Embracing a geographically capacious definition of "North American religions," this panel features research papers that explore religious life in different locations across the Americas. The first paper focuses on the Nahua people of Mexico and considers the ontological foundations of their cultural perseverance and resistance to colonization. The second paper centers on Hawaii and investigates how Korean immigrants drew on notions of America as "white Christian nation" to advance nativist views of Japanese Americans. The final paper focuses on the U.S./Mexico borderland and considers the religious dynamics of tents and tented events in that region. All together, these papers invite a comparative and transnational approach to the study of American religion that reaches across and beyond national boundaries.
Following the 16th Century invasion of the Anahuac by Hernán Cortés different forms of assimilation, acculturation, accommodation took place amongst the Nahua people throughout the centuries. Notwithstanding, the Nahua resisted and persevered to become an enduring people. A distinct Nahua ontology, in contrast to Western forms of ontology arising from Aristotle and a consequent arising therefrom - namely, an emphasis on imagination - has contributed to Nahua perseverance. A result of the Nahua worldview is an emphasis on work, discipline, and penance. This is expressed in collective community, obligations to the earth, and self-identity with respect for difference. An inclusion of variety of modern Nahua voices, arising from interviews across Mexico is included to support these claims. These voices also shed light on the past, particularly where the Nahua fell at diverse times on the three pillar modalities which facilitate change in subaltern-dominant group interactions: assimilation, acculturation, accommodation.
This paper explores how religion played a central role in the understanding of US citizenship and racial categorizations during World War II, centering on Haan Kilsoo, a Korean immigrant who firmly supported a nativist viewpoint toward Japanese Americans. Drawing from public statements, correspondence between intelligence agencies, legal documents, news articles, and letters, this paper examines how Korean immigrants like Kilsoo claimed their loyalty to the States by drawing from the predominant idea of America as a “White Christian nation” in Korean immigrant communities. Korean immigrants’ understanding of race as intertwined with religious affiliation helped many to disassociate themselves from the broader racial category of “Asian,” particularly during a time in which Korean immigrants were negotiating between their racialization in the States and the colonization of their homeland by the Japanese empire.
This paper examines three kinds of tents and tented events that have been erected and coordinated in the US/Mexico borderlands, particularly Texas. The first two, early Pentecostal missionary meetings designed to convert Mexican people, and semi-local, small Mexican circuses, or *carpas,* coincided in the nineteen teens and early nineteen twenties. The third, tented migrant detention camps run by the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, especially those used to detain minors seperated from their caregivers, exploded across the borderlands and the national consciousness almost exactly one hundred years after the heyday of missionary tents and *carpas.* The paper details the similarities of the material infrastructure of the tent at all three sites, noting how the tent form offers a set of affordances and connotations that enable and constrain three distinct subject-making enterprises.
| Brandon Bayne | bayne@unc.edu | View |