The Only Thing I Want to Fix are My Celestial Papers: Religion and National Belonging

• In Event: 098 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Paper Session. Latina/o Civic and Political Participation

Abstract

This paper examines how Central American and Mexican immigrants in a high-poverty Mexican neighborhood in Fresno, California use their religious experiences to constitute themselves as “spiritual citizens” even as legal systems may exclude them from formal citizenship. My examination of the effects of an uncertain status on the daily lives of Central American and Mexican immigrants is part of a larger ethnographic case study of a Latina/o Apostolic Pentecostal congregation in Fresno, California. Based on twelve months of participant observation, in-depth interviews and shadowing members of Fuente de Luz in their homes and as they navigate the neighborhood, I analyze how legal status shapes immigrants’ identities and religious practices. I introduce the concept of “spiritual citizenship” to show how this congregation establishes moral parameters of individualism and self-reliance through which congregants create their own articulations of legal status and national belonging. Through weekly services, bible studies, and prayer, this congregation produces spiritual citizenship as a process that allows undocumented immigrants to confront illegality and make themselves into political subjects into the American social order, albeit at a religious scale.

Author

• Melissa Guzman, University of California-Santa Barbara