Racial
and religious groups have played a key role in shaping the American
West, yet scholars have for the most part ignored how race and religion
have influenced regional identity. In this collection, eleven
contributors explore the intersections of race, religion, and region to
show how they transformed the West. From the Punjabi Mexican Americans
of California to the European American shamans of Arizona to the
Mexican Chinese of the borderlands, historical meanings of race in the
American West are complex and are further complicated by religious
identities. This book moves beyond familiar stereotypes to achieve a
more nuanced understanding of race while also showing how ethnicity
formed in conjunction with religious and regional identity. The
chapters demonstrate how religion shaped cultural encounters,
contributed to the construction of racial identities, and served as a
motivating factor in the lives of historical actors. The opening
chapters document how religion fostered community in Los Angeles in the
first half of the twentieth century. The second section examines how
physical encounters—such as those involving Chinese
immigrants, Hermanos Penitentes, and Pueblo dancers—shaped
religious and racial encounters in the West. The final essays
investigate racial and religious identity among the Latter-day Saints
and southern California Muslims. As these contributions clearly show,
race, religion, and region are as critical as gender, sexuality, and
class in understanding the melting pot that is the West. By depicting
the West as a unique site for understanding race and religion, they
open a new window on how we view all of America.
Contents
Introduction: Rethinking the Three Rs
1 Going Against the Grain: Multiracialism
and the
Fate of the Social Gospel in 1920s Los Angeles (William
Deverell
and Mark Wild)
2 Religion, Immigrants, and Americanizers
in Los
Angeles, 1900--1925 (Michael E. Engh, S.
J.)
3 Bringing in the Sheets: Robert Shuler,
the Ku Klux
Klan, and the Southernization of Southern California (Daniel Cady)
4 Engaging Habits and Besotted Idolatry:
Viewing Chinese Religions in the American West (Laurie Maffly-Kipp)
5 Bodies on Borders: African Americans,
Penitentes, and Social Order in the Southwest (Pablo Mitchell)
6 Modernists, Pueblo Indians, and the
Politics of Primitivism (Tisa Wenger)
7 Children of Ham and Children of
Abraham: The
Construction and Deconstruction of Ethnic Identities in the Mormon
Heartland (Armand L. Mauss)
8 E Pluribus Unum: The Islamic Center of
Southern
California and the Making of an American Muslim Identity (Mary Jane
O'Donnell)
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Race, Religion, Region
Landscapes
of Encounter in the American West
edited
by Fay Botham and Sara M. Patterson
University
of Arizona Press,
2006
Order
a copy.
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