Spiritual Citizenship among Latina/o Pentecostal Immigrants in Fresno

Melissa Guzman
Sociology
UC Santa Barbara

This project analyzes how Latina/o immigrants use their faith and religion to create communities in light of discourses and theories on citizenship and migration. For many immigrants, lack of citizenship status becomes a basis for exclusion in the US (Bosniak 2009). By conducting an ethnographic study of a Spanish-speaking, Latina/o Pentecostal church in Fresno, CA, this project examines how immigrants figure out the rules for coping with the contingencies of living in US society within a religious context. This project situates the spiritual dimensions of citizenship in the context of everyday immigrant religious life by analyzing the relationship between increasingly restrictive immigration policies, nativist versions of citizenship, and how religious communities influence how immigrants understand their experiences in society. This work contributes to theories of citizenship and the study of immigration by using spiritual citizenship as a tool to analyze the parallels between citizenship and religion.