If Jesus Could Not Save Himself, How Would He Save Me?

A California Mexican in an Anglo Midwestern Protestant Faith

Julián Segura Camacho

As the country recognizes the 101st birthday of former President Ronald Reagan, this memoir offers insight into a local Anglo-Protestant community in Westchester, California, that was but one grain of sand in a sea of change that led to the Reagan Revolution. In the early 1980s, this cohort of Anglo-Protestants reached out to neighborhood youngsters in a dedicated attempt to “save” them from hell. Julian Segura Camacho, a Mexican American teenager living in California at the time, soon found himself attending an all-white church, primarily upper class but still sprinkled with less fortunate ones. This Assembly of God church became a family and much like any relationship, Camacho found pleasure and anguish as different personalities played themselves out.

As a member of this communal religious and racialized space, Camacho was able to see firsthand how the Reagan Revolution attracted those who felt the US was becoming too secular. Yet this book is not political; it is simply a story of a Mexican American boy engaged in a seven-year routine of bible study, youth and boy scout activities, and camping trips, along with sermons about the coming of Christ, and the evils of Darwinism.

Hamilton Books

Pages: 74 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-0-7618-5883-6 • Paperback • September 2012 • $38.99 • (£30.00)

978-0-7618-5884-3 • eBook • September 2012 • $37.00 • (£30.00)

Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, History / Social History, Religion / Christian Living / Social Issues, Religion / Christianity / Protestant, Social Science / Sociology of Religion

If Jesus Could Not Save Himself, How Would He Save Me?

A California Mexican in an Anglo Midwestern Protestant Faith

Paperback

eBook

Summary

As the country recognizes the 101st birthday of former President Ronald Reagan, this memoir offers insight into a local Anglo-Protestant community in Westchester, California, that was but one grain of sand in a sea of change that led to the Reagan Revolution. In the early 1980s, this cohort of Anglo-Protestants reached out to neighborhood youngsters in a dedicated attempt to “save” them from hell. Julian Segura Camacho, a Mexican American teenager living in California at the time, soon found himself attending an all-white church, primarily upper class but still sprinkled with less fortunate ones. This Assembly of God church became a family and much like any relationship, Camacho found pleasure and anguish as different personalities played themselves out.

As a member of this communal religious and racialized space, Camacho was able to see firsthand how the Reagan Revolution attracted those who felt the US was becoming too secular. Yet this book is not political; it is simply a story of a Mexican American boy engaged in a seven-year routine of bible study, youth and boy scout activities, and camping trips, along with sermons about the coming of Christ, and the evils of Darwinism.

Details

Hamilton Books

Pages: 74 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-0-7618-5883-6 • Paperback • September 2012 • $38.99 • (£30.00)

978-0-7618-5884-3 • eBook • September 2012 • $37.00 • (£30.00)

Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, History / Social History, Religion / Christian Living / Social Issues, Religion / Christianity / Protestant, Social Science / Sociology of Religion

Author

Julian Segura Camacho is a lecturer at West Los Angeles and Mission College.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1. South Inglewood, 1981
2. My First Communion
3. A New Religion and Church
4. Westchester Assembly of God
5. Bible Class
6. Youth Ministry
7. Royal Rangers
8. Prayer Groups
9. Sunday Services
10. Riverside
11. Trouble
12. By Your Own Hands
13. The Deaths
14. 2000
15. The Wedding

Reviews

Camacho has struck out a path of independent Chicano research that sheds light on issues avoided or ignored by more mainstream researchers.
— James Diego Vigil, Ph.D., professor of criminology, law, and society, University of California, Irvine, author of From Indians to Chicanos and Barrio Gangs

Camacho is a unique and appreciated scholar of the Mexican American experience. This work, the most recent of the author’s several contributions to Mexican American studies, is a poignant commentary on the conflicts, realities, and new future trends of the Mexican American experience.
— Robert LaCarra, Ph.D., professor of Chicano studies, Los Angeles Valley College

If Jesus Could Not Save Himself, How Would He Save Me? is another gut punch in the arsenal of the life and times of Julian Camacho. It brandishes a harsh truth not many of us are willing to accept with a take no prisoners style of storytelling.
— Oscar Barajas, Eastside correspondent, Newstaco.com

We hear of Mexican Americans as Christians, particularly Catholics, but we rarely read about their faith. Julian . . . provides us insight to a Protestant religious way of life in the 1980s when we were all Reagan’s babies.
— Marcos A. Ramos, Undergraduate Advisor for the College of Letters and Science, University of California, Berkeley