Rose Blooms in Desert Lands: A College’s Story on Brethren Westward-Movements into the San Gabriel Valley

Between 1911 and 1915, under the presidency of Edward Frantz, the District of Southern California and Arizona and the Northern District of California deeded to “the Northern District of California an undivided half interest in Palmera College and grounds at Lordsburg, California, clear of all indebtedness except for certain street improvements.” Today, more than a century later, multicultural and multireligious identities are highly celebrated at the University of La Verne. Acknowledging the indigenous vinculum with its “grounds at Lordsburg” is a significant way that this spirit of inclusion is being cultivated. With authentic clothing and headwear, Tongva and Karuk Indians of the San Gabriel Valley perform in major events like commencement and convocation and are commonly invited as guests to lead discussions and ceremonies on special occasions such as Indigenous Day. Their sage ceremonies, commemorative ritual and invocation, indigenous song and dance, and lectures invite everyone in attendance to remember the original peoples and to re-sacralize the land upon which the campus has been built.

Amid these efforts, nonetheless, archival work conducted at the University of La Verne on its heritage demonstrates that its spirit of inclusion evolved from an exclusivist, U.S. American view.  While repudiating Spanish and Mexican Catholic colonizing practices, the Brethren were complicit in civilizing the American Indians when journeying to California as with other settlers of European descent. The dispossession of ancestral lands and loss of subjectivity of indigenous peoples paved the way for the founding of the college and deeding of the land “clear of indebtedness” in Lordsburg. This aspect of the heritage of the institution can be uncovered through an analysis of the historical pageants of 1927 and 1933. The pageants tell the story of how the early Brethren fulfilled their dream to till fertile soil hence the biblical hope of desert lands blooming like a rose (Is. 35:1-2). Therefore, this chapter argues that early modern theatre in the college was influenced by the colonial and imperialistic enterprise of “land possession” characteristic of the nation’s westward expansionism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This assessment arises from a decolonial hermeneutic as espoused in migration and border studies being applied to interpret the founding and the early developmental years of the University of La Verne. While the Brethren founders were a peaceful people, the chapter adopts a similar definition of colonization akin to Walter Mignolo for whom the erasure of gnosis has been an expression of semiotic violence due to the loss of cultural identity that colonial expansionism caused, for example, as when speaking of indigenous peoples.  The chapter aims at decolonizing the Brethren assumptions of benign intentions towards the land upon which it built its academic structures and towards the peoples that the founding members encountered. Still, this chapter additionally seeks to show the evolution of the institutional embrace of indigenous otherness and its acknowledgment of indigenous origins and claims to the land. Thus, an understanding of how the subversive seeds of indigenous memories have emerged in the present are briefly explored at the end of the essay.

The aim of this essay is to artfully reframe the heritage of the University of La Verne, which initially was a Brethren college (first named Lordsburg College, then La Verne College). Emphasis is put on three motifs that elucidate the Brethren theological understanding of the land where the college was established: tilling, hoping, and blooming. The historical pageants of the La Verne College (1927 and 1933) inform this research by which motifs are explained in conjunction with other artistic works such as the denominational mural painted by Medford D. Neher (1953) and the TV script written for the show College Report (1962). Official documents detailing the founding of the denomination are also utilized but in complementary manner. In doing so, the essay demonstrates the effectiveness for art to communicate how the college perceived itself as being guided by a divine purpose that enabled it to create and preserve a sense of community and denominational identity that would later evolve into the expressions of inclusion evinced today.