Once upon the faraway corner of the lost Mayan civilization, a 20th century exodus was brewing thousands of miles away across the Pacific from a conquered kingdom.
A tall Methodist circuit rider on horseback roamed the harsh badland thick with henequen plants brimming with stinging thorns under the unbearably burning heat.
The Rev. Whang Sa-Yong, one of the earliest converts to Christianity in the feudal Korea, was on a biblical mission to bring home hundreds of former slaves, women and children trapped in the prison-like plantations.
You can take the slave camp out of Whang Sa-Yong, but you can't take Whang Sa-Yong out of the slave camp. The trails of this latter-day abolitionist ran deep into the Yucatan territory wracked with an imminent revolution.
This shadowy figure on mule back was here and there, everywhere. Fevered whispers of "Viva Whang Sa-Yong" were heard among the abandoned orphans of the world, jobless and hungry.
The historic date was May 9, 1909, when Whang and his partner/minister Bang Hwa-Jung mobilized the down-and-out tribe and founded the Yucatan branch of the Korean National Association (KNA) at Merida. It was a glorious (janghata!) moment for the 305 freed slaves from 16 plantations who had joined the cause, pledging their life and fortune to fight for a free Korea. 
Coincidentally, the National Association of Advancement for Colored People (NAACP) was established the same year by children of freed slaves to fight for civil rights and racial justice.
In his seminal centennial book The History and Life of Koreans in Mexico, 1905-2005, author Nam Hwan Jo, after 10 years of on-site investigation and missionary work, called the Whang-Bang mission "instrumental in creating an identity for Mexico's Korean community."
Jo elaborated: "They were both Christians and leaders of the church, but they didn't work only for the church. They applied all their passion toward helping to establish the (KNA) branch in the Yucatan. They didn't try to convert people to Christianity but people came to them of their own accord. In the U.S., churches supported the KNA and their patriotic activities. But in Mexico, the KNA was the church and the members of the church were the members of the KNA.
"But the most important thing is that the philosophy and leadership of these two men was what influenced the basic frame of mind of the people. [After Bang was forced to return home due to sickness in a few months], Whang remained for several more months, and thus it is Whang who can be regarded as guiding the philosophy of the [KNA] branch. Another person was Ahn Chang Ho."
Out of the fog of the lost century, Whang looms as a historic agent of change almost single-handedly transforming Korean Christianity in the New World into a fighting force for not only nationalism and independence but social and racial justice for underdogs.
A bitter irony of the Korean Diaspora is that this great liberator's grave is missing in South Korea's national cemetery of patriots. This spiritual heir to Dosan Ahn Chang Ho remains faceless and nameless to the Korean government. In the 1970s, he died penniless and homeless in Seoul, and nobody knows where he is buried in the homeland for whose independence he dedicated his whole life at the silent sacrifice of his family. 
Born in 1881 in Shinuiju on the shore of the Yalu River and converted to Christianity in 1899, the Korean circuit rider came to Hawaii at age 18 in 1903 to work on a sugarcane plantation. Two years later, he earned enough fare to sail for San Francisco and joined his mentor Dosan Ahn Chang Ho's Konglip Hyuphoe (Mutual Aid Society).
Shortly, with Minister Min Chan-Ho, he started circuit preaching in the first Korean settlements of Reedley/Dinuba in California's Central Valley. Then in 1909, the KNA based in San Francisco dispatched the Whang-Bang pair to Yucatan for relief work and to organize its branch in Merida.
Within a few months, Bang fell sick under the brutal weather and returned to the mainland. Sa-Yong stayed on for another 10 months gaining great trust and admiration among the stranded. He visited with those released from their four-year contract, settled them in Merida and resettled another 20 in the mainland.
His inspiring message from Yucatan spread like wildfire among the fellow surrogate slaves laboring in the mainland and Hawaii. Upon his return, he was elected president of the KNA of North America.
Throughout, Whang Sa-Yong practiced what he preached as the great circuit rider in the best tradition of American Methodism.
First, he was assigned as an evangelist for the Methodist church in Oakland under Pastor Lee Dai-wii. In 1912, he became a local preacher at the Korean Methodist Church in San Francisco, also serving as a circuit rider for Nothern California. A year later he joined Ahn Chang Ho's elite Hungsadan (Korean Youth Academy).
His next circuit in 1916: the Korean Methodist Episcopal mission in the farming hamlet of Manteca. In 1924, he returned to Hawaii to take charge of the Wahiawa Korean ME Church and two other missions in Waialua and Kahuka. "Brother Whang always gets along with his people and with everybody else; for that matter," reported his superintendent Dr. W.H. Fry of the Hawaii Methodist Mission.
During his three-year stint, his church faced the challenge from a new rival church set up by Syngman Rhee and his newly formed Dongjihoe (Comrade) club in the tiny village of Waialua.
In the late 1920s, he and his nomadic family were based in San Francisco, where his younger brother Sa-Sun served as pastor of the first Korean Methodist Church in the mainland.
In 1930, he was assigned to the Korean United Methodist Church in Los Angeles that had been undergoing growing pains. The new pastor set the direction for the eventful 1930s, infusing the traditional Christian faith with the social gospel and anti-Japanese resistance. Also, he initiated the first English-language service for the emerging American-born generation.
The church's 2004 centennial history book on "Faithful Witness" noted: "People came to hear the passionate sermons of the Rev. S.Y. Whang who combined his pastoral care for the Korean American community with a fervent devotion to the cause of Korean independence. His long association with Dosan Ahn Chang Ho and the Young Korean Academy drew the well-known leader, his wife, Helen Ahn, and their children to the church when they settled in the Los Angeles area."
Korean immigrant churches in the Yellow Peril years shared one common struggle with their black congregations in the post-Emancipation South - for survival and civil rights. Their community-based churches were home to a lonely flock of farmhands, laborers and domestic helpers, jobless or between crops, while their preachers held many odd jobs to supplement their meager pay, if any.
But hardly known were the abject poverty these preachers' families had to endure in the shadow.
In my 2002 interview with Paul Whang, the first American born to the legendary pastor Whang Sa-Sun of the Korean Methodist Church in San Francisco, the 88-year-old retired schoolteacher spoke of his family's 24/7 feeding/sheltering for hundreds of hungry students and jobless or homeless exiles. "As early as I can remember, it was tough life for my parents and family."
His "Big Uncle" Whang Sa-Yong, who had brought his father and aunt Ha-Soo to this country, was also known as the "revolutionary" or "rebel" within the Whang clan for his "progressive" (leftist) activism.
How was Sa-Yong's family doing? More in sorrow than exasperation, Paul recalled, "He was a constant traveler for the independence movement. He was never home. He went to Mexico to organize the KNA branch. He preached everywhere. What I heard from the older people and from his children, he wasn't much of a father because he was never home, so they felt bitter. They (Marian, Joey and Sammy) were at home struggling. They grew up pretty much without a father."
Paul's embittered remark set me on a protracted search for any surviving children, scattered and out of touch over the half century.
It was Ralph Ahn, the lone surviving son of Dosan Ahn and the hub of exchanges among the few surviving children of the first-wave pioneers, who finally led me to his old childhood friends: Marian Whang Pyo, 83, Sa-Yong's oldest child and lone surviving daughter; and her cousin Moses Yim, 88, the surviving son of pastor Chung Koo Yim, Sa-Yong's former preaching partner.
Marian and her childhood playmates, all retired in Southern California, share one common fate: They grew up with the ordeals of being born to mostly absent fathers whose lives were totally dedicated to the cause of a country their American-born children had never seen. And, above all, their mothers suffered terribly in silence and stoicism.
During Dosan's prolonged absence, Ralph's mother, Helen, labored as a farmhand, maid, fruit peddler and seamstress and sent her meager earnings to her husband in exile. In addition she raised a growing family and fed and sheltered an army of hungry and jobless exiles at her modest house near downtown Los Angeles. "We had to scrape our living together," recalled the youngest son. "I don't know how, but she sent money to him for many years."
Ditto the Yim household. "My mother was a first cousin to Whang Sa-Yong," said Moses. "My mom supported my father all the way in his ministry. She raised three children, took care of dad's mom and her brother in our house for many years. His ministry covering most of northern California cost him his life at age 53."