RELGST 1419 - LATIN AMERICAN RELIGION AND SOCIETY

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
Long Description This course traces the entanglements of religion, race, and identity in Latin America and in U.S. Latinx communities from the colonial era to the present. We begin by examining religion and race not as fixed realities but as categories shaped by history, politics, and power. From the legacies of cleanliness of blood in Iberia to the caste hierarchies of colonial New Spain, Catholicism provided the grammar through which difference was imagined and enforced. At the same time, Indigenous peoples, Africans, and their descendants found ways to navigate, subvert, and remake these boundaries, producing the unstable yet dynamic social formations that came to define Latin America. The course then turns to the complex dynamics of syncretism and iconoclasm. We consider how Amerindian religions were demonized as idolatry, how enslaved Africans and their descendants reshaped Catholic symbols into creole religions, and how the legacies of slavery and racial exclusion continue to mark Afro-descendant religious practices. In the final part of the course, we shift to the U.S. context to explore how Latinx communities negotiate race and religion within a different racial order. We examine how Latinos have come to be understood as a homogenous racial group, the role of Pentecostalism and Afro-Indigenous religious revivalism in shaping Latinx religious identities, and the ambivalence of these communities as sites of both empowerment and exclusion.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis

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