Sowing the Sacred by Lloyd Daniel Barba

Author:Lloyd Daniel Barba
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sewing the Sacred: Workwomanship and the Material Holiness of the Temple

The term talentos bespoke a sacred and social material world largely created by women. In the carpas and temples (described in the previous chapter) funded by the sale of tamales, one would encounter an aesthetically consistent and rich world of temple decor, consisting of tejidos (embroidered fabrics), other costuras (handmade items), and estandartes (banners). Unlike tamales, which did not in and of themselves bear an aesthetically sacred function, costuras to varying degrees served sacred purposes. Across state and national boundaries, tejidos exemplified diasporic artistic values steeped in a Mexican tradition of weaving.

Women visualized and produced a borderlands aesthetic in the making of tejidos to decorate the most sacred spaces in their temples and carpas.127 Rather than relying on mass produced goods (which were made by anonymous makers subject to the alienation of labor) women in these various churches hand-made many of the decor items, thereby demonstrating a realm of material goods dominated by women producers. Temple aesthetics showcased workwomanship in a realm where they constituted the majority of producers yet went consistently unrecognized. Apostólicas sewed dignity into their handmade decor items. Rangel offered the following truism: “Se dice que la mujer para trabajar, es la más curiosa. De una ‘Miniatura’ hace una ‘Hermosura.’ Saben hacer costuras atractivas de tejidos y bordados y muchas curiosidades, que hasta han dicho jugando, jugando alcanzan su ‘meta.’” (It is said that women’s work is the most curious, from a “Small thing” they can make “something Beautiful.” They know how to make attractive handmade fabrics and embroidered items and many neat items, so much so that it is said that even in playing around and around, they still excel at their craft.)128

Apostólico decor coalesced around a borderlands aesthetic. The unlikely pairing between the facade of many adobe brick temples and the handmade temple decor demonstrates how Apostólicos made do with the talentos at hand to fashion a borderlands aesthetic.129 Inside Protestant and Catholic adobe brick churches one would not expect to find most of the decor so heavily influenced by the Mexican tradition of handmade tejidos. The evidence of such a ubiquitous and robust traditional aesthetic echoes, albeit in a different spatial locus, anthropologist John Burdick’s observation regarding Brazilian Pentecostalism’s conveyance of female aesthetics as a “viable idiom for imagining and articulating” an ethnic identity.130 Figures 4.3–4.5 offer snapshots into the many strands of female aesthetic productions in an Apostólico house of worship.

Female handiwork took on varied yet prominent forms in the temple. Because the podium served as the site from which ministers preached, it operated as a consecrated (set apart) place. On that sacred place, however, women interwove their own creative genius as white or multicolored fabrics that came in the form of a tejido. Preachers placed their Bibles and delivered sermons from pulpits covered and beautified by women’s handmade products, such as the ones shown in figures 4.3–4.5. Such decor visually amplified the constructed sense of holiness accorded to the verbal medium of preaching.

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