Loiza is a Puerto Rican town known for best representing the African traditions, a community of a mostly black population affected by profound racial discrimination and poverty. But many Loiza residents strongly identify themselves in religious terms, strategically managing their individual, familial, gender, generational, local, national, and racial identities through a spiritual prism that effectively helps them cope with and transform their difficult reality.Based on twelve months of fieldwork, this study shows how believers experience their religion in its various dimensions. Writing as a native ethnographer, the author offers the personal religious histories of many of Loiza’s residents, some of whom she follows northward to the United States as they re-create regional and political boundaries. Hernández Hiraldo plays the role of participant observer, a social scientist with affection for her subjects, who shared the most important aspects of their spiritual lives with her. Her narratives reveal an unusually nuanced understanding of the role of faith in the lives of Loiza’s people.Arguing that understanding and respecting the power of religion in this community is essential to addressing and remedying its social problems, Hernández Hiraldo contests the characterization of Puerto Rico as a culturally homogenous country with a monolithic church. She analyzes the changing nature of Catholicism on the island and the challenges it faces from the community’s other denominations, especially the Pentecostal churches, many of which are struggling to preserve their congregations.

Black Puerto Rican Identity and Religious Experience (New Directions in Puerto Rican Studies)

Politics & Social Sciences

Hernández Hiraldo, Samiri

Social Sciences

University Press of Florida

“A well-rounded and perceptive analysis of why Puerto Ricans have converted en masse to Protestantism, especially Pentecostalism, as well as how the Catholic hierarchy has grappled with greater religious heterogeneity.”—Journal of Latin American Studies
“This book presages the new scholarship on religion so badly needed in Puerto Rican studies. …[E]legantly weaves history, politics, and ecclesiastical endeavors into a narrative that is preeminently about faith.”—Centro Journal
“Records religious diversity and complexity in a town that is usually observed through racial lenses that render it homogeneous and fixed in the past. …[C]ontributes to the understanding of the deep interrelation between religion, spirituality, identity, and race in contemporary Puerto Rico and part of its Diaspora.”—Journal of the American Academy of Religion
 Loíza is a Puerto Rican town known for best representing the African traditions. Its mostly black population is affected by profound racial discrimination and poverty. Many Loíza residents strongly identify themselves in religious terms, strategically managing their identities through a spiritual prism that effectively helps them cope with and transform their difficult reality.
 Based on twelve months of fieldwork, this study shows how believers experience their religion in its various dimensions. Arguing that understanding and respecting the power of religion in this community is essential to addressing and remedying its social problems, Hernández Hiraldo contests the characterization of Puerto Rico as a culturally homogenous country with a monolithic church.

History

World

Do we think often or at all about how much feet tell us about ourselves? About life? The Five Legs of the Cat takes us from Puerto Rico to around the world on a personal journey through past and present, good and bad, big and small. We do not have to be on our feet to begin this journey, and we may start seeing feet in a different way; perhaps to see more than five legs.

The Five Legs of the Cat

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Saddle Road Press

Al Vapor (Spanish Edition)

Editorial Caliope

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Books by Hernández Hiraldo, Samiri