Religion and Spirituality
Winter 2021 | Volume XX, Number 2
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
First Take
The Mexican Angels in the Attic
Years before I met the Mexican angels in that Chicago attic, my abuela Carlota Carranza Carrasco told me about religion. Carlota was born in Batopilas at the bottom of the Cañon del Cobre in 1896 and crossed the border into El Paso to escape the chaos of the Mexican Revolution in 1912…
Catholicism and Beyond
El Salvador, Back in the Day
The glory days are long gone. They began in the 70s. Extraordinary grassroots pastoral work, accompanied by a then-new school of thought known as “liberation
Christianity between Religious Transformations
English + Español
In the second half of the 20th century, Latin America was surprised by religious changes that not only were transforming the religious panorama, but also influencing both society and politics. Beginning in the 1950’s, some in the Catholic Church—not just priests and…
Witnessing the Seeds of Liberation
Having first learned about liberation theology in college, I arrived at Harvard Divinity School in the mid 1990s with a desire to deepen my understanding of this historic movement…
Picturing Calixta
My longtime friend Calixta Gabriel, a Kaqchikel Maya poet and spiritual guide had decided the time had come to unbury her past. As she revealed her history to me, I discovered
The Pilgrimage to Guadalupe: Sacred Renewal in Mexico City
Along the Calzada de Guadalupe in Mexico City, I walked shoulder to shoulder with a growing swarm of pilgrims. They moved briskly and flocked in passage, with printed images of
The Evangelical Boom
Exodus Testimonios
The audience at Iglesia Monte de Sion was ecstatic as believers lined up to share their testimonials. “God delivered us from Egypt and brought us to the Promised Land,” said José as he shared his testimonio with the small Latinx Pentecostal church in central California…
Water of Life
As I was conducting fieldwork in Brazil in 2014 for my recent book, about half the country was in the first year of a drought that would last through 2017. I was living in Juiz de Fora, a medium-sized city in the state of Minas Gerais, about three-hours inland from Rio…
Evangelicals in Latin American Politics
In February 2006, while doing field research in Peru for the doctoral dissertation that would become Presidential Campaigns in Latin America, I attended a rally for Humberto Lay, a neo-Pentecostal
Afro-Latin Religions
Eusebia Cosme and El Cobre: Performing Sacred Histories
Muddy water rippled like brown skirts surrounding our small boat on the Toa River, where the river meets the sea in rural Cuba. My eyes traced the outline of the trees from the cacao farm where we disembarked, over to the
The Body as Layered Divinity
I am a practitioner in the Afro-Cuban spiritual-religious tradition, Regla de Ocha-Ifá. What is the tradition, you might ask? You might be familiar with Regla de Ocha-Ifá as Lukumí…
“Axé, Capoeira!”
Abby “Dendê” Rehard is a Ph.D. student in Musicology at Florida State University. Since she first encountered the sounds of the Portuguese language and samba drumming in 2010, her research interests have centered in Afro-Brazilian movement and music forms like…
A Residual Note on Weeping
One of the last things I remember doing on the Harvard campus before quarantine was to hurry down a narrow and winding staircase to the underground levels of the Fine Arts Library. I had recently learned about a Black Cuban artist named Belkis Ayón Manso…
Judaism in the Americas
Buscando America: A Sephardic Pre-History of Jewish Latin America
When I give public lectures about Conversos and Sephardim in the Americas, whether it is in the United States or South America, I always get at least one question, “Columbus was Jewish,
Exploring Mexican Judaism
I was shivering on that sunny warm Mexico City afternoon in March 2019. The climate-controlled archives of the newly inaugurated Colección Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Comunidad Ashkenazi de México (CDIJUM) were otherwise a delight…
My Ancestors’ Keys
When I was a child in Havana, we lived half a block away from the Patronato, also known as Temple Beth Shalom, the Jewish community center built on the eve of the Cuban revolution of 1959. I was too young when we left Cuba to remember it…
In Monsieur Chouchani’s Footsteps
Monsieur Chouchani—occasionally spelled “Shushani”—is a ghost, at least allegorically. His real name might have been Hillel Perlman, or perhaps Mordechai Rosenbaum, although neither of these options is certain. His death was recorded in…
Growing up Jewish in Chile
English + Español
I grew up Jewish in Chile, that long, narrow country that extends to the very tip of the South American continent. As I listen to the ebb and flow of the waves of the Atlantic where I
Mexican Yiddish and Secular Jewish Identity in Mexico
Visitors to the Casa Azul in Coyoacán, Mexico City, can walk through the house of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, admiring their collections of folk art, oddities, masterpieces, and furniture. As a student of literature, I was most drawn to their bookshelves during a visit there…
Indigenous Religions in the Americas
Translating the Maya Popol Wuj
It’s the 20th of December and we are in Chichicastenango for its Fiesta Patronal. Just after 3:33 A.M., we are woken up by powerful explosions right above the Hotel Pop Wuj where
Rituals of Resistance
When I first passed along the Guatemalan lakeshore to the Cofradía Santa Cruz, where Maximón spends much of the year, I was out walking. I didn’t know where I was…
Sacred Smoke of Copal
Dozens of Mexican-American women stand in front of their computers at awkward angles. Most are muted per proper Zoom etiquette; many have their eyes closed and hands outstretched. Turning to face…
A Quest for Contemporary Maya and Aymara Spirituality and Identity
I remember Coba, Quintana Roo, as a remote and sleepy Maya village in the 1990s, which had to be reached by a good hour-long drive on a narrow road inland from Tulum. We stayed at the Villa Arqueologica, an upscale hotel, at that time the only tourist hotel in Coba…
Híbridos, the Spirits of Brazil
Eight years ago, in 2013, I received an unexpected email from French filmmaker Vincent Moon, who was looking for a Brazilian partner to undertake an ambitious project: a poetic and…
Herbs, Roots and Magical Remedies
English + Español
The evening of March 25, 1631, a woman named María de Archuleta, of about 30 years of age, was summoned by the Inquisition in Santa Fé, New Mexico. When…
Shamanic Tourism
Today it is hard to find someone who has not heard of the infamous hallucinogenic plant mixture called ayahuasca commonly prepared from the stems of Banisteriopsis caapi and the leaves of Psychotria viridis or chacruna. The brew, well known for its purging and visionary…
Book Talk
Indigenous Peoples, Active Agents
Recently, the Amazon and its indigenous residents have become hot issues, metaphorically as well as climatically. News stories around the world have documented raging and relatively…
Beyond the Sociology Books
If you are not from Colombia and hoping to understand the South American nation of 50 million souls, you might tend to focus on “Colombia the terrible”—narcotics and decades of socio-political violence…
Poetry and History in 18th-century Brazil
In his presentation of the beautifully published volume, Obras Completas de Alvarenga Peixoto, historian Kenneth Maxwell turns our attention to one of his specialties, the late 18th-century
The Price of Gold
English + Español
I loved to be in the Chocó. My work on a biodiversity conservation project allowed me to travel frequently to the seldom-visited northwest fringe of Colombia. The…
Bolivia in the Age of Gas
Bret Gustafson’s Bolivia in the Age of Gas is an ambitious and exquisitely detailed historical ethnography of Bolivia and its complicated relation with gas (and oil). Fossil fuels, Gustafson argues, have been central to the making of Bolivia, of this “gaseous state.” Drawing on a deep, decades-long engagement in the region…