Fernando F. Segovia once described Latinas and Latinos in the United States of America as having "two places and no place on which to stand."¹ This dissertation considers the "no-place"—one possible translation of the word utopia—as a place in which identity is rooted and negotiated. Utopian narratives are often an aspect of broader scripturally based mythologies of time and space, and I find that utopias are social dreams that play with time and space. Utopian play with time and space is significant to the socio-cultural politics of constructions of identity and community, especially within and in relationship to the power dynamics of empires. Scriptures, as sites in which some utopian(izing) narratives have been placed, function as more than just the texts we term "the bible," and I consider scriptures in terms of a broad range of practices—as both the "no-place" and the "homing" space of identity formation, contestation, and negotiation of imperial power.

Because this project seeks to examine interactions between multiple complex phenomena (scriptures, apocalyptic, utopia, identity, gender, sexuality, power, and empire), it could not be limited to only one historical period, community, figure, or text. Instead, I consider the phenomena in different historical moments, but the moments are intimately related through the narratives deployed and their role in the imagination of one particular place: California. I examine three particular moments: the writing of Aztlán, the mythical Aztec homeland, and the Chicano/a movement in the 1969 El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán; scholarly readings of the New Jerusalem from Revelation 21-22; and the Franciscan utopian performance in the Alta California mission projects from around 1769-1800.

¹Fernando F. Segovia, "Two Places and No Place on which to Stand: Mixture and Otherness in Hispanic American Theology," Listening 27 (Winter 1992), 26-40.