by Anne M. Martínez

about Anne M. Martínez

Anne M. Martínez is Assistant Professor of American Culture and Cultural Theory at the University of Groningen. She is the author of Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire, 1905-1935.

Religion

As numerous scholars have noted, there is long-standing resistance in Latina/o and Chicana/o studies, in particular, to writing about religion ([Espinosa and García 2008](/latina-latino-studies/works_cited/espinosa-gaston-and-mario-t/)). Some of this resistance derives from the origins of Chicana/o and Boricua studies, which were deeply imbued with Marxist trends and influences, but it also has to do with the historical stigmatization of Indigenous and African traditions in the Americas. Further, the association between Christianity and colonialism leads some scholars to regard Catholicism as a tool for the oppression of Latina/o communities by colonial forces. Such perspectives minimize the contemporary centrality of religion to Latina/o populations, as well as the ways Latinas/os have used religion to resist oppression in a variety of settings. The majority of Latinas/os in the United States are Catholic (55 percent), often with an infusion of Indigenous and African practices and devotions. However, the Catholic share of the Latina/o population is rapidly declining, as the Pew Research Center (2014) report on _The Shifting Religious Identity of Latinos in the United States_ indicates. In 2014, one quarter of the Latina/o population identified as former Catholics who had become Evangelical Protestants or unaffiliated with a religious tradition. The largest growth in the twenty-first century...