The Global Futures of Muslim Lives: Latin American and Caribbean Intersections

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina, Barbados, Mexico, and the U.S./Mexico borderlands to examine emergent Muslim infrastructures and embodied forms of knowledge production beyond traditional centers of Islamic authority. Focusing on migrant shelters in Mexico, philanthropic and professional networks in the eastern Caribbean, and halal export initiatives in and from Argentina, I suggest that these so-called peripheries are generative sites of Islamic innovation and Muslim futurism. These cases recast religious authority as infrastructural, gendered, and commercially embedded, while challenging dominant frameworks that equate Muslim politics with state power or Islamism. In conversation with the theme “Futures / Future(s),” the paper suggests that Muslim communities in the Americas are crafting locally grounded yet globally entangled political and religious futures that reconfigure hierarchies of knowledge and representation within the contemporary landscapes of globalized Islam.