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Examines how Latino Evangelical churches promise salvation while reinforcing logics of surveillance and criminalization systems that oppress their congregants
Living Redemption examines how faith-based institutions in Latinx communities enhance the state’s carceral power even as they attempt to empower and redeem their adherents. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research across two Latinx congregations in Fresno and the San Francisco Bay Area, Melissa Guzman-Garcia explores how Mexican, Central American, and Chicana women build their own spiritual services and support systems while recruiting other criminalized people into their church. While these services are meant to offer support, Guzman-Garcia uncovers how they also end up enacting their own spiritual versions of carceral control.
These faith-based organizations tend to socialize people to sanctify state power, either by promoting the idea that collective protests and social movements that challenge capitalism or capitalist exploitation would be unsuccessful, or by putting forward beliefs that the solution to social problems is a matter of “saving your soul,” not working for structural change. Thus, these evangelical settings both perpetuate and disrupt the dominant the racial and gendered social order, sustaining and strengthening state power.
Guzman-Garcia’s analysis urges us to assess the gendered logics and spiritual ideologies that fuel contemporary forms of American carceral governance and consider who exactly benefits from this spiritual and political labor.
— Lynne Haney, author of Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers
"Melissa Guzman-Garcia keenly maneuvers the worlds of Latine Pentecostals as they perform a paradox: They testify to experiencing forms of agency and freedom within church institutions that sustain logics of the carceral state. As Guzman-Garcia is increasingly welcomed into vulnerable sites of prayer, praise, and outreach —sacred circles of support cultivated by Pentecostal women — so too are readers drawn in. The carefully curated narratives of Guzman-Garcia's collaborators offer deep insights into how lived religion shapes the political imaginations of people bearing precarious identities, often in surprising ways."
— Jonathan Calvillo, author of When the Spirit Is Your Inheritance: Reflections on Borderlands Pentecostalism
"Guzman's startling study based on years of intensive interviews in Latiné born-again churches revises conventional narratives of Christianity's transformational power in minoritized communities. Living Redemption is a disquieting reinterpretation of that old hymn "Ya tengo la Victory" / "Victory in Jesus" for contemporary evangelical and Pentecostal hermanas."
— Rudy V. Busto, author of King Tiger: The Religious Vision of Reies Lípez Tijerina