ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to take readers into sanctuaries designed and maintained by Mexican Pentecostals in California’s agricultural empire in the 1940s and 1950s. Believers throughout the US–Mexico borderlands made sacred aesthetics in their own cultural image. Mexicans Pentecostals did not ascribe the same meaning to flowers as devotees of Guadalupe or observers of the Day of the Dead did, but flowers are one of the many kinds of borderlands aesthetics that were created and re-created. The presence of flowers, doilies, tejidos, and items with blackletter font remind us of the various forms of rasquache art once alive in the borderlands aesthetics of Mexican Pentecostalism. This material culture demonstrates how, despite their staunch disavowal of Catholicism, Pentecostals ultimately drew from their context of lack to decide how their sacred spaces should be adorned. Mexican Pentecostalism emerged in California in the early twentieth century, steadily gaining momentum on the heels of the Azusa Street Revival’s heyday.
