This dissertation aims to understand the ways that the social, specifically race, ethnicity, and neighborhood, intersects with the religious identity, beliefs, and practices of early-generation Americans in Chicago. This dissertation asks at the most general level: What is the relationship of race, ethnicity, and religion for early-generation Americans? More specifically, this dissertation answers this question through a comparison of second- and third-generation Irish Americans and Mexican Americans living in ethnic enclaves on Chicago’s Southside. This dissertation is built on evidence from a qualitative, multi-methodological comparative approach to delve deeply into the daily lives and experiences of Irish and Mexican Americans. Using evidence from a multi-year ethnography and eighty-two in-depth life narrative and visual elicitation interviews with early-generation Irish and Mexican Americans, this dissertation makes two broad claims: (1) Religious identities, beliefs, and practices cannot be understood apart from race, ethnicity, and the local environment, and (2) Religion remains relevant and persists on Chicago’s Southside partly because of, not in spite of, the importance of race and ethnicity in the local context. More specifically, I argue that the different racial contexts and experiences of Irish and Mexican Americans shape their everyday institutional and non-institutional religious practices. For the Irish Americans, the racial experience of being white amidst a predominantly Black far Southside bolsters a salient ethnoreligious identity (“Irish Catholic) which is centered around the local parish neighborhood and school. Moreover, because of the “perceived racial threat†of nearby Black neighborhoods, the Irish Americans feel they have no choice but to use the Catholic schools rather than the predominantly Black public schools, a phenomenon I call the “Catholic school imperative.†For the Mexican Americans, their racial experiences, namely with racism and structural inequality, bolsters a salient racial-ethnic identity and shapes the aims of their everyday Catholic practices toward addressing the effects of structural inequality in their daily lives. To this end, Mexican Americans use everyday Mexican Catholic practices such as home shrines and religious objects to protect them from the deleterious impact of systemic racism.

Last modified

• 11/19/2019

Creator

• Christopher R Carroll

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-wezp-vv10

Subject

• Sociology

Keyword

• sociology
• Catholic studies
• race
• religion
• Chicago
• ethnicity

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright