God gives me license: religion, immigration, and place in the Nuevo South

This dissertation examines the lives of Latin American immigrants in two enforcement landscapes of the US South, revealing the entanglement of religion with everyday social experiences and their geographies. It supposes that local places and their politics have the potential to structure action, but that these realities do not go uncontested by strategic actors. As federal-local enforcement agreements proliferate, local neighborhoods are increasingly perceived and mapped by immigrants in relation to insecurity and risks they pose. I find that Latinos strategically resist precarity and the local immigration conditions by engaging both communal and individual forms of religion in their neighborhood spaces. They make spaces safe through the enactment of religion where danger is perceived and redefine local geographies that threaten their existence through practical decisions with their religious networks. The research employs ethnographic, visual, and spatial methods, including in-depth interviews with 60 participants. Situated in a practice approach, the research follows these religious actors from their institutional spaces of religion into the multiple and varied locations of their lives. It interrogates the practices in institutions and spaces of the neighborhood, including the immigrant religious congregations that remain a focal point in Latino lives. By attending to the micro interactions and practices that occur in these geographies, the dissertation uncovers how spaces within places are battlegrounds of power where hiddenness and visibility are situationally and strategically employed. The research findings are developed in three empirical chapters, as I map the role of religion in these negative policy contexts. In the first, I consider the place of Latino congregations in relation to the US religious landscape and the logics of congregational geography. Then, I investigate the communal practices of religion at these Latino churches given the everyday experiences of immigrants, documenting the practical ways immigrant congregations assisted members with the local conditions of enforcement. Last, I turn to locate religion in the broader spaces of social life. Participants’ stories reveal that religion is transportable to all kinds of spaces, and they creatively invoke their traditions to claim space and redefine themselves around the neighborhood. Not every practice in everyday life should be counted as religious, but this dissertation reveals that religion remains entangled in the local immigration experience.