RELS 228 Chican@ Religious Identities

In this course students will interrogate several overlapping categories of human identity. First we will seek to define the term Chican@ situating our understanding within the historical particularities in which it emerged as well as studying its economic political social and religious implications for U.S. Latin-Americans who identify as such. Second we will investigate the ways in which contemporary Chican@s understand Chican@ and religious identity to be interrelated specifically as a hybridization of Catholic Christianity along with the spiritual traditions of Africa Asia and the indigenous people of the Americas. We will also consider the ways in which Chican@s have looked to their spirituality and religious practices in order to construct narratives of identity belonging community and resistance.