Latinas and Religion: Subordination or State of Grace?

Journal of Global Catholicism, 2021

A critical problem to study Catholicism in the context of Latin American modernity, is that the conceptual tools we use to study religion were designed to understand the transformations that modernity provoked in European religiosity. Studies on the religion of Latin Americans have largely explored the religiosity of the population through surveys that measure attendance, adherence and affiliation. While some anthropologists have explored religious practices among particular groups, we do not know how ordinary, urban Latin Americans practice religion. To fill this gap, a group of researchers from Boston College, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Catholic University of Córdoba, and Catholic University of Uruguay, funded by the John Templeton Foundation conducted between 2015 and 2018 a study of religion as practiced by Latin Americans in their daily lives. We saw that the transformations brought about by modernity at the social and personal level have affected religious traditions and organizations as well as the ways in which people live their religiosity. Religious sources have been pluralized, and religious practices are diverse and occur everywhere. There are no “exclusive” secular or religious spaces, objects or times; religious practices are not circumscribed to “the religious.” This way of living religion among respondents, poses future questions for sociology and religious institutions.

In the United States today, Latin Americans (mainly Mexicans) constitute the largest group of immigrants and this majority puts them at the center of debates regarding integration into U.S. civil society. Some parties to these debates regard immigrants' religions as an impediment to their integration, 2 yet there are very few studies that cover recent immigration from a religious perspective. The role of religion and religious institutions for immigrants in the past is, by contrast, well documented. Research on immigration from Europe, for instance, underscores the fact that religious institutions have been among the most important resources for meeting the challenges immigrants face in a demanding and often threatening new environment. 3 It is also manifestly the case that immigrant religions contribute to a pluralism that alters the American religious landscape.

Due to immigration and high birth rates, Latinos (or “Hispanics”) are rapidly growing as a proportion of American society—faster than any other racial-ethnic group—and are widely dispersed throughout the United States.Moreover, a growing number of U.S. Latinos are not Catholic but Protestant. Beyond their individual religious devotion, Latino Protestant churches (LPCs) capture and channel Latino Protestant religiosity to a greater extent than Roman Catholic churches.While the study of LPCs should be methodologically open and theoretically diffuse, it is likely that researchers will recognize each other only by coalescing around a common set of questions, specifically around worship and liturgy, ethnicity and identity, and civic and community engagement. These three focal points are described as a starting point to foster cooperative dialogue and stimulate further scholarship as LPCs grow in numbers and significance in America.

U.S. Catholic Historian (Fall 2012), 2012

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Basado en trabajo de campo cualitativo y entrevistas con 54 inmigrantes, este articulo compara el lugar que ocupan las instituciones religiosas en las vidas de los inmigrantes guatemaltecos, salvadorenos y cubanos en Phoenix, Arizona. La iglesia siempre ha ocupado un lugar destacado en las vidas de los inmigrantes, pero no todos —ni siquiera todos los latinos— comparten las mismas visiones y experiencias. Las diferencias mas notables se presentan entre los cubanos, por un lado, y los salvadorenos y guatemaltecos, por otro. Este ensayo muestraque para los inmigrantes el lugar de las instituciones religiosas y sus actividades estan intimamente ligados a los contextos de salida en sus paises de origen y de destino en los Estados Unidos. ABSTRACT Based on qualitative fieldwork and interviews with 54 immigrants, this article compares the place that religious institutions occupy in the lives of Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Cuban immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona. The church has always occupie...

LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH REVIEW, 2018

Latin America today is much more than simply Catholic. To describe it as such would obscure the complicated cultural history of the region while belying the lived experiences of believers and the dynamic transformations in the religious field that have distinguished the longue durée of colonial and postcolonial Latin America. Diversity, heterodoxy, and pluralism have always been more useful descriptors of religion in Latin America than orthodoxy or homogeneity, despite the ostensible ubiquity of Catholic identity. Indeed, deep indigenous Amerindian, colonial European, and displaced African roots have intermingled for centuries and vie today for status and influence among the myriad believers who make up the multicultural tapestry of New World faith and belonging. At the same time, new religious movements along with extremely successful Protestant proselytization campaigns have come to shape the diverse character of religious life as we know it from the Caribbean to Central and South America. The four volumes reviewed here offer a snapshot of this diversity and indicate the trends in scholarship that attempt to render it comprehensible in comparative terms. OPEN ACCESS: https://larrlasa.org/articles/10.25222/larr.341/

Perspectiva Teológica, 2015

PersPectiva teológia adere au ma licença não comercial 3.0 creative commons

Catholicism become the most widespread religion in Latin America.By the 1990s Latin America was responsible for 42% of the world’s Catholic population. Despite their common Catholic identity,Latin Americans also have Amerindian, African, and popular non-Christian religious traditions inherited from Spain. Even today many Catholics incorporate practices and beliefs that are not accepted by the Church, including devotions to non canonized saints, some of them portrayed as bandits (or who protect criminals). Over the past few decades, the religious map of Latin America has been further enriched by the presence of new religions, predominantly Protestant denominations. Because Pentecostalism shares various cognitive and emotional ties with African and indigenous religions, this may help to explain its popularity among indigenous inhabitants of rural areas and for those with a history in Afro-Brazilian religions.This chapter also discuss religious practices in Latin America, including miracles; different hierarchies of “supernatural” beings; reciprocity, which includes promise and sacrifice; pilgrimages; popular celebrations; and a variety of devotional practices