Description: Based on twelve months of fieldwork, this study shows how believers experience their religion in its various dimensions.
Brief description: Samiri Hernández Hiraldo teaches anthropology and religion at Florida A&M University. She has conducted research and has published academic work in these areas. Currently, she researches the activism of Afro-Puerto Rican women connected to spirituality. She is the author of six poetry collections, and her poems have appeared in national and international anthologies and literary journals. Lately, she has also delved into literary anthropology, especially ethnographic poetry, linking it to fieldwork, research, teaching, and the dissemination of anthropological knowledge.
Review Quotes:
"A well-rounded and perceptive analysis of why Puerto Ricans have converted en masse to Protestantism, especially Pentecostalism, as well as how the Catholic hierarchy has grappled with greater religious heterogeneity."--Journal of Latin American Studies
"This book presages the new scholarship on religion so badly needed in Puerto Rican studies. ...[E]legantly weaves history, politics, and ecclesiastical endeavors into a narrative that is preeminently about faith."--Centro Journal
"Records religious diversity and complexity in a town that is usually observed through racial lenses that render it homogeneous and fixed in the past. . . . [C]ontributes to the understanding of the deep interrelation between religion, spirituality, identity, and race in contemporary Puerto Rico and part of its Diaspora."--Journal of the American Academy of Religion