Session Abstract

This is the third of a series of panels exploring migration and diaspora in Latin America, with a focus on questions of race, ethnicity and politics. All papers are sensitive to transnational connections, examining both the influence of the country of heritage and the place where people chose to lead their lives.

Religious diasporas – groups of migrants who share a collective ethno-national identity based around a religious tradition – are the topic of this panel. Specifically, this panel explores the role of religious organizations among three diasporic religious groups both within and outside of Latin America between 1920 and 1960: Sephardi Jews in Buenos Aires; Mexican Catholics in the United States; and Chinese Latin Americans in Macau and Hong Kong. As the presentations will demonstrate, diasporic groups often made a conscious effort to form religious associations in order to promote ethnic and religious solidarity, to assert political power, or to achieve social mobility.

Each panelist narrates the formation and significance of religious associations, and the role of religion in both creating and reinforcing diasporic identities based on a shared concept of the homeland. Mexican Catholics in the United States articulated a religious nationalism that served as a counterpoint to the political agenda of the Mexican state; Sephardi Jews sought to establish a political and religious framework that would allow them to interact more effectively with the Argentine government; while Chinese Latin Americans developed a religious association that would link them to each other, and help to further their quest for Latin American citizenship. By investigating the specific historical circumstances under which these transnational religious associations formed, each panelist has developed new and valuable theoretical concepts about how diasporic communities engage with religion and religious institutions in order to develop their own identities, as well as to define themselves as citizens in relation to their nations of origin and settlement.

This panel’s theoretical contributions are particularly important because debates over definitions abound, especially with regard to the relationship between migration and the formation of diaspora, as well as how inclusive the category of “diaspora” should be. This is partly because theoretical concepts of migration and diaspora, while necessary, are occasionally overly abstracted from the lives, places, and stories of interest to historians. Methodologically, then, this panel takes a thoroughly transnational approach to the question of diaspora, making use of sources from numerous national collections in order to tell a story that, while Latin American, also transcends national frameworks, and will therefore allow us to further develop conceptual definitions that are global and universal.