Full Description
The stories and struggles of Puerto Rican Muslims in modern day America.
Among Puerto Rican converts to Islam, marginalization is a fact of daily life. Their "authenticity" is questioned by other Muslims and by fellow BorÍcua on the island and in the United States. At the same time, they exist under the shadow of US colonization and as Muslims in the context of American empire. To be a Puerto Rican Muslim, then, is to negotiate identity at numerous intersections of diversity and difference.
Drawing on years of ethnographic research and more than a hundred interviews conducted in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and online, Ken Chitwood tells the story of Puerto Rican Muslims as they construct a shared sense of peoplehood through everyday practices. BorÍcua Muslims thus provides a study of cosmopolitanism not as a political ideal but as a mundane social reality-a reality that complicates scholarly and public conversations about race, ethnicity, and religion in the Americas. Expanding the geography of global Islam and recasting the relationship between religion and Puerto Rican culture, BorÍcua Muslims is an insightful reckoning with the manifold entanglements of identity amid late-modern globalization.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface and Note on Language
Introduction: AmeRÍcan Muslims in a Cosmopolitan Age
1. Coyunturas and Contingent Lineages: Archives of AmeRÍcan Muslim Memory
2. "I will never deny I'm BorÍcua": Resignifying Puerto Rican Peoplehood
3. An ummah en vaivÉn: AmeRÍcan Muslims, Global Traditions
4. Between ummah and asaBorÍcua: Generative Frictions on the Margins
5. ¡Pa'lante, inshallah! Intersectional Solidarities in the Shadow of American Empire
Conclusion: "Get to know one another"
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
Notes
Index
