Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism Among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam

The stories and struggles of Puerto Rican Muslims in modern day America.

Among Puerto Rican converts to Islam, marginalization is a fact of daily life. Their ＂authenticity＂ is questioned by other Muslims and by fellow Borícua on the island and in the United States. At the same time, they exist under the shadow of US colonization and as Muslims in the context of American empire. To be a Puerto Rican Muslim, then, is to negotiate identity at numerous intersections of diversity and difference.

Drawing on years of ethnographic research and more than a hundred interviews conducted in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and online, Ken Chitwood tells the story of Puerto Rican Muslims as they construct a shared sense of peoplehood through everyday practices. Borícua Muslims thus provides a study of cosmopolitanism not as a political ideal but as a mundane social reality--a reality that complicates scholarly and public conversations about race, ethnicity, and religion in the Americas. Expanding the geography of global Islam and recasting the relationship between religion and Puerto Rican culture, Borícua Muslims is an insightful reckoning with the manifold entanglements of identity amid late-modern globalization.

Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture.