Mom, Minding the Mosque

Dear Colleagues and Collaborators,

Over the past few months, I had the opportunity to spend time in Mexico, Barbados, and New York City conducting fieldwork on Muslim life across the Americas. The places and communities are quite different from one another, but moving between them once again reminded me how difficult it is to draw neat boundaries around Muslim life in this hemisphere. Conversations in mosques, migrant shelters, homes, restaurants, community centers, and other everyday spaces repeatedly point toward connections that cross national, linguistic, ethnic, and institutional lines.

This issue brings together several contributions that speak to those connections as well. They approach Muslim life through documentary film, academic research, public-facing resources, and a new podcast series, but each offers a different way of thinking about how Muslims make lives, communities, relationships, and claims to belonging in Latin America and the Caribbean.

That theme comes into particularly sharp focus in our conversation with Indonesian filmmaker and interdisciplinary writer Gladhys Elliona about her short documentary Mom, Minding the Mosque(Mae Menjaga Masjid). The film follows Bu Ipah, an Indonesian migrant who has spent more than two decades caring for a mosque in Brazil. Elliona’s account of making the film opens onto larger questions about the Indonesian diaspora, Muslim migration, gendered and often invisible forms of religious labor, and the everyday work involved in sustaining a Muslim community. Her reflections also remind us that the history of Islam in Latin America is not only a history of institutions or migration statistics. It is also found in kitchens, family life, Ramadan meals, mosques, and the people who keep them going.

Two recent articles in the International Journal of Latin American Religions extend these questions in different directions.“Latino Muslims as Interfaith Bridge-builders: Theorizing Identity Negotiation and Jewish-Muslim Relations in Miami’s Polarized Landscape”examines the ways Latino Muslim identities can shape interfaith encounters in a politically and religiously polarized environment.“Muslim Women in Costa Rica: From Alterity to Political Action” turns our attention to Muslim women’s movements from experiences of difference and marginality toward forms of civic and political engagement. Together, they underscore the analytical value of attending to identity as something negotiated and lived rather than simply assigned.

We are also pleased to highlight new publications from LACISA members, along with other items from across our network. As always, these contributions are part of what makes LACISA valuable, documenting a field that is increasingly diverse in its methods, geographic scope, and intellectual concerns.

Finally, we are excited to share Carrying Oceans: The Muslim Atlantic Through Decolonial Light, a new podcast series that invites us to think across the waters and histories that connect Muslim communities around the Atlantic. The series offers another way of approaching a central concern of this newsletter, which is refusing to treat Latin America and the Caribbean as peripheral to the study of global Islam, and instead asking what becomes possible when the region is placed within broader histories of movement, empire, race, religion, and exchange.

Taken together, these pieces offer different ways of seeing Muslim life across the Americas. My recent travels have only reinforced for me the value of looking for those connections while remaining attentive to the particular histories and circumstances of each community. I hope you’ll read, listen, watch, and, as always, send along your own work and discoveries for future issues.

Adelante,
Ken Chitwood
LACISA Senior Editor