Abstract
This article seeks to contribute to the study of Islam and Muslims in Latin America and the Caribbean by considering broader geographies in the Americas and viewing these communitiesin light of hemispheric dynamics of movement, encounter, interaction, and exchange. This article seeks to do so in two distinct ways: first, by presenting the narratives of Puerto Rican Muslims’ everyday cosmopolitan lives in the USA in the context of movement, migration, transnational connection, and solidarity between and across borders and boundaries in the Americas; second, by suggesting that telling such transnational tales not only expands our view of what it means to be Muslim in the Americas, but also that it helps broaden our understanding of what it means to be Muslim in a cosmopolitan age. To do so, this chapter highlights four different narratives from among Puerto Rican Muslims in the USA as a way to situate their significance in the narrative of Islam and Muslim communities in the Americas as a whole: first, that of Youssef Ali Abdullah in Staten Island; second, Danny Khalil “al-Portorikani” in Yonkers; third, the impact of Hurricane Maria in 2017 on the Puerto Rican Muslim community in the New York and New Jersey area as a whole; and fourth, through the story of the founding of Alianza Islámica in Spanish Harlem in the 1980s. These narratives were sourced during my fieldwork in New York City in summer 2016 and fall 2017 and as part of a broader ethnographic research project with Puerto Rican Muslims in the USA, in Puerto Rico, and online.
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Notes
In his poem “AmeRícan,” Tato Laviera redefined Puerto Rican nationality to include both Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico and those living in the USA. The blend creates a new AmeRícan identity that is a blend between the USA and island traditions and histories.
A dojo is a dedicated space for martial arts or meditative training and learning.
They also made their way to Hawaii, Ohio, Massachusetts, and more recently places such as Texas, California, and Georgia, for an overview of these migrations and background on the experience of Puerto Rican Muslims in each of these places.
In some sense, this brings the Florida-Puerto Rico connection full circle over the last 500 years, starting with Juan Ponce de Leon’s initial foray into La Florida from the western ports of Puerto Rico in 1513.
The “air bus” or “flying bus” representing the ease of movement between New York and Puerto Rico as if it were like taking a city bus.
In the 1950s, René Marqués wrote a play—La Carreta—often considered a classic that depicted the movement of a family from a Puerto Rican village to La Perla in San Juan and then to New York and—after the tragic death of a young man—came back to Puerto Rico. The play and its central metaphor—la carreta—came to be seen as an artistic expression of the collective Puerto Rican experience and the desire to maintain identity and integrity in the midst of movement and migration. Tato Laviera’s poetry collection La Carreta Made a U-turn spoke to this metaphor and sought to ground the contemporary Puerto Rican identity firmly in New York as well as Puerto Rico. It is often considered a classic collection of Nuyorican poetry and culture and cited in the debate over the authenticity of “Puerto Rican” identity among Puerto Ricans in New York and elsewhere in the USA.
The same could be said for the Caribbean as a whole.
This number was acknowledged by the Puerto Rican government in August 2018 nearly a year after their initial report of just 64 deaths and then raising it to 1427 in the beginning of August. Debates over the number continue to rise. Other reports and estimates put the number even higher. A highly publicized and viral Harvard report said the number could be anywhere between 80 and 8500.
So important was Malcolm X to the New York Young Lords—a group of, primarily, Nuyorican, radical youth fighting for freedom and justice in their community—that in the first issue of Palante published in New York City (in late 1969), their initial biographical feature was not on a great Puerto Rican leader. It was on Malcolm X and the relevance of his legacy.
Maryam Jameel, “Alianza Islámica: Islam in the Barrio,” December 2, 2016.
This can be seen as part of the broader Puerto Rican activist sentiment to “take it to the streets” in various ways. While there has been focus on various social and religious aspects of these efforts by Puerto Rican activists, the vast majority of literature on the topic within Puerto Rican studies ignores the Islamic inflections of this work as evinced by the endeavors of La Alianza Islámica. See Whalen and Vásquez-Hernández, 103.
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There are no conflicts of interest to report. However, some of the research for this article was conducted via a Summer Travel Research Grant from the University of Florida’s Center for Global Islamic Studies.
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Chitwood, K. Muslim AmeRícans: Puerto Rican Muslims in the USA and the Need for More Cosmopolitan Frames of Analysis in the Study of Islam and Muslim Communities in the Americas. Int J Lat Am Relig 3, 413–434 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41603-019-00085-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41603-019-00085-z