Borderlands Religion and the American West

The rubrics “North America” and “Latin America” presuppose a divide that has often left Americanist historians poorly equipped to chart the interconnections of the history of religion in the Americas. In no small part, a source of this problem is that while geographers understand North America as encompassing land considerably farther south than the United States border with Mexico, historians of religion in the United States have rarely made use of this insight. This paper argues that because of its direct historical relationship to Latin America, the study of religion in the far American West offers historians the opportunity to explore how U.S. cultural and religious history can be understood as having a significant and Latin American component at its core.