University of Texas doctoral student Sandra Canas, under the supervision of Dr. Shannon Speed, will undertake research on the growing Muslim community in southern Mexico, where hundreds of poor indigenous people are reported to have converted in recent years. The focus of Canas' research will be Mayan women converts in Chiapas and the relation between their conversion and their struggles for land entitling. The research is important because religious conversion under conditions of socioeconomic stress is known to be a worldwide phenomenon, but the conversion of indigenous people to Islam in Latin America is a more recent and less well-understood development.
For more than 10 years, indigenous Muslims in Chiapas, along with other indigenous people, have struggled to regularize their use of urban lands, which they occupied after being forced off rural agricultural land. Preliminary resarch has found that women have actively participated in the land regularization struggle, and some use Islam as a resource to do so. At the same time they show increasing interest in learning about their new religion, in discussing the sacred texts, and in attempting to selectively incorporate Islamic tradition into their daily lives and their changing understandings of citizenship and nation.
The investigator will undertake 12 months of anthropological field research in Chiapas. She will conduct household surveys, carry out extended participant observation, do unstructured interviews, and explore archival resources. Her overarching research goals are to: (a) explore religious conversion, gender dynamics, and citizenship among Mayans Muslims in Southern Mexico; and (b) analyze the relationship between conversion processes and social mobilization.
Ethnographically grounded research on new Muslim communities is important for deepening our understanding of conversion processes within globalized and multiethnic environments. This is especially the case for Latin America, where almost no research has been done on conversion to Islam.
