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>> 1 Chapter 1 Introduction Religious, Racial, and Ethnic Identities of the New Second Generation Russell Jeung, Carolyn Chen, and Jerry Z. Park It’s like regardless of your race or background, everybody comes. You see—well, there’s not too many whites, [but] you know, we had that Bosnian guy, he came. And we have some African Americans, we have a whole lot of Arabs and people from the Indian subcontinent. We have an Indonesian guy who comes. . . . It’s just everybody comes together. We come and pray together, and it’s just awesome. . . . It’s— we’re all equal, all standing in line together, we’re all praying to the same Lord, and we’re all listening to the same speaker. It’s unreal. —Shaheed, second-generation Pakistani Muslim, describing how his university’s Muslim Student Association transcends race and ethnicity I think that Nueva Esperanza is what our people have been looking for, for years. And I think that if these folks stay on track, the Latino community is going to have a voice like never before over the next ten years. I think the black church is organized; I think that African Americans in this country have organized. It’s time for our people to organize! You know, we’re the least respected, least educated, most impoverished, and I think that that season and that age is changing now with organizations such as Nueva Esperanza. —Pastor Francisco, a second-generation Puerto Rican evangelical, describing how his national organization mobilizes Latino religious leaders Race and religion matter enormously for the new second generation, the children of post-1965 immigrants. They are negotiating who they are and where they belong in a United States that has transformed with contemporary immigration. In the epigraphs, Shaheed delights in how his Muslim identity transcends ethnic and racial differences; for Pastor Francisco, on the other hand, religion offers a way to mobilize Latino solidarity and 2 > 3 not become eclipsed. Instead, the experience of race and ethnicity not only foregrounds but shapes the religious experiences and identities of the new second generation. To answer the questions of “Who am I?” and “To which group do I belong?” the second generation today does not look merely to religion, as Herberg claimed, but to religion, race, and ethnicity simultaneously . The core motivating question for this volume, then, is, How does the second generation negotiate these three different forms of competing and possibly conflicting claims on identity and belonging in America? Four Trajectories of Race, Religion, and Ethnicity The second generation may be seen as negotiating race, religion, and ethnicity in four different ways: (1) religious primacy, (2) racialized religion, (3) ethnoreligious hybridization, and (4) familistic traditioning. Latino and Asian American evangelical Christians who belong to multiethnic congregations, Muslims, and Asian American Jews are examples of members of the new second generation who practice religious primacy and prioritize religious identities over all others. For those who practice racialized religion, religion does not transcend race and ethnicity but rather affirms racial boundaries that are a product of the racialized experiences of Asian and Latinos in the United States. Both Latino faith-based organizations and Latino gang ministries are examples of racialized religion. Ethnoreligious hybridization describes the processes by which second-generation groups such as Korean American evangelicals and Filipino Catholics employ multicultural discourse to reinvent religious traditions and to combine ethnic and religious identities. And finally, noncongregational religious and spiritual traditions that are domestic and kin centered fall into the category of familistic traditioning. Practices such as Chinese popular religion, Vietnamese ancestral veneration, and Indian American Hinduism are often not identified as “religions” by practitioners , but they are family traditions that affirm identification with and belonging in an “ethnic” family. The four religious trajectories of the new second generation are structured by three factors that have emerged since Herberg’s time of writing. First, the racial composition and economic opportunities of the American population have shifted as the new post-1965 immigrants have primarily been people of color. Their assimilation has been segmented, so that they do not necessarily adopt a singular “American Way of Life,” nor do they have equal access to upward mobility, as Herberg described. Second, much of American discourse now embraces a racialized multiculturalism, in which both ethnic and racial identities are valued. Consequently, religious mobilization along 4 > 5 of 1952. We can safely presume that the majority of the members of today’s nonwhite second generation are the children of immigrants who...

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