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170 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 8 Looking for Lived Religion in Immokalee PHILIP J. WILLIAMS AND PATRICIA FORTUNY LORET DE MOLA Our research in Immokalee, Florida, was based on the assumption that religion would be highly salient for Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants. As discussed in chapter , the notion of the saliency of religion among immigrants is well established in the literature on religion and immigration in traditional gateway cities. Contrary to secularization theories that anticipated the privatization and marginalization of religion in modern societies, Stephen Warner argues that immigrants’ “religious identities often (but not always) mean more to them away from home, in their diaspora, than they did before.” Similarly, Raymond Williams, in his study of Indian and Pakistani immigrants in traditional gateway cities in the United States, argues that “immigrants are religious—by all counts more religious than they were before they left home—because religion is one of the important identity markers in helping them preserve individual self-awareness and cohesion in a group.” Recent work on religion and immigration in traditional gateways has tended to concentrate on congregational life. This approach emphasizes “what new ethnic and immigrant groups [are] doing together religiously in the United States, and what manner of religious institutions they [are] developing of, by, and for themselves.” During our preliminary research in Immokalee, we learned that congregations can provide limited “spaces of sociability,” which function as intimate spaces where immigrants can find voice and fellowship and develop civic skills. Nevertheless, unlike the case of immigrants in traditional gateways, our preliminary research found that, given their “mobile livelihoods,” most immigrants in Immokalee are not spiritually connected to religious congregations . On the contrary, it is the more established immigrants that are most active in congregational life; however, they represent a minority of the immigrant population in Immokalee. Recent debates in anthropology have questioned the notions of locality upon which congregational studies are based. In the context of globalization LOOKING FOR LIVED RELIGION IN IMMOKALEE 171 characterized by transnational flows of capital, goods, people, ideas, and culture, the “natural” connection between culture and locality can no longer be assumed. Instead, as Anthony Giddens argues, global modernity facilitates the “disembedding ” of social relations from local contexts of face-to-face interactions and restructures them “across indefinite spans of time-space.” Paralleling these debates, in religious studies there has been a move to study religion beyond localized congregations . These new approaches focus on lived religion, “what people do with religious practice, what they make with it of themselves and their worlds.” Our research in Immokalee sought to build on these developments in anthropology and religious studies, assuming that religious life was just as likely to take place at home, in the workplace, or in the streets as in religious congregations . Moreover, following Robert Orsi, we viewed religion as “a network of relationships between heaven and earth,” with all its ambiguities and ambivalence , avoiding the “notion of religious practices as either good or bad.” At the same time, we were careful not to ignore congregational life altogether. As Orsi warns, “it would be unfortunate if the turn to lived religion meant simply changing the valence of the familiar dualities while preserving them, just substituting religious practices in the streets and workplaces for what goes on in churches.” We found that religion, while important, may be less salient for Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants in Immokalee than in their communities of origin. To make some sense of these findings, we begin with a discussion of the congregational life of immigrants, focusing particularly on two churches—one Catholic and one Pentecostal. The next two sections examine lived religion, including prayer, popular devotions, and public religious practice. We conclude with some reflections on the implications of the research for the broader literature on religion and immigration. Congregational Life: “Here We Come to Work” In Immokalee, immigrants can choose from a diverse array of churches to live their religion communally. Here we will focus on the two most important congregations in Immokalee. The Catholic church, Our Lady of Guadalupe, is the largest Christian organization in Immokalee. It was founded in  by a group of priests from the Scalabrini Order. With the arrival of Father Richard Sanders in , the church began to offer Masses in several languages (Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Kanjobal, in addition to English). During Sanders’s time as priest (–), the parish established the Guadalupe Center, offering a number of social services. Of all the churches in town today, the Catholic church offers the most complete...

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