“Somos el pueblo del avivamiento”: Moral and imagined cartographies in Latino Pentecostalism in Los Angeles

• In Event: Geopolitical Imaginaries in the Americas

Abstract

Religion can be a key component in the construction of cognitive maps through which individuals and institutions try to locate themselves in new landscapes established by globalization. Religious mapping is especially important to transnational migrants, who in the process of settlement in the host country need to delineate new cartographies of belonging. They find in religious membership a resource that serves both to delete and to redraw boundaries.

This paper inquires into what are some of the moral and imagined cartographies fostered by Pentecostalism, which is experiencing remarkable growth in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos. It aims at highlighting the importance of these imaginaries in the processes of construction and re-definition of certain spaces and identities within Latino communities in U.S.A. The locus of the study is Los Angeles, California, where a considerable number of Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans of first, second, and even third generation live and many of them participate actively in Pentecostal congregations.

Author

• Clara Buitrago Valencia, Universität Bielefeld