Spiritual Homes and Belonging: Mexican Pentecostals and Spiritual Citizenship in Fresno, CA

Team Members/Contributors

Melissa Guzman University of California, Santa Barbara Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

This work considers how Pentecostalism impacts the lives of Mexican immigrants and Chican@s in Fresno, California. It explores how immigrants develop meanings about community belonging and American citizenship through their religious experiences. Based on a year-long ethnographic project that includes interviews, shadowing, and the analysis of audio-recorded interactions, this work asks: How does the lived practice of Pentecostalism inform Latina/o immigrants’ sense of belonging and notions of citizenship in the U.S.? I argue that contemporary Pentecostalism gives Mexican immigrants in Fresno a chance to develop and practice “spiritual citizenship”, a religiously-based type of belonging that becomes a fundamental resource for navigating their neighborhoods and narrating their positions in the broader American society. My work pursues the emergence of Latina/o Pentecostal churches in Fresno as a local testament to the multiple realities enveloped in poor, racially-segregated communities in America. Through examining contemporary Mexican Pentecostalism parallel to discourses about American citizenship we can turn our attention to the civic implications of American religion in the 21st century to reveal how religious commitments complicate people’s notions of nationality, belonging, legal status, and citizenship. Crucial to the outcome of my project is the suggestion that taking seriously how people use religion can assists in our understanding of specific struggles of Mexican immigrants. It is this close attention to a specific location and congregation that then informs the larger understanding of how faith and American religion become resources for confronting social inequalities and working out collective understandings about subjecthood, belonging, and social change.