule. Written sometime in the
late first-century CE and circulated among communities with many mem-
bers who likely saw themselves as Jewish, Revelation became scripture for
Christians after centuries of dispute.
Although quite short in length, Revelation presents an epistemological,
mythical, and scripturalizing challenge to its past and present audiences
because it imagines history as having a greater cosmic meaning that must
be “revealed” to us. The Greek ἀποκάλυψις better translates as “unveil-
ing” or “revelation” than “apocalypse” because of contemporary associa-
tions of the “end of the world” with the “apocalypse.” The Apocalypse of
John is one proper title to the book of Revelation, and the term apocalypse
contains important layers, especially in the ways that it implants a sense of
knowledge borne out of crisis. For the sake of some comparative conver-
sation between Aztlán and the new Jerusalem, I approach apocalyptic as
an orientation toward cosmic-scale revelations, a quest to unveil an other
world behind and beyond the world portrayed in dominantized cultural
scripts. Apocalyptic orientations are especially concerned with destinies,
with a kind of playful futurity that is entangled with the present and the
past, but sometimes these destinies are less clear or less final than popular
interpretations might hold. As the prototypical example of apocalyptic lit-
erature, Revelation’s multivalent possibilities of meaning do not provide
14 J.M. HIDALGO

any clear, agreed-upon interpretation; Revelation continues to be engaged

as a locus for making meaning even amid, or especially because of, its
imaginative ambiguities.37
Some of the descriptions that have been applied to Revelation, such
as genre-defying, syntactically strange, a mind-bendingly mythically play-
ful performance that uses astrological and geographical imaginaries to
constitute a textual portrait of alternative peoples and places, could also
be applied to Figueroa’s book Ancient Footprints. Though they are both
quite different texts, produced in distinct contexts, with dramatically
varying levels of popular recognition, a conversation between the worlds
invoked in and around the both of them demonstrates that textual worlds
are not just the realms of erudite scribes residing at a safe remove from
the messy materialities of daily life. Both texts manifest a concern with the
slippage of knowledge as power and its relationship to problems of place
and self-determination.
If one retrieves apocalyptic as something inclusive of but bigger than
its traditional Judeo-Christian moorings, as a mode of reading and writing
a new cosmo-mythohistorical narrative of the world rather than a genre
of texts only about gory endings, then the apocalyptic frameworks of the
Chicanx movement can be perceived more freely. Both Revelation and
Chicanx movement texts revise the “mythohistorical.”38 They are spaces
that make other sorts of world imagination possible, and peoples ever con-
test their imaginative boundaries. Aztlán and the new Jerusalem invoke
multiple times and multiple kinds of space at once; their scriptural rev-
elations also encode manifold layers of conquest, numerous histories of
imperial domination and devastation. The new Jerusalem trades upon
Jewish oral and textual memory of prior dominating imperial abuses:
Babylonian and Roman being the most named, though layers of Persian
and Hellenistic/Seleucid domination also remain. At the same time, the
term “the new Jerusalem” carries forward Jewish oral and historical mem-
ory of agency and resistance in the face of these empires, and it carries forth
a recollection of the world before these empires dominated and promises
a world after them. Aztlán invokes older Mexica traditions from before
European conquest, but to invoke the term is to remember both Spanish
invasion and US conquest even while Aztlán also imagines a present of
Latin American immigration into the Southwest, which literature scholar
Rafael Pérez-Torres likewise dubs an imagination of “reconquest.”39 This
term matters because, as much as they imagine resistance out of and away
from dominating empires, both Aztlán and the new Jerusalem also incor-
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 15

porate centering imaginaries of conquest, whether Israelites in the land of

Canaan or Aztecs in the Valley of Mexico.
As a result of Figueroa’s claim of Blythe/Aztlán, his friend Robert
Gonzales Vasquez wants people to stop perceiving Aztlán as merely mythi-
cal. For Gonzales Vasquez, the mythological vision, the locating of people
and self in textual imagination, is insufficient. As he states, “People say
Aztlán is a ‘place in the heart.’ Well, honestly, that’s garbage.…If it’s a
place in the heart, then we have no beginning. Alfredo wants to give us a
home.”40 Gonzales Vasquez implies that to locate Aztlán outside of tex-
tual imagination is a revelation that will finally locate himself and locate
the “we” to which he feels he belongs. For both Figueroa and Gonzales
Vasquez, historical displacements created by conquest, colonization, and
minoritization in California can be resolved by practices of scriptural and
cosmo-historical revelation, practices that first find and invoke a place of
belonging in text and then map that textual belonging back outside the
world of a text. In some ways then, for Figueroa and Gonzalezs Vasquez, a
fuller exposition of Aztlán and mapping of it onto Blythe is a way of taking
Blythe—and Aztlán—back. This play along different temporal and spatial
imaginaries through the language of myth and the power of sacred texts
speaks to, critiques, and reinvents Revelation’s own historical uses as one
of the crucial scriptural loci for Spanish and US conquest myth-making
and self-fashioning in this hemisphere.
In what might be either ironic or fully logical, the utopian vision and
critical epistemology of a minoritized and subjugated group came to be
biblical Revelation, one of the scriptures of an imperial order, first of the
Roman world, and then, in modernity, of the various settler colonial nations
of Western Europe. In reading US history, we are frequently reminded of
the power of the Exodus motif—which also exists in Revelation—as both
a locus for settler colonial justification and African American resistance to
racialized enslavement. However, biblical motifs of place, such as Eden
and the new Jerusalem, also were powerful. So too, as I discuss more in
Chap. 6, are other “scriptures,” such as the US Constitution, that work
to construct the broader USA and its citizens as a specifically scripturally
invested and located people, nation, and country. This project takes up a
conversation between the Chicanx movement and the book of Revelation
in order to think about scriptures as loci and discourses of power, as prac-
tices of homemaking for those who have been unsettled, but also to some
extent, this book must consider how scriptures have been practices of self-
homing while unhoming others, at least as these practices have been used
16 J.M. HIDALGO

by settler colonizers and dominating regimes. A persistence of apocalyptic,

utopian, and scripturalizing modes travel from the book of Revelation and
become part of the social fabric that Chicanxs appropriate, contest, and
revise in the context of the Mexican-American civil rights movement of
the 1960s and 1970s.

WRITING FROM “NO PLACE”

A key assumption of this project is that Chicanxs have already been sig-
nificant interpreters of Revelation, playing with the textual imaginary
in ways that are not always registered as such in dominantized biblical
scholarly discourses.41 In shifting from a focus on the Bible alone to the
question of scriptures, I can look at the ways in which Chicanxs have
engaged scriptural phenomena, particularly as legacies of biblical usages
and imaginations, even when Chicanxs do not directly quote the Bible.
Hence, in order to undertake this project, I have worked to interlace bib-
lical studies, broader studies of the “sacred” and “place” in religion, and
Chicanx and Latinx Studies work on ethnic Mexican histories, identities,
and epistemologies.42 This section of the introduction might normally be
the “methods” discussion, but because of this project’s interdisciplinary
mode, I have to talk about how I both rely upon and defy the methods of
multiple fields in doing this work. The problem of how peoples navigate a
sense of unhoming and displacement not only informs the core questions
of this book, but it also shapes the methods pursued to answer them in
that I work outside of and between multiple fields, often feeling displaced
from any one area of inquiry.
In the process, I have redefined what the “sacred” can and must mean
in the particular context of the Chicanx movement, though such a redefi-
nition is rooted in ongoing work in the study of religion, which is itself a
hotly contested category. Thus, my own discussions of the “sacred” and
the “religious” are fraught with accompanying limitations. Foregrounding
the Chicanx movement as a moment in an apocalyptic, hemispherically
American legacy provides a starting point for thinking with and about
Revelation in the USA.43 I describe the relationship between Aztlán and
the new Jerusalem as “resonant” imaginaries, and in so doing, I am invok-
ing a set of scholars who have engaged Revelation complexly within stud-
ies of postcolonialism, imperialism, and gender.44 My work is partially
informed by a set of minoritized, womanist, feminist, and queer bibli-
cal critics. I focus on Revelation and other scriptures, but I am not that
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 17

interested in the ancient world; I am interested in how these scriptures

have been used and remade in modernity. That does not mean I abandon
questions of historicity, but I have come to ground my questions more
squarely in the study of sacred place and social movements in the USA as
a way of more thoroughly interlacing minoritized biblical criticism with
the broader study of religion and with the interdisciplinary field of Latinx
Studies.
Questions about the power relationships created and reimagined in and
through scriptures are the shaping core of this project. Scriptures should be
perceived as centering texts used by and in order to define communities.
Thus, the term does not always refer to familiar texts such as the Qur’an
or to the canonical texts of contemporary Christian Bibles. Scriptures are
not special texts on their own; scriptures are something that human beings
do and make with texts. If the word scriptures signals a kind of relation-
ship rather than a quality inherent to a text, then different questions about
scriptures, ones that are not necessarily focused on content meaning par-
ticular to specific texts, begin to surface.45 Asking this question of “why
scripturalize” turns the focus of this study from the texts that are “scrip-
tures” as such and toward the processes of their production and usage;
or alternatively, it means shifting focus from the simple noun scriptures to
formulations of the verb scripturalize, formulations such as scripturalizing
and scripturalization.46 The emphasis here is on how scriptures exist as
part of human social imagination and contestation.
This book is an attempt to grapple with why humans scripturalize by
thinking about Chicanx engagements of “scriptures” as concept and prac-
tice, while also contextualizing those engagements within the legacies of
biblical imaginations of the Americas by concentrating on the book of
Revelation. I address the question of “why scripturalize” by contextualiz-
ing the making of scriptures, and the rituals that surround them, as falling
under a complex and ambivalent utopian practice; this emphasis on place
and utopia both sets this project apart from other studies of scripturaliza-
tion and speaks to the focus upon Chicanx movement subjects. A certain
ongoing slipperiness infects the relationships people negotiate between
place and scriptures. People turn to, invent, and reconstruct scriptures
not only to imagine themselves and the places in which they live, but
they also make and remake scriptures as places to inhabit. As theorist
of religion Charles H.  Long suggested some years ago about religions
of the oppressed, often in order to experience their fuller humanity, the
oppressed must look to “an-other” world, a utopian no place of possibilities
18 J.M. HIDALGO

incompletely experienced in daily life.47 Scriptures act as a place that is also

not a place, an ambivalent and ambiguous slippage that enables groups to
use scriptures in order to open up new worlds of communal imagination
while foreclosing others. Scriptures become homes that people seek to
inhabit, and by writing, reading, and performing scriptures, people hope
to remake the world outside of these scriptures. Scripturalization as a
term emphasizes the dynamism of this process of making and engaging
scriptures while also attending to broader sociocultural power dynamics of
enshrining any one special set of texts and reading strategies.
Figueroa’s story is part of why I became interested in utopian orien-
tations as one of the strategies of diasporic peoples that religion scholar
Jonathan Z.  Smith examines. The import of sacred space pervades
Figueroa’s story, if in part because he fights for US legal recognition of
areas around Blythe as sacred. Such a struggle though, in Figueroa’s case,
reveals a quest for autonomy and self-determination with respect to the
place that he feels is his own, even if his belonging has been questioned
by others and his legal power has been restricted; the utopian and self-
determination become intertwined in Figueroa’s story. When J.Z. Smith
describes “sacrality” as “a category of emplacement,”48 it allows us to treat
religion, at least within these contexts, as an assortment of strategies that
somehow displaced peoples have taken up to make place for themselves;
religion, then, is not merely a shorthand for some neatly defined institu-
tional commitment to or belief in a higher power. Nor is religion always
about strictly dividing the world between sacred spaces and acts and pro-
fane spaces and acts. Although ever a slippery term that leaves a remainder,
religion, for some communities, can be about making, contesting, and
reshaping place rather than just navigating a world already neatly divided
between sacred and profane. A student of religion must focus on the
production of the sacred rather than presuming its pre-existence. Smith
distinguished between imperial religions with their production of sacred
“centers” and diasporic religions with their shifting attention to a “reli-
gion of ‘nowhere’” that is a byproduct of their lack of spatial control in the
world as is.49 Instead of his “religion of nowhere,” I take up “no place”
because of the utopian importance of how a “no place” is an imagined and
powerfully created “place,” even if only locatable within the boundaries
of scriptures.50
Utopian narratives are often an aspect of broader scripturally based
mythologies of time and space. Utopia is a term coined by Thomas More
in the earliest years of Europe’s imperial ascendancy. More’s Utopia por-
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 19

trayed an imaginary island of perfected living. Utopia is a pun on Greek

words—ou-topos and eu-topos, which combine to mean “no place” (or
“non-place” or “not-a-place”) and “good place,” both paradoxically
bound together in the one term. Utopias are visions of better worlds with
a fundamental ambivalence toward existence, precisely because they are
the “good place” and the “no place.” Utopian orientations concern good
places that exist, even if just imaginatively or in other worlds, but whose
bounds are always fuzzy and contestable because of the quality of also
being “no places.” I consider visions that did not always strictly classify
themselves as utopias, but that scholars have located within the phenom-
enological dynamic of the utopian, of the imagination and pursuit of a
better world that is a “no place” because it does not completely exist in the
present moment.51 A concern with place and no place also appears within
Chicanx Studies scholarship about Aztlán.52
That utopia terminologically originates in a nascent English impe-
rial context matters. Besides its global imperial actions, the USA persists
as an entirely settler colonial state, a state whose existence requires the
continuing enforcement of settler colonialism and subjugation of those
populations who resided in the USA before conquest. Such a national
situation has always entailed an unsettling experience, a continual problem
of place that has exacerbated already existent Protestant tendencies toward
scriptural fetishization. As a result, dominantized US cultures developed
a range of methods for scripturalizing this nation, through a plurality of
texts, but dominantized cultures did not invent scriptures; they just have
their own particular modes of engagement. The Mexicas had their own
scriptures and scriptural practices before the Spanish tried to destroy them.
Scriptural practices, media, and loci look different among different com-
munities in different historical moments; they even diverge significantly
across time, space, and culture among groups we term Christian, and even
among the peoples we might identify with dominantized US culture. Yet,
particular dominantized practices must be the focus of this project because
they are the practices that Chicanx activists try to scripturalize out of and
away from.
I concern myself with the utopian, instead of the heterotopian, term
because I think that this good/no place pun connects with the discourses
I heard among interlocutors and that I have read in other Latinx religions
scholarship. Biblical scholar and Cuban American cultural critic Fernando
F. Segovia once described Latinxs in the USA as having “two places and
no place on which to stand.”53 While different Latinxs and Latinx populations
20 J.M. HIDALGO

experience those two places and no place differently, the idea of having
“no place” resonated with my own Costa Rican and US background; and
it also seemed to resonate, albeit in idiosyncratic ways, among varying
Chicanxs with whom I spoke and about whom I read in this project. I
heard echoes of Segovia when Figueroa described people telling him he
had no country, but it was within this denial of place that Figueroa came
to articulate that he did have a place, a land that was his. Even if he shares a
problem of displacement, Figueroa narrates that struggle with place quite
distinctly from Segovia in that he finds a way to lay claim to place by tak-
ing a no place, Aztlán, and seeing it both within himself and the land sur-
rounding him.
This observation, that Latinxs come to experience and make home
within a certain porosity, perhaps a borderlands, between worlds, a home
that requires something of Chicana critic Gloria Anzaldúa’s “mestiza con-
sciousness,” made me wonder about this no place that Segovia names.
What if that no place is where peoples often take a stand? Can the no
place, when textually, especially scripturally, encoded, work as a place
upon which peoples stand? Since Segovia also connects that “no place”
to an “other world,” somehow intertwined and yet separate from the two
worlds in which Latinx identities are grounded, and since for many, this
“other world” is a better world, then might that “no place” also be a par-
ticular endeavor into and framing of the utopian, drawing from the roots
of More’s term as ou- and eu-topos, the no place and the good place inter-
twined? If utopias become especially emplaced in scriptures, then are there
not ways in which scriptures serve as that no place where peoples ground
themselves as a utopian practice?
While most of my work in addressing these questions relies on texts, life
story interviews with a handful of Chicanx activists provide a sense of how
these activists narrated themselves and their own relationship with the
movement and key movement texts and issues. During graduate school, I
became friends with a woman who had been a Mecha member and student
activist in the early 1970s at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Through a snowball process of being passed along from one interlocutor’s
connection to the next, I came to interview mostly college-educated and
education-oriented activists connected to MEChA, Católicos por la Raza,
the Church of the Epiphany, or the steering committee that organized the
Santa Barbara conference. This collection of interlocutors is both bound
up with and informative of my interest in the powers of education as one
locus for challenging and remaking scripturalization. Figueroa is the main
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 21

exception to my snowball method because I contacted him directly after

having found him on the Internet. Figueroa did not graduate college, but
he had been a farmworker and Chicanx activist in the 1960s and 1970s.
Education also mattered—and continues to matter—a great deal to him.
While some of the individuals requested that I provide them with an alias,
others opted that I share their names.
Given the diversity of the movement, my interlocutors represent a nar-
row band of voices, only a limited and partial perspective on the conflict-
ing visions and shared aspirations of the multiple insurgencies that marked
the classical movement years. They come from a strain of the movement
that was prominent among educators, writers, and artists; a part of the
movement committed to transformations of epistemology and representa-
tion. In advance of an interview, they knew I was going to ask them about
their biography, identities (racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and class par-
ticularly), Aztlán, the Chicanx movement, and religious discourses in the
movement, and that undoubtedly shaped the stories they told me. Still, I
wanted to see what key points, texts, and ideas showed up in their stories.
I consistently wrestled with my own expectations about what scriptures
should be like, what texts should be cited, and how they should be read.
Whether reading Revelation or El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, I am not
particularly invested in figuring out their precise meanings or authorial
intentions. While the contexts of their writing matter, I am interested in
the varying meanings and investments in meaning that have been made in
relationship to specific texts and imaginations. I do not just study the text
of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán alone; instead I take up multiple readings
of Aztlán. In my writing, I try to distinguish between readings taken up
during the movement era, later in critical scholarship, and among oral his-
torical reflection. I do at times treat scholarly readings as both “primary”
and “secondary” sources in this regard, as I do with scholarly readings of
the Bible at varying points as well; scholars are also data for this project.
For the most part, I have delimited my movement readings by focusing
on California-based Chicanxs; the work of Enriqueta Vasquez is one of the
main exceptions to that approach.

REVELATION IN AZTLÁN
I demonstrate the ways in which scriptures are utopian projects precisely
when they can function as homing devices for people who feel somehow
displaced—for instance, a home in the world has been denied them or
22 J.M. HIDALGO

taken away, they move between and belong to too many worlds, or a dom-
inantized power has circumscribed their place and greatly restricted their
movements in space and time—and weigh the power dynamics and conse-
quences of making and treating scriptures in such a manner. “Home” also
becomes a category that is more of a contested process than a stable locus.
In order to make this case that scriptures are utopian homing devices,
I first excavate lived constructions of the utopian and the scriptural in the
Chicanx movement. Thus, Chap. 2 focuses on utopian facets within the
Chicanx movement by looking at El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, the myth
of Aztlán, and its afterlives in Chicanx interpretive communities. While
El Plan is frequently referenced in scholarship on the Chicanx movement
as a utopian vision, this chapter shows that utopia and the utopian rely
upon and construct a process of scripturalization. Drawing especially on
José Esteban Muñoz’s approach to utopian horizons in Cruising Utopia
(2009), this chapter works to make sense of the ways that utopian rheto-
ric shapes and is transformed by El Plan and its readers. The writing and
reading of El Plan works to disrupt the contemporary time and space
of the USA by imagining a place that has existed, does exist, and will
exist, a place that is located and bound within a newly written and ritually
engaged scripture. The utopian facets of El Plan help explain the power
of scriptures because they can become loci for accessing and belonging
to “an-other world.” At the same time, El Plan serves as an ambivalent
homing device, and I consider the power of this ambivalence as crucial to
Aztlán’s enduring influence for individuals such as Figueroa. Focusing first
on El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán reveals the utopian mode of place- and
people-making that was crucial to certain writings and readings of the
movement; it also shows how scriptures work as loci that delimit com-
munal boundaries while being pliable and multivalent foci of imagination.
Yet, a study of El Plan also presses at the ways that scriptures are often cre-
ated and engaged specifically as part of a utopian practice, which is one of
the unique emphases of this book, that scriptures are bound up with quite
human dreams of and daily, lived efforts for the utopian.
Drawing on this examination of Aztlán and El Plan, I intentionally
defy a normal chronological progression and instead focus on Revelation
in Chap. 3, examining its utopian imaginary of the new Jerusalem in par-
ticular in order to understand how the utopian may have worked as a
mode in Revelation. Chicanx Aztlán then becomes an informative conver-
sation partner for prying at Revelation’s utopian mode, and at the same
time Aztlán stands as a contemporary foil that pulls out how Revelation’s
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 23

pastness interrupts our contemporary world. In the ancient context of

Revelation, a peoplehood gets made and reimagined through the creation
of a utopian city-temple in the text via the imagery of the new Jerusalem
of Revelation 21–22; Revelation remakes the temple as utopian text, as
mobile scripture. By recontextualizing El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán as
an apocalyptic text, one that is concerned with cosmo-historical revela-
tion and transformation, and El Plan, as a more contemporary riffing on
apocalyptic traditions, this chapter draws out strands of American apoca-
lyptic that are often obscured when scholarship spotlights narrowly on the
legacies of Revelation in Christian fundamentalist and end-time orienta-
tions. Thus, the conclusion of Chap. 3 rapidly traces out from Revelation’s
ancient world manufacture into modernity, showing how the utopian
mode becomes scriptural and the scriptural becomes implicated in settler
colonial conquest.
Chapter 4 then chronologically returns to the Chicanx movement in
order to contextualize El Plan de Santa Barbara as a text that, among
other things, is quite concerned with scripturalization and responds to
the scripturally colonized world that falls out as a wake from settler colo-
nial engagements of Revelation. While the Chicanx movement’s El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán helps us to understand the utopian modes and pro-
cesses of Revelation’s ancient scripturalization, a recontextualized sense
of how Revelation was not just utopian but also how it became scriptural
helps us to understand what sorts of scriptures and processes of scriptur-
alization that the Chicanx movement must necessarily engage with and
respond to. Framing El Plan de Santa Barbara’s rhetorics and interpreta-
tions as participating in an apocalyptic and utopian mode that employs
and critiques legacies of Revelation in the Americas, this chapter shows
how scriptures can get created and read as centers of and for utopian prac-
tice. At the same time, this chapter also clarifies how practices of scriptur-
alization are articulated as crucial to making new and alternative forms of
knowledge while empowering Chicanxs.
Both Revelation and key Chicanx texts have, in the last few decades,
also been the loci of crucial feminist54 and queer55 critical engagement.
Even as feminist and queer critics demonstrate the contested terrain of
utopian scripturalization, they also reveal scripturalization’s ongoing shap-
ing power. Chapter 5 takes up feminist and queer readings in order to
understand how scripturalization persists as powerful magic even among
those seemingly most alienated from its bonds. On the one hand, this
chapter shows how the limits of scriptural pliability caused and perpetu-
24 J.M. HIDALGO

ated physical and rhetorical violence and unhoming among women and
queer activists and interpreters. On the other hand, this chapter also
examines how feminist and queer critics take up Chicanx scriptures and
Revelation in ways that emphasize the import of such textual loci, not
as stable homing sites, but as foci for ongoing contestation and remak-
ing of selves and worlds. Feminist and queer critics of both the Chicanx
movement and Revelation demonstrate how scripturalization works, not
because scriptures are stable texts with clear meanings, but because they
are places where people go to contest and reshape “an-other world” and
this world together.
But what are scriptures after the Chicanx movement? In order to
rethink the category of scriptures, in Chap. 6 I study how author Cherríe
L. Moraga, who was inspired by Chicanx movement activism, redeploys
ideas about Mesoamerican glyphs and codices alongside the book of
Revelation in her 1992 “Codex Xerí.” Moraga’s essay elucidates the power
dynamics and settler colonial history of “scriptures” as a category in the
study of religion, portraying the limits of the category, which she aban-
dons in favor of a “Chicano Codex.” Yet, even while Moraga’s essay chal-
lenges scriptures as they have commonly been understood and the book of
Revelation as it has been employed, her Chicano Codex opens possibilities
for making and engaging scriptures differently as fluid, embodied, and
performed—rather than strictly written—“centers” for peoples in need
of seeing themselves. Moraga’s Chicano Codex may have a greater affin-
ity with some contemporary scholarly interpretations of Revelation than
one might at first presume. Revelation in Aztlán offers up the Chicanx
movement as a fruitful and interesting locus from which to think about
and reconsider the phenomena of scriptures, apocalypticism, and utopia-
nism, and their fraught and interconnected legacies in the New World.
Scriptures are and have been places of power, not just because they are
“sacred” but also because people have found ways to uncover, challenge,
transform, and uphold the power regimes of the world around them in
and through these texts.

NOTES
1. Japenga, I24.
2. Figueroa, Footprints, xiv.
3. Interview with Figueroa. Most of my quotations of him come from this
interview unless otherwise cited.
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 25

4. I use “America” and “American” to refer to the hemisphere. When speak-

ing of the United States of America, I will use the full name or the acro-
nyms, US or USA. I use “Mexican American,” “African American,” etc.
because of the current regular written recognition of those naming
practices.
5. When speaking broadly of people in the USA who trace their ancestors to
Mexico (or lands once held by Mexico), nations of Central and South
America (including Brazil), and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, I use the
term Latinx, primarily in order to refer to the small group of scholars who
focus upon and deal with Latinx theologies and religious studies. I use
Chicanx, and on rare occasion the masculine Chicano or Xicano, to refer
to people who self-identify with the term. I use the terms Mexican
American and ethnic Mexican to refer to varying Mexican and Mexican-
descended populations in the USA more broadly. See E. Chávez, 8.
6. Figueroa, Footprints, xiv.
7. In 2009, Williams College colleague Edan Dekel drew my attention to the
confluence between the city’s name and Figueroa’s claims.
8. Figueroa recounts, “But here the majority of people like my father when
he worked all that time with all these big mines and all this. That’s why he
died from mining consumption. My grandfather, great-grandfather, all of
them died.” He also describes how “we ourselves helped destroy mother
earth because we were miners. That’s why I quit.”
9. Many attempts have been made to interrupt the gender binary of Spanish
(“Chican@” and “Chicana/o”, for instance). Even among my interlocu-
tors, some argue for the inherent inclusivity of Spanish structurally,
describing “Chicano” as all-encompassing (and hence “Chicano move-
ment” is still favored by this publisher for this book’s title). Following
other Latinx Studies scholars, in my own text, I use the “x” to signal both
gender inclusivity and transgression.
10. In translating la Raza, I follow historian Ernesto Chávez in using “peo-
ple” rather than “race.” Most activists with whom I spoke viewed it as a
term of “pride in being Mexican.” See discussion in C. Muñoz, 97.
11. Marty, 146.
12. For discussion of this specific term, see Ahmed, 9.
13. Wimbush, Magic, 46.
14. I am adapting dominantized and minoritized from the “Minoritized
Criticism and Biblical Interpretation” Consultation of the Society of
Biblical Literature; see website description by Tat-siong Benny Liew and
Fernando F.  Segovia, “2014 Annual Meeting Program Units,” http://
w w w. s b l - s i t e . o r g / m e e t i n g s / C o n g r e s s e s _ P r o g r a m U n i t s .
aspx?MeetingId=25; accessed 03/05/14.
15. Price, 47, 191, endnote 31.
26 J.M. HIDALGO

16. The Brown Berets’ occupation of Santa Catalina Island, reclaiming it as

Mexican territory in August/September 1972, partially hinges on their
reading and treatment of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The occupa-
tion was also informed and inspired by the American Indian Movement’s
occupation of Alcatraz. See E. Chávez, 56.
17. O’Sullivan, 5–10.
18. Manifest Destiny fits within a certain strain of “apocalyptic,” one that
emphasizes a “fatalistic” determinism, a “sense of a revealed, underlying
design for history.” Wojick, 4; also see 21–36 for a survey of some strains
of apocalyptic in US cultural history.
19. Robert Allen Warrior stridently critiqued both US and liberationist deploy-
ments of the Exodus narrative by underscoring the use of this narrative in
shaping Euro-US conquest justifications whereby the Euro-US population
was the new Israel and Native Americans were cast as Canaanites. See
Robert Allen Warrior, “A Native American Perspective: Canaanites,
Cowboys, and Indians,” Voices from the Margin, ed. Sugirtharajah, 277–
285. Many scholarly texts address and query the import of traditions com-
ing from the Jewish Bible that have been redeployed (in a supersessionist
manner) by dominantized Euro-US Christians in order to narrate their
place in this hemisphere. On “God’s New Israel” in US self-articulation as
a nation, see Cherry, ed. God’s New Israel. Also see Shalev, American Zion
on the Old Testament in US public life through the Civil War. For attention
to the contrasting ways that African Americans also took up tropes of the
“New Israel” and other Hebrew biblical motifs in the nineteenth century,
see, for instance, Thomas, Claiming Exodus, and Johnson, Myth of Ham.
20. In this painting, a white feminine “America” presides as “Indians, fleeing
her approach, disappear into the fury of storm waves in the Pacific Ocean.”
See León, 88.
21. Price, 47.
22. Whitman, 2. See also D.A. Sánchez, 89.
23. See Pinheiro, especially 64–66.
24. Lint Sagarena, 130.
25. See the thorough examination of indigenous Mexican rhetorics, practices,
concepts of space, and the larger import of “indianismo” informing
Chicanx movement ideas in Miner, Creating Aztlán.
26. The terms “reactivate” and “reactivation” come from composition theo-
rist Damián Baca in order to convey the sense of how Chicanxs dynami-
cally remake and redeploy pre-existing tropes, ideas, and practices.
Chicanxs are not reviving a “lost past,” but they may also diverge from the
survivals of these traditions among specific Mesoamerican indigenous
populations. Baca, 79.
27. Lint Sagarena, 136.
 INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURES, PLACE, AND NO PLACE ... 27

28. Scholars have emphasized the problem of “chrononormativity” that reifies

nationalist and male activities as the meaningful core of a Chicanx move-
ment “era.” See Ontiveros, especially 20–33. Because I focus on scriptur-
alization, including normative historiography, I mostly stay within the
chrononormative scheme.
29. Nationalism was not the only ideological pole or orientation available. For
instance, many Chicanx activists participated in socialist organizations. See
Mariscal, 42.
30. For a contemporary example of a historiography that emphasizes the
movement’s pluralistic, diverse, coalitional, and internally contestational
nature, see Gómez-Quiñones and Vásquez, Making Aztlán.
31. Beltrán, 26.
32. Blackwell, 27. As a Latina who grew up in the Midwest, I lament some of
my project’s focus on California because Chicanx activists were spread
throughout the USA.
33. The “four horsemen of the Apocalypse,” are cataclysmic metaphors that
signal a great transformation; descriptions of them can be found in Rev
6:1–8. The main printed reference to first dub César Chávez, Rodolfo
“Corky” Gonzales, José Angel Gutiérrez, and Reies López Tijerina as the
“four horsemen” of the Chicanx movement may be found in Meier and
Rivera, 257–280.
34. César Chávez remains an unofficial saint of the movement. His words have
been scripturalized as can be observed in M.T. García’s edited volume, The
Gospel of César Chávez, which organizes and compiles the words and writ-
ing of César Chávez on various theological topics. Some significant reli-
gion scholarship has undertaken examination of Chávez, Tijerina,
Católicos por la Raza, Las Hermanas, and PADRES.  See Busto, King
Tiger; M.T. García, Católicos, Chaps. 5 and 6; León, Political Spirituality;
R.E. Martínez, PADRES; Lara Medina, Las Hermanas.
35. Figueroa claimed we were going to be overwhelmed with all we were
learning from him. When we got ready to leave, he said “See, you’re going
to be the hunchbacks now …hunchback with the knowledge.”
36. In discussing the book of Revelation or the Apocalypse of John, I some-
times use the names Revelation and Apocalypse interchangeably in order
to underscore how “unveiling” and “revealing” matter as much, if not
more, to apocalyptic than our contemporary focus on end-of-the-world
rhetoric and imagination.
37. My approach draws upon Erin Runions’s “queerly sublime ethics of read-
ing” that is “attuned to a queer opacity—that is, the sublime, liminal unde-
cidability of alterity—in the production of what is taken as transcendent.”
See Runions, Babylon, 214, 215, 228, 244 emphasis hers.
28 J.M. HIDALGO

38. This term is useful for the study of religion given Bebout’s approach, “that
myth and history form a discursive field through which power relations are
constructed, contested, and refashioned.” Bebout, 1.
39. Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring,” 16.
40. Japenga, I24.
41. Major exceptions to this avoidance of Chicanx interpretations of Revelation
include D.A. Sánchez’s work and some of the essays by Jean-Pierre Ruiz.
42. Rather than rely on “intersect,” I draw on Cecilia González-Andrieu’s
approach to interdisciplinary work because “interlacing evokes images of
multiplicity, movement, playful mingling, and also discreteness.” See
González-Andrieu, 164. I also partially take up her approach because of
the historically problematic practice of methodolatry in biblical studies.
See Moore and Sherwood, especially 39–40.
43. Most scholars tend to start with politically powerful Euro-American fig-
ures, such as Ronald Reagan, or evangelicals, or explicitly millenarian
movements, except for scholars working in minoritized biblical studies,
cited below, especially in Chaps. 3 and 5 .
44. Keller, God and Power, 27.
45. W.C. Smith, 9, 17.
46. Levering, “Introduction,” Rethinking Scripture, 8.
47. Long, 151.
48. J.Z. Smith, To Take Place, 104.
49. J.Z. Smith, Map, xiv.
50. J.Z. Smith also uses this substitution, J.Z. Smith, Map, 101.
51. Though utopian projects (communities, texts, etc.) are seen as social
dreaming, comparatively little attention has been paid to scripturalization
as one of the social dreams taken up in these communities.
52. See especially Gaspar de Alba, 103–140.
53. See Segovia, “Two Places,” 26–40.
54. I use “Chicana feminists” with recognition that Chicana feminists, as with
much of the movement, reflected a diversity of views even on how to name
themselves. See Blackwell, 187.
55. In describing scholars, artists, and authors who root themselves in “queer”
theoretical and critical trajectories and traditions, I use the term “queer.”
In other historical notes, I retroactively apply “LGBTIQ” in order to con-
vey the complexity, fluidity, and plurality of persons involved.
 CHAPTER 2

“We Are Aztlán”: Writing Scriptures,

Writing Utopia in El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán

In Alfredo Acosta Figueroa’s memory, primary and secondary education

amounted to “Americanization school,” an institution that attempted to
strip him of his knowledge of and pride in his Mexican ancestry. Only
“five Chicanos graduated from high school since it was started in 1916 to
1947 when [he] entered the high school,” despite the numerical major-
ity of Chicanxs in Blythe.1 Viewing education as part of the unjust power
relations in Blythe, which he compares to Mississippi as a more nationally
prominent example of “rampant racial discrimination,” he distrusts the
knowledge broadly circulated in Blythe’s schools. Instead, he advocates
a skeptical reading of what he dubs “European conquest” histories and
a turn toward the “historical facts” and “reminiscence of our indigenous
cosmic cultural traditions.”2 Tracing his descent as “Xicano,” Chemehuevi,
and Yaqui, Figueroa presents himself as both a defender and a retriever of
indigenous knowledge that has long been obscured.
When Figueroa describes himself as Xicano, with an X, he claims the
name not only as an ethnicity but also as an indigenous title that he traces
through the Mexican Revolution, Independence, and back to the Aztec
empire where, in his description, Xicanos were “the defenders.” Likewise,
when Figueroa asserts his descent from the somewhat mythical figure of
Joaquín Murrieta, he both proclaims the duration of his family’s history in
California as miners even before 1849 and remembers Murrieta along the
lines of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s famous 1967 poem, I Am Joaquín,
another central text of the Chicanx movement that I discuss further in

© The Author(s) 2016 29

J.M. Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59214-9_2
30 J.M. HIDALGO

Chap. 4. For Figueroa, “Joaquín Murrieta was the guy that defended us,
the miners from the atrocities that were being committed up in Sonora
California,” and in this way, Figueroa also sets up a genealogy for himself
as a defender of peoples and lands. In Figueroa’s rhetoric and narratives,
the legacies of certain shifts in scripturalization have been lived out over
the course of the decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
As a “defender,” Figueroa has spent much of his life as an activist,
whether for farmworker rights, against nuclear power plants and waste
facilities, or, since 2011, in opposition to the building of solar power
plants on federal lands that local peoples deem sacred.3 The local lands
around Blythe contain geoglyphs that represent what Figueroa calls “the
creator’s travel on the surface of earth.” The local lands are not only sites
of sacred import to contemporary indigenous populations: for Figueroa,
the whole local landscape reveals the archaeological traces of Aztlán, the
Aztec homeland, as described and depicted in Spanish colonial codices
and the traditions and texts Figueroa encountered during and after the
Chicanx movement. Therefore, for Figueroa, these lands cannot and
should not be used for government solar power contracts that destroy the
geoglyphs and eliminate indigenous rights to relate to and decipher the
wisdom inscribed into the local landscape.4
For Figueroa, Aztlán represents many things. On the one hand, it is a
past place that definitively existed, that can be found archaeologically and
can be witnessed in the natural phenomena that Figueroa observes in his
daily life.5 At the same time, its past power also means that the present-
day space of Blythe is of great import to the world: “So here in Blythe
is the center,” a sacred center of a larger hemispheric path of creation.
The promises of a textual center found in Spanish codices and Chicanx
texts are deeply interconnected with that center of Figueroa’s daily life,
Blythe, remaking the place around him through a relationship with those
key texts. Linking his knowledge about Blythe to the prophecy of the last
Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc—“the time will come when our Sun will
shine again”—Figueroa argues that knowledge of and about Blythe can
be shared with others in order to transform the world and end the dam-
aging legacies of conquest.6 By laying claim to Aztlán as polytemporally
and polyspatially powerful, and connecting it to Blythe, Figueroa remakes
assumptions about Blythe as a small irrelevant desert town, and Chicanxs
as minoritized subjects, transferring both town and people from the mar-
gins of power to the centers of sacred place and knowledge. Although
few archaeologists would support Figueroa’s claims about Blythe, his
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 31

approach to his world speaks to the power of utopian scripturalization

that is the focus of this chapter and Chap. 3.
When people—themselves, their families, their communities—have
lived in a space for generations, or even just their own lifetime, and yet
somehow feel like their ability to claim space, rights, and belonging in that
space has been denied, they have historically turned to myriad strategies in
negotiating that situation. Since 1848, one of the strategies that people of
Mexican descent living within US boundaries have adopted is Aztlán: lay-
ing claim to the US Southwest or any place where Chicanxs live and work
as Aztlán, a multivalent utopian imagination of a mythical Aztec homeland
stretching backward and forward in time and defying neat cartographic
restrictions on space. While Aztlán as story, myth, and undiscovered site
has for centuries been an important symbol to indigenous Mesoamericans,
Europeans, and their descendants in the Americas, many associate the con-
cept particularly with the Chicanx civil rights movement of the late 1960s
to the mid-1970s.7 From 1969 to 1976, for many, Aztlán functioned as a
site in which to fundamentally locate the “we” as Chicanxs.
Written and read at a Chicanx youth conference in March 1969, El
Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán; or El Plan) is
considered the first major text of that era to establish Aztlán as a locus
of Chicanx identity formation while also setting pragmatic and revolu-
tionary goals for the movement. Both Figueroa’s poring over old Spanish
codices to decipher Blythe as Aztlán and the writing of El Plan reflect
a slippage between scriptures, utopia, and place. Aztlán became a tex-
tual site of vocalized resistance, in defiance of dominantized restrictive
narratives, especially narratives about Chicanxs and the very land many
Chicanxs inhabited. El Plan established Aztlán as vocabulary and imagery
of utopian home and locus of resistance, and Aztlán’s power as utopian
imaginary is part of what continues to persuade some Chicanxs, as well
as conservative anti-immigration activists, to engage the ideas of El Plan
to this day.8 In some ways, El Plan became one of the scriptures of the
Chicanx movement. How did it come to be scriptural, and how does the
particularly utopian reading of Aztlán and its role in El Plan serve to con-
test and claim place for the Chicanxs who engage it?
I consider this one central text of the movement in order to examine
some of the textual play, or signifying, that transpires in this document
and around the concept of Aztlán.9 This chapter takes up the question of
“how scriptures mean”10 by considering the textures of Aztlán, especially
in relationship to the negotiation of its entexted presentation in El Plan.
32 J.M. HIDALGO

As with any scripture, I assume that “all interpretation is contextual,” and

thus no single interpretation of El Plan can be posited.11 Instead I am
interested in the multiple ways people have sought meaning from and in
relationship to this text. How does this utopia (as both good place and no
place) locate people textually and figuratively, and how do people make
meaning of the present world through their engagement with the mythi-
cal land and this particular text? In what ways are relationships to Aztlán
negotiated and encoded through texts?
Aztlán was not the only or even necessarily the most important imagi-
nary to come out of the Chicanx movement, but Aztlán functions as a
site of a people’s identity formation and imagination, and, in El Plan, it
becomes a scripturalized utopia and a “technology of diaspora,” a means
for resolving, or attempting to resolve, the problematic experience of feel-
ing unhomed in one’s land of residence. El Plan, and Aztlán within it,
functions so well for Chicanx identification because of the temporal and
spatial pliability of Aztlán’s own utopian ambivalence toward existence. In
the study of Aztlán that follows, I am interested in the varying and often
non-harmonious ways that a plurality of Chicanx activists engaged and
envisioned Aztlán so as to challenge and bend dominantized construc-
tions of space, place, and time. This pliability enables Aztlán to be a place
where people see themselves located across boundaries of time and space.

“WE DECLARE THE INDEPENDENCE OF OUR MESTIZO

NATION”: WRITING EL PLAN
The conjunction of social activism, identity nationalism, utopian vision-
ing, and scriptures especially among student and educationally oriented
activists may be why Chicanx historians have focused more on some texts.
Among the many matrices that lead to entexting Aztlán, two crucial texts
and one crucial moment precede and inform the writing of El Plan. While
the Chicanx movement had many sources and tactics, the drafting of cru-
cial written texts became a key feature of the 1960s and 1970s, and a key
focus in historical narratives. One of the first texts of imaginative chal-
lenge during the classical movement era, the Plan of Delano, emerged in
1966 because of the grape strike. Largely attributed to Teatro Campesino
director and activist Luis Valdez, the Plan of Delano plays with text that
have been important at key moments in Mexican history, including the
Texas/Mexico-border Plan de San Diego (1915) that was part of an earlier
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 33

ethnic Mexican uprising against US domination, Emiliano Zapata’s Plan

de Ayala (1911, part of the Mexican Revolution, and arguably the most
important antecedent to Delano), and the Plan de Iguala (1821) that was
central to Mexican independence from Spain. These planes were also not
just texts; they were often read and performed. The Plan of Delano, for
instance, was read aloud in March of 1966 at the start of the trek from
Delano to Sacramento, and Valdez continued to read it aloud at each stop
along the way.12 The publication, performance, and circulation of the Plan
of Delano speak to the scriptural aspirations of Chicanx movement activ-
ism, a turn toward the articulation of key stories and ideas in central texts
that are circulated beyond their place of origin and regularly turned to and
ritually engaged in varying contexts.
While declaring the march a pilgrimage of “penance,” the Plan of Delano
nonetheless calls for a revolutionary transformation, one that recognizes
both the long history of Mexican farmworkers and their struggles, while
commending such struggles as necessarily reaching across and beyond
ethnic boundaries in order to build a greater unity: “We know that the
poverty of the Mexican or Filipino worker in California is the same as that
of all farmworkers across the country, the Negroes and poor whites, the
Puerto Ricans, Japanese, and Arabians; in short, all of the races that com-
prise the oppressed minorities of the United States.” The Plan of Delano
is only a few pages long, but it moves quickly between meditations on the
meaning of penance in the pilgrimage and the goals of such penance, goals
that entail the creation of an active, nonviolent social movement on behalf
of strikers who request greater dignity and fair treatment: “We want to be
equal with all the working men in the nation; we want a just wage, better
working conditions, a decent future for our children.” Containing a well-
known civil-rights rhetorical challenge, “WE SHALL OVERCOME,” this
document then also alludes to the biblical book of Revelation where those
oppressed by Roman rule will overcome (or will conquer, depending on
your translation). The promise “WE SHALL ENDURE,” written in the
Plan of Delano as well, echoes the activity of persistence that Revelation
emphasizes as the mark of those who will overcome.
The 1966 Plan of Delano stresses nonviolent resistance and a desire for
cooperation with and belonging to the US government and the Roman
Catholic Church. Although the farmworkers César Chávez, Dolores
Huerta, and Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino are important matrices
for, and often included overlapping activists involved with, the Chicanx
movement, their focus was less on specifically Chicanx concerns and
34 J.M. HIDALGO

more upon cross-ethnic solidarity in the name of specific labor organiz-

ing. Thus, the Plan of Delano is an important text in shaping Chicanx
movement activists, but it also reflects the distance between the particular
efforts of the farmworkers and the concerns of Chicanx nationalism that
drove much youth and student activism in the late 1960s. In reactivating
a history of Mexican planes and a call for a certain form of revolution, the
sparks for those “scriptural” Chicanx movement texts appear and then
get taken along other trajectories. Especially the rhetorics of endurance,
survival, overcoming, and conquest in the names of revolutionary trans-
formation, all crucial themes of Revelation (and of course many other
writings), also appear in other crucial movement texts. The following year
(1967), elder activist and a former boxer of Presbyterian religious back-
ground, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, published a prominent poem, I am
Joaquín, that ends by proclaiming the power of survival as formidable
nationalist myth:

I am the masses of my people and

I refuse to be absorbed.
I am Joaquín.
The odds are great
But my spirit is strong,
My faith unbreakable,
My blood is pure.
I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ.
I SHALL ENDURE!
I WILL ENDURE!13

Throughout the rhetoric of Gonzales’s poem, a naming of a Chicanx

self through a quick history of crucial historical and mythical figures,
including the sixteenth-century “Aztec prince” Cuauhtémoc and the
Spanish Christian conqueror Hernán Cortés, an emphasis on Chicanx
nationalism, self-articulation, and self-determination pervades the poem.
Gonzales’s poem signals a shift to writing down oral historical knowledge
and performing it in new and altered forms, a practice of creating Chicanx
specific, and overtly nationalist, “scriptures”—crucial communally infor-
mative and informed texts, ritually read repeatedly and publicly—that
transform the knowledge and myths that Chicanxs have about themselves.
Besides these two crucial texts, the March 1968 Los Angeles Blowouts/
walkouts also signaled a shift. Not only was it a large student strike, but
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 35

the strike also became a central shaping and remembered event in Chicanx
movement narratives as “the first major mass protest explicitly against
racism undertaken by Mexican Americans in the history of the United
States.”14 In the midst of these developing and overlapping activisms com-
mitted to transformation, in March of 1969 Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s
organization, the Crusade for Justice, hosted a National Chicano Youth
Liberation Conference, often just called the Denver Youth Conference,
which convened on Palm Sunday.15 A number of movements from across
the country came together in the Denver Conference, and almost 1500
people attended.16 Filmmaker and documentarian Jesús Salvador Treviño
was present, and his memoir supplies a particularly Californian Chicano
perspective on the Denver Youth Conference.17 Members of student and
political organizations such as the United Mexican American Students
(UMAS), Brown Berets, Third World Liberation Front, and others
showed up. Even in the context of those who participated, divergent
visions were apparent, and many argued over the basic guiding param-
eters.18 Given this diversity of people present and the worlds imagined
and experienced there, the label conference is inadequate to describe what
happened. Writing in El Grito del Norte, Maria Varela claimed, “It was
in reality a fiesta: [five] days of celebrating what sings in the blood of
a people who, taught to believe they are ugly, discover the true beauty
in their souls during years of occupation and intimidation…. ‘We are
beautiful’—this affirmation grew into a grito, a roar, among the people
gathered in the auditorium of the Crusade’s Center.”19 Her descrip-
tion reads as though a religious revival transpired in Denver that March.
What queer and performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz dubbed an
“ecstatic” temporality, a stepping out of a dominantized straight tempo-
ral mode, often frames accounts of Denver.20
The conference turned around the imagination and affirmation of
“Chicano” identity as key to the larger quest for self-determination; “social
revolution” and “cultural identity” were the two main but interrelated
themes of the conference.21 The conference opened with the students
from the Crusade for Justice’s Escuela Tlatelolco. The children sang “Yo
Soy Chicano”, a new song adapted to a Mexican corrido, “La Rielera”,
which was a tale of an adelita following “her soldier husband through
the Mexican Revolution.”22 Treviño described it as a kind of “national
anthem.”23 Gonzales’s emphasis on “the need for a national program for
Chicano liberation” added to this affirmation of Chicanx identity.24 He
noted that Chicanxs had lost land and power, and that they must “have
36 J.M. HIDALGO

self-determination. We can and must determine our own destiny as a

nation of people.”25 Gonzales connected this self-determination to a need
for a “national identity.”26 The nationalist call gave a thematic structure to
the rest of the conference, and overrode competing calls for more general
class-based or cross-ethnic solidarity.27
As fervent cultural nationalism became the main ideology of the gath-
ering, a caucus was formed to write a plan for liberation that entexted
the ideals of the conference, and this text became El Plan Espiritual de
Aztlán. Not unlike dominantized scriptures such as biblical texts or the
US Constitution, El Plan had several authors, with Gonzales promi-
nent among them, but attached was a prologue, largely written by the
poet Alurista. Nevertheless, the spiritual invocation of the text and its play
with mythology, particularly its invocation of an alternative Aztec space of
belonging for this “new” people, became a significant way of redefining
the frames of reference for self-understanding and self-determination. El
Plan’s language expressed disillusionment with the USA while espous-
ing a commitment to the ideals of “democracy.”28 El Plan Espiritual de
Aztlán also overtly situates itself within a line of scripturalization29 outside
of dominantized US narratives, even as it plays with the Declaration of
Independence and the US Constitution. Its very name situates the text
within a history of written planes as discussed above but also including El
Paso, Texas Raza Unida’s Plan de la Raza Unida (1967).30 The writing
process, key phrasings, and organizational structure of El Plan Espiritual
de Aztlán all signal a recognition of the power of scripturalizing as a mode
of “center” creation, of capturing within one document central and cen-
tering concepts and ideals.
El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán is a comparatively short document, easily
found online and reproduced in different volumes. Since it was frequently
read aloud, the import of oral-rhetorical flourish structures some of the
phrasing, including occasional strategic uses of Spanish, especially as found
in Alurista’s preamble that summons the spirit of a people, lays claim to
the Southwest, and declares the land of Aztlán and the people as one
nation, united and free. Then the Plan lays out a program for the politi-
cal mobilization of Chicanxs from diverse geographies, socioeconomic
classes, and walks of life through the commitments of nationalism. The
next brief section then defines nationalism as a goal that can transcend
other key social differences between Chicanxs. Moving from this sec-
tion, El Plan lays out seven organizational goals specifically tied to unity,
economy, education, institutions, self-defense, cultural values, and politi-
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 37

cal liberation. These goals are then followed by six points of action, some
of which remain relatively vague, such as economic cooperation that will
drive exploiters out of Chicanx communities, while others are more spe-
cific, such as declaring September 16 (Mexican Independence Day) to
be a day for a national walkout. Endurance no longer a driving goal, El
Plan ends with a proclamation of pervasive self-determination—including
culture, economics, politics, war, and justice—and then concludes with a
claim about the nature of the document itself: “El Plan de Aztlán is the
plan of liberation!”31
Notably, the first point of the action section of the plan calls for the
text’s own replication, its own scripturalization, as it were: “Awareness
and distribution of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. Presented at every
meeting, demonstration, confrontation, courthouse, institution, admin-
istration, church, school, tree, building, car, and every place of human
existence.”32 Indeed, portions of El Plan were rapidly reproduced and
spread in varying “Chicano periodicals.”33 For instance, La Verdad in San
Diego reprinted Alurista’s preamble in April 1969 along with a report
about the conference.34
Exegetical attention demonstrates the ways that El Plan was scriptural-
ized from its earliest circulation. Sometimes periodicals engaged in dis-
secting El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and calling on others to do so as well.
Enriqueta Vasquez continued to promote the power of the text in some
of her editorials, and in one case she gave particularly scripturalizing lan-
guage: “‘El Plan de Aztlán’ came out of a youth conference which was held
in Denver last Spring. Now we must take this plan and study it in order to
understand the strong significance of this document of the Raza. We must
all talk about it, and more than that we must think and search and know its
deep meaning and how it affects all of us.”35 Here, she emphasizes com-
munal discussion of the text and a sense, much like biblical study, of tear-
ing through the deeper meanings hidden in the text. She then goes on to
suggest that the deep meaning of El Plan entails a transformed knowledge
of history, consciousness, and “a deep spiritual awareness.”36 Beyond a
continuing emphasis on the “spirit” of Aztlán throughout her essay, it also
ends with two lines directly from El Plan, but she does not directly cite the
text at that point.37 She presumes she does not need to.
Other communal meetings even adopted resolutions to recognize
something of the scriptural power of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, even
those workshops that had reason to dispute some of the core themes and
ideas of the text. For instance, the religion workshop at the highly con-
38 J.M. HIDALGO

tested 1971 Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza in Houston “proposed

resolutions to recognize the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán by taking over exist-
ing church resources in order to provide services to the Chicano commu-
nity, to oppose institutionalized religion, and to demand that the Catholic
Church become part of revolutionary change or ‘get out of the way.’”38 In
this manner, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán became a sort of scriptural text
for the movement, one that challenged pre-existing scriptures and institu-
tions to serve the utopian cause or move elsewhere.
As a utopian concept, Aztlán came to stand for something of the
distinct history and peoplehood within the context of this conference.
On the third day of the conference, the poet  Alurista opened proceed-
ings by reading the preamble for El Plan in which Aztlán was publicly
named and declared.39 The preamble introduced the more poetic call to
action through cultural nationalism, while the rest of the document laid
out some rhetorical and political strategies. The two documents together
were widely circulated at and beyond the conference as El Plan Espiritual
de Aztlán or sometimes just El Plan de Aztlán.40 This new people also
laid claim to the Southwest as the ancestral homeland that the USA had
unjustly invaded, both complicating their “newness” and rejecting domi-
nantized US constructions of ethnic Mexicans as “foreigners.”41 Following
within the tradition of written planes I describe above, to name the docu-
ment El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán was to name Denver, if not the whole
Southwest, as Aztlán.
The text did more than invoke a utopian idea; it also elevated key
social loci as targets for utopian transformation. El Plan declared, “social,
economic, cultural, and political independence is the only road to total
liberation from oppression, exploitation, and racism.”42 The Crusade for
Justice’s founder and leader, Gonzales, would later describe these aspira-
tions in terms that speak quite distinctly of a form of scripturalization:
“Nationalism exists in the Southwest, but until now, it hasn’t been formed
into an image people can see. Until now it has been a dream. It has been
my job to create a reality out of the dream, to create an ideology out of
the longing.… what[ever] his politics may be. He’ll come back home, to
La Raza, to his heart, if we will build centers of nationalism for him.… We
are an awakening people, an emerging nation, a new breed.”43 In his own
discussion of his aspirations of his work, his own utopian dreaming, one
can see Gonzales striving to make a more concrete “center” around which
Chicanxs may organize themselves as “an awakening people.” Yet one can
also see the prioritization of both place (centers) and vision (“an image for
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 39

people to see”) in shaping the ideological and discursive frames he hopes

to develop. In other words, though fighting for greater rights in the USA,
El Plan underscored Chicanxs as a distinctive people with their own dis-
tinct history and ritual practices that rely upon a utopian turn.

BETWEEN PLACE AND NO PLACE: SCRIPTURES

AS UTOPIAN PRACTICE

El Plan worked in part because it was a specific sort of scripture, one that
was geared toward representing and enabling an-other world, a utopia.
Writing in 1989, Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco Lomelí note the impact
of Aztlán on Chicanx identity: without Aztlán, they say, “we would be
contemporary displaced nomads, suffering the diaspora in our own land,
and at the mercy of other social forces. Aztlán allows us to come full
circle with our communal background as well as to maintain ourselves as
fully integrated individuals.”44 For Anaya, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán’s
deployment of Aztlán was a naming ritual that “fuses the spiritual and
political aspirations of a group,” and this “home” provided the possibili-
ties for “cohesion” and new potentialities.45 Aztlán writes back against
the script of Manifest Destiny by laying a claim of more ancient historical
roots and a parallel sense of providence. Aztlán, in this formulation, names
and claims a space through a fusion of the spiritual and the political, and
Anaya and Lomelí point toward the ways that religious texts and affective
senses of sacred space can both overlap and collide.
Space and place have been prominent concerns in the study of reli-
gion.46 Sociologist Émile Durkheim’s neatly binaristic distinction of space,
which then inhabits the work of other central theorists in religion, is ripe
for critique from those working within Latinx Studies–based examina-
tions of space and place.47 Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on the borderlands
challenges any neat binaries, especially when it comes to the division of
space and the practices of peoples within those spaces.48 Presenting “reli-
gious space” as “broken space,” as space with distinct and clear partitions
between the sacred and the profane, may be more reflective of the aspira-
tions of imperial map-making than the daily negotiations of “hierarchical
interconnection” that structure many people’s lives.49 In Figueroa’s dis-
cussion of the remains of Aztlán and the sacred knowledge present in the
local geoglyphs, it is their interconnection with the home space of his daily
life that is part of their sacrality.
40 J.M. HIDALGO

Yet, in attending to the geoglyphs and in defining the marks of his local
landscape in relationship to texts, Figueroa slips between text and place:
both are centers in relationship to each other.50 Jonathan Z. Smith’s work
on the sometimes coterminous approaches of locative and utopian reli-
gious place-making can provide a bridge between thinking about sacred
texts and sacred place that can play with but also open up a sacred/profane
binary. Smith shows how locative tendencies often come out of scribal and
imperial cultures, revealing the aspirations of textual production to be the
creation of a center that wields imaginative power over varying peripher-
ies. In the midst of diasporic life, when communities cannot control a geo-
graphic center, a utopian propensity—a tendency to have a center that is
“nowhere”—comes to the fore.51 Aztlán suggests that the locative and the
utopian modes of place-making are implicated together within projects of
scripturalization, in that a sort of center comes to be located within the
texts while belonging gets ascribed to a good/no place. Utopian religios-
ity still has a central place, even if that central place persists mostly within
mobile scriptural texts and imaginaries.
Utopia is a Greek pun coined in early English modernity: ou-topos and
eu-topos, “no place” and “good place.” As with most of the key terms
in this book, no one easy definition can be given for utopia. Thomas
More crafted the moniker Utopia to name the island in his 1516 work De
Optimo Rei publicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia.52 As a term, utopia
had such far-reaching ability to capture certain human imaginings that
it quickly came to be applied to other texts, though first just those that
followed More’s contrivance in describing journeys to imaginative, “bet-
ter” islands.53 After More, utopia became a word in multiple languages
and came to signify multiple overlapping concepts, which even led to a
scholarly sense of a “utopian propensity,” a recurring human orientation
toward a better, other world.54 The term’s existential ambivalence remains
a tension that echoes throughout varying approaches to the utopian: the
imagined good/no place stands in contrast to a broader society.55
This existential ambivalence also allows utopia to be used pejoratively
to mean “fanciful.”56 No mere fantastical voyage entirely away from daily
life, however, utopian attempts to depict a good/better world necessarily
entail social critique of and wrestling with present society.57 According
to historian Dylan A.T. Miner, Aztlán may be approached as an ambigu-
ous imaginary, an indigenous spatiality that defies normative Euro-US
cartographies, and as an example of utopian spaces “that enable critical
inquiry and dialogue among competing positions” rather than “enunciate
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 41

a monolithic, all-encompassing solution to social ills.”58 I take up utopias

in part as a way of understanding the broader project of scriptural engage-
ment precisely because of this both/and feature of utopia, its capacity
to encompass ambiguity and contradiction. Aztlán as utopia is especially
poignant in the ways that it slides between and defies more restrictive car-
tographies of space and time that would seek to delimit its geographic or
temporal location to any one space or time.59
Utopias, in their ambivalence toward existence, demonstrate what I
here term polytemporal and polyspatial pliability and play; utopian no
places are inscribed onto multiple modalities of time and space, often in
the same rhetorical flow. José Esteban Muñoz uses a “utopian herme-
neutics” to rethink the politics of “queer critique” in his work Cruising
Utopia, and he draws on Ernst Bloch’s notions of the “not yet” and the
“no longer conscious.”60 For Muñoz, existential ambivalence is crucial to
the hopeful utility of utopias. Thus, Muñoz depicts utopias as visual hori-
zons, as imaginaries that are more about the possibilities and the partiali-
ties, the pliabilities and the limits of utopian vision: it is an “invitation to
look to horizons of being. Indeed to access queer visuality we may need to
squint, to strain our vision and force it to see otherwise, beyond the lim-
ited vista of the here and now.”61 Utopias both exist and do not exist; they
always exist within the limits of a text, song, artwork, communal practice,
experiment, or performance that invokes them, but they also resist any
sort of static constitution with isolated space.62 In the process of reading
scripturalized utopias, something of utopia is experienced on the part of
the reader as they squint at the hints of an-other world invoked for them
in a text of sacred power.
Muñoz constructs utopian “hope as a critical methodology [that] can be
best described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision.”63 Utopias
often summon a past place, while imagining a future one, and utopias
use both temporalities to interrupt the present. As such, utopian thought
demands and depends upon a non-normative approach to time and space,
an approach that differs from the more linear and literal orientation to
which many of us are accustomed. Utopias can invite alternative concep-
tualizations of space and place, challenging how places may be currently
imagined. Polytemporal and polyspatial play is key to understanding the
no place’s pliability that allows identity formation.
Utopian visions, especially those of minoritized subjects, sometimes
render the future through the backward glance of cultural memory,
though such cultural memory is not always neatly or perfectly nostalgic;
42 J.M. HIDALGO

sometimes a “visionary future stained with memories” glances back at

painful, not ideal, cultural memories.64 Yet, utopian visions are not neces-
sarily restricted to a future temporality; most classical utopian antecedents,
such as those of Hesiod or the biblical Eden, are placed in the past.65 A
constructed and reimagined cultural memory, contrasting with “official
memory,” is taken up so as to ground “a future hope.”66 Such a use of
utopian memorialization breaks an official narrative of neat continuation
between the past and the present, and this break is interruptive of the
present while also interventionary in laying out an alternative future that
is wedded to an alternative past.67
Utopia also participates in the field of apocalyptic; both play with tem-
porality by fusing the present and future through an evocation of rev-
elation, the unveiling of once presumed segregated space/time. Existing
within the unveiling moment, apocalyptic entretiempo (“between-time”)
embodies a tension-filled present fused with a future that exists in a state
of becoming, not quite at resolution, not static or simply linear.68 Thus,
entretiempo is not a flat present point, existing on a neat linear progres-
sion; it is more akin to Muñoz’s ecstatic temporality, a nonlinear present
infused with polytemporal resonances, haunted by a past and interrupted
by a future that is still in process.
Utopian theorists, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century
and the first decade of the twenty-first, have often been quite critical of
the problems of the utopian, the ways that it has been implicated in settler
colonialism and facets of varying state repressions. Utopian visions can be
both socially critical and inventive while also perpetuating ongoing forms
of social violence and even justifying new forms in the name of the uto-
pian cause.69 Utopian practitioners have tended toward closure, isolation,
and senses of purity that are partially enmeshed in modern machinations
of racial purification.70 Though both criticism and satire, More coined
the term utopia in those early decades of Europe’s “Age of Exploration,”
and thus the fantasy of utopia hinged on the fantasies of nascent imperi-
alism.71 More’s utopia, found through Vespucci’s voyages, also reflected
both European prejudices and European settler colonialist aspirations. His
fictional island imagined a utopian society to be already in existence, likely
founded by Greek philosophers or some relatives of theirs—a culture ulti-
mately European in origin even if found outside Europe; he also suggests
that to relieve internal pressures, utopians sometimes sent settler colonies
to other places. His ideal society was a colonial and colonizing space imag-
ined to be illimitably pliable to human machinations.
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 43

Michel de Certeau captures something of the utopian within and

inspired by the European settler colonial imagination when he describes
a “scriptural economy” and “the blank page” as the “fundamental and
generalized utopia of the modern West.”72 As writers are trained in sitting
before their own utopian blank page, they are also trained to summon
a world into being through writing on that blank page.73 The basis of
the scriptural economy of the modern “capitalist and conquering society”
presumes that learning to write upon a blank page is a “fundamental initia-
tory practice” into looking at the world as a blank page to be rewritten.74
However, to get a blank page, something has to be erased or ignored,
whether that is the labor of converting trees to paper or the people who
already populate a land; this problem of settler colonial erasure has also
been leveled at Aztlán. Yet, Chicanx Aztlán can be described as starting
somewhere else. As Figueroa’s story poignantly clarifies, many Chicanxs
turn to Aztlán, as utopian vision, in part because of their struggle to claim
place and rights within a contested landscape with long histories of domi-
nation by others. Chicanxs did not necessarily assume a blank page, an
empty landscape, on which they can write as they please. Rather they start
in a place of alienation from what someone else has written.75 Perhaps
this difference in starting point explains why Chicanx Aztlán, as I illumi-
nate further throughout this book, is much more dynamic, plurivocal,
and mutable than some other utopias. The tensions between openness
and closure, between and among varying temporalities, between change
and stagnancy, between fluidity and fixity, or, the tensions that I describe
as “limiting pliability,” are fruitful pluralities that structure varied engage-
ments with Aztlán because limiting pliability does not presume a utopia
of unlimited pliability, ever open to a dominating human imagination.76
I do not wish to pretend that all nonutopian space/time is singular,
univocal, or linear. Yet, utopias mean, in part, by questioning and prying
at constructions of temporalities. Such prying at temporal constructions is
perhaps most prominent when utopias are deployed resistantly or subver-
sively against dominantized cultures that construct space/time univocally.
To play with a phrase of Muñoz’s, Aztlán is both here and not: “we are
and are not yet Aztlán.” The tension of the “we are” and “we are not yet”
may be seen in the struggles over meaning. Aztlán as utopian imaginary
is rarely deployed as being static or whole; rather it is imagined in fits
and starts of polytemporal and polyspatial play. Aztlán survives, as Rafael
Pérez-Torres suggests, because it is an “empty signifier”; it is not empty
of meaning but is quite pliable within certain parameters.77 Aztlán’s limits
44 J.M. HIDALGO

are always under negotiation but also matter to its meaning; gender and
sexuality are the most significant present limits that have been focused
on in these past few decades, but there are others of note, such as race,
imperial rhetoric, or class that also persist as interrogated limits. Yet, not
all limits are bad and not all pliabilities are good; limits and pliabilities, or
what I term limiting pliability, are part of how utopias, and the scriptures
that often contain them, function as texts of social focus and attention.

“THE CALL OF OUR BLOOD IS OUR POWER, OUR

RESPONSIBILITY, AND OUR INEVITABLE DESTINY”: AZTLÁN,
IDENTITY, AND UTOPIAN SPACE/TIME
Aztlán as a utopian idea, a past paradise, a homeland for the Aztecs, or a
possibly still-existent source of wealth reaches back at least to the era of
Spanish conquest.78 Particular geographic sites have even been claimed
as the site of Aztlán, including Blythe, California, the Mexican state of
Nayarit, Florida, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and even China.79 Often, the
particularities of Aztlán as a place are left vague; few like Figueroa try to
pin it down or draw a blueprint. What is generally clearest about Aztlán
is the way that it contrasts with the present, the way Aztlán acts as a place
of belonging and justice for people of Mexican descent. Aztlán is a locus
for belonging and identity because of the ways that it exhibits existential
ambivalence as a multivalent and diversely articulated good and no place.
Aztlán’s functioning as utopian imaginary has captured scholarly atten-
tion from several fields, whether theology, history, or literature. Theologian
Jeanette Rodríguez-Holguín describes utopia as one of the myriad capaci-
ties of Aztlán, which she considers an “affective tie” that one group of
people nurtures in relationship to its environment.80 Historian Ignacio
M. García roots Chicanismo within Aztlán as “social, political, economic,
and cultural utopia, free of liberal politicians, welfare programs, police
brutality, discrimination, poverty, and identity crises.”81 Literature scholar
Daniel Cooper Alarcón identifies the “utopic” as having a long-term
effect on how Aztlán is read and understood. Other scholars have likewise
identified Aztlán as depicted imaginary, as being rife with the contradic-
tions of both utopian ambivalence and the particularities of Chicanx no
place identity. Many Chicanxs begin to locate themselves in a no place that
can mirror the multiplicity and complexity of belonging and not belong-
ing.82 Through a utopian, interruptive polytemporal and polyspatial play,
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 45

Aztlán can come to serve as such a center for peoples who are often cat-
egorized as peripheral to the USA and Mexico.
Without positing a precise or specific location, El Plan asserts that
Aztlán already exists as a “nation autonomous and free.”83 As a “utopic
space,” Aztlán was also viewed as the place of equality that belonged dis-
tinctively to “Mexican culture and identity,” a place that could be both
a “spiritual and political homeland.”84 Historian Ernesto Chávez main-
tains that at the core of the movimiento’s language, which is often termed
Chicanismo, was the demand for “the creation of Aztlán, a place where
Chicanos could exercise self-determination.”85 El Plan is a textual perfor-
mance of this link, and it draws power partially by evoking a utopia that
lays a claim of historical precedence on the Southwest. Yet, El Plan also
deploys utopian time and space both to simplify multiple peoples into one
streamlined nationalist movement and to complicate the present moment.
Aztlán here is an example of how the utopian good/no place interrupts
the present through a process of becoming;86 it serves as an enunciation,
a naming, that interrupts even amid its quest to unify Chicanxs. El Plan is
about the process of interruption that brings the utopian world into being
and also not being.87 In El Plan, a scripturalized “homing” site is accessed
precisely for its utopian no placeness, its play with time and space, and that
scripturalized pliability is what enables El Plan’s Aztlán to act as a central
locus for identity formation.

Polyspatiality, Polytemporality, and Utopian Resistance

Aztlán’s deployment across multiple contacts of time and space, as in El
Plan, is partially meant to frustrate certain linear, progressive temporali-
ties that mark varying settler colonial narratives of the Southwest.88 The
major narrative temporality contested here is the chronological progress/
end-of-history approach that maps a westward motion of “Anglo-Saxon
civilization” across the Southwest.89 While this deployment of Aztlán may
have taken on new life in the movement, it does have a prior history in the
region. When Ignacio Bonillas invoked Aztlán in 1878, he underscored
that “even today we can gaze at the ruins of the cities that they built
during their passage. In this territory of Arizona, in New Mexico and in
Sonora, we have many ruins of the cities that flourished for many years
under the government of the ancient Aztecs.”90 This rhetorical maneuver
anticipates something of the work to which varying movement activists
put Aztlán because Bonillas takes an area that has been “marginalized”
46 J.M. HIDALGO

with respect to Mexico and the USA and “elevates Arizona from lost fron-
tier outpost to place of origin.”91 He lays the groundwork for one of the
major Chicanx employments of Aztlán: its depiction of a past claim, lost
in mythical time, that challenges dominantized US narratives of Manifest
Destiny—a destined control of southwestern land and its peoples. At the
same time, Bonillas disputes the marginalization of the Southwest with
respect to Mexican history and culture.
El Plan’s Aztlán echoes this call when it interrupts the present with
claims of an ancient past paradise combined with notions of historical pre-
cedence in the land that does exist: “In the spirit of a new people that is
conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal
‘gringo’ invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civi-
lizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers,
reclaiming the land of their birth.” While claiming newness for Chicanx
people, it also asserts an ancestral connection to a land that once was
theirs and now must be reclaimed. El Plan asserts that this land belonged
to the modern nation state of Mexico and to the indigenous ancestors
of Mexicans. As one former student activist whom I interviewed and call
by the alias Ramón claimed, “The concept of Aztlán was a really radical
notion of reverting back to what was our land, or reverting back to ter-
ritory that we claimed to be still México. Honestly, one of the problems
was that México was not even claiming this territory, not that we had the
ability to advocate for, or to represent, a claim as such. But certainly we
were inspired by the rhetoric and the mythology of Aztlán.”92 Here he
notes that a challenge to this claim lay in its dual past temporal identifica-
tion, in that the modern nation state of Mexico was not fighting to reclaim
the Southwest; while not all Chicanxs identified themselves with Mexico
or Aztlán with Mexico, Ramón’s objection speaks to the tensions that
surrounded the ambiguous and ambivalent evocations of Aztlán as a past
place to be retaken in this present.
This claim on the land through connection to multiple Mexican pasts
fixes upon another textual vision of nationalism as a future temporality.
The language of newness here—a newness that still seeks historical prece-
dent—draws upon José Vasconcelos, a revolutionary who had fled Mexico
for Spain in 1925. He wrote an essay that became very influential, “La
Raza Cósmica.”93 Vasconcelos’s patriotism for Mexico refocused on Latin
American unity in opposition to “Anglo-Saxon America.” Vasconcelos
argued that Latin America would win this grand human historical contest
because Latin “America shall arrive, before any other part of the world, at
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 47

the creation of a new race fashioned out of the treasures of all the previ-
ous ones; the final race, the cosmic race.”94 Here something of a mythic
and revelatory narrative that can compete with and dominate over other
mythic grand narratives appears. The idea of the cosmic race, of La Raza
Bronze in El Plan, was a powerful locus of resistance in a dominantized US
culture that devalued Mexican Americans for not being “white.”
With the Denver Conference’s assertion that the US Southwest was the
more ancient seat of Mexican civilization, Aztlán could be employed to
carve out a Chicanx identity that was deeply interconnected with Mexico
and yet  also distinctive. According to Aztec legends that were refracted
through Spanish colonial codices and later archaeological and imaginative
searches, Aztlán names the “homeland” of the Mexicas/Aztecs, the place
from which they migrated to Mexico’s “central plateau in 820” CE.95 By
declaring Chicanxs a people who had both hailed from and returned to
Aztlán, El Plan located the southwestern USA as home while also tak-
ing up a claim to indigeneity, a claim with both racial and land-based
assertions.96 Some have criticized this use of Aztlán, because Chicanxs are
actually descended from a plurality of peoples whose ancestors hail from
all over the world, and even those who are members of indigenous com-
munities rarely hail from strictly Aztec ancestry.97 Yet others contend that
Aztlán provides a locus through which Chicanxs might “reclaim the con-
nection to indigenous peoples and cultures,” which makes their use of
raza quite distinct from that of Vasconcelos.98 One of the student activists
from the late 1960s with whom I spoke, whom I call Alejandro for confi-
dentiality reasons, contextualized Aztlán this way:

I look at it as a kind of a metaphor for the indigenous heritage but primarily

of people from Mexico. But that to me it represents that the relationship
historically and then I would think societally... the whole hemispheric rela-
tionship, that has been submerged but not obliterated and then some ways
is reemerging in the global socio-economic cultural, developments in the
twenty-first century.... I’m struck with the experiences of the indigenous
here, that... had very limited interaction I think with the Aztec.... But what
is clear to me is that these peoples humanized, and I would even say I’m
beginning to consider the term civilized, this part of the earth.99

Although he rejects any “literal… view of Aztlán,” he still critically

engages and reimagines El Plan’s use of the Aztec past as a way to respect-
fully engage diverse indigenous North American presents, and he still
48 J.M. HIDALGO

alludes to El Plan’s preamble when doing so (“civilizer of the northern

land of Aztlán”).
Hence, this use of the past was not an act of simple nostalgia. Though
not a movement activist, author Cherríe L. Moraga, who was quite inspired
by movement rhetorics and practices, suggests that Aztlán’s past was a par-
ticularly utopian critique of the present: “Every oppressed group needs to
imagine through the help of history and mythology a world where our
oppression did not seem the preordained order.”100 Moraga’s description
here suggests a sympathy with activist and Teatro Chicano actress Lydia
López’s understanding of Aztlán as a counter-scripturalization: “for me
it was a possible history…possible geographic outlining of the vision for
a patch of geography that would have had a different identity for our
people. It was something I knew nothing about and I thought, my good-
ness, why didn’t I know of any of this stuff?” Even though she did not
have “strong feelings” about Aztlán, López describes it as providing an
alternative past that should be known.
Counteracting racism, anti-immigration rhetoric, and past “repatria-
tion” efforts, this concept of Aztlán also interrupts the present by point-
ing out that Mexican Americans cannot be deported from the Southwest
and “returned” to Mexico because all Mexicans have descended from the
southwestern USA.101 El Plan claims that the geographical US Southwest
is “the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers.”102
Thus, having Aztlán as a homeland matters, perhaps most of all in El Plan,
because it asserts “historical precedence” in the southwestern USA and
suggests a possible parallel world available to Chicanxs, a world that did
not have to conclude with their present experiences of minoritization and
dispossession.103
Once established, the alternative past and historical trajectory were
actively marshaled for transformation in the present. Treviño identifies
El Plan’s significance in shaping the movimiento as residing in its word-
ing, which “called for a whole generation of Chicano youth to take con-
trol of their lives. We would rise up to reclaim our ancient homeland.”104
This notion of reclamation makes Aztlán “simultaneously a utopian and
non-innocent recasting of space” where the US Southwest becomes a
Northern Mexican homeland.105 The language of Aztlán was not meant
to invoke a simple, idealized past; rather, its employment was meant to
be a spur to present action, one that directly challenged US rhetorics of
justified domination.
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 49

For Treviño, Aztlán’s pastness supplied a connection to “ancestors”

and further fueled his desires for alteration of the present. El Plan’s nam-
ing of its “new people” hinges directly upon this connection between
consciousness “not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the
brutal ‘gringo’ invasion of our territories.”106 Here El Plan lays claim to a
fabled history as a way of interrupting a colonized present. Another activ-
ist whom I interviewed and call Rubén noted that Aztlán was on one level
“a mythical Mexican paradise” that provided a contrasting vision to the
contemporary moment.107 Indeed, the claim of Aztlán was one that “rep-
resented Chicano roots that extended deep in the history of the land,” so
that even those who immigrated north from Mexico in the present were
just “seeking to reclaim what was once theirs.”108 Aztlán was an “ancient
homeland” that called for present actions to reclaim rights and cultures.109
The mythical past took on a “timeless” quality, in that it could invoke
multiple pasts and alternative presents, and it became a renewable resource
to turn to for power in crafting a sense of identity rooted in a quest of
liberation. A student activist and muralist, a woman I interviewed whom
I call Elena, found that Aztlán “was a language,” one that drew on Aztec
imagery and Mexican iconography to rerender her world while enabling
her to communicate herself.110 She also recalls a desire to reclaim the
imagery of Mesoamerican stories.111 For Treviño liberation meant that
Chicanxs named the land for themselves, resisting the naming practices
of dominantized US culture: “we declared that we were no longer out-
siders in a foreign land, but a prodigal people returning to the ancient
homeland of our ancestors.”112 Historian and movement activist Ignacio
M. García recalls poetry, art, and theater as working together to imagine
“history and the present... not as they were but as they could and would
become. It was in the realm of literature that Chicanos had full control of
their lives.”113 The particular scripturality of Aztlán, in texts and art and as
performed in song and theater, thus became a crucial reservoir of memory
and identification because it was a place where they could imagine and
enact the self-determination so often denied under dominantized US rule.
El Plan’s Aztlán makes claims about present space, whether about
actual geography or notions of a spiritual in-breaking onto present physical
spaces. Yet, invocations of Aztlán’s present also best reveal the quite var-
ied ways that different individuals took up Aztlán. In El Plan, on one
level, Aztlán is a blatantly identifiable space: “We are free and sovereign to
determine those tasks which are justly called for by our house, our land,
the sweat of our brows, and by our hearts. Aztlán belongs to those who
50 J.M. HIDALGO

plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the for-
eign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze
continent.”114 Here Aztlán is specifically land, and it invokes embodied
images of Mexican American farmworkers as the inhabitants. That Aztlán
was, and continues to be, used interchangeably to speak of the southwest-
ern USA is a product of the work of El Plan as centering and enunciatory
scriptural text, one that spoke of, laid claim to, and contested the borders
of a geographical space. Elena reflected on how important Aztlán’s physi-
cal location in the Southwest had been for her. She “wanted [Aztlán] to be
a tangible place,” and she felt it was a place about which she could speak
tangibly. It was “California and Arizona,” land that once had belonged to
Mexico.115
This sense of its tangibility can be seen in a variety of publications, espe-
cially student publications from the era. The later Plan de Santa Barbara
gives its printing location as “Alta California de Aztlán.” Early student
group el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) docu-
ments from the University of California at Berkeley reveal their prefer-
ence for referring to California as “Aztlán.”116 Not only was the University
of Colorado at Boulder UMAS chapter’s periodical titled Somos Aztlán
(“We are Aztlán”), but a 1972 map demarcates cities that are important to
the movement narratives: obvious locations such as Los Angeles and San
Antonio, but also places important specifically to movement narratives,
such as Delano, Crystal City, and Tierra Amarilla. These sites are called
“RESERVACIÓNES DE LOS INDIOS EN AZTLÁN.” Thus, they name
Chicanxs as indigenous inhabitants, and these locations are their “reserva-
tions” within what should be the proper territory of Aztlán.117 The pream-
ble of El Plan is also incorporated into the map, suggesting the scriptural
correlation of this named territory.118
The University of Colorado map from 1972 named the boundaries
as “LOS LIMITES ILEGAL DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS” (the ille-
gal limits of the USA).119 Where US narratives of Manifest Destiny had
excluded the Mexicans already in the southwestern USA from full citizen-
ship, in Aztlán Chicanxs sought to reclaim power over themselves and
the land they inhabited.120 At the same time, Aztlán is a contrast to the
USA. While referring to the land of “brutal ‘gringo’ invasion,” El Plan
asserts that Aztlán as opposed to the US Southwest, belongs to those who
work the land and not those who arbitrarily laid claim to the land. Aztlán’s
Southwest was a land without “capricious frontiers,” existing in a space
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 51

unlike the one demarcated by the USA even when referring to the same
geography.121
Perhaps invoking a “spiritual unity,” El Plan declares people and place
intertwined: “Before the world, before all of North America, before all
our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of
free pueblos, we are Aztlán.”122 This identification of “we” with Aztlán
suggests that Aztlán is not just a place but also the people who define
it. Armando B. Rendón, writing in 1971 and reflecting on the meaning
of Aztlán to Chicanxs, said: “We rediscovered Aztlán in ourselves. This
knowledge provides the dynamic principle upon which to build a deep
unity and brotherhood among Chicanos.”123 Writing after the movement,
Moraga likewise observes the tension between the creation of Aztlán in
the movement and its pre-existence within her: “Aztlán gave language
to a nameless anhelo [longing] inside me.”124 Aztlán then becomes an
alternative spatiality, existent in the present, a “home” built amid struggle.
Remaking the present is one of the actions El Plan calls for and labels
itself: “Community nationalization and organization of all Chicanos: El
Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.”125 Actions were bound up with this imagi-
nation of Aztlán. According to Treviño, on the third day of the 1969
Denver Youth Conference, conference attendees went to a Farm Workers
Union rally outside Denver’s Capitol building. While Gonzales spoke on
the steps, the Mexican flag was raised over the Capitol. As a participant,
Treviño experienced that “for a moment, the theory and rhetoric of the
Plan de Aztlán were a reality.”126 In this moment, they “had reclaimed
Colorado…as territorio liberado de Aztlán, reconquered territory of
Aztlán.”127 Past territory becomes present action and future land: “we…
declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our
inevitable destiny.”128 For Treviño, the present was being remade even
while an alternative space existed and a future place was being summoned
into existence.
The sense that Aztlán could be enacted in the present pervades certain
movement-era texts and activities. El Plan de Santa Barbara calls for stu-
dent groups to unify as one organization by categorizing themselves as
a united nation of Aztlán: “Since the movement is definitely of national
significance and scope, all student organizations should adopt one iden-
tical name throughout the state and eventually the nation to character-
ize the common struggle of La Raza de Aztlan. The net gain is a step
toward greater national unity which enhances the power in mobilizing
local campuses organizations.”129 Here, Aztlán is identified with the peo-
52 J.M. HIDALGO

ple in active struggle. In another example, from May to August 1971,

the Brown Berets and the Chicano Moratorium undertook a “Marcha
de la Reconquista” from Calexico to Sacramento. Casting California as
land to be taken back but to which the activists already belonged and
held claim also signaled a transformation in the Chicano Moratorium’s
agenda, a shift from focusing on the war and police brutality to a larger
desire for more radical political transformation.130 Once in Sacramento,
the marchers lowered and burnt the US flag, lowered the California state
flag, and raised the Mexican flag.131 After the Marcha, David Sánchez,
Brown Beret Prime Minister from October 1971 to August 1972, led
“La Caravana de la Reconquista,” where they drove through California,
Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. On the trip they proclaimed
both “cultural nationalism” and the sense that the Southwest was “con-
quered” land to be reclaimed and reconquered. Sánchez later described
the caravan in a book titled Expedition through Aztlán.132 These nam-
ing rituals and expeditions also have a certain consonance with Alianza’s
October 1969 convention and its decision to establish “La Republica de
Aztlan.”133
The members of the group constitute the existence of the land, wher-
ever and whenever they may be, and many interpreters have focused on
this notion of spiritual unity rather than geographic constitution. As Luis
Leal describes it, “Aztlán symbolizes the spiritual union of the Chicanos,
something that is carried within the heart, no matter where they may live
or where they may find themselves.”134 This “spiritual reality” of Aztlán
did not make it less real, and only enhanced Chicanxs’ sense of “duty to
establish it as a political-territorial entity.”135 Jorge Mariscal interprets the
sometimes controversial phrasing in El Plan, “Por la Raza todo, fuera de
la Raza nada” (“For the [Chicano] people everything, nothing for those
outside of the [Chicano] people”), not as call to racial isolation; rather it
“meant simply that in their daily activities Chicanos and Chicanas ought
to focus on how they were working to improve the life chances of their
community.”136
For some, this focus on the present and the future meant that Aztlán
was something more than a mythic past. Enriqueta Vasquez, in her cover-
age of the Second Denver Youth Conference in 1970, wrote: “The home-
land of Aztlán for La Raza is no longer buried in the past, it is no longer
a myth, it is no longer a dream, but a necessity and a reality. In Aztlán,
there is life, spiritual belief—a human revolution. A call for the reawaken-
ing and cultivating of human values. A call to make us whole again. And
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 53

so, last month, a chapter was written in the history of a new society, a new
nation.”137 Though she does not deny that Aztlán was a past, what mat-
ters is that it is a spiritual present necessary for a new people building a
different future.
For others, Aztlán’s ability to summon and shift between many times
and places was part of its power and appeal. Elena experienced Aztlán as
multiple times and places, wherein Aztlán could be visualized on maps
while also being a mythic symbol, something rooted in multiple images
and in “the feelings conjured.”138 For Elena, not immediately, but over
time, Aztlán’s recasting of present space and time was a way of naming
herself while remaking the world as a borderlands space and time; Aztlán
became an alternative configuration of space and place by invoking a land
that could be fluid and move. Elena identifies Aztlán as the in-between
place just as she identifies herself as an in-between person: “it’s kind of
a charged place, that is fluid and moves and, just like in my situation of
being in an in-between place. I move in between cultures.” Though she
identifies herself as a MEChA activist who was “on the periphery, and not
in the center” of the movement, she later found in Aztlán permission to be
in-between; she sees herself reflected there and draws strength for reading
the world from an in-between Aztlán.139 Cultural theorist Alicia Arrizón
also approaches Aztlán as a space of “in-betweeness,” cast somewhat dif-
ferently, that “is marked performatively by processes of transformation in
which time and space intersect to produce tropes of spiritual decoloniza-
tion.”140 She describes how Aztlán can be the borderlands place and also
the borderlands time, an entretiempo. The time of Aztlán is a borderlands
present, the “between time,” where the present exists in a state of becom-
ing, not quite at resolution.141 This entretiempo, this imagination of a fluid
utopian space/time, is a key aspect of El Plan’s scripturalizing power.
Aztlán’s polytemporality of resistance is entretiempo; Aztlán existed
in the past, exists in the present, and will exist in the future. As Muñoz
argues, manifestos are often time-playful, utopian “call[s] to a doing in
and for the future.”142 Looking at El Plan’s “northern land of Aztlán from
whence came our forefathers,” Anaya and Lomelí contend that Aztlán was
not about turning to the past as much as it was about grounding a past,
finding a rooted identity, from which a future could be confidently con-
structed and brought into being.143 For Treviño, it was in part the past,
the Chicanx connection to “ancestors,” that provided the transformative
“unity” for which he was looking.144 In El Plan de Santa Barbara, Aztlán
is described as an in-process future as well as a present struggle: knowl-
54 J.M. HIDALGO

edge and the university as locus for its production was positioned as key
in “giving impetus to that historical consciousness which Chicanos must
possess in order successfully to struggle as a people toward a new vision
of Aztlan.”145
Aztlán’s multivalent entretiempo quality supplied an imaginative pliabil-
ity, which enabled not just group identification but also activist organiza-
tion. The utopian future of Aztlán was invoked to remake the present,
to rename the present’s participants. Through polytemporal and poly-
spatial play, Aztlán as past territory becomes present action and future
land: “we…declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsi-
bility, and our inevitable destiny.”146 In some readings of El Plan, Aztlán
becomes an act of temporal resistance that relativizes the historical power
of colonization, both Spanish and the USA, because it asserts that a time
and space before colonization still holds power, bracketing colonial effects
with a beginning and envisioning their approaching ends.147 Even when
Moraga admits that Chicanxs rarely believe that they can ever take Aztlán
from the USA, Aztlán can still supply the hope that, as other empires have
fallen, perhaps so too might the USA.148 For others, such as Vasquez,
Aztlán provides, the hope for cultural and spiritual survival in the future
in the face of concerns that Chicanxs will be lost to conquest, poverty,
assimilation, and many other factors: “With Aztlán, we have the answer to
the call of the spirit. We know that we will not let our culture die, we will
not be defeated, for cosmic spirits do not die.”149
While moving in entretiempo, existing in multiple times and spaces,
Aztlán can also be approached as naming precisely the no place that does
not exist. Positioning Aztlán as a locus of critique, Rafael Pérez-Torres,
as both scholarly critic and interpreter, suggests that Aztlán’s power rests
in this existential ambivalence: “As an empty signifier, Aztlán names not
that which is or has been, but that which is ever absent: nation, unity,
liberation. The various articulations of Aztlán have sought to make these
absences present in the face of oppressive power.”150 Aztlán is also a no
place that can be squinted at in Muñoz’s horizon by naming what is
absent where the viewer stands. Again, for Pérez-Torres, Aztlán offers a
“dream” of what might have been and of “what could be,”151 but, as a
dream, it also remains in a dimension distinct from, if interrelated with,
the worlds we know. Even though she depicts Aztlán’s existential ambiv-
alence more negatively, Gaspar de Alba’s invocation of Aztlán as a sci-
fi experience of alternative spatial dimensions may be instructive here:
“But to get to Aztlán, you have to suspend your disbelief and go into an
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 55

X-Files–like dimension, where the past and the present converge in one
place.”152 Aztlán can therefore be understood as “an-other world,” both
deeply intertwined and yet significantly different from the dominantized
world or the everyday worlds inhabited by those who turn to Aztlán as an
alternative.

Utopian Space/Time As Multivalent Identity Formative Locus

Aztlán’s invocations of no places, past abodes, assertions of present geogra-
phies, and in-breaking of future possibilities were all the pliable places that
enabled it to behave as a powerful locus for Chicanx identity formation
and negotiation. Writing in 1989, Anaya and Lomelí understand Mexican
Americans in the USA as people who “lived at the margin of the society,
and thus at the margin of history.” In their view, this existence necessitated
a new locus from which “to define and assert its identity.” Aztlán was just
such a locus.153 Elena’s questions of personal identity, of understanding
who she was and what mattered for her, were central aspects of her time in
MEChA, a student group that still exists on high school and college cam-
puses. As a teenager, she had felt embarrassed by aspects of her Mexican
background, such as eating tamales during school lunch. After participat-
ing in the movimiento, she came to be proud of her heritage. The text itself
is not what matters, but rather scriptures in “dynamic interaction” with
people.154 Elena’s personal transformation with regard to her cultural heri-
tage speaks to the power of Aztlán and the texts that carry it to work in the
dynamic mirroring and recasting of self between a person and a scriptural
imaginary. At the same time, Elena and other Chicanxs’ deployments and
recurring interest in Aztlán speaks to how not “at home” many Chicanxs
felt—and feel—within a broader US society.155
Aztlán’s multivalent utopian space/time enabled it to function as a
sort of “national myth,” and in that fashion participate in the formation
and negotiation of Chicanx identity. At the 1969 Denver Conference,
this facet of Aztlán was privileged. Gonzales, the organizer of the Denver
Conference, felt that unity came through “nationalism,” and this was
what was necessary for liberation: “What are the common denomina-
tors that unite people? The key common denominator is nationalism….
Nationalism becomes la familia [the family].”156 Treviño had read about
Aztlán the summer before while preparing a Chicanx history course, but
it was in listening to Alurista at this conference that he realized the con-
cept held the promise of creating a “unity” that would liberate Chicanxs
56 J.M. HIDALGO

from their oppressive experiences: “Aztlán was this unifying identity.”157

Treviño found that the use of Aztlán and its writing of El Plan supplied
the Denver Conference with a meaning that he had been seeking. Aztlán
is then the site out of which “collective consciousness” should come, and
signifying on Aztlán should lead to both action and identity formation.158
The language and images used in the construction of a Chicanx self are
inscribed into El Plan, and the language of El Plan continues to resonate
for this construction even as the constructions come to have meanings dif-
ferent from those originally assumed in the formation of the text.
Many of the movement’s leaders hoped that this evocation of an Aztec
land combined with an emphasis on Mexican and Chicanx historical heri-
tage in the USA would unite those of diverse socioeconomic, religious,
and ideological differences who might otherwise remain separate159:

El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán sets the theme that the Chicanos (La Raza de
Bronze) must use their nationalism as the key or common denominator for
mass mobilization and organization. Once we are committed to the idea and
philosophy of El Plan de Aztlán, we can only conclude that social, economic,
cultural, and political independence is the only road to total liberation from
oppression, exploitation, and racism. Our struggle then must be for the con-
trol of our barrios, campos, pueblos, lands, our economy, our culture, and
our political life. El Plan commits all levels of Chicano society—the barrio,
the campo, the ranchero, the writer, the teacher, the worker, the profes-
sional—to La Causa….Nationalism as the key to organization transcends all
religious, political, class, and economic factions or boundaries. Nationalism
is the common denominator that all members of La Raza can agree upon.160

Aztlán could inspire unity. The hope was that Aztlán could become a
new “center” around which to make Chicanxs.
The idea of Chicanx self-determination was crucial to the meaning-
making language of El Plan and the myth of Aztlán. Both Elena and
Rubén had signaled the importance of self-determination as an ideal and
a goal embodied in Aztlán and described in El Plan. “Self-determination”
was a significant part of Elena’s understanding of MEChA and its goals,
and “self-determination” was what Rubén focused upon as the goal of the
movimiento overall. For Rubén, the name Chicano indicated a desire for
self-determination: it was a name chosen by the group for itself rather than
one such as Hispanic, which had come from the outside.161 Even the very
act of naming Aztlán was part of this quest for self-determination: “we
declared that we were no longer outsiders in a foreign land, but a prodigal
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 57

people returning to the ancient homeland of our ancestors, a home that

had existed long before there was a United States of America.”162 The
power of Aztlán is a self-naming declaration that, at the same time, relies
on a sense of temporality beyond the present and a sense of space that
interrupts present spatializations.
The “sacred” power that adhered to Aztlán as a “centering” imagi-
nary was the sense of relationality wherein self-determination with and
in relationship to land was possible, something that Figueroa’s ongoing
political struggles suggest. In Figueroa’s fight to have the US govern-
ment designate areas around Blythe as “sacred,” his concern is a territorial
dispute that is bound up with issues of autonomy and local, communal
self-determination; in other words, it is a dispute over problems of terri-
tory and power in the here and now as much as the there and then. He
does not see this land as sacred because it exists in a neatly defined, binary
separation from profane space. Sacrality is instead about the relationship
between people and the land, a relationship that hinges upon people’s
autonomy and self-determination in the land. In Vasquez’s reflections on
the interconnections between humans and nature, she discusses Aztlán
while also talking about how “we learned about the earth, the land, and
we called; la madre tierra; la santa tierra; la tierra sagrada (the mother
earth, the holy earth, the sacred earth).”163 She names this sacred connec-
tion to the land as Aztlán near the conclusion of her essay when she says,
“we choose the way of the land; the way of the earth; the way of the water;
the way of the wind; the way of Aztlán.”164 Aztlán exists as a separate path,
but its power derives from the relational choice that she and others make
in engaging it.
For Anaya, the naming of Aztlán created a “spiritual awareness,” and
the “naming ceremony” recurs every time that Aztlán and Chicanxs’
“common destiny” is discussed.165 The quest for a common destiny sug-
gests the ways that Aztlán’s pliability was still meant to supply a unifying
power that must out of necessity also be limiting. Aztlán, however, never
supplied quite the “unity” that some anticipated. The aspiration of “unity”
is perhaps one of the most remarked-upon challenges of any utopian prac-
tice, sometimes entailing violent consequences in the desires to smooth
out the conflicting ambivalence of utopian vision. El Plan Espiritual de
Aztlán’s number one organizational goal is framed as “UNITY in the
thinking of our people,” and that assumption that a sort of sacred unity of
thought above and beyond contemporary diversity could be found within
cultural nationalism also relied on the assumption that a sort of “spiritual
58 J.M. HIDALGO

unity” was the most important factor: “Unity is what mobilizes to move
Chicanos forward; unity is what will make the group effective and suc-
cessful.”166 Since Chicanxs imagined themselves as shared spiritual family,
disagreement within the familia was too often treated as “pathology,” as
something “unnatural” and somehow “external” to the spiritual union to
be found in Aztlán.167 If Aztlán survived, it was among those who trans-
formed their understanding of the “union” possible within and in rela-
tionship to Aztlán.

“WE ARE [NOT YET] AZTLÁN”: CRITIQUES OF 

EL MOVIMIENTO’S USE OF AZTLÁN
Many Chicanxs expressed strident critiques of Aztlán, at times even
questioning the utility of a center at all. One primary vein of that cri-
tique was that Aztlán was inadequate and too restrictive to incorporate
the heterogeneity of Chicanx experiences even if the goal of its use was
“strategic homogenization.” Many critics opposed the radically seces-
sionist tone of the concept of Aztlán as not in keeping with other goals
and aspirations. The “romantic” use of Aztlán was criticized, even at the
Denver Youth Conference, as being inconsistent with the experience of
other Chicanxs.168 While challenging racist views of Mexicans and their
ancestry, this cultural nationalism also seemed to assert that Mexicans
did not belong in the USA. This claim did not work for those Chicanxs
who saw themselves as and wished to be seen as “rightful participants
in ‘American’ culture.”169 Aztlán ultimately did not retain representative
power across the spectrum of many people’s everyday lives in different
Mexican American communities.170
In finding a “common” ground for the movimiento, Aztlán could cre-
ate an “authentic” Chicanismo that excluded many.171 Aztlán’s supposed
location outside of more mundane temporalities could be used to ignore
problems of race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire in past and pres-
ent formulations of Aztlán. El Plan’s Aztlán invoked an unquestioned
“conflation of a nation and a culture,” which assumed political affilia-
tion entailed cultural unity and thus consequently posited an essential-
ized Chicano subject.172 Alurista, who had not expected his preamble to
become so popular,173 tried to reconceptualize Aztlán in 1981  in a way
that only strengthened the tone of essentialization: “The term comes to
represent not just the fact of sovereignty, but the fact of existence, the very
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 59

being that is the Chicano.”174 Certain constructions of Aztlán became

conflated with a delimiting of proper Chicanismo, wherein the cultural
finding of Aztlán transforms into a “messianic” and “salvific” narrative
that others might feel cast outside of.175
Aztlán’s pliable polytemporality was critiqued not only for its render-
ing of a fixed core; this essentialized center was perceived as insufficiently
self-critical in terms of reigning imperial structures, settler colonial imagi-
nations, and racial constructs. For instance, geographer Patricia Price con-
tends that Aztlán reverses oppressive power structures without challenging
them, and that Aztlán does not interrogate its own imperial and racialized
past.176 It leaves previous imperialist constructions of peoplehood and
space uninterrogated by merely reversing them and creating a new power
center that seeks to control its own peripheries; rather than questioning
anyone’s right to own land as property, Aztlán may just offer up another
rival “claim” on land as property to be imperially controlled.177 Literary
critic Daniel Cooper Alarcón describes Aztlán as an imperial construct for
the Aztec elite.178 He also underscores the difficulties of constructing an
Aztlán separated from the effects of Spanish fantastical utopian myths that
justified and legitimated settler colonial ambitions, myths such as Cíbola,
the island of California and Quivira, not to mention biblical myths such as
Eden and the new Jerusalem.179
Intertwined with settler colonial legacies, racial restrictions also haunt
Aztlán, which too often presumed a “revival” of indigeneity as if living
Nahua individuals and cultures have not been present all these centuries.
Cooper Alarcón criticizes the movimiento’s Aztlán for not wrestling with
the mestizo/a colonization of Native American land under Spanish colo-
nial rule in what is now the US Southwest.180 The movimiento in part
inherited this difficulty by drawing on Vasconcelos’s and the Mexican
Revolution’s rendering of the “Indian” in problematic ways that did not
eradicate the racism of the Spanish colonial system and treated Native
cultures as dead traditions of the past rather than as still living among
indigenous peoples in the present.181 Cooper Alarcón finds Aztlán danger-
ous in its potential exclusion of competing claims of the USA’s own Native
American populations as well as African Americans and Asian Americans
in the Southwest.182 While some Chicanxs tried to temper this facet of
Aztlán, making it more understandable as a practice of indigenous solidar-
ity, the tensions of mestizx hierarchy persist in other readings.
As I discuss further in Chap. 5, constructions of Chicanxs in Aztlán
as familia too often deployed a cis-heteropatriarchal familial vision that
60 J.M. HIDALGO

located feminist and queer concerns on the “peripheries” or outside of

Chicanismo altogether. Alurista sought to redress facets of these challenges
early on in his Nationchild Plumaroja (1972), which was more gender
inclusive and more focused on indigeneity rather than mestizaje. Notably
Alurista’s revision of El Plan’s prologue in Nationchild Plumaroja (1972)
revises “bronze” to “red,” moving away from a valorization of mestizaje
and affirming indigeneity. As historian Dylan A.T. Miner argues, this move
speaks to movement-era Chicanx self-imagination as a new “indigenous”
people and “not a settler people.”183 Aztlán’s critics often point to the ways
that the very creation of a “center,” be it as a no place, is problematic in
the way that it recreates and perpetuates practices of hierarchal domina-
tion and marginalization even if it opens up other spaces for indigenous
solidarity and resistance.
The tensions of Aztlán were not only about hierarchies and borders;
whether the Chicanx homeland imaginary was too pliable to serve as a
good locus for constructing a community was also at issue. By the late
1980s and early 1990s, many saw Aztlán as an “empty symbol,” rather
than Pérez-Torres’s “empty signifier,” a symbol too centered on negatives
to be necessarily usable.184 For some, Aztlán was too entangled with a
direct antagonism against dominantized US culture to hold positive con-
tent on its own. For instance, Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie Chabram
argue that “recuperating the mythic pre-Columbian past” ignored the
importance of historical change and situation in the making of identities
and depended too much on racial binaries.185 Even when reconfiguring
the utility of Aztlán, Moraga expresses concerns about how Aztlán’s exis-
tential ambivalence depletes the unificatory potential that other nationalist
groups had: “Unlike the island of Puerto Rico whose ‘homeland’ is clearly
defined by ocean on all sides, Aztlán at times seems more metaphysical
than physical territory.”186 Gaspar de Alba, tackling the idea of Aztlán as
a no place, argues that its very “no place-ness” maintains Chicanx “non-
existence” as embodied persons: “An imaginary homeland, I argue, like
a virtual gallery, is not a place, but a conceptual space that only perpetu-
ates our ‘non-existence.’ […] rather than locate us bodily in the land base
that we claim as our place of origin, it dislocates our identity from that
place, and leaves our bodies out of the equation of signifiers that con-
nect our multiple and diverse ‘moments of presence.’”187 The problem is
that Aztlán is too pliable and too “otherworldly.” Precisely, its no place
entretiempo plasticity could also make it feel like a weak tool.
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 61

Yet, the scriptural power of El Plan and Aztlán is such that scholars,
artists, writers, and other individuals have sought ways to retrieve it and
reimagine its utility. Both Cooper Alarcón and Pérez-Torres find some
possibility for Aztlán if it is recognized instead as a palimpsest that con-
tains multiple and conflicting histories.188 Much as Elena has done, Pérez-
Torres posits Aztlán directly as a “borderlands” space in order to reflect
the ways that differences meet, redivide, reimagine, and contest Aztlán:
“Aztlán represents not a singular homeland, but rather borderlands
between sites of alliance. The borderlands mark a site of profound discon-
tinuity between regions delimiting racial, sexual, gender, and economic
identities.”189 Thus, Aztlán as borderlands imagination evokes the “trans-
gression” of plural boundaries.190 Pérez-Torres and others see in Aztlán
a scriptural imaginary worth recuperating if it can be taken up through
transformed practices of reading, imagining, and authorization, practices
that attend to power dynamics differently and that move beyond a mere
center/periphery spatialization of belonging.
Although diverse readers conflict and converge in dissonant alterna-
tions among their wide-ranging engagements of Aztlán, their varying ver-
sions of Aztlán offer an imaginative polyspatiality and polytemporality that
interrupts and challenges the present by reclaiming lost, but malleable
pasts, and squinting at altered future horizons. Even when critically engag-
ing Aztlán as imagination, many scholars do not abandon it.191 Although
the Plan did not completely transform the USA,192 and many have viewed
its articulations as too vague to frame a usable politics, the varying figures
this chapter focused upon have found within it a pliable locus, even if the
ways and the terms upon which they turn to Aztlán differ dramatically.
Lydia López may recognize in it an interesting history and funny fantasti-
cal vision, searching for belonging in an-other place, while Alfredo Acosta
Figueroa remakes his home of Blythe into the past and future Aztlán. Both
seek that “other world” where self-determination is possible, where one
might find the mirror of a certain wholeness. For Elena, it was a space of
imagination and almost a “structure of feeling”193: “it has to do with the
symbols […] the myths that the feelings that are conjured up when you
see that imagery.” For her the experience of feelings in the imagery of
Aztlán mattered as a counterbalance to the world she lived in: “it’s just
weird too, when you live in this Los Angeles area and you’re continually
using Spanish […] yet the people who inhabited this place are discounted
and ignored and dismissed and degraded.”194
62 J.M. HIDALGO

Aztlán makes a “home” where a sense of being at home has been

denied, even if the people who place themselves there seek to be “bor-
derless.” That texts and narratives of no places can function as “home”
for some suggests that home can be more dynamic and mobile than
often configured; that home can be tied to a textual no place brings
to the fore questions about signifying practices around those words
deemed sacred and powerful in the imagination of individual and
communal selves. El Plan’s enunciation of Aztlán creates a sacralized
national space, but for someone such as Elena, it can also open up
an interruptive and hybrid space that supplies a critical orientation to
self and world, while yielding an in-betweenness that Elena may seek
to inhabit.195 The movement’s language and strategies may have been
inadequately cognizant of the full heterogeneity of Mexican-descended
peoples in the USA, but Aztlán also represented attempts to remake
and transform worlds.196
Perhaps this empowering enunciation of Aztlán as another kind of
space explains why the naming of Aztlán and the ideas of El Plan can
continue to terrorize the imagination of anti-immigration activists who
desire stricter border control in order to protect against a conspiracy of
reconquest.197 Both Antonio Villaraigosa (former mayor of Los Angeles)
and Cruz Bustamante (former lieutenant governor of California) had to
navigate public depictions of their association with MEChA as if they had
belonged to a racist and nationalist separatist organization because the
memory of the early 1970s remained so potent. Even in 2004, students
at Stanford voted to defund MEChA, claiming that the group “advo-
cated racism” because of their support for Chicanxs as a raza, which they
translated as “race” rather than “people.”198 The language of reconquest
remains threatening to the dominantized narratives that readers of El Plan
seek to displace, even if those who seek Aztlán try to transform how we
read and not just what we read.
In part, it is the play with borders, real and imaginary, that makes uto-
pian narratives so strategically compelling as identity formative texts. El
Plan still matters to the Chicanx student group MEChA because El Plan
remains important in the socialization of new members.199 Contemporary
Mechistas honor the text of El Plan while recognizing it as having a his-
torical situation that imperfectly applies to present discourse. They openly
turn away from the literalist “fetishization” that scriptural fundamentalists
employ in other traditions by suggesting that its rhetoric need not always
be taken at face value; it need not be read as a literal demand to reconquer
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 63

the Southwest but as a metaphorical and spiritual call.200 One of the main
veins of conservative US critiques of El Plan depends upon a literalist
reading of the text as calling for cartographic reconquest; ironically, this
literalist reading comes not from present-day Mechistas but from conser-
vative anti-immigration activists.201
Aztlán can be that place in which “both belonging and not belonging
at the same time” inhere in an-other world of multiple pasts, presents, and
futures that can interrupt dominantized modes of temporal and spatial
logic.202 When Figueroa attempts to locate Aztlán physically in Blythe,
CA, he takes up the authorizing power of the scripturalized no place in
order to reimagine and reread the physical world in which he resides.
Yet, he consciously invokes one singular scriptural name in a contested
landscape, reimagining his hometown as a mythic place existent before
Spanish or US empires. Such homes are contentious spaces, but so are
the scriptures that act as them and serve to define them. Scripturalized
no places are sites of struggle as significant to the negotiations of identity
as any place that can be located on a map. Aztlán continues to make the
geographical US Southwest complex, interrupting dominantized narra-
tives of present space and time with alternatives, even while supplying an
ambivalent locus of identity formation for Chicanxs who turn to it. As a
text that plays with a powerful utopian vision while also demonstrating an
awareness of its own potential to circulate as a communal text, a scripture
as it were, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán has many antecedents. In Chap. 3,
I am interested in the way that El Plan may both intervene in and allow us
to reframe the historical uses of Revelation as a locus of utopian imagina-
tion and as a site for the formulation of textual utopias as scriptures. El
Plan exemplifies both the opening of possibilities and the foreclosing of
boundaries endemic to the ambivalent limiting pliability that marks uto-
pian scriptures and the communities that engage them.

NOTES
1. Figueroa, Footprints, 128. Uncited quotations from Figueroa derive from
my personal interview with Figueroa.
2. Figueroa, Footprints, xiv–xv.
3. For further discussion of this fight over sacred space and solar power, see
discussion in a forthcoming essay that I have written, “Competing Land
Claims and Conflicting Scriptures: Chemehuevi and Chicano Sacred Sites
in Blythe, CA.”
64 J.M. HIDALGO

4. See local media, for instance Brown, 29–31, as well as the online docu-
mentary series from planet r/la, such as “Blistering Desert Solar Meeting:
Mohave Traditional/Hereditary Chief Ronald Van Fleet Speaks Out,”
from Robert Lundahl, La Cuna de Aztlán Sacred Sites Protection Circle,
online film from planet r\la, 8:08, 2013, http://planet-rla.com/
who-are-my-people-blm-clip/.
5. “Aztlan has many meanings, but the most recognized and accepted mean-
ing is place of the herons due to the abundance of herons in the Palo
Verde/Parker Valleys. It also means land of the whiteness because of the
large white limestone deposits that are seen on the slopes of the surround-
ing mountains. Aztlan also means land of the rising sun because the sun
rises during the equinoxes in between two peaks that form a ‘u’ shape in
the Moon Mountains, located in Colorado River Indian Tribe
Reservation.” See Figueroa, Footprints, 7.
6. Figueroa, Footprints, 68.
7. Cooper Alarcón, 50.
8. Many Chicanxs and ethnic Mexicans are not particularly interested in or
persuaded by Aztlán, and many never were, as some of my interviews even
of Chicanx activists show. See Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring,” 16.
9. Aztlán had long lived in cultural consciousness and oral tradition as a lost
Eden. See Zaragosa, “Aztlán: Mito y Conciencia Histórica del Pueblo
Chicano,” in Aztlán, ed. Anaya and Lomelí, 86. Yet, the exact moment
when Aztlán re-entered public consciousness, especially in this politically
symbolic and identificatory form has been debated. In 1962 Jack D. Forbes
connected Aztec/Mexica cultures to the US Southwest. See discussion in
Lint Sagarena, 138. Luis Leal has observed that movement texts played
with stories found in earlier Mexican novels. Yet, Leal contends that El
Plan is the first explicitly Chicanx document to discuss Aztlán by name.
Luis Leal, “In Search of Aztlán,”in Aztlán, ed. Anaya and Lomelí, trans.
Gladys Leal, 11–12. However, historian Maylei Blackwell discusses the
formation of a women’s “support group,” Las Chicanas de Aztlán, in
Long Beach as taking place in 1968 before El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán
was written. See Blackwell, 44.
10. See Wimbush, “TEXTureS,” in Theorizing Scriptures, 5.
11. Ruiz, Readings, 17.
12. For discussions of how the Plan of Delano also functioned as a religious
text, see León, 133–135.
13. Gonzales, “I Am Joaquín,” in Message to Aztlán, ed. Esquibel, 29.
14. C. Muñoz, 80.
15. Specifically March 27–31, 1969. García, Chicanismo, 93.
16. García, Chicanismo, 93.
17. Treviño, 100.
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 65

18. Soldatenko, 28.

19. María Varela as quoted in Steiner, 389.
20. In somewhat religious language, Muñoz describes horizonal queerness “as
a modality of ecstatic time in which the temporal stranglehold that I
describe as straight time is interrupted or stepped out of.” J.E. Muñoz, 32.
21. García, Chicanismo, 93.
22. Treviño, 103. Note the gendered configurations of revolutionary roles.
23. Treviño, 103.
24. Treviño, 104.
25. Treviño, 104.
26. García, Chicanismo, 95.
27. Treviño, 104. “Gabacho” here is a derogatory term for “white.”
28. E. Chávez, 7.
29. D.A. Sánchez observes how El Plan specifically invokes and subverts the
US Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, pp. 83, 102.
30. Other counter-cultural manifestos of the 1960s should be seen as equally
important in informing the writing of these planes. Scholar and activist
Carlos Muñoz, Jr. describes El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán not as a riff on the
Constitution or planes, but on African American thought from the 1960s
(C.  Muñoz, 3). During our interview, Fernando De Necochea described
the import of black student activism for a larger “Free University” in moti-
vating Chicanxs in Santa Barbara and the work of the Santa Barbara confer-
ence that leads to El Plan de Santa Barbara. The Black Panthers’ Ten Point
Program (1966) can be seen as an important antecedent, especially in terms
of the interplay of rhetoric about self-determination, self-defense, and com-
munity control of institutions. The Brown Berets had produced their own
Ten Point Program as well in June of 1968. Some Puerto Rican activists,
including members of the Young Lords, were present at the Denver Youth
Conference (C. Muñoz, 94; García, Chicanismo, 93). Also inspirational was
the “militant black nationalis[m]” of United Slaves (C. Muñoz, 103).
31. See El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
32. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
33. Bebout, 3.
34. La Verdad (April 1969), San Diego, CA. Also see Bebout, 90.
35. E.  Vasquez, “Somos Aztlán!” in Enriqueta Vasquez, ed. Oropeza and
Espinoza, loc 1186/3068, [October 13, 1969].
36. E. Vasquez, “Somos Aztlán!” loc 1196/3068, [October 13, 1969].
37. “We are Aztlán. With our hearts in our hands. Somos Aztlán.” E. Vasquez,
1213/3068, [October 13, 1969].
38. Blackwell, 173. Of the handful of individuals I interviewed, two of the
women remained institutionally religiously involved, with Lydia López
long active in mainline Protestant denominations and Elena continuing to
66 J.M. HIDALGO

be an active practicing Catholic. Religious institutions were among the

hotly contested aspects of this conference which included a walkout on
the part of many Chicanas. Among those attending the larger conference
were Chicana nuns working for transformation of the Catholic Church.
However, active Catholic women “were outvoted by young, vocal Chicana
activists in the conferencia workshop. The final resolution of the religion
workshop read, ‘We, as mujeres de la Raza, recognize the Catholic Church
as an oppressive institution and do hereby resolve to break away and not
go to it to bless our unions.’” See discussion in Blackwell, 174. At the
same time, one of the disappointments of the Houston conference,
besides the walkout, was its failure to produce “a shared blueprint for
action, like El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán did at the Denver conference”
(Blackwell, 178).
39. Treviño, 105. Figueroa, likewise, cited Alurista as knowledgeable about
Aztec lore and a primary circulator of myths and insights during the era.
Interview with Figueroa. Intriguingly, Treviño quotes Alurista, and the
quotation is a little different from the published preamble of El Plan: “With
our hearts in our hands, and our hands in the earth, we declare before the
world, before all of North America, before all of our brothers on the bronze
continent, we are a nation and are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán.”
40. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
41. Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí! 85–86.
42. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
43. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales quoted in Steiner, 385.
44. Anaya and Lomelí, “Introduction,” Aztlán, iv.
45. Anaya, “Aztlán: A Homeland without Boundaries,” Aztlán, 230–231.
46. Knott, 1104. Also see M. Vásquez, 263–264.
47. A desire to divide the world between a here and not here may speak well
to aspirations for controlling people and space in ways that do not coin-
cide with lived “Thirdspace.” Soja, 78–81.
48. See Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera.
49. O’Neill, 1097, 1102.
50. Figueroa’s definition of fact is instructive here in that it requires a relation-
ship between text and vision of place: “By facts we mean that you can
compare what you’re seeing with what is written. That’s a fact.”
51. See discussion in J.Z. Smith, Map, xii–xv.
52. Briefly translated as Of a republic’s best state and of the new island Utopia.
53. Manuel and Manuel, 2.
54. Manuel and Manuel, 5.
55. Claeys and Sargent, “Introduction,” Utopia, ed. Schaer, et al., 1.
56. Schweitzer, 15.
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 67

57. Schweitzer, 18. Rather than providing a “blueprint” for a specific ideal
society, utopians tend to be more akin to the modern inventor, more fas-
cinated with fixing “what is wrong” with the present. Jameson, 11–12.
58. Miner, 13–14, 37.
59. Aztlán as utopia may also be aligned with native North American empha-
ses on space/time, where time is also a kind of space, not a linear progres-
sive temporality, but a timing composed of spatial relations and vectors.
See discussion in Weaver, 20.
60. J.E. Muñoz, 25–26. Also see Levitas, 4.
61. J.E. Muñoz, 22.
62. Schweitzer, 15.
63. J.E. Muñoz, 4.
64. Lock, 3. Darko Suvin considers utopia to be “a literary genre or
verbal construction” whose imagined ideal society hinged upon certain
feelings of “estrangement arising out of an alternative historical
hypothesis” (110).
65. Schweitzer, 15.
66. Boer, Novel Histories, 139.
67. Boer, Novel Histories, 140.
68. Romero, 136–137.
69. Jameson, 291.
70. John Gray argues that utopias are characterized by an unattainable pursuit
of “harmony.” Gray, 17.
71. Krishan Kumar finds a close relationship between the age of exploration,
apocalypticism, and modern utopia. Kumar, 22–23.
72. Certeau, 135.
73. Certeau, 135.
74. Certeau, 136.
75. I would like to thank Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre for helping me to see
how I was positing utopianism as operating differently than the more
Blochian approach.
76. Some of my sensibilities here come out of discussions of feminist utopia-
nism as encapsulating more open and dynamic imaginaries. See Castelli,
38–40.
77. Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring,” 17.
78. For some more detailed descriptions of these quests, see Miguel León-
Portilla, “Aztlán: From Myth to Reality,” in The Road to Aztlán, ed.
Fields, et  al., trans. Rose Vekony, 29–31; Cooper Alarcón, 53–55;
J.R. Chávez, The Lost Land, 7–22.
79. Price, 62.
80. Jeanette Rodríguez-Holguín, “La Tierra: Home, Identity, and Destiny,”
From the Heart of Our People, ed. Espín and Díaz, 196.
68 J.M. HIDALGO

81. García, Chicanismo, 18.

82. According to Beltrán, “as a narrative of home and identity,
Aztlán mirrors the contradictions of Chicano subjectivity. Like Chicanos
themselves, Aztlán is from but not in Mexico, in but not of the United
States. Aztlán is portrayed not as a return to Mexico but as the spiritual
and territorial embodiment of Chicano aspirations.” Beltrán, 43.
83. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
84. M.L.  Martínez, 197. And “spiritual and political homeland” from
García, Chicanismo, 95.
85. E. Chávez, 4.
86. Roland Schaer, “Utopia: Space, Time, History,” in Utopia, ed. Schaer,
et al., trans. Nadia Benabid, 5.
87. I approach Aztlán’s utopian space/time as resonating across multiple
dimensions, making it polyspatial and polytemporal. Other readings and
framings of this are possible. For example, Alicia Arrizón argued that the
term itself “redefines space.” See Arrizón, 50.
88. Aztlán both takes up and responds to the ways that “narratives of tem-
porality frequently structure nationalist claims to land, indeed consis-
tently structure the production of space and place.” Brady, 35.
89. A. Pérez, “Splitting Aztlán.”
90. Ignacio Bonillas, ‘‘Fragmentos del discurso civico,’’ El Fronterizo,
Doingo, 29 Septiembre de 1878, as quoted and translated in Brady, 34.
91. Brady, 34. Bonillas’s and other invocations were also fraught with some
of the racial and gender fractures that haunt more contemporary articu-
lations of Aztlán. See Brady, 36–37.
92. Interview with Ramón.
93. Vasconcelos, Cosmic. El Plan de Santa Barbara names La Raza Cósmica
as an intellectual antecedent. See El Plan de Santa Barbara, 51.
94. Vasconcelos, 40; also see discussion in Lint Sagarena, 111–112.
95. Pérez-Torres, Movements, 57. Our first written accounts of Aztlán are
refracted through Fray Bernardino de Sahagún relying on “Christianized
informants,” in his 1555 Spanish account and 1585 “Nahuatl revision.”
See Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje, 148.
96. Pérez-Torres, Movements, 57.
97. Pérez-Torres, Movements, 62.
98. Pérez-Torres, Movements, 68. Chicanxs living in the US context took up
mestizaje, in part, because they had to confront a racial system predicated
on a black/white binary that erased them. See García, Chicanismo, 72.
99. Interview with Alejandro.
100. Moraga, Loving, 120.
101. See Socolovsky, 74.
102. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 69

103. Arteaga, 9. Also see Brady, 145.

104. Treviño, 105.
105. D.A. Sánchez, 104.
106. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
107. Interview with Rubén. Rubén’s view aligns with Brady’s analysis, that
Aztlán “provided a beloved landscape on which to project desires for a
different, less-racist life.” Brady, 142.
108. García, Chicanismo, 95.
109. Treviño, 105.
110. Interview with Elena.
111. Interview with Elena.
112. Treviño, 105.
113. García, Chicanismo, 53.
114. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
115. Interview with Elena.
116. See, for example, the pamphlet, “MECHA Survival Kit: A Practical
Guide to the Bureaucratic Jungle of The University of California,
Berkeley Aztlan,” September 1969, Chicano Studies Program Records
1961–1996, bulk 1969–1980, CS ARC 2009/1:46, University of
California, Berkeley, Ethnic Studies Library.
117. As Bebout observes, this combination of choosing cities and towns of
Chicanx historical import with the naming of Aztlán makes this map “a
conceptual map as well, marking the locations and boundaries of Chicano
nationalist ideology” (Bebout, 72–73; the map is on p. 73).
118. Arrizón, 51.
119. Bebout, 72–73.
120. Price, 62.
121. There were differences within the movement and between the move-
ment and land activist groups that were not specifically “Chicanx nation-
alists” (Bebout, 74).
122. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
123. Rendón, 10.
124. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” Last Generation, 150.
125. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
126. Treviño, 107.
127. Treviño, 108.
128. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
129. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 51.
130. E. Chávez, Raza, 77.
131. E. Chávez, Raza, 78.
132. David Sánchez, Expedition through Aztlán; also see E. Chávez, 56.
70 J.M. HIDALGO

133. Alianza was the organization that grew out of Tijerina’s land grant
movement, and, as Bebout observes, the convention that votes for the
Republica de Aztlán is also the same convention that forces Reies López
Tijerina to resign (Bebout, 90).
134. Leal, 8.
135. Michael Pina, “The Archaic, Historical, and Mythicized Dimensions of
Aztlán,” in Aztlán, ed. Anaya and Lomelí, 15.
136. Mariscal, 65.
137. E.  Vasquez, “Our New Nation is Born,” loc 1236/3068, [April 17,
1970].
138. Interview with Elena.
139. Interview with Elena.
140. Arrizón, 77.
141. Romero, 136.
142. J.E. Muñoz, 26.
143. Anaya and Lomelí, ii.
144. Treviño, 105.
145. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 78.
146. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
147. Zaragosa, “Aztlán,” 86.
148. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 169.
149. E. Vasquez, “Somos Aztlán!” loc 1201/3068, Kindle edition, [October
13, 1969].
150. Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring,” 37.
151. Pérez-Torres, Movements, 61.
152. Gaspar de Alba, 135–136.
153. Anaya and Lomelí, ii.
154. Love, 112.
155. L.E. Pérez, loc 1760–1326 of 3652, chap. 4: “Tierra, Land” Section:
“Tracing the Indigenous: Kathleen Alcalá’s The Flower in the Skull.”
156. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, quoted in E. Chávez, 150.
157. Treviño, 105.
158. Grandjeat, 21.
159. De León and Griswold del Castillo, 159.
160. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
161. Interview with Rubén.
162. Treviño, 105. This sense of Aztlán as naming ceremony can also be
found in Anaya, “Aztlán: A Homeland Without Boundaries,” in Aztlán,
230.
163. E.  Vasquez, “La Santa Tierra,” loc 1010 of 3068, Kindle edition
(December 7, 1970).
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 71

164. E.  Vasquez, “La Santa Tierra,” loc 1050 of 3068, Kindle edition
(December 7, 1970).
165. Anaya, “Aztlán: A Homeland Without Boundaries,” 232.
166. Beltrán, 44. The movement, even in its own discursive framing and era,
never relied solely on a vision of unity. El Plan de Santa Barbara calls for
“Chicano Studies” to be “the formal, institutionalized, and dynamic
study of Chicano culture in all of its diversity and unity” (El Plan de
Santa Barbara, 40).
167. Beltrán, 46-47. Beltrán suggests that this drive toward unity was so great
that even feminists found no rhetorical approach other than to also argue
for unity.
168. Lint Sagarena, 143.
169. M. Martínez, 191.
170. M.E. Valle, 41.
171. For more discussion of the ways that starting from common ground can
both be important while dangerously teetering toward problematic nor-
mativizing and otherizing, see Nanko-Fernández, 14–17.
172. Pérez-Torres, Movements, 65.
173. As Alurista states during an interview in Chicano! History of the Mexican
American Civil Rights Movement, episode 1, Galán Productions (Los
Angeles, CA: Distributed by NLCC Educational Media, 1996), VHS.
174. For discussion of Alurista, see Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring,” 20. As
Fregoso and Chabram note, the problem is that identification with
Aztlán may “posit an essential Chicano subject for cultural identity.” See
Fregoso and Chabram, 204.
175. Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring,” 28.
176. Price, 75.
177. Brady, 148.
178. Cooper Alarcón, 58.
179. Price, 67.
180. Cooper Alarcón, 52. As early as November 1969, Enriqueta Vasquez
became concerned about the relationships between Chicanx Aztlán and
Native American land rights. See discussion in Lorena Oropeza,
“Viviendo y luchando,” Enriqueta Vasquez, ed. Oropeza and Espinoza,
loc 369 of 3068.
181. Price, 73.
182. Martínez, 200.
183. Miner, 52.
184. Price, 80.
185. Fregoso and Chabram, 206.
186. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 153.
187. Gaspar de Alba, 135.
72 J.M. HIDALGO

188. For Cooper Alarcón, “unless Aztlán is understood in all of its layers, all
its complexity, it will never be an attractive model to the diverse culture
its leaders seek to encompass within its borders, borders that have been
and will continue to be fluid” (62). Along this vein, Pérez-Torres goes
on to assert, “Thus Aztlán as borderlands marks a site that both belongs
to and has never belonged to either the United States or Mexico”
(“Refiguring,” 31).
189. Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring,” 31.
190. Pérez-Torres,” Refiguring,” 35.
191. “We cannot abandon Aztlán precisely because it serves to name that
space of liberation so fondly yearned for. As such, it stands as a site of
origin in the struggle to articulate, enact, and make present an absent
unity. Aztlán is our start and end point of empowerment.” Pérez-Torres,
“Refiguring,” 37.
192. Other movement texts left much more distinctive “political legac[ies]”
whereas El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán offered more of an “imaginative
conceptualization.” Pérez-Torres, “Refiguring,” 28.
193. See, for instance, Williams, 64.
194. Interview with Elena.
195. Potentially one might see this as a “Third Space.” Bhabha, 38; and
Interview with Elena.
196. E. Chávez, 7.
197. Consider, for example, an Associated Press profile of Jim Boyd, a conser-
vative who ran for Nashville’s City Council on the grounds that El Plan
reveals a conspiracy to reconquer the USA. See Loller and Prengman,
A4.
198. Oropeza, 1.
199. Valle, 13 and 28.
200. Here I am alluding to how literalist focus abstracts the text away from its
broader communal roles or specific racial and cultural formations. See
Wimbush, Bible and African Americans, 73. Though MEChA remains
attached to El Plan, and the desire to situate it within a particular histori-
cal context may mirror the fetishization of the text taken up by nonfun-
damentalist biblical studies, I suspect a dynamic similar to Christian
scriptural fundamentalism is at work when conservative anti-immigration
activists take up El Plan’s myth of Aztlán without attention to its par-
ticular meaning-making role, knowledge of its historical context, or
awareness of the actual tensions that often do exist between Chicanxs,
newer Mexican (im)migrants, and (im)migrants from other Latin
American countries. Anti-immigration activists see a conspiracy of recon-
quista behind (im)migration without attending to the plurality of causes
that undergird contemporary (im)migration dynamics. Meanwhile,
 “WE ARE AZTLÁN”: WRITING SCRIPTURES, WRITING UTOPIA ... 73

MEChA students still read the documents, thus signaling a certain devo-
tion to the texts, but they treat them more as historical artifacts: “MEChA
leaders say it is a historical document from a more radical time distorted
by critics who focus on a few lines while missing the broader picture.
‘When did we say we wanted a separate nation? We never did,’ said
Graciela Larios, who recently retired as head of the UC Riverside
MEChA club. ‘We know about the spiritual plan for Aztlán. It reflects
the time it was written in. We are not ashamed of it. We stand by it.’”
Kelly, B2.
201. Lydia López also observed that it was a particularly settler colonialist
understanding of Aztlán that misinterprets it: “it was taking something
that might have been a historic notion—and if it was, that’s fine too–this
idea of defining this community in this particular way and to couple that
with the changing demographics and the beginning of an exercise of
political power among Latinos. Putting all together and making this
amalgam of this conspiracy that Aztlán is somehow the plunder.” For
López Aztlán is an alternative history of possibility, an imaginative space
that cannot be owned, and thus she critiques conservative readings
because they focus on the idea of Aztlán as territory that can be taken as
“plunder.” Interview with Lydia López.
202. Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje, 152. Or as L.E. Pérez suggests, “Aztlán is thus
the symbol of an imagined, ideal, more democratic nation, which, if once
a separatist impetus by which some early Chicana/o activists countered
their exclusion by racists with the idea of secession, today marks a
grounding politics of geographical, social, and ideological space of inclu-
sion for Mexican Americans and other minoritized population groups,
including women and the queer.” Pérez, loc 1372 of 3652, chap. 4:
“Tierra, Land,” Kindle.
 CHAPTER 3

“The Holy City Which Has Been Written

in This Book”: The Utopian
Scripturalization of Revelation

The events of the 1960s, especially civil activism and youth uprisings
around the world, shaped not only the Chicanx movement; indeed some
of the broader calls for epistemological transformation articulated in the
1960s impacted a plurality of scholars and interpreters, including figures
in biblical studies such as past Society of Biblical Literature presidents
Fernando F.  Segovia and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, both of whom
have articulated the import of 1960s and 1970s activism to their work.
Studying the biblical book of Revelation—especially with interpreters in
the vein of Segovia and Schüssler Fiorenza, interpreters attentive to poli-
tics and social location—can be a way to excavate transformations in the
legacy of a teleology of revelation as a utopian homing process. How can
we make sense of and think about people reading the book of Revelation
as a product and practice of utopia, as the making of and engagement
with scriptures—or scripturalization—as always already in a utopian key?
Politically and locationally aware biblical scholars have turned more
often to contemporary iterations of biblical texts, frequently focusing on
conservative evangelical apocalyptic writings.1 Direct quotations of biblical
material in contemporary texts, though useful to consider, are not always
the best (and certainly not the only) places to look in order to understand
the legacies of Revelation in our contemporary moment. Chicanx move-
ment scripturalization practices have activated, channeled, and challenged
Revelation as a longstanding imaginary, even when Chicanxs do not
directly tackle the literal biblical text per se. The apocalyptic mode persists

© The Author(s) 2016 75

J.M. Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59214-9_3
76 J.M. HIDALGO

in sometimes subtle and sometimes overt ways in Chicanx writings. For

instance, in “The Chicano codex,” Chicana author Cherríe L.  Moraga
writes, “is our book of revelation.”2 The title of The Last Generation
(1993) signals the “apocalyptic” concerns of Moraga’s writing, her trepi-
dations about potential cultural—if not biological—genocide. Such inter-
ests inflect “apocalyptic” with our more modern overtones, our sense that
those who are apocalyptic are somehow oriented toward a concern for
the end of the world. Although she does not quote the Bible directly,
Moraga summons the book of Revelation, a resource for Christopher
Columbus’s descriptions of the “other world” into which he sailed; she is
writing in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s incendiary arrival
in the Western Hemisphere. In the wake of the Rodney King uprising,
Moraga portrays US cities like Babylon, as drawn from Rev 17–22, judged
and ravished by the violence that imperial Babylon helped to create. At the
same time, our contemporary Babylon has been built in the name of the
new Jerusalem of Rev 21–22, with its golden streets and presentation as
a “temple,” a temple that now “is falling into flames.”3 Moraga provides
a multivalent image that draws on different cities and myths but reminds
readers of the import of “Revelation” as one of those codes in Western
settler colonial history.
Moraga’s essay, “Codex Xerí,” upon which I focus in Chap. 6, does
not only evoke apocalyptic imaginations in terms of the end of the world
or imperial conquest. She also remembers apocalypse through its fuller
Greek meaning as “unveiling,” as a practice of scribal prophecy that
imparts heavenly sights and sounds to readers, wherein prophecy is not a
direct writing of future events but a collusion of “memory,” “knowledge,”
and “hope,”4 through which a scribe is called “to interpret the signs of the
time, read the writing on barrio walls, decode the hieroglyphs of street
violence, unravel the skewed message of brown-on-brown crime and
sister-rape.” Her Chicano book of revelation “is the philosopher’s stone,
serpentine and regenerative. It prescribes our fate and releases us from
it.”5 Moraga presents herself as a communally and prophetically tasked
critic of imperial and settler colonial legacies of the book of Revelation in
the Western Hemisphere even as she draws on other modes of unveiling;
indeed she utilizes some of the very facets of prophecy as alternative and
resistant knowledge resource that many also locate in Revelation. Because
of her direct interest in Chicanx movement texts and ideas, Moraga also
continues Aztlán’s polytemporal and polyspatial utopian and apocalyptic
practice when she reimagines unveiling legacies from Revelation, among
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 77

other biblical texts. In order to better understand the utopian, apocalyptic,

and scriptural legacies that Chicanx activists challenged, in this chapter I
turn backward in time, using the Chicanx movement to uncover certain
layers of Revelation’s creation and mobilization as scripture in the ancient
and modern world before the Chicanx movement. Admittedly, then, this
chapter requires a certain temporal and argumentative circularity. Chapter
2’s examination of Chicanx Aztlán can help us to redescribe facets of
Revelation, particularly in reading its utopian new Jerusalem, but then I
want to trace how these strains become an imperial utopian scripturaliza-
tion to which Chicanxs must respond, by both mimicking and subverting
Revelation.
An “apocalypse of Jesus Christ,” the Christian biblical Revelation more
frequently refers to itself as a “book of prophecy,”6 a positioning within the
biblical tradition of Jeremiah and Isaiah that formed the basis of its claims
to interpretive authority.7 Revelation’s prophetic sensibility was generally
cast as a performed text with ritualistic meaning and power in communal
interaction. Revelation is but one biblical apocalyptic example that can be
read as one project within processes of scripturalization, a textualization of
place, a making of place in and through a particular no place that over time
becomes “scriptural.” Revelation might be read as a locus in which ancient
diasporic and peripheralized subjects, lacking control over a physical cen-
ter, come to make a textual center, a utopian no place, a temple in a text,
“an-other” world of knowing and belonging. Yet in so doing, and even
amid its potentiality as anti-imperial locus, Revelation also participates in
imperial visioning, removing the veil upon an alter-imperial8 imagination
that in turn becomes the scriptural center as basis and (un)homing device
for ongoing imperial and settler colonial appropriation.

THE PROBLEM OF GENRE

Let me offer a few caveats before proceeding: in this chapter, I am reading
biblical scholarship and reading Revelation, but I am not making a case for
what Revelation must necessarily have meant, only how we might see cer-
tain possible ancient situations and meanings as actionable loci in American
modernity (starting in 1492) and in the late twentieth century. My main
questions are not about what Revelation must have meant in its ancient con-
text. Rather, I am interested in how scholarly interpretations of Revelation’s
ancient historical context can help us to think about the worlds of scriptural-
ization that encircle and emanate from reading Revelation. Besides drawing
78 J.M. HIDALGO

upon a reader-response approach that does not privilege authorial intent,

I also question the very reasons for which biblical scholars so often seek
“pure” “origins” rather than taking up potential interpretive points along
a more complex, non-linear, or pluralized historical path.9 Though I some-
times refer to an author, I generally refer to “Revelation” as though it were
a subject, even when I do not think the text itself can be a subject that does
things. That simplifying of the subject should be taken as shorthand for my
own offering of the plurality of possible meanings I, and other people, seek
in the text, meanings that cannot be restricted to one “author.”
Scholarship on Revelation has an acutely charged history because
Revelation has been a historically charged book. Symbolically rich, it is a
difficult book to interpret according to the reading methods most favored
in modernity. While Revelation’s canonical status was perhaps the most
debated of the Christian New Testament, it has been a locus for popu-
lar imagination over millennia. People have long taken Revelation’s self-
description as “prophecy” quite seriously, but they generally interpret that
to mean that Revelation offers predictions about the future;10 perhaps that
is partially why popular readers tend to dub the text “revelations” rather
than the singular of its official title. People have mined the texts in varying
ways for guides to this future, and they have, perhaps in ways beyond bib-
lical scholarly capacity, sought to tie their readings of Revelation into the
present world. The popular pluralizing of the title also reflects a capacity
for pluralizing meaning in Revelation that scholarship too often avoids. In
reading Revelation, one cannot ignore the histories of popular and evan-
gelical millenarian readings because of their prominence in US rhetoric,
politics, and foreign affairs. Yet, such popular millenarian readings are not
the only matrices that matter for thinking about Revelation’s long-term
impact as a text; those readings reveal an orientation toward Revelation
as a scriptural text that has larger ripples and ramifications for US culture.
From Revelation’s ending chapters, both a utopian vision and a par-
ticular kind of rhetoric of scripturalization can be excavated. The text can
be and has been read with a similar interruptive, polyspatial, and poly-
temporal pliability as that observed around Aztlán. Historical possibilities
around the book’s composition, while interesting and of some analytical
utility, are only potential interpretations of how Revelation became and
continues to serve as a locus wherein utopian meaning making transpires
in the encounter between the reader and the text. Because of the way that
it builds a utopian no place to be encountered within the temporally and
spatial mobile text, this ancient text lends itself to scripturalization.
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 79

If one starts with the issue of orientation, rather than genre, then the
relationships between Revelation and Chicanx texts are more readily
apparent.11 Considering apocalyptic orientation as not strictly about the
“end of the world” but rather as an unveiling—a revealing, a transforma-
tion—draws on Moraga’s terms for scribal power: apocalyptic unveiling is
a practice of memory, knowledge, and hope about and for the world on a
bigger scale. This sense of apocalyptic orientation resonates with scholarly
definitions of apocalypse as a literary genre that have often emphasized
the revelatory framework of apocalyptic literature.12 Does not El Plan, as
a genre-playful text like Revelation, shed light on the present by appeal-
ing to a higher power and hence the “spiritual” of its title? Do not both
El Plan and Revelation articulate certain behaviors that they advocate
through recourse to a cosmic framework?
El Plan and its readings engage in several rhetorical maneuvers that
might be termed apocalyptic. As noted in Chap. 2, El Plan shares an
affinity with, even while criticizing, key texts of US nationalism, includ-
ing the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the concept
of Manifest Destiny. This interest in “destiny,” especially as a counter-
narrative to one that is manifestly perceived, is perhaps the most overtly
apocalyptic turn in El Plan. The prologue invokes religious allusions for
naming the “we” that are “Chicano inhabitants”: “we” are the ones “con-
secrating the determination of our people of the sun” who “declare that
the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable
destiny.”13 What precisely this destiny entails has been frequently a mea-
sure of varying interpretation and dispute, but that it is somehow bound
with land and peoplehood, however broadly imagined, recurs quite fre-
quently. Thus, El Plan shares with apocalyptic texts, as biblical scholars
understand them, in a framing of cosmic and mythohistorical rhetorics
that are used in shaping and exhorting the imagined Chicanx community.
El Plan and Revelation are not linked only because they share an iden-
tical literary genre as defined by fixed textual characteristics. Rather, both
are literature of an “apocalyptic imagination”14: they have divergent but
interconnected roles in certain communal imaginations and invocations.
Such an approach explains some of the religious and “spiritual” dimen-
sions summoned in El Plan’s own title as “The Spiritual Manifesto of
Aztlán,” and yet it also engages biblical scholarly approaches to the book of
Revelation by reimagining it as a text employed by different communities,
readers, and auditors15 specifically for a process of utopian scripturaliza-
tion, even if those processes look and feel very different to the commu-
80 J.M. HIDALGO

nities and individuals involved. Revelation and El Plan both proffer an

alternate cosmo-historical view of the world that challenges dominantized
framings while providing a revelatory scaffold within which peoples who
feel somehow displaced can now place themselves and dislodge dominan-
tized structures. Revelation can be used—and El Plan has been used—to
provide a textual locus for communal imagination, for a slippage between
place and no place that transpires in the interactions between peoples,
the places they live, the places from where they feel displaced, the places
for which they hope, and the texts through which they make and remake
themselves and the world. Seen comparatively, perhaps, Revelation is also
a technology of diaspora, a utopian homing device. Casting Revelation in
such a way helps to reframe the legacies of scripturalization that fall out
from reading Revelation in modernity.

REVELATION AS AN ANCIENT DIASPORIC HOMING DEVICE

Very little can be claimed with any certainty about the historical context
that first gave rise to Revelation. Over the years, historical critical engage-
ments and related approaches have asked many questions that remain
mostly unanswerable. Who was John of Patmos? Did such a person even
exist? Where and when was this text first written and circulated? Who
was the target audience? Is this text mostly a unique composition or a
redaction of prior source material? Where does this text fit within Jewish,
Christian, and other ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern literary
and religious cultures? While a book could be written on the attempts
to answer all of those questions, as well as work that queries the utility of
each question, what can be guessed about Revelation’s earliest circulated
contexts provokes questions about the relationships between peoplehood,
place, and power in the making of scriptures as we understand them today.
While we can never know the author or authors of Revelation, we can
take John as a “rhetorical device”16 and glean a couple of things about the
communicator, as a character, who narrates this divine vision to us who
read and hear the book of Revelation.17 The rhetorical author, “John of
Patmos” (henceforward John), is imagined as an exile, living on Patmos
because of the “word of God and testimony of Jesus” (1:9). Since exile
was a political punishment, this rhetorical device situates Revelation as a
critical response to, but ongoing participation in, a dominating Roman
Empire, and such an exile could connote both a sense of displacement as
well as a prior background of relatively high status.18
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 81

John and the earliest communities to engage this text could be catego-
rized as belonging to a diasporic people we might term “Jewish,”19 though
any such categorization is problematic given our historical moment,
when we think of Jews and Christians as distinct subsets of a category
we term “religion,” a category of limited utility in thinking about the
ancient world. Revelation becomes identified with “Christians” and not
with “Jews” some centuries after the text was first written.20 The author is
never identified with the term Christian, and the text was certainly crafted
and circulated before any such meaningful distinction exists.
Given this terminological morass, what is the utility of thinking with
or about the “Jewishness” of this text at all? Remembering Revelation as
a diasporically Jewish text foregrounds its relationship to long-standing
and continually contested practices of survival under different strains of
imperial domination. Jewishness in the ancient world covered a range of
identifications and practices (that float among things we now term race,
ethnicity, nation, and religion) within a turbulent climate. The Babylonian
destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 587/6 BCE, which led to exile
for certain populations, some of whom remained in exile from that point
onward, may have spawned a certain drive toward and creation of some
of the practices of scripturalization in which we participate today.21 Under
the rule of the Persian Empire, some exiles returned to ancient Judea
and built a second Temple, and, at the same time, a flourishing of tex-
tual production and circulation transpired. After the Persian Empire and
Alexander’s conquest, Hellenistic rulers dominated Judea, later serving
as client-states of Rome before formal Roman control became actualized
over the region.
All of these imperial transitions predate Jesus and Revelation both.
To be “Jewish” under Roman imperial rule was to live with “colonies of
occupation,” and thus ancient Jewish negotiations navigated a distinctive
form of imperialism from the Chicanx experiences with and under US
and Spanish settler colonialisms, and not just because of the differences of
time, language, and technology.22 Nevertheless, a sense of displacement
from power, and, in particular, a lack of political power over a geographi-
cal center, affected many in the broadly defined Jewish world, the majority
of whom lived in diaspora. Whether as a genre or an orientation, promi-
nent contemporary scholars read Jewish “apocalyptic” literary traditions
as scribal impulses of resisting imperial power. Earlier Jewish apocalyptic
texts have been quite strikingly characterized as “resistance literature”
under Hellenistic rule.23 The cathartic experience, performed reading,
82 J.M. HIDALGO

and even the writing of Revelation may be contextualized as resistance

literature for the eschatological community in opposition to the Imperium
Romanum.24
Because of Jewish diasporic textual traditions, Revelation connects
with other texts in an oral-traditional manner wherein thematic con-
nections tend to override direct quotation.25 Linguistic clues in the text
suggest that the author was more familiar with the Hebrew versions of
Jewish texts, though the Hebrew and Aramaic tenor of John’s Greek may
have more to do with a constant use of Jewish textual allusion than any
author’s native tongue.26 Revelation was a text that was heard more than
it was “read,” a text experienced in a hybrid oral and literate culture, in
a world where literacy was powerful but few people were fully literate,27
so most early “Christian” and “Jewish” experiences of Revelation would
have been seen and heard through ritual or liturgical performances in
their communities.
Determining the date of the text’s earliest circulation becomes an
issue, especially in terms of conceptualizing how Jewishness was related
to a physical “center,” a temple in Jerusalem. A Roman state-sanctioned
“persecution” almost certainly does not account for the social situation
in which this text was written and initially circulated. In the late 60s
CE, war erupted in Judea: an uprising against Roman imperial power
led to the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.
Most scholars date Revelation, in close to its current form, to a time
after the destruction of the Temple, during the reign of Roman emperor
Domitian (81–96 CE). But some scholars have placed Revelation in the
era of Nero (54–68 CE),28 so perhaps different parts of Revelation were
composed at different times and finally compiled together toward the
end of the first century CE. Whether the Temple in Jerusalem stood or
not, the initial circulations of this text and those who engage it would
point toward an investment away from a physical temple in this world
and a making of another kind of temple and its associated centricity in
a text. Even if the Temple still stood when this text was written and
circulated, the Romans already exercised a strong enough control over
the Temple hierarchy that many Jews did not feel the Temple was a cen-
ter under their control.29 The use of “Babylon” as a city codename for
Rome30 may suggest an intentional use of the cultural memory of the
Babylonian destruction of the first Jerusalem Temple in 587/6 BCE.31
Thus, whatever the date, one can see how Revelation lets go of the pos-
sibility of locating power in a Jewish-controlled physical, geographic
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 83

center. Revelation may rather place power in the making and the con-
testing of a textual—rather than a physical—“center” for diasporic life.
The relationship between John, his communities, and the Roman
Empire has dominated most recent scholarship on Revelation, and thus
the relationship with Rome appears even in the simplest of summaries of
the text; for those unfamiliar with Revelation, I attempt to provide such
a narrative summary here. Ostensibly an extended letter, the Apocalypse
of John takes its name from the first verse, “The apocalypse [revela-
tion] which God gave […] by sending [God’s] angel to [God’s] servant
John.”32 The first three verses introduce John the seer, guided by an angel
from God. John writes what he has “witnessed,” and blessings are prom-
ised to those “who read aloud,” “listen,” and “heed” that which is written
(1:3). A hearing and witnessing audience is emphasized even while a writ-
ten text is also affirmed. By 1:4, Revelation becomes, on one level, a let-
ter addressed to seven “churches” in Asia (Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum,
Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea).33 These cities in the seven open-
ing letters were diverse urban centers, and each had been “named neo-
koros—an official center of the imperial cult—at some point in the late first
and early second centuries.”34 These letters (1:4–3:22) move quickly from
John’s voice to Christ’s, and they frame the rest of the visions by estab-
lishing a seemingly anti-Roman imperial ethical stance of endurance and
“conquest.” The book of Revelation, and hence most Christian Bibles,
also closes as if it were a letter.
After the opening letters, Revelation quickly turns into a multisen-
sory and evocative experience, a sort of mystical encounter with heav-
enly visions.35 Revelation moves through symbolic cycles of sevens (letters
to churches, seals, trumpets, bowls), a number evocative of divine per-
fection, creation, and the passage of time.36 By 4:1, Revelation quickly
passes through a series of visions that start with John, and by extension
the audience, peeping through a heavenly door at God’s alter-imperial
throne room. Beyond establishing God’s alter-imperial rule, the text’s
larger cosmo-historical vision takes up Roman narratives of the world and
transforms them, flipping the narrative of Roman success and domina-
tion on its head by promising an ultimate transformation of the status
quo with a consequent elevation of those who suffer under Roman impe-
rial rule. David A. Sánchez, who also converses with the Chicanx move-
ment in some of his work, has already shown how this process can be
perceived in Revelation 12, which takes over the Roman imperial myth
of Apollo-Leto-Python and transforms it in favor of Revelation’s faithful
84 J.M. HIDALGO

auditors.37 Rome may proclaim its eternal power, superiority, and peace,
but such proclamations are a sham in the grander scale of God’s rule and
cosmic history. One can see the ultimate destruction of “Babylon,” gen-
erally recognized as a metaphor for Rome, and the descent of the new
Jerusalem as a promise of ultimate victory to those who choose the right
city, the new Jerusalem, over Rome.38
Not unlike El Plan’s alter-imperial stance that critiques the USA even
while manifesting a Chicanx alter-imperial imaginary, the Roman-empire-
critical orientation of Revelation cannot be denied, but it also cannot be
presumed to be the main or only focus. Starting with the Chicanx case
reveals the limits of dualistic framings that envision a minoritized popula-
tion only in relationship to a dominantized one. The study of Chicanx
movement texts underscores that the rhetorics of minoritized texts are
often more concerned with creating and contesting the target minoritized
population, with a figurative representation of dominating power being
rhetorically important but not the focus. Thus, many scholars approach
the book of Revelation in general as dealing with the experience of “alien-
ation” in relationship to the Roman Empire and the social world of Asia
Minor.39 Apocalypse, in this sense, could be a theodicy—helping a com-
munity cope with the difficulties of life and inevitability of death.40 By
imagining a new earth with a holy city ruled by God and populated with
members of their own community, John adds a promise of dominion to
those who now live in “alienation and powerlessness.”41
An important note of caution should be raised about how neatly to
trace this rhetorical distinction; a community purified of Roman-ness
would not have been possible. Rather than anxiously emphasizing the dis-
tinctions between Revelation and Rome, or even simply pointing out that
its attempt at critiquing Rome falls into replication, we must recognize
that Revelation is an alter-imperial text written within the possibilities of
he Roman Empire and not always strictly opposed to them.42 The letters
are to seven churches (ἐκκλεσίαι), not to the Romans, and Revelation
concerns itself most with Jews and non-Roman kings and nations, cast-
ing aspersions especially on those who do not meet certain expectations
for appropriate Jewish identity performance (Jezebel, Balaam, and syna-
gogues of Satan are named as internal opponents).43 While ancient Romans
would have recognized themselves as a critical target in Revelation, just
as contemporary conservative US activists see themselves critiqued in El
Plan, they exist as characters in these texts, not as the main figures of
address. Just as Chicanxs are also a part of the USA, however minoritized
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 85

or subjugated, Revelation is part of the ancient Roman world, but neither

Chicanxs nor Revelation are only products of their dominating imperial
worlds.

MAKING THE LOCATIVE INTO THE UTOPIAN: REVELATION’S

TEXT AS CENTERING NO PLACE FOR MEMORY,
KNOWLEDGE, AND HOPE
Overall, Revelation focuses on urban imagery: it opens with letters to dif-
ferent cities in Asia Minor and closes with a vision of a new Jerusalem come
to replace the world that has been rent asunder during Armageddon. What
exactly is the new Jerusalem though? Is it a future heaven or a symbolic
vision of the Christian community in the world today? Or maybe it is an
experience one has when reading and hearing the text, a critical promise
that directs us both to the insufficiencies of this world and the potential of
something better? Or perhaps it is an alter-imperial ruling center that can
be built and rebuilt as needed in this world? In ways that are still being
excavated in a hemispherically American context, diverse interpretations of
the where and when of the new Jerusalem imagination of Revelation, in
tandem with older Hebrew biblical imaginations, especially those within
the prophetic tradition, have shaped utopian imaginations in and about
the New World.
After addressing the seven cities, Revelation’s visions move quickly
between heavenly throne rooms, earthly plagues, cosmic wars, and then
a sustained focus on the destruction of Babylon, figuratively garbed as a
woman who stands in for Rome. Following the city’s ruination, heavenly
celebration ensued, and then another cosmic battle led to the chaining of
the devil in a pit for a thousand years while the souls of the faithful were
revived to be with Christ. After the thousand years, Satan was released,
only to be ultimately defeated and “thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur”
(20:10) while the “book of life” was opened according to which the dead
“were judged” (20:12). The sea, death, and Hades all gave up their dead
who were also judged, and death and Hades and those not in the book of
life were thrown into the lake of fire (20:13–15). After this vision, then the
text takes a turn into Chap. 21 with a different tone (and hence I shift my
own verb tense here for clarity of focus).
A “new heaven and a new earth” with “no more” sea are revealed
because the first earth and heaven are gone. The new Jerusalem, “the
86 J.M. HIDALGO

holy city,” descends, “from God,” and the city is likened to a woman, “a
bride adorned,” and it is described as a city where God dwells with God’s
people, with no more tears, death, pain (or possibly toil), and all things are
“new.” The city is then described as a gift for the “conquerors” of faith,
and a list of those exiled to the lake of fire and sulfur then follows. The
vision’s guiding angel takes the narrator up to a mountain to witness the
city descending from heaven, shining like a jewel, with high walls, twelve
gates, twelve angels on the gates, varying inscriptions, a perfect cube that
can be measured, streets of gold, and walls adorned with jewels. God and
the Lamb (presumably Jesus) light the city, so there is no sun or moon,
and the gates are always open. While people of all nations seem to be
welcome, the text reminds readers that those who are not in the “Lamb’s
book of life” will not be in the city (21:26). In the center of the city is
God’s throne from which “the river of the water of life” flows, and on
both sides of the river, the tree of life can be found bearing fruit for each
month of the year and providing leaves of healing, suggesting a revived
garden of Eden within the city gates. God and the Lamb are inside the
city, encircled by worshippers who are named as slaves with the Lamb’s
name tattooed on their foreheads. Then the whole book concludes with
some meditation on its own nature but still promising entrance into the
city for some, while also promising that others will be locked out for vary-
ing reasons, some of which I discuss further below.
That this city is also a “utopia” of ancient varieties has been amply
demonstrated in other works, such as Eric J.  Gilchrest’s extensive com-
parative study between ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish utopian visions
as they are drawn into the imagination of Revelation’s new Jerusalem.44
Everyone is healthy (20:4–6); death, pain/toil, tears, and suffering have
passed with the old order (21:4). The landscape promised is a paradise.45
What this combination of the evoked city combined with a meditation on
the nature and power of this particular “book of this prophecy” (22:19)
suggests, however, is that a utopian city, a center for the faithful, has been
evoked and created within a text, allowing it to be continually engaged,
performed, and experienced by varying readers and auditors for millennia
but also providing one step in a process of scripture-making and scriptur-
alization in our contemporary moment. The new Jerusalem becomes a
temple and a utopian locus encapsulated in a ritually read and performed
text.
J.Z. Smith’s analysis of locative (geographically centered) and utopian
(diasporic and not as specifically geographically tied) modes of religiosity
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 87

shows how a locative religious center gets made into a utopian one.
However, this utopian move, crafted in a text that becomes scriptural,
is still locative, thus still centering, albeit in a different fashion than hav-
ing a physical location. Hence Revelation as “scripture” becomes a uto-
pian textual center of limiting pliability for varying peoples who turn to it.
Tensions between place and no place come to imbue the text because of
this shift from a geographic to a utopian textual center; at the same time,
when we think of biblical texts as material objects “around which differ-
ent human groups habitually gather,” it becomes clearer how scriptures
can take over also as physically mobile centers.46 Revelation plays with the
temple as a center of textual imagination.
From the very first mention of the new Jerusalem in Revelation 3:12,
the city is connected with a temple, though not strictly identified as one:
“I will make the one who conquers a pillar in the temple of my God and
you will never go out of it. I will write upon you the name of my God
and the name of my God’s city, the new Jerusalem, which comes down
out of heaven from my God, and my new name.” Even this introduction
of the new Jerusalem contains many of the interpretive tensions that mark
belonging to the new Jerusalem. When Revelation names those commit-
ted community members who remain steadfast to their religious/ethnora-
cial identification and practices, they are often called “conquerors.” Even
as the “faithful” are named as conquerors, they are also recognized to
be enslaved to God and Jesus because of the tattooing of names upon
them.47 Therefore, members of God’s community are imagined as having
a mixed status; they are conquerors who dominate, but they are also domi-
nated. Moreover, this representation of them as pillars not only conjures
the Temple from Jerusalem but also connects to other ancient Greek and
Persian temples where pillars could be sculpted in the forms of humans,
who do the labor of keeping the structure up.48 This verse can also repre-
sent God’s domination, forcing those, inscribed as slaves to God and the
new Jerusalem to always labor to hold up the temple.49 The new Jerusalem
comes to the fore as a place that traffics in and troubles varying forms of
power, a place that may mix different temples in its new creation, and yet,
at the same time, summons for readers/auditors the ideas of a temple,
made up of its worshipping people.
Although drawing on a range of urban and garden imaginations, the
depiction of the new Jerusalem seems to grow from many Hebrew biblical
representations of Solomon’s first Jerusalem temple, prophetic imagina-
tions of a restored temple, and other depictions of the second Temple
88 J.M. HIDALGO

built after those who survived the Babylonian exile returned under Persian
rule (with the Second Temple period generally demarcated as running
from 530 BCE to 70 CE). The import of viewing the new Jerusalem from
“a high mountain” (21:10) connects to Isaiah, though also to Ezekiel
40:2 where Ezekiel was brought to “a very high mountain.”50 The cubic
shape of the city (21:16) mimics many Hebrew biblical descriptions of the
holy of holies and ideal temple design,51 and the stones in the foundations
of the new Jerusalem (21:19–20) may resonate with descriptions of the
priestly breastplate.52 The cherubim of the Solomonic temple may also
partially be an inspiration for the city guards, the angels atop the gates
(21:12).53
Parallels between Revelation and Ezekiel seem quite extensive, especially
between Ezekiel’s descriptions of the new Temple (Ezek 40–48) with the
new Jerusalem, though scholars also note significant divergences.54 Just
as a man measures the temple complex thoroughly for Ezekiel (40–42;
and then presumably God gives some even more thorough instructions
for the design of the Temple in 43), so too does the angel measure the
new Jerusalem, though its structure is a much simpler cube to follow with
a more simply narrated central area. The Temple in Jerusalem mattered
precisely because God dwelled there (as in Ezek 48:35), and because faith-
ful practitioners could come to God there, a function the new Jerusalem
fulfills.55 As in Ezekiel 47:1–12 water flowed from the Temple, in
Revelation 22:1 water flows freely from the throne of God within the
city.56 Anything that might defile it cannot enter the city (Rev 21:27),
rules that would have held to sacred space in the temple as well in Ezekiel
(47:8–9). One of the words used in this verse, κοινὸν, appears only here
in the book of Revelation, and its background is traced to the language
of “ritual impurity” found in Second temple Jewish writings. Viewing the
new Jerusalem as the new temple falls especially in line with Ezekiel’s con-
cern for the ritual purity of the new Temple.57
Concerns around boundaries of ritual purity in Ezekiel or Revelation’s
new Jerusalem may be intertwined with the constructions of sacred space
and power. In his study of the city and temple imagery in Ezekiel 40–48,
J.Z.  Smith interprets different “ideological maps” that present “a hier-
archy of power” rooted in dichotomies of sacred/profane and pure/
impure.58 He shows how concentric hierarchies of sacred/profane rela-
tions are envisioned: the “throne place” in the Temple is sacred whereas
the rest of the Temple is profane, but in Jerusalem, the entire Temple
Mount is sacred whereas outside the Mount is profane, establishing a
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 89

hierarchal interconnection instead of a strict duality of space. This hier-

archal organization of space is also inflected in the varying locations of
different ritual actors within the Temple.59 In Ezekiel 48:30–35, the city
comes to parallel the Temple in its description, making it a civic “coun-
ter-balance” of power to the Temple.60 By adapting this mobile ideology
outlined in Ezekiel, Revelation can be seen as taking up this hierarchal
organization of space through text, but it also takes up that text’s ambi-
guities of hierarchal interconnection.
Revelation also presents the power of the new Jerusalem as a city that
has eradicated the physical temple: “I did not see a temple in [the city] for
its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev 21:22). Because
the Temple is meant to facilitate a connection with the divine, there is
no need for one specific focal connection when God and the Lamb are
always present there (e.g., see 21:3).61 Others suggest that the community
is now the temple, not unlike suggestions in Paul’s letters or the gospel of
Mark.62 Or perhaps the images of God in Chaps. 5 and 6 in a heavenly
throne room make a point already prominent in diasporic Judaism, a point
even more powerful once the Romans destroy the second temple, “that
no earthly temple is the true place of God’s ruling power.”63 Whether
a temple or not, a physically locative center has been remade, and thus
made differently, within this text, taking up and transforming the notion
of a locative center into something that can be experienced in relation-
ship to this text. The locative center becomes the utopian religion of a
temporal and spatial nowhere in this move from geographical locus to
textual locus. This reading can also imply that sacred space, embodied in
a city, is a people-oriented and community-centered imagination of sacred
space.64 Though the Temple has been destroyed, Revelation imagines a
new Jerusalem reconstituted with no temple because God is pervasively
present in a city that is all temple. This temple is constituted as a city,
constituted by and thus identifiable to and with the members of the com-
munity who look to it.
More than mere “reading,” as a private and silent individual act, is
involved in engaging the text and historical context of the Apocalypse of
John.65 Texts as communally performed and experienced liturgy may have
served to create an experience of an invoked center, a new Jerusalem as
temple of God, and that experience may have been part of the process
of scripturalization that led to Revelation becoming a “scripture” in the
ways we understand the term. Charismatic, ecstatic, and visionary wor-
ship can affect divine communion that supplants present marginalization.66
90 J.M. HIDALGO

Revelation can blur temporal and spatial boundaries in that utopian

sense of “ecstasy,” a stepping out of linear time and restricted geography,
the ecstatic as queer and performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz has
described and which I observed in my discussion of Aztlán in Chap. 2.

Text as Utopian No Place

This scriptural temple is utopian as both a good place and a no place that
exists elsewhere, in a textual encounter. For all the seeming utopian qual-
ity of the new Jerusalem, its temporality and spatiality have been long
debated. Is the new Jerusalem in the future or does it interrupt and remake
the present? Framed spatially, is this city heavenly or earthly? The text
exasperates any attempt at a clear-cut interpretation with its constant play
with verb tenses and spatial terms. The book of Revelation consists of a set
of letters in which a narrator describes an encounter with an angel, a host
of varying visions—already seen and heard—of earthly and cosmic war,
along with hymnic interludes that were likely sung. Such contents would
frustrate any sense of smooth linear temporality. After all those switches in
narrative mode, imagine that this complex mix was generally read out loud
as part of a liturgical ritual, drawing on the resonance practices of oral-
ity.67 Then, what would one make of the ways that even grammatical tense
shifts occur throughout the narrative?68 What happens for Revelation’s
interpretive legacies if we let go of much of the modern Western emphasis
on “linear temporality” in reading Revelation, embracing it as a border-
lands imaginary, a city whose “coming down from heaven” (21:2) means
it is always caught in between heaven and earth, an “elsewhere” blur-
ring boundaries and existing within an entretiempo, a between space/time,
whose temporality cannot be “straightened”?69
Most of these questions have only contested responses in the history of
scholarly interpretation. While some scholars have tried to pinpoint one
temporal or spatial location for the new Jerusalem, others have accepted
its ambiguity and polysemic nature.70 Whether a dreamscape with spiral-
ing, “helical temporality” and a loop-like rhythm,71 or a “past-future”
replete with the now and pushing outside of history,72 Revelation does not
represent a neat, causal linearity that can easily be traced from a beginning
to an end.73 What are some of the ways that Revelation’s polytemporal
and polyspatial utopia may actually be seen to serve as an antecedent for
just the sort of “prophetic” scribal labor of the Chicanx movement? Does
Revelation’s utopia also provide a parallel and an antecedent for practices
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 91

of utopian scripturalization coming out of the Chicanx movement era;

for instance, does someone such as Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, who turns
to Aztlán in order to create new knowledge about how one transforms
what one sees and what one reads, also have a relationship to the sorts
of practices possible in reading Revelation? Does Revelation serve as an
antecedent not only for settler colonialism but also for some of those lega-
cies of imaginative “reconquest” that appear with Aztlán in the Chicanx
movement?
The new Jerusalem plays with temporality, interpretable as invoking
varying kinds of “pasts” and different past spaces. Revelation may turn
to other written prophetic and apocalyptic traditions as sites for conjur-
ing a usable “cultural memory,” wherein texts such as Daniel or Ezekiel
help to “‘remember’ Israel when she was under the rule of Babylon and
Persia.”74 Such a memory promises continued survival and endurance, an
ability to outlive these pasts, and thus to outlive hard presents. The term
“those who conquer,” often also translated as those who “overcome,”
with the verb “conquer” (νικάω) appearing in participial form, generally
gets assigned to those whom we might term the “faithful” throughout
the opening letters (2:7, 2:11, 2:17, 2:26; 3:5; 3:12; 3:21), with this term
reappearing in the new Jerusalem section (21:7). This term may be rooted
in a memory of having endured prior empires.
Invocations of an ancient past can be naively nostalgic in Revelation
and Chicanx and movement discourse, dangerously appropriative of the
harsh lived realities of existing indigenous communities, in the context
of the Chicanx movement and violently supersessionist in the context of
Christian appropriations of Jewish stories and history within later readings
of Revelation. However, at other times, the invocation of the mythic past
can provide a sense of power over history by writing a version of history
that has been denied by a dominating power.75 This appeal to the ancient,
even when not taken literally, may serve a contemporary political end.
Perhaps, something of this facet of Chicanx play with a mythologized past,
not just as nostalgia, but as Muñoz’s backward glance to enact a future
vision, a glance that looks to alternative worlds that were or that never
came to be, to pasts where imperial powers did not hold the same kind of
sway, perhaps something of that can also be read in Revelation’s mobiliza-
tion of Jewish memory.
Additionally, the new Jerusalem invokes not only stories of Jewish liter-
ary history but also a mythic utopian past, an Eden restored and revived as
seen in 22:1ff.76 John even describes a “tree of life,” thus alluding to Gen
92 J.M. HIDALGO

2:9–10, suggesting that the well-being of a past paradise exists in this city.77
The allusion to the tree of life evokes both city and garden, Jerusalem and
Eden, a return to primordial creation combined with human civilization.78
Drawing on other Jewish literary imaginations of the apocalyptic city, the
new Jerusalem may also be perceived as “pre-existent,” already a place,
waiting to descend, or in the process of coming down already.79
Revelation’s utopian evocation of Eden may intimate that somehow
the beginning and the end are the same, and that time is cyclical.80 Even
by using “new Jerusalem” as a term, Revelation signals a conversation
of memory in dialogue with “prophetic promise,” indicating the com-
ing completion of a past promised in prophetic literature.81 The new
Jerusalem with its twelve gates is also a restored Israel with twelve tribes
present again in their inscription, notably their names are written on the
twelve gates of the city (21:12).82 Reading such play with the past as con-
nected with the present and the future could also be a revelation of alter-
native knowledge; however the world may appear, the cosmos has its own
controlled cyclical process of return.
Revelation does not abandon the present for this past-future. Living
under an empire that claimed itself to be ever powerful and perpetually
in charge of the world order, Revelation construes such claims as false.
Instead Revelation suggests that other forces, the Jewish God and the
Lamb/Jesus, stand above and beyond this world order, judging Rome in
the guise of Babylon and ultimately judging those whose works keep them
from being inscribed in the book of life. In ritual reading of Revelation, the
present can coexist with the possible, transforming sensibilities of both.83
In a liberationist perspective, Revelation’s utopian view is very much about
this world, deploying utopia to build hope and “the consciousness of a
people,” while stridently critiquing the surrounding world.84 Revelation
then shows that the world according to Roman narrative and as it may
presently appear, that world is false, and the veil of vision can be ripped
to see a different world.85 Perhaps part of why Revelation tries to draw
readers/auditors into its world through frequent comments on seeing and
being seen is about drawing them to see the world differently.
This shared knowledge can also be read as fostering the new Jerusalem
as existent in the community who shares knowledge of it. Akin to cer-
tain Chicanx readings of Aztlán, readings of the new Jerusalem note its
relationship with past places even while perceiving the new Jerusalem
to be a place that already exists among the people who believe they are
part of it. To his question of whether the new Jerusalem is a heavenly or
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 93

earthly city, biblical scholar Ariel Álvarez Valdés answers definitively by

claiming that the new Jerusalem is not a future imagined but rather “a
reality already done and finished, thanks to the death and resurrection of
Jesus.”86 Álvarez Valdés, among others, suggests that the new Jerusalem
always exists as a space within the churches that practice it, akin to the
spiritual communion of Aztlán.87 Thus, the new Jerusalem, while evok-
ing a contemporary geography of Jerusalem and distinguishing itself from
this Jerusalem under Roman control, can also exist in the present not as a
specific geography but as a “spiritual unity”; the new Jerusalem may exist
“wherever its members are,” and they can craft a world together beyond
Roman domination or hegemonic thinking.88 Revelation’s communities
and Aztlán’s Chicanxs can continue to exist in that space and time of
unveiling.
Revelation’s symbolic language does not just grant a shared commu-
nity experience but also a locus of identification. The community reading
Revelation may see itself not only within the city, but also as the city, and
the community members are meant to see themselves embodied in the
new Jerusalem. While a new earth is mentioned, only the city is described,
a city vast enough to home numerous saints. Because of a parallel between
the saints in 20:9 and the new Jerusalem in 21:1ff, the new Jerusalem may
become “a symbol of the saints themselves,” a city that is not so much a
“dwelling place” as the people who inhabit it.89 Additionally, followers
will have both God’s name and the new Jerusalem written upon them in
3:12; practices of communal inscription thus emplace once within the new
Jerusalem.90
Such a present is not simple or static. For certain liberationist Christian
encounters with this text, Jesus’ resurrection has already altered the pres-
ent, made it a “kairos: a moment of grace and conversion, a time of resis-
tance, witness, and building of the reign of God.”91 Thus, the present
is about conflicting temporalities, and though the heavenly Jerusalem
to some extent stands outside of time, it also invites historical transfor-
mation. These possibilities for transformation have long informed social
movements who took inspiration in Revelation as a resource for build-
ing a utopian new Jerusalem in the present. Even within the late second
century, we have evidence of early Christians known as Montanists taking
inspiration from the new Jerusalem, and indeed they may have made their
own new Jerusalem within their present world.92 Other movements have
shared something of that drive, taking Revelation’s conclusion as “an invi-
tation” to build the earthly utopia.93 Emphasizing his interpretive approach
94 J.M. HIDALGO

as Christian, Álvarez Valdés signals that “the future is now, totally and
completely, in the hands of humans.”94 The capacity to experience this
utopia as presently available in textual engagement occurs not only when
the text is read aloud but even when certain biblical scholars read, think,
and write about it in more silent and private modes.
Many readers have long assumed that the new Jerusalem is both heav-
enly and in the future. Conservative evangelical dispensationalists see the
text as describing the fate of our world, and some biblical scholars see the
text as anticipating a future and imminent end within the worlds of the
ancient audiences, specifically an end to the Roman Empire. Perhaps it is
an interruptive future, a squinting at the horizon as Muñoz described it,
that shapes this polytemporal play. Where past memory provides a critical
sense of past survival and flourishing, where present knowledge awakens
readers/auditors to a sense that the world is not as it first appears in domi-
nantized hegemonic systems, future hope promises that the perils of the
present will end. Not unlike Aztlán, by invoking Eden and a sense of a
templed, God-filled new Jerusalem, Revelation reminds its readers/audi-
tors of a world before imperial domination and provides hope of a world
after empire, delimiting its effects.
The idea of “newness” defines this city, the “new Jerusalem,” but it is a
promise of newness that may be offered in critical service. Some contem-
porary scholars understand the city’s newness to be a striking statement of
resistance to Roman imperial order; the new Jerusalem resists Rome pre-
cisely because it does away with the old order and creates a new one.95 In
the era in which the text was presumably written, the real-world Jerusalem
either exists under Roman imperial control or lies in ruins, occupied by
Roman forces. Many “Jews” have been forced out of Judea, while Rome
stands wealthy and thriving. Thus, a “new” Jerusalem paralleled to a
destroyed Babylon signals a reversal of the text’s contemporary historical
situation.96 At the same time, Rome in the first century portrayed itself
as the ruler of a “new world order,” a Pax Romana that was heavenly,
earthly, and universal.97 A new Jerusalem may underscore the falsity and
fragility of such claims. Part of Revelation’s imaginative work is construct-
ing a future beyond history, especially present oppressive histories.98
The new Jerusalem can, like Aztlán, be that no place that does not
exist. The city may be more eternal than the humans who come and go;
certainly the text has outlasted the first generations to read it. The new
Jerusalem, as a bride whose “telos” we do not witness, as a city with its
gates ever open, “has no closure or end.”99 Thus, the city’s imagination
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 95

is not restricted to the book because the city has not fully come yet;100
the readers/auditors are living and (not yet) living in the new Jerusalem
at one and the same time. Sitting near the end of the Christian Bible, the
new Jerusalem then does not just reflect a locative center; it also reflects
a utopian border figure, at the edge of the Bible and moving beyond
its canonical bounds.101 The new Jerusalem is pliable in space, time, and
meaning, even as its gates convey a sense that some limits must be found.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF READING REVELATION

Significant facets of contemporary biblical scholarship have been shaped
by the turns and interests of liberation theology on the one hand and
postcolonial theory on the other, so that even those who are not particu-
larly attentive to the theoretical turns of postcolonialism have taken up a
stronger attention to the prominence of imperial rhetoric and practices
of resistance within the text. Given the ways that Revelation’s rhetoric
was marshaled in militaristic terms under the presidencies of both Ronald
W. Reagan and George W. Bush, it is hardly surprising that concern for
the imperial ambivalences of the text would appear in scholarship written
within the USA. The text proves itself to be a pliable device for drawing
limits, depending on the reader, and thus our questions might be: who
is reading the text, how are they reading it (by what means), from what
place, with which no place in mind, and for what purposes?
Neither the new Jerusalem’s social nor economic structure is necessarily
clearly identified in the text, but scholars have made what they can out of
the details available. By identifying concerns with economy, security, liber-
ation, and better equality in Revelation’s new Jerusalem, scholars empha-
size that Revelation’s turn to “an-other” world is critically enmeshed with
this one. Throughout this chapter, I have reflected upon the import and
impact of Roman imperialism and colonial occupation on the pluralities of
Jewish diasporic lives and identities. The imperial cult wielded a visual and
social prominence in cities in Roman Asia Minor, cities where local Roman
elites often sought to participate actively and prominently in the impe-
rial cult in order to secure greater power.102 While the communities from
which Revelation arose and among whom it first circulated are almost
impossible to identify, that the text somehow troubles Roman imperial
domination and hegemony seems to be an agreed-upon interpretive key
among many contemporary scholars, even if such disturbing of empire
can also be understood as a facet of Roman self-reflection and production.
96 J.M. HIDALGO

Given that so much contemporary biblical scholarship is written from

within seats of global political and economic power—and, bearing in mind
I am also someone writing from such a context—it is perhaps not surpris-
ing that much concern is given to how Revelation offers up a model of
resistance or a model of imperial mimicry.
Utopianism is social dreaming as critique, imagining an-other world
that contrasts with and in relationship to what is wrong with the world as
it is.103 This facet of the utopian may account for some of the structuring
dualisms found in Revelation, the text’s own way of demarcating cen-
ter/periphery, heaven/earth, God/Satan, and new Jerusalem/Babylon.
Revelation seems to set up dualisms that put Rome on the wrong side
of God and reversals that lift up those seemingly peripheralized at pres-
ent, dualisms that seem to even turn on others within Revelation’s shared
periphery when these others do not turn away from the imperial “center”
sufficiently. The major example of such internal fracturing may be found
in the letters’ critiques of other “Jewish” and/or “Christian” figures, espe-
cially “Jezebel” and “Balaam.”
The new Jerusalem’s main dualistic antagonist is Rome in the guise
of Babylon, even if that neat dualism is also easily blurred. Babylon is
aligned with Satan, and, whereas the new Jerusalem is home to God and
the Lamb, Babylon “became an abode of demons” (18:2).104 By contrast,
John sees “the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven
from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (21:2). Both
Babylon and the new Jerusalem are metaphorically imagined as cities,
as cities and land were often figured as women in the ancient world. In
Greek, these cities are generally referred to as “her” because of the gen-
dered pronoun structure of the language. For a native English speaker, it
can be a little jarring reading these pronouns as the new Jerusalem is the
only female-identified speaker in Revelation. She says, “Come” (22:17),
forming a (perhaps erotic) parallel to a heavenly voice who had earlier
called for people to “come out of” Babylon/Rome, which is imagined as
a female prostitute (18:4).
This biblical “other” world has been built, as utopias often are, from
experiences of the failings of this world, though again, such an inter-
pretation resides in the eye of the beholder. Economics, the rendering
of Revelation’s communities as those who cannot “buy or sell,” is a
fundamental aspect of the political, cultural, and religious exclusions expe-
rienced by the intended audiences of the text.105 The text uses a variety of
words that speak of the Roman economic system, of commerce, of trade,
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 97

of wealth, of metals, although these usages may merely reflect an aspi-

ration to replace Rome with God in this economic system.106 However,
these linguistic elements could be seen as serving Revelation’s “prophetic
indictment” against systemic inequality.107 The very process of buying and
selling luxury goods, let alone people, may have been eliminated from the
new Jerusalem. Reading in womanist perspective, Clarice J.  Martin has
drawn attention to the list of imperial merchandise (18:11–13) that can
no longer be sold once Babylon/Rome falls, and she observes how the
last part of that list focuses upon “slaves and human lives.”108 By pairing
“slaves” with a term that can be translated as “human souls” or “human
lives,” Revelation disputes an Aristotelian reading of slaves as somehow
“defectively souled” and, thus, disparages an economic organization that
traffics in human lives. Revelation 21:1 may emphasize the end of trade.
Rather than the sea necessarily symbolizing chaos, perhaps the sea stands
in for a “shipping economy,” and thus the absence of a sea represents a
desire for the end of Roman commerce and economic domination, espe-
cially one that traffics in human bodies.109
Why do so many precious metals and jewels appear in the description of
the new Jerusalem? Is it a reflection of Roman wealth or a play with Isaiah
54:11–12?110 The description of the city—built on jewels, paved with
gold—speaks of literal earthly images of wealth. The physical opulence of
the city suggests a transformation of Roman luxury into something that is
available to everyone.111 Since all displays of wealth in the new Jerusalem
have to do with public goods, such as the roads of gold, the city may fit
within Greco-Roman utopian interests in seeing wealth invested within
the “public sphere.”112 Paving the streets with gold has in turn deval-
ued gold, removing “its exchange-value and its fetishism.”113 Instead of
Babylon’s economic buying and selling, the new Jerusalem presents “a gift
economy.”114 The wealth of the new Jerusalem may also parody Greco-
Roman ideals.115
While I do not think it necessarily clarifies an alternative economy, that
the utopian city exists in an economic dualism with Rome parallels El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán, which promises another economic and civil order. El
Plan foresees a more just economy as well as sovereignty, status, and secu-
rity for its members, though again, the specifics of what that entails are
often open to interpretation. The preamble describes members of Aztlán
as “free and sovereign to determine those tasks which are justly called
for by our house,” suggesting that they can determine what their labor
should be and for what it should be used.116 The “struggle” involves both
98 J.M. HIDALGO

“liberation” and “control” of a variety of social worlds, including land,

economy, and politics. The second organizational goal specifically identi-
fies the economy as a central issue, involving not only control but also
alternative economic visions premised on “humanism” and “cooperative
buying and the distribution of resources.”117 At the same time, these lands
“will be fought for and defended,” and not surprisingly “self-defense” is
also a key organizational goal.118 Economic concerns reappear when El
Plan describes Chicanx “cultural values of life, family, and home” to be “a
powerful weapon to defeat the gringo dollar value system and encourage
the process of love and brotherhood.”119 As with Revelation, a rhetorical
dualism contrasts Chicanxs and the dominantized USA, not just in their
economic strategies but also in their modes of relating to each other; akin
to Revelation, rhetorical dualism between Chicanx and dominantized US
society certainly gets marshaled against those deemed to be too “gringo”
among the Chicanx population. Nevertheless, the opening and closing of
that sentence puts the focus most squarely on nurturing Chicanx cultural
life and love, suggesting a sense that human lives have been demeaned in
the broader US economic system and that Chicanx Aztlán should model
an alternate relationality.
Part of this alternate city and economic model, in the Chicanx case, is
predicated on the presumptions of other ways of being in the world that
come from the people who populate Aztlán. El Plan focuses on the epis-
temic privilege and right to power of those who work the land: “Aztlán
belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the
crops.”120 When the struggle for just wages for farmworkers was a key locus
for the increasing of Chicanx political consciousness, such a statement put
those farmworkers at the epistemic center. An emphasis on working the
land incorporates a problematic romanticization and essentialization of
Chicanx identity around farmworker roles. However, such an epistemic
privileging of farmworkers may try to reverse a sense of who has the power
to control the land and those who labor it. In the case of Revelation,
scholars have asked if something similar happens in Revelation with its
focus on slaves. Does Revelation elevate “slaves,” as representative of a
particularly marginal social class, to epistemic privilege? If it does so, does it
romanticize that identity? “Slaves and human lives” (18:3) are things
Babylon/Rome sells, and Revelation’s author and members of these “faith-
ful” communities are generally identified under some inflected form of the
word δοῦλος (1:1 introduces the text on these terms), often translated
as “servant” in the purposefully inclusive NRSV translation, but better
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 99

translated as “slave.”121 The 144,000 slaves of God are notably “marked”

with a “seal” (7:3–4), a “seal” that may represent the power of writing
because they are sealed with the inscription of God’s and the Lamb’s
(14:1). What was once a way of denigrating slaves by marking them has
been turned into a symbol of power and protection.
What might it mean then to imagine early “Christians” as slaves? Even
though δοῦλος as a legal status had varying ramifications, iterations, and
could be considered a quite dynamic and fluid signifier, at the same time
it connoted a sense of peripheral status with regard to the center and
a sense of subjugated will with regard to a “master.”122 Historical evi-
dence points to acts of resistance based on a sense of shared group identity
within the framework of δοῦλος; in other words, some people thought
of themselves as belonging to a collectivity of “slaves” beyond their own
specific household.123 While it has been commonplace for scholars to con-
tend that ancient slavery was “relatively innocuous,” especially when the
baseline of comparison is hemispherically American, modern, racialized
plantation slave-systems, the violence of enslavement in the ancient world
should not be understated; it matters that slaves are the particular social
class evoked in varying parts of the New Testament.124 Why do so many
early “Christian” writers adopt this term and metaphor in defining a com-
munity through this form of subjugated committed relationship to Jesus
Christ?
Slaves have an elevated status in Revelation, as the heavenly figures of
angels are also “fellow-slaves.”125 In the new Jerusalem, slaves of God and
Jesus are given a near central location, with God and the Lamb in the
new Jerusalem’s central courtyard Eden surrounded by worshipping slaves
(22:3). One reads this description and thus takes the proper inhabitants
of the new Jerusalem to be these slaves.126 Yet, although the “faithful”
are generally the ones named as δοῦλοι, they are not the only slaves. All
humans seem to be enslaved, and even Babylon/Rome may be understood
as a slave, with certain humans and Babylon/Rome marked as owned by
Satan or the beast; notably there are names that have not been “writ-
ten” down, absent as they are from the “book/scroll of life” (13:8). By
privileging “slaves” as the way of designating humans, perhaps Revelation
is engaging in a thematic reversal that undermines Roman self-narrative
about who is properly in control. If all humans are slaves, then no one can
truly claim self-mastery.
Interpretive struggles surround the peopling of the new Jerusalem.
Other than God’s slaves, who belongs there, and how do we know? Again,
100 J.M. HIDALGO

I would suggest Revelation lacks visual clarity on this topic, necessarily

frustrating representation, portraying a city but blurring its boundaries.
On the one hand, the new Jerusalem appears as distinctly gated, a center,
rigidly separated off from the rest of the world, imagining not even a
periphery. There is only inside and outside the new Jerusalem.127 In some
ways, this new Jerusalem reads almost akin to Aelius Aristides’ wry remark
about the glories of Roman “peace and security,” wherein the Romans are
to be praised for keeping the barbarians at bay (for a while) but reminded
that “like the enclosure of a courtyard, cleansed of every disturbance, a
circle encompasses your empire.”128 This new city transposes not only
Jerusalem but also the Roman Empire as a circumscribed garden of peace.
Somehow, though, this binary easily unravels, blurring in and out of
focus. All nations are welcome, the “kings of the earth will bring their
glory into her,” the gates never close since it is always day, and “they [it
is unclear who “they” are here] will bring the glory and honor of the
nations into” the new Jerusalem (21:24–26). One might see an anteced-
ent for contextual biblical interpretation here if this imagined city is self-
consciously remembered as a locative, scriptural power node. In other
words, everyone can bring their own unique perspective to bear on their
encounter with the new Jerusalem, and they are always welcome. Perhaps
this representation only echoes certain psalmist and prophetic sensibilities
that all nations would come to Jerusalem with gifts and for God’s wor-
ship.129 In the new Jerusalem, many scholars see a scheme of universalizing
identity. Part of the basis for this is in 21:3, where a loud voice proclaims,
“See, the tent of God is among human beings. And he will dwell with
them, and they will be his people(s).” A slight text variant in 21:3 suggests
that the “original” reading of “peoples” may be λαοί (peoples) instead of
λαός (people) because such a reading allows for a universalistic inclusion
of diverse “peoples” as Christian saints included in the new Jerusalem.130
This plural peoples can be found as the preferred manuscript choice in the
current Nestle-Aland, the standard scholarly Greek New Testament refer-
ence text, as well.
Whereas Roman citizenship claimed that all peoples were integrated
into the one people (which Revelation may also critique in 13.7), the new
Jerusalem’s peoples are still plural, perhaps affirming a certain diversity.131
The closing of the Apocalypse in Chap. 22 returns to the benediction of
other early Christian letters, and this can be taken to remind the congre-
gation of their own particularity, despite a universalizing identification,
and to emphasize the importance of the message being read and practiced
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 101

within particular communities.132 Both universalism and particularity, flu-

idity and fixity, may mark membership in the city.
While scholars have argued that the plural peoples and the open gates
make the new Jerusalem more universally accessible, the city also persists
as one of exclusions as much as inclusions. Just as people bring in their
honor and glory of the nations, “the impure” are kept out (21:27).133
Earlier, “the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the for-
nicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars” are cast outside to die
“in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur” (21:8). Perhaps Revelation
mimics Augustan attempts to control the city of Rome, forcing elites to
marry, prosecuting adultery, restricting prostitution, acting (as “lying for
a living”), and sorcery?134 Or perhaps those most excluded from the uto-
pian city are others who presently reside close at hand? When Revelation
21–22 is read in relationship to the letters of Revelation 2–3, letters that
challenge those who are deemed inadequate or improper in their faith, it
seems as if the excluded may actually be among those to whom the vision
is addressed.135
In unclear unveilings, blurring sights and sounds, Revelation may be
a text that constructs “deviant knowledge,” knowledge special to com-
munities somehow minoritized under Roman rule, knowledge that
contradicts and disrupts “public knowledge,” the dominantized episte-
mological frameworks and narratives of the ruling elite.136 Yet, this distinc-
tion between epistemes should not be overstated. As much as Revelation
supplies an alternative textual home, it also may work to create a greater
discomfort with one’s place inside imperial power through its presenta-
tion of “deviant knowledge.” Thus again, Revelation can be seen as both
critiquing Rome and yet participating in Rome’s own possibilities of
self-criticism.
Revelation offers an alternative way of seeing how the world works by
summoning a larger cosmic picture; this bigger picture partially depends
upon models of center/periphery in the Roman world and reverses them.
The “combat myth” found throughout the ancient Mediterranean invokes
a rebellion, often by a beast, against the divine creator; eventually this
divinity succeeds in conquering the beast and “re-establish[ing] order in
the world.”137 John of Patmos may have sought to make his readers (more)
aware of this tension, for example, by his use of the contrasting symbols
of “God’s rule” and “Satan’s rule.” Revelation seeks either to convince its
audience or confirm its view that the world is not as it should be. Thus,
every combat myth retelling in Revelation leads to “the triumph of the
102 J.M. HIDALGO

Lamb,” understood as the overcoming of the tension between order and

chaos in the world.138 This experience grants a cosmic level of meaning
to the situation of the audience, while reassuring the audience through
recourse to ancient stories and symbols that this story has always and will
always happen a certain way—namely, that ultimately God’s forces will
win.139 Such reassurance relies on already common tropes and ways of
narrating the world.
Likewise, El Plan sits particularly well within the legacy of apocalyptic
as revealing the big picture cast with different players, of sharing a “deviant
knowledge” of a cosmo-historical narrative that proceeds along divergent
paths from the tale told in dominantized narratives. Riffing on “Manifest
Destiny,” El Plan proclaims “the call of [Chicanx] blood is our power,
our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.”140 Where dominantized US
culture previously articulated Mexican Americans as having a problematic
bloodline that determined a lower social status, this prologue reverses that
“call of blood” as strength and destiny. “El Plan de Aztlán is the plan
of liberation!” concludes El Plan (also notably bolded in the Anaya and
Lomelí edition).141 If read as sharing in something of the roots of libera-
tion theological discourse within the same historical moment, Aztlán may
articulate an apocalyptic episteme in its imaginations of historical crisis
and transformation.142 Certainly, varying readers of El Plan see its tenor
as reflecting a moment of historical crisis, one that calls for transforma-
tive choice to participate in a struggle for “Chicano liberation,” however
understood.
This liberation-oriented cosmic narrative that depends on a dualistic
construction, requires the knowledge practices of the critiqued imperial
power, even as it tries to present alternate ways of knowing, and especially
“seeing,” the world. Even in the ways that Revelation can be most overtly
claimed as a font of alternative knowledge, its titling as “a revelation,”
an “unveiling,” incorporates facets of the power/knowledge structures of
Rome. The ritual emphasis on “seeing” throughout the text is apparent in
the frequent emphasis on looking and seeing, whether as the interjection
ἰδοὺ (most basically translated as “behold”) or varying forms of the verb
see (ὁράω)—whether reporting what was seen or commanding auditors
“to see.”143 The way that we read Revelation as emphasizing “seeing”
the world differently, that the world is not as it appears, this emphasis
on sight is not only because of our modern ocularcentrism. The ancient
Romans also attached knowledge and power to seeing and being seen, an
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 103

important part of the regularly recited honor/shame dialectic of ancient

Mediterranean cultural practices.144
Imagistic visual appeal within text was an important rhetorical persua-
sive maneuver in Roman contexts.145 Roman rule conveyed power through
a variety of visual media, especially in cities under Roman imperial control.
Aspects of imperialist exhibition included spectacle events and public dis-
plays, including friezes in various public spaces and buildings throughout
the empire, and even within the gardens of the elite where exotic plants
and statues from conquered places may have been on display.146 We can see
the book of Revelation playing with ancient spectacular, too, where the
audience of the book becomes part of a cosmic audience observing vary-
ing theatrical scenes that provide knowledge about selves and others.147
In attending spectacle events, at the coliseum in Rome, for example,
or in varying Greek theaters in the eastern provinces, spectators viewed
wild beasts, gladiators, criminals, and prisoners, with strange creatures and
other humans on display so as to demonstrate the expansiveness and dom-
inating power of Rome; these spectacles also entailed knowledge-making
about the world.148 In viewing spectaculars, Romans and Greeks were also
on display to be viewed by others; likewise, the audience of Revelation’s
visions was being watched by the panoptic God of the Apocalypse.149
Viewing provides an opportunity to demonstrate self-mastery, and yet
being viewed in the audience also places one in an observable and judged
social status. In Revelation, viewing becomes a way of establishing and
navigating power, where those who view and become amazed at the beast
are weak followers and those who view Babylon’s destruction share in
God’s domination; all the while the Lamb is not amazed and gazes on.150
In Revelation’s spectacular optic, the book’s power is not always about
discerning “meaning.” Revelation can also be a work of rhetoric and per-
suasion that creates a certain self-perception about what and how God’s
slaves know.151
Revelation mocks Roman imperial power in mimicking it. But then
is the reverse also possible? Might the mimicry of imperial power mock
colonized aspirations of resistance?152 Akin to certain Chicanx movement
rhetorics, Revelation’s production within an empire may help to shape a
text replete with rhetorical senses of “reconquest,” of conquering again
what once was but has been taken even as “reconquest” also presumes the
creation of something “new.” Thus, the polytemporal play is not just a
rhetoric of resistance. In 21:7 it is those who “conquer” (or “overcome”
depending on your translation) who inherit the new world.153 Revelation
104 J.M. HIDALGO

promises the utopian new Jerusalem to those who take up conquest; every
time a form of the verb νικάω appears in the letters, it is followed by a
promise that links “those who conquer” to the new Jerusalem.154 Conquest
remains ambivalent, with the Lamb who appears “slain” (5:6).155 Yet, even
this portrayal of the Lamb as the “slain” and the privileging of the periph-
eralized “slaves” can feed into rhetorics of reconquest.156 This slippage
between mimicry, mockery, and replication marks much interpretation of
Revelation.
Revelation breaks with earlier Hebrew biblical prioritization of hearing,
and, yet, while trafficking in the knowledge of sight, it also presses forward
toward our own age by engaging in an emphasis on writing.157 While writ-
ing itself definitely had power, even “magical” power in the ancient world,
writing in Revelation may point toward a form of scripturalization more
properly understood as a kind of spectacle. Even as Revelation, by making
a temple centered in a written and read, mobile and copyable, product rep-
resents a moment in the creation of scripturalization as we understand it,
it also works within the power of scripturalization, in terms of how social
power relations are understood, encoded, valorized, and reproduced, as it
was in the Roman world, where power derives from seeing and being seen.
The making of this system into a codified, read, performed centering text
casts the seeing of this text, and the being seen with this text, as a crucial
part of scripturalization around this text. Especially as Revelation becomes
part of a canonical bible, made as such under Roman imperial control, the
book takes on an iconic status.
Whether a past, present, or future place, a practice of spiritual com-
munion, a future-past distinctive temple, “an-other world” that provides a
locus of hope, contrast, participation in, or critique of the Roman world,
the new Jerusalem is a place best si(gh)ted within text. Maybe Revelation
deploys and deflects the limiting pliability of scriptures as a tool for “dia-
sporic hermeneutics.”158 Yet, Revelation’s diaspora—its move to a mobile,
not just earthly, new Jerusalem, as center—can also be seen as “a critique
of discourse of fixed origins, while taking account of a homing desire
which is not the same thing as desire for a ‘homeland.’”159 By making the
center a textual no place rather than a fixed earthly location, Revelation
opens up a diasporic possibility.
At the same time, the Christianities that take up Revelation as a scrip-
tural text never became a religion of no place in particular, no matter
what they claimed. A connection to particular places on earth remained,
with Jerusalem, however imagined by auditors, continuing to be a crucial
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 105

center in the larger worldly places that shape any given auditor’s/read-
er’s sense of connection to the textual new Jerusalem. This connection
became even stronger once a Christian empire, Rome under Constantine,
could connect with and circulate objects from Jerusalem to other parts of
the world.160 The mobility that comes with ritualized scriptural life, the
existential ambivalence of place, as no place, allows Christianities to move
while being bound with the geographies that inspired them.

THE ONGOING UNVEILING OF REVELATION’S

HEAVENLY CITY
Although Revelation’s no place precedes what we take “scripture” to be,
most Christians encounter Jerusalem and the new Jerusalem through the
imagination and “the loci of appropriate Scripture.”161 In the nearly two
millennia since Revelation’s earliest circulation, Christian peoples and
nations have read Revelation and seen themselves as God’s agents, taking
for granted that practices of military violence and religio-cultural, eco-
nomic, and environmental domination and exploitation have been justified
by this text. Yet, minoritized peoples have also recognized the Beast and
Babylon/Rome as nations and governments, especially those of Western
Europe and the USA in the twentieth century, that have economically
exploited them and their lands while marginalizing and oppressing their
religious, cultural, and linguistic identities. For them, this text offers the
hope of ultimate divine reversal.
In both critical biblical scholarship and critical Chicanx discourses
that engage Revelation, however, the imperial legacies tend to be
foregrounded—hardly surprising, considering the myriad ways that
Revelation’s new Jerusalem, as “scriptural” locus, has been a crucial “no
place” deployed in the violent settler-colonial making of place in the
Americas; settler-colonial place-making also means displacement for those
already there, something that Moraga’s “Codex Xerí” addresses most
directly. Such scriptural slippage, the foisting of textual no place onto
already existent places, has a long history in Christianity.
Even under Constantine, more than two hundred years after Revelation’s
first circulation, something of this project appears underway in the mak-
ing of a Christian imperial Jerusalem where the Holy Sepulchre church
becomes an occupational and settler-colonial remaking of scriptures in that
it relies on the unhoming and disavowing of prior inhabitants. In Eusebius’s
106 J.M. HIDALGO

portrayal of Constantine here, a notion of scriptures, now as “divinely

inspired records,” is referenced:

Accordingly, on the very spot which witnessed the Saviour’s sufferings, a

new Jerusalem was constructed, over against the one so celebrated of old,
which, since the foul stain of guilt brought on it by the murder of the Lord,
had experienced the last extremity of desolation, the effect of Divine judg-
ment on its impious people. It was opposite this city that the emperor now
began to rear a monument to the Saviour’s victory over death, with rich
and lavish magnificence. And it may be that this was that second and new
Jerusalem spoken of in the predictions of the prophets, concerning which
such abundant testimony is given in the divinely inspired records.162

If the Roman siege of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple had

inspired Revelation’s earlier writing and circulation, it is perhaps no small
irony that in some ways Revelation inspired a Christianizing emperor
to remake Jerusalem on the basis of that text. Constantine’s project, as
Eusebius describes it at least, recurs again under the Crusades, where
earthly Jerusalem—not the utopian new Jerusalem—is somehow con-
sidered a necessary part of Christian empire. In this medieval moment,
Christians again conflate an imagined new Jerusalem with a need to recon-
quer earthly Jerusalem, and in so doing, they wreak violent havoc unset-
tling Jerusalem’s populations.163
In the era of the Spanish Reconquest, too, the new Jerusalem came to
be molded into a particular architectural style and settler colonial format.
As Iberian Christians took land from Muslims and Jews in their own settler
colonial “reconquest” of the Iberian peninsula, they created settlement
models for Spanish peasants that would later inform Spanish missionary
practices in the Americas.164 Such facets of the reconquest then form a
backdrop for Christopher Columbus’s (Cristóbal Colón’s) evocations of
biblical imaginaries in making sense of the “new world,” already inhab-
ited by those to whom it was not new.165 Describing the mouth of the
Orinoco in contemporary Venezuela, Columbus outlines his reasons for
believing he is at the edge of the earthly paradise.166 Later, in a letter in
which he sought assistance, Columbus would write of the “new world,”
describing the lands he had “discovered” as though he were a prophet in
the footsteps of John of Patmos, author of Revelation: “God made me the
messenger of the new heaven and the new earth, of which He spoke in the
Apocalypse by St. John, after having spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah;
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 107

and He showed me the spot where to find it.”167 Here, the new Jerusalem
becomes locatable by Columbus as prophet, in the Western Hemisphere.
“New earth,” later “new world,” the utopian and apocalyptically keyed
popular term for this hemisphere, and biblical texts and tales became pop-
ular loci through which European colonists imagined, named, and remade
the places they “discovered” all while unhoming, subjugating, killing, and
enslaving indigenous populations and forcefully migrated Africans.168
Roman Catholic missionaries also came to the New World, often in an
attempt to live with and make Christians out of the indigenous popula-
tions. Among the first religious orders to attempt this were the Franciscans,
whose rather terminologically mythologized “Apostolic Twelve” arrived
in Mexico in 1524.169 The Franciscans adopted the earlier legacy of
Columbus, whereby the medieval gaze toward Jerusalem was turned
Westward to the New World, perceived as a “new Promised Land” full
of “religious symbolism” and possibility.170 As the Spanish empire moved
into territories with less dense populations than Mexico’s central valley,
missions changed from projects that restructured existing settlements into
projects of collection and resettlement.171 From the sixteenth century on,
these New World missions served as loci for various “utopian projects”
among various native peoples, seeking the “creation of a new Christian
community innocent of the evils and vice of the European societies.”172
The Jesuits established reducciones [reductions/congregations] for those
native populations encountered outside of already urban areas, gathering
smaller settled populations as well as semi nomadic indigenous peoples
into one place for evangelization and remaking.
This pattern can also be seen in Franciscan missions such as those of
Alta California, or the territory that becomes the US state of California.
Adapting medieval Spanish peasant settler colonial communities from
medieval Spanish territorial “reconquest,” these reducciones were predi-
cated on a utopian vision that an ideal Christian community could be
built, ideal communities that evoked both the Garden of Eden and the
new Jerusalem, a town of ideal Christian behavior isolated from the rest
of the sinful world.173 The reducciones depended on the assumptions that
native Californians must be “made human (hacerlos hombres),” that this
involved immersing them in a culturally Spanish inflected Christianity, and
that this could only be accomplished under the auspices of a tightly con-
trolled police state. Missionaries believed they could build a ciudad, a city,
that properly asserted a “Hispano-Christian identity and order over the
‘disorder’ of a savage and pagan world.”174
108 J.M. HIDALGO

Many of these missions were designed specifically with the “new

Jerusalem,” as described in Revelation, in mind. In Mexico, the Puebla
de los Angeles was planned “as an ideal city where Spaniards would build
the new Jerusalem.”175 Even in early texts about the New World, the con-
nection between missions and the new Jerusalem was invoked; take for
instance the engraving of the heavenly Jerusalem as a mission in Mexico in
the 1579 Rhetorica Christiana.176 In California, as Rubén G. Mendoza's
work explores, within the mission complexes “there can be found a trea-
sure trove of elements that hearken to the essential identification of the
monastery and its mission church with the New Jerusalem and the Field
of Paradise writ large.”177 The mission sanctuary melded images from the
Apocalypse of John with Christ’s nativity and the scholastic worldview.178
Not all of these architectural details are currently present in all missions,
and it can be difficult to know what details were present at which missions,
in part because of the disrepair and subsequent restoration experienced
by many of the missions, but some traces can still be found. One aspect
of architecture evidenced in the missions, and traceable back to Islamic
Spain, is the use of the courtyard with atrio, at the center of which stands
a fountain or cross, symbolic both of Paradise and of the River of Life’s
water springing from God’s throne in the new Jerusalem. This River of
Life’s water then poured out onto the original wooden doors surrounding
the courtyard; each courtyard door had the river symbolically carved into
it. The porticos formed a route often used for the Stations of the Cross,
in which one walked around a model of the Paradise found in the new
Jerusalem.179
For a variety of reasons, many indigenous Californians did choose
to join these new Jerusalems, but many also wished to leave. When the
Franciscans would not let them, they were often kept as prisoners, and
their behavior was closely watched as the missionaries generally saw the
indigenous residents as children they needed to educate and remake into
Spanish subjects. In some readings of the new Jerusalem, the all-seeing
light of God may be taken more as a panoptic prison, “a city where uni-
versal surveillance is perfected.”180 Mission design was partially organized
to facilitate a strident level of observation; the indigenous residents were
kept under the watchful eye of the missionaries and the escolta, the military
guard housed at each mission.181
The first outright revolt against the Alta California mission system hap-
pened early in Spanish colonial settlement (which did not occur until the
summer of 1769) on August 15, 1769, at San Diego when a priest and
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 109

some soldiers went aboard the ship, and a number of Kumeyaay attacked
the San Diego camp on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.182
Shortly after the San Gabriel mission was established, during the fall of
1771, local Kumi.vit leaders attacked the mission on two occasions,
seemingly in response to Spanish soldier assaults on Kumi.vit women.183
Multiple other examples of outright and violent revolts can be noted
throughout the Spanish period of colonial mission history.184
Revolts were not the only indication of the practices of settler colo-
nial oppression that accompanied the building of new Jerusalem missions
along the California coast. Missionized natives tended to live shorter lives
than other local indigenous populations.185 In Alta California, the native
population was estimated anywhere from 135,000 to 705,000 in 1769.186
This population declined precipitously both because of diseases (such as
syphilis, small pox, and measles) that came with the conquest, as well as
because of the violence of the conquest itself.187 Despite recognizing this
demographic collapse, the Franciscans continued their pattern of reduc-
ción in the missions.188 Nevertheless, the Franciscans’ utopian project ulti-
mately “failed to completely transform Indian culture.”189
In the context of US history, these missions were founded and developed
in the same era that certain intellectuals were conceiving new approaches
to nations, citizens, and natural rights.190 The historical rhetorical power
and prominence of cosmologically revelatory approaches to history, how-
ever, shaped much of the American hemisphere, not only the Spanish but
also the English Puritans and US articulations of Manifest Destiny, such as
those of journalist John Louis O’Sullivan.191 Of course, the demographic
collapse of California Indian populations that started under the Spanish
became near-total genocide under the USA when the California Indian
population was estimated to have declined 80 % from 1848 to 1860.192
Perhaps not coincidentally, utopian dreaming helped fuel US expansion
into Californian lands.
In the case of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, the rhetoric of destiny has
some resistant relationship to the US apocalyptic discourse of Manifest
Destiny, but it also takes direction from the shaping influence of Mexican
nationalist intellectual José Vasconcelos’s conceptions of mestizaje, of
imagining race and peoplehood within an apocalyptic framework of prog-
ress toward destiny. In an argument that came to have rhetorical suasion
in both Mexican nationalism of the 1920s and the Chicanx movement,
Vasconcelos’ La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race) names itself as an apoc-
alyptic discourse within its own title, which suggests the text will reveal the
110 J.M. HIDALGO

cosmological meaning of humanity and human history. Through varying

twists and turns, including many critiques of US and “Anglo-Saxon” racial
discourses, Vasconcelos suggests that Latin America is poised to birth a
fifth race, one that will be a mixture of the “four” that currently exist
(in more contemporary parlance: African, Asian, European, and Native
American).193 The title of the text reveals that this apocalyptic framework
concerns itself with both the opening up and the delimiting of the borders
of ideal peoplehood, and unlike El Plan, The Cosmic Race references a
future people, not “a people whose time has come.”194
Many critics tackle Vasconcelos’s racializing and racist framework, the
ways that he elevates European, especially Spanish contributions to the
coming fifth race while also eliding the continuing import of living African
and indigenous communities and relying on an ongoing denigration of
African, Asian, and indigenous populations.195 Even while sometimes criti-
cal of European colonial practices, Vasconcelos still describes the Spanish
and the English as being charged with a “transcendental mission” to bring
Native Americans, and ultimately others, into a “universal race” through
colonialism.196 Despite this rhetoric that seems antithetical to many of
the stated aims of the Chicanx movement, Vasconcelos’s imagination of
peoplehood and the ways that it is linked to an apocalyptic space/time
are important to El Plan. Even by drawing on Vasconcelos obliquely, and
tying it to an Aztec terminological landscape, El Plan and its readers are
still participating in the contestation of apocalyptic discourse and an apoc-
alyptic contestation of the Americas.
Although Vasconcelos envisioned mestizaje as eradicating the indig-
enous, Chicanx movement thinkers often treat mestizaje as a route to
reclaiming indigenous, especially Aztec, thought in the case of Aztlán.197
Nevertheless, the very concept of Aztlán itself is also rooted in those histo-
ries of territorial and material contestation. The myth could be approached
as Aztec “Manifest Destiny” at some level in that it is the narrative of the
journey of the ancestral Mexicas from a northern land into the Valley of
Mexico, a journey that was divinely guided, perhaps along an “exodus”
model. Still it can be hard for scholars to determine the myth as it might
have been understood in 1520 because Spanish interests and constructions
shape our own perspectives on Aztlán.198 The first Spanish discussion of
Aztlán by the Franciscan Diego Durán bears the hallmarks that enshrine
much Spanish discourse on the topic, discourses that alternately searched
for Aztlán because of a desire for more wealth while also making sense
of Aztlán as a parallel religious myth of Eden and/or the new Jerusalem,
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 111

an expulsion from paradise that includes a promised return, though this

return entails transformation from the starting imagination. Some Spanish
thinkers cast the Mexican indigenous populations as among the lost tribes
of Israel, and such an appeal to Christian scriptures in order to make sense
of Mexicans all the more motivated a desire to inscribe Mexican myths
within the bounds of Christian ones.199
Revelation makes possible the worlds of apocalyptic and utopian scrip-
turalization that peoples in the USA have inherited and to which Chicanxs
must respond. Not only does the cosmo-historical epistemology matter, so
too does a commitment to making scriptures. Revelation’s penultimate verses
(and therefore the near-final verses of most standard Christian Bibles), read
through more modern eyes, seem to call for the text’s scripturalization while
also threatening exile to those who do not scripturalize the text appropriately:
“I witness to all who hear the words of the prophecy of this book: if some-
one adds to them, God will add onto that person the plagues that have been
inscribed in this book. If someone takes away from the words of the book of
this prophecy, God will take away that person’s part in the tree of life and the
holy city, which have been inscribed in this book.” These verses offer a prom-
ise to auditors, not to scribes or readers, if we take the command as directed
toward an “us” beyond the author. Given that we know many scribes have
amended the text in the years since it was first circulated,200 and given that
we know it was orally performed, it seems impossible not to add or subtract
in some way. On the face of them, these verses seem an exercise in futility.
Naturally, people will add and take away from the text.
While Revelation transforms Roman myths, Revelation also transforms
Jewish texts in the process. The ending curse can be understood to have a
relationship with previous commands to scripturalization in Deuteronomy
4:2: “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take
away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God
with which I am charging you.”201 Revelation’s rhetorical flair in the end
seems to pull from Deuteronomy 29:19–30:8.202 It may also mimic impe-
rial rhetorics; Achmaenid Persian Emperor Darius’s Behistun inscription
(near Kermanshah) from around 500 BCE promises rewards to those who
preserve and curses to those who destroy the memorial of his “accomplish-
ments.”203 Revelation can be taken as another fraught moment in the pro-
cess of scripturalization, a process in which we still participate. We cannot
but read and question these verses differently than previous generations.
Even the most liberatory readings of Revelation grasp onto the text with
a certain ambivalence and uncertainty.
112 J.M. HIDALGO

Although I suggest in Chap. 2 that El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán

offers a model of utopian scripturalization, El Plan was just one text in
the larger Chicanx movimiento. Its writing was contested, and its usage
continues to be challenged and reimagined. However, this ongoing con-
testation speaks to one of the core characteristics of scriptures, that people
fight, verbally and sometimes physically, over scriptures’ importance as
well as their interpretation. Texts of the apocalyptic imagination are per-
haps among the most contested, and most biblical scholars remind readers
that the book of Revelation had the least firm situation in the canon of the
“New Testament.” That apocalyptic literature tends to this sort of con-
testation over its very relevance might be worth always bearing in mind
as a context of apocalyptic thought and literature, and though this book
focuses on apocalyptic, it is but one imagination activated, employed, and
challenged in the making of the Americas.
El Plan’s scriptural and religious imagination can be approached as an
intervention into nationalist discourses and confrontations of territoriali-
ties in the hemisphere, but El Plan also can be seen as an engagement and
interruption of the binding of space and time in an apocalyptic frame that
has been part of the various histories of European settler colonialism in the
Americas. El Plan is a debated text, but the text’s writing and those who
have thought with, through, and around this text have also participated
in a contestation over the meaning and power of apocalyptic in shaping
hemispherically American peoples and places. Apocalyptic literature might
be approached as a set of practices of communal scripturalization wherein
the struggle over meanings and identities is inscribed on a cosmological
scale, wherein some sort of polytemporal, and polyspatial play transpires
in crafting greater authority for both the opening and limiting of com-
munal identity borders, borders that are both matters of textual binding
and social practice.
The book of Revelation—and Christian scriptures more broadly—
was never just a tool of conquest and colonization. One might
approach Revelation as not just a legacy of apocalyptic utopianism
but also as the making of scriptures as a utopian practice. Diasporic
emplacement becomes mobile by making sacred centers within texts,
rather than relying on geographic temples alone. In the USA, however,
conquest logics of scripturalization helped create a scriptural mission
and a scripturalized republic, wherein certain power structures and
regimes became part of officially and unofficially sanctioned interpre-
tive practices. Most strident and striking in both imaginative legacy and
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 113

experience has been the creation of a certain race and class of Euro-
North Americans as the perceived “natural” US citizen while other
groups have had to fight to claim rights and spaces. In this chapter,
I showed how Revelation is both a comparative diasporic and impe-
rially resistant text, and yet it also became entangled in practices of
imperial scripturalization and settler colonial domination. In Chap. 4, I
focus on Chicanx attempts to intervene in and transform this history of
scripturalization by creating their own scriptures and their own means
of performing and interpreting those scriptures. How can a minori-
tized community use the tools of scripturalization that a dominantized
power has wielded in order to challenge that dominantized power and
empower that minoritized community? The crafting of Chicanx scrip-
tures during the movement era partially embroils itself within that very
challenge as I discuss in Chap. 4.

NOTES
1. Greg Carey examines the rhetorical back-and-forth between biblical schol-
ars and millenarian popular readers, especially Christian evangelical ones,
and how they construct each other as an “other.” See Carey, 25–32.
2. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” The Last Generation, 190.
3. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 186. Also see her depictions on p. 191.
4. All are different terms Moraga assigns to the practice of scribal work
(Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 189–190).
5. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 190.
6. Despite the number of times that the text is identified as prophecy (e.g.,
1:3, 10, 18, 19, 22:7, 22:9), John is not identified specifically as a prophet.
See Darden, 172.
7. Rossing, Choice, 89. One need look no further than Rev 1:1–2 to see John
position himself within the Hebrew prophetic tradition.
8. Margaret Aymer describes the vision of God’s heavenly new Jerusalem as
“alter-imperial, rather than anti-imperial, for all the rhetorics of empire
pertain.” Aymer, 145.
9. Attention to the specific “origins” and “original” texts, or what Tat-siong
Benny Liew terms the “origin(al),” have often been predicated on a cer-
tain racially inflected sensibility that authority resides in pure origins; for
this reason, I do not pursue “origins” but rather some possible historical
pluralities that can and have been accessed in the present. Liew, 134.
10. As Jace Weaver argues, asking about the “when” of Revelation and placing
that “when” in the future reflects a particular sociocultural approach. By
114 J.M. HIDALGO

contrast, for instance, many Native American Christians might be more

inclined to ask after the “where” of Revelation. Weaver, 19.
11. Richard Horsley pushes readers to abandon the “apocalyptic genre”
entirely as an ill-fitting scholarly manufacture. From Horsley,
“Introduction,” in Revolt, Kindle edition. While the study of the genre
apocalypse is plagued by a “prototype” problem, just as the studies of
“religion” and “scriptures” are, Revelation is, in this case, the prototype.
See discussion in Portier-Young, “Introduction,” in Apocalypse Against
Empire, especially her response to Horsley’s work.
12. Collins defines apocalypse as “a genre of revelatory literature within a nar-
rative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly
being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both
temporal insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar
as it involves another supernatural world.” J.J. Collins, “Morphology,” 9.
To analyze and distinguish between social movements that are overtly
apocalyptic groups and individuals who participate in an apocalyptic men-
talité, and works of literature that participate in a specific literary form, we
separate apocalypse as a genre from apocalypticism as orientation. Hanson,
“Apocalypticism,” 28–34. Such distinctions are not strictly native terms to
the ancient world even if they draw on ancient Greek terminology.
13. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
14. Taken from the title of his text, J.J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination.
15. Because most people who encountered Revelation in its first centuries
heard it rather than read it, “auditor” may be a better term. See Gilchrest,
6.
16. Carey, 7.
17. Biblical scholarly debate has substantially discussed the “John” of
Revelation. These discussions reach back into the earliest centuries of
Christianity (see, e.g., Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 5.30 and Eusebius, Hist. Eccl.
7.25.7–8). Most scholars doubt that the figure or figures who composed
the Gospel of John also wrote Revelation. See Aune, Revelation 1–5, xlix.
18. Rev 1:9, where John is described as living on Patmos under duress and
“on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” However,
scholars even debate what this means. If ἐγενόμην is taken to be “I arrived,”
and διὰ is translated in a more purpose-driven direction, then perhaps
John chose to be at Patmos. See Thompson, 173. Yet, most scholars take
that διὰ as carrying the “on account of” meaning. (See, e.g., DeSilva, 33.)
John may have been from higher status since exile could be “permitted
those of higher status who had been condemned to death, but they were
usually subsequently deprived of both citizenship and property.” See
Aune, Revelation 1–5, 79. David A.  Sánchez identifies the rhetorical
author as suffering from Roman exile, relegatio in insulam, a specific kind
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 115

of banishment for those who have somehow “threatened public interest

and security.” See D.A. Sánchez, 37–38.
19. This identification would be more contested in scholarly literature. See
Frankfurter, 403–425 for why it could be useful to underscore Revelation’s
Jewish contexts.
20. The ways that we conceive religion may have been crafted in these ancient
relationships between Judaism and Christianity, but, even so, such defini-
tions of religion would emerge in the centuries after Revelation. See fuller
discussion in Boyarin, Border Lines.
21. See some of the critical work of Hindy Najman on the scribal practices that
also form Jewish “scriptures” and their relationships to exilic and diasporic
life, especially her argument about how “later traditions reimagined the
exilic past in order to make the future possible.” Najman, 4.
22. For a brief discussion of the distinctions—and blurred lines between—set-
tler colonies and colonies of occupation, see Moore, “Revelation,” 438.
23. Darden, 176.
24. Toenges, 152.
25. For a comparison between the Apocalypse and the rap practice of “sam-
pling,” see Blount, 109.
26. Some argue that Revelation is a Greek translation of Hebrew and Aramaic
originals. Others argue that Revelation’s Greek is a hybrid language in
which eastern Mediterranean Jews may have been conversant. Allen
Dwight Callahan suggests that the intentionality of the contorted Greek
reflects John’s “subaltern” situation wherein the author broke the rules of
Greek grammar “as an exercise of his own discursive power.” Callahan,
“Language,” 464.
27. Maier, 96.
28. See Bauckham, 384–407. For a discussion of the range of possible dates
for Revelation, from the 60s CE through the early second century, see
Friesen, 136–151.
29. Many Jewish communities may have made some peace with diasporic life
and already aspired to decenter the Jerusalem Temple in their lives. See
discussions in Gruen, Diaspora. For instance, the community at Qumran
may have been moving away from a physical “temple” and reconceptual-
izing its meaning well before the Temple was destroyed. See discussion
in Horsley, Jesus, 96–97, where he argues with regard to the gospel of
Mark that “If the renewed people itself were understood as the true
‘temple’ or ‘house’ of God, then of course there would be no need for a
temple-state, which was an imperial institution in the first place.”
30. Given the era in which Revelation was first circulated, the writers and audi-
tors could not possibly imagine the destruction of Rome in direct lan-
guage, so they had to turn to a signifying play on Jewish traditions about
116 J.M. HIDALGO

a long ago empire. That the figure of Babylon as a woman should invoke
Rome—especially in the guise of the goddess Roma—is apparent through
a variety of textual clues. For instance, Babylon rides “on a scarlet beast”
with “seven heads” (17:3) that “are mountains on which the woman is
seated” (17:9). In other words, the woman sits atop the seven hills of
Rome. Meanwhile she rides a beast, already familiar from Chap. 13, that
stands for the whole Roman Empire. Whereas Rome had its great god-
dess, valorized family values, and promised eternal rule, instead Babylon/
Rome is a promiscuous, easily destroyed, and abandoned woman. This
image conveys a cathartic reversal of Roman power. God is the ultimate
source of “salvation and glory and power” (19:1), and God will judge
Babylon/Rome and “avenge on her the blood of [God’s] servants”
(19:2). For discussion of the potential power of cathartic reversal in
Revelation, see Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis.
31. Here I follow Carey’s argument, wherein he describes the historical criti-
cal references that make a post-70 date likely. One should not build an
interpretation of the text out of an exact date, but perhaps one should
allow for the impossibility of defining the date with certainty and the plu-
ral interpretations such an impossibility allows. See Carey, Elusive, 13.
32. All translations of Revelation are mine, drawing on the Nestle-Aland 28th
text critical addition, with some consultation of the New Revised Standard
Version English translation, unless otherwise noted.
33. The term for “church” here, ἐκκλησία (ekklesia), I have placed in quota-
tion marks because I do not want us to presume we know what this term
means or functions as.
34. Gilchrest, 205. The “imperial cult” was much more complex than mere
propaganda. It was a ritual system in which colonized “provincial elites”
could negotiate relations of power and status in connection to imperial
rule. See Frilingos, 23–27.
35. Revelation may also be part of an “emerging Jewish merkabah mysticism.”
Afzal, 199, 196.
36. Many scholars have attempted a structural breakdown of Revelation in
order to make sense of key passages and meanings. For a survey of some
different models, see Humphrey, 101.
37. In making this case, Sánchez turns to the ideas of James C. Scott on how
dominated peoples utilize “hidden transcripts.” See D.A. Sánchez, 9–10.
The use of hidden transcripts here helps draw out forms of resistance other
than open rebellion. As other critics have pointed out, the language of the
Apocalypse hardly seems “hidden” in the sense of “covert”; while Rome is
coded as Babylon, a Roman would easily recognize Rome in Revelation’s
imagery. See Blount, 111. The notion of hidden transcripts can rely on a
troubling dualistic split between mind and body. See Portier-Young, 42–43.
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 117

38. For discussions of the two-city motif, see Rossing, The Choice between Two
Cities.
39. However, in Yarbro Collins’s estimation, the idea of the new Jerusalem
here exists precisely because this group is invested enough in the world to
care about its destruction. See Yarbro Collins, The Apocalypse, xii.
40. Deutsch, 108.
41. Deutsch, 118.
42. Frilingos argues that one can situate “the book of Revelation as a cultural
product of the Roman Empire, a book that shared with contemporaneous
texts and institutions specific techniques for defining world and self.”
Frilingos, 5. A different way of contextualizing this observation that
Revelation is a product of Rome might be to shift the primacy off Rome
here and frame this contextualization within the context of hybridity. As
Eric D. Barreto observes “the notion of hybridity opens a valuable, com-
plex, in-between space” for understanding the world beyond binaries and
“the gradation evident in colonial contexts between resistance and accom-
modation.” Barreto, 53.
43. Rossing, Choice, 9. There were other prophets who wrote their own books
of prophecy in these earliest Christian centuries. See Pagels, chap. 2, 39.
44. See Gilchrest, 1. Another important work that provides comparative
insight into ancient Hellenistic and Jewish utopianism is Beavis, Jesus and
Utopia.
45. Rossing, Choice, 148. Gilchrest queries the meaning of πόνος in 21:4.
Though it is generally translated as “pain,” it might mean “affliction,”
“hard labor and extreme toil,” or even the pain of laboring to give birth to
a child. Gilchrest, 261.
46. Vaage, 11–12. Vaage pursues this metaphor of the text as temple further
in showing how texts are more like spaces for meaning exploration than
singular speaking loci.
47. When people are marked in Revelation, it generally suggests enslave-
ment, though the placement of the mark might make an exception: “the
writing on Jesus’ thigh is a reference to himself (‘King of kings and Lord
of lords’ [19:16]), and not anyone else, indicating independence from
an external authority.” Shanell T. Smith, Woman Babylon, 136. Babylon’s
tattooed forehead proclaims her “the mother of brothel slaves” (17:5).
Darden observes that having a name inscribed on one’s body was gener-
ally an ancient signal of domination and punishment, particularly over
enslaved persons. Forehead markings revealed an individual to be a pun-
ished, “captured runaway.” See Darden, 200–201.
48. Stevenson, 304.
49. Darden, 200.
118 J.M. HIDALGO

50. Malina, 52. Malina parallels to Isaianic ideas of “the mountain of the
Lord”/“my holy mountain” found in Isaiah 11:0; 25:6–7, 10; 27:13;
30:29; 40:9; 56:7; 57:13; 65:11, 25; 66:20.
51. Gilchrest, 226–227.
52. Deutsch, 113. Deutsch finds parallels for the cubic shape of the Holy of
Holies in 1 Kings 6:20; 2 Chronicles 3:8f; and Ezekiel 41:21; 43:16; 45:1;
48:20. She sees the priestly breastplate rooted in Exodus 28:17–20;
39:10–13; Ezekiel 28:13 (LXX); Josephus, Ant III, 167–171, and the
4QpIsd interpretation of Isaiah 54:11–12 as discussed above. The issue of
the history and parallels of these stones in relationship to earlier Jewish
literature, at Qumran and in the Septuagint has marshaled considerable
scholarly attentions. See for instance, Aune, Revelation 17–22, 1156.
53. See 1 Kings 6:23–38; 2 Chronicles 3:7; and Aune, Revelation 17–22,
1155.
54. For an extensive examination of the parallels between Revelation and
Ezekiel in the chapters dealing more directly with Babylon, see Ruiz,
Ezekiel in The Apocalypse, 526–527. Ruiz makes the case for Revelation’s
textual “consumption” of Ezekiel as a scroll. For an examination of the
parallels in Revelation at large, see Mathewson, New, 29. Some significant
differences mark Revelation. For instance, Revelation is distinct in its focus
upon “walls and gates.” See Rossing, Choice, 153.
55. Yarbro Collins, Combat Myth, 228–229. She sees this temple mimicking
functionality in 21:3; 22:1, 3b; 22:3c-4.
56. Richard, 164.
57. Deutsch, 121.
58. J.Z. Smith, To Take Place, 56.
59. J.Z. Smith, To Take Place, 56–57, 60–63. There are tensions within this
power hierarchy in terms of the king and some slippage in the place given
to the Levite priests.
60. J.Z. Smith, To Take Place, 69.
61. Deutsch, 122 and Gilchrest, 225.
62. See 1 Cor 3:16, 2 Cor 5:1–2; 6:16. As Gilchrest observes, “community as
temple is something of an anomaly in ancient Jewish literature only found
elsewhere in the writings from Qumran (e.g., 1QS IX, 3–6).” See Gilchrest,
225.
63. Afzal, 202.
64. Yarbro Collins, Apocalypse, 150.
65. Some scholars have been criticized as overly literate in their understanding
of how this text works instead of appreciating the ritual language and
experience. See Malina, 9.
66. Filho, 213.
67. See Maier, 97, 128.
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68. Sometimes, the tense of verbs can shift in one sentence alone. If one were
to translate 21:24 with attention to the Greek tenses, one would notice a
shift between future and present within one sentence: “And the nations
will walk by her [the city’s] light, and the kings of the earth bring their
glory into it.”
69. Given the spatial mobility of the city, as something that is in neither heaven
nor earth, Jorunn Økland categorizes the new Jerusalem as an “else-
where.” Økland, “Why Can’t?” 316. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has
argued for the centrality of “community” as a theme in Revelation, and,
by emphasizing the thematic structure of Revelation, she shows that one
need not read Revelation as presenting any sort of progressive or “linear”
temporality. Taking the hymn of 11:15–19 as central to the book’s struc-
ture and message, Schüssler Fiorenza concludes that the expression of
“the eschatological reality of God’s kingdom” is the book’s structuring
concern, a concern that needs no temporal confines. Schüssler Fiorenza,
Justice and Judgment, 55–56.
70. Just as it bridged heaven and earth, so too the city bridges time and “tran-
scends temporal bounds.” Deutsch, 111, 108.
71. Keller, Apocalypse, 61.
72. Liew, 142.
73. Keller, Apocalypse, 61.
74. Darden, 160.
75. R.T. Rodríguez, chap. 3, Section “States of Subordination,” 140.
76. Deutsch, 116. Parallel texts from Jewish tradition are seen in Zechariah
14:8 and Ezekiel 47:1–12.
77. Deutsch, 117. Deutsch likewise sees parallels in Second Temple and Tannaitic
literature where Paradise and the eschatological city are linked. Revelation’s
new Jerusalem bears similarities to 1 Enoch 90:28–29 and its “placement of
the new house of Jerusalem,” which also descends from the sky after a judg-
ment. Baumgarten, 65.
78. Schellenberg, 475.
79. Deutsch, 118. Parallels are drawn to IV Esr 7 26; II Apoc Bar 4 2–3.
80. Deutsch, 117. This cyclical view contrasts with the linear assumptions
about temporality in which most of these readings participate.
81. Deutsch, 125.
82. Wengst, 200.
83. Hongisto, 210.
84. Richard, 173. Richard resonates with other liberationist-oriented read-
ings. Examining More’s utopia, Gustavo Gutiérrez contends that utopias
by their very nature critique the existing order, and that they propose a
projected future, serving as “a dynamic and mobilizing factor in history.”
See G. Gutiérrez, 233.
120 J.M. HIDALGO

85. Richard, 26.

86. Álvarez Valdés, 291.
87. Álvarez Valdés, 8. Kwame Bediako compares the image of the bride as
the church found elsewhere in New Testament writings: 2 Cor. 11:2,
Eph 4:23f; and Rev 19:7. Bediako, 33.
88. Yarbro Collins, Apocalypse, 150.
89. Gundry, 256.
90. Baumgarten, 65. Also see Zimmerman, 174–177.
91. Richard, 3.
92. See Tabbernee, 52–60.
93. Ricciuti, 185.
94. Álvarez Valdés, 296.
95. Bediako, 276.
96. Wengst, 197.
97. See discussions, Horsley, Jesus and Empire, 12-14, and Darden, 203–205.
98. Richard, 29. But he also emphasizes how the “beyond” of God transpires
“within history and represents the complete and final achievement of this
history.”
99. Økland, “Why Can’t,” 330.
100. Økland, “Why Can’t,” 330.
101. Økland, “Why Can’t,” 332.
102. Moore, “Revelation,” 440–441. Also see Howard-Brook and Gwyther,
116.
103. Schellenberg, 467. Schellenberg further suggests that the text here is
“performative,” and that it has the power of language that creates some-
thing by stating it.
104. For discussion of this characterizing contrast of cities inhabited by God
vs. demons, see Schüssler Fiorenza, Justice and Judgment, 226. The
word δαιμὀνιον, generally translated as “demon,” does not necessarily
mean “demon” the way we think of it today; one might also more
roughly translate it as “inferior divine beings” following the Liddell-
Scott-Jones lexicon. A structuring distinction between Satan’s people
and God’s people does appear throughout much of the book of
Revelation. For instance, in the letters, those who claim to be “Jews but
are not” are also denounced as being of “the synagogue of Satan” in 2.9
and 3.9, and are thus barred from the new Jerusalem. See discussion in
Yarbro Collins, Apocalypse, xiv and Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis,
160–161.
105. Richard, 23.
106. See Royalty, Streets, 78.
107. Ramírez Fernández, 97.
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 121

108. Clarice J. Martin describes how such an organization reverses the list of
imperial cargo in Ezekiel (27:12–25), which highlights Rome’s view of
slaves as having the least value, less than precious stones, livestock, or
cinnamon. Martin, “Polishing the Unclouded Mirror: A Womanist
Reading of Revelation 18:13,” From Every People and Nation, ed.
Rhoads, 82–109, especially 99.
109. Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue likewise envisioned an end to commercial ship-
ping and trade by sea. See Rossing, Choice, 146–147.
110. See discussion in Gilchrest, 215–218.
111. Wengst, 198.
112. Gilchrest, 223.
113. Richard, 166. Much debate has also transpired over the origin of the idea
of gold streets in the new Jerusalem. See Fekkes, 280–281.
114. Rossing, Choice, 152.
115. Maier, 194–197.
116. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
117. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
118. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
119. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
120. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
121. The NRSV is actually not uniform in this translation. Most often trans-
lated as “servant” in Revelation, a couple of inflected forms of δοῦλος are
translated as “slave,” for instance in 6:15, 13:16, and 19:18. On each of
these occasions, δοῦλος is terminologically set in relationship to
ἐλεύθερος, generally translated as “free.” When δοῦλος is used to mark
prophets, Moses, or members of early “Christian” communities, then the
translation of “servant” is used. However, “slave” is probably the more
appropriate English translation of all occasions of δοῦλος in the New
Testament. See Williams, “Formation,” 278. John rarely self-identifies or
proclaims these terms; rather these are generally words of designation
that come from the divine so “his identity as well as that of the commu-
nity is defined by God.” See Willliams, “Formation,” 280. Moreover, the
main angel with whom John speaks is also designated as a “fellow-slave”
(σύνδουλός) in 19:10 and 22:9. See Williams, “Formation,” 282.
122. Williams, “Formation,” 272–273.
123. Williams, “Formation,” 274–278. Such resistance included better
recorded acts such as running away and open rebellion in the “Slave
Wars,” but other more subtle “hidden transcripts” may also be
supposed.
124. Martin, “Polishing,” 101.
125. Williams, “Formation,” 283.
126. Williams, “Formation,” 280.
122 J.M. HIDALGO

127. Moore, “Revelation,” 444.

128. Aristides, To Rome, 29 (Orationes 26.29, trans. Behr). Writing some of
these sentences as I am in 2014, I cannot help but also think of the con-
nection between this imagination of Rome and certain US desires to
build a border fence that prevents migrants from Mexico and Central
America, even migrant children, from entering into US territory.
129. Mathewson, New, 165. Given the parallels between Rev 21:24–26 and
Isaiah 60, one might take the “glory and honor” of the nations as paral-
leling the “wealth” of Isaiah. Gilchrest, 218–219.
130. Bediako, 35. Following Shawn Kelley’s critique of biblical scholarship’s
anti-Jewish tendencies, nurtured in relationship to German philosophical
thought prior to World War II, I am suspicious of any interpretation that
depends upon a characterization of “Christian universalism” over and
against “Jewish particularism.” See Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus.
131. Wengst, 199.
132. Yarbro Collins, Apocalypse, 153.
133. Women are also denied entry depending on how you read Revelation
14.4. See Jorge Pixley, “Revelation 21:1–22:5, A Latin American
Perspective,”in Return to Babel, ed. Pope-Levison and Levison, 202.
134. For a fuller discussion of Augustus’s proscriptions on Rome, see Frilingos,
75.
135. Pixley, 202.
136. Thompson, 186–193.
137. Yarbro Collins, The Apocalypse, xi.
138. Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis, 142.
139. Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis, 150. In reading the often trou-
bling phrase, “the sea was no more,” (21:1), certain scholars interpret
the sea as a stand-in for evil and chaos; its non-existence is essential for
a new and more perfect order, one in which chaos and death are no
more. Yarbro Collins views “the sea was no more” as parallel both “to
the eternal confinement and punishment of Satan, the beast and the
false prophet,” but also to the specific statement in Rev 20:14 where
both Satan and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire. See Yarbro
Collins, Apocalypse, 144.
140. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
141. See “El Plan Espiritual De Aztlán,” in Aztlán, ed. Anaya and Lomelí, 4.
142. For liberation theology’s apocalyptic orientation, see Ashley, 39.
143. The New Revised Standard Version, which is the most frequently con-
sulted scholarly English translated, appears to find the frequency of com-
mands “to see” so irritating that it even fails to translate these commands
at certain points. Huber, Thinking and Seeing, 14.
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 123

144. Maier, 75–77; Frilingos observes the slippage between seeing and being
seen in ancient Mediterranean spectacular culture, a slippage that could
also trouble gender. See Frilingos, 11.
145. See Huber’s analysis of the rhetorician Quintillian on this subject. Huber,
Thinking and Seeing, 15. As Hongisto queries, to what extent is
Revelation actually rejecting Roman imperium when it draws on the
Roman spectacular as a tool in challenging the infra-group politics of
other “Jews” and “Christians”? Hongisto, 216.
146. Frilingos, 45.
147. Frilingos, 59.
148. Both sets of spectators participated in the production of knowledge
through spectacle: knowledge of empire and knowledge of themselves as
subjects of empire. Frilingos, 30.
149. Frilingos, 63.
150. Frilingos, 81.
151. Many scholars have made this point, most notably Schüssler Fiorenza.
152. Moore, “Revelation,” 446. Also see Aune, “Influence,” 6.
153. Yarbro Collins, Apocalypse, 146. Aune reads 22:3 as specifically meaning
that “the curse of war” is what is kept outside the city. “κατάθεμα is the
author’s way of interpreting ‫ םרה‬ḥērem. Thus the word refers not gener-
ally to curses, accursed things, or persons but specifically to the promise
that ‘the curse of war’ will no longer exist.” Aune, Revelation 17–22,
1179.
154. As Gilchrest observes, “For example, the ‘conquerors’ from Ephesus are
given access to the tree of life and the paradise of God (2:7); Smyrna’s
conquerors are not hurt by the second death (2:11); Sardis receives white
robes and a place in the book of life (3:5); Philadelphians have a place in
the new Jerusalem (3:12); and the Laodiceans get the chance to sit on
the throne of Jesus, perhaps that throne that sits in the middle of the city
in Rev 22:3 (3:21).” See Gilchrest, 222.
155. Frilingos, 76.
156. An ambivalence long exists toward Babylon in biblical traditions, espe-
cially in those prophetic texts, such as Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, that
seem most to inform Revelation’s visions. As Erin Runions describes, in
the case of Jeremiah, a fantasy of revenge against Babylon coexists with
an identification of Babylon as Judah. See Runions, Babylon, 13. Steed
V.  Davidson finds that the lingering import of Babylon in Rastafarian
visions draws most particularly on Hebrew biblical visions of Babylon
and less so on Revelation’s. Nevertheless, one can see in his examples, as
well as the work of Allen D. Callahan, Babylon as the “evil empire” dou-
bles representations of Zion. In the Rastafarian case, Babylon connotes
exile outside of Africa as well. See Davidson, 46–60. Callahan likewise
124 J.M. HIDALGO

identifies and reflects upon how certain African Diasporic intellectuals

recognize and relate the USA as Babylon. See Callahan, “American
Babylon,” 67–82.
157. Keller, Apocalypse, 42–43.
158. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism, 191.
159. Brah, 614–615.
160. J.Z. Smith, To Take Place, 88.
161. J.Z. Smith, To Take Place, 117.
162. Eusebius, Vita Constantini 3.33. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/
npnf201.iv.vi.iii.xxxiii.html. Eusebius does not necessarily address the
book of Revelation directly here but probably suggest its visions along
with earlier prophetic traditions.
163. Keller, God and Power, 41.
164. Leon Mujal, 80–81.
165. Christopher Columbus, when describing his encounter of South America,
suggests, however, that it is an unknown land, not Asia, but somewhere
else (Columbus, 139–141). The ancient textual silence about this “new
world” both enabled Columbus to map mythical idealized lands onto
this hemisphere while also initiating a change in European engagements
of authoritative ancient texts. Columbus’s use of a diary in particular is
part of this shift whereby he himself creates a “scriptural inscription of a
new world”; he creates a spectacle of the new world in and through writ-
ing for European consumption. Rabasa, 57.
166. Columbus expends some ink accounting for his view that the earthly
paradise is to be found in this previously unknown land. See Columbus,
139–141.
167. Columbus, 152.
168. Beyond ways in which biblical Eden may have shaped the imagination of
Aztlán as it was written about in Spanish texts, so too were other medi-
eval European stories, especially those born out of Spanish Reconquista,
quite important. For instance, the tale of the Seven Cities of Cíbola,
merged with legends of the Aztec mythical homeland of Aztlán, likewise
pushed expeditions north of Mexico. Unlike “California,” whose name
and tale appears first in Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 1510 epic (The
Labors of the Very Brave Knight Esplandían), Cíbola may have its origins
in the twelfth century amid Spanish Christian mythmaking about “recon-
quest.” Cíbola quests reached the Arizona-New Mexico frontier by
1539. Leon Mujal, 145–150. Also, see J.  R. Chávez, The Lost Land,
12–22. Also see Chávez’s article, “Aztlán, Cíbola, and Frontier New
Spain,” in Aztlán, ed. Anaya and Lomelí, 49–67.
169. One such Franciscan, Motolinía, presented himself as a New World incar-
nation of Saint Francis who wanted to build the new Jerusalem in the
 “THE HOLY CITY WHICH HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THIS BOOK”: THE ... 125

New World. See Alain Milhou, “Mundus novus et renovatio mundi:

Messianic and Utopian Currents in the Indies of Castille,” in Utopia, ed.
Schaer, et al., trans. Nadia Benabid, 152. For a reading of Motolinía’s
Memoriales and its use the new Jerusalem, see Rabasa, 156–157.
170. Milhou, 140.
171. Ettinger, 30.
172. Ettinger, 23.
173. Milhou, 150.
174. See Milhou, 151 on policing Native American behavior and the idea of
“humanization” (hacerlos hombres) in the reducciones. Life in the
California missions has been described as imprisonment and enslave-
ment. See Tinker, 42–68.
175. Rabasa, 155.
176. Diego Valadés, Rhetorica christiana, Perugia, 1579, 106–7, as looked at
in the Getty collection.
177. Mendoza, 94.
178. See Sandos, 46.
179. Mendoza, 92–93. Other facets of Revelation in mission design include
the following: the church’s exterior generally involved two bell towers
(few of which have withstood the test of time in California) symbolizing
San Gabriel in the north tower and San Miguel in the south tower. San
Gabriel serves as “messenger of the word and the herald of the
Apocalypse” while San Miguel is an “apocalyptic warrior” defending
“the faith.” Their placement also points to a messianic return in the east,
and they stand as guards and heralds of the new Jerusalem and Paradise.
Revelation 21–22’s effusive numerology impacts the architecture of mis-
sion churches, with twelve gates, pillars, and angels being displayed.
Mendoza describes the central nave of Mission San Juan Bautista as
being enclosed by a twelve-pillar arcade that again evokes the new
Jerusalem. In the contemporary San Gabriel mission, for example, one
can see the presence of twelve pillars as part of the altar display. These
twelve pillars can also be found on the retablo mayor’s base at Mission
San Juan Bautista, and there they are meant to evoke the twelve founda-
tions of the new Jerusalem. See Mendoza, 94–100.
180. Maier, 71.
181. Ettinger, 40.
182. Sandos, 42.
183. Jackson and Castillo, 75.
184. Sandos, 5.
185. Sandos, 13.
126 J.M. HIDALGO

186. Most scholars rely on decades-old data that estimates the population at
150,000–350,000, but it is possible that the indigenous population of
California was as high as one million at some point. Miranda, 280.
187. Kelsey, 510.
188. Jackson and Castillo, 109.
189. Jackson and Castillo, 31.
190. Leon Mujal, 437.
191. D. A. Sánchez, 85. Also see O'Sullivan, 5–10.
192. Sandos, 183.
193. “The central thesis of this book is that the various races of the earth tend
to intermix at a gradually increasing pace, and eventually will give rise to
a new human type, composed of selections from each of the races already
in existence.” Vasconcelos, Cosmic, 3.
194. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.
195. See especially the succinct critique in N. Medina, Mestizaje, 63–68.
196. Vasconcelos, Cosmic, 9. Even while acknowledging a legacy of “spilled
blood” that “centuries have not erased,” he also claims that “The Indian
has no other door to the future but the door of modern culture, nor any
other road but the road already cleared by Latin civilization” (16). Even
if Vasconcelos’a ideas did change over time, “Vasconcelos deliberately
confuses the concepts of race, nation, and civilization.” Stavans, 26, 36.
Movement discourses more often use mestizaje in order to claim indigi-
neity. Figures such as Alurista emphasized the Native American (often
specifically just Aztec), rather than the Spanish, facets of Chicanx identi-
fication. While some of N. Medina’s critique of Vasconcelos is quite apro-
pos to the movement’s appropriation of Aztec heritage. Aztec imaginaries
often shone with the “Edenic” quality of an idealized past, but
indigenizing mestizx identification attempted to critique and distance
Chicanxs from European and Euro-North American senses of superior-
ity. See Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí!, 85.
197. Delgadillo, Nook edition chap. 1, “A Critical Mestizaje” section, 22.
198. Miner, 24–26.
199. Cooper Alarcón, 53–54.
200. See Hernández, Scribal Habits.
201. NRSV translation.
202. Royalty, “Don’t Touch,” 291–292. Deuteronomy itself is revising and
rewriting earlier legal traditions. See Royalty’s footnote 38 on p. 292.
203. W.C.  Smith, 63. In the endnote, Smith connects this inscription to
Revelation 22. See endnote 73, p. 277.
 CHAPTER 4

“The Spirit Will Speak for My People”:

El Plan de Santa Barbara and the Chicanx
Movement as a Project of Scripturalization

Fernando De Necochea had traveled widely, both intellectually and spa-

tially, before becoming involved in the Chicanx movement, an involve-
ment that led to his drafting a section of El Plan de Santa Barbara. The
1969 El Plan de Santa Barbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education, an
educationally focused manifesto, grew out of a conference but was crafted
over several months by a committee. El Plan de Santa Barbara reveals
how important—and contested—texts and scriptures could become as
a utopian practice of fashioning mobile centers, making place, building
community, and reinventing knowledge.
De Necochea’s own family history exposes the sensibility of a perme-
able border between the USA and Mexico, a permeability and connected-
ness with which De Necochea describes his childhood and young adult
life.1 Though born in Calexico, a small Southern Californian border town
across from the Mexican city of Mexicali, his father had grown up in a
ranch in Mexicali, and his maternal grandparents had lived in El Paso,
Texas, after leaving Mexico and before his mother moved to San Diego.
Yet, his father’s family was not solely tied to Mexico; his paternal grand-
father was born in San Francisco, the son of a Spanish-born Chilean man
who had moved to California in 1846 among other Gold Rush migrants,
and his great-grandfather had married a Mexican woman in San Francisco.
He describes his father’s family as also having a long history in both Baja
and Alta California, making De Necochea, in part, “seventh-generation

© The Author(s) 2016 127

J.M. Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59214-9_4
128 J.M. HIDALGO

Californian.” Growing up in Calexico with parents who knew English but

raised him speaking Spanish, he also regularly traversed back and forth
across what felt like an “open border.”
If Latinxs are peoples who often live life amid “two places” and “no
place,” then De Necochea’s is a typical story. As a child, he felt that he
belonged to both the USA and Mexico: “Growing up in Calexico, I had a
sense of being Mexican, fully Mexican, full-sense of being Mexican, but also
full sense of being an American citizen. Every time I crossed the line you
were asked for your citizenship [and] we would routinely reply ‘American
citizen’ in a confident way, with no hesitation at all. If you hesitated, you
were always stopped.” His narrative incorporates the privileges and abili-
ties of negotiating two citizenships at a somewhat permeable border, and
yet, at the same time, it also reflects a sense that the US citizenship had to
be performed in a fashion that could feel alienating, that he had to act in a
different way in order to maintain the rights and privileges such citizenship
should include, such as returning to his family home in Calexico.
Although a level of pleasant comfort, of belonging to two places,
infuses De Necochea’s childhood memories, his story shares with other
students of the 1960s a sense of growing conscientization about the world
being not quite right. As he grew up, he also became more and more
aware of the power differentials that restricted his full belonging in both
places. When his family would take clothing and food to poorer relatives
in Mexico, he became aware of how economics and class shaped rela-
tionships between his US and Mexican relatives. He also described visit-
ing Mexican relatives as a teenager and becoming aware of some strident
“anti-American” sentiments. He then returned to Calexico and perceived
how a Euro-US minority governed a majority - Mexican town. Attending
Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in the early 1960s, he “was the
only Latino student in the whole campus,” and there were only “four
Blacks in [his] class,” and “four Asians, one who was from a royal family
in Thailand.”
After pursuing graduate work at UCLA and living with an inten-
tional community in Santa Barbara, he found himself serving as an aca-
demic advisor at the University of California in Santa Barbara in 1969,
a job that put him in a position to contribute to imagining the future of
Chicanx Studies in California universities and that led him to participate
in the Santa Barbara conference that crafted El Plan de Santa Barbara;
he later helped write the chapter on “The University and the Chicano
Community” that would be published in the Plan. Before the confer-
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 129

ence, he was already looking for texts and practices that provided access
to and imagined a better alternative world to the one in which he lived. In
our interview, De Necochea described his involvement in the 1969 Santa
Barbara conference and the concerns of the conference as turning around
the need for Chicanxs to take certain institutional power so as to craft their
own texts about themselves; for him, this conference was squarely about
writing an alternative world and producing a text that would transform
how knowledge was made and circulated by and about Chicanxs. El Plan
de Santa Barbara became an attempt to create a new textual “center,”
a new scripture and project of scripturalization, even while doing so, in
part, to question the ways that geographic, territorial, political, and scrip-
tural boundaries were imagined. The concerns of many Chicanx move-
ment texts from the late 1960s and 1970s reflect a concern for increasing
Chicanx educational achievement and, at the same time, transforming the
substance of the education available to Chicanxs.
This chapter focuses on the creation of El Plan de Santa Barbara and
its circulation in order to demonstrate how the Chicanx movement may
be understood as a struggle over scripturalization, especially the legacies of
Revelation as an apocalyptically keyed textual temple mobilized in Spanish
and US imperialisms, as I outlined in Chap. 3. Several other movement-
era texts also contested dominantized scriptures and reinvented modes of
scripturalization, even while what had been “private” practices of scrip-
turalization and storytelling became more publicly pronounced and per-
formed. Moreover, these practices of reinvented scripturalization are often
identified with the “spirit” or as “spiritual” work in these texts. The 1967
poem I Am Joaquín and the March 1969 El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán are
important textual predecessors to the work and aspirations of El Plan de
Santa Barbara. Those texts were often publicly performed and utilized,
meaning that they were not just texts that were read silently by lone indi-
viduals; for instance, activists in Kingsville used the poem and El Plan
as recruiting tools.2 El Plan de Santa Barbara sought to challenge and
reimagine US practices of scripturalization, especially academic practices.
Both the land grant (Alianza) and farmworker movements—inspira-
tional for but not strictly coterminous with Chicanx student movements—
had significant textual concentrations and concerns. The Tijerinas worked
to pressure US law by poring through both the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo and old Spanish titles. Newsletters and flyers were central to the
farmworkers’ struggles; for instance, their Plan of Delano in 1966 “for the
liberation of the farm workers associated with the Delano grape strike”
130 J.M. HIDALGO

was a frequently read part of the pilgrimage to Sacramento.3 The varied

activists of the movement era may have had different interests and foci,
and they may have approached the reimagination of Chicanx community
on quite distinct terms, but all groups were fundamentally invested in a
transformative scripturalization, in providing alternate texts while rethink-
ing the “ideological and discursive rules” that constructed the “frame-
work” for making Chicanx communities and selves.4
Even as Chicanxs sought to contest and remake authoritative texts
to serve their communities better, they found themselves wrestling with
scripturalizing frameworks that did not suit all their aspirations. The pro-
duction and reception of El Plan de Santa Barbara speak to the aspira-
tions and challenges of scripturalization, the desire to create a center of
reference for the movement and the process of limiting pliability involved
in creating a “centering text”: such scriptural engagement both demar-
cates interpretive restrictions (who, how, and what can interpret and be
interpreted) and opens up certain flexibilities of meaning and belonging.

COUNTER-SCRIPTURALIZATION AND COUNTERPUBLICS
Efforts to create an interconnected Chicanx community in the Southwest,
especially through and in relationship to texts, have a much longer his-
tory than the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Even prior to
US annexation, ethnic Mexicans were imagining and writing out potenti-
alities for identities and societies through play with texts.5 Some of those
potential discursive worlds were stopped in part because of US conquest.
Although the import of military conquest and violent suppression remains
primary in the conquest of the Southwest, scripturalization allowed a
dominantized US regime to establish itself as the “legitimate” ruler of the
Southwest even while it created a secondary status for those who already
resided in the conquered territories. In and through US textual power
regimes, “Mexican Americans” were created as a freighted category.
As De Necochea’s family narrative illuminates, the territorial boundar-
ies created by both physical and textual violence did not always match the
experienced porosity of the border, and many Chicanxs identify as both
those whose ancestors had been in the southwestern lands before 1848 and
those who migrated north afterward. Activists who came to be involved
in the Chicanx movement inflected and played with this sense of Mexico
as both distinct from and united with the southwestern USA. Because of
proximity, many ethnic Mexicans maintained relationships with Mexico,
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 131

as De Necochea’s case demonstrates; at the same time, multiple waves of

migration from Mexico continued to impact the ongoing ways that people
of Mexican descent lived in the USA. The both/and/neither (Mexican/
US) facets of being an ethnic Mexican in the USA remained pertinent
to their identities. Different US programs that fall under the rubric of
“Americanization” worked, through varying forms of education, to con-
vince ethnic Mexicans that they needed to assimilate to dominantized
US culture even while perpetuating a sense of ethnic Mexican placement
“outside” of proper US culture. Church organizations and individuals also
became involved in “Americanization” programs in the early twentieth
century. Such programs in California, for instance, tried to transform cul-
tural life under the assumption that they could help to educate and trans-
form ethnic Mexican populations into more assimilated US citizens.6
The histories of ethnic Mexican populations in the USA often varied
geographically and circled around different issues and foci, but cross-
regional challenges of citizenship, rights, labor, language, and education
have been frequently named in scholarly literature.7 While a range of social
and political concerns constituted the plural foci of the diverse and mul-
tiple insurgencies that became part of the larger Chicanx movement, the
contestation of knowledge and the centrality of education mattered even
to those who were not students or college oriented. These issues long pre-
date the 1960s and 1970s,8 but especially as more ethnic Mexicans went
to high school and college, the aspirations for and failures of US educa-
tional systems became more prominent. The overall ethnic Mexican popu-
lation in the USA skewed very young in the 1960s. Chicanxs at the time
perceived education—often under-resourced in urban communities—as a
crucial locus for economic mobility, but they also recognized education
as a tool for US power regimes.9 In the wake of earlier civil rights strug-
gles, Educational Opportunities Programs (EOPs) worked to bring more
ethnic Mexican students to college campuses, but students often did not
receive the education they needed well before college. Activists certainly
sought better school funding and better access to education for Chicanx
youth, but they also sought to reimagine the terms, purposes, and foci of
education.
The import of education to the narratives of the Chicanx movement can
be found in the way scholars often write the start of the movement with
the Los Angeles high school walkouts, though walkouts also happened in
many other high schools around the country. Historian Ernesto Chávez
places the beginning of the Chicanx movement in 1966 in a way that frames
132 J.M. HIDALGO

the high school walkouts as a starting point for transformations in Los

Angeles activism. Together, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s Camp Hess
Kramer and the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations
hosted the Mexican-American Youth Leadership Conference in April
1966.10 Seven participants from that conference—Vickie Castro, David
Sánchez, Moctesuma Esparza, Ralph Ramírez, Rachel Ochoa, George
Licon, and John Ortiz—created the Young Citizens for Community
Action in May 1966.11 Thanks in part to the facilitation of space and
conversation that came through the work of leaders at the Episcopalian
Church of the Epiphany in Lincoln Heights, these young activists also
came to know other local young activists connected to the Social Action
Training Center.12
Over time, these connections and activities, including many meetings
and conversations on the grounds of the Church of the Epiphany, gave
way to the creation and active use of a coffeehouse, La Piranya in East
Los Angeles, though in space cosponsored by Epiphany. Under the lead-
ership of figures such as David Sánchez, a collection of activists formed
the Brown Berets in January 1968; especially as time went on, not all the
Brown Berets were students.13 However, the Brown Berets and other local
high school and college students, including members of college associa-
tions, such as United Mexican American Students (UMAS), also worked
together to organize the March 1968 student strike also known as the
Blowouts. Though estimated numbers vary, many thousand ethnic Mexican
students walked out of their classes, over the course of eight days, demand-
ing better schools and fairer treatment in East Los Angeles.14 Significant
college student strikes and organizing also took place after these East Los
Angeles Blowouts, including the multiethnic and multiracial Third World
Liberation Front strike at Berkeley in January–April 1969.15
This struggle over access to and quality of education was also deeply
intertwined with the production of texts. Because of this concern with
education and texts, the Chicanx movement era should be seen as a
struggle over the reified media of and frameworks for the sociality of
power, and not simply a struggle about “identity.” The development of
philosophical activist chicanismo was one of the important facets of the
movement.16 More than identity politics, chicanismo was a transforma-
tion of world-making practices and self-understanding—in the terminol-
ogy of El Plan of Santa Barbara, it was fundamentally a “commitment to
the struggle for Chicano liberation” that relied on a particular “political
consciousness.”17
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 133

In the wake of the 1968 Los Angeles Blowouts, Chicano came to be

a more widely deployed term in student media. For instance, following
the Blowouts, the UMAS chapter at California State College Los Angeles
published its first newsletter and used the terms Chicano and Mexican
American synonymously.18 This terminological shift, the appropriation of
a term that had once been seen as derogatory, recaptured Chicano as a
sign of pride because it was an act of self-naming. Although predating
this publication, this textualized terminological shift marked a significant
transition of the movement because it spoke to Chicanx desires to reimag-
ine the frames of reference within which ethnic Mexicans inscribed them-
selves and were understood by others.19 This work of deploying texts,
challenging injustice, and reimagining identity was interconnected in their
own published self-presentation: “We are the avant-garde of the young
Mexican American liberation movement. We formulate a philosophy for
our people and we provide the hope for the future of Mexicans of all gen-
erations. We recognize ourselves as a generation of doers as well as think-
ers. …We are resolved to perpetuate an atmosphere of respect and dignity
for our people….We are the agents of progress and unity. We demand
social justice for a people too long oppressed.”20
With a reach that extended well beyond students and universities, by
1967 many organizations produced and circulated their own newspapers
as a means of working out and promoting their ideals; the Chicano Press
Association had over fifty member newspapers at one point in the move-
ment era.21 Sometimes they were regionally or organizationally based;
Denver’s Crusade for Justice, for instance, had El Gallo.22 Other newspa-
pers existed sometimes independent of universities or political organiza-
tions; yet all these different newspapers and magazines became a way of
circulating ideas throughout the country, since articles in one press might
be reprinted several times in other presses in different locations; then they
would also be “passed out during rallies or political discussions.”23 All
these publications served not only as loci for rethinking discursive frame-
works and for challenging naturalized constructions of peoplehood, they
also became ways to remake peoplehood because they could create a
“translocal/transcendent field” through which peoples in different places
could share, shape, contest, and reframe communal imaginations.24 They
could connect Chicanx centers, such as East Los Angeles, with Chicanx
peripheries, such as rural Kansas.
The influence of mobile textuality for creating a “translocal” movement
was perhaps most important as resource, even if also as a locus of conflict,
134 J.M. HIDALGO

in the creation of Chicana feminist counterpublics. Chicanas were often at

the forefront of crucial movement publications, such as the magazine of
Reies López Tijerina’s La Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres, El Grito del
Norte, edited by Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez in Española, New Mexico.
Or they worked to create their own publications, such as the short-lived
Hijas de Cuauhtémoc newspaper (1971) or the Encuentro Femenil.25 Texts
could become “autonomous political spaces within the Chicano move-
ment,” that would allow for women to think outside of those spaces that
men controlled even while these texts also circulated well beyond local
and women-controlled space.26 All this textual creation worked to reimag-
ine and invent new possibilities for being Chicanxs together, even while
such creation entailed new rules and limits that others would later encoun-
ter and contest.
Practices of Chicanx textualization fit within a dynamic of limiting pli-
ability because they sought to reimagine Chicanismo within certain lim-
its, but these limits had to be pliable enough for communal negotiation
and contestation. Textual practices did not necessarily foster unity, but
they functioned as communal “sites of construction and contestation.”27
These publications often took an approach that was more “montage” and
“anthologizing,” bringing together diverse women, perspectives, genres
of writing, and genres of imagery into one issue in order to respond to and
provoke “a new sense of creative agency.”28 An anthology approach allowed
for a greater plurality of voices and recognized the ongoing contestation
over the movement and divergences of perspective. In fact, Chicana “mar-
ginalization and displacement” especially led to their creatively reimagin-
ing and utilizing print spaces as “a survival strategy” and a way of making
themselves emplaced via textual powers.29 While the Chicanx movement
sought to take back and transform scripturalization for themselves, even
the making, sharing, interpreting, and revising of crucial new texts reveal
the power games often associated with scriptures as mobile textual centers.

QUESTIONING MYTHS AND WRITING NEW ONES IN ORDER

TO MAKE PLACE AS A NEW PEOPLE

As textual production flourished, particular Chicanx texts came to be scrip-

turalized because they interrogated key myths of US culture and sought to
offer up their own counter “mythohistorical” narratives that reimagined
the US and Chicanx communities.30 With the increased textual circulation
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 135

of the very term Chicano itself, core verbal concepts of Chicanismo were
widely circulated, even if their precise meanings were left open to rein-
vention. Many of the key points of this language, especially the ideas of
carnalismo (brotherhood), Aztlán, justice, liberation, self-determination,
and La Raza (The People), were formulated and circulated through a
variety of textual media, such as magazines and newsletters, that were
also performed at different events.31 They also came to be enshrined in
key texts that may be termed scriptural because of their power as move-
ment touchstones. Perhaps among the most remembered, performed,
and reiterated, especially in scholarly literature about the movement, are
Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s poem, Yo Soy Joaquín/I Am Joaquín, El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán, and El Plan de Santa Barbara.32
In order to understand scripturalizing as a utopian practice in El Plan
de Santa Barbara, brief consideration of the ways that the single-author
poem, I Am Joaquín, shaped a Chicanx scriptural imagination in the late
1960s may help clarify how utopia, myth, knowledge, and textual prac-
tices interface in the movement era. Activist, former boxer, and the author
of I Am Joaquín, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales ran an antiwar Denver orga-
nization, the Crusade for Justice, which he founded in April 1966; the
Crusade not only opposed the war in Viet Nam, but it also provided a
space for theater, dances, parties, and “political discussions,” with the
aspiration of offering a “place for the barrio people to come together
and feel at home.”33 In addition to trying to provide a Chicanx homing
space, the Crusade was also one of the most stridently US - critical orga-
nizations, and the Crusade—as well as Gonzales—facilitated the 1969
Denver Youth Conference that produced El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.34
Gonzales had already been at the forefront of a scripturalizing drive in
the movement, even before the conference. In 1967, the Crusade for
Justice published Gonzales’s poem, I Am Joaquín, which was quickly
and widely circulated via mimeograph, frequently read and performed
out loud at events around the country, and became a 1969 film by the
Teatro Campesino that served as a key teaching locus. The poem was
also republished as a 1972 Bantam Books edition with images from the
film.35 This text rapidly became among the most popularly read, cited,
and performed texts of the era. I Am Joaquín served as a nexus for narrat-
ing a new mythohistorical context and Chicanx subjectivity, but the very
format and approach of the text also took up and transformed practices
of scripturalization.
136 J.M. HIDALGO

The poem provocatively encapsulates a shift in ethnic Mexican politi-

cal rhetorics of the era.36 The multipage poem begins with the assertion
of identification between the contemporary author and the infamous
Mexican bandit, Joaquín Murrieta, whose story was made famous dur-
ing and after the California Gold Rush. Yet, this poem also crisscrosses
multiple timelines and geographies, transforming temporality and naming
different prominent Mexican and Mexican American figures, including
the last Aztec ruler Cuauhtémoc, heroes of Mexican independence and
the Mexican Revolution (such as Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and Emiliano
Zapata), and other figures of Mexican American resistance history (such as
Murrieta and the Espinosa brothers of Colorado’s San Luis Valley).37 The
only woman to bear a proper name in the poem is the Virgin of Guadalupe,
and she is only named while quoting Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla.38
Through the naming of historical figures of varying backgrounds and
time periods, the poem creates an alternative historical narrative, one
that is poignantly focused upon loss, survival, and strength. The poem
does not just identify with historical figures; it also connects these figures
at a personal level with the author as a struggling contemporary ethnic
Mexican, one who is “Lost in a world of confusion,” who has “come a
long way to nowhere,” but who “WILL ENDURE!”39 The poem hit at
least two resonant notes in the burgeoning movement quest for trans-
formative knowledge and identity formation. I Am Joaquín spotlighted
the ethnic Mexican experience—naming a historical background that few
young Chicanxs encountered in classrooms—and expressed the height-
ened ambivalence of that social-cultural location.40 The poem’s text scrip-
turalized histories that had often been left to oral tradition in Chicanx
communities, and it used those scripturalized histories to persuade now-
conscientized Chicanxs to take up the cause of fighting for rights, space,
and recognition.
I Am Joaquín put into an easily circulatable form myths that spoke to
Chicanx histories and experiences. The poem quickly became a tool in the
fight against institutional indoctrination,41 entexting an alternative history.
By valuing racial mixture and indigenous roots, I Am Joaquín and the
Chicanx movement at large transformed the racializing scripts of previ-
ous generations of ethnic Mexicans who had, to some extent, sought to
“whiten” their identities for the sake of greater social and legal access.42
The language of endurance spoke to an identification with “conquered”
populations and not their conquerors.
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 137

Beyond constructing a different history and offering a new version of

Chicanx racialization, the aspirations of unity circumscribed the poem:
the singular nature of its title, the way that a plurality of subjects cohere
in one individual, however confused he may be. As a cultural and iden-
tity center, I Am Joaquín upholds peripheries that have been contested,
especially by women, even within the era of the movement itself. The
challenge of “centers” is that they often also make peripheries by assert-
ing a clarity of “authentic” relationality between people and the fictive
scriptural center. I Am Joaquín’s narrative emphasized not only race
but also class, with idealized versions of urban working class and farm
labor imaginaries overshadowing other ways of being Chicanx.43 The
poem spoke to the portions of the movement that sought to take up
the economic perils confronting much of the imagined Chicanx com-
munity. But many activists, especially among those being educated and
thus participating in class mobility, tended to posit a “romanticize[d]
disadvantaged and disempowered” and hence most “authentic,” static,
and essentialized Chicanx subject that embodied the ideology of homo-
geneity that did not exist.44
Furthermore, the misogyny of the poem and of Gonzales’s own public
responses to feminists led many women to write back in relationship to I
Am Joaquín. Leticia Hernández’s poem, “Hijas de Cuauhtémoc” (1971),
takes up some of Joaquín’s style, but rather than starting the poem with
the singular, it always remains with plural subjects.45 It describes women’s
roles as revolutionaries and names the ways that women were oppressed by
Aztec gods and Spanish conquerors.46 Gloria Anzaldúa likewise remem-
bers I Am Joaquín, in portions of Borderlands/La Frontera, as a crucial
text (along with Cesar Chavez and La Raza Unida Party) in how Chicanxs
came to “know we were a people.”47 At the same time, she also reminds
readers that I Am Joaquín came later than a scriptural novel for her, City
of Night (1963), written by gay Chicano John Rechy.48 In her chapter on
“mestiza consciousness,” Anzaldúa freely adapts both José Vasconcelos
and I Am Joaquín, pushing them to be more inclusive of women. She
challenges the singularity of Joaquín’s identification when she seeks out
women’s images freed from “male dominance,” and these images are plu-
ral and no longer just historical: “I seek new images of identity, new beliefs
about ourselves, our humanity and worth no longer in question.”49 Even
these counter-scriptural moves, however, underscore the socially forma-
tive power of I Am Joaquín within larger imaginaries.
138 J.M. HIDALGO

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER: COUNTERING US

SCRIPTURALIZATION BY TRANSFORMING ACADEMIC
SACRALITY
Along with single-author writings such as I Am Joaquín, Chicanx confer-
ences and meetings also became key sites for the collaborative creation
of texts. Gonzales himself organized the larger conference in March
of 1969  in Denver that included the collaborative writing of El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán that I discuss in Chap. 2. The month following that
Denver conference, in April 1969, a second and much smaller conference
was convened, for three days, in Santa Barbara, California, in order to fur-
ther lay out guiding principles for the movement’s nationalism and work.50
This conference tasked itself with transforming and reconceptualizing the
aspirations of higher education and the very purposes of university-based
textual production as it related specifically to the concerns of Chicanx stu-
dents and broader Chicanx communities. Of the varying Chicanx efforts
to create and circulate new scriptures in the years following I Am Joaquín,
I focus on the writing of El Plan de Santa Barbara because of the way it
demonstrates the intertwining of place and people-making with an apoca-
lyptically utopian emphasis on the crafting and recrafting of scriptures and
scriptural knowledge. It also demonstrates how contested any scriptural-
izing text can be, even in its creation.
The main goal of the Santa Barbara conference was “that Chicano
students and faculty from California universities and state colleges come
together to discuss their vision of a master plan for Chicanos in higher edu-
cation comparable to the California Master Plan in Higher Education that
existed at that time.”51 Under the auspices of the Santa Barbara Conference
Steering Committee, later known as the Chicano Coordinating Council
on Higher Education (CCHE), a California collaborative group of fac-
ulty, staff, and students that formed after the 1968 Blowouts, the group
gathered with a focus on higher education, but unintentionally came to
be seen, for some, as a “‘founding convention’ for the Chicano student
movement.”52 Of the thirty-three-person steering committee, only five
were women.53 René Nuñez, director of the Educational Clearing House
for Central Los Angeles, was one of the leaders. Only a few professors were
there, including Rodolfo Acuña, Gus Segade, Gracia Molina Enríquez de
Pick, Jesús Chavarria of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and
Juan Gómez-Quiñones, a scholar of history at the University of California
at Los Angeles. Santa Barbara was chosen as a midway point between
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 139

northern and southern California.54 The conference included more than

one hundred staff, students, and faculty from twenty-nine college cam-
puses around California; all participants were already known to be activists
on their campuses.55
Some conference participants drew upon conference discussions and
created a document, which was published and circulated six months later
in a more developed, book-length format, as opposed to a short, easily cir-
culated text such as El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.56 De Necochea described
a sense of what motivated their crafting of El Plan de Santa Barbara: “We
needed to get a book out that we […] everyone could look at it, read it
you know, copy it, demand one, the community college and wherever you
were, in college or university.” In addition to a rallying call and statement
of intent, the Plan was practically and programmatically minded: “You
didn’t want it languishing in the library shelves; you want it disseminat-
ing.”57 Steering committee member Anna Nieto-Gomez remembers El
Plan de Santa Barbara’s publication as a contested one, however; she
describes the text as the product of an “ad hoc small group of individu-
als” that was published without CCHE approval. CCHE recommended
that a revised document be published, a document that better reflected a
broader consensus, but no such document was ever published. Later con-
ference publications never achieved the circulation or memorialized power
of El Plan de Santa Barbara.58
As it rapidly spread, the message began to take on a scripturalized life
of its own. An activist whom I interviewed and will call Rubén was not
present at the Santa Barbara conference, but he called El Plan de Santa
Barbara “the first kind of publication that identified, you know, in writing
what our needs were.”59 For him, the power of the text rested not only
in its written form but also in its collective generation from students: “I
think that one really carried so much weight was because it was done by
students. It wasn’t like UC Santa Barbara professors put it together; it
was students.” The Santa Barbara document looked to take up the power
of academic institutions and retool them for Chicanx communities, espe-
cially through the field of Chicanx Studies. In its intent to augur social
formation and political action by retooling scriptural precedents, El Plan
de Santa Barbara participated in scripturalization; not only did it seek to
be circulated in a quasi-scriptural way, but it also cited El Plan Espiritual
de Aztlán in arguably scriptural ways.60
The version published by La Causa publications in October 1969, El
Plan de Santa Barbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education, Analyses and
140 J.M. HIDALGO

Positions by the Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education, totals

155 pages. Composed of a mixture of images, essays, and appendices, El
Plan de Santa Barbara contains several different sections, some written by
individuals, some written by teams, and some that read almost like notes
from the workshops that happened in April.61 The main essays include, in
order within the publication, a “Manifesto,” which frames the ideologi-
cal and practical goals of El Plan; “Organizing and Instituting Chicano
Programs on Campus,” which lays out the reasons behind, guidelines for,
and the general steps required to build Chicanx programs in California
universities; “Recruitment and Admissions,” which addresses policies for
and concerns about recruiting, admitting, and retaining Chicanx stu-
dents, staff, and faculty; “Support Programs,” which tackles the import
of using college resources to provide training to Chicanx staff and to pro-
vide orientation, tutoring, and other support services in order to help
Chicanx students succeed in higher education; the “Curriculum” section,
which speaks specifically to the goals, guidelines for, and pertinent sub-
jects of Chicanx Studies curricula while also providing a model proposal
for new courses in a department of Chicanx Studies; “Political Action,”
which briefly contextualizes the history of the Chicanx student move-
ment and emphasizes the import of “political consciousness” and activ-
ism to Chicanx student organization; and “Campus Organizing Notes of
MECHA,” which describes the goals, campus roles, and ideal functions
of the newly renamed multicampus student organization el Movimiento
Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). After these notes, a thirteen-
page bibliography lists crucial resources in terms of academic books, statis-
tical studies, journals, publications in academic fields (including education,
political science, law, sociology/anthropology, public health), literature,
films, audio collections, theater companies, artists, and newspapers. De
Necochea’s section “The University and the Chicano Community” then
concludes the main essays with a discussion of the challenge of negotiating
relationships between academic institutions and local communities while
also providing suggestions for how Chicanx students may build, maintain,
and nurture such relationships. Almost all of these essays incorporate a
balance between theorizing issues of identity, knowledge, community, and
the university while also providing suggestions for what different facets of
these theories can and might look like when embodied in specific institu-
tional contexts.
In addition to collecting different essays that address the possibilities
for building various Chicanx Studies programs, support services, student
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 141

organizations, and institutional relationships throughout the California

system, El Plan de Santa Barbara also includes several appendices. It
devotes a page to listing the initial members of the CCHE’s Steering
Committee, placing an asterisk by the names of Editorial Board Members;
then the document lists the varying workshops (campus organization, leg-
islation funds, community programs, Chicano Studies curriculum, recruit-
ment, political action, organizing and instituting Chicano programs, and
support programs) as well as the participants; one can see how many
of the workshops align with the essays published. The appendices also
incorporate sample Chicanx Studies program proposals that address the
various institutional structures of the California public university system:
one sample comes from the University of California at Santa Barbara and
addresses the need for and challenges of institutionalizing Chicanx Studies
while also providing a model of curriculum design; another sample comes
from San Fernando (now the California State University at Northridge);
and San Diego Mesa College provides a model for an associate of arts
degree in Chicanx Studies. While visual art can be found throughout the
document, four straight pages of visuals separate these sample proposals
from sample course syllabi, which include “The Mexican American and
the Schools,” “History of the Chicano,” and “Contemporary Politics of
the Southwest.” Then the end of the appendices includes a proposal with
regard to the role of “Sociology in a Mexican American Studies Program”
and an “Outline of the Barrio Center Program.” That these appendices
account for more than one-third of the publication speaks to how one
of El Plan de Santa Barbara’s goals was to be an important circulating
resource and reference text for a plurality of institutions.
The broad goals stated by the text are all in support of a Chicanx cul-
tural transformation and consciousness, one that El Plan de Santa Barbara
could hopefully help flourish. This Plan was invested in the crafting of nar-
ratives and histories that can help to substantiate and nourish this period
of renaissance. Picking up on several rhetorical tropes found in El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán, the first main section of El Plan de Santa Barbara, its
manifesto, opens with an echo of the US Declaration of Independence that
establishes a sense of newness and rebirth that also comes out of a revising
of history: “For all people, as with individuals, the time comes when they
must reckon with their history. For the Chicano the present is a time of
renaissance, of renacimiento. Our people and our community, el barrio
and la colonia, are expressing a new consciousness and a new resolve. …
We will move forward toward our destiny as a people.”62 The manifesto
142 J.M. HIDALGO

then concludes with an evocation of José Vasconcelos, affirming that “The

destiny of our people will be fulfilled” and thus they come to the university
“‘to demand that the university work for our people.’”63 The manifesto
encapsulates the sense that El Plan de Santa Barbara was chronicling a
reborn people, providing them with an alternative to US Manifest Destiny,
and playing polytemporally by invoking both past and future.
El Plan de Santa Barbara presents the nurturing of Chicanx commu-
nity as the central aim of any scripturalizing practice or university envi-
ronment. As part of this project, Chicanxs sought to provide a space for
being a newly scripturalized people in a different key from dominantized
US cultural modes of scripturalization. They were now going to write
for themselves how they should be understood. Describing the task as a
“quest for cultural expression and freedom [that] has taken the form of
a struggle,” the manifesto begins by naming the “American Dream” as
a failure for Chicanxs and its “cost of assimilation” as too high; in other
words, they suggest that the upward mobility promised by US higher edu-
cation as it was currently practiced required that Chicanxs give up on their
communities.64 This cost motivates the call for “self-determination of our
community,” again echoing El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.65 Ramón, who
had been involved with the Santa Barbara Conference, emphasized com-
munity outreach in his experience with the institutionalization of Chicano
Studies at Long Beach; he remembered most strikingly how students
became involved with “the barrio’s education” through a local “neigh-
borhood center.”66
In part, El Plan de Santa Barbara’s concerns with the university came
from the experiences of students, but their concerns also speak to the
power of universities as mediators of authority under regimes of scriptur-
alization: “The university is a powerful modern institution because it gen-
erates, and distributes, knowledge, which is power. So far-reaching is its
power that the university today is widely acknowledged as being the single
most important factor in social and economic growth.”67 The multivalent
power of academic knowledge is not isolated in either a sacred other world
or an ivory tower but has a crucial relationship with the worlds outside
university gates.
Expressing a commitment to Chicanxs in a broad range of higher edu-
cational facets (from admissions to research to community-based pro-
gramming and “social action centers”), they nevertheless positioned their
work as holding the university (specifically the public university system in
California, but they also reference private universities) up to its highest
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 143

ideals: “universities and colleges will truly live up to their credo, to their
commitment to diversification, democratization, and enrichment of our
cultural heritage and human community.”68 This approach to “institu-
tionalization” reflects a concern with scripturalization for the sake of com-
munity, with the sense that “Power must be taken here, as elsewhere,” and
that power should be rooted in “self-determination and self-liberation”
where Chicanxs have power over their college programs.69 With a focus on
exercising self-determination and having their own institutions, El Plan de
Santa Barbara grounds itself and its aspirations for the university within
some of the utopian themes and visions already stated as central in El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán.
As commonly happens in utopian modes, El Plan de Santa Barbara also
positions itself as critique; all these aspirations for what Chicanx Studies
might accomplish are articulated in relationship to the current liabilities
of higher education that incoming Chicanx students confront. The activ-
ism behind the Santa Barbara conference perceived and critiqued the ways
in which US academic thought and writing could buttress conceptual-
izations of “American exceptionalism,” imperialism, and a covertly white
supremacist US national imagination. El Plan de Santa Barbara concerned
itself with the indoctrination of Chicanxs into the racial hierarchies that
academic institutions legitimated: “To succumb to traditional structures
and approaches is to legitimize their role in indoctrinating Chicanos to
become a part of gabacho society.”70 Because of this relationship between
academics and US nationalism, activists wanted to expound new knowl-
edge instead of the dominantized forms propagated in higher education.71
While a focus on academic discourses, programs, frameworks, and pub-
lications certainly speaks to elite and upwardly mobile classes of Chicanxs,
such a focus also attends to the sense that academic knowledge and insti-
tutions can have the power to perpetuate, shape, and transform crucial
myths, visions, and ways of being in the world that inform various struc-
tures of social power. In his study of the “mythohistorical interventions”
of the Chicanx movement, literature scholar Lee Bebout suggests that
movement reimaginations of the “mythohistorical,” the making and
rich deployment of “countersymbols,” “forgotten pasts and alternative
futures,” stood as key decolonial loci, but that the movement also became
invested in the transformation of “the locations of consecrated discourse,
namely the schools and other Ideological State Apparatuses.”72 Not only
did myths need to be transformed, but also the institutions that perpetu-
ated these myths. However odd it may seem to some of us in the academy
144 J.M. HIDALGO

who often feel politically disempowered, universities can wield significant

social capital and were approached in movement literature and organiz-
ing as regimes of power. Bebout’s language for this transformation draws
upon a sense of sacrality, a particular mode of authority that inheres in the
textually focused world of academic discourse.
This sense of the sacred power and place of the academic world as some-
thing to be taken up and transformed infuses varying facets of El Plan de
Santa Barbara as well as recollections of the conference. Carlos Muñoz
Jr., one of the conference organizers and a political scientist, quoted his
conference invitation in his book, and the quotation portrays the main
aspirations for the conference on these terms:

The purpose…is to develop a ‘Master Plan’ for Chicanos in higher edu-

cation which would at once serve as a guideline…and would articulate
the reality of the Chicano educational situation to the established system
at large….[It would] produce a document that can be used as a guide to
recruit Chicano students, faculty, and administrators…to deal with support
programs, curriculum, etc. [and]…present the needs of the Chicano com-
munity, as it relates to higher education, not as a series of demands, rather
as an irrevocable law—an objective to be reached within a given time—a
tangible reality.73

The aspirations of scripturalization can be found in this letter: the goal

of creating a central, “master” text that can be a rubric to “articulate
the reality” Chicanxs faced in education and can create clear, “tangible”
goals for transforming education, goals that were to be “irrevocable law.”
This last phrase dramatically suggests a desire to take up and transform a
certain “sacred” power that academic institutions seemed to wield, and
participants, such as Ramón, saw the crafting of a text as a particular
way to take up and transform university power: “the document of El
Plan de Santa Barbara…fit into place a practice you may say on the one
hand in terms of how we could bring institutionalized change.”74 At the
same time, this emphasis on educational transformation spoke to a more
widespread sensibility that issues of knowledge and interpretation were
indeed part of the stakes in the larger civil rights struggle.75 This Plan
eventually helped to proliferate Chicanx Studies programs (significantly
not “Mexican American Studies”) throughout the California university
system, but that was not their only goal.76 Activists sought a more sys-
temic transformation.
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 145

The authors of El Plan de Santa Barbara portray higher educational

institutions as sites for the making and refracting of social and legal
power, and thus Chicanxs must have control of higher educational insti-
tutions in order to make institutions oriented toward Chicanx libera-
tion: “Traditionally, the goals of higher education have been directed to
meet the demands of the ruling strata of society by training the special-
ized manpower required for the operation of their demands. …Hence
the defense scientists, college faculties, journalists, etc., have supplanted
the scribes and priests of ancient civilizations. …Therefore all attempts
to project Chicanos into the mainstream of higher education as it exists
today are equivalent to enslaving La Raza to the controlling powers of this
society.”77 The authors liken higher education to religious training, rest-
ing with certain “sacred” powers in relationship to society; contemporary
scholars are described as the descendants of ancient “scribes and priests.”78
The university as sacralized clerical training ground is also imagined as
enslaving and in need of change.
While construing academic institutions as sacred loci to be remade, the
authors of El Plan de Santa Barbara imagine the proper task of Chicanx
Studies curricula as “reconquest”79—of self and of community, requiring
the uncovering of hidden histories, about “la herencia chicana” as tied to
daily “experiences.”80 On the opposite page facing the introduction to
“Organizing and Instituting Chicano Programs On-Campus” is a ren-
dering of the Mayan feathered/plumed serpent deity, Kukulkan, a deity
that also has a certain resonance with the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, a patron
deity of learning and knowledge. This open invocation of Mesoamerican
concepts and mythologies around learning speaks to the aspirations for
transforming knowledge-making practices by turning to traditions that,
though they have survived in different ways, have been denied Chicanxs in
formal educational institutions. The image of the feathered serpent takes
on even more power as a patron of reconquest, one that requires a mov-
ing beyond European and Euro-US knowledge systems. According to the
Plan, Chicanxs needed universities not only because they already con-
tributed to them but also because universities could provide research and
analysis needed for a “liberation of the Chicano community” positioned as
a practice of ongoing transformation in consciousness.81
Such a reconquest takes up a sense of the sacred as not just power but
also space, space in which other ways of being Chicanx could be pos-
sible. For brief moments, according to Chicanx Studies scholar Michael
Soldatenko, different fights for Chicanx Studies fundamentally opened up
146 J.M. HIDALGO

spaces for a student “to ask and answer traditional and new questions
without the inquisitorial fear exercised by the academic sacerdotal class.”82
Here the language of the sacred returns, though this time with academics
presented as priests who might wield their sacred power in order to hinder
free thought and expression. Though the actual attempts to change the
academic system may not have enacted the hoped-for transformation, all
the attempts did fundamentally question the ways that knowledge and
authority were constructed and constituted in the USA at the time.
El Plan de Santa Barbara then takes up a resonant and parallel recon-
quest to that proposed in Revelation. Not only does it maintain a persis-
tently utopian emphasis on spirit and destiny that relies on invocations
of Aztlán as past, present, and future place, El Plan de Santa Barbara
also transposes the more physical “sacred temples” of learning that are
California universities, over which Chicanxs have restricted access and
control. As a conglomeration of visions for university functioning in con-
cern with community, the idea of the university as a communally shaped
and responsible temple of learning gets built into the body of a text. With
its appended resources, images, and articulations of Chicanx Studies goals
and practices, El Plan de Santa Barbara can itself become the mobile,
sacred university, the temple in the text. At the same time, the text pro-
poses that these utopian temples may someday be built in the world
outside the text and in close relationality with a community. El Plan de
Santa Barbara actively constructs the possibilities of utopian futurity by
imagining autonomous universities that can better serve the community,
and they specifically name one of these future universities as “Universidad
Autonoma de Aztlan.”83 The utopian bent of El Plan de Santa Barbara
inscribes a vision of the university as admitting more Chicanx students
and taking up a commitment to the whole Chicanx person; as an example,
the “support programs” part of El Plan includes a call for attention not
just to the student but to the needed stipend for the family and for family
medical services.84
El Plan then participates in a scripturalizing mode by encapsulating
sacred centers of learning within itself, but it also articulates that scrip-
turalization in direct critique of dominantized scripturalizing practices.
While El Plan de Santa Barbara rhetorically accentuates a need to take
over, transform, and create distinctive Chicanx forms of higher educa-
tion, El Plan de Santa Barbara often conveys a concern with what is and
what has been written: “the Chicano has not often enough written his
own history, his own anthropology, his own sociology his own literature.
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 147

He must do this if he is to survive.”85 In describing the ways that the

educational system has eliminated Chicanxs from the historical narrative,
Enriqueta Vasquez, articulates the need for a written record: “Y entende-
mos que nuestra historia realmente no la hemos estudiado, tal vez por que
no está escrita. Precisamente porque la historia del indio nunca ha sido
escrita. Al sistema educativo presente se le hizo más facil eliminarnos en
total.”86 She thusly argues also for the importance now of writing those
histories in order to take back and take over dominantized narratives; it
is when histories are not written that they can be derided and eliminated.
Another student activist from the period whom I interviewed, and here
name Elena, went on to teach “multicultural art” in elementary and high
schools with curricula she developed specifically to help students engage
forms of art not found in the Western “big narrative” that she recalls hav-
ing been taught.
Scripturalization as an explicitly textual practice in dominantized US
culture may then require that Chicanxs arrogate some of that textual
power for themselves, on their terms. Among the recommendations for the
institutionalization of programs is a concern with textual control: “That
Chicano authored or sponsored publications be given preference as course
materials. That Chicanos publish through Chicano journals. That Chicano
publishing-houses be established.”87 De Necochea and other authors of
El Plan de Santa Barbara thought that written words, particularly those
produced under the aegis of university institutions, held a shaping power
that Chicanxs must come to wield for themselves. However diverse many
of the campus activists were, much of the work aspired to create space,
“a zone,” for a different model of knowledge and knowledge formation,
though it was one that often retained, even if just in antagonism, a con-
nection to preexistent US models.

THE PURSUITS OF UNITY AND THE FRUSTRATIONS

OF MAKING NEW SCRIPTURES

The aspiration and desire to bring together a diverse set of movements so

that they might cohere around a shared text and shared vision informed the
Santa Barbara conference and its plan. One of the main accomplishments
of the conference was to combine several different local campus groups
into a larger cross-campus organization: M.E.Ch.A. (el Movimiento
Estudiantil Chicano/a de Aztlán/The Chicano Student Movement of
148 J.M. HIDALGO

Aztlán; henceforth MEChA).88 El Plan de Santa Barbara served as a

central and centering text for the new, more unified MEChA. The Plan
then sought to articulate existing ideas and new possibilities for MEChA
even while eliding and rejecting others. A scriptural center can be created,
contested, and negotiated among an even small group; different read-
ers engaged El Plan de Santa Barbara as an imaginative and inspirational
mobile textual center but also as a locus for delimiting what can and can-
not be said and read.
Casting scriptures as an attempt to make textual “centers” for peo-
ples who do not always share geographic centers, one can see how scrip-
turalizing the Planes of Aztlán and Santa Barbara was interconnected
with attempts to create a more unified movement. By 1967, several dif-
ferent student organizations existed on a variety of college campuses in
the Southwest under different names, and in the Los Angeles area, many
chapters of the UMAS existed as well as a Mexican American Student
Association (MASA) at East Los Angeles Community College. Northern
California developed multiple chapters of the Mexican American Student
Confederation (MASC).89 At Santa Barbara, the student leaders worked
to develop a more cohesive group, and they chose MEChA as a name
that would signal the already widespread power of El Plan Espiritual de
Aztlán.90 Despite this aspiration, however, MEChA had a very limited
spread outside of California, with a handful of significant MEChA chap-
ters appearing over a course of years in Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and at
the University of Notre Dame.91
Still, the focus on Chicanx identity in the organization’s name also
signaled a turn toward their indigenous backgrounds and away from
European influences, an attempt to participate in some of the mythohis-
torical transformation found in I Am Joaquín and El Plan Espiritual de
Aztlán.92 As a member of UMAS, Rubén viewed the transition to MEChA
as signaling its radical nationalist shift because the group’s name labeled
them “Chicano” and located them in Aztlán rather than “America.”93
El Plan de Santa Barbara also called on MEChA organizations to pro-
vide multimodal access to varied written materials about Chicanxs, argu-
ing that each MEChA chapter should build and maintain a library “so
that the membership has ready access to material which will help them
understand their people and their problems.”94 The authors of El Plan de
Santa Barbara also emphasized the importance of communication and
media, the need for Mechistas to be “spreading the message of the move-
ment by any media available, this means speaking, radio, television, local
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 149

newspaper, underground papers, posters, art, theatres, in short spreading

propaganda of the Movement.”95 The concern with spreading information
can be contextualized as the kind of aspiration that enshrouds scriptural-
ization, a sense of gaining and spreading power through the varying media
and means associated with authority; to have a library, moreover, would
then also be to have a physical space that designates crucial and meaning-
ful texts, that opens up and circumscribes the boundaries of meaning play.
The physical artifact of El Plan de Santa Barbara also resembles the
Christian Bible as an anthologized and mobile text that is sometimes bro-
ken up and distributed in component pieces. Although movement texts
were often meant to be easily reproducible and mobile, the formal text
of El Plan de Santa Barbara is not one document alone, and often dif-
ferent pieces of it might be circulated. For instance, the “manifesto” can
still be found on different campus MEChA websites, but the full Plan
became enshrined within a special textual design and style in its first edi-
tion, though it can currently be downloaded as a black-and-white PDF
file. The physical publication’s cover is a textured dusky red, setting the
basic color scheme that pervades the pages inside. On the cover, the text is
established as a “spiritual” document and as a “MEChA” document rather
than as anything else; a stylized, blocked, and stenciled human head-in-
profile looking left sits in the center of a set of words. Ringing the top
part of the verbal circle is “POR MI RAZA HABLA EL ESPIRITU” (the
spirit speaks for my people), and then in larger letters in the bottom of
the circle is “MECHA.” Here, the cover design also invokes the Mexican
university system and the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s
motto, as well as Vasconcelos: “Por mi raza hablará el espiritu” (the spirit
shall speak for my people).96 The tense shift from future (at UNAM) to
present is worth noting; El Plan de Santa Barbara emphasizes that the
spirit is speaking, in MEChA, and in this very book. Such evocations of
the spiritual and the making of El Plan de Santa Barbara as an iconically
special text resonates with the complex history of publishing and distribut-
ing Christian Bibles in the USA.97 The creation of a specially bound and
yet reproducible and separable anthology whose component parts suppos-
edly contain a speaking spiritual power has a remarkable kinship with some
modern approaches to biblical texts and material artifacts.
What makes the kinship more resonant are attempts to legitimate and
authorize the creation of a more unified group, MEChA, with their own
shared textual, and spiritual, “centers” in El Plan de Santa Barbara and El
Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. Although the goal was certainly the creation of
150 J.M. HIDALGO

viable Chicanx Studies programs across California, political scientist and

conference participant Muñoz claimed that “the most important product
of the conference was the spirit of unity and sense of common purpose
that it generated.”98 The conference worked to create a text that could be
an enacted locus of this new “spirit of unity” even while it still held the
wider ethnic Mexican community as an authority of greater import than
the academic world or the textual loci produced within it. The creation
of MEChA had not been planned in advance; actually it was a surprising
development to those who attended. This creation of a more centralized
student organization, however, was in keeping with the scripturalizing aim
of the conference: to create a text that would manufacture greater cohe-
sion among diverse student movements throughout the state of California
in order to help them align around a more “particular vision” for what
an alternative educational and curricular structure would look like; the
incorporation of syllabi and reading lists also plays with notions of canon
and canonization.
Yet, the challenge of a scriptural framework begins to fall out from this
goal. What happens when a minoritized community takes on and takes
up some of the practices of scripturalization that have been part of their
minoritization? Indeed, this tension seems to undergird varying critiques
of El Plan de Santa Barbara and Chicanx Studies programs, as it simi-
larly appeared in critiques of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and those who
continue to invoke Aztlán itself. For instance, even though El Plan de
Santa Barbara was critical of the US academy, in that it sought to mar-
shal the academy’s resources, it did not fundamentally challenge academic
formulation because it retained an assumption that “academic work was
ancillary to political work.”99 El Plan de Santa Barbara could not marshal
a stronger intellectual formulation of what a fully alternative knowledge
practice might look like because it presumed the division of knowledge
from praxis that dominated the US academy at the time.100 Accepting cer-
tain academic discursive norms even while seeking to challenge others, El
Plan de Santa Barbara fundamentally relied upon and restated academic
constructions of “fields of knowledge” even if it imagined scholars work-
ing in multi- and interdisciplinary ways.101
Here, we see reflected some of the crucial tensions of scripturalization’s
limiting pliability: it limits the voices—even the voices that were involved
in facets of the text’s creation—that can be contained within a restricted
and bounded text. Even while it opens up a plurality of meanings, and
new pliabilities of alternative knowledge worlds, the very creation of the
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 151

document silences other voices and elides, or even erases, certain histories.
While such delimiting can serve important functions in the creation of
an alternative scripturalizing mode, it also can entail violent erasures. In
NietoGomez’s recollection, one of the problems with El Plan de Santa
Barbara is that it ignored, reduced, and diverged from the immense plu-
rality of ideas, visions, and disagreements that had been offered at the
conference itself.102 She describes how El Plan de Santa Barbara was never
meant to be a blueprint for Chicanx Studies “but perhaps a beginning,
perhaps a cornerstone in the development of a master plan.” As proof
that it was never a blueprint, she describes how quickly some of its key
concepts were removed in practice: “For example, one of the main prin-
ciples was the participation of the community and students in policy. By
1973 students and community participation was almost non-existent and
by 1976, it had disappeared.”103
Despite her criticisms of the text and its reception, NietoGomez also
portrays the ideal that “the Plan de Santa Barbara as a living document
... would be revised and published on a ongoing basis.” Historically, the
CCHE saw the Plan as a starting point, and they also quickly recognized
significant flaws, such as a lack of attention to women in higher education.104
El Plan de Santa Barbara was published after many Mexican American and
Chicanx Studies programs, departments, and centers had formed.105 It also
may have been more of a response to the civil rights movement than a vision
for academic futures.106 NietoGomez argues that, though Santa Barbara was
the first conference, it was hardly the most important in terms of lasting
intellectual effects on the field, and that part of the problem with El Plan de
Santa Barbara is the way it is privileged as a special text.107 In other words,
she would challenge its scripturalization. NietoGomez’s memory of the
conference’s diversity, the way that diversity was eliminated from the Plan,
and the ways that this Plan gets treated as a special text that it was not meant
to be, all these tensions actually speak to the process of scripturalization as a
powerful field for communal creation and contestation.

SCRIPTURALIZING BEYOND THE WRITTEN WORD:

LOCATING POWER OUTSIDE THE TEXT
While El Plan de Santa Barbara did not reflect the sort of communally
formative and informative debate that transpired at the conference, the
Plan still became an important locus for imagining alternative forms of
152 J.M. HIDALGO

knowing, for invoking spiritual genealogies and practices that came out
of indigenous and hybrid Chicanx traditions, and for relating to academic
textualities. El Plan de Santa Barbara inscribed a certain textual loose-
ness to its own authority by expecting that the document would not be
the final word, that there would be other meetings and future revisions.
The CCHE also wanted to host a conference to revisit and revise El Plan
de Santa Barbara, but by the time it received more funding in 1973, the
University of California faculty in Chicanx Studies had their own organi-
zation. So attempts at revision never came to fruition.108 Perhaps, because
of the history of having been detrimentally imagined via the writings and
scripturalizing practices of others, these authors resisted investing any doc-
ument with fully scripturally authorized power.109
The document never held itself, or even any texts, as the ultimate author-
ity or the arbiter of organization. Rather than the text being the shaper of
community, El Plan de Santa Barbara elevated the relational power of the
community over textual authority: “The differentiation of roles required
by a given situation must be defined on the basis of mutual accountability
and equal sharing of responsibility. Furthermore, the mobilization of com-
munity support not only legitimizes the activities of Chicano student orga-
nization but also maximizes political power. The principle of solidarity is
axiomatic in all aspects of political action.”110 The framers emphasized that
the greatest educational emphasis for MEChA was to be involved with the
community: “The best educational device is being in the Barrio as often
as possible.”111 El Plan inscribed the community and the Causa as hold-
ing a greater authority and locus of loyalty than MEChA itself or the text
of El Plan. When Mechistas work in the community, it is incumbent on
them to “realize that MEChA is there as a supporter.”112 The community
may be understood as the spiritual power behind this text. That page of
El Plan de Santa Barbara rhetorically concludes: “Of the community, for
the community. Por la Raza habla el espiritu.” Thus, any sort of textually
fundamentalist fetishization becomes textually forbidden because the text
should never hold the final “word” on communal orientation, meaning,
and practice; the spirit may speak for the people but always when it comes
out of and is accountable to the people.113
This new MEChA born at the Santa Barbara conference saw itself
as mobilizing for Chicanxs on campus but always with a connection to
local and home ethnic Mexican communities; in this vein, students and
academics should be accountable to those communities, and universities
should be resources for their communities. The students wanted to pressure
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 153

the universities to put more “resources” toward and give “attention” to

Mexican American communities.114 Despite De Necochea’s “agnostic”
view of institutions, he could “see how the university could be a training
ground for leadership, that offered students resources that nobody in the
community had: financial aid, time, classes; not to mention ideology, a
new political class.”115 CCHE participants thought that robust Chicanx
Studies programs might be able to capture and utilize some of that univer-
sity power for ethnic Mexican communities rather than helping individual
ethnic Mexicans to escape their communities.
El Plan de Santa Barbara’s emphasis on the community as a higher
authority speaks to their aspirations to take up scripturalization’s power
without conceding to the rules that had guided dominantized US scrip-
turalization with its investment of authority in the text. Given both the
restricted literacy of many ethnic Mexicans in the USA at the time as well
as the history of a different form of literacy in native Mesoamerican tradi-
tions, many other non textual practices in ethnic Mexican communities
might be viewed as equally “sacred” and “scriptural”: visual traditions,
such as murals and home altars, and musical traditions, such as corridos,
which often maintained oral histories. In fact, many varieties of public
performance, spoken word, plays, street theater, speeches, songs, as well
as Mexican radio magnified the spread of different ideas, texts, and turns
of phrase, and these non textual resources also spread non textual senses of
sound and body encoded within musical and performance styles.116
These practices have been important loci for other ways of knowing
and remembering, for imagining and contesting cultures, and making and
claiming space.117 These non textual loci, because they fell beyond domi-
nantized cultural policing, were able to make imaginative transformations,
such as the narrative conversion of Joaquín Murrieta; Murrieta had been
a “criminal” and a “footnote” in Anglo histories, but throughout many
different corridos, he became a heroic insurrectionist, as he was textually
recorded to be in Gonzales’s poem.118
Certain movement texts were treated scripturally in ways that accord
with scriptural scholar James Watts’s theories of scriptural dimensionality,
wherein scriptures are ritualized in three dimensions: a semantic dimension
with elaborate practices of interpretation with regard to their meaning, an
iconic dimension with a legitimating power through their special visual-
ization, and a performative/performed dimension with an inspirational
power associated with their ability to be enacted by bodies.119 Chicanx
movement scriptures were ritualized in semantic, performance, and iconic
154 J.M. HIDALGO

domains, but rather than position the sacred texts as the arbiters of power,
the authority granted to the texts relied upon the power of the people
reading, performing, and drawing these texts. The texts became powerful
only because people engaged these texts through other expressive cultural
practices.
I Am Joaquín quickly became more than a widely circulated text; it was
also frequently performed, especially at protest events.120 It was not a text
that was merely read academically and privately.121 The poem’s repetitive
style fit within “oral tradition” and suited it to communal performance.122
Its deployment as scripture can be seen even in these early mimeographs
because it was not merely a text alone, but it also contained evocative
images, Manuel Martínez’s black and white drawings that were also eas-
ily mimeographed.123 Then, in 1969, it became a film, though some lines
were changed and “gringo” became “Anglo,” but the film provided
another locus for teaching and sharing the poem.124 In other words, the
text of I Am Joaquín was treated as powerful via other media, but other
means of knowing and communicating beyond the written word were
viewed as more powerful ways of “reading” and engaging the text. Much
of I Am Joaquín’s power came not from the semantic dimension of inter-
pretation but from the ways the poem drew on and was made into visual,
aural, and non written media (Fig. 4.1).
El Plan de Santa Barbara was published as a visually special text, but
its power was never with the words alone. The internal pages of the text
are significantly textured, filled with images, drawings, and photographs.
Sometimes the images fill a page or accompany the texts, but at other
times, images appear lighter, in varying shades of the dusky red setting,
watermarked beneath the text as a faded background. This employment
of images with text illuminates a facet of the scripturalizing orientation of
El Plan de Santa Barbara. The text on its own is not what is powerful or
meaningful; its power comes in relationship to other facets of Chicanx life
and activism. Many of the photographs are protest images from different
contexts; the drawings are a mixture of indigenous Mesoamerican motifs,
portrayals of different ethnic Mexicans (mostly men, a few women), and
overtly political images (for instance, one critiques police brutality).
Strikingly, at the end of the “The University and the Chicano Community”
section that De Necochea worked on, facing the page labeled “Appendices”
is a man wielding a rather large machete. Perhaps the text proposes that the
university can be a machete if wielded properly as the last paragraph prior
to this image states, “What is needed at this time, more than anything else,
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 155

Fig. 4.1 This photo captures how important visual signifying traditions were in
relating an epistemology that incorporated nationalism, politics, and Mesoamerican
and Christian religious images. Yet, certain words also held sway, here with the
text “Viva la Raza” on the cross as well as the text in the dove’s wake (“Pray for
peace in the barrios”). (Photograph by Sourena Parham; taken in the Ramona
Gardens public housing development in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of
Los Angeles, CA)

is to firm up the rapidly growing identification of the university as a critical

agency in the transformation of the Chicano community. Our people must
understand not only the strategic importance of the university, however;
they must above all perceive the university as being our university.”125 The
pairing of text and image suggests that words alone were not considered
a powerful enough force for meaning making and creative imagination.
Significantly, criticisms of El Plan de Santa Barbara as a publication
were directed not only at the content but also at the material form of
the published document: “The CCHE Chicanas Adhoc committee also
had criticisms of the Plan of Santa Barbara. The graphics depicted leaders,
thinkers and scholars solely as men. The only graphic of a woman reinforced
156 J.M. HIDALGO

stereotypes of Chicanas as barefoot and pregnant. The CCHE Chicanas

Adhoc committee recommended that the next publication include graph-
ics and pictures of Chicanas as scholars and leaders.”126 Calling for the
graphics to change is also an acknowledgment of the power of the pub-
lished Plan as circulated material and visual object.
The text itself recognizes the import of interconnections between tex-
tual media and performance. In the section on campus organizing, public
events and large actions are described as a way to bring student groups
and community members together. These actions are seen as sites where
the ideals of the movement, ideals encoded in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán
and El Plan de Santa Barbara, could be spread. To this end MEChA can
“spread the Chicano Liberation Movement philosophy” at events, espe-
cially speeches or symposia; they can use their meetings as “educational”
spaces for “discuss[ing] ideological or philosophical differences; or some
event in the Chicano’s history.”127 The text then suggested its own scrip-
turalizing modes, modes that did not rely on semantic interpretation alone
but rather imagined a broader communal engagement, especially in per-
formative dimensions.
While one can see how El Plan de Santa Barbara and other texts such
as Gonzales’s I Am Joaquín were made into iconically special texts in their
physical production, the key focus in terms of distribution in the move-
ment was actually that texts not be so physically special but rather that they
could be circulated easily as photocopies. Rather than trying to central-
ize the texts in a locative fashion, practitioners generally hoped to mobi-
lize them by increasing the fluidity of their textual representation. Thus,
movement-produced texts are easily accessible today on the Internet. Yet,
their content was often iconically represented and performed, with aspects
read aloud, larger content ideals performed in plays and other acts, and
ideas represented in murals and other artworks. The impact of many of the
writers whose texts reimagined Chicanx mythic history, whether Gonzales
or Rodolfo Acuña, was also bound up with how these authors could pres-
ent their mythohistorical imaginations in live performances throughout
the Southwest.128 Some of the texts that loom large in memorializing the
movement may in part do so because of the frequency with which they
were performed, read aloud, or portrayed on barrio walls through murals
and other forms of visual art in varying geographic contexts.
Scriptural visualization was distinctly important in murals, films, photo-
graphs, and even in the images that so often accompanied texts, whether
in book forms such as El Plan de Santa Barbara or in newspapers and
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 157

magazines. Elena, when reflecting on how El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán

mattered to her, did not emphasize the textual particulars at all; instead,
she emphasized the imaginative space the language world of the text
opened up: “It was a language…a visual language related to it; there was
iconography, like using the Aztec imagery, symbols, or the eagle, some of
the imagery rooted in Mexico and pre-Columbian. It’s like it was people
were reclaiming that old iconography and re-appropriating it, using it to
communicate something that was meaningful at this time.”129 What mat-
tered was the combination of varying media in helping to create certain
feelings and certain affective spaces; texts alone were not invested with the
authoritative capacity to create such shared affective space.
Images also became a focal mechanism through which Chicanas took
back and sought to transform the heteropatriarchal traditions of repre-
senting male revolutionary figures and male-headed families. The mas-
culinist images of I Am Joaquín’s mimeographs and the male-dominated
images of El Plan de Santa Barbara became a locus for later critics who
visually reimagined Chicanismo in more liberative ways for women and
LGBTIQ persons by “re-imaging” Chicanxs.130 The textual domain was
not powerful enough on its own to accomplish Chicana feminist revi-
sions. Chicana artists transformed representations of women in rebozos
by making them look armed for resistant action.131 Public art played an
important role in establishing and reinforcing the counter-narratives shap-
ing Chicanx identity.132
Emphasis remained on the authority of the “spirit” of community
rather than any particular text or narrative. Once MEChA was formally
constructed out of the other student movements, its goals focused on
“political and economic power,” the desire for self-determination embod-
ied in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.133 MEChA, as a student organiza-
tion, focused its efforts on making the educational system more responsive
to Chicanx students.134 Yet, MEChA demanded not just political com-
mitment but also a commitment to a particular collective and individual
identity rooted in a certain “spirit” and an orientation of “liberation”:
“MEChA then, is more than a name, it is a spirit of unity of brotherhood,
and a resolve to undertake a struggle for liberation.”135 MEChA was not
meant to be just a student organization but a political community, “a place
on campus” that nurtures “a feeling of familia with his Chicano broth-
ers.” Such familial organization should then naturally cultivate “loyalty
and support.”136 MEChA should be more “than just a club or a clique”
but rather a locus of “the feeling of hermandad” that also leads to “disci-
158 J.M. HIDALGO

pline” and “mutual respect.”137 These metaphorical rhetorics around what

MEChA could and might be as a communally authorized organization,
with reference to particular texts, should be held in tension with the aspi-
rational limits of scripturalization.

SCRIPTURES ARE THE TEXTS THAT KEEP MOVING

Mainstream Chicanx cultural memory of the movement often incorpo-
rates a critique of some of these “scriptural” texts as contributing to the
ultimate decline and dispersal of movement power. Some critics problema-
tize the distance between these textual intellectual ideals and the realities
that most ethnic Mexicans faced. In considering the specific case of the
Center for Autonomous Social Action’s (CASA’s) demise, Chávez argues
that distance was a key factor: when one particular group became “con-
vinced that they knew what was best for ethnic Mexicans throughout the
nation. That attitude led to fractures within the organization as well as
sharp attacks from ethnic Mexicans outside the group.”138 Movement
activists and groups tend to have strength in critiquing larger structures
but less strength in creating “substantive political and economic alterna-
tives” that went into a larger and more unified practice.139
The student movement did have some successes in terms of the pro-
liferation of Chicanx Studies programs throughout California universities
and in terms of increased Mexican American student enrollment.140 After
a few years, MEChA’s agenda became one of greater “ideological ambigu-
ity” besides just the assumed need to “struggle for equality and justice.”141
MEChA continued on college campuses and expanded to include high
schools, though it never spread much beyond its initial geographic base.
While always a part of the movement, Chicana feminists also had greater
impact on MEChA beginning in the mid-1970s.142 El Plan de Santa
Barbara and El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán survived and circulated among
Mechistas (members of MEChA) and former members of the movement
as important documents, even if their import shifted as activists came to
press at the limits of Chicanismo.143
Although aspirations to revise El Plan de Santa Barbara never came to be,
Chicanx Studies did form as a field and even went through its own process of
“canon formation,” whereby particular texts and particular ways of reading
those texts came to be the central loci for knowledge and authority within the
field; the dominantized (within the field of Chicanx Studies, not the larger
academy) scholarly narrative that is even told about how Chicanx studies
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 159

came to be through and in relationship to other parts of the Chicanx move-

ment has shaped those canonical trajectories.144 According to Chicanx Studies
critic Michael Soldatenko, Chicanx Studies has ceased to be an “oppositional”
field because it no longer hosts its initial plurality of voices; he posits that both
the set of diverse approaches to knowledge in early Chicanx Studies as well as
its utopian bent have been lost.145 He thus suggests that Chicanx Studies did,
to some extent, yield to dominantized modes of scripturalization, of valoriz-
ing certain texts and narrower ways of reading and beings of reading (who can
read in what ways), than activists may have once envisioned.
The ongoing debates over what El Plan de Santa Barbara did and did
not do, what it was capable of, speak to its own level of scripturalization, at
least within Chicanx Studies as a field. El Plan de Santa Barbara has been
a shaping force in almost all contemporary Chicanx Studies programs,
even if many were founded before the text was written.146 Once a student
activist and now a historian and critic of the field, Ignacio García articu-
lates a sense of scriptural priority for El Plan de Santa Barbara, at least in
terms of returning to the text for wisdom, even if one does not need to
follow it to the letter. In an article from 1996, he charged that Chicanx
Studies stood at acrossroads where it “will either retake its place as an
agent of change or simply become another stepchild of the academic ivory
tower.”147 He revisits El Plan de Santa Barbara and its role in the forma-
tion of Chicanx Studies, pointing out the possibilities that emanate from
the flexible implications of the text: “Because Chicanismo meant different
things to different people, el Plan de Santa Bárbara created a stimulus
for the creation of Chicano Studies programs throughout the Southwest,
each with a different mission and oftentimes a unique curriculum.”148 He
argues that certain core principles of El Plan de Santa Barbara got lost,
principles that might still be recuperated to challenge the field’s formation.
He points out how the programs have been institutionalized away from
Chicanx community control, how programs have departed from a focus
on “a history of struggle” toward an emphasis on “degree requirements
and…diversity in the United States.”149 Recommitting to the narrative
that Soldatenko criticizes, that Chicanx Studies is entirely a creation of the
Chicanx movement, García calls for a “return to the plan,” not necessarily
in its literal entirety but rather as an inspirational lesson.150 Meanwhile,
several other Chicanx Studies scholars have construed García’s own essay
as being too restricted by El Plan de Santa Barbara’s original parameters;
his rhetoric makes him too committed to a fetishization of the text.
These texts (I Am Joaquín, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, and El Plan
de Santa Barbara) continue to be turned to and read; some might argue
160 J.M. HIDALGO

they are read too often and too much. The tensions around their cre-
ation, the multiple voices involved, and the multiple perspectives left
out of the final documents also speak to the challenges of scripturaliza-
tion as a process of limiting pliability wherein dynamic tensions between
interpretive openness and restriction are necessarily part of scriptural
engagement. The ways in which these texts are read today differ from
the movement era and diverge from dominantized expectations for treat-
ing texts as revelatory sources isolated from communal contexts. When
contemporary readers examine these texts, even when they do so lov-
ingly, they historically situate them in particular moments, and they con-
textualize these texts not as “naïve” ideas but as works that anticipated
other possible worlds. These other worlds can be entered as imaginative
but ambivalent spaces, powerful and useful, but not all-controlling or
perfectly wonderful. Yet, the desire to turn to these worlds that never
came to pass also bespeaks a sense of loss. At some level, while certain
scripturalizing practices shifted in both the USA and among many ethnic
Mexicans after the era of the movement, the dissatisfaction with what the
movement accomplished often stems from a desire for these worlds that
never came.
In the years since the classical movement era, one major source of dis-
agreement has been the tensions between the scripting of family, gender,
and sexual norms in movement rhetorics and among community mem-
bers. As a form of social dreaming, almost all utopian imaginations, medi-
tate, at some point, on what an ideal family structure looks like; Chicanx
movement texts are no exception. Scriptural liabilities, though, are not
just about how the texts may imagine normative gender and sexuality;
rhetorics of the familial are often tied to communal relationships with the
texts themselves, and especially notions of “fidelity” circumscribe who
really gets to lay claim to proper communal authority in interpreting the
texts. Movement activism did change facets of education, but it failed to
entirely transform the world and the terms through which we all engage
the world. In some ways, perhaps making other scriptures that maintained
and relied on normative gender and familial rhetorics only reinforced pre-
existing, dominantized modes of scripturalization. The movement did
not build a permanent exterior utopia, and not all processes of scriptural
engagement, especially those that dealt with gender and sexuality, were
revolutionary.
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 161

NOTES
1. “I grew up in a small town that connected to a state capital, that bordered
with a very open border. My parents spoke English, but I grew up speak-
ing Spanish and I didn’t know any English until I started school. And my
grandparents on my mother’s side had a business…a liquor store during
the prohibition, and when I was growing up I spent a lot of time in
Mexicali, going to the ranch with my father and of course a lot of time in
Calexico.” Interview with De Necochea. All quotations come from this
interview.
2. García, Chicanismo, 139. García appears to speak out of personal experi-
ence here.
3. Main authorship of the Plan of Delano is generally attributed to Luis
Valdez, then head of the Teatro Campesino.
4. For discussion of the core aspects of scripturalization, see Wimbush,
Magic, 19, and my introduction.
5. Coronado, 28–29.
6. In the case of early twentieth-century Americanization programs, histo-
rian George J.  Sánchez’s work, Becoming Mexican American, describes
how Protestants aggressively evangelized ethnic Mexican communities
while providing social services and focusing on Americanization in a way
that presumed a connection between being English-language literate,
Protestant, and “American.” See Sánchez’s discussion, 151–170. In the
same period, US Catholic church structures especially inculcated
Americanization programs through social service institutions and Catholic
schools. Medina, Hermanas, 16–17.
7. Although it was once commonplace to distinguish the efforts of a
“Mexican American generation” after World War II from those of Chicanx
activists in the late 1960s and 1970s, more scholarship has shown some of
the important continuities between what is identified as the Chicanx
movement era and the political struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. See
both E. Chávez, ¡Mi Raza Primero! and Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí! as examples.
8. For instance, in the 1940s, students and parents of ethnic Mexican and
Puerto Rican backgrounds fought to end the racial segregation of
“Mexican” children in Orange County public schools. The case, generally
called by the shorthand of Mendez v. Westminster, went before the United
States Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit, which determined such segrega-
tion unconstitutional. Mendez is often cited as a precedent for the land-
mark 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka case. The activism around the case also speaks to how struggles
over education had been central to Mexican American civil rights well
before the movement era.
162 J.M. HIDALGO

9. Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí! 81.

10. From “Fourth Annual Camp Hess Kramer Leadership Conference for
Mexican-American Youth,” April 3–5, 1966, program, p.  1. Quoted in
E. Chávez, 43.
11. E.  Chávez, 43. They would change the name to Young Chicanos for
Community Action later. Education was never the only issue that mat-
tered; even at this early date, concerns about police brutality and other
issues received much attention. E. Chávez, 44.
12. E. Chávez, 44.
13. Both Lydia López, a Chicana activist during that era, and Roger Wood, an
Episcopalian priest who worked at Epiphany in the 1960s, emphasized
Epiphany’s involvement in the funding of La Piranya and the birth of the
Brown Berets in their interviews with me. Interview with López and
Interview with Wood. Also see E. Chávez, 45 for insight into the forma-
tion of the Brown Berets.
14. De León and Griswold del Castillo, 165.
15. C. Muñoz, 86.
16. García, Chicanismo, 8.
17. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 50.
18. C. Muñoz, 82.
19. Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí! 82. Chicanx also no longer referenced “American” or
US identities (p. 85).
20. UMAS Central Newsletter no. 1, 5 May 1968. Also quoted in C. Muñoz,
83.
21. E. Vasquez, “Preface,” Enriqueta Vasquez, ed. Oropeza and Espinoza, loc
77 of 3068.
22. García, Chicanismo, 58. Another example, Regeneración, initially edited
by Francisca Flores, was specifically modeled “after the famous [Flores
Magón brothers’] syndicalist, anarchist newspaper of the Mexican
Revolution,” even if driven by a more varied ideology (107). The farm-
workers served as an important model in their production of newsletters
that powerfully combined text and visual materials.
23. García, Chicanismo, 59.
24. Wimbush, Magic, 19.
25. Blackwell, 134.
26. Blackwell, 135.
27. Blackwell, 141. She goes on to discuss the magazines and pamphlets
that most often were central to Chicana Studies syllabi in 1971–1974,
including works from Regeneración and Encuentro Femenil. See
Blackwell, 197.
28. Blackwell, 155, 157.
29. Blackwell, 158.
30. See Bebout, Mythohistorical Interventions.
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 163

31. Most of these terms are taken from García, Chicanismo, 87, where he
points out that movement politics sought to make “practical meaning”
out of these otherwise “empty militant words,” but together “they repre-
sented a strategy for empowerment.”
32. These are certainly not the only texts that were scripturally meaningful dur-
ing or after the movement. For instance, Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied
America: A History of Chicanos (first published in 1972 but since edited and
republished several times) was mentioned by multiple interlocutors as a cru-
cial text. García discusses his own conversion experience of sorts, the way
that reading Occupied America, and coming to think through the frame-
work of “internal colonialism,” transformed his view of the USA and of
“Chicano history” (García, Chicanismo, 51). An anonymous reviewer also
reminded me of the import of Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima
(1972), which has significant themes dealing with the intertwining of gen-
der, land, and spiritual power. Chicanxs frequently engage other texts as
scriptural, texts from outside the movement era, texts such as the Nican
Mopohua (one of the seventeenth-century accounts of the Guadalupan
apparition), José Vasconcelos’s La Raza Cósmica (1925), or Gloria
Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987).
33. García, Chicanismo, 34.
34. García, Chicanismo, 36.
35. Bebout, 56. Antonio Esquibel, “Introduction,” in Message to Aztlán,
xxiv–xxv. While Gonzales’s best-known writing is the poem I Am Joaquín,
Esquibel describes the import of his edited volume because “It proves that
Corky Gonzales was not a ‘one-piece author’” (xxv). This observation
ironically demonstrates how particularly important the one poem, I Am
Joaquín, became.
36. Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí! 72.
37. Some of these figures are cited multiple times. He also mentions non-
heroic figures, “Cortez/the despot,” “despots Díaz/and Huerta.” Hence,
the “I” of the poem emphasizes the “non-innocent” and mixed history of
ethnic Mexicans in the USA.  See Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, “I Am
Joaquín,” in Message to Aztlán, 17, 22.
38. Gonzales, “Joaquín,” 18.
39. Gonzales, “Joaquín,” 16, 29.
40. C. Muñoz, 76.
41. C. Muñoz, 76.
42. De Necochea critiques the poem even while recognizing its power as
scripture precisely because of what it articulated: “At the time they [the
Chicanx students] are just almost hungry for ideas. That’s why Corky
Gonzalez’s poem was such a powerful influence at the time. Was it a great
poem? Of course not…but at the time that was a very powerful state-
ment.” He recognizes the limitations of the poem, but he also emphasizes
164 J.M. HIDALGO

the work it did in transforming the myths and the scripts that surround
people. Interview with De Necochea.
43. García, Chicanismo, 73.
44. Beltrán, 36.
45. Bebout, 130.
46. Leticia Hernández, “Hijas de Cuauhtémoc (1971),” in Chicana Feminist
Thought, ed. García, 141.
47. Anzaldúa, 63.
48. Anzaldúa, 59.
49. Anzaldúa, 87.
50. Soldatenko describes it as “an extension of the first national Chicano
youth conference.” Soldatenko, 28.
51. NietoGomez, e-mail, May 6, 2014.
52. C.  Muñoz, 95. While some written sources refer to the group as the
CCHE from before the conference, here I am favoring the description
given to me by Anna NietoGomez, a Santa Barbara Conference steering
committee member. Interview with NietoGomez.
53. See both the “Steering Committee” list, El Plan de Santa Barbara, 82–83;
and C. Muñoz, 161.
54. C. Muñoz, 162. Also see Acuña, Making, 59–60.
55. García, Chicanismo, 56; and C. Muñoz, 163.
56. C. Muñoz, 165.
57. Interview with De Necochea.
58. NietoGomez, email, 18 September 2015.
59. Interview with Rubén.
60. Examining the contemporary MEChA website, I found that its “About
Us” page cites historical origins at the Denver Youth Conference, but it
quotes from El Plan de Santa Barbara. See http://www.nationalmecha.
org/about.html; accessed 02/12/14.
61. Acuña argues that one can easily read Juan Gómez-Quiñones’s impact in
the document’s larger shaping. Acuña, Making, 60, 62.
62. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 9.
63. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 11.
64. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 9.
65. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 9.
66. Interview with Ramón.
67. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 77.
68. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 10. Also see p. 26 for discussion of how private
universities have an even greater responsibility to recruit and admit a plu-
rality of Chicanx students.
69. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 13.
70. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 30.
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 165

71. Soldatenko, 5.
72. Bebout, 58–59.
73. C. Muñoz, 162; he was quoting from his own files.
74. Interview with Ramón.
75. For instance, this comment from Raul Ruiz, a California Raza Unida Party
candidate, is instructive: “The tragedy is not that our people suffer so
much in this society, but rather that they cannot effectively interpret that
oppression.” Raul Ruiz, “El Partido de la Raza Unida,” La Raza 1, no. 7
(1972): 6. According to García, it was precisely this issue that made the
combination of race and class interpretive loci. See García, Chicanismo,
68–85, especially p. 76.
76. Lint Sagarena, 145.
77. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 29.
78. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 29.
79. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 40.
80. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 40.
81. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 78.
82. Soldatenko, 21.
83. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 20.
84. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 36.
85. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 59.
86. “And we understand that our history actually has not been studied, per-
haps because it is not written. Precisely because the history of the indig-
enous has never been written. It was made easier, for the current
educational system, to eliminate us altogether.” E. Vasquez, “La Historia
del Mestizo,” loc 1105 of 3068, (March 30, 1971).
87. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 22.
88. This sort of movement consolidation of multiple groups working in a
shared sphere was not restricted to California college student organiza-
tions. For instance, multiple theater groups merged into “Teatros
Nacionales de Aztlán” in 1970 (C. Muñoz, 86). This choice of Aztlán as
unifying territorial marker and its lingering academic power of Aztlán can
be seen in the way that it became and remains the moniker for one of the
most important journals in the broader academic field of Chicanx Studies.
89. C. Muñoz, 73–74.
90. C. Muñoz, 95. Literally translated, Mecha also meant “‘match’ or ‘match-
stick.’ Thus in the minds of Mexican American student activists the obvi-
ous symbol was ‘fire,’ with all its connotations of militancy” (C. Muñoz,
96).
91. C. Muñoz, 118.
92. M.E. Valle, 39.
93. Interview with Rubén.
166 J.M. HIDALGO

94. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 56.

95. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 61.
96. Mariscal, 59. This facet of the text is found again at the end of El Plan de
Santa Barbara’s section dealing with campus organizing and MEChA. We
also find “Of the community, for the community. Por la Raza habla el
espiritu” (El Plan de Santa Barbara, 61) instead of the US Constitution’s
“of the people, by the people, for the people.” El Plan de Santa Barbara
does not reference a generic people but invokes their specific “commu-
nity” and particular “spirit” that can speak for and to that community of
people.
97. For instance, see Gutjahr’s discussion of the import of the materiality of
the Bible as part of how it is and has been read in the USA, going back to
George Washington’s presidential inauguration Bible. Gutjahr, 39–88.
98. C. Muñoz, 164.
99. Soldatenko, 32.
100. “While [El Plan de Santa Barbara] furnished a political conception of
using the academy in the battle for self-determination, it was weak in pro-
viding an intellectual vision. [El Plan de Santa Barbara] did not provide
an adequate intellectual response to understanding Mexican American
oppression” (Soldatenko, 39).
101. Carlos F.  Ortega, “Introduction: Chicano Studies as a Discipline,” in
Chicano Studies, ed. Dennis J. Bixler-Marquez, et al., ix.
102. NietoGomez emphasizes that the conference was diverse with “people
from twenty-three California college and universities, and eleven commu-
nity organizations,” and she describes the profusion of discussion and dis-
agreement that pervaded day-time workshop and evening parties and
bonding sessions, a sort of profusion that could not be encapsulated in the
form of El Plan: “I know a lot of people said we did a lot of partying, but
we did partying at night. But even the partying at night was talking, plan-
ning, discussing, sharing ideas, disagreeing with ideas, talking about exist-
ing experiences with those who already had Chicano Studies and what was
the feedback from the students. What was the feedback from the parents?
How we hadn’t put the community involved there in all, but that was our
value. How do we do that? It was a think tank and we were just talking,
talking all the time about all of this and people listening to ideas and stuff.
And we were forming bonds and friendships that came to last for a very
long time.” For NietoGomez, the building of community that came out
of discussing and debating diverse ideas disappears from the smoothed
document of El Plan de Santa Barbara: “I don’t believe it accurately
reflects the diverse thinking and visions at the conference. El Plan of Santa
Barbara was not a blue print for Chicano Studies.” Interview with
NietoGomez, email May 1, 2014, and email September 18, 2015.
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 167

103. NietoGomez, email, September 18, 2015.

104. NietoGomez, email, September 18, 2015.
105. NietoGomez, email, May 6, 2014. Acuña agrees in his own narrative of
The Making of Chicana/o Studies.
106. NietoGomez, email, September18, 2015.
107. As NietoGomez argues, one should not treat El Plan de Santa Barbara
as particularly special for a variety of reasons: “El Plan de Santa Barbara
was not a blue print for Chicano Studies for many reasons. First, it was
one of the first Chicano Studies conferences and should therefore be
considered the first stage in the development of the philosophy and
objectives of Chicano Studies. Second, it was one of the first organized
discussions but it was not the last to occur on the subject. The succeed-
ing Chicano Studies conferences that followed perhaps had a more sig-
nificant impact on the direction and development of Chicano Studies
because those conferences reflected ideas that came from a broader
group of people, and they also reflected the growth in the development
of the thinking among faculty and students that came from more experi-
ence, evaluation and feedback from faculty, students and community.”
Additionally, she points out that while student voices were strongest at
the Santa Barbara conference (and that may be part of why it remains so
powerful in broader memory), later conferences with stronger faculty
and administrative voices may have had a more lingering effect: “[Santa
Barbara was] perhaps the last Chicano Studies conferences controlled
and directed by Chicano college students. There was a shift in power
relationships between students and faculty that came as a result of the
institutionalization of Chicano Studies and this shift may have had a sig-
nificant impact in changing the original mission and vision of Chicano
studies.” NietoGomez, email, May 6, 2014.
108. Soldatenko, 42.
109. For instance, as Enriqueta Vasquez observed, previous US legal writings
had sought to transform Mexican Americans as a people by taking their
land and reimagining who they were: “Thus, what was Mexico what is the
Southwest then and now—became part of the U.S.A. With a stroke of the
pen the U.S. stole the Southwest from Mexico [via the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo…. For that stroke of the pen cannot drain the Indian blood from
within us, whether it be just a drop or whether it be pure. That stroke of
the pen cannot erase our blood.” See E. Vasquez, “The 16th of September,”
loc 978 of 3068, (September 16, 1970).
110. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 51.
111. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 56.
112. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 61. At some level they seemed concerned that
communal and educational commitments informed why students went to
168 J.M. HIDALGO

work in the barrio: “If it is merely a cathartic experience to work among

the unfortunate in the Barrio—stay out” (El Plan de Santa Barbara, 61).
113. This reflection shares certain resonance with Latinx theological emphases
on conjunto theology, on the ways that theology should “belong to the
community.” González, Out of, 81.
114. C. Muñoz, 97–98.
115. Interview with De Necochea.
116. García, Chicanismo, 83.
117. Aparicio, 355–356.
118. Bebout, 53–54.
119. Watts, “Three Dimensions,” 141–142.
120. Bebout, 47–48.
121. Many of the central texts of the Chicanx movement are texts of “reading
with” rather than as “private” texts. See discussion in Ruiz, Readings, 39.
122. Pérez-Torres, Movement, 70.
123. Bebout, 56.
124. Bebout, 56.
125. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 80. A black and white PDF is available via the
national MEChA website: http://www.nationalmecha.org/documents/
EPSB.pdf. Accessed 02/06/14. I also looked at one of Fernando De
Necochea’s copies during our interview.
126. NietoGomez, email, September 18, 2015.
127. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 56.
128. García, 52.
129. Interview with Elena.
130. Blackwell, 111.
131. Blackwell, 122.
132. Lint Sagarena, 148.
133. M.E. Valle, 43.
134. De León and Griswold del Castillo, 165.
135. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 54.
136. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 55.
137. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 57.
138. E. Chávez, Raza, 116.
139. Beltrán, 33.
140. C. Muñoz, 102.
141. M.E. Valle, 45. A decline in certain forms of student activism was already
quite visible by 1971 as student organizations shifted to more of a career
focus. See C. Muñoz, 104.
142. M.E. Valle, 46.
143. Citing the critique from the National Coalition to Free Los Tres, for
instance, C.  Muñoz argues that Chicanismo may have been a powerful
 “THE SPIRIT WILL SPEAK FOR MY PEOPLE”: EL PLAN DE SANTA BARBARA ... 169

rubric of identification, but it did not really provide substantive political

practices and orientations. See C. Muñoz, 112–115, and quotation of the
Committee on p. 115 excerpted from Sin Cadenas, vol. 2, no. 1 (1975):
5–6.
144. Soldatenko, 1–2, 104. To this narrative on the connection between
Chicanx movement aspirations, the power of writing, and the birth of
university-based Chicanx Studies programs and departments, Soldatenko
would raise a cautionary flag about the limitations of the movement-nor-
mative myth of origins that pervades much Chicanx Studies scholarship.
The normative mythohistorical tale about Chicanx Studies origins tends to
present Chicanx Studies as an extension of the Chicanx movement, as
driven by political aspirations for training future activists. For Soldatenko,
such a Chicanx Studies narrative “homogenizes” activists in the move-
ment and activists who fought for Chicanx Studies when they were some-
times distinct populations. What they have in common, in his view, is their
“utopian imaginary” in that they sought space for an alternative world and
construction of knowledge. Soldatenko, 14–16.
145. Soldatenko, 9.
146. Soldatenko, 39. Chicanx Studies is thus distinct from Latinx or Latinx and
Latin American Studies programs, though many of those also exist in the
Southwest.
147. García, “Juncture,” 181.
148. García, “Juncture,” 184.
149. García, “Juncture,” 187.
150. García, “Juncture,” 196. The language of “return” can sound nostalgic,
and certainly García’s critique of younger scholars reads nostalgically.
García does not advocate a literalist return as some might think. Rather,
García looked for that which “was useful from the Movement agenda in
order to refunction it for the present” (Mariscal, 49). However, Blackwell
contends that García here traces a “linear” temporality reaching from El
Plan de Santa Barbara to the challenges of the (1990s) present (see dis-
cussion in Blackwell, 33).
 CHAPTER 5

“Power and Dominance, Loyalty

and Conformity”: Family, Gender, Sexuality,
and Utopian Scripturalization

If El Plan de Santa Barbara does mandate the community as the higher

authority that is imagined and negotiated relationally with the text, then
what happens when members of the community diverge sharply over
what they need? The years of Anna NietoGomez’s involvement with the
Chicanx movement—first as a student and as an activist, and then as a
scholar—align with the peak of the classical movement era, ranging from
1967 to 1976. In some ways, her family’s background provides a comple-
ment to the other California Chicanx stories I have shared in this book.
She was born in California to a family of mixed migration history, with
the legacies of the Mexican Revolution looming large in her family stories.
Yet, more than almost anyone I interviewed, she affirmed a strong sense
of connection to the USA rather than Mexico, and she contextualized
her Chicana identity and Aztlán in that perspective. She understood “that
one reason why we as Indians left Mexico was because we had no rights,”
so she did not see her Chicana identity or Aztlán as connecting her to
Mexico. Instead, “to me Aztlán meant we were indigenous to this land.
Whether we’re here one generation, two generations, three generations,
four, we belong here. …whenever I heard ‘Chicano’ as I was growing up,
it was soy Chicano, soy de aquí, meaning not only that we’re from here but
this is our land. We are indigenous. We are connected. It’s almost like our
roots, physically, our roots, our seeds are here. But that’s what it meant
to me.”1 For her, Aztlán as place and Chicana as identity were about an

© The Author(s) 2016 171

J.M. Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59214-9_5
172 J.M. HIDALGO

indigenizing ethnic claim to belonging in this place, but she also quickly
realized that for many others, those same terms were taken differently.
NietoGomez spoke consistently of the tensions of difference in Chicanx
perspectives. In our conversation together, I was struck by the moment
when “place” came up as a specific problem. NietoGomez referenced the
discomfort of being “put in [her] place” when reminiscing about the pain-
ful parts of her experiences in the movement. When I spoke to her in
May 2014, she described the week before when she had gone to an event
and ran into another veteran Chicanx activist who told her she was being
rude when she asked someone else if they wanted the first seat. “That’s
what I used to get all the time, putting me in my place. And I used to feel
like maybe my mother hadn’t raised me right.… It would always create
self-doubt.” Those experiences of feeling like her place was restricted and
denigrated in the movement, that she was somehow out of place in move-
ment gatherings, shape her memories of the era, even if at other times she
vividly described her active participation in conferences or fasting as part
of Católicos por la Raza’s efforts “to shame the Church to come back to
its calling.” Even as she participated in the movement, she struggled with
the feelings of distance that movement discourses cultivated, the way that
she came to be unsettled in her own sense of self.
Within some of the recent histories that describe the movement era,
NietoGomez comes across as both a powerful and a divisive figure, in
that different activists remember her strongly and quite distinctly, some-
times as a leading thinker and feminist and other times as a person who
divided activists, especially women. During the era she was well pub-
lished as a Chicana feminist thinker and critic of sexism in the movement.
NietoGomez’s story and persona divulge how the plurality of activists
could find themselves more divergent than unified; the “community” that
El Plan de Santa Barbara posits as an authority to which the text belonged
was never a community that offered up only one perspective; there was
no one spirit that spoke singularly for the people. Instead, the Chicanx
community and the interpreters of key movement texts offer a model of
struggle, and sometimes those struggles pushed individuals to the periph-
ery. NietoGomez was one such person, whose experiences often thrust her
to communal peripheries.
In a search for a better place, she had left the Catholic Church, though
she still considered her family’s spirituality and faith in God important to
her; likewise, she felt freer when she left the movement. In her recollec-
tion of the late 1970s, the years after she was denied tenure in Northridge,
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 173

California, and left movement activism behind her, she felt that the cultural
nationalists had traded in “due process” and “freedom of speech” and only
once she departed movement circles—even if she remained friends with
particular activists—did she feel “accepted as a woman, as a single par-
ent. It wasn’t a bed of roses, but really I had crossed over to the freedom
land. This was a contradiction I did not understand. Why was it that social
justice movement organizations functioned more like conservative fun-
damentalists? Chicano organizations were governed by power and domi-
nance, loyalty and conformity to the leader and his ideology. Disrespect,
abuse and exploitation were tolerated because it was for the ‘common
good’ of the community to protect the movement leaders and their fol-
lowers.… Chicano leadership retaliated against anyone who complained of
gender harassment and discrimination.”2 NietoGomez compares that with
her experience working “for civil rights governmental agencies” where
investigation and due process followed charges of “gender harassment and
discrimination.”3 While many feminists tried to transform spaces within
the Chicanx movement, that NietoGomez struggled with place as much,
if not more, in relationship to the movement as she did with larger US
social structures speaks to the ways that minoritized movements, in creat-
ing scriptural centers, can also create their own peripheries with their own
coercive and fraught infrapolitics.4
During the late twentieth century, feminist and queer critics have often
been cast as at the margins of or even as problems for communities, includ-
ing minoritized communities, and their scriptures. How then have femi-
nist and queer critics interpreted these texts? How have they responded to
those who challenge their interpretive authority? Why do they continue to
interpret them at all? What do feminist and queer critiques of Aztlán and
Revelation, when read comparatively, depict about the ongoing power of
scriptures even when those scriptures seem to unsettle rather than comfort
these critics? Scriptures can and have been used in violent and restric-
tive ways even within and among minoritized populations who may have
initially engaged scripturalization as a mode for creating their own “cen-
ters” away from dominantized control. The creation of such “centers,”
even if undertaken in ways that frustrate a neat center/periphery binary,
seems never to completely destroy such a binary, and those who adhere
to scripturalized “centers” often turn to rhetorics of peripheralization and
exclusion that subjugate others within a minoritized community. More’s
Utopia was an island, if in part because utopian visions, sometimes for
their own good, seek to control their relationship with the world beyond
174 J.M. HIDALGO

the island’s borders; so, too, are scriptures, especially Christian scriptures,
imagined to have closed and restrictive boundaries. Utopian impulses
often drive necessary exclusions, but they also often yield porous and con-
tested boundaries. Dominating desires for exclusions and control were
never total; groups and individuals have always found alternative modes
for scripturalizing.
Feminist and queer critics, by engaging the scriptures that seemingly
peripheralize them, actually point to how scriptures, especially apocalyptic
and utopian ones, work as loci for contesting and remaking social roles
and scriptural imaginaries. By putting feminist and queer critics from dif-
ferent interpretive communities into comparative conversation, I show
how scriptures persist as loci of utopian seeking and belonging, even for
those who may be deemed as most critical and most peripheral. I sug-
gest that feminist and queer critics are not “marginal” citizens but among
the active participants in fields of scripturalization. The rhetorics that cast
them at the margins reveal something else about how scripturalization
works. Because I am focusing on critics, scholarly voices compose the
majority of the data set I use below; I am looking at how and why they
interpret as they do. While their different intersectional locations often
demanded divergent strategies that cannot be collapsed into each other,
Chicana feminist and queer critics as well as many feminist, womanist, and
queer critical approaches to Revelation also demonstrate something about
the shared power of scripturalization, even when it manifests distinctly in
divergent contexts. For many critics, of both the Chicanx movement and
Revelation, ambivalence and struggle become crucial methods for circum-
venting practices of domination that sometimes emanate from the con-
struction of textual centers.

RECONQUEST AND ALTER-IMPERIAL MIMICRY:

SCRIPTURALIZATION, WOMEN, AND THE FAMILY
Because utopian visions, as social dreams, are necessarily concerned with
social structures, families are almost always part of these social visions.
Familial, household, and kinship metaphors appear as key lodestones for
imagining communal interaction and the relationality between peoples and
their texts. As particularly apocalyptic utopian texts, Revelation, El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán, and El Plan de Santa Barbara invoke rhetorics of
crisis and reconquest in concert, embedding communal kinship metaphors
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 175

within a frequently dualistic frame that categorizes familial and household

imaginaries as problematic frameworks within dominantized regimes. Yet,
familial and household imaginaries are also redeployed as loci of strategic,
minoritized communal survival and resistance. Household metaphors and
their associated hierarchies in particular become a terrain for both impe-
rial mimicry and reconquest in relationship to texts and among prominent
interpreters; when these household relations manifest interlocking hierar-
chies of power, or what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has dubbed “kyriar-
chy,” these metaphors become a central target of contestation and critique
for feminist and queer critics who work to remake their place within and in
relationship to these scriptures and their associated hierarchal metaphors
of engagement.5
Historically, settler colonists in the Americas have used Revelation’s
alter-imperial imaginary in relationship to scripting violent imperial familial
structures. For example, Franciscan mission projects in the New World—
projects that have drawn a lot of attention because of the recent canoniza-
tion of mission father Junípero Serra—employed Revelation among other
sources in imagining Christian family. Not only did Franciscans seek to
build the new Jerusalem into the architectural structure and layout of the
missions, but these missions were also spaces in which Franciscans scripted
what they considered to be more ideal gender and sexual norms, espe-
cially as they sought to imagine and remake the ways that family could
be housed and understood within mission spaces. Sometimes these norms
came from a desire to protect indigenous populations from the ravages
of military violence, especially the sexual violence that Spanish soldiers
inflicted on native women;6 at other times, missionary violence stemmed
from a quest to eliminate practices of abortion, birth control, and non-
monogamous and non-heteronormative sexualities, as also bound up with
teaching native Californians how to be Spanish subjects through specific
constructions of “men” and “women.”
The pattern of reducción mission settlement was chosen in part to
encourage “Christian” families with monogamous units and Spanish “sex-
ual ideals” among native Californian populations.7 Such colonial domina-
tion rests upon a logic of heteropatriarchy that envisions a gender binary
system where men dominate women; thus, communities that have gender
and sexual systems not matching this cis-heteropatriarchal system are tar-
geted for transformation so as to enable settler colonial domination.8 This
intertwining of imperial mimicry and restrictive familial construction has
a long history in interpretations of Revelation, and thus it is unsurprising
176 J.M. HIDALGO

that some of these concerns with family in the Chicanx movement resem-
ble critiques of the imagination of the familial in Revelation even though
the use of the familial in Revelation is quite distinct from familia in
Chicanx movement texts.
While one cannot find that Franciscan approaches to gender and sexu-
ality come directly from the text of Revelation, Revelation can provoke
readers to think about gender and sexuality as important terrains in which
a cosmic struggle can be described and redefined. Gendered visions and
sexual metaphors pass as signs within this cosmic struggle in ways that may
partially account for their import in places like the California missions.
Gender and sexuality are frequent rhetorical tropes through which the text
of Revelation reflects upon and refracts power. Feminine imagery is often
connected with sexuality, with metaphors of “fornication” being used to
describe and denigrate “idolatry” and general participation in practices
of Roman domination, participation in practices ranging from eating idol
meat to economic trade. Revelation’s use of fornication in order to describe
distasteful religious practices draws upon a long tradition of Hebrew bibli-
cal imagery.9 At the same time, this rhetoric also takes on additional levels
of signification when related to Roman imperial propaganda. Gender and
sexuality can be approached as rhetorical methods, akin to other symbolic
logics in Revelation. These symbolic logics have multivalent meanings,
and these plural meanings can lead to resistant, imaginative, as well as
terrifying interpretations that have had horrific impacts on lived women’s
experiences.
Familial rhetoric was an important facet of constructing and negotiat-
ing gender roles and relations under the Roman Empire more broadly;
moreover, familial rhetoric could be a way of thinking about and imagin-
ing other facets of Roman imperial propaganda. For instance, postcolonial
biblical scholar Christopher A.  Frilingos draws attention to the familial
imaginations portrayed in the Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan
Peace) frieze, which was commissioned in 13 BCE to honor the Emperor
Augustus in Rome. As a pedagogical tool, the scenes depicted different
facets of Roman rule. Augustus was portrayed as a father of a Roman
Empire whose “subjects” were all “children.”10 Thus, the familial meta-
phor did more than render or inscribe the roles of smaller family unit
members; the familial metaphor also served as a representation of the
state, mutually reinforcing the expectations of hierarchy in both.
Roman imperial rhetoric under the Augustan reforms legislated what
we might term “family values” by encouraging motherhood, punishing
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 177

adultery, and scripting appropriate relationships between husbands and

wives, fathers and children, and elite patriarchs and their enslaved house-
hold members. Such familial representations, whether in rhetoric or in
visual representation, though using women, were generally focused on
elite male “public self-presentation.” By representing elite men as masters
of their household, of their own sexual desires, and of “self-control,” elite
men were portrayed as reputable figures.11 The scripting of women’s roles
here may have impacted daily life, but women’s roles were less important
than the shoring up of imperial masculinities as built around imagina-
tions of self-control. Familial representation among Roman imperial elites
resonates with familial rhetorics and metaphors in Revelation, especially
in terms of the portrayals of God, the Lamb, women, and “slaves.” The
new Jerusalem is a city with two men at its center surrounded by worship-
ping slaves. At one level, then, the new Jerusalem is a Roman imperial
household imagination cosmically drawn, but in addition, the city of the
new Jerusalem is itself portrayed in some ways as a “bride,” suggesting the
inauguration of a new familial connection as part of communal interaction
with the divine in and through the text. On another level, though, by iden-
tifying almost everyone except God and the Lamb as slaves, Revelation
denies masculine self-control to any human. In the ancient world, elite
patriarchal masculinity depends on the strength of control that an elite
male exercises over household members; in the new Jerusalem, then, God
may be read as this elite male.
If one takes the Apocalypse to be, on some level, unveiling a new scrip-
tural relationship, a transposition of what had been a sacred physical cen-
ter into a textual one, then what to make of how such a transposition
happens partially through wedding imagery? Revelation metaphorically
creates a new familial bond and establishes familial rhetoric as part and
parcel of scripturalization. Indeed, as a term, apocalypse (ἀποκάλυψις) is
close to the verb ἀνακαλύπτω, the term for unveiling a bride, and thus a
wedding might be a crucial metaphor for understanding the aspirations of
Revelation as a critical unveiling.12 The new Jerusalem appears as a bride
after the depiction of Babylon/Rome’s fall, which leads directly into the
wedding supper of the Lamb (19:9). This image of the city-bride recurs as
a metaphor in 21:2: “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her man
[or husband].” The pronoun “her” follows the “city” because of Greek
syntactical structure, and so “she” and “her” pronouns appear throughout
the text compounding the ambiguity of whether a city or a bride is dis-
178 J.M. HIDALGO

cussed. Directly after the city is announced as a bride in 21:2, then in 21:3,
a voice comes from the throne, reminding us that this bridal image is part
of an alter-imperial wedding.
Revelation’s matrimonial household metaphors do not necessarily
require interpreters to map a cis-heteronormative patriarchal relationship
onto the community created in, through, and around the text. Marriage
and familial metaphors can connote an important relationality that may
defy strict hierarchalization. A wedding with a promise of new marriage
may be another metaphor for newness, restoration, and renewal as compo-
nents of polytemporality.13 The bridal imagery may signal the promise of
“a new generation,” a new family, and a new communal creation.14 At the
same time, it may connote “fidelity and fruitfulness” in an equalizing vein,
a fidelity that God bears toward the bride, thus defying any sense that the
burden of fidelity rests only on a dominated community.15 Revelation can
be seen as consonant with other prophetic portrayals of loving marriage
between God and community; for instance, the imagery of Second Isaiah
(Isaiah 54, for instance, specifically portrays Jerusalem with many paral-
lels to Revelation 21) where Israel is wife to God renders a loving marital
relationship between God and the community.16
To render a city full of people as also a bride may be taken as gender
playful and not necessarily strictly reinforcing of gender hierarchies; this
bride may be coterminous with the worshipping slaves within the city’s
garden, further exasperating neat hierarchal divisions. Prior to Revelation,
perhaps some communities wrestled with the implications for Jewish mas-
culinity in the ancient world when they participated in a dutiful covenant,
sometimes metaphorically invoked as marriage to a “masculine God.”17
The bride’s linen adornments are associated with “the righteousness of the
saints” in 19:8. Equating the bride with the city, biblical critic Dale Martin
argues that the city is composed of the twelve apostles (21:14) “and the
twelve tribes of the sons [emphasis his] of Israel” (21:12). Martin still finds
“desire and the erotic” to be present in the new Jerusalem, but perhaps
the marriage does not rely on heteronormative readings of the relation-
ship. Revelation’s city-bride may represent “a certain erotic of homosocial
male bonding.”18 The marriage is ultimately a marriage between God and
a bride consisting of male bodies in both the clothing and the physical
body of the new Jerusalem.19
Even when such a reading can press beyond cis-heteronormative read-
ings of a limited marriage metaphor, such a reading can also then pose a
problem for the role of female bodies within the imagined new Jerusalem
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 179

community. For instance, while biblical scholar Tina Pippin likewise per-
ceives this ending marriage as gender bending with the possibility of male
consorts made into a female bride for God, she does not find such an
imagination to be especially liberative.20 Pippin describes Revelation as
a “phallocentric text,”21 wherein the imagery of women in Revelation,
specifically the rival prophet dubbed “Jezebel” (Revelation 3), the Woman
Clothed with the Sun (Revelation 12), Babylon (Revelation 17–19), and
the new Jerusalem are all irredeemably negative. Aside from these images,
women are mostly absent in Revelation, and when they are mentioned
in 14:4, it is to exhort the faithful (presumably male) to stay away from
women’s bodies for fear of defiling themselves.22 So, Pippin asks, is there
any place for women in this text or the community that would make its
new Jerusalem a center? This question matters inasmuch as communities
continue to turn to Revelation’s utopian vision as a locus for communal
imagination and negotiation. Because the new Jerusalem is a no place
that disembodies flesh-and-blood women and queer bodies, Pippin que-
ries whether actual bodies could ever justly live with and in relationship to
such a scriptural imagination.23
In both positive and negative readings of this metaphorical marriage
in Revelation, interpreters presume that communal investments, people
managing relationships to each other, are an integral facet and conse-
quence of biblical interpretation. For many interpreters, the vision of the
bride is connected to ideas of contractual and covenantal promises; such a
contractual statement appears in 21:3, a statement that echoes an ancient
near Eastern marriage contract: “God will dwell with them, and they will
be God’s peoples.”24 The idea of this marriage as a covenantal promise,
as depicted in the promise of God’s dwelling, connects to texts from the
Hebrew Bible such as Ezekiel 37:37, Zechariah 2:10–11, and Leviticus
26:11–12.25 One might read this scene of Revelation, and its later deploy-
ment as scripture, as encoding a contractual marriage among the com-
munity who engages this text and between this community and God. This
scripting of community as metaphorical kinship made in and through this
text may speak to the potent ways that scripturalization becomes entan-
gled with fictive and real families and households.
Marriage representations, coming out of the ancient world, should
be contextualized within larger household metaphors. In Vincent
L.  Wimbush’s discussion of British practices of scripturalization and
Olaudah Equiano’s play with notions of scripture and scriptural authority,
he describes the British relationship to scripture as one of “enslavement,”
180 J.M. HIDALGO

provocatively subtitling his book, Scripturalization as Slavery. Of particu-

lar concern are the power dynamics that are created when people position
themselves as subservient to a set of texts. Slaves, children, and women
were all part of ancient household structures and metaphors as found in
Revelation and other biblical material. Therefore, marriage might join slav-
ery as a metaphor for thinking about scripturalization. Whether enslave-
ment or marriage, in an ancient Roman context, both metaphors for
scripturalization are intertwined within the hierarchies of the household.
In the Chicanx movement’s efforts to engage scripturalization, they could
not completely distance themselves from the freighted power valences
of ancient household metaphors; however, in Chicanx efforts to valorize
openly the relationship between the community and texts, they did try to
emphasize the “spirit” of the larger community as the source of authority.
Their imagination of scripturalizing relationality perhaps plays with tropes
of Israelite covenantal uses as well as early modern social contract theory.
Household rhetorics persist from the ancient world into these more con-
temporary texts and practices, even if the relationality within them does
not valence in the same hierarchal chains as the ancient metaphors.
Movement discourses of familia should be contextualized as a practice
similar to scripturalization in that Chicanx families had been targeted and
critiqued in broader US imaginations. Mobilizing a Chicanx approach to
family, for all its limits, should also be seen as an attempt to reimagine the
possibilities for Chicanx “family” as both facet of life and metaphor of
community in the context of broader cultural denigration of Chicanx fami-
lies.26 Yet, this trope of family can participate in imperial mimicry. Scholars,
such as historian Antonia I. Castañeda and religion critic George E. Tinker,
have observed that the Spanish family model was a major tool of social and
spiritual conquest of the Americas, especially in the California missions.27
Spanish imperialist culture had used the “conjugal family” in territorial
colonization since the Reconquista.28 Critic Alicia Gaspar de Alba argues
that the Spanish rhetorical use of a reconquest relationship to land was
deeply intertwined with a settler-colonial trope of familia in the Americas:

As a metaphor for the brown-skinned cosmic race forcefully forged during the
Spanish conquest of the so-called New World, the trope of ‘familia’ functions
as both figurative and literal reminder of conquest, hybridity, and cultural
survival. Thus, familia (from the Latin word famulus, which means a gath-
ering of slaves) encompasses each Chicano’s own immediate and extended
relations, as well as all Mexican-descended peoples who are engaged in the
struggle for liberty, continuity, and dignity in the face of colonization.29
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 181

From Spanish imperial rule and into Chicanx rhetoric, the fictive commu-
nal kinship of family becomes grounded in notions of racial blood kinship
as a facet of nationalist construction.
El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and other Chicanx nationalist literature
often invoked familia as the core metaphor of communal imagination,
and this invocation was frequently bound with a cis-heteropatriarchal con-
struction of gender. Aztlán, motherland, and origin became intertwined
in an emphasis on women as cis-heteronormative mothers.30 A member of
Teatro Chicano, and a participant at the 1969 Denver Youth Conference,
Lydia López wryly recalls how she was generally scripted to perform a
mother: “I was always the mother of the revolution—I gave birth, depend-
ing on the audience, I’d either give birth to Che or gave birth to Zapata
or some other revolutionary.”31 López’s repeated scripted performances
of maternity demonstrate how familia naturalized and normalized rela-
tions of gender, sexuality, and race, even when relatively little was written
explicitly about these appropriate roles.
Though the gendering of home and family as women’s space might
seem to give women power as mothers of the revolution, such rhetoric
restricted possibilities for utopian reimagination of certain social roles.
Besides mandating that women be mothers to be meaningfully women,
too often familial rhetoric became a basis for subjugation rather than a
locus for transformation. Gaspar de Alba has likewise observed the con-
nection between these familial rhetorics and tensions between and among
members of the movement:

Mother who is pictured over and over again as holding the family, the house,
and thus the culture together. This imbues the mother figure with a bio-
logical mystique and a symbolic role as the beating heart of Aztlán. Any
divergence from that role, be it through a political engagement with the ide-
ology of women’s liberation, as in the case of Chicana feminists, or through
rejection of the heterosexual imperative, as in the case of Chicana lesbians,
immediately casts Chicanas who subscribe to either or both of these choices
in a suspect light.32

Discourses of ethnic betrayal could be intimated more incisively

through discourses of kinship and family wherein those who refused cis-
heteronormative family were construed as contributing to an end of uto-
pian Chicanx possibility. For instance, certain movement activists would
disparage gay Chicanxs as leading their people to “genocide” through
lack of reproduction.33 Some figures in the Chicanx movement deployed a
182 J.M. HIDALGO

fictive kinship structure that scripted restrictive gender and sexual roles
and imagined itself in relationship to cis-heteronormative reproductive
futurity. The straight time, the linearity, and the presentism of reproduc-
tive futurity, these temporalities coexisted with the movement’s interrup-
tive utopian temporality.

POLICING THE BORDERS: RHETORICS OF FIDELITY

AND BETRAYAL IN THE MOVEMENT AND REVELATION

When scriptures serve as metaphorical household contracts, concern

with fidelity to the family rises as a rhetorical trope where individuals are
exhorted to be “faithful” and “loyal” both to the communal family and
to the scriptural centers. One ramification of these interpretive tensions
surrounding El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, El Plan de Santa Barbara, and
Revelation is what scholar Angie Chabram-Dernesesian describes as a
“discourse of exclusion and betrayal.”34 Engagements of these texts often
include accusations leveled at either community insiders on the margins
or proximate outsiders to a text’s target population; scriptures become a
way of thinking about and policing the boundaries of the community and
casting out those who seem “unfaithful” and “disloyal.”
In the case of the book of Revelation, much interpretive ink attempts
to understand critiques of near communal rivals such as Jezebel, the
Nicolaitans, or the “synagogue of Satan,” discussed within the opening
letters addressed to the seven churches. Of less interpretive prominence but
still significant in the case of the new Jerusalem are the populations who
must remain outside the city gates, never to enter the city, whether “for-
nicators” or “lovers of falsehood,” and so on (22:15) or those who have
somehow altered the text (22:18–19). In English, the “faithful” can termi-
nologically refer to matters of belief, but the word can also be deployed to
describe sexual and relational fidelity. Likewise, in Revelation, fornicators
and Jezebel may call attention to those whose practice seemingly put them
in an unfaithful allegiance with Rome, but Revelation’s rhetorics also rely
on a metaphorical sense that such practitioners are “in bed” with the enemy.
In reading Revelation and trying to make sense of the traitors within,
as in the case of Jezebel, the Nicolaitans, and the synagogue of Satan,
scholars have suggested that the outsiders referenced are Jews who don’t
believe in Jesus, or, alternatively, “Pauline Christians,” those who accede
to the Jewish following of Jesus but do not follow Jewish laws, especially
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 183

dietary laws. Those reading Revelation as a critique of empire construe

such attacks as directed against imperial participation rather than the
strict bounds of what we think of as “Christian” identity: Jezebel and the
Nicolaitans have somehow acquiesced and accommodated Roman impe-
rial authority and culture. In 2:20, Jezebel, which is obviously not her real
name but a biblical allusion, is described in the following way: “Jezebel,
who calls herself a prophet and she teaches and seduces35 my slaves to act
the harlot and to eat meat offered to idols.” Jezebel is named as adulterous
in 2:22, and her punishment may include rape (“I throw her onto a bed”)
and the murder of “her children” (2:23). Not only is Jezebel an unfaithful
woman who must be gruesomely punished, but the household metaphor
also incorporates concerns over “slaves” (2:20) who may likewise be led
into (sexual) infidelity. Even though the infidelity here is metaphorical
for seeming disloyalty to God, as epitomized in the eating of idol meat,
such an act may suggest other levels of assimilation to Roman imperial
“religious” and political expectations. One might also read this rhetoric as
paranoia about protecting God’s elite, male masculinity and demonstrated
“self-control” over a household. This concern over imperial accommo-
dation, especially among uncontrolled members of the metaphorical
household, this sense that Revelation would cast out proximate others by
claiming they have assimilated too much into the world of empire and are
now a threat to God’s household, bears remarkable affinity with some of
the critiques and concerns leveled at Chicana feminists during the Chicanx
movement and within Chicanx movement literature.
Distinct from how we often think of Christian relationships to their
Bible, Chicanx movement literature, such as El Plan de Santa Barbara,
valorized a community bound through text, rather than a community
bound to text (enslaved to text). These “scriptures” behave as a sort of
marriage contract among the members of the Chicanx familia. This heter-
opatriarchal scripting of familial marriage sealed through scripture might
help to explain the prominence of rhetorics of “fidelity” and “loyalty”
within key movement texts and discourses. A concern with circumscrib-
ing the bounds of Chicanx identity—a concern with “tio tacos” and other
familia members who are somehow disloyal to the “movement”—appears
early in El Plan de Santa Barbara and pervades much of the text. For
instance, even on the same page that El Plan de Santa Barbara asserts the
inclusivity of the Chicanx community, it also articulates concern about
“Mexican-Americans” being used as a buffer and student groups being
co-opted by Anglo institutional authorities.36 Institutional commitments
184 J.M. HIDALGO

describe the need to “Keep the ‘tios’ and the reactionaries out” because
Chicanx programs at institutions should be rooted in a “commitment”
of “complete fidelity” to a larger Chicanx community.37 The text affirms
over and over again that commitment must be singular to la comunidad
chicana: “In education, as in other matters there is one loyalty—the com-
munity; one criteria—service to La Raza.”38 Thus, the institutional sec-
tion stresses the need for Chicanx community “control” and “autonomy”
before all other facets of ideal design for Chicanx Studies programs.39
These rhetorics of family—admittedly cast more broadly than husband
and wife—also became embroiled in rhetorics of betrayal.
In recalling her involvement with the Santa Barbara conference,
NietoGomez reflected upon how much more robustly diverse the voices
were at the conference than within the text itself. Though a conference
steering committee member, she was never consulted about the text’s
publication and was surprised by its tone, especially the narrowness with
which it approached Chicanx identity. She found stultifying the ways that
the text deployed rhetorics of fidelity and the ways that it marginalized
non-Spanish speakers, those who were not necessarily fluent in formal
Spanish, including herself. Recalling the conference as more of a vivid
party of ideas, she did not expect the textualized form to take such a
polemical tack.40
Not only in El Plan de Santa Barbara, but in other places, women’s and
LGBTIQ persons’ experiences of oppression and marginalization within
the Chicanx movement were further underscored rhetorically through
accusations of “divisiveness,” “sellout,” “betrayal,” and “treason,” often
coupled with a sexualized rhetorical call for “fidelity.”41 The slippage
between home and family invoked in relationship to the people of Aztlán
may also account for the fervor of the discourses of exclusion and betrayal.
In observing a relationship both between conservative, nationalist US dis-
courses and Chicanismo traditioning discourses, literature scholar Richard
T. Rodríguez notes, “in the process of defining its boundaries, the family
must necessarily exclude all who do not adhere to its traditional values
(however those might be defined).”42 This rhetoric of home and family
summons the slippery boundaries of who is inside and who is outside,
with particular concern directed at those who might claim insider status
but are really bringing in outside influences. Columnist for El Grito del
Norte, Enriqueta Vasquez published an essay “The Woman of La Raza”
during the movement era, for which people called her “Malinche” in
order to signal that she had committed treason against her “race.” Given
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 185

that “Malinche” had been Hernán Cortés’ Nahuatl interpreter and lover,
and given her import to mythic narratives about the creation of Mexican
mestizaje, implications of sexual betrayal were also implicit in the label.43
Rather than describe it as the politics of the vendida (sellout), one might
also describe this movement imagination as “chingón politics,” wherein
culture and leadership are defined and understood “uncritically” and on
cis-heteronormative and patriarchal terms. Any break with those politics is
to risk being labeled as a traitor, with sexual overtones.44
This inscription of familial unity, with feminists portrayed as sexual-
ized threats because they were inflecting dominantized “white” US cul-
ture, appeared quite early on. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, leader of the
Denver Crusade for Justice that hosted the conference in which El Plan
was written, contrasted his own cultural “authenticity” of having “worked
in the fields,” with some Chicana feminists who were at risk of “los [ing]
their Chicanisma or their womanhood and becom [ing] a frigid gringa.
So I’m for equality, but still want to see some sex in our women.”45
Denigrating white women and any potential connection to them, and por-
traying Chicana feminism as being both white and expressly non-Chicana,
Gonzales inflected the threat of outside influence as sexual while under-
scoring his status as movement insider; this rhetorical move is remarkably
comparable to Revelation’s portrayal of Jezebel even if the terms vary.46
Writing in the 1970s about “sexism in the movimiento,” NietoGomez
observed that “a Chicana feminist is discredited by associating her with
‘white’ women,” and “in organizations where cultural nationalism is
extremely strong, Chicana feminists experience intense harassment and
ostracism.”47 In other words, Chicana feminists were believed to have
betrayed the movimiento because they had acquiesced and brought in a
contaminating influence of dominantized white culture. For this betrayal,
they, and their ideas, were cast as either outside of or lastingly peripheral
to the scriptural “center” of Chicanismo. The discourse of betrayal envel-
ops the border between the peoplehood of the text and the dominating
peoplehood cast outside the text.
While NietoGomez’s absence as a contributor to the writing of El Plan
de Santa Barbara was not necessarily about issues of gender, her memories
of the movement speak to the historical ways that women’s voices were
sidelined rhetorically and practically. Beyond the ways that women’s lead-
ership was marginalized and undermined, and the ways that activists were
sexually objectified by men, “women often were not seen as the real politi-
cal subjects of the movement but as auxiliary members.”48 The tendency to
186 J.M. HIDALGO

portray feminists as traitors and sellouts made it seem as though Chicana

feminists’ real ideas and identities emerged after the movement’s heyday
and thus were not part of the leadership of the movement era proper.49
Yet, such a rendering was more polemical and took place in writing; on the
ground and in the decades before, during, and after the 1960s, women,
including Chicana feminists, actively participated in the movement.50
Even in the midst of this trope of familial betrayal, women wrote back
against it, but the trope remained powerful enough to shape women’s
discourses.51 In her exegesis of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and what it
means to be Aztlán, Enriqueta Vasquez drew on the rhetoric of familia in
ways that summoned a reproductive futurity while also demanding clear
boundaries that demarcate those inside and out: “Let us remember that
we are one big family. The Raza is a strong brotherhood. We are all broth-
ers. When your neighbor suffers, it pains you also. The Plan de Aztlán is
very clear and very strong. You are either for your brothers or you are not.
You either live in the spirit of Aztlán or you do not.”52 Here, to live “in
the spirit of Aztlán” also required complete familial fidelity and allegiance
cast through the lines of “brotherhood”; Vasquez may imagine the family
on more equal terms, but such equality hinges upon a clear demarcation
of who resides in the “spirit of Aztlán” and who does not.
The rhetoric of unified familia was so powerful that feminists could not
quite imagine themselves out of it even when critiquing movement poli-
tics.53 Against the perception that gender solidarity would undermine the
movement, NietoGomez’s defense of Chicana feminists called for unity:
“Ironically women are accused of dividing the movement when their goals
are to fight the effects of sexism and unite with everyone.”54 However it
may diverge from masculinist cultural norms, NietoGomez’s argument
still subscribed to some of the dominantized terms by underscoring that
Chicana feminism was endemic to, and not outside of, “Chicanismo.”
NietoGomez’s formulation of the division as “femenistas” vs. “loyalists”
accentuates the power of that rhetoric; those seeking to remain faithful
to the texts were “loyalists,” even if NietoGomez also emphasized “that
feminism is a very dynamic aspect of the Chicana’s heritage and not at all
foreign to her nature.”55 NietoGomez’s concern with rhetorics of “loy-
alty” exposes such rhetoric’s prominence in the heyday of the movement,
and rhetorics of fidelity and loyalty were not only used against feminists.
“Lesbian baiting” was part of attacking feminists, with a consequent fur-
ther ostracism of lesbians. LGBTIQ persons at large were too often further
marginalized as “traitors,” within dominantized movement discourses,
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 187

because their sexuality might somehow hinder reproductive familialism;

also, at times, LGBTIQ persons were rhetorically aligned, like feminists,
with Anglo culture.56
These rhetorical tropes of betrayal were so significant that feminists and
queer Chicanxs writing after the movement era often had to reimagine
those tropes and myths. For instance, Gloria Anzaldúa revises the myth of
la Malinche to highlight that “Not me sold out my people but they me.”57
Likewise, Cherríe Moraga turns the rhetoric of treason on its head when
she suggests that—besides the infiltration of COINTELPRO, the antago-
nism of the US government, and the failings of “political strategy”—part of
the weakening of the movement (she would not claim that it “ended” but
rather became more “subterranean”) can actually be traced to “heterosex-
ism” and “inbred machismo.”58 Thus, she still turns to notions of betrayal,
but Moraga suggests the traitors were the patriarchal heterosexists.
Rhetorical constructions of betrayal, especially against feminists and les-
bians, persist into more recent historiography, even among those trying
to transform how women’s movement roles are remembered: too often
Chicana feminism has been framed as coming from outside the move-
ment—from white feminism and from middle-class, rather than working-
class, concerns. For instance, historian Ignacio García, though trying to
incorporate the role of women into the historiography of the movement,
follows the same logic of casting some Chicana feminists as “flirt[ing] with
white radical feminism,” again a sexualized metaphor, rather than as also
having grown in and from the Chicanx movement.59 Even after García
affirms the import of feminist analysis, he condemns facets of Chicana
feminist and lesbian Chicana scholarship, accusing too many of them
of being removed from the “working class” because “the academy has
become the only world for some of these scholars, because they have rede-
fined the concept of community.”60 The imagined community as locus
of authority and fidelity remains paramount and the standard by which
one’s belonging should be measured, but this imagined community is rhe-
torically positioned as explicitly not feminist so that feminists are always
imagined as foreign to the community. García claims their real households
are elsewhere, outside of Chicanx community, and thus they do not quite
belong to the familia Chicana.
Certainly, concerns about fidelity and loyalty were not restricted to
imaginations of Chicanxs as scripturally bound familia, and these rhet-
orics also reveal that sometimes protecting the limits of a community’s
membership and its texts was crucial to survival. Some of the paranoia
188 J.M. HIDALGO

about fidelity certainly came from FBI and local law enforcement infiltra-
tion of movement organizations.61 The day after the East Los Angeles
Blowouts, J. Edgar Hoover contacted law enforcement around the coun-
try to suppress these movements.62 Experiences with very real, sophisti-
cated forms of infiltration, surveillance, and incarceration partially explain
why movement texts could be paranoid about loyalty. The sense that the
allegiance of authority figures must especially be tested appears in El Plan
de Santa Barbara: “In the case of Chicano administrators it should not
a priori be assumed that because he is Raza he is to be blindly trusted. If
he is not known to the membership he must be given a chance to prove
his allegiance to La Causa.”63 Indeed, El Plan de Santa Barbara positions
student organization as a prod to “remind the Chicano administrators and
faculty where their loyalty and allegiance lies.”64 However, such rhetorics
of familial commitment and loyalty were not always cast as negative cir-
cumscription. Sometimes, such limits should perform the sense of com-
munity loyalty and “mutual accountability” to each other; students were
supposed to support the administrators and faculty whose jobs have been
threatened because they supported students.65
In the context of biblical literature and the ancient world, rhetorics of
“harlotry,” infidelity, and betrayal could be broadly applied in the con-
struction and policing of group boundaries, but these rhetorics could also
be used to comment upon and motivate certain behaviors among people
ever presumed interior to the community.66 Biblical tradition includes
multiple texts that portray Jerusalem as a woman and as an “unfaithful”
wife to God; and not unlike Revelation’s Babylon, in Ezekiel 16:39–40,
Jerusalem is stripped, laid naked, mobbed, and cut to pieces. Moreover,
Jerusalem tends to be used metonymically to symbolize Israel, and thus
such portrayals presume that belonging in community remains, so one
might be able to read such rhetorics of betrayal and infidelity as being
more about contesting proper behavior than actually demarcating com-
munal membership.67 Rhetorics of infidelity may work to inscribe certain
communal behaviors; these rhetorics do more to police the communal
borders than to produce them.
Biblical scholars also wrestle with the way that a trope of sexual pro-
miscuity not only marks Jezebel and group insiders who are perceived as
too involved with a potentially external other. Sexual licentiousness, in
Revelation, is also the trope through which the Other of Rome is imag-
ined and understood. In these renderings of Babylon/Rome and the
new Jerusalem, Revelation depends upon a rhetorical contrast between
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 189

“fornication” and “wedding,” and between “harlot” and “bride,” as dif-

ferent feminine metaphors.68 These opposing gendered metaphors divulge
further questions about the meanings available in reading Revelation’s
utopia. Revelation’s contrast between harlot and bride is in fact a rec-
ognizable cliché, a topos, of two women, seen in biblical sapiential tradi-
tions such as Proverbs 1–9 as well as broader Greek and Roman literature,
such as the choice of Heracles. In these cases, two women, standing for
divergent moral choices of good and bad, attempt to “woo” a man, who
is forced to choose between them.69 The two-women topos serves as “a
framework” for explaining the choices that a subject confronts.70 Rather
than reading the cities of Babylon and the new Jerusalem as “real women,”
they are a gendered rhetorical contrast in ethics, where the audience must
choose between a good and a bad option.71 Yet, the legacy of more liter-
ally minded interpretations recognize Babylon/Rome to be some form
of prostitute, and thus the portrayal of Babylon/Rome remains gender
problematic because it relies on the prevailing assumption that sex work
is something shameful, something that can be rhetorically used to deride
a bad choice.72 While the rhetorical gendering of a choice between US
empire and Chicanismo is not as clear-cut in movement literature, the
sense of a fraught division between dominantized empire and minoritized
community of resistance persists in ways that inform the rhetorics of infi-
delity described above. Perhaps, the apocalyptic dualism of both sets of
literature, in combination with their reconquest imaginaries, adds pres-
sure on familial rhetorics, and by extension, inscriptions of gender and
sexuality.
Considerations of Babylon/Rome and the new Jerusalem as being in
a paired rhetorical relationship wherein one must choose between the
bad or the good woman, the sexually promiscuous prostitute or the vir-
ginal bride, script patriarchal masculinities and the appropriate roles for
women under their control. Interpretations of the two cities in this way
may reinscribe a sense that different women must necessarily exist in com-
petition with each other. The new Jerusalem as protected, virginal bride
may have an afterlife in later colonial constructions where enslaved colo-
nized women are sexually exploited even while a virginal bride from the
dominating culture becomes an ideal. We cannot know historically how
these metaphors mattered or did not matter to women’s lived experiences
in the communities who first engaged Revelation, but we can wonder
about the legacies of these tropes. We can wonder about the pluralities
of possible meanings in the text that get deployed. Is Babylon/Rome an
190 J.M. HIDALGO

Other, or does she stand in not just for Rome but also insiders within the
communities that circulate Revelation? Just as she is Rome desecrated by
the many supposed allies who have “grown rich from the power of her
luxury” (18:3), might Babylon’s destruction also represent the abandon-
ment of all those perceived to have compromised with empire? Babylon as
“prostitute” (πόρνη) may be read as another colonized woman instead of a
direct Roman representation. Though she has often been read as a “cour-
tesan” (ἑταιρα), πόρνη may be better rendered as “brothel slave,” which
casts her in a very different light.73 A courtesan had a restricted selection of
clients and some autonomy in choosing them.74 Might Babylon/Rome’s
portrayal as a “brothel slave” somehow connect her more closely to the
community of the new Jerusalem, a community also cast as slaves?
Chicanx movement scripts often did not mesh with what women tell
us about their experiences. Many of the criticisms leveled against textual
depictions of Aztlán have much to do with actual experiences in move-
ment events and spaces, experiences that the language world of El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán and El Plan de Santa Barbara reflect and helped
shape; yet, the language of inclusion in these texts did not necessarily
match with experiences on the ground. Women and queer Chicanxs who
became involved with the Chicanx movement often did so out of “sur-
vival” necessity, “finding a political home” amidst it; but “it was the con-
tradictions [of]… the particular ways that ‘home’ was constituted that
compelled them to address the issues of gender and sexual power” that
were not always at the center of movement discourses.75 As a tension
between rhetoric and experience, the promise of Aztlán as an inclusive
ideal and exclusionary practice could impact a person at the same time. For
instance, at the very same Denver Youth Conference that named its plan
within the utopic space of Aztlán, many women had to fight for respect
and fend off sexual advances. Women’s concerns for safety and power were
sidelined at the conference, leading to their relative absence from El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán, an absence that, for some, was painfully sealed in the
conference’s public declaration “that the Chicana woman does not want
to be liberated.”76
This supposedly unneeded liberation belied the experiences at the con-
ference. Sylvia Castillo was so excited to attend that first day in Denver:
“the most amazing experience for me was sitting in an auditorium….
There was a stage in front and the bandera Mexicana and this big banner
with the Aztec stylized icon that says ‘Somos Aztlan’ and another red and
black banner of Che Guevara’s image.”77 Under the banner proclaiming
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 191

the unity of “We are Aztlan,” sealed by a masculine revolutionary image,

Castillo struggled to participate because of the unwavering sexual advances
of another student leader. At the end of the first day, Castillo found herself
alone having to physically fend him off. Because she and her cousin then
had to call her aunt for a ride, she could not attend the second day of the
conference because her aunt was concerned for their safety.78 While this
tension between belonging to Aztlán and wanting to belong to it while
having to negotiate issues of safety and repression helped to form Chicana
organizations, Aztlán was often experienced as a cis-heteropatriarchal
imaginary.79
Certain male scholars who participated in the movement later acknowl-
edged that they had been shaped by and struggled with gender bias; politi-
cal scientist and activist Carlos Muñoz admits to having been, at the time
of the movement, influenced by “some of the negative male-centered
attitudes and behavior associated with Mexican and US patriarchal cul-
tures.”80 The very “political speech of the movement was gendered,” and
movement practices often elevated an idealized “street warrior…subaltern
form of masculinity” as the epitome of Chicanx subjectivity.81 Certain prac-
tices of “subaltern masculinity,” certain versions of patriarchally inflected
“outlaw masculinities,” were taken up by the movement as an “idealized”
process through which any reconquest of place and imagination would be
possible.82 Thinking back to how important elite male self-control was for
Roman imperial propaganda about its own power, perhaps it is unsurpris-
ing that outlaw masculinities, as describing self-controlled men cast out-
side “the system,” would be appealing foci for reconquest imaginations.
For instance, the poem I Am Joaquín depends upon the evocation of a
masculine bandit hero, raised up in memory as more than a bandit but
somehow also a resistance fighter who struggled to take back some part of
California for the conquered Mexican population. Historical and mythical
figures such as Joaquín were then linked to more contemporary “outlaw”
figures, such as the vato loco, whose power was often connected as much
to their domination of Chicanas as to their resistance to the dominating
norms of US governmental and police repression.
Yet, the Chicanx movement’s imagination of fictive kinship does not
always present itself strictly within a hierarchical family structure, and rhe-
torical tropes of the father are often less prominent than tropes of broth-
erhood; such is also the case with much early Christian literature, which
uses the rhetoric of “siblings” to describe relationships between members
of “Christian” communities. However, even El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán’s
192 J.M. HIDALGO

use of carnalismo (brotherhood) appeared to emphasize an “ideal (ized)”

Chicanx family with male-dominated hierarchical cis-heteronormative
structures.83 These imagined ideals connected to movement practices on
the ground whereby a rhetoric of carnalismo demanded a “masculinized”
solidarity.84 Elena recollects her own sense of el movimiento’s Aztlán, as
distinct from her Aztlán because movement spaces were heavily male-
centric; women were too often cast into purely supportive roles.85 Yet, to
emphasize that El Plan may have maintained strict cis-heteronormative
gender and sexual codes is not to deny that women and men actively
resisted those codes even while actively participating in el movimiento.86
Within the movement, women quickly offered up critiques of machismo
and many masculine practices as colonial constructs that had been imposed
by and through dominantized cultural practices.87 Critics also attacked
dominating imperial masculinities as impacting organizational structures.
For instance, the Brown Berets were assessed as overtly masculinist for
focusing on men in both recruitment and leadership in such a way that
women were often marginalized as members.88 Vasquez describes how
certain Chicanas’ lives, struggling with poverty, family, and the Church,
left them the most dispossessed of the Chicanx population: “Everywhere
she looks, she seems to be rejected…. She has been doubly oppressed
and is trying very hard to find a place. Because of these facts she is a very,
very, strong individual. She has had to become strong in order to exist
against these odds.”89 These critiques also linger past the movement era
and impact readings of queer marginalization as well as women’s mar-
ginalization. Minoritized Chicanos have too often sought to take back
some power and control by violently repressing gender - non-conforming
Chicanxs.
Biblical critics have also questioned the relationship between gen-
dered rhetorics and lived experiences. In the case of Revelation’s imagi-
nation of Babylon/Rome, gender categories are not neatly ascribed to
biological sex. In the ancient Roman Mediterranean, “active” and “pas-
sive” are fundamental categories, even as they are gendered “masculine”
and “feminine,” but they are not necessarily coterminous with male and
female bodies; in fact, Romans “described passive men as effeminate and
active women as masculine.”90 Sometimes Roman public depictions of
imperial power not only emphasized Roman success but also portrayed
gendered defeat; for instance, the Sebasteion, an imperial temple complex
from the first century in Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, portrays in relief
the Emperor Claudius violently subduing Britannia, the female figural
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 193

representation of Britain, with a “bare breast” and “on her knees and
on the ground underneath him”; such a portrayal also hints at “sexual
humiliation and violence,” whereby Britannia is conquered and vulner-
able while Emperor Claudius stands “impenetrable.”91 Not only is sexual
violence a tool of colonization and conquest, it also informs the logic of
colonialism.92
Rome could also use women to represent itself as impenetrable, such as
the Vestal Virgins, whose bodies were likened to “the city walls,” whose
“inviolability” was tied to the virgins’ physical impenetrability.93 In part,
thinking symbolically and metaphorically with women and women’s bod-
ies as somehow representing cities connected to concerns with controlling
and policing the use of actual women’s bodies.94 Yet, not only do women’s
bodies as rhetorical trope matter in Revelation, but so too do men’s bodies
matter. A concern with male self-control on the part of the faithful, cast
in terms of “virginity,” shares a parallel with tense concerns around the
breaching of Babylon and the new Jerusalem as city images.95 An invest-
ment in bodily purity may be connected to the way the text takes up and
plays with tropes of the temple in which priests had to be much concerned
over their bodily purity.96
To be active and masculine, as a free, “mature Roman male” was to
be “impenetrable”; domination was often scripted as “penetration,” even
of those people—women, children, and slaves—considered to be elite
male property.97 When Babylon/Rome is depicted as a brothel slave, then
Rome is depicted as having come by its wealth not through impenetrable
conquest but by “sexual favors.”98 The portrayal as brothel slave thus also
chips at Rome’s conquering masculinity since it suggests that penetration
from other kings allowed it to accrue such wealth. Representing Babylon/
Rome as an oft-penetrated brothel slave is a demonstration of how Rome
is ultimately dominated by others. Sexual violence against Babylon may
also serve to undermine Roman imperial propaganda about itself as a safe
place.99
As landscape, Aztlán is gendered as a woman: reconquest masculine
domination of Aztlán can mimic previous settler colonial imaginaries and
rhetorics.100 Even if this gendering of the landscape is not the same form
as Revelation, here perhaps particularly is where the legacy of Revelation
most strikingly informs Aztlán’s deployment as a reconquest narrative
because Revelation so fully informs the US imperial gendering of the
Western landscape. Gaspar de Alba critiques the implementation of Aztlán
as a myth of reconquest because of the way that it incorporates Manifest
194 J.M. HIDALGO

Destiny even as it challenges it: “As opposed to the ‘chosen children of

God,’ whose destiny and divine right it was to move toward the frontier,
to conquer and civilize ‘the West,’ we have ‘the people of the sun’ (a refer-
ence to the Aztec sun god, Huitzilopochtli, by the way) whose destiny it
is to move into the streets, the fields, and the classrooms to reclaim and
civilize the Mexican North. Both are driven by their male desire to control
the land and by the ‘call of [their] blood.’”101 Thus, reconquest masculini-
ties do not just script a process whereby cis-heteronormative masculinities
dominate women, but they also replicate Spanish and US mythical justifi-
cations for dominating the land as feminized fantasy.
In 1976, New Mexican Chicano Rudolfo Anaya published a novel, The
Heart of Aztlán. This novel echoes facets of El Plan in its writing and imag-
ery.102 Aztlán appears as a locatable “center” for Chicanx identity. Though
contextualized among the complex gendered duality endemic to Aztec epis-
temology, Aztlán is gendered female even amidst the spatial and temporal
multiplicity that leads to the protagonist’s realization that he (the protago-
nist) is Aztlán:103 “They moved north, and there Aztlán was a woman fringed
with snow and ice: they moved west, and there she was a mermaid singing
by the sea; and always, beneath the form in the vision they heard the soft
throbbing of her heart.”104 Here the discussion of Aztlán is soft, feminine,
“pure,” and in need of the protection of the males who find themselves in
relationship to her. Gaspar de Alba challenges this scripting, wherein the
land as mother is an ancestral past but also a future destiny and motivator
of reconquest; the soft mother in need of care scripts masculine carnalismo,
a key familial metaphor for Chicanx community in and through Aztlán.105
In both Revelation and movement-era imaginations of Aztlán, a complex
slippage occurs between land and women’s bodies, especially as bodies that
must be protected and policed. As Chicanx national household members,
feminists and those who do not offer sexual fidelity to the promises of cis-
heteronormative familia, risk the integrity of the familia Chicana as it has
been bound together through scriptures as familial and marital compact. Even
when scripturalizing in a different key, Chicanx movement rhetorics echo
the reconquest cis-heteropatriarchal legacies of Revelation as they have been
deployed within the settler colonial conquests of Spanish and US empires.

TO CONTEST IS TO SCRIPTURALIZE
Many of these criticisms laid against El Plan Espiritual and Aztlán betray
El Plan’s continued significance as a text. El Plan’s Aztlán has a certain
enduring, scriptural power that people have sought to reconfigure. It con-
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 195

tinued to be a resource in and through which new and more inclusive imag-
inations of Chicanx identity, belonging, and politics could be fashioned.106
Chicana feminists, in the decades that have followed, played a crucial role
in the continued analysis and re-imagination of Aztlán.107 While many
Chicanas moved away “from the mythic terrain of Aztlán” and toward
the more historically and textually grounded Mexican Revolution in order
to retrieve alternative histories of feminism, many women also turned to
and reinvented Aztlán.108 Even in the movement era, one can observe the
sense that Aztlán could still be a no place from which to imagine gender,
as well as racial and ethnic, alternatives. One of the best-known Chicana
feminist organization grew out of the “informal support group” known as
las Chicanas de Aztlán,109 Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc; their name invokes
multiple ancestral layers by naming themselves daughters of the last Aztec
ruler. This name also invokes the Mexican Revolution of the early twenti-
eth century, and thus they lay claim to a longer history of Mexican femi-
nism.110 Likewise, a significant group of Brown Beret women resigned
at one point in order to form their own organization, Las Adelitas de
Aztlán—a title that demonstrates their ongoing commitment to the ideals
and visions of the movement and to Aztlán in particular.111
What both the Adelitas of Aztlán and more recuperative critics of
Revelation have in common is a recognition that Aztlán and Revelation
need not necessarily be read on the cis-heteronormative and patriarchal
terms through which they have so often been understood. One feminist
approach to Revelation is to contextualize it more thickly as resistance
literature and query the work that gendered images do. All the women in
Revelation cannot be read as the same when the gendering of “woman”
is not a universal across time, space, and culture.112 Each of the textual
women, even as a feminine image, is embedded within broader cultural
codes and structures depending on their contexts and so are the women
who might read or hear the text.113 Moreover, the gender dynamic
between dominating heteropatriarchal masculinity and dominated women
is not the only issue of rhetorical power that has come out of Revelation’s
interpretive history; indeed, issues between different women and the privi-
leging of specifically elite masculinities also come to the fore when one
lets go of simpler gender binaries.114 The text certainly invites readers to
see connections between Babylon and Jezebel. The rhetoric may, how-
ever problematically, serve the goal of clarifying the problems with that
prophet, namely the ways that Balaam and Jezebel are too comfortable
with Rome.115 Gender and sexuality are not deployed in and of themselves
but in pursuit of the “encouragement of an alternative vision and commu-
196 J.M. HIDALGO

nity structure.”116 The focus of Revelation, and of reading Revelation, may

be the necessity of and quest for invoking “an-other world” and the pur-
suit of that other world should be privileged above and beyond its rhetori-
cal uses of gender. For most feminist and queer critics, of both Revelation
and the Chicanx movement, this quest for an-other world entails advo-
cating a commitment to ambivalence and struggle in reading scriptures,
strategies that do not ignore problematic gender and sexual rhetorics; but
these strategies also do not let those rhetorics determine proper commu-
nal relationships with scriptures.
Even when reading Revelation in an emphatically liberative way, it can
be hard to miss the often dangerous ramifications of how John portrays
female images. Too often, people have read these images so as to enable
violence against actual women and prostitutes. Thus, womanist interpreter
Shanell T. Smith dubs Revelation a “masculinist minority report” that she
must always read with an eye to “ambiveilence.” Foregrounding African
American women’s reading experiences, ambiveilence looks to read with
and through assemblages of race–class–gender domination.117 Rooted in
intersectional analysis, ambiveilence conveys a sense of the tense dualities
of the text as both a Bhabhaian, ambivalent subversion and appropria-
tion of imperial rhetoric (as alter-imperial) and also as participating in a
DuBois-inflected “veiled” imaginary, reflecting the inability for full and
complete revelation to be found, because many of us, especially minori-
tized women in the USA, cannot but encounter textual imaginations and
especially ourselves as both colonized and colonizer.118 Smith advocates
for reading both critics and texts on ambivalent terms rooted in a sense of
ongoing struggle.
Holding on to a palimpsestic and ambiguous approach can have rami-
fications for what we can and might make of ancient texts in the present
moment. Biblical cultural studies scholar Erin Runions’s “queerly sublime
ethics of reading” holds onto a fundamental “opacity” and “indetermin-
ability” of meaning in biblical texts. On the one hand, this means elevat-
ing the ambiguities and tensions of what we can know about the ancient
world. Colonized subjects in Asia Minor inhabited and struggled with
a “feminized masculinity” vis-à-vis varying waves of Persian, Greek, and
Roman colonization. Reflecting the ambivalence of alter-imperial critique,
Revelation portrays a Babylon/Rome that is both desired and despised.
Babylon/Rome shares features with the kingdom of God and the new
Jerusalem even while Revelation’s initial audiences necessarily see some-
thing of themselves in Babylon/Rome.119 Taking the author as a rhetori-
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 197

cal device, perhaps the reader/auditor is meant to mimic the tensions of

performing Roman masculine “self-control” while looking at her, desiring
her, and despising their “own stereotyped gendering through her.”120 We
must acknowledge the ongoing ambiguity and multiplicity of gendered
imaginaries in Revelation.
For some critics who reinvent Aztlán, this approach to reading, a
searching for ambiguities, a recognition of ambivalence, are all important
modes, but not sufficient in and of themselves; one should remember
that the historical moment in which a particular critic wrote impacts their
work. After the 1980s and especially Anzaldúa’s work on Borderlands,
more critics assumed that notions of place and place-making must be
transformed as part of any cultivation of ambivalence and tolerance for
ambiguities in meaning. Thus, ambivalent yearning toward the utopian
requires a fundamental querying of what place might be. As Moraga
describes for herself, place can still be a powerful past and a transformative
present without necessarily always providing a “safe” space; belonging is
not always happy or comfortable: “I can write, without reservation, that
I have found a sense of place among la Chicanada. It is not always a safe
place, but it is unequivocally the original familial place from which I am
compelled to write, which I reach toward in my audiences, and which
serves as my source of inspiration, voice, and lucha.”121 Thus, for some
artists and scholars, “place” and “no place” had to be made away from any
notion of “reconquest”; there is no idyllic past to be taken back, only a
past and present that fuels struggle/lucha.122
For some, place then becomes located first in the body, again point-
ing to the import of the self, not only as a reader but as an intercon-
nected politics. For instance, Chicana artists may still approach Aztlán but
through an altered, body-focused aesthetic that locates origin within the
body rather than in a lost land.123 The body can then become a site to
remake relations of choice.
For others who sought to reinvent the bounds of Aztlán, this past is
rooted in a process Chicana historian Maylei Blackwell has termed “ret-
rofitted memory,” a process that recognizes the tensions of the past and
the need to constantly rework past memory to suit present and future
needs. Perhaps, this practice can be seen at the mythical level in how vari-
ous Chicana feminist and queer Chicanx theorists critically tackle Aztec
imaginations. Rather than letting go of the Aztec past that has served as
a powerful cultural imaginary, varying artists and theorists instead retell
that past so as to hold onto the tensions, contradictions, and pain of the
198 J.M. HIDALGO

past, even while using it as a locus of power in reading and remaking pres-
ent selves and places.124 This transformed use of the Aztec past appears in
Anzaldúa’s portrayal of Aztec myth and history as a “noninnocent” his-
tory. Anzaldúa, despite her criticisms of the heteropatriarchy of the mov-
imiento, employed Aztlán both as a term for the Southwest as a place of
“origin” with recoverable possibilities in a “new mestiza consciousness,”
but she did so by describing some of the facets of patriarchy that had been
part of that Aztec world.125 Therefore, she can reactivate Aztec ideas with-
out idealizing them.
Tensions, fluidity, and non-static dynamism then appear as hallmarks
of a re-imagined Aztlán, one that embraces ongoing contestation as part
of the sacred past and present. For instance, Leticia Hernández’s poem
“Hijas de Cuauhtémoc” challenges imaginations of an idealized Aztec or
mestizx past before Spanish conquest by describing a past in which gods
demanded sacrifices and people were violently suppressed and violated so
that “mestizas” came to be. Yet, at the same time, she stresses the ways
that ancestral mothers maintained a sacredness of struggle.126 This poem’s
elevation of mothers suggests that a rethinking rather than complete aban-
donment of family was already part of movement-era discourses. Even
in the movement era, Hernández portrayed the possibilities for unstable
and contested utopias within constantly renegotiated and imagined kin-
ship structures.127
Within more dynamic, contested, and ambivalent frameworks of
interpretive struggle, remaking and rethinking familia in relationship to
scriptures became a critical task. For instance, the second Denver Youth
Conference Chicana workshop emphasized, “We must change the con-
cept of the alienated family where the woman assumes total responsi-
bility for the care of the home and the raising of the children to the
concept of La Raza as the united family. With the basis being brother-
hood, La Raza, both men and women, young and old, must assume
the responsibility for the love, care, education, and orientation of all
the children of Aztlán.”128 A commitment to the “children of Aztlán”
as an expression requires that familial relations of the present must be
transformed so that no one cis-heteronormatively constrained mother
figure remains the sole caretaker of the future. In defying the rhetorics
of brotherhood (carnalismo) alone, las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc at Long
Beach coined their own term, “hermanidad,” in 1971 in their publica-
tion “Our Philosophy.” They deployed hermanidad in order to promote
a “more inclusive political tradition” that supported Chicanismo even
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 199

while challenging Chicanxs to learn more about Chicana issues and to

practice greater Chicana solidarity.129
Revelation’s interpreters likewise look for the processes by which the
text may challenge gender norms. Revelation’s gender imagery may try
to subvert the gender norms of its time. In this approach, the text is not
supposed to be a model for appropriate gender norms, but it can provide
an example of how people once worked to destabilize imperial norms of
gender and sexuality. To approach Revelation in this way, we must first
expose interpretive presumptions of contemporary cis-heteronormative
marital practices in reading the marital relational metaphor. Nothing in
this text must support contemporary assumptions of cis-heteropatriarchal
marriage and family life: in Revelation 14, the male faithful are told to
steer clear of sexual relations with women in order to “be properly clean
for their nuptial copulation with the Horned Lamb.”130 Consummation
of the marital relationship between the bride and Lamb is ambiguous at
best, and if the consummation transpires at all, it is between a community
of celibate, male faithful and God.131
Biblical critic Lynn Huber picks out the “144,000 male virgins” from
Revelation 14 as a place where Revelation subverts the gender norms of
its time. She argues that the imagery opposes Roman imperial dictates and
visions regarding marriage and family. Huber considers that the text inter-
rogated Roman imperial masculinity and conceptions of “sexual domi-
nance” so as to call the text’s audience to conceive of alternative gender
ideologies.132 Instead of demonstrating masculine virility through “sexual
conquest,” these 144,000 are constituted through a self-control that also
demonstrates “faithfulness” to the Lamb to whom the community is later
the bride.133 For Huber, the virginity of the faithful is connected to the
new Jerusalem precisely because the ideal community is to become a bride;
the community then “readies itself for the masculine subject.”134 Drawing
on interpretations of the Lamb’s fluidity of gender roles, Huber suggests
that the community that follows the Lamb also participates in a “gender-
bending” experience, the main part of which is to foster a community
identity that opposes and imagines an alternative to Rome.135
Just as Huber looks to Revelation as a place for opening up alternatives,
even if the alternatives are not best exemplified in the text, but in thinking
with the text, so too did other Chicanas try to find ways to make a place
that fostered empowerment through alternative relationships to family
and place. They too decided to think with the texts of the movement era
even if the texts do not themselves formulate an-other world to be pursued.
200 J.M. HIDALGO

This sense that family and Aztlán can and must be remade together is
perhaps most starkly articulated in Moraga’s essay, “Queer Aztlán: The
Re-formation of Chicano Tribe.” This essay shows the enduring power of
scriptures as loci that people turn to remake and reconfigure.
Affirming her connection to and inspiration from the Chicanx move-
ment, though she was not an activist during its classical era, Moraga rene-
gotiates Aztlán around “queer familia,” in an attempt to redefine Aztlán
as embracing of Chicana feminists and queer Chicanxs. While much could
be and has already been written about Moraga’s essay, her essay exempli-
fies a certain desire to struggle with and reimagine multiple layers of domi-
nation and global interconnections between people and land. She draws
upon powerful imaginaries of the Chicanx movement and underscores
certain ways those imaginaries fail the present. The very title speaks to the
desire to form again what was once possible (thus “re-form” rather than
“reform”). She imagines an Aztlán more inclusive of “difference.”136 She
depicts the struggle for sovereignty as one of body, soul, bread, and earth,
one where “our freedom as a people is mutually dependent and cannot be
parceled out—class before race before sex before sexuality,” a struggle that
“requires a serious reckoning with the weaknesses in our mestizo culture,
and a reaffirmation of what has preserved and sustained us as a people.”137
Moraga’s Aztlán is no longer just about reconquest. Though still seeking
autonomy and self-determination, her essay writes “an-other place,” one
not demarcated by settler colonial ambitions to own and control land,
women, and sexuality.138
Moraga does not articulate Aztlán as a remote other world; her Aztlán
must not be disentangled from this world because, as she claims, “with-
out the dream of a free world, a free world will never be realized.”139
This statement may be taken as a hinge point for why she still turns to
Aztlán even, or perhaps because of, the ways that Chicanx movement cis-
heteropatriarchy failed her. She grounds her discussion very much in the
tensions, problems, and frailties of the world and the people in it. Even
when seeking to reimagine religion through a recuperation of “Madre
Tierra,” she also evokes the realities of bitter fights over resources and
environmental disasters.140 Even when illuminating how queer Chicanx
thinkers and artists can reveal new ways of being gendered and sexual
humans together, she also raises challenges to gay Chicanx masculinities as
something that must be rethought along with cis-heteronormative mas-
culinities; eventually she suggests that all people must rethink and perhaps
give up the category of the “human” to better inhabit the world.141 Such
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 201

articulations are suggestive of the always “provisional” status of alternative

utopian visions; in holding onto Aztlán, she advocates for a transformed
relationality between peoples and sacrality, one predicated on ambivalence
and struggle as well as embrace and hope of a never fully realized or articu-
lated other world.142
Moraga’s essay is still quite utopian on the terms I describe in Chap. 2.
As each section focuses on one temporal or spatial field but remains
haunted by others, the multiplicities of José Esteban Muñoz’s utopian
temporalities frame Moraga’s essay, where “Queer Aztlán” takes a “back-
ward glance,” then turns to present “enact [ments]” in bodies and lands,
while squinting at a “future vision.”143 She engages in a temporal play,
a frequent move back and forth through time, not as a unity, but as an
entangled, non-linear process. Each division of her essay tends to focus
on a particular moment while conjuring its relationality to other times.
Her essay opens with an epigraph from poet Ricardo Bracho that que-
ries whether a future can exist given present constraints: “How will our
lands be free if our bodies aren’t?”144 But her own voice opens in 1968,
though she is writing in 1992. The present haunts her opening discussion
of the past as she alludes to both the time and space that had to be trav-
eled for her “to bring all the parts of me—Chicana, lesbiana, half-breed,
and poeta—to the revolution, wherever it was.”145 Then, her next section
moves to the present, but a present anxious about a future and haunted by
the concerns of the past; she reminds her readers that the past is not fully
past.146 The sections of her essay then move to sacred land, then back to
the past, then return to the present, until eventually she concludes with
a futurity, articulated as hope, not inevitability. This essay exists in a col-
lection of apocalyptic concern after all, one that fears Chicanxs have “no
future,” that they are the Last Generation.147
The polytemporal and polyspatial play and interruptive critique that
mark Aztlán as utopian good and no place still matter to her. No lon-
ger drawing on strictly biological notions of familia Chicana, Moraga
invokes a “queer family” struggling to imagine a broader and more pliable
Aztlán, “a Chicano homeland that could embrace all its people, including
its jotería.”148 Even while seeking a more pliable Aztlán in terms of its
embrace of jotería, Moraga holds onto the specificities of the Chicanx
vision, the limits that also make it a meaningful locus for particular peo-
ple in particular struggles; it is not a universal claim for all peoples in all
times: “I recognize the dangers of nationalism as a strategy for politi-
cal change.… But it is historically evident that the female body, like the
202 J.M. HIDALGO

Chicano people, has been colonized. And any movement to decolonize

them must be culturally and sexually specific.”149 She does not imagine
here a universal claim good for all time but one that is pliably meaningful
within certain limits, though the pliabilities and the limits are always up for
negotiation and contestation.
The renegotiation of gender and sexuality in Aztlán speaks to its con-
tinuing power as a location of identity reformulation and resistance.
Aztlán, as the legendary home of the Aztecs, was meant to serve as the
space of the Chicanx nation, providing unity and forming the basis for an
identity that sought to be rooted in a time before conquest.150 In Moraga’s
reading, Aztlán becomes more pliable, fluid, dynamic, and contested; it is
not a static whole. Trying to make it a “center” that does not require a
“periphery,” nevertheless, Chicanxs such as Moraga try to negotiate that
tension between their desires for great pliability but also their desires to
restrict and maintain the particularity of a Chicanx people who can go into
the future. Over time, a borderlands sense of Aztlán has come to dominate
its reimagination, an Aztlán configured through more dynamic processes
of ambivalent contestation.

CONCLUSION
Scripturalization does not depend upon a simple dichotomy of critics who
tear the texts apart and try to abandon them as opposed to those who
recuperate them; even the most strident critics still engage the material
with an eye to how such material can be most usefully read by and for
others. The question is not whether metaphors matter. Of course they
do. In reading Revelation, Shanell T. Smith argues, “the real question of
the debate is how to respond/read for real women in one’s analysis, both
historically or theologically, and through which metaphors?”151 I would
suggest that there is a step beyond this question as well; this concern
over how reading a text matters for the people who live outside but in
relationship to the text, to ask this question is itself a mark of scriptural-
ization. Apocalyptic literature, with its evocation of cosmological crises,
may be a striking example of how contestation is endemic to scripturaliza-
tion. In texts that fundamentally wrestle with conflict and crisis, perhaps
it is unsurprising that conflict and crisis could transpire within and among
those who engage both texts. One criteria for recognizing a text as “scrip-
tural” is the extent to which the meanings and purposes of the text, and
the identities associated with and invoked by, through, and in relation to
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 203

it, are all open to repeated contestation over a duration of time and among
a plurality of people.
The challenge is scripturalization itself. It is not just a question of how
we read the texts or read ourselves, but what forms of power do we even
accord these texts, and what are the ramifications for according them any
power at all? If scriptures designate a human relationship to texts, then
might other relationships be practiced? The processes of scripturalization
about and around the Chicanx movement itself have tended to uphold
specific writings, such as the key texts named above (e.g., I Am Joaquín),
that are often presumed masculinist. These processes perpetuated a ten-
dency to portray Chicana feminism as a later development and not as part
and parcel of the formulations and contestations that happened within
and between facets of the movement. For a variety of reasons, the writings
of Chicana feminists from the movement era were only later republished
in academic circles; yet, their influence persisted in shaping new genera-
tions of activists and scholars.152 Certainly, the ongoing activist work of
women such as Elena, López, and NietoGomez shaped generations of
Chicanas. While some poetry and art from Chicana feminists was widely
published and circulated, texts that hold lasting, almost scriptural, power
in Chicanx memory and Chicanx studies do not tend to appear until the
1980s, with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera perhaps being the
main example.
The processes of scripturalization around Revelation and the Chicanx
movement have so often entailed an eliding of gender and sexuality even
while scriptures are always deeply implicated in and by processes of making,
performing, and living gender and sexuality. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán
erases gender and sexuality as social categories when it claims that nation-
alism “transcends all religious, political, class, and economic factions or
boundaries.”153 Either nationalism cannot transcend gender and sexuality
or those categories are supposed to be erased from scriptural engagement.
El Plan de Santa Barbara is notable for its relative lack of direct refer-
ence to Chicanas or Chicana experience. This relative lack led Chicanx
Studies scholar Mary Pardo to categorize El Plan de Santa Barbara as a
“man”-ifesto.154 Chicana historian Cynthia Orozsco’s critique can be read
as participating in this ongoing treatment of El Plan de Santa Barbara as
a scripture worth returning to and reimagining from: “Today, we revise
‘El Plan de Santa Barbara’ to encompass the feminist voice it lacked in
1969. We have appropriately called it ‘El Plan de Santa y Barbara’ since
it is a proposal written to Chicano Studies from across the nation in hope
204 J.M. HIDALGO

that feminism will reemerge in strength.”155 The terms deployed in these

feminist revisions play with and take up the rhetorics of these earlier texts,
for instance, calling for women to “move forward toward our destiny as
women,” with destiny here being a key term in both El Plan Espiritual de
Aztlán and El Plan de Santa Barbara.156
As with rhetorics of familia, employments of utopian scripturalization
as homing devices are not always bad. Instead, one can start by seeing uto-
pianizing and apocalyptic scriptures as contested, conflictual, and shifting
as members in a community of interpreters shift. Attention to scripturaliza-
tion, if focused only on textual practice, obscures the multiple forums and
ways in which Chicanxs sought to make alternative discourses, conscious-
ness, and ways of being possible in a plurality of venues. Something of
textual practice both in broader US culture and in the Chicanx movement
tends to favor particular patriarchal and cis-heteronormative remakings of
consciousness. According to Rodríguez, for instance, “Chicano gay male
articulations of experience, identity, and desire that forge a Chicano gay
male consciousness do exist—and have existed—yet they take form mostly
in nontextualized, non-canonical arenas.”157 A focus on textuality tends
to script a heteronormatively reproductive model of “generativity” onto
consciousness creation and fomentation.
Yet, Rodríguez’s work holds that one cannot abandon critical modes,
whether family or scriptures, that people have engaged. The necessity of
questioning the work that particular practices of making and negotiating
social worlds do, whether rhetorics of family or processes of scripturaliza-
tion, remains. As Rodríguez awaits a “next of kin,” I too look forward to
“our own future text,” to some other modes of scripturalization that nei-
ther wed us to cis-heteropatriarchy nor enslave us.158 When NietoGomez
had to leave the movement to find freedom, she had to seek the stories
and places that made a freer world possible for her. This desire for a future
text that enacts a different mode of scripturalization and an-other world
of familial belonging belies Moraga’s revisioning of Aztlán, and thus in my
Chap. 6 I return to her work in order to rethink scriptures in light of the
Chicanx movement.

NOTES
1. Interview with NietoGomez. Quotations in this opening story all come
from that interview unless otherwise noted.
2. Interview with NietoGomez and email September 15, 2015.
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 205

3. NietoGomez, email, September 15, 2015.

4. “Feminist” continues to be a highly contested category in Latinx religion
and theology. For a good survey of some of the different approaches to
Latina feminism and the challenges it faces in theology, see Michelle
A. González, 150–155.
5. The term kyriarchy, derives from the Greek kurios. See Schüssler Fiorenza,
Rhetoric and Ethic, 5.
6. Antonia I. Castañeda, “Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769–
1848: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family,” in Contested Eden, ed. Gutiérrez
and Orsi, 230.
7. Hinojosa, 64.
8. Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies,” 61.
9. Many scholars have drawn connections to the Jewish scriptural use of for-
nication as a metaphor for idolatry, a sense of unfaithfulness that is perhaps
particularly evocative of marriage. See, for instance, discussion in
Thompson, 121–124.
10. See Frilingos, 21.
11. Frilingos, 66.
12. Huber, Thinking and Seeing, 1.
13. Malina, 73.
14. Timothy G. Kiogora, “Revelation 21:1–22:5, An African Perspective,” in
Return to Babel, ed. Pope-Levison and Levison, 211–212.
15. Deutsch, 112. The maternal images she notes as parallels are in IV Esr
9:43–47; II Apoc Bar 3:1–3: and the spousal image is in IV Esr 10:17.
16. Rossing, Choice, 137.
17. Frilingos, 95.
18. Martin, 110.
19. Martin, 111.
20. Pippin, Apocalyptic, 123.
21. Pippin, Death and Desire, 84.
22. Pippin, Death and Desire, 70.
23. See Gaspar de Alba, 103–140.
24. Fekkes, 283. My translation of the biblical passage.
25. Rossing, Choice, 149–150.
26. R.T. Rodríguez, Chapter One: Reappraising the Archive, section “Sifting
through the Archive,” particularly 36. Familia is accorded such a striking
place in El Plan partially because of the histories of families torn apart by
migration and deportation during the twentieth century. For a discussion
of the ways that migrational challenges to family impact scriptural inflec-
tions, see Cuéllar, 148.
27. Tinker, 8.
28. Castañeda, 238–239.
206 J.M. HIDALGO

29. Gaspar de Alba, 124.

30. Gaspar de Alba, 116.
31. These tropes of “motherhood” are not unique to the Chicanx movement,
and sometimes activists would play them to their advantage. For instance,
when recounting her experience on trial following the Católicos por la
Raza protests, López discusses how she used her very pregnant appearance
to garner sympathy—and freedom—within the California legal system:
“By that time I was getting bigger and bigger and so I really milked the
scene and I waddled up to the witness stand and had my prettiest little
pearl earrings on and my nicest maternity dress and talked about all the
good that I was doing, right, and how could they possibly find me guilty…
you know, pending motherhood here.” Interview with Lydia López.
32. Gaspar de Alba, 125.
33. Price, 79.
34. Chabram-Dernersesian, “I Throw Punches,” 84.
35. I am interpreting the verb, πλανάω, as “seduce,” a lexical option, but oth-
ers might translate this verb as “deceive” or “beguile.”
36. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 14.
37. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 18.
38. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 14. Education should not and cannot be sepa-
rated from other aspects of Chicanx “society.”
39. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 16.
40. Interview with NietoGomez.
41. For further discussion, see Price, 78.
42. Rodríguez, Next of Kin, chap. 1, Familia Portraits section, 40.
43. E. Vasquez, “Preface,”, Loc 97 of 3068. By 1971, Vasquez was already
openly critical of this treatment of “Malintzín” (“La Malinche”). See for
instance, her discussion of Malintzismo in “La Historia del Mestizo,” loc
1120 of 3068, (March 30, 1971). Also, see Anzaldúa, 22.
44. Blackwell, 76.
45. As quoted in Beltrán, 48.
46. See more in-depth analysis in Beltrán, 48.
47. Anna NietoGómez, “Sexism in the Movimiento,” in Chicana Feminist
Thought, ed. Alma M. García, 99.
48. Blackwell, 65.
49. Blackwell, 30–32.
50. Take, for instance, the activism of a figure such as Emma Tenayuca in the
era after World War II. See Ontiveros, 178.
51. Emma Pérez argued that women “created their own spaces interstitially,
within nationalisms” (33). In some ways, this description is akin to Daniel
Boyarin’s discussion of the majority of ancient Christians and Jews who
lived “interstitially” between the texts that tried to script “orthodox” ways
of believing and belonging. Boyarin, Border Lines.
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 207

52. E. Vasquez, “Somos Aztlán!” loc 1201/3068, Kindle edition, [October

13, 1969].
53. Bebout, 47.
54. NietoGomez, “Sexism,” 99.
55. NietoGomez, “La Femenista,” in Chicana Feminist Thought, ed. Alma
M.  García, 87. An essay reprint of Encuentro Femenil 1, no.2 (1974):
34–47.
56. Bebout, 115.
57. Anzaldúa, 22.
58. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 149.
59. García, Chicanismo, 109.
60. García, “Juncture,” 190.
61. For instance, Ernesto Chávez cites law enforcement infiltration as one of
the reasons for the end of the Brown Berets. These sorts of infiltrations
increased paranoia. In order to join the Committee to Free Los Tres,
“applicants had to fill out a five-page questionnaire on their reasons for
wanting to join, their backgrounds, and family histories. They also had
to go through a screening process administered by three senior members
of the group.” E. Chávez, 59. Also see Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí! 78, 102.
62. C. Muñoz, 83, 205.
63. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 58.
64. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 59.
65. El Plan de Santa Barbara, 30–31.
66. Adela Yarbro Collins, “Feminine Symbolism in the Book of Revelation,” in
A Feminist Companion to the Apocalypse of John, ed. Levine with Robbins,
124. Jennifer Wright Knust also describes how early Christians and other
ancient world contemporaries used “sexual slander” to delegitimize others
and shore up their own identity boundaries. See Knust, Abandoned to Lust.
67. For the use of the metaphor of Jerusalem as God’s wife, see discussion in
Huber, Thinking and Seeing, 51–52.
68. Zimmerman, 182. Fekkes looks at the specific parallels of the “bride
adorned” in 21:18–21 and the “harlot adorned” in 17:4 and 18:16. See
Fekkes, 283.
69. Rossing, Choice, 17.
70. Rossing, Choice, 14. She uses “topos as a stock treatment of a moral
subject.”
71. Rossing, Choice, 15. Rossing depicts Revelation as departing somewhat
from traditional practice because the women are not presented in parallel
fashion, but rather introduced serially. Rossing, Choice, 163.
72. This rhetorical maneuver is part of why the contemporary sex workers
with whom Avaren Ipsen reads Revelation find its imagery so
problematic.
73. Glancy and Moore, 551–52, 557.
208 J.M. HIDALGO

74. McClure, 16.

75. Blackwell, 43.
76. For a poignant first-person discussion of the difficulties involved in hear-
ing that statement at the Denver Youth Conference, see E. Vasquez, “The
Woman of La Raza, Part I,” loc 1478/3068, [July 6, 1969].
77. Sylvia Castillo as quoted in Blackwell, 73.
78. Blackwell, 74.
79. Blackwell, 83.
80. C. Muñoz, 5.
81. Blackwell, 66.
82. Blackwell, 96–97.
83. Price, 76.
84. Blackwell, 67.
85. Interview with Elena. As Denise Kimber Buell observed to me, perhaps
Elena’s more “in-between” imagination of Aztlán comes out of her con-
trasting experience as a woman in the movement.
86. Blackwell discusses how women both took up and transformed represen-
tations of La Adelita as “revolutionary (m)Other.” See Blackwell,
112–119.
87. NietoGomez and others at UCLA’s 1969 Corazón de Aztlán symposium
similarly observed that “the effects of a virile form of masculinist national-
ism were felt more detrimentally among student and youth sectors of the
movement” (Blackwell, 99).
88. E. Chávez, 57.
89. E. Vasquez, “The Woman of La Raza, Part I,” loc 1528/3068, [July 6,
1969].
90. Brooten, 116.
91. D.C. López, 44.
92. This point may present a connection between ancient Roman imperialism
and modern US settler colonialism. “It is through sexual violence that a
colonizing group attempts to render a colonized peoples inherently rap-
able, their lands inherently invadable, and their resources inherently
extractable.” A. Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies,” 61.
93. Huber, Thinking and Seeing, 47.
94. Huber, Thinking and Seeing, 48.
95. Økland, “Sex, Gender, and Ancient Greek,” 130, 136. See further discus-
sion in Økland, “Why Can’t,” 319–325.
96. Økland, “Sex, Gender, and Ancient Greek,” 137.
97. Frilingos, 71. Such a reading is not always stable or necessarily true in all
ancient Roman contexts, however. Penetration could also provide an ave-
nue for reversal in Roman imagination, where a gladiator whose body has
been “penetrated” with viewing gaze may demonstrate “self-mastery” and
 “POWER AND DOMINANCE, LOYALTY AND CONFORMITY”: FAMILY ... 209

the “masculine” viewers run the risk of losing their self-control. Frilingos,
78.
98. Royalty, Streets, 192.
99. Huber, Thinking and Seeing, 88.
100. For other European examples deployed in the case of African conquests,
see Dube, 43.
101. Gaspar de Alba, 123–124.
102. See Brady, 142–144.
103. Anaya, Heart of Aztlán, 131.
104. Anaya, Heart of Aztlán, 129.
105. Gaspar de Alba, 104.
106. Bebout, 8.
107. Arrizón, 76.
108. Blackwell, 101.
109. Blackwell, 59.
110. Blackwell, 18.
111. For more discussion of some of the varying feminist constructions of
Chicanx unity, see Beltrán, 48–52.
112. Mohanty, 21–36. This volume reprints her 1986 essay.
113. Schüssler Fiorenza, Justice and Judgment, 209.
114. Schüssler Fiorenza, Justice and Judgment, 218.
115. Schüssler Fiorenza, Justice and Judgment, 207. Or as she later observes,
“gender is always constructed and inflected by relations of domination”
(216). Further, “Revelation’s ‘othering’ and vilifying invectives are hurled
against both wo/men and men.” Both Balaam and Jezebel are swept up in
metaphors of “fornication” for their teachings. See Schüssler Fiorenza,
Justice and Judgment, 223.
116. Rossing, Choice, 165.
117. See S.T. Smith, Woman Babylon, 10–13, 56–71.
118. S.T. Smith, Woman Babylon, 9–12. Work on colonial ambivalence tends to
draw upon Bhabha’s essay “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of
Culture, 85–92. Also see W.E.B.  DuBois The Souls of Black Folk (Arc
Manor, 2008), 12. DuBois hopes for African Americans to tear that veil
(not unlike Revelation), to come to see themselves as a whole and thereby
to end a “striving” borne of the “contradiction of double aims” (DuBois,
13).
119. Runions, Babylon, 240.
120. Runions, Babylon, 240.
121. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 147.
122. Moraga’s emphasis on “lucha” as hermeneutical location, drive, and way
to imagine place has strong resonance with the work of mujerista theolo-
gian Ada-María Isasi-Díaz. For Isasi-Díaz, this “struggle” incorporated
210 J.M. HIDALGO

many facets and was aimed in many directions: “to survive,” “for sur-
vival,” “for liberation,” “for justice and peace,” “for our sanity,” “to over-
come that oppression,” “against oppression,” “against ethnic and racist
prejudice,” “against sexism,” “to change oppressive structures,” and to be
“historical subjects” and “subjects of our own history.” (x, xii, 22, 23, 43,
52, 57, 61, 68, 81, 88, 90, 105, 133, 142, 164, 165, 181, 186, 204, 205).
Moreover, she also articulated a sense that “struggle” is a location, per-
haps even its own kind of “place” (229). For one example, see Ada-María
Isasi-Díaz, En la lucha/In the Struggle. Also see L. Medina’s discussion of
the import of “transformative struggle” in the theological articulations
and practices of Latina feminist religious organization Las Hermanas.
L. Medina, Hermanas, 123–146.
123. Gaspar de Alba, 127.
124. Rudy V. Busto describes this as a process of nepantla, of middling, endemic
to the Chicanx religious predicament, and Moraga’s use of Aztec myths
forms one of his prime examples, wherein she revises the myth to move
away from patriarchal legacies. See Busto, “The Predicament of Nepantla,”
especially 243–249.
125. Anzaldúa, 5, 32, 88.
126. Hernández, “Hijas,” in Chicana Feminist Thought, 141. The poem was
part of the cover of the April 1971 issue of Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, which
Bebout reprints on p. 134. On p. 131 he argues that this poem challenges
constructions of a “utopian” Aztec past. One can also hear echoes here of
Isasi-Díaz’s foci in mujerista theology as discussed in endnote above.
127. Here I am inspired by Rodríguez’s argument wherein he critiques Chicanx
nationalist deployments of familia while also still holding onto the ways
that family can be reconstructed and redeployed as action and idea in mak-
ing Chicanx community. See R.T. Rodríguez, “Introduction,” especially
23 and 27.
128. García, “Resolutions form the Chicana Workshop,” in Chicana Feminist
Thought, ed. 147. Enriqueta Vasquez likewise echoes this approach when
she takes up “brotherhood” in la Raza as a call to equality: “The man must
look upon this liberation with the woman at his side, not behind him fol-
lowing, but along side of him leading.… When the man can look upon
‘his’ woman as HUMAN and with the love of BROTHERHOOD and
EQUALITY, then and only then, can he feel the true meaning of libera-
tion and equality himself.” E. Vasquez, “The Woman of La Raza, Part I,”
loc 1550/3068, Kindle edition [July 6, 1969].
129. Blackwell, 87–88. Members of las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc coined the term
hermanidad as organizational premise in their own platform, “Our
Philosophy” (1971), even though the very coining of this new word was
quite contested among the women involved.
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130. Martin, 111.

131. During the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, on November
21, 2009, Margaret Aymer and Lynn R. Huber had a conversation during
the question and answer portion of a review panel for David A. Sánchez’s
book, From Patmos to the Barrio. Aymer and Huber suggested that
Revelation’s bride is an image that could be read with and understood
through denigrating representations of sexually available and exploitable
gay men in contemporary US cultural imagery.
132. Huber, “Sexually Explicit?” 3–28.
133. Huber, “Sexually Explicit?” 18.
134. Huber, “Sexually Explicit?” 19.
135. Huber, “Sexually Explicit?” 20.
136. Yarbro-Bejarano, 125.
137. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 174.
138. Brady, 139, 150.
139. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 164.
140. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 172.
141. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 159, 162, 174.
142. See discussion in R.T. Rodríguez, “Afterword: Making Queer Familia,”
173.
143. J.E. Muñoz, 4.
144. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 145.
145. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 146.
146. “For me, ‘El Movimiento’ has never been a thing of the past, it has
retreated into subterranean uncontaminated souls awaiting resurrection in
a ‘queerer,’ more feminist generation.” Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 148.
147. See J.E. Muñoz, 92–94.
148. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 147. As R.T.  Rodríguez observes, models of
“queer familia,” such as those found in Moraga, are not “mutually exclu-
sive” of “biological relations,” but they displace “procreation” as the pre-
dominant guiding terms and metaphor for conceptualizing family. See
Rodríguez, “Afterword: Making Queer Familia,” 173, Nook edition.
Moraga’s readings have also been critiqued for her use of indigeneity and
the problem of presuming a neat connection between indigenous peoples
and the land. See Bebout, 173.
149. Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 149.
150. Fregoso and Chabram, 204–205.
151. Shanell T. Smith, “Empire, Gender, and Ambiveilence,” 6–7. Smith cred-
its Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre for helping her to characterize the debate
on these terms.
152. Blackwell, 207.
153. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. For discussion of how the text ignores gen-
der and sexuality, see Villa, 226.
212 J.M. HIDALGO

154. Pardo, 14–15.

155. Cynthia Orozco, “Sexism in Chicano Studies and the Community,” in
Chicana Feminist Thought, ed. Alma M. García, 267 (originally published
in 1986).
156. As quoted in Orozco, 267.
157. R.T. Rodríguez, Chapter Four: “Carnal Knowledge,” 145.
158. I take “next of kin” from R.T.  Rodríguez’s title and conclusion. I take
“We will make our own future text” from Ishmael Reed as Wimbush
deploys Reed’s writing in Wimbush’s essay, “‘We Will Make Our Own
Future Text’: An Alternate Orientation to Interpretation,” True to Our
Native Land, ed. Blount, et al., 43–53.
 CHAPTER 6

“Faith and Social Justice Are So Connected

in My Book”: Scriptures, Scrolls, and Scribes
as Technologies of Diaspora

In the crafting and rhetoric of El Plan de Santa Barbara, Chicanx stu-

dents, faculty, and staff articulated a commitment to the relationality of
“scriptures,” whereby the needs and aspirations of a broader Chicanx
community should always be a locus of authority higher than the text
on its own. In the years after it was published, the text persisted as a cen-
tral locus, a good/no place where utopian aspirations and inspirations for
Chicanismo might be found and reworked. Both El Plan Espiritual de
Aztlán and El Plan de Santa Barbara, as with Revelation, remained pow-
erful texts as ideas and icons from which pieces continued to be retrieved,
read, reread, displayed, and performed in varying manners. Both Planes
also incorporated alternative relationships to scriptures, pointing toward
alternative sources of authority that diverged from more dominantized
Protestant Euro-US practices. Because movement challenges to dominan-
tized scripturalization left some practices of coercive authority unchecked,
feminist and queer critics, often still informed by a utopian drive, not only
questioned which scriptures could be scriptural but also came to ques-
tion the nature of the relationship between people and their scriptures,
advocating more ambivalent and less hierarchal interpretive practices in
the process. How then did approaches to scriptures shift after the Chicanx
movement? How might scriptures be rethought as a critical category in
the study of religion, especially the study of American religions, in light of
the Chicanx movement?

© The Author(s) 2016 213

J.M. Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59214-9_6
214 J.M. HIDALGO

Even as she continued to focus more on traditional “Christian scrip-

tures,” one Chicana activist with whom I spoke described the place of
scriptures as part of a personal framework that privileged communal
justice as the highest authority. If you spent much time among the Los
Angeles Chicanx picket lines in 1968 or 1969, you might have described
Lydia López as “a church lady” who was “very connected to Epiphany.”1
López takes some pride in that identification because being the Chicana
church lady suits her strong identifications as a Chicana and a Christian,
one whose background and adult life demonstrate reverent commitment
to Chicanx activism and mainline Protestantism.
López grew up Baptist and spent much of her life actively involved with
Episcopalian and other Protestant churches. Her narrative memories reflect
the sense that religion and social justice interconnect, even if she sometimes
had to search out the places where those two could interlace best. “Faith
and social justice are so connected in my book,” she says, “so that you can’t
do one without the other, according to my book.” That her Christian iden-
tification still entails her own special and distinctly referenced “book,” a per-
sonal scripture of sorts, speaks to the themes of this chapter, the importance
of finding place through reference to scriptures, with scriptures that are
communally committed and yet personally negotiated; without abandoning
an important “book,” scriptures become more dynamically imagined and
less neatly circumscribed in light of the Chicanx movement.
López’s narrative of her involvement in the movement and her quest
for “place,” which for a time she found at the Episcopalian Church of
the Epiphany in Lincoln Heights, and her aspirations to work from that
place in order to build a better world, one that can be found in her own
particular “book,” speak to the larger themes of my project. Epiphany had
been a meeting space for planning the school Blowouts, an institution
that helped facilitate the founding of the Brown Berets and aided with
the printing of the local La Raza newspaper. It was also a significant locus
for César Chávez’s visits to Los Angeles and for the organizing of the
Chicano Moratorium committee. “If it weren’t for Epiphany,” López told
me, “there would not have been a Chicano movement as it was.” After
being invited to Epiphany for a party, she realized “it was a place where I
needed… a place that I needed as a Chicana and as a Christian: it became
home; you know, for more than fifty years it’s been really part of my home
base.” The Spanish form Chicana emphasizes something that an English
speaker might miss; Epiphany enabled her to be a proud woman—of
Mexican descent—and Christian.
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 215

What about Epiphany enabled this embrace of intersectional identity?

López lifts up the import of other women at the church and the feeling
of the space where a mixture of Mexican and indigenous cultural aspects
that are not always specifically tied to Christianity adorned the walls, along
with symbols more traditionally associated with Christianity:

The church had the first Mariachi masses in town, they had the Aztec danc-
ers. I mean, a lot of the cultural symbols were already evident there before it
caught on anywhere else locally. The papel picado. It was really quite a beau-
tiful place and when I go to the service there and the place is jam-packed
and the Mariachis are playing, I just wept. I say that I was just so taken and
so moved by that, that it’s not…. I couldn’t resist it; it was just I had found
home and it felt like home and it felt like it was a place that I could be there
as a Chicana and a place that could be home for me as a Christian. And it
was there that I’m taught so much by these leaders there and it was where
we first heard about the theology of liberation and I later meet Gustavo
Gutiérrez, go to Cuernavaca…just lots and lots of experiences that helped
form who I became or was becoming. But I think there was something very
special and holy about that place.

The seemingly harmonic combination of Christianity, Mexican sym-

bols, mariachis, and Aztec dancers brought her to tears and gave her a
sense of “home,” of belonging in a place, a place that was “special and
holy.” Epiphany was a space that spoke to multiple parts of her iden-
tity and to the faith and social justice that were key in “her book,” and
Epiphany was the place that embodied and performed that book of hers.
As such, Epiphany could be “home.”
López found meaning in her life by being “of service” to others and
especially to her own local communities; although led by white male
priests, Epiphany was strongly shaped by a Mexican American administra-
tor, Virginia Ram, and some other powerful women. After the movement,
López went on to organizing work at a local level, serving on a grand
jury, and in 1981 she became president of the United Neighborhoods
Organization (UNO). “I go back to the fact that the base—it’s kind of…
my theology school, you know, was Epiphany; I mean, that was the place
where I learned so much of this. And it has been lasting, because it was
there that I first met Cesar Chavez and I remember going back home for
holidays and talking about all of this to my family, saying ‘viva La Raza’
and ‘viva Cesar Chavez’ and all that.” Epiphany was a home for her not
because it spoke to some static and essential way of being or to some
216 J.M. HIDALGO

sacrality neatly divided from the rest of the world but because it trans-
formed her way of being in the world: it provided her with multiple shap-
ing experiences.
Though López always maintained a stronger commitment to Protestant
traditions than to the new “scriptures” of the Chicanx movement, her life-
story narrative and her engagement of both scriptural traditions speak to
the interconnected and conflicting logics of place-making and competing
scripturalizations in the 1960s and 1970s. López grew up in Jimtown which
she contrasted with the east side of Whittier from where Richard M. Nixon
hails. López described how her parents moved from northern Mexico in
the early 1900s, how her mother had left Garfield High School in order
to take up migrant farm labor with her family, and the fact that López’s
childhood neighborhood was once a “labor camp” in the nineteenth cen-
tury and an “immigrant barrio” by the time she lived there. Comparing
Southern California’s freeways to New  York’s “slum clearances,” López
explained that “our little barrio is now the 605 Freeway and so it’s no
longer there.” For the 605 freeway to exist, López’s family was unhomed.
Amid all the tensions of place and displacement, López remembers
how important church was to her father and to her own childhood. She
remembers being disgusted with the local minister, who was horrified
when the first black family moved into her neighborhood in Whittier. Yet,
she also remembers her father returning to their family home after a long
day at the steel mill, pulling out his Bible or his theology books, and she
vividly recalls her father being a bastion of generosity to those in need in
the neighborhood even when her own family didn’t have much. López’s
life also reflected educational and class mobility between herself and her
parents. Feeling educationally successful but culturally displaced, López
received a bachelor’s degree at “Cal State” and pursued some “seminary
studies” in Claremont. During that period, she also drifted away from
church life and lived briefly in San Francisco, a time that she described as
“pretending I’m somebody else.”
Both the religious and political “preaching and the teaching” of the late
1960s helped her to “g[e]t out of this place,” to stop feeling lost and out
of place from herself, because she “learned that faith is a connection that
we make with people.” At the urging of a supervisor, she went to a picket
line in order “to demonstrate against the indictment of thirteen Chicanos
for the walkouts.” The coincidence of her involvement and meetings in
this picket line changed the course of her life. At the first picket line she
attended, she both became involved in the movement and discovered
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 217

Protestant church leaders who differed from the Baptist minister of her
childhood in Whittier. López’s wrestling with place and cobbling together
of a Chicana and Christian identity, a cobbling that required her own stra-
tegic practices of negotiation rooted in her commitments to justice, speak
to the focus of this chapter: How were more dynamic articulations of
scriptures enunciated after and because of the Chicanx movement? What
might those articulations help us to clarify about the study of scriptures in
the field of religion?
In order to press this attention to a transformed notion of scriptures
further, I wish to put López’s personal “book” in conversation with a
“Chicano codex” that evidences a wrestling with the history of scriptures,
as objects and category, while constructing other scriptures and relation-
ships to those scriptures. During the late 1960s and 1970s, writer and critic
Cherríe L. Moraga eagerly watched the Chicanx activism reported in the
news. However, during those years, she remained under her Anglo father’s
last name, struggling with her full self as a mixed-race Chicana lesbian
poet, and thus, while not at the picket lines with López, she admired the
activists from her San Gabriel, California, neighborhood. By the time I was
an adolescent in the 1990s, Moraga had herself become an iconic figure
of Chicanx imagining. Since working with Gloria E. Anzaldúa on the first
edition of the anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color (1981), Moraga’s own essays, prose, and poetry had come
to be read with great frequency, especially in Chicanx studies curriculum.
In 1992, Moraga wrote an essay for an exhibition that asked different
Chicanx artists to respond to “Mesoamerican codices.” With some adap-
tation, Moraga’s text for this exhibition became the final piece in her 1993
collection, The Last Generation: Prose & Poetry, a title that itself alludes to
a document that closes a very different anthology and codex: the book of
Revelation. Her entire essay collection is apocalyptic—in a more contem-
porary and popular sense than biblical scholarship defines the term—in
that it pursues revelations while fretting over the dying of a “last genera-
tion” and the possibilities of “cultural extinction.”2 Even as she recalls the
book of Revelation and trades upon its cultural prominence, she works to
displace the power associated with the Bible. I consider Moraga to be a
theorist of the codex and an important interpreter and reader of Chicanx
movement scripturalization, but Moraga’s essay also positions her as a
theorist about the book of Revelation, particularly its usage of “scrolls”
and “prophecy,” and its history as scripture.
218 J.M. HIDALGO

To understand scriptures after the Chicanx movement and as a practice

of defiant relationship to a larger, European - Protestant-dominated US
context, two approaches to “scriptures” must be held in tension: scriptures
restricted to modern European - Christian assumptions and scriptures as
something more than just texts—scriptures as practices that reach beyond
and transform our notions of the written and sacred “word.” Scriptures
can be perceived as sacred texts that are deployed for communal imagi-
nation, contestation, and negotiation through practices of utopian limit-
ing pliability, of turning to these texts in ritualized performative modes
that engage them for circumscription of social powers while also turning
to them as resources for opening up pliable and mobile possibilities for
other ways of being in the world. When Moraga pushes the boundaries of
what we take as scriptures in order to invigorate a transformed relationship
between a community and its scriptures, she still uses scriptures as utopian
homing devices.

SCRIPTURES AS A COLONIAL CATEGORY IN THE STUDY

OF RELIGION

The colonial legacies of “scriptures” as concept, construct, and practice

matter for Moraga’s contemporary Chicanx appropriation of codices.
Sponsored by San Francisco’s Mexican Museum, and curated by art his-
torian Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino, the exhibition The Chicano Codices:
Encountering Art of the Americas addressed a quest for “a new vision of
American culture” by asking contemporary artists to relate to an old prac-
tice: “the codex, or picture book, developed by North American cultures
centuries before the arrival of Europeans.”3 Mesoamerican codices diverge
significantly in style, material, and technology from the European codex,
the general term for a binding technology that came into popular use
around the first century CE and, until very recently with the advent of
e-books, came to be synonymous with book. Mesoamerican codices bring
together visual art, performance, and a theory of writing that push beyond
the strictly verbal and alphabetic.4
However, the Spanish in the sixteenth century burnt most of these
codices, with only some codices later recuperated under Spanish gaze and
control. The initial exhibition of Chicano Codices positioned itself explic-
itly as a response “to the quincentenary of the arrival of Europeans in
the Americas,” one that quite intentionally works to “forge a future that
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 219

truly promotes multiple opportunities, voices, and visions.”5 The cura-

tor, Sánchez-Tranquilino, affirms the hybridity of the contributors and
the practices found in the exhibition.6 Sánchez-Tranquilino hopes that
the exhibition could “replenish the void” created when Europeans burnt
indigenous codices and dispersed the remaining codices and facsimiles
around the globe.7 This exhibition, and Moraga’s response to it, takes
up one of the main challenges for interlacing the study of religion and
Chicanx studies: the legacies of “religion” and “scriptures” as categories of
colonial invention, enforcement, and destruction in the Americas.
Moraga’s essay was crafted as a reaction not only to these lost codices
but also to the plurality of artists in the exhibition who worked to reac-
tivate their own codex practices that drew upon Mesoamerican traditions
in combination with other sources and practices.8 Moraga reactivates the
codex as a reflection on the 500 five hundred years since Columbus as con-
textualized amid the urban uprisings in California following the Rodney
King verdict.9 In her piece, which she titles “Codex Xerí,” she makes the
case for Chicanx art and writing as something religiously powerful, espe-
cially in the midst of crisis. Although far from the only Chicana to play with
notions of Mesoamerican codices or glyphs, she contextualizes Chicanx art
as religious codex, as a practice of “prophetic” interpretation, a combina-
tion of reimagined Aztec roles as both scribe and sage.10 Moraga’s codex is
a meditation on and a reinvention of writing by taking up and reimagining
a format of Mesoamerican “text,” by pushing both European and Aztec
scriptures into a hybrid dialogue and understanding well beyond the con-
texts for which Mesoamerican codices may have first been intended.
While Moraga’s essay appeared with the exhibition, she remade her
contribution as the conclusion to her own 1993 apocalyptic essay collec-
tion. Perhaps grounding itself within the nonlinear practice of the folding
screens found in Aztec codices, Moraga’s essay does not follow a neat
linear structure, but rather moves in a serpentine manner through a plu-
rality of topics, pressing at the pains and possibilities of the 1990s as a
particular moment of temporal resonance. After rendering present crises
such as urban violence, poverty, environmental disaster, breast cancer, and
AIDS in broad strokes, she conjures a different past, a beginning named
with “God, Ometeotl,” but then rushes through five hundred years of vio-
lence, both Spanish and US, and demands restitution. She tasks “Chicano
scribes” with “deciphering” unwritten histories found in images of daily
life. After describing what Chicanx scribes and codices might be, she
returns to a prophetic tone, summoning the Aztec Fifth Sun as a promise
220 J.M. HIDALGO

that all empires fall, and that this moment will pass, albeit painfully, as a
new day dawns on the horizon. Because of her temporal and thematic
play, her move between indigenous thematic tropes such as Aztlán, and
her rendering of more contemporary visual images such as people gath-
ered together in a mourning ritual, I find it difficult to provide a simple
content summary of the document. It is a text about codices, but it also
offers itself up as a codex.
Despite frequent use of the terms writing, codex, scroll, and scribe, in
Moraga’s “Codex Xerí,” the terms scriptures and book appear sparingly,
if at all. This terminological issue is worth flagging because the biblical
book of Revelation, akin to “Codex Xerí,” is a text much concerned with
the act of writing and with varying “scrolls” (βιβλίον and the diminutive
form βιβλαρίδιον in Rev 10), but the term much of the so-called New
Testament generally uses for writing, the term the scholarly New Revised
Standard Version English Bible generally translates as “scripture,” ἡ
γραφή, is completely absent in Revelation.11 The Apocalypse of John plays
with texts that could be deemed “scriptural” in Jewish and Roman con-
texts, whether phrasings and stories from the Torah or Jewish prophetic
literature such as Ezekiel and Isaiah, or those texts containing powerful
Roman and Mediterranean myths such as those surrounding Apollo-
Leto-Python, the cult of Isis, the imperial cult and the goddess Roma, or
astrological ascriptions.12 Revelation never names or quotes these sorts of
“scriptural” texts or myths directly, instead claiming to draw “quotations”
straight from Jesus, angels, and other heavenly figures. Moraga’s “Codex
Xerí” is also quite evocative of varying texts and myths drawn from a plu-
rality of Chicanx experiences and lives, but she also includes images of
Babylon and the new Jerusalem drawn from Revelation alongside ancient
Mesoamerican myths, hybrid appropriations, and contemporary texts. She
does not quote any of these sources directly either.
That both “Codex Xerí” and the book of Revelation lack overt ref-
erence to scriptures does not necessarily mean they are unaware of the
concept; the absence of the language of scriptures may serve as a mean-
ingful locus to interrogate what scriptures have meant and might mean
as discourses of power, and such an interrogation may explain why both
texts avoid the term scriptures. As with many categories in the study of
religion, including the very term religion itself, scriptures as an analytic
term carries with it a fair amount of historical baggage in English. Given
Moraga’s work to reactivate a codex practice that colonialism attempted to
eradicate, Moraga’s essay can help illuminate how the very term scriptures
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 221

encodes a colonial history, as does the larger category of religion under

which we often place scriptures. This colonial history might explain why
Moraga and so many Chicanx critics have been reticent to engage in direct
discussion with the study of religion.
Scholars in Chicanx Studies have not avoided the religious entirely, and
they sometimes turn to “spirituality” rather than “religion” because of
concerns over what religion presumes.13 The more popular definition of
religion as institutional spirituality cannot speak to Chicanx practices that
are so often lived at the margins of and beyond institutional frames.14 Even
when examining César Chávez, so well revered for his public institutional
affiliation with Catholicism, historian of religion Luis D. León makes the
case for understanding this public institutionally religious practice as a
political tool and for perceiving Chávez’s spirituality as one that crossed
religious allegiances and borders.15 One of the reasons León must make
this point is because of the constraints of our general definition of religion.
In the historical roots of the academic study of religion, certain forms
of Protestant Christianity became the prototype for religion, a category
that is significantly legally inscribed in the US Constitution, and hence
inescapably binding for those of us who live in the USA.16 The problem
with the formulation of this category is that it too often presumes that
religious identities are exclusive in ways that do not speak to Chicanx reli-
gious experiences of practicing and living multiple “religious” allegiances,
and, at the popular and legal level, religion is too often understood as
belief-focused, or in terms that might be understood as theocentric.17
Beliefs about God are not the only focus of Chicanx spirituality.18 Even by
emphasizing a “Chicano codex,” a term laden with nationalist identifica-
tion, rather than just religious identification, Moraga points codices away
from a narrowly theological focus; her codex emphasizes itself as “a prayer
for the last generation,” not a prayer to any god.19 She only discusses God
and specific gods a few times in her essay, and she never addresses gods as
her main subject of focus.
The other problem here is that religion, in its various guises, ever remains
a discourse of power, and in certain ways, particularly in the Americas,
religion came to be formulated over and against practices that are deemed
superstitious as a way of distinguishing whose and which practices may be
legitimate. Casting “religion” as “institutional” is to suggest that religion
is associated with dominantized “power.” For this book, I interviewed
an individual whom, for confidentiality’s sake, I call Ramón: he describes
growing up Roman Catholic in Mexico until the age of twelve, but then
222 J.M. HIDALGO

when he came to the USA and encountered mass in English, he left the
Catholic Church because he experienced it as “an oppressive, racist, and
discriminatory institution.”20 The idea that spirituality as a term better
conveys the practices of minoritized communities suggests that part of
the problem with dominantized definitions of religion is that “religion” is
associated with dominating power.21
This sense of religion as an institutional power structure also encodes an
assumption of singular and purified allegiance that, in part, comes out of
European missionization of other peoples under colonialism. Syncretism is
especially invoked by scholars of religion to explain the “religious hybrid-
ity” and “survivals” of indigenous, African, and Asian traditions within
various forms of hemispherically American Christianities.22 The problem
is that syncretism has generally been used to denigrate non-European reli-
gious forms, to situate folk Christian and non-Christian practices as infe-
rior to supposedly pure and clear “world religions,” such as Christianity or
Judaism. When Chicana scholars fight to remake the term syncretism along
less Euro-centric lines, they are speaking to the ways that many Chicanxs
strategically reimagine and redeploy terms of religious discourse in order
to challenge how the very categories through which Chicanxs have been
studied and placed may be understood. Chicanx Studies scholar Laura
E. Pérez stresses that syncretism is characteristic of all religions: none exist
as “pure” essential beings; rather, all religions undergo constant human
reimagination and reconstruction as people come into contact with each
other.23
Something of this approach to syncretism undergirds Moraga’s “Codex
Xerí,” in which she describes her own mix of religious rituals drawn from
multiple traditions: “Before writing. I burn the sage Juan brought back
from the hills outside Tijuana. I plant the geraniums that Carmen gave
me from her garden. I light a vela [candle] before la Virgen. And on
Christmas, Las Comadres will put down our paintbrushes, turn off our
computers, and stick our hands into the masa como han hecho las abuelas
por siglos [as the grandmothers have done for centuries].”24 Her contem-
porary scribal practice easily moves within and among seemingly disparate
traditions, and this movement functions as ways to “remember the forgot-
ten,/the fragmented,/the dismembered.”25 Moraga presents this seeming
religious hybridization as a putting back together of that which has been
falsely separated. Her examples of religious practices challenge and defy
the colonial history of differentiating the institutionally religious and the
syncretic.
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 223

Revelation and many other Jewish and Christian texts from the Roman
imperial period amply demonstrate that no pure or essential isolated “reli-
gion” exists that can be neatly disentangled from other religious practices
or frames of meaning making available in the ancient world. Revelation
plays with earlier Jewish texts, stories, and numerology, but it also trades
upon Babylonian astrological imaginaries and ancient Near Eastern and
Mediterranean religious myth-schemes. For instance, the imagery of the
“queen of heaven” who is pursued by a dragon in Revelation 12 evokes
astrology, the Egyptian goddess Isis, and Apollo-Leto-Python, to name a
few possibilities. The woman is saved from the dragon’s relentless pursuit
in verse 16, thanks to the intervention of the earth, which almost acts as
a goddess.26
That Revelation may actually be a record of past religious hybridity
should challenge fundamental assumptions about what scriptures are.
Theorist of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith proposes that humans have a
penchant for making and engaging scriptures, but do they really?27 Why
would Moraga, and Revelation for that matter, avoid the term? At the very
least, it depends on what we take that category to mean, and how it means.
That “scriptures” can sound hopelessly “Christian” to those outside the
academic study of religion is not surprising. As with the category of reli-
gion itself, religious studies discourses, for all their intellectual virtuosity,
have in fact often presumed a Protestant Christian biblical prototype for
the category of scriptures.28 Certainly, Moraga is concerned with working
out a Chicanx codex that can contribute to human transformation, that
can be something more than just a piece of writing. Moraga’s scribes take
up the polytemporal task that W.C. Smith labeled as part of scriptural phe-
nomena: a meditation on the past, present, and future of being human.29
Even within the Christian context, the Bible came to be a different
sort of textual collection to diverse Christians in distinctive eras. Before
modernity, the Bible was a collection of “normative texts” certainly, but
it was mostly present through “ritual” and other “vectors.”30 By con-
trast, later canonical formations appear during and after the Protestant
Reformation, and these behaviors seem more proximate to general
assumptions of how the Bible “works” today, whereby the Bible becomes
“viewed as independently valid and powerful, and as such, as being abso-
lutely closed and complete.”31 Many Christians of Western European
background recognize approaches to scriptures as one of the markers of
division between Protestants and Catholics with most Protestants, follow-
ing Martin Luther, claiming the supremacy of the Christian Bible and
224 J.M. HIDALGO

its particular set of canonical texts, a doctrine taught as sola scriptura,

scripture alone, as distinguished from Catholic concern with “tradition.”32
Protestants and Catholics even have distinct sets of canonical texts that
make up their scriptures, and, of course, this difference of selected texts
is also perceptible among Christians as one of the divisions that separates
Christians from Jews who share some canonically scriptural texts, but not
others (most notably that Christians also include the “New Testament”),
and the books of the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, also follow a different
sequence than the Christian “Old Testament.”
Even within the traditions that generally serve as prototypes for what
we term “scriptures” in English, one sees that scriptures, particularly in
terms of content and communal orientation, are perceived to define the
boundaries between groups who are presumed to be exclusive of each
other. While over time the English term scriptures came to apply beyond
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions33 and came to designate almost
any seemingly special texts within other traditions, such as the Vedas for
so-called Hinduism,34 scriptures also become a key distinguishing feature
of religions, a way to separate off and divide up distinct religious “tra-
ditions.” Therefore, scriptures are a means of identity play, a means for
defining and dividing distinct groups of people. While Moraga’s essay may
help to critique some of this historical abuse of scriptures across dynamics
of power, her inflecting of the need for Chicanxs as a people to have their
own codices reflects something of this presumed interconnection between
peoplehood and texts; Moraga trades on the power of having scriptures
even as she denies the term’s applicability to the Chicanx context.
An obvious reason to favor codex over scriptures has to do with specifi-
cally Christian associations of the term; scriptures are too often bound up
with ideas of “bibles” and the “Christian Bible.” When Moraga conjures
the specifically Christian book of Revelation, she does so to challenge and
transform its scriptural power by equating it with “the Chicano codex,”
a codex whose glyphs include “a small group of jotería, ‘two-spirited’
people” gathered in mourning in San Francisco, “street violence,” and
“brown-on-brown crime.”35 Thus, she challenges the Bible as standing
on a singular ground, lifting up a more diverse set of scriptural sources,
and she emphasizes the “serpentine” quality of the Chicano codex.
Beyond the import of serpents in Mesoamerican thought, given Moraga’s
emphasis on relating “darkness and dawn,” she may also allude to Gloria
Anzaldúa’s specific reactivation of Guadalupe as an ancient Mesoamerican
serpent goddess and Anzaldúa’s emphasis on the Coatlicue state: a painful
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 225

wrestling as a “prelude to crossing,” a state of ongoing struggle and

revelation grounded in “my thousand sleepless serpent eyes blinking in
the night, forever open.”36 Such a play, a trading upon biblical scriptural
power in order to make many sources scriptural, and in order to invoke
indigenous and lived worlds as revelatory, also points to the omissions that
have informed dominantized approaches to scriptures.
Moraga’s codex explodes the category of “bible” by considering the
ways that biblical texts and traditions surrounding them are but iterations
of larger human social, political, and religious phenomena through which
meaning is articulated. At the same time, her emphasis on the memory
of conquest as an intertwining of religious and sexual violence requires a
reconsideration of where scriptures fit in that history: “In a suit of armor,
he rides us—cross in one hand, sword in the other. And this is how they’ve
always taken us with their gods of war and their men of god.”37 This spe-
cific identification of the Christian god as a war god is also her indictment
of how religion—and by extension scriptures—have been enforced upon
Chicanxs.
Beyond the struggles internal to Europe between Protestants
and Catholics, European settler colonists, slaveholders, and imperial
thinkers conceptually deployed scriptures in early modern American
contexts to differentiate indigenous populations and enslaved West
Africans from European conquerors. In the midst of European confla-
grations between Protestants and Catholics, which partially manifest as
a fight over what the Christian Bible is and how to use it, the Spanish
also burnt the Mesoamerican codices and then later sought to pre-
serve and recreate only certain pieces.38 The idea that some religions
are “religions of the book”—we might think of Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam here—has meaning because there are religions that fall
outside “the book,” instead constituted by their lack or deficiency in
relationship to the prototypes. As a critical response to this prototype
effect, many Chicanxs have sought to make other texts considered
equally “scriptural” in relationship to the Bible, too. As early as 1971,
Chicana activist Enriqueta Vasquez drew attention to how indigenous
Mesoamericans had other important texts, stories, practices, and ideas
“que son tan válidos como la literatura europea. Tenemos en México
hoy mismo El libro de Los Libros de Chilam Balám y el Popul vuh que
son tan válidos como la Biblia, son libros de consejos. Y los conceptos
del hopi, del Navajo, del apache y de otros tribus tienen básicamente
creencias relativas a las del Azteca.”39
226 J.M. HIDALGO

Encoded within the English word scripture is a reference to “writing”

in the form of “script.”40 In the Americas, Europeans encountered indig-
enous Americans and enslaved African populations, and described them as
lacking “writing” and thus lacking in scriptures. As many contemporary
Chicanxs would reflect, such a distinction depends upon a definition of
“writing” intentionally articulated to exclude non-European peoples. Even
when we recognize certain indigenous Mesoamerican writing as such, we
may do so because we still hold to a European prototype. Vasquez under-
scores the tensions between kinds of textuality and orality that get identi-
fied as scriptural; she draws attention to the power dynamics behind Aztec
thought being placed above other indigenous “texts.” Though scholars
try to broaden the categories of writing and scriptures and make the case
for perceiving indigenous American traditions as scriptures, they tend to
favor those cases imperially recognizable to European traditions.
Pre-Columbian American and sub-Saharan African contexts did have
several systems that we might label as “writing” if we are willing to let go
of the need for an alphabet or a sense of strict correspondence between
specific images and precise words. Classifying Mesoamerican systems as
“semasiographic,” rhetoric scholar Damián Baca describes these systems
as “a configuration of permanently recorded marks that signify thought,
ideas, and imagery rather than visible speech.”41 These scribal systems
assimilate writing and painting, even in the very Nahuatl terms for writing,
such as the verb Tlaquilolitztli.42 Additionally, scribal composers/artists
(tlacuiloque) had specific roles; a separate class of Tlamatinime, loosely
translated as “sages,” interpreted, studied, and performed the “discourse
of the ancients” that was encoded within the writing systems.43 The visual
representations of writing were insufficient carriers of meaning; as histo-
rian Dylan A.T.  Miner further argues with regard to Aztlán specifically,
performances “activated [the texts] by adding supplementary and irre-
placeable knowledge not directly inscribed on the amatl of the codices….
Aztlán was located in the space created by the performance. Aztlán was
transformed from a site within representation space to one that existed
within real space.”44 Thus, Nahua codices were explicitly tied to perfor-
mance, and the places that were textually encoded were actively performed
and made into place with each reading.
Although I would suggest that if we look at writing in the ancient
Roman world, we can also observe a parallel, if somewhat distinct, sense
of writing as something that is not just individually read but also socially
performed, the Nahua approach to written representation and the
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 227

presumption of how it worked diverged from the practices of the Spanish

in the early sixteenth century. Mexican amoxtli were more important as
referents for oral recitation and storytelling performance, whereas the
Spanish emphasized words and letters.45 However, because of Spanish and
broader European conquests, which additionally transpired in the midst
of the Gutenberg printing revolution and the Protestant Reformation,
the Spanish came to place a greater and greater emphasis upon writing as
specifically alphabetic representation, and literacy in that form of writing
was upheld as a certain civilizational standard.
As a critical response to this facet of conquest-inflected approaches to
scriptures and scripturalization, Moraga’s “Codex Xerí” pointedly defines
her writing in the Latin alphabet as articulation in “Roman hieroglyphs”
so as to undercut the ways that the Latin alphabet became “script” while
certain other forms of writing were perceived as idolatrous pictures, as
icons and hieroglyphs, and not more “formal” writing.46 The language of
glyphs and hieroglyphs, establishing an affinity between writing and paint-
ing that recuperates the shared Nahuatl terminology, permeates her essay.
Even as Moraga challenges the colonial history of scriptures and reactivates
a less alphabetically focused practice, she continues to refer to a codex and
to codices as revelatory and powerful centers for communal negotiation.

RETHINKING SCRIPTURES AS CATEGORY

Rather than thinking only with the problems of scriptures as a histori-
cally created and recreated construct, Moraga also plays with what that
constructed category can help us to understand about human communi-
ties. Adapting the term codex for her later collection, A Xicana Codex of
Changing Consciousness, 2000–2010, Moraga’s personal codex is pointedly
just a codex. Her codex does not present a summed up, essentialized,
static personal portrait; rather the codex as collection chronicles her some-
times - conflicted journey. If her use of the codex is actually more akin
to some of the plural ways that scriptures can function, when unmoored
from assumptions of the mid-twentieth-century Protestant prototype,
then scriptures may be approached as chronicles and as parameters, but
not as neatly identifying the entirety of a people’s beliefs and practices.
Rendering the scribal, if not the scriptural, as a host of relational prac-
tices concerned with power and communal shaping, Moraga’s sensibil-
ity signals what one might label an “affective relationship” or at least an
“attitude” of people toward texts (or other objects of scripturalizing).47 If
228 J.M. HIDALGO

we classify her appeal to the revelatory power of codices as also scrip-

tural, then Moraga also clarifies the social import of both dominantized
scripturalization practices and Chicanx responses. She presents codices/
scriptures as social objects of human relationship not just to text but also
to each other.
If one presumes the relationality between peoples and scriptures as an
ongoing process of scripturalization, then, rather than concentrating on
what texts and practices count as scriptures, perhaps a better focus is on
one of W.C.  Smith’s questions: “What have those people done to the
text in rendering it scriptural; and what has it done to them?”48 When I
ask what other people have done with the Rev 22:18–19 prohibition on
adding to or subtracting “from the words of the book of this prophecy,”
I am not trying to find a single original meaning for this prohibition, but
I am trying to understand what has happened to people when they focus
on this prohibition and take it in certain directions. Moraga, though, does
not merely defy the prohibition: she offers up her own embodied “book
of revelation.”
Rather than merely relegate Revelation’s prohibition to a focus on the
text itself, we might think about that prohibition as reflective of a certain
shift in relationality, and one possible way of reading Revelation’s proscrip-
tion enables our modern sense of the Bible as a closed and authoritative
locus. Revelation’s prohibition can be contextualized as a moment in the
remaking of the practices of social power that surround scriptural engage-
ments. Scriptural theorist, and trained biblical scholar, Vincent L. Wimbush
attends to the practices of power in human relationality with and around
scriptures, a set of practices he terms “scripturalization.” Scripturalization
is a process by which “ideological and discursive rules and practices” for-
mulate and bind an “imagined community,” even as those rules are ren-
dered mobile and somehow communally transcendent.49 Moraga’s use of
the codex has indeed been read as part and parcel of her attempt to rede-
ploy and reimagine cultural nationalism; for all Moraga’s reimagination
of “nationalist, mythic, and anti-imperialist discourse,” something like a
“codex” is still relevant because it has to do with nationalist and com-
munal imagination.50 Likewise, it matters that Revelation creates in text
the city that had been a Jewish “center,” Jerusalem, whose Temple the
Romans leveled in 70 CE. As I argue in Chap. 3, the new Jerusalem of
Rev 21–22 is also a temple of sorts; a new “center” for people has formed
within “the book of this prophecy” (see, e.g., Rev 22:19).
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 229

Although Moraga does not necessarily invoke the “normativity” of a

center, she certainly plays with this sense of scripturalization as a nation-
alist project when she imagines a “codex” as a metaphor for “we” as
Chicanx people: “The Chicano codex is a portrait of our daily lives…. We
are a codex of lotería and boxing matches.”51 Her codex portrays lived
and embodied activities of a “we” who can be found in a codex and a
“we” who also are that codex. Scriptures need not be “overtly religious”
to qualify as such, and understanding central nationalist texts as scrip-
tures helps to reveal that the Chicanx movement not only reacted to the
Bible but also to larger practices of scripturalization, and to the processes
through which particular texts, particular ritual ways of reading, particular
veins of interpretation, and particular interpreters, are elevated as authori-
tative and others are marginalized as peripheral.52 The US Constitution
is a civic text that participates in and relies upon the politics of scriptur-
alization. Note its capital C as well as the assumption that something is
“constituted” through this text. Because it is supposed to provide a key
framework for binding together a nation, it is often treated reverentially,
and it is employed through a vast legal system that references it daily;
members of the larger population often quote (and misquote) it as a final
source of appeal on a range of issues in social and political life in the USA.
Multiple scholars have made the case for seeing the Constitution as “nor-
mative American scripture.”53
In an essay that seeks to illuminate the distinctions between regular
“texts” and those texts which become and are engaged as “scriptures,”
religion scholar James W.  Watts traces “three dimensions” of scriptural
ritualization that entail specific relations of social power.54 Watts compares
scriptures across traditions and outlines varying ritualized practices that
deal with scriptures’ “semantic dimension” (the practices of interpretation
that attend to “the meaning of what is written”), “performative dimen-
sion” (wherein aspects of the words and/or the content/larger ideas of
a scripture are performed), and the “iconic dimension” (visual and artis-
tic representations of scriptures, especially visualizations that “distinguish
[scriptures] from other books”).55 Watts’s model clarifies the intercon-
nected negotiations of social power and textual ritualization that demar-
cate scriptures, and it helps us rethink taken-for-granted practices. For
instance, despite a seeming antagonism toward icons, Protestant Christians
treat the Bible with great iconic reverence in different ritual practices—
consider, for example, Bible carrying and the giving of Bibles as presents.56
230 J.M. HIDALGO

Though Watts suggests that “secular,” especially national texts, are

only ritualized in one or two dimensions, many “secular texts” are indeed
ritualized in all three dimensions.57 The US Declaration of Independence
and Constitution meet all three of Watts’s ritualizations of scriptures: they
are iconic (just visit the national archives to witness how great power is
associated with them at an iconic level),58 vigorously interpreted in the
semantic domain in pursuit of power associated with their “correct inter-
pretation,” and performed, with portions read out loud in various events.
The Constitution is ritually read and interpreted, not only in the US legal
system but also by scholars in a variety of disciplines, by commentators
on television, by people in everyday conversations, and in song lyrics.
These practices seek some kind of authority from the Constitution. The
Constitution is ritually performed, though perhaps not in the inspira-
tional ways that stories can engender. As a child, I remember having to
memorize portions of both for school, especially the Preamble to the US
Constitution, and in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on every Fourth of
July, there is a public reading of the Declaration of Independence.
So what might be gained by a willingness to accept that nations, too,
can ritualize scriptures along those three dimensions? While the USA
does often use Christian “symbols,” “a sacred aura” adheres to the USA’s
“founding documents” because they are perceived as constituting “a
social order.”59 Not only is the Christian Bible a still powerful scripture in
dominantized US society, but the USA is also a prime example of a nation
in the thrall of scripturalization, a nation constituted and naturalized in
and through texted words. As a scripturalized nation, the USA, especially
through its Constitution, reveals how any framework of scripturalization
can be construed as a kind of “magic.” Constituting the USA through
text specifically entails coaxing people to believe in a certain shared social
fiction that they do not completely understand.60 Likewise, in my previ-
ous chapters, I have argued that many Chicanx texts are ritually semantic,
iconic, and performative, and thus one might see these texts as attempts to
constitute and reconstitute, ritually, the social order of Chicanxs. I would
also add that these ritual uses are reinforcing; it is not just that scriptures
lend authority to the rituals, but also that the rituals help to maintain the
authority of scriptures.
If we accept that nations scripturalize, then do scripturalization prac-
tices in Chicanx nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s merely align with
dominantized US modes of scripturalization? Besides critiquing the omis-
sion of indigenous and hybrid scriptural traditions, do their practices of
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 231

scripturalization challenge dominantized models? How does Moraga

redeploy Chicanx cultural nationalism through a reimagined model of
the “codex”? Moraga invokes the Chicanx rendering of Aztec prophecy,
that we are at the tumultuous end of the age of the Fifth Sun, and a
new age will come that could undo the USA as we know it.61 For her,
this end entails the violent burning of Babylon/new Jerusalem/US cit-
ies, and also a transformation in scripturalizing practice: “It is 1992, and
we are witnessing a new breed of revolucionario, their speech scrolls are
slave tongues unraveling.… And we, the Codex-Makers, remove the white
mask/We wait and watch the horizon.”62 In invoking “slave tongues” and
a “white mask,” Moraga summons Frantz Fanon and points to a desired
transformation away from a system that has controlled words, faces, and
actions through enslavement, which sounds akin to Wimbush’s indict-
ment of “scripturalization as slavery.” At the same time, Moraga’s turn
to the “codex” and “speech scrolls” and away from languages of “scrip-
tures” may also be understood as contesting this coercive US national-
ization through scriptural practice. Her evocation of plural codices and
codex-makers, her desire to seek out pluralities and to pursue “unities-in-
difference,” renders a version of scriptures that conjures not just the limits
circumscribed but also the pliabilities available for diverse people to share
particular scriptures that they engage differently.63
Chicanx practices of counter-scripturalization demonstrate that the
USA and its scriptural politics have always been spaces of contest and strug-
gle over social boundaries, practices, meanings, and identities.64 Even as a
dominantized scriptural formation, the USA and its scriptures have never
been statically fixed or only understood one way. That Chicanx movement
texts played with the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence,
can be approached as a certain kind of subversive mimicry through which
minoritized populations deploy, invert, and hybridize centering texts,
myths, and practices from the dominantized realm in order to destabilize
the power of a center/periphery binary that relegates minoritized popula-
tions to the margins. Chicanxs, as with the communities of Revelation, are
thus part of their respective empires, even as they are marginalized within
them. As a tool of domination, scripturalization is a practice of making
discursive “centers,” but then what is scripturalization among minoritized
populations who seek to challenge the unequal power relations of centers?
In Chap. 3, I argue that one sees a utopian move in Revelation, where
the geographical center of the temple is moved into the text, and this move
can be seen as a moment in the journey of Revelation’s own scripturalization.
232 J.M. HIDALGO

While religion scholar Jonathan Z. Smith focuses on the way that diasporic
religionists in antiquity made the “cosmos” into their home and all of
earth their exile, I am suggesting that diasporic practices may transfer an
old imperial center away from physical space and into another mode, such
as scriptural textuality; in so doing, scripturalization turns scriptures into a
homing mechanism, or a “homing device,”65 an object for locating one’s
relationship to the cosmic home and for creating some sense of home
wherever one finds oneself.
Remarkably, the USA as a nation of settler colonists inherited some-
thing of this utopian scriptural practice and took it up, perhaps because
to be settler colonists is also to be unsettled in place even while violently
unsettling others. The idea that “scriptures” can serve as a new sort of
center can also be found in meditations on Chicanx movement texts.
For instance, Genaro M. Padilla examines the use of corridos in Rudolfo
A. Anaya’s 1976 novel, Heart of Aztlán, underscoring the power of scrip-
turalization in the deployment of corridos and other Chicanx texts. But
he emphasizes that corridos provide access to a world not fully material-
ized in the present: “Relocating their own spiritual center through the
chant of magic words—a corrido, a cuento, or a text—restores their clarity
and understanding and ultimately renews the group’s social resolve.”66
Diasporic populations often seek belonging to a world beyond, and such
a world can be made through texts because of their “translocal” qualities,
their abilities to move when and where peoples cannot; thus, they can aid
in an imagined community bigger than face-to-face geography allows.
The sacred here helps to clarify the slippage between texts and places.
In their focus on spirituality, Chicana scholars have often taken up a focus
on the sacred and its somewhat hierocentric sense of spatial differentia-
tion.67 Chicana literary theorist Theresa Delgadillo’s definition of spiritu-
ality heavily relies on the sacred as a key to divining the “other world” and
“other way of knowing.”68 Although Delgadillo approaches the sacred
through the lenses of spiritual and racial mixture, invocations of the sacred
have historically envisioned a hierocentric conception of religion that pic-
tures a hierarchy of space and imagination, a conception that replaces the
theocentric God with a different but related abstraction; moreover, many
versions of the sacred imagine space as divided into a neat dichotomy—
sacred and profane—in ways that distinctly do not apply to peoples who
imagine life in a “borderlands” and as “mixture.”
Delgadillo and others still need to use the language of the sacred because
the word is so often combined with space and place, even if they need sacred
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 233

to articulate a relationship to space different from how sacred has been tra-
ditionally understood. Discourses of and about the sacred, sacrality, spirit,
and spirituality appear with striking regularity in multiple writings (not just
text but also various ephemera, such as posters) from the movement period
as well as writings by those who respond to and take inspiration from the
1960s and 1970s.69 Yet, their use of sacral language makes more sense
if the very notion of the sacred, like scriptures, is a term of human rela-
tionship.70 While earlier theorists, such as the sociologist Émile Durkheim,
imagined the sacred and profane as distinctly separated from each other,
more recent scholars have reimagined the relationship between sacred
and profane spaces; affect studies, for example, illuminate how people
experience sacred and profane spaces not as divided but as “hierarchically
interconnected.”71 Because “nothing is inherently sacred,”72 rather than
presume the world neatly divides between sacred and profane, or center
and periphery, scholars of religion could focus on how people come to feel
and perceive particular kinds of space on particular terms.73 López’s experi-
ences with Epiphany speak to how that church was “sacred space” for her
because it blended seemingly profane and holy worlds in one environment;
what mattered is how she felt in that space. A significant tension around
using the “sacred” in the study of religion is the encoding of a seemingly
neat binaristic division of space that does not apply to how people often
“feel” sacred space. A binaristic division fits within dominantized power
relationships whereby greater power gets distributed among those closest
to and with greater authorized access to the scriptural center; no wonder
then that Chicana scholars would resist this approach.
Sacred spaces are not simply “discovered”; rather they are “claimed”
and contested “by people advancing specific interests.”74 In short, they
are not just spaces of power, they are major loci of power negotiation,
enforcement, and subversion, and as such they are subject to the same
problematizing of power and spatial relations that Chicanx Studies schol-
arship has launched at the US border. Simple spatial binaries, in fraught
relationship also with other social power binaries, are indeed what much
Chicanx intellectual work and artistic activity have labored to frustrate for
many decades. Most notably, Anzaldúa’s work, Borderlands/La Frontera,
is a striking—and practically scriptural in Chicanx Studies perspective—
intervention into simplistic spatial, sexual, gender, racial, and power bina-
ries. One might even understand Anzaldúa’s and Moraga’s works, with
their mixtures of languages and genres, as striving to transform and move
beyond a host of polarities.75
234 J.M. HIDALGO

Perhaps, both Moraga’s and Revelation’s avoidance of the actual ter-

minology scripture attempts to evade recreating such a center/periphery
binary for their own (re)imagined communities. Glimpsed through the
lens of Moraga’s emphasis on “we” and the plurality of possible glyphs,
codices, and revelations, the translation of Revelation 1:1 becomes more
ambiguous for me. Although “Ἀποκάλυψις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ” is normally
translated with a definitive article, “The revelation of Jesus Christ,” in part
because of the proper noun “Jesus Christ,” another translation might
affirm the less singular possibility of just “revelation” or “a revelation,” a
translation that would open up a greater sense of potential plurality and
less definitive authority.
Moraga’s work then critiques and releases any need for one sacred
center in favor of many, sometimes competing, centers, but she also does
so in the name of claiming sacred space. In the Chicano Codices exhibi-
tion, Sánchez-Tranquilino contextualizes each piece as drawing on more
than the texts we presume to be “scriptural”; each exhibition codex plays
with a plurality of sources and media, including Aztec and other Mexican
visual, cultural, and religious practices—“family histories, personal mem-
ories, folk practices, and language.”76 This diversity of sources becomes
an important focus for Moraga’s response to the works she sees. Moving
back and forth between lament over the savagery of European conquest
and the present-day crisis-level sorrows of poverty, racism, and crime,
Moraga sketches Chicanx daily life in practices such as bread-making,
low riding, and communal mourning—all are potential sites of revela-
tory insight, resistance, and hope. She argues that artists and writers can
and should be those who “read the signs of the times,” who interpret
daily pains, joys, and tedium, in order to discern and speak a certain form
of deeper level truth to their people in a given and particular moment.
Invoking an ancient version of apocalyptic as revelatory unveiling of
truths beneath surface sights and sounds, she emphasizes how scribes
must “decode” and “interpret the signs of the time,” but in a process of
polytemporal and agonizing utopian play: “[The Chicano scribe] looks
backward in order to look forward to a world founded not on greed,
but on respect for the sovereignty of nature. And in this, she suffers—
to know that fertility is both possible and constantly interrupted.”77
Chicanx scribes then take up an old apocalyptic task of revealing deeper
truths, and they must sometimes struggle with their knowledge of the
gap between the “other world” remembered and imagined and the
world in which they reside.
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 235

Besides establishing scribal practices as being utopian ones of memory

that fuel hope, Moraga also shows them to be practices of memory of loss
and death: “The Chicano codex is a demand for retribution—retribution
for land and lives lost. Our records show the sum of Chicano existence
engraved on tombstones: World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam,
Iraq. Our records show a five-century-long list of tributes paid to illegal
landlords.”78 Here, the Chicano codex becomes a memory of lives and
land paid to dominantized powers; the presumed dynamics of “center”
and “periphery” are necessarily critiqued through this vision. The quotid-
ian experiences of a peripheralized relationship to a dominantized cen-
ter necessitate a divergent orientation toward that center and toward any
“other world” constructed and negotiated in relationship to the centers of
daily life. Latinx perspectives have been critical of the US “myth of inno-
cence,” because such a myth ignores histories of genocidal conquest, vio-
lence, slavery, and “theft.”79 Latinx identities recognize cultural descent
from violent mixture—from conqueror, conquered, enslaved, enslaver,
persecuted, and a range of peoples and behaviors in between.80 This sense
of Chicanxs as products of a “noninnocent” history that must reckon with
the USA in “an-other” perspective pervades “Codex Xerí.” Challenging
the narratives that the dominantized center has circulated as its norm,
Moraga summons “an-other world” in the Chicanx codex where alterna-
tive memories obtain. Her move between a singular codex and a plurality
of records exasperates any attempt to create a new singular center that
might replace the dominantized mode.
Moraga, akin to many of the feminist and queer critics discussed in
Chap. 5, underscores an approach to scriptures that revels in indetermi-
nacy and signifying play.81 Moraga’s codex and practices of interpreta-
tion are dynamic and plural, and that is why she characterizes the scribal
task within the guise of the sage. Again, pushing beyond the alphabetic,
she conjures images to point to the excesses possible while also stressing
the need for women especially to reinvent scriptural relations: “And the
women whisper:/we are more than/mujer before metate […]/A Mechicana
glyph. Con Safos.”82 Moraga’s image of women yearning becomes a scrip-
tural glyph, another revelatory image in the Chicano codex, so that notions
of barely audible longing become part of a Chicana feminist scripturaliza-
tion. This more dynamic and indeterminate scripturalizing imagination,
while playing with a Chicanx phrasing for “respect” (“Con Safos”), also
signifies on notions of writings and glyphs by pushing them to contain
more than the written word presumably bears. Notions of scriptures also
236 J.M. HIDALGO

already require a resistant space of playful interpretation for those whom

authorized interpreters have minoritized; so the minoritized find their
own ways to open up and transform the textual practices that minoritized
them.

Scriptures as Utopian Episteme

Moraga describes her “demand for retribution” as also being about an
“América unwritten,” and hence previously inaccessible to the domi-
nantized regimes of knowledge and power. Her genre-bending can be
understood as expressing “the indeterminacy of knowledge that opens the
text.”83 Moraga riffs on codices and scribal power to confront the terms
upon and ways in which power and knowledge have been constructed
together in the past five hundred years in the Americas. Although she sig-
nals toward a desired-for retrieval of a world before Columbus, she does
not entirely relegate her search to an idealized past; instead, she draws
upon “an-other world” whose temporal and spatial realms do not oper-
ate in clear-cut linear progressions with smooth and neat borders. She
suggests that in the American world before Columbus, “Science was less
intelligent than art. And art and its makers were respected.”84 While this
assertion could be read as a simplistic and nostalgic binary, Moraga does
not necessarily deny knowledge-power to science. However, she does
note that certain forms of knowledge are respected and accorded primacy
within different discursive frames. In her reading of Mesoamerica before
Columbus, art’s intellectual value was greater than at present.
Contextualized also as an outgrowth of El Plan de Santa Barbara’s
concerns about the interconnections of authorized knowledge and prac-
tices of scripturalization, Moraga’s unease with contemporary relations
between science and art may be recast as a concern with what the eleva-
tion of writing makes possible and what the elevation of writing restricts.
Thus, Moraga mixes both Spanish and English in order to draw attention
to that which rests beyond the written word: “The Chicano codex es una
peregrinación to an América unwritten.”85 One way to translate peregri-
nación would be “pilgrimage,” and the religious resonance of that word
signals how a codex can point to and draw people into another sort of
“sacred” realm beyond the written word, one that recollects the painful
and non-innocent past conflict that has led from 1492 to 1992.86 The
past and the present southwestern territories are not the only “unwritten”
lands reclaimed by a Chicanx codex: so, too, is the future. Thus, Moraga’s
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 237

essay ends with a sun rising on a new day/new era, one glimpsed through
a third eye that opens up other avenues of Chicanx self-imagination.
Dominantized power relations have forged these minoritized subjects
in language that the subjects would not choose for themselves. Peoples
who have been signified—created secondarily in a range of academic dis-
courses generated by others but not, until quite recently, by members of
their own community—also, necessarily, sought to create worlds beyond
those that were written upon them.87 Scripturalization, as more than just
a concern with what qualifies as scriptures, can be further clarified within
this context, in which a dominantized regime creates a hegemonic world
discursively, a world that minoritized populations must struggle to move
through and beyond.88 In other words, scripturalization is about discur-
sive worlds, not as “self-referential” systems in isolation but the very ways
that these “self-referential” systems come to exist and be loci of power
within particular social worlds. Scripturalization is not merely about texts
but also the ways that whole worlds and the knowledge made about them
come into being.
Near the end of Moraga’s essay, she plays with the rhetoric of look-
ing for “an-other place” beyond dominantized modes: “And we, the
Codex-Makers, remove the white mask./We wait and watch the horizon./
Our Olmeca third eye/begins to glisten/in the slowly/rising/light.”89 To see
beyond dominantized modes requires, for Moraga, seeing and situating in
“an-other place” and time. Delgadillo argues that spiritual mestizaje serves
as “an epistemology rather than an eschatology,”90 thus distinguishing
Chicanx spirituality from the normative concerns of “religion” by claim-
ing that “salvation” is not the primary issue at stake. Rather, the concern
is about how knowledge is made and articulated with regard to this world
and its relationship to “other” worlds. This different approach to knowl-
edge rests in “telling ambivalences rather than the pretense of control and
omniscience.”91 One way of conceiving Chicanx spirituality for Delgadillo
and Pérez, then, is to approach it as a struggle of scripturalization, of
creating and playing with sources of knowledge and power beyond and in
excess of dominantized modes. Delgadillo and Pérez are not suggesting
that these are the only stakes of Chicanx spirituality and religiosity, but
knowledge and power are crucial factors in “other” world orientations.
Although not mapping the same peoples or experiences, Fernando
F. Segovia’s charting of Latinx theologies and place also provides a further
example that clarifies how this other world is often an explicitly utopian
one. Segovia contextualizes his and other Latinx experiences of diaspora
238 J.M. HIDALGO

and exile in a crossing between and among varying worlds, including a

world that does not quite exist: “We are in the world, indeed in two worlds,
but we are not of the world, indeed of no world. Such is the point of
departure for my theology of the diaspora.”92 As Segovia argues, to some
extent his own visionary locus is the “no place.” Segovia further describes
in that same essay, in the “going back and forth” between two worlds, an
exile necessarily “ends up constructing a ‘home’ of his or her own, a world
of otherness….”93 For Segovia, this home—in an “other” world between
worlds while being neither world—is a world particular to that exilic per-
son. Unlike dominantized suggestions that one can be an objective reader
by interpreting from “no place in particular,” Segovia elevates the strident
particularity of everyone’s placement. Even “other” worlds are particular
to individuals, communities, and these “other” worlds are entangled with
the multiplicities of daily lived experiences. What is important to recog-
nize here is that this “no place” in which Segovia finds home is not “no
place in particular.” Other worlds are always quite particular “no places.”
Moreover, for Segovia, a utopian bent characterizes engagement with
this other world,94 and that is part of why I consider “utopia” as a descrip-
tive key for making sense of scripturalizing practices for peoples who
struggle with place, peoples such as the Chicanxs that are the focus of this
book. If we recontextualize the “utopian” within an existentially ambiva-
lent instability, wherein the utopian mode can be recognized as a social
tool with significant limits, the utopian bent can seem more like the con-
cern with “healing” self and knowledge that Pérez has portrayed as central
to Chicana art. Texts can become a mode for the utopian, a way in which
to access “an-other world,” a better world of a utopian “good place.”
Indeed, these texts can even become that “other world” as utopian “no
place.” This utopian mode informs how scriptural codices help to provide
glimpses of a utopian “horizon.”95

Playing with Textuality
So far, this chapter has emphasized the textual facets of scriptures and
scripturalization even if noting that “text” is not the only form of scrip-
ture or way it is practiced. The primacy of the “textual,” of that which is
written and unwritten, has a complex history in relationship to scriptures.
Scriptures have never been only about text but also about a whole host of
practices that refer to texts. Many of the Chicanx intellectuals for whom
these issues of scripturalization most mattered in the 1960s and 1970s
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 239

are quite distinct from the majority of the ethnic Mexican population in
the USA; most ethnic Mexicans, given significant class and educational
differences, had different literacy practices.96 Likewise, in the ancient
world, the vast majority of persons had greatly circumscribed literacy,
and oral cultures tended to value writing “as less authoritative than oral
communication.”97 For example, Jennifer Scheper Hughes described how
some Mexicans within the diocese of Cuernavaca actively resisted Bishop
Sergio Méndez Arceo’s attempt to increase Bible reading and discussion
in liberation-oriented base ecclesial communities because they saw such
biblicization to be Protestant.98 Moraga is not alone in emphasizing that
much power and import can still be found beyond the inscriptions of texts.
Although not the focus of this book, the power of visual materials (murals,
films, theater, and other visual or mixed media art forms) and audio/oral
materials (such as songs and folk tales) as another form of “scripture,” as
another sort of practice of scripturalization in varying Chicanx and other
communities, cannot be underestimated.
Textuality acts as a dominantized mode of scripturalization within the
broader world; texts can be aligned with power even when most people
have minimal “literacy.” Even when the majority of a population is illiterate,
its people will recognize when a dominantized culture has attached great
power to literacy.99 Revelation’s author is often commanded to “write,”
though the rhetorical emphasis and power in the Apocalypse rests on the
sensory sight, sound, and feeling of the heavenly revelation. Readers, who
would primarily have been listeners and viewers in the ancient world, hear-
ing and watching Revelation performed, are drawn into sensory experi-
ences as powerful in relationship to but also beyond the textual.
The tension between seeing, listening, and writing in Revelation may
be understood as its own genre-bending riff on the tools of the powerful,
both playing with those tools of writing, recognizing the power they have
been granted, while still locating authority in worlds beyond the textual.
In the context of the Chicanx movement, Anna NietoGomez reflected on
the power of viewing an oral tradition written when she described seeing
a student with a picket sign at Long Beach State College in 1967: “He
was a Chicano, and on this poster were these words, and I didn’t know
the words. So I sounded it out—chi-ca-no—‘Chicano!’ Oh my god! I
had never seen it written—it was only an oral word, something I heard
in my community. I was raised that we’re Chicanos, but I had never seen
it written in black and white. I was so ecstatic because I felt so alone.”100
For NietoGomez, a certain community-making power adheres to seeing
240 J.M. HIDALGO

what once felt like a secret oral tradition inhabit that powerful nexus of
written authority, but the authority of Chicano as a term rested within the
oral tradition of her community in San Bernardino. NietoGomez’s sense
of drawing a connection between an oral tradition and its expression in
writing speaks to the ways in which identity performances can be linked
to and thought about with scriptures. One need not necessarily construct
the world in an oral/literate dichotomy. Rather, one might instead per-
ceive “that orality is the matrix of literacy.”101 Dominantized modes may
privilege literacy, but in practice, writing is a tool of oral and aural worlds.
The “script” of scriptures also references performance.102 Thus, scriptures
always depend upon meaningful indeterminacy as texts are taken up by
different interpreters.103
Moraga describes her use of “codices” as resting on the oral, not
the written, referent. “I describe these writings as codices because the
Nahuatl word evokes the oral impulse that first birthed this record
of essays, poems, and meditations.”104 She conveys the difference
between her practice of writing, as rooted in Mesoamerican writing,
and the European tradition, “in the context of an unjust Western liter-
ary canon that extols the privately read, soundless word and abstract
thought over the canto of cuento.” Perceiving herself as distinguishing
Mesoamerican codices and her own writing from Western “scriptures,”
Moraga emphasizes the performer of written words as the person who
can make them live, “giving [the work] voice, body, propósito.”105
Moraga’s stories are read in embodied ways, and thus their meanings
vary with the bodies who take up, inhabit, and transform the texts she
has written. Meanings are always in the moment and in the people who
read and access texts.
Purpose (propósito) is a crucial point here. Certainly, aspirations of mak-
ing better worlds and healing selves lurk in Moraga’s discussion of her
work as a codex of her consciousness. The appropriate focus for a student
of this facet of scriptures, then, is not the content-meaning in a given text
(or oral tradition or visual work that might also be scripture) or the sort of
format or genre in which it might fall; rather people who engage scriptures
derive meaning in the relationship they build with these scriptures.106 For
Moraga, scriptures and codices are not isolated textual objects that are
read by abstracted individuals. Instead, they turn our attention to the ways
that scriptures are scriptures because they are ritualized; they are embod-
ied and performed. Even private reading is a specific kind of embodied
ritual performance when undertaken with scriptures.
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 241

Moraga’s essay emphasizes that people in different communities, whether

cities, barrios, Chicanxs, or a circle of jotería meeting in San Francisco,
serve as interpreters, revisers, and makers of varying sorts of texts.107 Her
description does not foreground the texts but rather the people who
create, perform, and interpret them. Her identification of these varying
groups then shifts focus to the dynamics separating embodied peoples and
texts even while she suggests a confluence between them: “In the circle of
this oración we form a contemporary urban Chicano glyph. A small group
of jotería, ‘two-spirited’ people, standing in the shadow de Los Pechos de La
India (San Francisco).… We sprinkle his ashes in the comadre’s yard, an
urban jardín of coffee-can pots and desert succulents.”108 By describing a
mourning ritual as a glyph to be interpreted, Moraga redirects our atten-
tion to the rituals of performance and interpretation that are bound up
with writing.
Moraga retains a fascination with the notion of the Mesoamerican
codex, not only in her essay “Codex Xerí” but also in her more recent col-
lection of writings from the first decade of the twenty-first century.109 She
privileges the codex as a site of reactivation, as something entangled with
but other than the ancient Mesoamerican practices upon which she draws.
Conflating the work of the ancient Mesoamerican tlacuilo (scribes) with
the tlamatinime (sages),110 Moraga imagines “scribes” as doing something
besides just writing; scribes must “interpret the signs of the time, read the
writing on barrio walls, decode the hieroglyphs of street violence, unravel
the skewed message of brown-on-brown crime and sister-rape.”111 Rather
than completely distinguish this interpretive practice from the Christian
tradition, we might actually recognize a fruitful comparative relation-
ship to Revelation in some of its earlier contexts. There, too, scribes are
involved in a practice of communal interpretation and performance that
is ongoing and not only about letters and words, that attends to external
conflicts and intragroup violence; none of these texts can be perceived as
the work of an individual alone in a private room reading a solitary book.
Moraga stresses the tensions between the timeless and time-bound
qualities of writing: “After these Roman hieroglyphs have been pressed
onto the printed page, history will have advanced well beyond the time of
this writing.”112 Here, she emphasizes both the temporary relevance and
yet the ongoing life of the text, and she draws attention to the impact of
“print” culture, to the world after the Gutenberg printing press when her
writings are not made by her own hand or someone else’s but reproduced
through mechanical devices. Thus, she recognizes that her textual words
242 J.M. HIDALGO

will change their meaning as history moves on beyond the moment in

which she wrote them herself. The printing press cannot actually “fix” her
words in one moment in time. Another facet of our more modern assump-
tions about scriptures depends upon the world after Gutenberg, a world
that presumes the absolute rigidity of printed text.113 Most of US culture
perceives the Bible as a singular, uniform text because of print culture’s
production of so many different Bibles, which, as Timothy Beal argues,
produces a sense of the Bible as a standardized text, always available in
print.114 Our assumptions about what scriptures are and how they work
cannot be neatly disentangled from the printing technology and material
artifacts through which we have received them.
The view of the Bible as a static, unitary material object that falls out
partially from this techno-cultural shift comes to inform the Bible’s iconic
place in dominantized US culture, and the way that most people in the USA
rhetorically privilege a focus on the Bible as closed and authoritative, even
if such an affirmation is inconsistent with practice. Some strands of aca-
demic biblical scholarship have only recently come to play with notions of
textual multiplicity and multivocality, and such scholarship recognizes the
public ethos of biblical interpretation as not just an individualized reader
interpreting alone.115 More scholars now attend to Revelation as a text
infused with multiple meanings, and more scholars also study how varying
people have interpreted Revelation in different periods in an attempt to
recognize the open, plurivocal, and multivalent meanings of the text.116
Moraga’s own essay treads among these tensions of print, tensions
of singularity and manyness. Her text separates out prayer and poetry
in italics from more prose essay pieces in standard print, but even
those distinctions are not always so neat. After meditating on the five
hundred years of a violent prohibition of “regeneration” that comes
from the codices having been burnt, she claims that “Decapitated, our
speech scrolled tongues float in a wordless sea. How did we grow so
speechless?”117 Here, the italics do not serve to distinguish simple prose
from poetry, but they do press the reader to wonder about how the loss
of certain indigenous practices of representation did not just hamper
literacy but also restricted speech among a plural we that share a sin-
gular sea; certain regenerative voices have and remain lost even if they
are all part of the same sea. This tension of the many and the singular,
what can be said and what cannot, not only defies the limits of print but
also participates in an ongoing tension between scriptural singularity
and plurality that pervades the essay.
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 243

Partially, this tension between singular and plural has to do with an

understanding of scriptures as loci of revelation. The opening depiction of
her own codex as a prayer also melds into her frequent use of the singular
“the Chicano codex” even when she seems to be referring to plural scribes
writing them; then, on occasion, she also refers to “codices” in plural form
so as to show up the tensions endemic to a collection of “scriptures”—that
they are both plural, multivocal and particular while also being singular
within a certain frame of reference.118 The tension of fixity and fluidity—
consistency and change over time—in scriptural traditions reappears as a
concern for both Moraga and Revelation. Certainly, the book of Revelation
was compiled, composed, and first circulated in written form long before
anything resembling our modern notion of scriptures appeared. Although
never using a formal term for scriptures, Revelation plays with Jewish writ-
ings, though they were not yet canonically bound as scripture. But the
book does not appeal explicitly to the authority of the other texts it plays
with; rather, its direct appeal is to its own writing down of a heavenly
vision that others can come to know. Specifically, the book names itself an
“apocalypse,” or a “revelation of Jesus Christ” that God gave through an
angel that was sent “to his servant John” (1:1).
Moraga also plays with Aztec traditions about revelatory transforma-
tions that come as one era transitions to another, and she references the
Nahuatl expression for writing, in tlilli, in tlapalli (the black, the red):119
“Amid the fires of the Los Angeles Rebellion, on the eve of a fading
Quinto Sol and a rising new época, I paint in scribe colors—the black
of this ink, the red of those fires—my own Chicano codex. I offer it as a
closing prayer for the last generation.”120 Rendering this particular start
of her essay in italics, set off almost like an epigraph, she then provides a
genre classification for her text as not explicitly scriptural, but as implicitly
revelatory, and certainly she signals an explicit religious and ritual genre to
her text by dubbing it as both a prayer and an offering.
Although Revelation does not credit any literary sources, and one
might question whether it really articulates itself within a genre, an ear-
lier generation of apocalyptically attuned Jewish texts (generally from the
second and first centuries BCE) inform it, especially in the sense that the
prior texts mattered to their communities not because of a clear fixed con-
tent but because of the ways that they can be employed, contested, and
reimagined for Jewish populations wrestling with imperial Greek (and, in
the case of Revelation, Roman) domination and cultural hegemony.121 So,
too, can we view the unnamed intertexts for Revelation as authoritative
244 J.M. HIDALGO

but fluid resources for the author.122 Contemporary biblical scholarship

understands that apocalyptic texts of the time were generally read aloud,
performed orally, and heard. Revelation’s rhetorical claim to direct divine
revelation allows it to be seen as a text that does not invest authority in
written words alone.123 Its circulation in the first and second centuries was
a moment in a process of scripturalization, but a moment that remains
removed from the assumptions many today bring to the text as scripture.
Oddly, perhaps, Revelation’s playfulness with earlier sources and
its history of being fluidly performed and transformed in situations of
public reading—this Revelation before it becomes what we think of as
“Christian scripture”—may be more attuned to Moraga’s own aspirations
for a Chicanx codex. Moraga’s text does not just meditate on codices, but
also on the people who write and read codices. In their prophetic roles,
Chicanx scribes can act as resources for those living in relationship to cul-
turally hegemonic power, whether the USA or Rome or some other form
of domination. Moraga presents her work as one among a shifting many
potentially powerful written texts, works of art, and facets of daily life:
“Our codices are a record of remembering.… Our memory is the umbili-
cal cord buried beneath the shade of cottonwoods, where abuelita cuentos
pour scroll-like from the tongue.”124 Moraga’s codex is only one among
many that unfurls in particular moments in time, while other powerful
codices exist on barrio walls or the tips of other tongues. Many codices—
scrolls, even—are necessary for remembering.125
Revelation also relies upon the power of—and perhaps need to—
remember a plurality of texts, images, stories, and hymns, but it ends with
a seeming call for fixity, demanding that listeners (and note: not readers or
scribes) neither add nor subtract from the book (22:18–19): “I witness to
all who hear the words of the prophecy of this book: if someone adds to
them, God will add onto that person the plagues that have been inscribed
in this book. If someone takes away from the words of the book of this
prophecy, God will take away that person’s part in the tree of life and
the holy city, which have been inscribed in this book” (my translation).
Even if such a call for strict textual fixity and restriction (as later adherents
read it) misrepresents the fluid play with text and performance endemic
to Revelation and its earliest circulation, this concluding note, a riff on
Deuteronomy 4:2 and 29:19–30:8,126 becomes another locus from which
to signal Revelation’s place within a shifting practice of scripturalization.
In a couple of centuries, this shift leads to canonically binding particular
texts. Ironically, though, Revelation’s canonical status is one of the most
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 245

debated of all Christian texts.127 Historical evidence suggests greater fluid-

ity to the order and organization of the Bible among varying European
Christians, even into early modernity. Protestant concern with formulat-
ing a canon of texts distinct from the Roman Catholic tradition explains
the greater fixity that comes to attend sensibilities about the Christian
canon in those same early centuries of European conquest of the New
World.128

SCRIPTURES AS HOMES
Situating his Chicano Codices exhibition in relationship to “the Chicano
movement,” Sánchez-Tranquilino lamented the colonial destruction of
“knowledge, culture, and history…that left conquered people sitting on
the ash heap of their power, dreams, and identity.”129 He identifies the
artists as drawing upon “Aztlanic terrain,” wherein Aztlán is not any one
specific geography but “any place a Chicana or Chicano lives.”130 In these
stated goals and ideals for the exhibition, Sánchez-Tranquilino contex-
tualizes the practices of the Chicanx codices as spatiotemporally playful
founts for communal identification. As such, he touches upon how these
codices may be made into a utopian practice, one that plays with multiple
times and spaces in the making of a better world; yet, these codices may
also be a utopian practice in the way that they themselves become loci for
belonging and imagination in response to, and as a means of transcending
beyond, the challenges of colonial histories.
In another of Moraga’s collections, she writes, “It’s the little bit I have
to offer the exiled and forgotten I call my nation.”131 She offers up her
writings as a place of people-making and identification, especially for those
who have somehow been displaced, as “exiled and forgotten.” Why does
she turn to textual media to do so, even admitting that she tries to remake
textual media? In different parts of this book I have argued that, especially
for minoritized populations, scriptures become loci of the “elsewhere”
and the “no place” as people try to make place, whether by running, mak-
ing a home, or reimagining the home that is made.132 As loci and objects,
scriptures may be approached as utopian homing devices, wherein home
is not any one static or comfortable place but a name for an-other process
of belonging that remains unsettling.
Moraga envisions the codex as a mirror for retrieving the past and
revising present perceptions: “The Chicano codex is the map back to
the original face. Its scribes are the modern-day tlamatinime. We grab
246 J.M. HIDALGO

our raza’s face and turn it in our palm. We hold up the obsidian mirror,
tell them, ‘Look, gente, so that you might know yourselves, find your
true face and heart, and see.’”133 The codex thus serves both as a map
for a journey toward another territory and time even while it is also an
“obsidian” mirror from that time; moreover, the codex again contains
plural scribes and the people in the mirror are plural “yourselves.” Rather
than impelling stages of homing among minoritized communities, scrip-
tures as homing devices may be better perceived to act as “mirrors” of
these experiences and as sources of “language” with which to describe
the world.134
Echoing Revelation’s emphasis on “seeing,” Moraga also stresses
that Chicanx revelation leads to a fuller embodiment by taking back
language. She describes “speech” as one of those facets that the world
since Columbus has hampered, and it is the task of the “Chicano codex”
to provide movement out of “a wordless sea” through the unfurling of
“speech scrolled tongues.”135 Even while invoking the ways in which
power resides in the practices around and beyond the written word,
Moraga both holds up and recognizes the power of scripture as written
word. Chicanx movement scripturalization wrestles with the relational
gap between sacred power and spatial belonging. Scriptures are ways that
sacred power and sacred belonging as a “spiritual center” for Chicanx
activists becomes locatable in mobility. Scriptures, and the utopian Aztlán
that Chicanx scriptures carry, do not exist as fixed points or a teleological
goal; for Moraga and others after the movement era, they work more as
loci of nepantla, a Nahuatl term for the constant processes of negotia-
tion endemic to postconquest existence.136 Nepantla, as a term, can cap-
ture “the liminalities of postcontact” Chicanx worlds where conflicting
ideas coexist, are encountered, and transformations become possible.137
Scriptures then become mobile loci encapsulating conflicting ideas and
ongoing, communally shared negotiations of these ideas. As a “technol-
ogy of diaspora,” a practice of peoples living without the official political
ability to claim their own physical centers, Chicanxs created new scrip-
tures that could be new portable loci for mediating “spiritual power,”
senses of what constitutes ultimate authority to arbitrate what we can
know and where we can be.138
The way that Moraga signals a relationship between past, present,
future, and peoplehood in the Chicano codex also speaks to the ways
that scriptures have often been treated as loci of and for memory, with
memory construed as both remembering but also as an imaginative
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 247

home of a people. Ancient Christian codices, the earliest assemblages of

circulating textual collections considered to be of particular import to
varying early Christian communities, were not the norm for writing in
the ancient Roman world of the first and second centuries, when scrolls
still dominated. Rather than see these codices as “books” the way we
understand them, ancient Romans initially approached them “as aides de
mémoire.”139 In other words, the utility of the codex was its portability
and the way that a codex helped one to remember something of import,
but the “material object” was of little import initially.140 Before they were
Christian scriptures, the texts of the Bible were places to keep memo-
ries but not yet lieux de mémoire, “sites of memory” in Pierre Nora’s
parlance. By the early third century, ritualization transforms certain
Christian texts from memory aides into sites of memory.141 In some ways
then, though the physical format of ancient Christian and Mesoamerican
codices differ significantly in visuality and texture, they share a use as a
locus for embodied performers to remember and interpret. Rather than
merely being a resource for helping to remember something, these texts
became repositories for cultural memory and negotiation.
Because scriptures can and do serve as “sites of memory,” as loci for
communal practices of making sense of the past and present, they are
often quite contested.142 Instead of perceiving such contestation as a pecu-
liarity that should be rectified and controlled, which biblical scholarship
often does, Moraga tends toward the approaches of some feminist and
minoritized biblical critics who look upon contestation as part and par-
cel of scripturalization. As feminist biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler
Fiorenza describes, this approach “enables us to understand the bible as
a site of struggle over meaning and biblical interpretation and debate and
argument rather than as transcript of the unchanging, inerrant Word of
G*d.”143 Scriptures have themselves served as loci around which individ-
uals and peoples have thought, played, and struggled, but these texts,
for Schüssler Fiorenza and Moraga, cannot be perceived as meaning the
same or behaving the same for all interpreters across time and space. Thus,
other modes of handling the book of Revelation might share more kinship
with Moraga’s Chicanx codex that one might initially suspect.
As texts that are richly evocative of and reliant upon the possibilities
of multiple meanings and the necessity of multiple, embodied perform-
ers and interpreters, perhaps Moraga’s “Codex Xerí” and Revelation
both trade on certain scriptural powers while trying to sidestep other
scriptural restrictions. Scriptures and the practices surrounding them can
248 J.M. HIDALGO

be understood as polyvocal, complex, and frequently contested homing

devices, ever employed when people seek to remake themselves and the
world around them. The Bible may work so well as scripture because it is
an intertextual, theologically and experientially diverse conglomeration
of texts. Hence, a certain limiting pliability inheres to the multifaceted
Bible, a collection of plural texts and voices with delimited borders but
pliable and plural meanings; a certain “polyphonic” quality characterizes
the Bible.144 This quality enables the Bible to be accessed from multiple
readerly locations. Such limiting pliability appears necessary for some-
thing to be engaged as scripture.145
Yet, scriptures can never be employed as scripture if they are not
held in a dynamic tension of people creation, the tension between both
fluidity and fixity. Scriptural pliabilities are contingent, bound up with
group identities. Thus, scriptures are not only polyphonic and pliable—
they are also taken up because they entail certain borders. Scriptures
are engaged not just because of their pliability but also because of the
ways they can be used in the inscription of limits and boundaries in
terms of texts and communities of engagement.146 This provocative
tension of limiting pliability and the contestation over both fixity and
fluidity within canons, interpretations, and communities can help us to
understand how and why scriptures are both fruitful loci for communal
imagination, especially in the Chicanx case, yet, they are also unstable
loci. Without enough larger engagement and ongoing contestation,
without a sense that these texts matter for a community, texts are not
scriptures. Not only did certain Chicanx movement activists seek to
alter the content of the texts they wrote, but they also attempted to
work them and relate to them differently. Despite recognizing a need to
transform scripturalization to serve Chicanxs better, they still took up
scripturalization in some form. Scriptures work not because they mean
one thing or because people ritually relate to them in one way; rather
scriptures as scriptures are constituted precisely in those practices that
struggle over what and how scriptures mean. If people do not struggle
over special texts, then those texts are just texts, not scriptures. Yet,
such struggles over scriptures are ongoing; they continuously lift up,
critique, and transform new kinds of relationships between peoples and
the texts they think of as scriptural.
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 249

NOTES
1. Interview with López.
2. Yarbro-Bejarano, 112.
3. Marie Acosta-Colón, “Acknowledgements,” in The Chicano
Codices, ed. Sánchez-Tranquilino, 2.
4. Miner, 33.
5. Acosta-Colón, “Acknowledgements,” 2.
6. Marcos Sánchez-Tranquilino, “Feathered Reflections on an
Aztlanic Archaeology,” in Chicano Codices, 4.
7. Sánchez-Tranquilino, “Foreword,” 2.
8. Baca, 79.
9. 1992 was the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voy-
age into the Western Hemisphere. On April 29, 1992, a California
jury acquitted officers who were charged with assault in the
Rodney King case, remaining hung over whether one of the
defendants had used excessive force. Given the racialized nature
of police brutality in Los Angeles, “black-white” tensions became
the media focus with some attention to tensions between African
Americans and Korean Americans. Underreported were the large
numbers of Latinx participants. Valle and Torres, 45–66.
10. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 184–190. For a consideration of some
other Chicana artists’ codices, see Díaz-Sánchez, 31–50.
11. The term “writing” (γραφή) or the perfect verbal forms for “it is
written” (γέγραπται and γεγραμμένα) appear relatively frequently
in the Gospels and Pauline letters, generally to assert something
that has a presumed authority. Something of this usage was
already present in Jewish writings prior to the New Testament, in
the Letter of Aristeas, for example. Philo and Josephus, however,
are notable for using a range of words to conjure a sense of “writ-
ten revelation.” See discussion in Roland Deines, “The Term and
Concept of Scripture,” What is Bible? ed. Finsterbusch and Lange,
259–271. Revelation notably uses verbal forms for the act of writ-
ing or something being “inscribed,” such as γεγραμμένον, with
significant frequency, but when formulations of the verb “to
write” (γράφω) appear, they do not generally reference any texts
we might term “scriptural” except for the book of Revelation
itself. Generally, when γράψον appears in Revelation, it is a com-
250 J.M. HIDALGO

mand to the author to write down the visions he is receiving,

presumably in the book that will be our Revelation (1:11, 1:19,
2:1, 2:8, 2:12, 2:18, 3:1, 3:14, 14:13, 19:9, and 21:5). Notably,
there is also the negative imperative “do not write,” or γράψῃς, in
10:4; a couple of references to the book of Revelation itself as
something that has been written can be found in 1:3 and 22:18.
Participial forms of “written,” which I often translate as
“inscribed” (γεγραμμένος, γεγραμμένον, γεγραμμένοι,
γεγραμμένων, γεγραμμένα, and γεγραμμένας) appear with refer-
ence to objects in the heavenly vision the author sees (2:17), such
as the scrolls in heaven (5:1), or to the notion of a “book of life”
that keeps record of those who will one day inhabit the new
Jerusalem (or more often, those who have not been inscribed
there; see 13:8, 17:8, 20:15, and 21:27, with 20:12 referring to
books that record the works of the dead), and the utopian city at
the end of Revelation (see Chap. 3 of this book). A major excep-
tion has to do with referring to people (as humans or metaphori-
cal representations) being “written upon” or “inscribed” with a
name or a mark (3:12, 14:1, 17:5, 19:12, and 19:16). For
instance, in 3:12, those who “conquer” for Jesus will have the
name of God, the new Jerusalem, and presumably Jesus’ name
written on them. See discussion in Shanell T.  Smith, Woman
Babylon, 136.
12. D.A. Sánchez’s From Patmos the Barrio, David Aune’s extensive
commentary on Revelation, and Austin Farrer’s A Rebirth of
Images all provide some lengthy discussions of the plurality of
Roman and other Mediterranean myths and images used in the
Apocalypse.
13. In studying Chicana art, Pérez describes why she distinguishes
“spirituality” from “religion” thusly: “I choose the former over
the latter to describe the loose, unorthodox, or self-created forms
of belief and practice that characterize the work under study.”
L.E.  Pérez, Notes section, from “Introduction,” endnote 1,
Locations 2618–2626 of 3652. Theresa Delgadillo likewise favors
spirituality, despite its historical flaws because it “has entered the
contemporary lexicon as a signifier of non-Western belief and life
systems and noninstitutional or organic forms of engagement
with nonmaterial realities. Therefore, in this book I generally
employ the term religion to refer to organized, institutionalized,
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 251

traditional religions in Western thought and the term spirituality

to refer to non-Western and non-institutional forms of relation to
the sacred.” See Delgadillo, Chapter One: “A Theory of Spiritual
Mestizaje,” 15. This preference for “spirituality” continues in the
more recent edited collection, Fleshing the Spirit, ed. Facio and
Lara. Christopher Tirres offered an interlacing reading, a way of
looking for paths of bridging the senses of the spiritual and the
religious in a conference paper at the July 2014 International
Latina/o Studies Conference, “Imagining Latina/o Studies:
Past, Present, and Future,” in Chicago, IL.
14. Similarly, Alfredo Acosta Figueroa refused to use the term religion
in discussing his ideas about Aztlán: “In this book you will see we
don’t use the word religion. You know what religion means?” In
my interviews with Alberto Juarez and Richard Martínez, for
instance, they both asserted the import of religious backgrounds
in shaping the “values” that motivated their movement activities,
but they were reluctant to connect their movement activism spe-
cifically to “religion.” Juarez also observed that a higher propor-
tion of vocal Chicanx activists tended to come from Protestant
backgrounds, including himself, Lydia López, Rosalio Muñoz,
and Bert Corona. Interview with Juarez and interview with
Martínez.
15. See León, passim, but especially 10–11, 95.
16. See discussion in J.Z. Smith’s essay, “God Save This Honourable
Court: Religion and Civic Discourse,” in Relating Religion, 377–
378. Also see Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions.
17. Jason A.  Josephson helpfully classifies scholarly approaches to
defining “religion” within two foci. One definitional approach,
generally older, can be termed “theocentric” because it central-
izes a Protestant style, individually relational devotion to a “God”
as the defining characteristic of religion. Josephson, 10.
18. I do not deny that theological beliefs and theology can be quite
important to Chicanxs and Chicanx religiosity. However, I con-
tend that a definition of religion that stresses the primacy of theo-
logical belief misses important facets of Chicanx religiosity.
19. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 184.
20. Interview with Ramón, emphasis mine.
21. The challenge is finding a term that speaks to Chicanx agency as
minoritized subjects and “emerge[s] from a purposeful integration
252 J.M. HIDALGO

of their creative inner resources and the diverse cultural influences

that feed their souls and their psyches.” L.  Medina, “Los
Espíritus,” 189.
22. For L.E.  Pérez, many artists reflect ethnic, racial, and religious
mixture. See Pérez, loc 152–156 of 3652, “Introduction:
Invocation, Ofrenda.” These are traditions that are often cast as
mutually exclusive of each other in broader US understanding,
and thus the term “religion” can seem too restrictive for lived
experiences.
23. Pérez, loc 928 of 3652, Chapter Three: “Altar, Alter,” Section:
“On the Altars of Alterity.”
24. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 189–190.
25. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 190.
26. For an examination of the many ancient near-Eastern images and
traditions that may appear in Revelation, see Yarbro Collins,
Combat Myth. Brigitte Kahl also drew my attention to the possi-
bility that the earth (ἠ γῆ) of Revelation 12:16 could be read as
the goddess Gaia saving the woman during a New Jersey transit
train ride in the summer of 2009.
27. W.C. Smith, x.
28. Much work on this problem of the “prototype” definition of reli-
gion has been done wherein Protestant Christianity is the basis for
the definition and other “religions” are measured against it. This
prototype problem also bedevils scriptures. See Kendall W. Folkert,
“The ‘Canons’ of ‘Scripture,’” in Rethinking Scripture, ed.
Miriam Levering, 173. Since other cultural groups, including
those who practice non-dominant forms of Christianity, have had
to wrestle with this term “religion,” especially in the case of the
USA where “religion” and “sacred” are terms of legal discourse
with associated rights, that does not mean that they have not
exercised agency in how they appropriate and deploy notions of
“religion.” Even in its native contexts, “religion” can be a term
that also always leaves a “remainder,” something that smacks of
religion while not fitting its definition. See Josephson, 76–77.
29. Here I am drawing out different tasks of the codex and scribe as
named in “Codex Xerí” on p. 186, 187, and 190. I am also sug-
gesting the polytemporal play that I return to in discussing Aztlán.
30. Folkert, 173.
31. Folkert, 176.
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 253

32. Jean-Pierre Ruiz has further argued that “Catholics are not a people
of the Book, and that it might be more accurate to affirm that we are
people of the Word, and, even more specifically, people of the Word-
made-flesh,” i.e., the incarnation of Jesus is a source of authority
beyond the writings of the biblical texts. See Ruiz, “Chapter 2: The
Bible and Liberation: Between the Preferential Option for the Poor
and the Hermeneutical Privilege of the Poor,” in Readings, Kindle
edition, p. 21 of 125. Wimbush, however, contends that Catholics
still fall well within a rubric and practice of scripturalization that
fetishizes textuality, even if Catholic practices diverge from Protestant
ones. See Wimbush, Magic, 87–90.
33. Jewish and Muslim communities have distinct terms that diverge
significantly in meaning from the English scripture: “Quran
means ‘recitation,’ not ‘scripture,’ and the Hebrew Bible knows
not only the kĕtîb but also the qěrȇ—Jesus presumably never used
the kětîb Yahweh.” See Stendhal, 5. Of course, “scriptures” have
not always meant the same thing or been employed the same way
even within the Christian context.
34. W.C. Smith, 6. Smith’s study, broadly comparative though it is,
also suggests a “prototype” approach when he treats “Islamic
[scripture]…as the culmination of an historical process to be dis-
cerned in the Near East” (Smith, 47).
35. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,”189–190.
36. Anzaldúa, 27–51, with quotations from 48, 51.
37. Moraga “Codex Xerí,” 187.
38. Baca, 73–74.
39. Or in English translation, “that are as valid as European literature.
Today in México we have The Book of The Books of Chilam Balám
and the Popul Vuh [important Mayan texts] that are as valid as the
Bible, they are books of advice. And the concepts of the Hopi, the
Navajo, the Apache, and other tribes have beliefs basically akin to
those of the Aztecs.” She also goes on to argue that the Aztec
beliefs are known better because they were the imperial power in
the valley of Mexico when the Spanish arrived. E. Vasquez, “La
Historia del Mestizo,” loc 1126–1132 of 3068 (March 30, 1971).
Mexican biblical scholar Elsa Támez made a similar call. Elsa
Támez, “The Bible and the Five Hundred Years of Conquest,” in
Voices from the Margin, ed. R.S. Sugirtharajah, rev. ed. (2006), 23.
See also Támez, “Introduction: The Power of the Naked,” 1–14.
254 J.M. HIDALGO

40. W.C. Smith, 7.
41. Baca, 69.
42. Baca, 70.
43. Baca, 70.
44. Miner, 33.
45. Mignolo, 253.
46. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 185.
47. W.C. Smith, 18.
48. W.C. Smith, 21.
49. See Benedict Anderson’s discussion of the power of the printing
press and “the origins of national consciousness,” 39–48.
50. Yarbro-Bejarano, 122.
51. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 188–189.
52. Also see his discussion regarding the particular centrality of the
Bible within scripturalization practices in “Euro-American civili-
zation” (Wimbush, Magic, 105).
53. See Pelikan, 21.
54. Watts, “Three Dimensions,” 135.
55. Watts, “Three Dimensions,” 141–142.
56. Watts, “Three Dimensions,” 148.
57. Watts, “Three Dimensions,” 141. Watts argues that national texts
are often ritualized in semantic (interpretive) and iconic ways, but
he seems to ignore that they are also performed. He also distin-
guishes between textual and oral traditions on the basis of these
three dimensions: “Scriptures differ from oral traditions because
they are physical objects and so can be ritualized as icons. They
differ from non-textual visual symbols because their words can
both be interpreted and performed in highly ritualized ways.”
(Watts, “Three Dimensions,” 145).
58. “Presidents become presidents by swearing to uphold it. Citizens
become citizens by answering questions about it.… At the
National Archives, where it is enshrined inside a titanium and
glass case filled with argon gas, pilgrims parade past it.” Prothero,
“The Constitution,” 113.
59. Crapanzano, 230.
60. As Wimbush states, scripturalization “refers to the uses of texts,
textuality, and literacy as a means of constructing and maintaining
society, as a legitimation of authority and power. It becomes
shorthand for a type of structure and arrangement of power rela-
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 255

tions and communications of society, the ultimate politics of lan-

guage. It is nothing less than magic, a powerful and compelling
construction, make-believe” (Wimbush, Magic, 86).
61. This prophecy frames her codex with a reference to the “Quinto
Sol” in the opening italics of the essay and with the last section
opening with the claim “The Fifth Sun is quickly vanishing.”
Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 184, 191.
62. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 192. It is also an intriguing parallel here
to Marvin Suber Williams’s approach to Revelation in which he
emphasizes God’s slaves as the main actors and inhabitants of the
new Jerusalem. See Williams, 264–286, and my discussion of his
work in chap. 3.
63. Yarbro-Bejarano, 108.
64. Stephen Prothero tries to create his own “American Bible” that
reveals this history of contestation.
65. Ahmed, 9.
66. Genaro M. Padilla, “Myth and Comparative Cultural Nationalism:
The Ideological Uses of Aztlán,” in Aztlán, ed. Anaya and
Lomelí, 129.
67. Following Josephson’s division, the hierocentric is the more pop-
ular twentieth-century formulation of religion; it emphasizes a
problematic “sacred/profane binary,” something that many
Chicanxs likewise problematize even when holding onto the
“sacred” as category. Josephson argues that “The hierocentric
definition is merely a displaced theocentrism.” Josephson, 9.
68. Delgadillo, Chapter One, Section: “Queering Mestizaje,”
15/253.
69. Tensions persist between notions of religion and the awakenings
of activism, well beyond the movement era and even if not directly
connected to the movement. In Moraga’s discussion of a “Queer
Aztlán” (1993), she not only describes the inspiration she derives
from movement imaginaries—and the challenges that she lays to
the limits of those movement imaginaries—but also discusses
sacred land and religious ideas. Though not derived directly from
the movement, she describes how “coming to terms with that fact
[earlier stated as ‘the recognition of my lesbianism’] meant the
radical re-structuring of everything I thought I held sacred.”
Moraga, “Queer Aztlán,” 146. In other words, definitions of the
“sacred” that were available to her had to be let go of and remade.
256 J.M. HIDALGO

70. J.Z. Smith, Relating, 111.

71. O’Neill, 1102.
72. David Chidester and Edward T.  Linenthal, “Introduction,” in
American Sacred Space, ed. Chidester and Linenthal, 6.
73. O’Neill, 1103–1104.
74. Chidester and Linenthal, 15.
75. Although not a focus in this discussion, the fact that Anzaldúa
and Moraga specifically use genre indeterminacy also to under-
mine sexual roles and assumptions should be seen as central to the
ways in which they challenge spatial binaries in their language
play. See Yarbro-Bejarano’s discussion on 92–93.
76. Sánchez-Tranquilino, “Feathered Reflections,” 4.
77. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 190.
78. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 187.
79. See especially the critical conclusion of Mack, 351–376, especially
its examination of dominantized US appropriations of a “myth of
innocence,” 368–376.
80. See González, 39–40; Ruiz, “The Bible and U.S.  Hispanic
American Theological Discourse: Lessons from a Non-Innocent
History,” in From the Heart of Our People, ed. Espín and Díaz,
101–102.
81. Gates picks up on a traditional story of a “Signifyin(g) Monkey”
in order to elucidate the fundamental “indeterminacy of interpre-
tation” as well as “meaning” in African American expressive cul-
tures. Gates, 22, 41.
82. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 188.
83. Yarbro-Bejarano, 93.
84. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 186.
85. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 187.
86. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 187.
87. Long, 4, 121.
88. Wimbush, Magic, 46.
89. Moraga, 192. The idea of “horizon” here also resonates with
my discussion of José Esteban Muñoz’s approach to utopia in
Chap. 1. Also see Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
90. Delgadillo, Chapter One, Section: “The Serpent Movement of
Spiritual Mestizaje,” 21/253. Drawing on Embry, 101.
91. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 187. Pérez, loc 118–122 of 3652,
“Introduction: Invocation, Ofrenda.”
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 257

92. Segovia, “In the World,” 203.

93. Segovia, “In the World,” 213.
94. Segovia, “Two Places,” 34.
95. Here I use quotes in order to reference both J.E.  Muñoz’s
approach to the utopian and Moraga’s conclusion to “Codex
Xerí,” 192.
96. Personal conversation with Orlando Espín, October 11, 2013,
San Diego, CA. Espín actively critiques definitions of “Christianity”
that focus upon it as a “religion of the book” precisely because
most Christians, historically, have not primarily encountered
Christianity as text. He goes on to argue that a focus on “written
texts,” reduces Christianity “to a cultural product of the literate
(and conveniently dominant) elites.” See Espín, especially
xxiii–xxiv.
97. Claudia V. Camp, “Possessing the Iconic Book: Ben Sira as Case
Study,” in Iconic Books and Texts, ed. Watts, 402.
98. Jennifer S.  Hughes’s remarks at round table response to (Mis)
Reading America, Claremont, CA, 24 October 2013. Also see
her written version in Inscriptions, http://www.cgu.edu/
PDFFiles/iss/newsletter/Inscriptions%202014%20.pdf, espe-
cially p. 7.
99. Keith, 59.
100. Anna NietoGomez as quoted in Blackwell, 58. Also discussed in
email September 18, 2015.
101. Spencer-Miller, 51.
102. See William A.  Graham, Beyond the Written Word. A range of
works also address this issue in biblical studies; see the recent
example of Pieter J.J.  Botha, Orality and Literacy in Early
Christianity.
103. Spencer-Miller, 53.
104. Cherríe L. Moraga, “Prólogo,” in A Xicana Codex of Changing
Consciousness, 41–44.
105. Moraga, “Prólogo,” 45–47.
106. Foregrounding relationality, Love suggests that even for those
who engage scriptures, in her case Yoruba practitioners in South
Carolina and the more oral tradition of the Odu, “the meanings
are found in the people and their relationship with the ‘scrip-
258 J.M. HIDALGO

tures,’ not in the content or form of the scripture, whether oral or

written.” Love, 11.
107. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” especially 189. I have left jotería unde-
fined, though one could perceive it as a term inclusive of individu-
als often associated in English with “queer,” but Moraga’s own
translation emphasizes a more native North American definition
of “two-spirited.”
108. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 189.
109. Moraga, “Prólogo,” 40–51. She signs her prologue as Xerí, writ-
ing from Oakaztlán, Califas tying herself to Aztlán.
110. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 190. Writers such as Anzaldúa and
Moraga do not always adhere to the distinctions in indigenous
writing practices that Mignolo and others historically describe.
See L.E.  Pérez, loc 360 of 3652, Chapter One: “Spirit,
Glyphs.” Section “Spirit Tongues: Glyphs, Codices, and
Tlamatinime.”
111. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 190.
112. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 185.
113. It is not only Gutenberg’s printing press that has shaped our view
of the Bible today, but also the technological revolutions that fol-
lowed in the early nineteenth century that have shaped our view
of the Bible as both one and many in the USA through a dynamic
diffusion of quite divergent printed bibles containing plural trans-
lations, commentaries, maps, additional information, and wide-
ranging material appearances and constructions. See Gutjahr,
especially his discussion of stereotype bible publishing in the early
nineteenth century on p. 29–37.
114. Beal, “The End of the Word,” 182; also see his expanded work,
Timothy Beal, The Rise and Fall of the Bible.
115. See Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic and many others.
116. Huber observes how both millenarians and biblical scholars have
too often mined the book of Revelation for one true meaning,
even if they have radically different presumptions about what that
meaning is. Huber, Thinking and Seeing, 4.
117. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 184.
118. Moraga continually plays with notions of the singular and the
plural. For instance, in “Codex Xerí,” p. 188–189, she switches
between plural “scribes,” a singular “codex” that is about “daily
 “FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE SO CONNECTED IN MY BOOK” … 259

lives,” a plural “we” who “are a codex,” and a plural “codices”

that “are a record of remembering.”
119. Or, as Baca would translate it, “the black ink, the red ink.” See
Baca, 69.
120. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 184.
121. Portier-Young, 74.
122. The import of these intertexts is undeniable. See Nicklas,
312–313.
123. As Nicklas argues, the text of Revelation makes claims for its own
authority based on the Torah and prophetic writings, but also the
text “claims to be the word of God or Jesus Christ’s revelation,
respectively.” See Nicklas, 311.
124. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 189.
125. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 189.
126. Deuteronomy is also playing with earlier written legal traditions
in its list of blessings and curses upon those who keep the law. See
Royalty, “Don’t Touch,” 291–292.
127. Although the process that led to the canonization of texts into
Jewish and Christian Bibles took centuries and had many layers,
as early as discussions of appropriate “canonical” Christian texts
began taking place so did some early Christian writers suggest
Revelation had no place among those texts. For instance, see
Eusebius’s discussion of these debates in Hist. Eccl. 7.25. Available
at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf201.iii.xii.xxvi.html.
As Juan Hernández’s work shows, the text of Revelation has
hardly been fixed in its history of transmission either. Juan
Hernández, Jr., Scribal Habits.
128. Deines, 236–249. In fact, partially those Roman Catholic biblical
texts that are not present in the Jewish bible/Tanakh, become
separated from the Protestant canon because they were used to
support some Catholic doctrines that certain Protestant groups
did not support (Deines, 249).
129. Sánchez-Tranquilino, “Foreword,” 3.
130. Sánchez-Tranquilino, “Feathered Reflections,” 4.
131. Moraga, Loving, 213.
132. Wimbush, “Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures,”
in African Americans and the Bible, ed. Wimbush with the assis-
tance of Rodman, 23.
133. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 187.
260 J.M. HIDALGO

134. Wimbush, “Reading Darkness,” 27–28.

135. Moraga, “Codex Xerí,” 186. The “tongues” as “speech scrolls”
image returns again near the end of the essay (see p. 192).
136. Miner, 144. I also want to thank Lara Medina for helping me to
think about Aztlán as nepantla during our conversation in San
Antonio at the Las Hermanas: The Struggle is One symposium in
March 2015.
137. Miner, 167.
138. As L.E. Pérez observes, “The search for, and creation of, more
socially relevant spiritual beliefs and practices have characterized
the last four decades in the United States are thus hardly charac-
teristic of U.S. Latina/o artists alone. [Indeed one might assert
that such work has gone on around the world for even longer.]
What is different is the source of spiritualities cited, the politics of
such drawing, and the possible effects of such inscriptions, given
the historical and ongoing uneven marginalized social, political,
economic, and cultural status of Chicana/os as negatively racial-
ized ethnic minorities.” See Pérez, loc 312 of 3652, Chapter
One: Spirit, Glyphs,” Section “Membering the Spirit.”
139. Jason T. Larson, “The Gospels as Imperialized Sites of Memory
in Late Ancient Christianity,” in Iconic Books and Texts, ed. Watts,
376.
140. Larson, 377.
141. Larson, 377.
142. Larson, 375. Memory has been a central focus of studies of both
early Christianity and the Chicanx movement, and so I have
decided not to make “memory” the focus of this study.
143. Schüssler Fiorenza, Power of the Word, 265. Schüssler Fiorenza
then suggests that the future of biblical studies demands a trans-
formation of this vision toward collaboration and away from met-
aphors of “battle, combat, and competition.”
144. Kort, 7.
145. Kort, 7.
146. Kort, 11. A theory of scriptures must wrestle with the problem of
“borders”: what is bordered, what powers those borders invoke,
what lies outside those borders, and how “significant” is what lies
outside the borders.
 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS
AND RECONQUEST

The Ronald Wilson Reagan Presidential Library and Museum stands atop
a hill, overlooking the rolling contours of Southern California. The Reagan
Library forms an interesting counterpoint to Alfredo Acosta Figueroa’s
Blythe, given its far greater political prominence and attention as site of
almost religious pilgrimage for many. Where Blythe lies along a major
interstate that one might stop in by accident, the Reagan Library requires
an intentional drive, though it is easily accessible by freeway. Additionally,
its location, Simi Valley, figures prominently as the town where a jury
found three Los Angeles police not guilty of using excessive force against
Rodney King in 1992. Reagan was also governor of California in the late
1960s and early 1970s, marking him as a major political antagonist not
only for the Chicanx movement but for many of the leftist political organi-
zations and student mobilizations in California of that era. His use of reli-
gious, especially biblical rhetoric, has drawn considerably more scholarly
attention than most of the Chicanxs profiled in this larger book.
The Reagan Library reflects a shared legacy of drawing upon and perform-
ing Revelation, of slipping out of text and into place. In order to reach the
Reagan Library, one must not only leave behind the sprawling, racially and
ethnically mixed, and densely populated urban landscape of Los Angeles, one
must also wind up a large hill past images of the presidents preceding Reagan.
The website for the library proudly boasts of its location “perched atop a
hill with sweeping views of the southland,” suggesting that a visit to  the

© The Author(s) 2016 261

J.M. Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59214-9
262 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST

Looking down on Southern California from the Ronald Wilson Reagan Presidential
Library and Museum in Simi Valley, CA. Photo by Jacqueline M. Hidalgo
 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST 263

library necessarily includes gazing on Southern California at a safe remove

from life below. When touring the library, many visitors have to park their
cars on the surrounding hillside and then take a shuttle up to the top of the
hill where the sizable complex sits. Such a path of entry may actually speak to
the aspirations of religious pilgrimage that enshrine the library, aspirations to
make library visitors feel that they are leaving behind the mundane world of
Southern California and entering a holier, more idyllic space.
In August of 2013, some family members and I drove about forty miles
northward from our then residence in West Los Angeles in order to visit
the Reagan Library. In drawing on my own experiences at the library, I
think about how the Reagan Library provides one example of the blend-
ing of textual and non-textual worlds that can and should also be read by
scholars of religion. Though Reagan’s positionality registers too easy of a
binary between a conservative US president and Chicanx movement activ-
ists, I also hope it reveals something potent about their complex intercon-
nections and distinctions. The Reagan Library represents another strain of
the new Jerusalem legacy in the Americas.
Perhaps because it has a history of being used to support empire,
Revelation is one of the most popular loci for both postcolonial critical
and empire-critical readings.1 Many scholars contextualize Revelation as a
politicized response to Rome, whether viewing Revelation’s textual play
with Rome as subversive and hybrid mimicry or as divinely sanctioned
imitative—and hence replicative—imperialism. Certainly some scholars,
such as Barbara Rossing, have demonstrated the vehemence with which
Revelation critiques the Roman Empire, and other scholars, such as
Stephen D. Moore, have deftly employed postcolonial theory—especially
Homi K.  Bhabha’s categories of hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence—
in interrogating the failings of Revelation’s imperial rejection.2 Many of
these scholars have openly drawn from and written in relationship to con-
temporary loci, especially including conservative US Republican iterations
of apocalyptic.
I consider the Reagan Library not only because of the prominence of
Reagan within the field of US conservative Christian rhetoric but precisely
because the library reappropriates and intentionally mimics eighteenth-
century Spanish Franciscan mission architecture. In attending to a later
US employment of Spanish imperial tropes, I join other scholars, especially
Latinx scholars, who have sought to complicate the smooth east-to-west
flow of Anglo-American settler colonial history and the Manifest Destiny
narrative by also recalling the older south-north flow of Spanish settler
264 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST

history, especially because US settlers in California also summoned that

history, albeit on their own terms. This book lifts up the lasting import
of the biblical visions of the new Jerusalem, of settler cityscapes around
gardens. Biblical images of a heavenly city, especially in Revelation’s ver-
sion, matter because of the way that later iterations of these more spe-
cifically urban—and also suburban—visions recognized a preexistent place
and sought to retake it and remake it as a city that is both more open and
more restricted than other cities before.
The Franciscans’ missions in California, built between 1769 and 1823,
were meant to be the first line of Spanish settler colonial invasion. The
Franciscans hoped to remake indigenous converts as human beings fit
for utopia, and thus they designed their missions to invoke many idyl-
lic visions, including a beloved utopia, the new Jerusalem of Revelation
21–22. The missions invoke Revelation through architectural and numeri-
cal references, but also through an ideological invocation of the city’s goals
and boundaries. The Franciscans thought the missions should welcome
those of all nations (Rev 21:26), but only so long as those who entered
were committed to Christianity, which meant, for the Franciscans that
indigenous populations should learn Spanish, reimagine their normative
gender and sexual systems, and take up Spanish agricultural practices.3
These efforts at cultural transformation and purification can jump off
from a reading of Rev 21:8 and 22:15, a reading that maintained borders
between who could be inside and those who must remain outside the new
Jerusalem: “the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the
fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars,” and the Franciscans
applied these terms, and some variations, to indigenous Californians who
were not among the mission converts.
In practice, the missions seemed to ignore Rev 21:4 and its visions of
a city without tears, death, mourning, or pain. One might see the mis-
sions as dystopian prisons that forced slave labor out of indigenous resi-
dents, as loci of disease and punishment that killed 80–90 % of indigenous
Californians, as sites for attempting cultural genocide and containment.4
Despite this quite troubled lived mission practice, in the late nineteenth
century, the missions came to infuse the US imagination of California,
invoking an apocalyptic dualism, standing in for settled life and the march
of civilization amid the Western wilderness. The use of mission-revival
architectural style and motifs on the part of US colonists also became
a way of eradicating the history of Mexican California, marginalizing
ethnic Mexicans, and reinforcing narratives justifying US  domination
 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST 265

of Californian lands and peoples.5 The ongoing import of this mission

memory can be lost on those not from California, but in California,
school children have to study and build model missions in the third or
fourth grade.
Besides owning a Spanish revival “Rancho del Cielo” (Sky/Heavenly
Ranch) in California, Reagan is a president popularly remembered for his
uses of biblical rhetoric and imagery. Of course, the US president who
revived the rhetoric of the “city on a hill” should have a presidential library
on a hill; indeed, the website’s introductory video to the library does refer
to it as “Reagan’s shining city.” In 2013, getting to the Reagan Library
required dedicated driving, and a rather hefty $21 to gain entry, thus delim-
iting the sorts of individuals who would really choose to show up there.
Mostly, only the ideologically pure want to pay to go to the library, so the
poor and the Democrats tend to remain outside its gates. Entry to the
library brings one into a vision of paradise, a mission-style courtyard. At the
center of most mission courtyards stands a fountain, which was meant to
invoke Paradise and the River of Life’s water springing from God’s throne
in the new Jerusalem. The Reagan Library has a rather ostentatious central
fountain, with a phallic geyser, a symbol of a patriarchal, hypermasculine
God spouting forth water in a dry landscape. The fountain also serves as a
visual and auditory reminder of a panoptic God within the city center, and
the garden reminds the visitor of a patriarchal, hypermasculine Reagan,
presenting a bronze statue of him in cowboy dress.
The Reagan Library draws upon the missions’ invocations of the new
Jerusalem in other ways. For instance, the pairs of columns ringing the
courtyard are a feature common to Spanish mission evocations of the new
Jerusalem’s twelve gates and foundations (21:12–14).6 As with Revelation,
even if the numbers no longer perfectly align, the columns may also evoke
the divine throne room, with its “24 lictors who regularly accompanied
Domitian.”7 These symbolic guards are additionally meaningful given that
the courtyard is the only part of the library and museum lacking in actual
security guards. Reagan’s statue, in place of the statues of Serra found
in the missions today and where Reagan is dressed as the masculine set-
tler colonial icon of cowboy, is the only overtly twentieth-century pres-
ence in this entry courtyard, which should otherwise feel nostalgically like
an eighteenth-century domesticated fortress Eden contained within the
larger great city. Some of Revelation’s most stridently anti-imperial textual
layers are precisely what get invoked in service of the Reagan Library’s
practices of spatial “peace through strength.”
266 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST

Readings that find patriarchal hypermasculinity and authorization of

imperialist power inflected in Revelation’s new Jerusalem are not the
only forms of biblical scholarship that illuminate this space. Though it
might seem counter to their purposes, anti-imperial readings of Revelation
often expose the library’s structures and rhetorics. For instance, Harry
O. Maier’s interpretation of Revelation hinges on narrative reversals that
draw readers into the subversive ideology of a lamb sovereign, and thus
Maier challenges biblical interpreters who would argue that Revelation
reauthorizes empire. Yet, one can find such narrative reversals throughout
the Reagan Library, here retooled for empire. Though visitors are greeted
by cowboy Reagan in the courtyard, the museum’s first significant room
emphasizes that Reagan’s story is really the “story of how an ordinary
guy grew up to do extraordinary things in a nation where any boy or girl
can grow up to be president. Reagan lived that promise and changed our
world forever.”8 Akin to the ideological reversal of Revelation, Reagan is
presented as our Jesus, the slaughtered lamb who becomes the conqueror,
but he is powerful precisely because he was so normal in his beginnings,
not like a Roman emperor at all. The anti-imperialist reversal of Revelation
has been acquired and transformed into one of the most foundational
myths of the USA’s own self-representation of benevolence: the “possibil-
ity” of the USA is that anyone can be president, well provided they are a
“natural born citizen” that is.
But the lamb’s narrative reversal is not all the Reagan Library appro-
priates in its ideological spatialization of the new Jerusalem. As another
scholarly example, Barbara Rossing’s Rapture Exposed emphasized the
book of Revelation as a message of hope, in contradistinction to the
despairing end-time fantasies of so much of the US right. Here, in the
museum’s main narratives, messages of apocalyptic doom do not hold
sway. Reagan is presented as the embodiment of hope. Showing a clip
from his 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater that catapulted
Reagan to the governorship of California and national political spotlight,
the museum also invokes some of Revelation’s dualistic rhetoric, but in
the service of optimism. Even though the museum does not directly ref-
erence Revelation in replaying this speech, it does emphasize that one
either turns toward the new Jerusalem or toward a Satan-ruled millen-
nium of darkness, all the while deploying the promise of providence that
shaped so many US settler colonial messages: “You and I have a ren-
dezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this the last best
hope of men on earth or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a
 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST 267

1000 years of darkness.” Reagan’s true gift was that he brought us hope

and a path away from an evil empire: “He reminded all of us that the best
was yet to come.”
That the Reagan Library plays with and works within this binary choice
between a better or a lost future is unsurprising. The museum’s narra-
tive hinges upon the ideological choice between two cities.9 In the online
introductory video, Gary Sinise proclaims about the displayed piece of
Berlin wall that “looking at this symbol of oppression and communism,
it now stands here in the open air in freedom up at Reagan’s shining city
in stark contrast to its original purpose.” Lest one think the dualistic logic
pits Reagan’s shining city only against a defeated Soviet bloc, a museum
tour of the Cold War takes viewers directly into a room that reminds them
that Reagan also fought other “evils,” and some of those still endanger the
contemporary USA and prevent it from realizing Reagan’s dreams: those
figures being Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Libya’s
Muammar Qaddafi, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. As with Revelation’s
call to bear witness, the museum suggests that visitors must take up an
ongoing witness because, though Reagan accomplished a lot, some ene-
mies are yet to be felled completely.10
At the same time, the insecurity of victorious imperial spectacle haunts
the walls of the Reagan Library. Christopher Frilingos has argued that
Revelation draws readers into practices of Roman spectacle, where one
is both watcher and watched, undoing the very solidity the apocalyptic
gaze seemingly evokes. That spectacle would be significant at the Reagan
Library is hardly surprising; it is the library, after all, of the actor who
would be president. Yet, it is often a space that works so hard to prompt
you to have certain feelings, even creating a room for you to relive the
attempted assassination of March 30, 1981. Moreover, many of the
patrons seem to take on the spirit of pressing for purity of sentiment.
As I walked through Air Force One, the man ahead of me kept quizzing
the security guards on whether they worked at the museum because they
loved Reagan. He would remind them that Reagan was a better president
than “this guy we have now” (he would not say Barack Obama’s name).
When the security guards would describe themselves as non-partisan
patriots just serving their country, he would shoot back, “but we all know
Republicans have been best for this country.”
My partner was also with me, and though now a US citizen, he was
born and raised in Tehran, Iran. At one point during our visit to the
museum, my partner was looking at Air Force One, which sits within a
268 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST

larger open hangar and has a rather spacious second floor viewing deck,
sizable enough for a large crowd to take in the view. My partner and his
cousin were standing relatively alone on one side of the floor, speaking
in Persian, when a woman sniped at him under her breath that he was
blocking her view. When my partner inquired as to why she would not
just directly ask him to move, and despite the fact that he could not
have been blocking her view in such a large space, she shook her head
at him, casting a condescending glare. On multiple occasions during
the visit, my partner was reminded in subtle ways that he was really
not welcome in the Reagan Library. That my father’s family is from
Central America and my partner from Iran may have exacerbated our
experience of library patrons’ drive for security. The library’s narrative
suggests that, while the Soviets were defeated, Middle Eastern Muslims
and Latin American Communists remain a threat to US integrity. The
insecurity and instability of an imitative new Jerusalem is then mocked
by our ethnic presence, something that devoted pilgrims recognize.
Perhaps though, the museum’s play with the myth of Revelation leaves
the space insecure, with gates both open and closed, and that insecu-
rity may be part of why visitors police the ideological purity of other
patrons.
A lot more could be said about the Reagan Library, and another
scholar could tackle “Reagan’s shining city on a hill” and the gospel of
Matthew, but I offer this brief sketch as a way of thinking about how
biblical scholarship can and does clarify ongoing practices and contes-
tations of US imperialism. That this scholarship elucidates the spatial,
ideological, and rhetorical strategies of the Reagan Library is not odd,
since such scholarship was often borne out of critical reaction to Reagan
and late twentieth-century conservatism. I offer this coda description
of the Reagan Library in order to make the case for attention to itera-
tions of the new Jerusalem not solely from the vantage point of biblical
studies as narrowly construed in relationship to the ancient world. I am
interested in a biblical studies more broadly construed as an enterprise
with critical power to speak to and about the contemporary world in
which we live.
When cultural critics write of mythic imaginaries mapped onto the
Western USA, they often focus on renditions and transformations of
Exodus narratives or Eden as inflected solely in Genesis. Chicana art
historian and US cultural critic Alicia Gaspar de Alba, for example, in
her critique of US imperialist imaginations of the Southwest, describes
 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST 269

the tensions of Edenic imaginations and gendered readings of Western

landscapes as either a wilderness to be ravished and domesticated or a
paradise to be married, a “new garden of Eden.”11 For Gaspar de Alba,
these gendered constructions of imperial Eden are not only undertaken
and deployed by the settler colonialist USA but also by the responses of
once colonized Mexican American populations.
The work of biblical scholar Tina Pippin actually suggests that the
Eden invoked in Gaspar de Alba’s formulation might also be the Eden
of Revelation’s new Jerusalem, a gendered female bride containing a
garden which is “more perfect,” at least in terms of domination: “the
garden is surrounded by the walled city and thereby managed and
controlled, and (presumably) none of the inhabitants is going to be
disobedient. Who would ever want to leave this city? These gates are
for entrance, not expulsion, since only the purest believers are allowed
inside.”12 Here, the land is not just idyllic, but it is also controlled, and
so are the populations who reside within. Gaspar de Alba’s very use of
the notions of husbandry and landed marriage provoke attention to
the gendered cultural legacy of the imagined new Jerusalem as landed
imperial bride, one whose unsettling ambiguities so often leave unre-
solved the questions of imperially locative and resistant power within
one text.
These biblical scholars speak to the Reagan Library’s aspirations to
conquer space through biblical invocation because many of them inten-
tionally set out to challenge Reaganesque biblical understandings. The
situatedness of scholarly readings in no way delegitimizes their interpreta-
tions of the ancient world or our present one; in fact, biblical scholars who
earnestly proclaim their projects’ responses to conservative US imperial
modes clarify their readings and their relevance to interpreting the pres-
ent Reagan Library. But what would readings look like if they were more
interested in how colonized persons have appropriated and responded
to these imperial biblical readings? In a discussion at the 2013 Society
of Biblical Literature annual meeting, Fernando F. Segovia talked about
being in Nicaragua during Reagan’s state funeral in 2004 and the ways
that Nicaraguan subjects perceived Reagan’s funeral as a tribute to Roman
imperial excess. The Nicaraguans that Segovia met remembered Reagan
as the emperor who oversaw war and state campaigns of terror in Central
America in the 1980s; for them, Reagan was the president who exercised
violence and instability in the name of a Pax Americana.
270 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST

What Segovia’s work inspired me to think about early in my graduate

studies is how an ethics of reading must be deeply interconnected with
the place from which people read. The Reagan Library exemplifies a US
imperialist gaze, on a hill near the Pacific, at the edge of the continent,
and an attempt to be seen and to see, to take in the whole horizon. This
museum on a hill contrasts with Figueroa’s Aztlán, located in the Palo
Verde/Parker valleys, in the desert near the Arizona border, where, in
the shadow of a medium-security penitentiary, it is not so easy to find the
traces of past utopias. Both the Reagan Library and Figueroa’s Blythe
engage in play with scriptures, scripturalization, utopian dreaming, and
apocalyptic/unveiling orientations. While significant differences mark
their approaches and impacts, their shared tools provoke questions about
those tools themselves and the ever-persistent ambivalence of reconquest
visions, visions including Revelation and Aztlán that imagine a taking back
of what has been lost, a return to the past in order to secure the future,
a skirmish for present space that is fought out time and again through a
recourse to the contested terrain of scriptures as tools of utopian imagina-
tion and invocation.
Rather than approach texts as detached intellectual productions,
an examination of the Chicanx movement’s fraught and multiple
approaches to textual production and invocation illuminates how the
writing and reading of texts are significantly located, with location
being socially, temporally, and geographically particular. For all Chicanx
Aztlán’s shortcomings, one can contextualize it as coming from a place
different from the Reagan Library, or from the history of the utopian
imagination that Michel de Certeau described. If European and Euro-
North American imperialist utopian dreamers began by writing from a
blank page that was never truly blank, that instead just obscured and
drove the labor that led to the blank page into the background, then
Chicanx utopianism reflects what it means to dream utopia from the
experience of that displacement, from having been pushed off to the
margins of someone else’s blank pages and scriptural practices. These
different starting places may impact how these tools get used. For
Cherríe Moraga, her “book of revelation” comes from combining the
daily experiences of people with the scraps of lost pages, burnt colo-
nial Mesoamerican codices that have recombined into a malleable cul-
tural memory so as to make a new knowledge predicated on a blurry
future hope. Utopian dreaming in Moraga’s case becomes about the
possibilities of other worlds, about muddling lines of distinction.
 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST 271

Indeed, Moraga’s work and that of many Chicana feminist and queer
critics would challenge the neat binary between colonizer and colonized
that I have used to think about the Reagan Library. Utopias and scrip-
tures as utopian projects have been tools that imperially powerful and
colonially displaced peoples have used in violently coercive ways, but
they are also among the ways that peoples, from many different places,
have critiqued, dreamed, and reimagined what it means to be human in
the midst of daily lived struggles.
Perhaps one of the major distinctions among utopian dreamings may
actually hinge on the epistemologies of “no place”; from which no
places might we best dream utopia? To conceive of God as omniscient
has a powerful resonance with imperial domination, a resonance akin to
Catherine Keller’s observations about imperial fondness for an omnipo-
tent God.13 To know all and absolutely is to control all absolutely. The
challenge in scholarly endeavors is our own need to construct our-
selves, even in the midst of postmodern deconstructive revelry, as par-
ticipating in the same omniscience, the same abilities to make claims
from the God’s eye view, to supply our interpretations as if they come
from no place in particular. Such scholarly pretensions can only be
made by those who have lived comfortably emplaced or seek to carve
out a controlled space of domination. The experiences of living caught
between worlds, as Segovia suggests, forces many of us to recognize the
constructedness of those multiple worlds, the possibilities and flaws of
such constructions, and the necessity of perceiving the particularity of
one’s own.14 We come to distinguish the specificities of our no places
and between places. Segovia’s path entails a certain epistemic humility,
a recognition of the limited, contentious scope of one’s own scribal
claims and practices, even if such work may only be undertaken with
the hope of reaching across and beyond the no places that were once
inscribed for us.
Ultimately, this book makes the case that scriptures and those who read
scriptures cannot be understood as separate from the regimes of power that
encircle scripturalization. My apocalyptic, utopian scriptural foci reveal
the ways that scriptural power is always already a site of ongoing contesta-
tion and reframing, one that bleeds well beyond textual borders. Textual
borders are shaped by the ways people struggle to situate themselves in
time and space amidst ever fraught and changing systems of social power.
There is no one way to read these texts or these peoples engaging texts,
but this book makes a case for the ongoing import of utopian dreaming
272 CODA: SCRIPTURAL REVELATIONS AND RECONQUEST

and contestation to practices of scripturalization. Chicanx engagements

of scripturalization, utopias, and apocalyptic underscore the diversity of
any one people’s approaches. That these people all engage with texts and
utopian dreaming does press the question of why, even if that why has
more answers than could be inscribed in any one book.

NOTES
1. Tolbert, 26.
2. Moore, “Revelation,” 446.
3. See Sandos’s discussions of the import of theohistorical work in
understanding Franciscan missionary activity in Converting
California.
4. See Tinker, 42–68.
5. See Lint Sagarena’s pointed discussion of the use of mission-revival
styles in the 1910s and 1920s, particularly when Mexican migration
into California was on the rise in the wake of the Mexican revolution,
p. 127–128.
6. Mendoza, 92–93.
7. Moore, “Revelation,” 443.
8. Gary Sinise, host, “Reagan Library Video Tour,” The Ronald Reagan
Presidential Foundation & Library website, http://www.reagan-
foundation.org/reagan-library-video-tour.aspx.
9. Rossing, Choice.
10. Although I went to the Reagan Library in 2013, I wonder what a visit
to the library would entail now that the USA is normalizing relations
with Cuba.
11. Gaspar de Alba, 120.
12. Pippin, “Ideology,” 161.
13. Keller points out how the relation between imperial and divine
omnipotence is not causal; it is rather resonant feedback. See God and
Power, 27.
14. Segovia, “Toward a Hermeneutics of the Diaspora: A Hermeneutics
of Otherness and Engagement,” Reading From This Place, vol. 1, ed.
Segovia and Tolbert, 64–65.
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 INDEX
A Anaya Rudolfo A., 39, 53, 57,
Academia. See Education system
Activism. See Chicanx and Chicanx
movement
Acuña, Rodolfo, 138, 163n32
Las Adelitas de Aztlán, 195, 208n86
African American activism, 65n30
Alcatraz, 26
Alejandro, 47–48
Alianza Federales, 7, 8, 70n133, 129,
134. See also Tijerina, Reies López
Alta California missionary history,
107–109, 125n174
Alurista
on identity, 66n39, 126n196
impact of work by, 55, 58
Nationchild Plumaroja, 60
preamble to El Plan by, 10, 36–38, 58
Álvarez Valdés, Ariel, 93, 94
American Indian Movement, 26n16
American Progress (Gast), 7, 26n20
Amerindians. See Native North Americans
Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to endnotes.
© The Author(s) 2016
J.M. Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59214-9
163n32, 194, 232
Ancient Footprints of the Colorado
River: La Cuna de Aztlán
(Figueroa), 1, 14
Anti-immigration politics. See (Im)
migration politics
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 39, 137, 187,
197–198
on Aztec tradition, 224–225
Borderlands/La Frontera, 137, 197,
233
playful interpretation by, 256n75
This Bridge Called My Back, 217
Apocalypse of John. See Revelation
Apocalyptic modes, 4, 13–16
about literary genre, 81,
114nn11–12
Chicanx racial theory and, 109–110,
126n193, 126n196
in Chicanx scriptures, 75–76
four horsemen trope, 9, 27n33
295
296 INDEX
Apocalyptic modes (cont.)
Manifest Destiny, 7, 12, 26n18
racial apocalyptic theory, 109–110,
112–113, 126n193, 126n196
rhetoric of, 27n36. See also Biblical
criticism; Revelation; Utopian
scripturalization
ἀπokάλυψις, 13
Apollo-Leto-Python myth, 83–84,
220, 223
Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan
Peace), 176
Architecture and design of missions,
108, 125n179, 264–265, 272n5
Arizona, 45–46. See also California;
United States
Arrizón, Alicia, 53, 68n87
Art in Chicanx movement. See
Performance-based cultural
practices; Visual art
Augustus, Emperor of Rome,
176–177
Aune, David E., 114nn17–18,
123n153, 250n12
Aymer, Margaret, 113n8, 211n131
Aztec civilization and heritage
familiarity of, 253n39
feminist approach to, 197–202,
210n126
modern appropriation of, 45–48,
126n196, 136, 145, 157
Moraga’s use of, 231, 243, 255n61.
See also Ethnic Mexicans
Aztlán
as beyond mythohistorical location,
15, 31, 47–48, 68n87, 245
Blythe as, 1–3, 2, 18, 30
Chicanx unity through, 55–58, 61–62,
71n166, 71n167, 72n191, 148
criticism of movimiento’s use of,
58–63, 194–195
entretiempo of, 53–55
establishment of “La Republica de
Aztlan,” 52
feminist approach to, 198–202
as gendered landscape, 193–194, 197
locative vs. utopian place-making,
39–40, 54–55, 66n47, 67n57
myth as Aztec Manifest Destiny,
110–111
“no place” and place of, 18–20,
39–44, 60–63, 66n47, 72n188
present geographies of, 44, 50–52,
69n117
re-introduction of modern rhetoric
on, 36–39, 64n9
textual descriptions of physical
location, 64n5. See also Chicanx
and Chicanx movement; El
Plan Espiritual de Aztlán
(1969); specific related concepts
B
Babylon motif, 76, 82–84, 115n30,
116n37, 117n47, 123n156. See
also Revelation
Baca, Damián, 26n26, 226, 259n119
Balaam, 84, 96, 195, 209n115
Bantam Books, 135
Barreto, Eric D., 117n42
Beast motif in Revelation, 13, 99, 101,
103, 115n30. See also Revelation
Bebout, Lee, 28n38, 69n117,
70n133, 143–144, 210n126
Becoming Mexican American
(Sánchez), 161n6
Bediako, Kwame, 120n87, 122n130
Beltrán, Cristina, 68n82, 71n167
Bhabha, Homi K., 196, 263
Biblical criticism
Bible as object, 242, 257n96,
258n113
fidelity and, 188–190

interdisciplinary method of, 16–21,
28n42, 77–80
Jews and Christians in, 81, 100,
122n130, 123n145
modern approach to, 268–269
by Moraga, 105, 224–225
multiplicity of meanings,
242–243, 248, 258n113,
258n116
scripturalization defined, 4–5
use of “other”, 96–97, 113n1.
See also Apocalyptic modes;
Revelation; Scripturalization;
Utopian scripturalization;
specific books of the Bible
Biblical rhetoric
Babylon motif, 76, 82–84,
115n30, 116n37, 117n47,
123n156
Exodus motif, 7, 15, 26n19, 268
lamb’s narrative, 266
of Reagan, 261, 265, 266. See also
Scripturalization; Utopian
scripturalization
Black Panthers, 65n30
Black student activism, 65n30
Blackwell, Maylei, 64n9, 169n150,
197, 208n86
Blowouts (student strikes, 1968), 132,
214
Blythe, California, 1–3, 2, 18, 30.
See also Aztlán; Figueroa, Alfredo
Acosta
Bonillas, Ignacio, 45–46, 68n91
Book of Revelation. See
Revelation
Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa),
137, 197, 233
Boyarin, Daniel, 206n51
Boyd, Jim, 72n197
Bracho, Ricardo, 201
Brotherhood, 135, 192, 194, 198
INDEX 297
Brown Berets
activist activities of, 6–7, 26n16, 35,
52
black student activism and, 65n30
ending of, 207n61
founding of, 132, 162n13, 214
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
161n8
Buell, Denise Kimber, 208n85
Bush, George W., 95
Bustamante, Cruz, 62
Busto, Rudy V., 210n124
C
Calexico, California, 127–128, 161n1
California
borderlands and citizenship,
127–128, 130–131, 161n1
farmworkers rights movement, 3,
129–130, 162n22
institutionalizing Chicanx Studies
in, 10, 139–144
Mexican American student
enrollment in, 158
mining, 3, 25n8, 29–30
missionary history in, 107–109,
125n174, 175
population of, 109, 126n186. See
also Chicanx and Chicanx
movement; Native North
Americans; specific cities; specific
institutions
California State College Los Angeles,
133
Callahan, Allen Dwight, 115n26,
123n156
Canonization, 95, 150, 159, 223–224,
259n127
La Caravana de la Reconquista
(1971–1972), 52
Carey, Greg, 113n1, 116n31
298 INDEX
Carnalismo, 135, 192, 194, 198
Castañeda, Antonia I., 180
Castillo, Sylvia, 190–191
Castro, Vickie, 132
Catholic Church
education and Americanization by,
161n6
missionary history, 107–109,
125n174
social activism and, 38, 65–66n38.
See also Christianity and
Christian traditions
Católicos por la Raza, 20
La Causa Publications, 139
CCHE. See Chicano Coordinating
Council on Higher Education
(CCHE)
Center for Autonomous Social Action
(CASA), 158
Certeau, Michel de, 43, 270
Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie, 60,
71n174, 182
Chavarria, Jesús, 138
Chávez, César, 3, 27n34, 214
Teatro Campesino, 33
Chávez, Ernesto, 45, 131, 207n61
Chicanas de Aztlán, 195
Chicanismo, as term, 132,
168–169n143
Chicano, as term, 25n5, 25n9,
133–135, 239–240
The Chicano Codices (exhibition),
218–221, 245, 252n22
Chicano Coordinating Council on
Higher Education (CCHE), 138,
139, 141, 152–153, 164n52
Chicano Moratorium, 52, 214
Chicano Press Association, 133
Chicanx and Chicanx movement
activism against education system,
20–21, 29
carnalismo, 135, 192, 194, 198
Catholic Church and, 38,
65–66n38
Christian tradition and, 11–12
criticism of use of Aztlán, 58–63
cultural nationalist rhetoric, 34–37,
47, 55–56, 68n88
currency of, 187, 211n146
defining terms, 25n5, 25n9, 163n31
diversity of, 9, 151, 166n100,
166n102, 167n107
fidelity rhetoric and, 183–188,
190–194
four horsemen trope, 9, 27n33
gender politics within, 155–157,
171–174, 180–182
homemaking and, 3–4, 43, 55
imagery and, 154–157
interdisciplinary method of inquiry
of, 16–21, 28n42
law enforcement and, 188, 207n61
machismo in, 187, 190–194,
208n87
marches of, 33, 52, 132, 214
mestizaje, 60, 68n98
(im)migration politics and Aztlán,
31, 48, 72n200, 205n26
mythohistorical narrative and,
12–16, 47–48, 68n87,
134–137
newspapers of, 133–134, 162n22
non-textual cultural practices,
153–154
performance-based activities of,
153–154, 156
political use of scriptures, 72n197,
84
racial apocalyptic theory, 109–110,
126n193, 126n196
re-introduction of Aztlán rhetoric
in, 36–39, 64n9
religion as category and, 220–222,
251n18

revelation and sacred space in,
232–234
scriptural tradition of, 7, 9–11
self-determination in, 34–37,
56–57, 61
student activism, 35, 65n30, 129,
131
terms defined, 25n5, 25n9,
132–135, 239–240
unity through Aztlán, 55–58,
61–62, 71n166, 71n167,
72n191. See also Aztlán;
Denver Youth Conference;
Escuela de la Raza Unida;
Santa Barbara conference;
specific groups; specific people;
specific texts
Chicanx Studies
institutionalizing, 10, 139–147,
166n102, 167n107
vs. Latinx Studies, 169n146. See also
Education system
China, 44
Christian Bible. See Biblical criticism
Christianity and Christian traditions
intersection identities and,
214–215
Jews in biblical criticism and, 81,
100, 122n130, 123n145
Manifest Destiny, 7, 12, 26n18
mapping geographies in, 105–106
movimiento and, 11–12
scripture, as category in, 223–224
textual vs. cultural object, 257n96.
See also Biblical criticism;
Catholic Church; Missionary
history; Scripturalization
Chrononormative scheme, 22–23,
27n28
Church of the Epiphany, 20, 132,
162n13, 214–215
Cíbola, 59, 124n168
INDEX 299
Citizenship
in book of Revelation, 100–101
US-Mexico borderlands and,
127–128, 130–131, 161n1. See
also Homemaking; Identity
City of Night (Rechy), 137
Claudius, Emperor of Rome, 192–193
“Codex Xerí” (Moraga), 24
apocalyptic mode in, 76
Aztec prophecy in, 231, 243,
255n61
beyond mythohistorical narrative in,
245–246
biblical interpretation in, 105,
224–225
as response to Chicano Codices
exhibition, 219–221
on scribes, 244
scripturalization and, 235–241,
247–248
singular and plural textuality,
242–243, 258n118
on written representation, 227.
See also Moraga, Cherríe L.
Codices
in ancient Rome, 247
exhibition on, 218–221, 252n22
in Mesoamerica, 24, 217–220,
225–226, 240–241, 247
vs. scriptures, 224–225, 227
social power through, 227–229,
239–241. See also
Scripturalization; Scrolls in
Revelation
Collins, John J., 114n12
Colonization
homemaking and, 49
missionary history and revolts,
107–109, 125n174
of New World, 106–107,
124nn165–166, 264
sexual violence and, 192–193, 208n92
300 INDEX
Colorado, 51. See also Denver Youth
Conference (1969)
Columbus, Christopher (Cristóbal
Colón), 106–107, 124n165,
249n9
Combat myth, 101–102
Committee to Free Los Tres,
207n61
Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza
(1971), 38, 65–66n38
Constantine, 105–106
Constitution, US, 15, 36, 65n29, 79,
229, 254n58
Cooper Alarcón, Daniel, 44, 59, 61,
72n188
Cortés, Hernán, 34, 185
The Cosmic Race (Vasconcelos),
109–110, 126n193, 126n196
Cruising Utopia (Muñoz), 22, 41.
See also Muñoz, José Esteban
Crusade for Justice, 10, 35, 133, 135.
See also Gonzales, Rodolfo
“Corky”
Cuauhtémoc, 30, 34
Cultural nationalist rhetoric, 34–37,
47, 55–56, 68n88. See also
Chicanx and Chicanx movement
D EOP and, 131
δαιμὀνιoν, 120n104
Darden, Lynne St. Clair, 117n47
Davidson, Steed V., 123n156
De Gaspar Alba, Alicia, 54, 60, 180,
193–194, 268
De Necochea, Fernando, 127–131,
139, 140, 153, 154
on black student activism, 65n30
family history of, 127–128, 161n1
on I Am Joaquín, 163n42
El Plan de Santa Barbara and, 127,
128, 140
Declaration of Independence, US, 36,
65n29, 79, 141, 230
Delgadillo, Theresa, 232, 237,
250n13
Denver Youth Conference (1969)
about, 10, 35, 135, 138
cultural nationalism at, 34–37, 51,
65n30
El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and,
3, 9–10, 36–38
women’s concerns at, 190–191.
See also Gonzales, Rodolfo
“Corky”
Denver Youth Conference (1970), 52
Deportation. See (Im)migration
politics
Deuteronomy, 259n126
Deutsch, Celia, 118n52, 119n77
Δoῦλoς, 98, 99, 121n121
Drawing. See Visual art
DuBois, W.E.B., 196, 209n118
Durán, Diego, 110
Durkheim, Émile, 39, 233
E
Eden, 4, 15, 42, 59, 86, 91–94, 107,
268–269
Education system
Figueroa and, 20–21, 29
Mexican American enrollment
and, 158
racialized programs in, 161nn6–8,
165n86
sacred power and, 143–146.
See also Chicanx Studies; Santa
Barbara conference; Student
activism
Educational Opportunities Program
(EOP), 131
ἐkkλεσίαι, 13, 116n33

Elena
art by, 147
on El Plan, 56, 62, 157
on gender politics in movimiento,
192, 208n85
identity of, 55, 65–66n38
imaginative space and, 49, 53,
61–62
on physical location of Aztlán, 50
Encuentro Femenil (newspaper), 134,
162n27
Ending curse motif, 111, 123n153.
See also Revelation
Enslavement. See Slaves and slavery
Entretiempo, as term, 53–55, 90
Epiphany. See Church of the Epiphany
Equiano, Olaudah, 179–180
Escuela de la Raza Unida (School of
the United [Chicanx] People)
founding of, 3
Escuela Tlatelolco, 35
Esparza, Moctesuma, 132
Espín, Orlando, 257n96
Esquibel, Antonio, 163n35
Ethnic Mexicans
activist heritage of, 131, 161n7
citizenship and, 127–128, 130–131,
161n1
land rights and identity, 7,
167n109
Mayan traditions, 8, 145, 253n39
Mexica heritage, 14, 19, 47
Nahuatl language and traditions, 8,
59, 226–227, 240
racial oppression of, 161n8
term defined, 25n5
textuality of, 238–239. See also
Aztec civilization and heritage;
Chicanx and Chicanx
movement; Native North
Americans
Eusebius, 105–106, 124n162
INDEX 301
Exodus and exodus motif, 7, 15,
26n19, 268. See also
Scripturalization
Expedition through Aztlán (Sánchez),
52
Ezekiel, 88, 91, 118n54
F
Fact, defining, 66n50
Familia and familial rhetoric
Hijas de Cuauhtémoc use of, 198
MEChA on, 157–158
(im)migration politics and, 205n26
in El Plan, 205n26
queer scholarship on, 211n148
scripturalization and, 174–182, 204,
205n9
Spanish colonization and, 180–181.
See also Gender norms and
politics; Masculinity and
machismo
Fanon, Frantz, 231
Farm Workers Union, 51
Farmworkers rights movement, 3,
129–130, 162n22
Fekkes, Jan, III, 207n68
Feminists and feminist scholarship
on Aztec heritage, 197–198
on Aztlán, 198–202
Aztlán and exclusion of, 59–60,
73n202, 194–195
biblical criticism on Revelation and,
97, 122n133
Gonzales comments on, 185
Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, 195
in Latinx religion and theology,
205n4
MECha and, 158
on Revelation, 195–197, 252n26
scripturalization and revisions by,
23–24, 203–204
302 INDEX
Feminists and feminist (cont.)
as term, 28n54
on unity, 71n167
on utopianism, 67n76. See also
Gender norms and politics;
Masculinity and machismo;
Women
Fidelity rhetoric, 182–194
Figueroa, Alfredo Acosta
on abundant knowledge, 12, 27n35
Ancient Footprints of the Colorado
River
La Cuna de Aztlán, 1
biographical information on, 3
defining “fact,” 66n50
on land destruction by mining, 3,
25n8
on lost histories, 12, 29
“no place” and, 20, 61
physical location descriptors of
Aztlán, 64n5
protecting Blythe as sacred land by,
1–2, 18, 30
on religion as term, 251n14. See also
Chicanx and Chicanx movement
Film, 154
Flores, Francisca, 162n22
Florida, 44
Forbes, Jack D., 64n9
Fornication, 176, 205n9, 209n115
Four horsemen trope, 9, 27n33
Franciscan missionary history. See
Missionary history
Fregoso, Rosa Linda, 60, 71n174
Frilingos, Christopher A., 117n42,
123n144, 176, 267
G Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky”
Gabacho, as term, 65n27, 143
Gadsden Treaty (1854), 6
El Gallo (newspaper), 133
García, Ignacío M.
on Aztlán, 44
on empowerment rhetoric, 163n31,
165n75
on feminist and lesbian scholarship,
187
“Juncture”, 159, 169n150
on performance of history, 49, 129,
161n2
on personal conversion, 163n32
García, Mario T., 27n34
Gast, John, 7
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 256n81
Gay community. See Feminists and
feminist scholarship; Queer
concerns and queer scholarship
Gender norms and politics
fidelity rhetoric, 182–190
hermanidad, 198–199
male-dominated imagery, 155–157
missionary history and, 175
within movimiento, 155–157,
171–174, 180–182, 190–194
representations of Aztlán, 193–194
in Revelation, 199, 209n115
in Roman civilization, 192–193,
208n97. See also Familia and
familial rhetoric; Feminists and
feminist scholarship;
Masculinity and machismo;
Queer concerns and queer
scholarship; Women
Genesis. See Eden
Geoglyphs, 2, 30, 39–40
Geographic markers in landscape, 3
Gilchrest, Eric J., 86, 117n45,
118n62, 123n154
Gómez-Quiñones, Juan, 138, 164n61
on awakening Chicanx identity, 38–39
Denver Youth Conference and, 10,
35, 36, 135, 138

on unity through nationalism, 55
on women in movimiento, 185. See
also Crusade for Justice; I Am
Joaquín (Gonzales)
Gonzales Vasquez, Robert, 15
González-Andrieu, Cecilia, 28n42
The Gospel of César Chávez (García),
27n34
γραφή, 249n11
Gray, John, 67n70
Greek civilization and tradition
utopia, 42–43, 86, 87, 96. See also
Revelation; Utopianism; specific
Greek terms
Greek civilization and traditions
seeing and looking in, 103,
123n148
El Grito del Norte, 35, 134, 184
Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 119n84, 215
H I Am Joaquín (Gonzales), 29–30, 34,
The Heart of Aztlán (Anaya), 194, 232
Hebrew Bible. See Biblical criticism
Las Hermanas, 11, 210n122
Hermanidad, 198–199, 210n129
Hernández, Juan, Jr., 259n127
Hernández, Leticia, 137, 198,
210n126
Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel, 136
Hierarchal organization of space,
88–89
Hijas de Cuauhtémoc (newspaper),
134
“Hijas de Cuauhtémoc” (poem by
Hernández), 137, 198
Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc
(organization), 195, 210n129
Homemaking
Chicanx unity through, 3–4, 43,
55–58, 61–62, 71n166,
71n167, 72n191
INDEX 303
colonization and, 49
displacement and scriptures, 5
locative vs. utopian place-making,
18–20, 39–44, 54–55, 66n47,
67n57, 85–90
Revelation and, 80–85, 104–105
scriptures and, 15–16, 231–232. See
also Aztlán; Land rights; “No
place” as place; Utopianism
Hongista, Leif, 123n145
Hoover, J. Edgar, 188
Horizonal queerness, 65n20. See also
Utopian scripturalization
Horsley, Richard A., 114n11, 115n29
Huber, Lynn, 199, 211n131,
258n116
Huerta, Dolores, 33
Hughes, Jennifer Scheper, 239
I
135–137
gendered power and, 191
historical figures in, 136, 163n37
impact of, 163n35, 163n42
performance of, 154
El Plan de Santa Barbara and, 129
visual art in, 154, 157. See also
Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky”
Identity
chicanismo, as term, 132,
168–169n143
Chicano, as term, 25n5, 25n9,
133–135
land rights and, 7, 167n109,
171–172
unity through Aztlán, 3–4, 43,
55–58, 61–62, 71n166,
71n167, 72n191. See also
Chicanx and Chicanx
movement; Homemaking
304 INDEX
Imagery. See Visual art
Immigration. See (Im)migration
politics
Interdisciplinary method of inquiry,
16–21, 28n42, 77–80, 270
Isasi-Díaz, Ada-María, 209–210n122
Isis (goddess), 220, 223
Islam. See Muslims and Muslim
traditions
J The Last Generation (Moraga),
Jews and Jewish traditions
Christians in biblical criticism and,
81, 100, 122n130, 123n145
fidelity and, 182–183
literary history of, 91–92, 115n21,
118n62
scripture, as category in, 223–224,
249n11, 253n33
unfaithfulness in, 205n9
Jezebel, 84, 96, 179, 182–183, 195,
209n115. See also Revelation
John of Patmos, 13, 80–84, 101,
113nn6–7, 114n17
Johnson-DeBaufre, Melanie, 67n75,
211n151
Josephson, Jason A., 251n17, 255n67
Jotería, as term, 224, 241, 258n107
Juarez, Alberto, 251n14
“Juncture” (García), 159, 169n150
K Locative vs. utopian place-making,
Kahl, Brigitte, 252n26
Keller, Catherine, 271, 272n13
Kelley, Shawn, 122n130
King, Rodney, 76, 219, 249n9, 261
Knust, Jennifer Wright, 207n66
Kumar, Krishan, 67n71
Kumeyaay revolts, 108–109
Kyriarchy, as term, 175, 205n5
L
Land rights
Alianza Federales, 7, 8, 70n133,
129, 134
identity and, 7, 167n109, 171–172
reclamation activities in El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán, 49–52
Tijerina on, 7, 8, 70n133, 129.
See also California;
Homemaking
Larios, Graciela, 73n200
76, 217
Latinx: heritage of, 235
as term, 25n5. See also Chicanx and
Chicanx movement
Latinx Studies
vs. Chicanx Studies, 169n146
feminism in, 205n4. See also Chicanx
Studies
Law enforcement and movimiento,
188, 207n61
Leal, Luis, 52, 64n9
León, Luis D., 221
Lesbian community. See Feminists and
feminist scholarship; Queer
concerns and queer scholarship
LGBTIQ community. See Feminists
and feminist scholarship; Queer
concerns and queer scholarship
Licon, George, 132
Liew, Tat-siong Benny, 113n9
Limiting pliability, as term, 43–44, 57
18–20, 39–44, 54–55, 66n47,
67n57, 85–90
Lomelí, Francisco, 39, 53
Long, Charles H., 17
Looking. See Seeing and looking
López, Lydia
on Aztlán, 48, 61, 73n201
impact of, 203

intersectional identity of, 214–217,
251n14
as mother, 181, 206n31
religion and, 65n38, 162n13, 214,
233
Los Angeles, California
race relations in, 76, 219, 249n9, 261
student protests (1968), 131–132,
214
Los Angeles Times, 1
Love, Velma E., 257n106
M Mexican American, as term, 25n5,
Maier, Harry O., 266
Malina, Bruce J., 118n50
Manifest Destiny, 7, 12, 26n18, 79,
193–194
Maps of Aztlán, 50, 69n117
March (Delano-Sacramento, 1966),
33, 129–130
Marcha de la Reconquista
(Calexico-Sacramento, 1971), 52
Mariscal, Jorge, 52
Marriage norms and metaphors,
175–180, 199, 205n9
Martin, Clarice J., 97, 121n108
Martin, Dale, 178
Martinez, Elizabeth (Betita), 134
Martínez, Manuel, 154
Martínez, Richard, 251n14
Marty, Martin E., 4
Masculinity and machismo
carnalismo, 135, 192, 194, 198
male-dominated imagery, 155–157
in movimiento, 187, 190–194, 208n87
of Reagan, 265
in Revelation, 177–178, 196
in Roman civilization, 189, 208n97.
See also Feminists and feminist
scholarship; Gender norms and
politics
INDEX 305
Mayan civilization and traditions, 8, 145,
253n39. See also Ethnic Mexicans
MEChA. See Movimiento Estudiantil
Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA)
Mendez v. Westminster, 161n8
Mendoza, Rubén G., 108, 125n179
Mesoamerican codices, 24, 217–220,
225–226, 240–241, 247
Mestizaje, 60, 68n98, 110, 126n196,
185
Mexica heritage, 14, 19, 47. See also
Aztec civilization and heritage
Mexicali, Mexico, 127–128, 161n1
133. See also Chicanx and Chicanx
movement
Mexican American Student Association
(MASA), 148
Mexican American Student
Confederation (MASC), 148
Mexican Museum (San Francisco),
218–219
Mexican-American Youth Leadership
Conference (1966), 132
Mexico (Los Estadoes Unidos
Mexicanos)
history of land-rights conflicts of,
6–7, 25n16, 45–46
missionary history in, 107–109,
125n174
US borderlands and citizenship,
127–128, 130–131, 161n1.
See also Aztec civilization and
heritage; Mayan civilization and
traditions; Mexica heritage;
Nahuatl language and traditions
(Im)migration politics
borderland politics, 127–128,
130–131, 161n1
modern vs. biblical, 100, 122n128
use of El Plan in, 31, 48, 72n200,
205n26
306 INDEX
Miner, Dylan A.T., 40, 60, 226
Mining, 3, 25n8, 29–30
Missionary history, 107–109
brutalities of, 125n174
mission design, 108, 125n179,
264–265, 272n5
sexual politics of, 175. See also
Christianity and Christian
traditions
Molina Enríquez de Pick, Gracia, 138
Moore, Stephen D., 263
Moraga, Cherríe L., 24
on Aztlán as utopia, 48, 51, 54
criticism of, 211n148
on gender politics of movimiento,
187, 209n122
intersectional identity and, 222,
246, 263n69
The Last Generation, 76, 217
playful interpretation by, 256n75,
270–271
purpose of work by, 245
“Queer Aztlán,” 200–202, 255n69
scripturalization of, 217–221,
235–241
This Bridge Called My Back, 217
use of Aztec prophecy, 231, 243,
255n61
A Xicana Codex of Changing
Consciousness, 227–229, 241.
See also “Codex Xerí”
(Moraga)
More, Thomas, 18–19, 40
Motechuzoma Ilhuicamina, 2
Motherhood tropes, 174–182, 198,
206n31
Motolinía, 124n169
Movement-produced texts. See
Performance-based cultural
practices
El movimiento. See Chicanx and
Chicanx movement
Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de
Aztlán (MEChA), 10, 20
on California as Aztlán, 50
goals of familia, 157–158
El Plan de Santa Barbara and,
140, 147–150, 152–153,
164n60
El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and,
72n200
symbol of, 165n90
Muñoz, Carlos, Jr., 65n30, 144, 191
Muñoz, José Esteban
on horizonal queerness, 65n20
on utopian temporalities, 35, 41–43,
53, 54, 90, 201
Muñoz, Rosalio, 251n14
Murrieta, Joaquín, 29, 136, 153
Muslims and Muslim traditions, 17,
106, 224, 253n33, 268
Mythohistorical narrative
I Am Joaquín (Gonzales), 29–30,
34, 129, 135–137
scripturalization and, 12–16,
47–48, 68n87, 134–135,
158–160
as term, 14, 28n38. See also El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán (1969)
N
Nahuatl language and traditions, 8,
59, 226–227, 240. See also Ethnic
Mexicans
Najman, Hindy, 115n21
National Autonomous University of
Mexico, 149
National Chicano Youth Liberation
Conference. See Denver Youth
Conference (1969)
Nationalism. See Cultural nationalist
rhetoric
Nationchild Plumaroja (Alurista), 60

Native North Americans
American Indian Movement, 26n16
Aztec heritage and, 126n196
Aztlán and exclusion of, 59,
71n180
missionary history and, 107–109,
125n174, 175
population of, 109, 126n186
on space/time, 67n59. See also
Ethnic Mexicans
Nayarit, Mexico, 44
Nepantla, as term, 246, 260n136
New Jerusalem as biblical utopia, 5, 13
biblical passages on, 122n129
Constantine and, 105–106
feminist and queer critique of,
178–179, 188–190, 193,
196–197, 199
mission design and, 125n179,
264–265
mythohistorical narrative of, 14–15,
22–23, 113n8, 269
utopian scripturalization of, 85–95,
100–106, 228, 231, 250n11.
See also Aztlán; Biblical
criticism; Revelation; Utopian
scripturalization
New Mexico, 44–46
New World colonization, 106–109,
124nn165–166, 125n174, 264
Nicaragua, 269
Nicklas, Tobias, 259n123
NietoGomez, Anna
background and identity of,
171–173
on diversity vs. El Plan de Santa
Barbara, 139, 151, 166n102,
167n107, 184
impact of, 172, 203
on oral tradition, 239–240
ostracism and, 185–186, 204,
208n87
INDEX 307
“No place” as place, 18–20, 39–44,
60–63, 66n47, 72n188. See also
Utopianism
Nuclear power and sacred space, 30
Nuñez, René, 138
O
Occupied America (Acuña), 163n32
Ochoa, Rachel, 132
Økland, Jorunn, 119n69
Oppression, 161n8, 165n75, 192.
See also specific groups
Oral tradition. See Performance-based
cultural practices
Orozsco, Cynthia, 203
Ortiz, John, 132
O’Sullivan, John Louis, 7, 109
P
Padilla, Genaro M., 232
PADRES, 11
Pardo, Mary, 203
Peregrinación, 236
Pérez, Emma, 206n51
Pérez, Laura E., 73n202, 222, 237,
250n13, 260n138
Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 14, 43, 54, 60,
61, 72n188
Performance-based cultural practices,
153–154, 156
biblical scholarship on, 244
García on, 49, 129, 161n2
women and, 181
written representation and,
226–227, 239–240. See also
Scripturalization; Visual art
Pippin, Tina, 179, 269
La Piranya (restaurant), 132, 162n13
Place. See Aztlán; “No place” as place;
Utopianism
308 INDEX
El Plan de Ayala (1911), 33
Plan of Delano (1966), 32–34,
129–130
authorship of, 161n3
El Plan de Iguala (1821), 33
El Plan de la Raza Unida (1967), 36
El Plan de San Diego (1915), 32–33
El Plan de Santa Barbara (1969),
9–11, 23, 65n30
chicanismo, 132
community and, 151–153,
167n112, 168n113, 183
components of, 139–141, 149
creation of, 127–130, 139
criticism of, 151, 155–156,
166n100, 166n102, 167n107,
184, 203
entretiempo in, 53–54
fidelity and, 188
García on, 159
goals of, 144, 147, 149–150
impact of, 139, 148–149, 213
institutionalizing Chicanx Studies
and, 139–144, 166n102,
167n107
nationalist rhetoric in, 50, 51,
142–143
on El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,
139
sacred power and education,
143–146
“spirit is speaking” in, 149, 166n96
unity and, 71n166, 150–151. See
also Santa Barbara Conference
(1969)
El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (1969),
3, 9–10, 22–23
as apocalyptic episteme in, 102, 112
Chicanx unity through Aztlán,
55–58
criticism of movimiento’s use of
Aztlán, 58–63, 194–195
cultural nationalist rhetoric in,
34–37, 47
familia in, 205n26
land reclamation activities in,
49–52
legacy of, 72nn191–192
(im)migration and, 31, 48, 72n200,
205n26
performance of, 129
political use of, 72n197, 84
preamble, 38, 50, 66n39
women’s concerns in, 190
writing of, 32, 36–39. See also
Aztlán; Utopian
scripturalization
Poetry, 153–154. See also I Am
Joaquín (Gonzales)
Price, Patricia, 59
Printing press, 241–242
Prothero, Stephen, 255n64
Puerto Rican community, 33, 65n30,
161n8
Q
“Queer Aztlán” (Moraga), 200–202,
255n69
Queer concerns and queer
scholarship
Aztlán and exclusion of, 59–60,
73n202
gender politics within
movimiento, 155–157,
171–174, 181
scripturalization and revisions by,
23–24
terms defined, 28n55, 224, 241,
258n107. See also Feminists
and feminist scholarship;
Gender norms and
politics
Qumran, 115n29, 118n52, 118n62

R body markings, 99, 117n47
Race and education. See Education
system
Racial apocalyptic theory, 109–110,
112–113, 126n193, 126n196
Ram, Virginia, 215
Ramírez, Ralph, 132
Ramón, 46, 142, 144, 221
Rapture Exposed (Rossing), 266
Rastafarianism, 123n156
La Raza (newspaper), 214
La Raza, as term, 25n10, 62
La Raza Cósmica (Vasconcelos), 46–47,
109–110, 126n193, 126n196
Raza Unida Party, 36, 165
Reactivate/reactivation, as term,
26n26
Reagan, Ronald W., 95, 261–271
Reagan Library. See Ronald Wilson
Reagan Presidential Library and
Museum
Rechy, John, 137
Reconquest, as term, 6, 14, 103–104,
123n153
Reducciones, 107, 125n174, 175.
See also Missionary history
Regeneración (newspaper), 162n22,
162n27
Religion, redefining, 18, 81, 115n20,
220–222, 252n28. See also
Catholic Church; Christianity and
Christian traditions; Jews and
Jewish tradition; Scripturalization
Rendón, Armando B., 51
Revelation
Apocalypse of John as title, 5, 13, 220
architectural style and, 264–265
Babylon motif, 76, 82–84, 115n30,
116n37, 117n47, 123n156, 179,
188–190, 193, 195–197, 231
the Beast motif in, 13, 99, 101,
103, 115n30
INDEX 309
as canonical text, 78, 104, 243–245
citizenship and, 100–101
combat myth and, 101–102
debates on origin of, 82, 114n17,
115n26
ending curse in, 111, 123n153,
228, 244–245
engagement with, 80–82, 89, 104,
111, 114n15, 120n103
Exodus motif, 7, 15, 26n19, 268
feminist approach to, 195–197,
252n26
fidelity rhetoric, 182–183, 188–190,
192–193
four horsemen trope in, 9, 27n33
gender and sexuality in, 175–178,
199, 207n66, 209n115
homemaking and, 80–85, 104–105
imperial cult of, 83, 116n34
interpretive legacy of, 90–91,
116n36, 118n65, 243–245
Jewish mysticism in, 83, 116n35
Jezebel in, 84, 96, 179, 182–183,
185, 188, 195, 209n115
John of Patmos, 13, 80–84,
113nn6–7, 114n17
masculinity in, 177–178, 196, 199
Moraga’s use of, 217
mythohistorical narrative in, 12–14
performance-based practices of, 244
Plan of Delano and, 33–34
queen of heaven imagery, 223
reconquest and, 103–104,
123nn153–154
rhetoric of, 27n36, 95–98
scripture, as category in, 218–227,
247–248, 249n11
scrolls in, 99, 217, 220, 247, 249n11
seeing and looking in, 102–103,
122n143, 123n144
slavery in (see Slaves and slavery)
310 INDEX
Revelation (cont.)
synagogue of Satan in, 121n104,
182
as transformation of Rome,
100–103, 263
wedding supper of the Lamb,
120n87, 177–178
Woman Clothed in the Sun motif,
179, 223, 252n26. See also
Apocalyptic modes; Biblical
criticism; New Jerusalem as
biblical utopia; Utopian
scripturalization
Revelation, as term, 234
Revelation motif, 21–24
Rhetorica christiana (1579), 108
Rodríguez, Richard T., 184, 204,
210n127, 211n148, 212n158
Rodríguez-Holguín, Jeanette, 44
Roman civilization and tradition
Apollo-Leto-Python myth, 83–84,
220, 223
codices and, 247
familial rhetoric of, 176–177
fidelity and, 183
gendered imperial power in,
192–193, 208n97
Revelation, as tranformation of,
100–103, 263
seeing and looking in, 102–104,
123n148
slavery and, 98–100, 180.
See also Greek civilization and
tradition; Revelation;
Utopianism
Ronald Wilson Reagan Presidential
Library and Museum, 262,
261–270, 272n10
Rossing, Barbara, 207n71, 263, 266
Ruiz, Jean-Pierre, 253n32
Ruiz, Raul, 165n75
Runions, Erin, 27n37, 123n156, 196
S
Sacred lands
Blythe as, 1–2, 18, 30
in defense of, 30, 49–52
relationship with people and, 55–58
religion and, 18, 233. See also Aztlán
Sacred power
education and, 143–146
scripturalization and, 231–233
Sahagún, Bernardino de, 68n95
Sánchez, David A., 52, 65n29, 83,
116n37, 132
Sánchez, George J., 161n6
Sánchez-Tranquilino, Marcos,
218–219, 245
Santa Barbara Conference (1969),
9–10, 127, 138–139. See also
El Plan de Santa Barbara (1969)
Santa Catalina Island, 7, 26n16
Schellenberg, Ryan S., 120n103
School of the United People. See
Escuela de la Raza Unida (School
of the United [Chicanx] People)
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 75,
119n69, 175, 247, 260n143
Scott, James C., 116n37
Scripturalization, 202–204
canonization, 95, 150, 159,
223–224, 259n127
chrononormative scheme and,
22–23, 27n28
familial rhetoric and, 174–182,
205n9
interdisciplinary method towards,
16–21, 28n42, 77–80,
270–271
by Moraga, 217–221, 235–238
multi-heritage comparison of,
225–226, 253n39
mythohistorical narrative and,
12–16, 47–48, 68n87,
134–135, 158–160

scripture, as category, 218–227,
247–248, 249n11
scriptures as utopian episteme,
236–238
social power through, 227–230,
257–258n106, 260n146
terms defined, 4–5, 17
transition from locational to
scriptural home, 231–233
Wimbush on, 254n60. See also
Biblical criticism; Utopian
scripturalization
Scrolls in Revelation, 99, 217, 220,
247, 249n11. See also Codices;
Revelation
“Sea was no more,” 122n139
Seeing and looking, 102–104,
122n143, 123n144
Segade, Gus, 138
Segovia, Fernando F., 19–20, 75,
237–238, 269–271
Self-determination, 34–37, 56–57, 61,
143. See also Chicanx and Chicanx
movement; Cultural nationalist
rhetoric
Sex work, 188–189, 207n72
Sexual violence, 192–193, 208n92
Sexuality and scripturalization,
175–176, 205n9
Slaves and slavery, 97–99
marking of, 99, 117n47
as metaphor, 11, 180, 231
resistance by, 99, 121n123
terms for, 98, 99, 121n121
visual depiction of, 177
worshipers as, 86–87, 121n108
Smith, Jonathan Z., 18, 40, 86–88,
232
Smith, Shanell T., 196, 202, 211n151
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 126n203,
223, 228, 253n34
Social Action Training Center, 132
INDEX 311
Society of Biblical Literature, 75, 269
Solar power and sacred space, 30
Soldatenko, Michael, 145, 159,
164n50, 169n144
Somos Aztlán (“We are Aztlán”), 50
Sonora, Mexico, 45–46
Southwestern US. See Aztlán; United
States; specific states
Student activism
1968, Blowouts, 132
1968, Los Angeles school walkout,
34–5, 131–132
of black community, 65n30
newspapers and, 133–134, 162n22
Suvin, Darko, 67n64
Syncretism, as term, 222
T
Támez, Elsa, 253n39
Teatro Campesino, 32, 33, 135,
161n3. See also Chicanx and
Chicanx movement; Valdez, Luis
Teatros Nacionales de Aztlán,
165n88
Temporalities
Muñoz on, 35, 41–43, 53, 54, 90,
201
nationalism and, 68n88
native North Americans on, 67n59.
See also Utopianism
Ten Point Program (1966), 65n30
Tenayuca, Emma, 206n50
Textual interpretation. See Biblical
criticism; Scripturalization
Textual ritualization and social power,
227–230, 238–240. See also
Scripturalization
Theater activist groups, 165n88
Third World Liberation Front, 35, 132
This Bridge Called My Back
(anthology), 217
312 INDEX
Tijerina, Reies López, 7, 8, 70n133,
129. See also Alianza Federales
Tinker, George E., 180
Tirres, Christopher, 251n13
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (Treaty
of Peace, Friendship, Limits, and
Settlement, 1848), 6, 26n16
Treviño, Jesús Salvador, 35, 48, 49,
51, 53, 55–56, 66n39
U modes; Aztlán; New Jerusalem
Unhoming. See Homemaking
United Mexican American Students
(UMAS), 35, 132, 133, 148
United Neighborhoods Organization
(UNO), 215
United States
Bible and self-imagination in, 4
Constitution, 15, 36, 65n29, 79,
229, 254n58
Declaration of Independence, 36,
65n29, 79, 141, 230
history of land-rights conflicts in, 6–7
identity and dominance in 19th c.,
7–8, 26n20
Mexico borderlands and citizenship,
127–128, 130–131, 161n1.
See also specific states
University of California at Berkeley,
50, 132
University of California at Santa
Barbara. See Santa Barbara
Conference (1969)
University of Colorado at Boulder, 50
Urista Heredia, Baltazar. See Alurista
Utopia (More), 18–19, 40
Utopian scripturalization, 12–19,
31–32, 236–238
Babylon motif, 76, 82–84, 115n30,
116n37, 117n47, 123n156
economy in, 96–98
Eden as, 4, 15, 42, 59, 86, 91–94,
107
limiting pliability, as term, 43–44,
57
vs. locative place-making, 18–20,
39–44, 54–55, 66n47, 67n57,
85–90
Muñoz on temporalities, 35, 41–43,
53, 54, 90, 201
in El Plan de Santa Barbara,
146–147. See also Apocalyptic
as biblical utopia; El Plan
Espiritual de Aztlán (1969);
Scripturalization
Utopianism
criticism of, 58–59
feminist scholarship on, 67n76
scholars on, 44–45, 67n64,
67nn70–71, 69n107
utopia, as term, 18–19, 40. See also
Revelation
V
Vaage, Leif E., 117n46
Valdez, Luis, 32–33, 161n3. See also
Plan of Delano (1966)
Varela, Maria, 35
Vasconcelos, José
El Plan de Santa Barbara and, 142
La Raza Cósmica, 46–47, 109–110,
126n193, 126n196
Vasquez, Enriqueta
on Aztlán, 52, 54, 57
on brotherhood, 186, 210n128
criticism of, 184, 206n43
on land rights, 71n180, 167n109
on oppression, 192
scripturalization rhetoric by, 37
on scriptures, 147, 225–226,
253n39

Venezuela, 106–107
Villaraigosa, Antonio, 62
Visual art
vs. authorized knowledge value,
236, 254n57
Chicano Codices exhibition,
218–221, 245, 252n22
in I Am Joaquín, 154, 157
movimiento and, 154–157
in El Plan de Santa Barbara,
154–155, 157
religiosity in, 250n13
Revelation and, 175–179
in schools, 147
social power of, 155, 239
written representation and,
226–227, 235–236
W X
Warrior, Robert Allen, 26n19
Wastewater plants and sacred space, 30
Watts, James W., 153, 229–230,
254n57
Weaver, Jace, 113n10
Wedding supper of the Lamb motif,
120n87, 177–178. See also
Revelation
Whitman, Walt, 7
Williams, Marvin Suber, 255n62
Wimbush, Vincent L., 5, 179–180,
228, 253n32, 254n60
Wisconsin, 44
Woman Clothed in the Sun motif,
179. See also Revelation
“The Woman of La Raza” (Vasquez),
184
Women
activist publications by, 134, 137
concerns at Denver Youth
Conference of, 190–191
INDEX 313
fidelity rhetoric and, 182–194
motherhood trope, 174–182, 198,
206n31
in performance activism, 181
Revelation on, 175–182
in Santa Barbara Conference
Steering committee, 138. See
also Feminists and feminist
scholarship; Gender norms and
politics
Wood, Roger, 162n13
Writing and written representation
as category, 226–227, 249n11
tradition of, 24, 76, 219, 241–242
visual imagery of, 235–236. See also
Moraga, Cherríe L.;
Scripturalization
A Xicana Codex of Changing
Consciousness, 2000–2010
(Moraga), 227–229
Xicano. See Chicanx and Chicanx
movement
Y
Yarbro Collins, Adela, 117n39,
122n139, 123n153
Yo Soy Chicano (song), 35
Yo Soy Joaquín. See I Am Joaquín
(Gonzales)
Young Citizens for Community
Action, 132, 162n11
Young Lords, 65n30
Z
Zapata, Emiliano, 33, 136
Excerpts from THE LAST GENERATION. Copyright © 1993 by Cherríe
Moraga. First published by South End Press in 1983. By permission of
Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected
by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved. The print-
ing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without
express permission is prohibited.
Excerpts from A XICANA CODEX OF CHANGING CONSCI-
OUSNESS: WRITINGS, 2000-1010. Copyright © 2011 by Cherríe
Moraga. Published by Duke University Press in 2011. By permission of
Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected
by the Copyright Laws of the United States. All rights reserved. The print-
ing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without
express permission is prohibited.
Excerpts from LOVING IN THE WAR YEARS/ Lo Que Nunca Pasó
Por Sus Labios. Copyright © 1983, 2000 by Cherríe Moraga. First pub-
lished by South End Press in 1983. By permission of Stuart Bernstein
Representation for Artists, New York, NY and protected by the Copyright
Laws of the United States. All rights reserved. The printing, copying,
redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express permis-
sion is prohibited.
“I am Joaquín: an Epic Poem, 1967” is reprinted with permission
from the publisher of “Message to Aztlán: Selected Writings” by Rodolfo
“Corky” Gonzalez (© 2001 Arte Público Press – University of Houston).