Monday, April 25, 2011

Religious conversion

Randy McGuire reports that at the San Xavier del Bac mission in Tucson, among the little votive offerings pinned to Saint Francis as requests for healing or thanks for healing—metal charms representing body parts, photos, written prayers—he found someone's official deportation/repatriation ticket from INM (Mexican immigration). It could have been placed there by the person who had been deported, or by a family member.

At Albergue San Juan Bosco in Nogales, Sonora, the crucified Christ in the chapel wears dozens of prison ID bracelets, each with a name, mug shot, serial number, etc. The pink Maricopa County bracelet is prominent among them. If you don't need to hold onto your bracelet as a subsistence form of identification (which some people do because they've been deprived of all other ID), you can put it here.

I still haven't gotten over how certain religious contexts can incorporate elements that are fairly prosaic (though not exactly mundane and insignificant, in this case) and assign them a meaning. To me, this quality of prosaicness-compatibility increases these contexts' power and helps them be places where people can exert control, at least to some extent beyond the personal, at least by exerting the power of choice, over the meaning of experiences whose meaning is contested, including undocumented immigration, criminalization, and deportation. All very interesting.

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