AmeRícan Muslims: The Everyday Lives of Puerto Rican Muslims

On a muggy late-May afternoon, I met up with “Lebron” at Noches de Colombia, a restaurant serving pan-Latin American fare just off Bergenline Ave. in Union City, New Jersey. As the restaurant’s windows dripped with humidity, we discussed his recent comments on “The Deen Show” — a popular YouTube program hosted by Eddie Redzovic.

Responding to disparaging comments toward Muslims tweeted by then Miss Puerto Rico, Destiny Velez, Lebron said Ms. Velez would be welcomed by the Muslim community, but she needed to show more “Boricua pride” and needed a “history lesson.” 

“If she is a true Puerto Rican, true to the Puerto Rican pride, and proud of her culture, proud of where she came from, then I would ask her to go back and read about how Puerto Rican came about being the country that it is now after being colonized. We see that our people weren’t really a people of Christian faith and Christian belief,” he said. 

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Screen shot from The Deen Show.

Pushing back on those who frame Puerto Rico as a “Christian nation,” Lebron went to talk about Muslim contributions to mathematics, science, education, technology, and navigation. He harkened back to Andalusian Spain and Caribbean history, claiming his family had Taíno, African, and Andalusian roots. 

Looking at the camera, he challenged Miss Puerto Rico to “see how our people are connected to Islam, especially in our Boricua culture.” 

You are cordially invited to an online lecture and discussion of, “AmeRícan Muslims: The Everyday Lives of Puerto Rican Muslims” on 5 November 2020, made possible by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, Freie Universität Berlin. 

The online event is on 5 November, starting with a streaming of the lecture at 4:00 pm (Berlin, GMT +2). The live discussion will take place at 4:45 pm followed by an open Q&A with participants. The discussants will be Prof. Dr. Kai Kresse (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient) and Dr. Harold Morales (Morgan State University). 

If you’d prefer to watch the lecture ahead of time, watch it above (or at this link) and join us for the live discussion on Thursday, 5 November.

My goal with the lecture is to showcase the lives of Puerto Rican Muslims like Lebron, addressing questions of identity, ethnicity, and religion in the context of diversity and difference. 

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Puerto Rico, the U.S., and online, I provide a nuanced view of how Islam takes shape in Puerto Rican Muslims’ everyday lives as “quadruple minorities”:  being Puerto Rican in the Muslim community, Muslim in the Puerto Rican community, and both Puerto Rican and Muslim in the U.S. context. 

I focus on how Puerto Rican Muslims “permanently live with the unfamiliar” (Appiah 2006) in four interrelated ways: 1) alongside other Puerto Ricans and their conception and construction of “authentic” Puerto Rican culture, 2) in relationship, and networked, with other Muslims around the globe, 3) as Puerto Ricans in colonial relationship with the U.S., and 4) as Muslims in the context of American empire. 

Essentially, for Puerto Rican Muslims, there are few established communities that they can go to without having to suppress part of their identity, adapt their representation, or resist some form of marginalization. 

Although I do not want to frame their situation in binaries and oppositions, Puerto Rican’s lives contain multiple boundaries they live across, at, and in between

I argue that their experience and perspective offers insights in three ways:

  1. it enriches our understanding of Islam and Muslim communities in the Americas;

  2. adds more texture to our understanding of Latinx Muslims in the U.S. and American Muslim communities in general;

  3. and it further invites scholars to consider what can be learned by a critical focus on the supposed “margins” of the study of global Islam. 

In particular, I make the case that Puerto Rican Muslims’ cosmopolitan lives help us better grasp how Muslims in the late-modern world develop and implement strategies to negotiate diversity and difference both among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims.