This format offers an opportunity for more substantive conversation about works in progress than the traditional panel presentation. This year, we will be discussing two new projects exploring Latinx and Latin American religious expression and embodiment in the United States through Chicana art and Brazilian Pentecostal Faith healing practices. Both authors will share a brief overview of their work for the benefit of the audience; two respondents, who will have read the longer versions of the papers, will share comments and questions designed to stimulate discussion, encourage further investigation, and offer suggestions for preparing the papers for publication. Audience questions and suggestions will follow.
Chicanas have faced oppression historically through colonization and its rippling effects of machismo and marianismo. Paulo Freire states that the fundamental theme of our epoch is domination. If, by extension, domination is a fundamental theme in Chicana lives, then liberation is an objective to be achieved. In this research, I argue that one way Chicanas have achieved their own liberation is through embodying Our Lady of Guadalupe by reinterpreting the icon to reflect themselves and those within their community. I examine the artwork of Ester Hernandez, Alma López, and Yolanda López. Through the form of embodying Guadalupe, Chicanas experience liberation by engaging in conscientization that is political and spiritual. By becoming Guadalupe, Chicanas are active agents in shaping their history and future, rejecting colonialism, machismo, marianismo, and any social construction of Chicanas that functions to exclude and/or oppress, thereby experiencing a form of self and communal liberation.
Faith healing has been central to Pentecostalism expansion in Latin America. However, most sociological studies that investigate this practice in the region start from theoretical assumptions that do not reflect the region’s religious reality. Using a lived religion approach, I explore how members of a Brazilian Pentecostal church in greater Boston make sense of this religious institution's healing system to construct their own definitions of illness and health. The research draws from 114 hours of ethnographic observation of the church’s practices and 11 interviews. The results show that the church’s healing system is based on a dualistic and hierarchical perspective on health that promotes the total spiritualization of medicine. However, members exercise their agency by resisting both the spiritualization of medicine and the medicalization of society through the construction of a dualistic and horizontal interpretation of health and illness that is simultaneously based on religious and medical definitions