Abstract
This interdisciplinary panel explores the limits and possibilities of religion in efforts to provide care to vulnerable populations in the form of spiritual healing, charity, and activism. Borderlands and religious studies scholar Israel Domínguez examines the lives of nineteenth and twentieth century curanderas to explore how ancestral Mexican-American practices of spiritual healing can not only resist the forces that have entrenched coloniality, but also offer sanctuary to vulnerable populations in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Immigration historian Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez traces how a group of mid-twentieth century U.S. churchwomen helped create an unofficial social safety net to alleviate migrant families’ vulnerabilities, but they ended up deepening their precarity in some cases while failing to improve migrant children’s educational outcomes in others. Finally, religion and migration studies scholar Barbara Sostaita analyzes the contemporary organizing efforts of Iglesia Cristiana Sin Fronteras, her father’s congregation, on behalf of vulnerable migrants in North Carolina. Rooted in a profound awareness of migrant precarity, the activism of the congregation operates alongside and in contravention of the state to demand a redistribution of resources to help sustain migrants’ livelihoods and protect them from the harms of immigration enforcement. In sum, this panel considers the role of religion and religiously motivated actors within the politics of precarity and migrant welfare in the U.S. It reveals not only how faith leaders and institutions both harm and help vulnerable communities, but also, how their efforts can help us arrive at more expansive understandings of what counts as solidarity, reciprocity, decoloniality, and the political.
Presenters
Ivon Padilla RodriguezAssistant Professor, History, University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois, United States Melissa Borja
Associate Professor, American Culture, University of Michigan, Michigan, United States Israel Dominguez
Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies, Grand Valley State University, Michigan, United States Barbara Sostaita
Assistant Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies, University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—Fragile Meanings: Vulnerability in the Study of Religions and Spirituality
KEYWORDS
Migration, Migrant Precarity, Politics of Religion, Curanderismo, Charity, Activism
