“So many of our destinies are tied beyond our understanding:” Rethinking religious hybridity in Latinx/o/a contexts

Abstract

In December 2018, then congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines for a brief speech she was invited to give at a Hanukkah-lighting event sponsored by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in Queens, New York. Some people found Ocasio-Cortez’s statements problematic. In partial and prompt response, she further clarified her perspective in a Twitter thread that amply demonstrated some of the tensions that arise in the study of Latinx/a/o religious pluralism. This article examines how Latinx/a/o stories can complicate dominant definitions of religion in part because of the memory of colonialism that frames religion as a category in Latina/o/x contexts. However, Latinx/o/a contexts themselves have been overly dominated by romanticized narratives of mixture that present their own challenges, particularly when encoded with a linear, straight temporality focused on both origins and destinations. Nevertheless, drawing on the work of Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez (2020) and her use of apocalypso, I turn to understandings of hybridity that could disrupt a neat, linear temporality.