The stories and struggles of Puerto Rican Muslims in modern day America. Among Puerto Rican converts to Islam, marginalization is a fact of daily life. Their "authenticity" is questioned by other Muslims and by fellow BorIcua on the island and in the United States. At the same time, they exist under the shadow of US colonization and as Muslims in the context of American empire. To be a Puerto Rican Muslim, then, is to negotiate identity at numerous intersections of diversity and difference. Drawing on years of ethnographic research and more than a hundred interviews conducted in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and online, Ken Chitwood tells the story of Puerto Rican Muslims as they construct a shared sense of peoplehood through everyday practices. BorIcua Muslims thus provides a study of cosmopolitanism not as a political ideal but as a mundane social reality-a reality that complicates scholarly and public conversations about race, ethnicity, and religion in the Americas. Expanding the geography of global Islam and recasting the relationship between religion and Puerto Rican culture, BorIcua Muslims is an insightful reckoning with the manifold entanglements of identity amid late-modern globalization.
Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at UniversitAEt Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture.
List of Illustrations Preface and Note on Language Introduction: AmeRIcan Muslims in a Cosmopolitan Age 1. Coyunturas and Contingent Lineages: Archives of AmeRIcan Muslim Memory 2. "I will never deny I'm BorIcua": Resignifying Puerto Rican Peoplehood 3. An ummah en vaivEn: AmeRIcan Muslims, Global Traditions 4. Between ummah and asaBorIcua: Generative Frictions on the Margins 5. !Pa'lante, inshallah! Intersectional Solidarities in the Shadow of American Empire Conclusion: "Get to know one another" Acknowledgments Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations Notes Index
"BorIcua Muslims is a timely and groundbreaking study of Latinx Islamidad and the growing number of Puerto Rican Muslims in the Caribbean and the United States. Ken Chitwood brings his multilingual talents in cultural studies, ethnography, and journalism to bear in this expansive and joyful exploration of how AmeRIcan Muslims negotiate their island lives, transnational migrant encounters, and cosmopolitan community belongings in the global Muslim ummah." - Aliyah Khan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, author of Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean "This expansive and powerful book sheds light on the everyday lives of AmeRIcan Muslims by tracing their experiences, border crossings, and identities from Newark to BayamOn to Houston. BorIcua Muslims is intellectually rich, well written, and full of incredible stories that offer a compelling look at the varied and complex intersections of American religion, global Islamic studies, and Latinx Muslims." - Felipe Hinojosa, Baylor University, co-editor of Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945
