Spatial Racialization and Spiritual Resilience: The Afromexican Diaspora in Santa Ana, California and Beyond

• In Event: 40267 - Towards an Unruly Latinx Sociology

Abstract

This paper explores how Afromexican migrants maintain forms of racial consciousness through religious placemaking in Santa Ana, California. Mexican immigrants broadly are often conceptualized as members of a racialized population in the US. Societal classification, political discourse, migration policies, and legal-juridical enforcement are among the mechanisms that bolster the racialization of Mexicans. For Afromexicans, experiences of racialization are made all the more complex because of the unique forms of racialization that Afromexicans experience in both Mexico and in US receiving contexts. Religion, I argue, offers Afromexicans opportunities to not only reproduce practices from the homeland, but also to establish new hubs of Afromexican regionalism in diaspora. For Afromexicans in the Santa Ana area, regionalism (Jones 2013) is one of the primary forms of articulating their racialized experiences. Religion is one of the primary platforms by which to express this racialized regionalism. Based on in-depth interviews, participant observations among Catholic and Protestant Afromexican religious adherents, and analysis of media and cultural materials, this chapter argues that religious practices provide Afromexican migrants with opportunities to agentically fashion their own racialized identities in ways that distinguish them from coethnics, even as they participate in community life with the broader Mexican-origin population. As some Afromexicans enact religious change through religious conversion to Pentecostalism, I also explore how Pentecostal Afromexicans navigate their identities.

Author

• Jonathan Eli Calvillo, Emory University