Enchanted Faith: Latino Religiosity, Gender Constructions, and Social Networks in the Church

CLAS Seed Grant    The proposed project will combine oral history narratives with archival research to understand how Latino Mormons engage their faith. In addition, the research will include an analysis of the Church of Latter Day Saints as it reaches out to their Latino converts. With only one major academic single-authored book on the topic, Hispanics in the Mormon Zion 1912-1999 (2002), the proposed project expands the analysis beyond archival history of Latino Mormons in Salt Lake City to contemporary communities in Arizona. The location of this project in Arizona is especially important given the political conflict and negative attention of the state’s relationship to Latino residents. Settled by Mormons in the 19th century, the contemporary Mormon population in and around Mesa comingles with an equally present Latino/Spanish speaking settlement in the area.

Far from liberating, the LDS Church certainly supports traditional segregated gender norms that can run counter to notions of gender equity between followers. Men and women will be asked to reflect on their cultural and religious approach to gender segregation in the Church. While women’s religious social networks can be a space for autonomy, the traditional mothering role held for women in the Church can also limit girls and women into all too familiar tropes that parallel Catholicism in Latin America. These established norms of family, gender, and morality may in fact aid in the conversion process for Latinos and could help explain why so many first generation immigrants are transitioning to the LDS Church.

Lastly, the project will locate the particularities of being Latino and Mormon in Arizona. How does the politics of belonging impact Church identity, participation, and conversion? Does the Church’s emphasis on genealogy and history play a role in places like Arizona where Latino ethnic history is otherwise so hotly contested. Finally, what can Arizona teach us about ethnic religious identity as a means of combatting a general sense of inhospitality both within the state and the Church.