Latina/o/x Pilgrimage and Embodiment

Abstract

This chapter posits that a focus on pilgrimage, of both humans and devotional objects and images, provides scholars with new avenues to approach historical and contemporary issues of migration, labor, and politics; the affective bonds between devotees and saint images, forged through the devotional labor of pilgrimage and procession, create a historical and theological bridge between preconquest religion, colonial Catholicism, and contemporary Christianity. This chapter portrays pilgrimage traditions among Latina/o/x communities in the United States to be as much about religions traveling on the bodies of migrants as they are cultural descriptors of migrant communities in diaspora. The chapter emphasizes that pilgrimage is not only about the religious moving through the migrant body but also about the political and cultural implications of migrant religious bodies and images on a racialized American landscape.