Abstract

Excerpted From: Sabrina A. Ochoa, Race, Religion, and Reconciliation: Building a Mosaic of Latine Faith from the Margins, 14 University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review 143 (Spring, 2024) (78 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Expressed cogently by Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera, the spaces “in-between” cultures are often filled with ambiguity, contradiction, and negotiation. These processes are continuously replicated in the history and construction of Latinidad across the United States and Latin America. Religion - as both an institution and a personal expression of faith - exists as one expression of this liminality. In this “in-between,” religious doctrine and motifs color the way communities navigate their positions within hierarchies of privilege and power. This ambiguity holds expressive and symbolic significance on a personal level for many individuals.

This Essay examines the racialization of different religions within the Latine community and Latine intersections within the American legal system. This includes regulations concerning religious practice and the political mobilization of different Latine groups by religious affiliation. Using two seminal cases in the Supreme Court's Free Exercise jurisprudence - Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah and Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith - this Essay argues that religion's intersection with race, both within the Latine community and in the United States at large, has served the purpose of “othering.” This has resulted in racial marginalization within the community. Further, these intersections highlight how religion's internal tensions between orthodoxy and popular adaptation mirror the dynamics of division and cooperation that color Latine political and social action. As existential questions of the nature of Latinidad and the political expression of Latines as a heterogenous bloc remain relevant, examining the use of religion to minoritize racial and ethnic communities is an important tool in understanding the barriers to social and political solidarity within the community.

Part II begins with a review of existing LatCrit literature on the dynamic role of religion in the Latine community. Part III adds to that literature by analyzing Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye and Smith as case studies on the expression of racial marginalization through regulations on minority religious practices. Then, by using the example of Latine Protestants and the anti-abortion movement, Part IV discusses how majority and minority positions are constantly shifting in the American political context, as minoritized religious groups can renegotiate their positions to occupy a new space within the moral majority. Finally, in synthesizing these dynamics of fluid religious positioning along ethnic lines, Part V concludes by providing recommendations for addressing racial othering within the Latine community using the tools of religion.

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As this Essay outlines, religion has historically been weaponized to perpetrate and maintain racial hierarchy through cultural erasure and marginalization. At the same time, religion has been and continues to be a tool used by the oppressed to build community, retain elements of their cultural and ethnic heritage, and to coalesce around social justice movements. This lasting potential for religiosity and faith as a means by which to understand and mobilize the Latine community cannot be ignored. Ultimately, the findings of this Essay suggest that confronting the problem of religious orthodoxy and its subordination of various groups cannot solely be accomplished through reflexive secularism, given that religion operates on both collective and personal levels of identity. Rather, integrating the widespread experience and practice of faith into our theories and actions on anti-subordination principles is necessary to “honor the human capacity for spiritual experience and connection.”

This Essay's deconstruction of various legal and social discourses suggests that recognizing implicit racialization is a necessary first step to “clean house” within the Latine community and navigate a sociopolitical context that incentivizes the splintering of that community in the pursuit of assimilation into whiteness. However, this vision does not conceive of Latines as holding a homogenous set of political objectives, cultural values, or even religious norms, since “a culture that can be shrunk to mere political discipline has lost its power as culture and become something else ... closer to our concept of partido (political party), and far less attached to our notion of comunidad (community).” Rather, this Essay ultimately seeks to promote a vision of Latinidad demonstrating that the beauty and diversity within Latinidad is truly greater the sum of all of its parts.

Harvard Law School, J.D., 2024; University of Pennsylvania, B.A., Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, 2021.