This dissertation explores the emplaced religious lives of Latin American immigrants in the United States. Studies of “lived religion” have attempted to overcome the theoretical constraints of seeing religion either in terms of religious decline – a view propelled by secularization theorists (Berger, 1969; Casanova, 1994) – or in market terms of intense religious competition (Finke and Stark, 2005). These two theoretical traditions influenced how religion was measured in the United States and around the world. However, we have missed a lot of religion as a result by privileging the official over the unofficial and by failing to capture the individual practices of religion occurring in everyday life (Ammerman, 2014). Rather than reduce religion to a single dimension, I attend to both the everyday practices and congregational forms of religion.

Based on ethnographic research in rural and urban North Carolina which resulted in 60 in-depth interviews, this project investigates how religion is expressed in everyday practices and how those practices shape and are shaped by the experience of migration and the physical places in which they take place. By attending to placemaking practices, I further explore how Latinos produce safe spaces in a contentious immigration landscape of the New South, “bending” space and adapting religion to attenuate experiences of fear and threat given their immigration status. Such agentic activity is constrained in part due to the complex local immigration landscape, concerns about group detection and automobility, and the unfavorable (urban) or limited (rural) availability of congregational sites for religious participation. A full understanding of American religion today requires attending to Latino religion in a way that captures the complexity and diversity of believers, following religious entrepreneurs from their churches into all the other spaces in which they live.