CCISTHE CENTER FORCOMPARATIVE IMMIGRATION STUDIESNetworks and Religious Communities Among SalvadoranImmigrants in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C.By Cecilia MenjívarUniversity of ArizonaWorking Paper No. 25October, 2000University of California-San DiegoLa Jolla, California 92093-05101Networks and Religious Communities Among Salvadoran Immigrantsin San Francisco, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C.*Cecilia MenjívarSchool of Justice StudiesArizona State UniversityIn this paper I seek to examine the place of religious institutions in the lives of Salvadoranimmigrants, particularly how these immigrants view their links with and participation in thechurch in light of the conditions in which they live. Religious rituals infuse with transcendentalmeaning important events in the immigrants’ lives, but religious institutions also respond inpractical terms to the immigrants’ needs and afflictions. This observation is not exceptional inthe cases I present in this piece, however, relative to the importance of religion in theimmigrants’ lives, contemporary immigration scholars have not focused enough on this aspect of *PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION.I would like to thank the participants in this study for their patience and willingness to share theirviews with us. I would also like to thank my assistants (Carmen Albertos and Carlos Ramírez inWashington D.C.; Eugene Arène, Cindy Bejarano, Michelle Moran-Taylor, Eddie Portillos andEmily Skop in Phoenix) for their help in conducting field research, as well as all the religiousworkers and leaders with whom I spoke. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in San Francisco aspart of a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Funding for theWashington D.C. portion came from a grant from the Pews Charitable Trusts that Anna Peterson,Manuel Vasquez, and Phillip Williams obtained; they included me in their research team. Andfunds for the Phoenix portion came from grants from the Center for Urban Inquiry and a Dean’sIncentive Grant at Arizona State University. Direct correspondence to: Cecilia Menjívar, Schoolof Justice Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-0403, or e-mail [email protected] immigration flows. Immigrants’ religious participation was a major theme in sociologicalstudies of turn-of-the-century immigration. Scholars’ interest in the role of religion inimmigrants’ experiences stemmed in part from the prominent place that the church occupied inthe lives of immigrants, as religious congregations developed an intricate welfare system to servethe needs of Italian, Irish, and Jewish newcomers. Stephenson (1932) observes that the Lutheranchurch constituted the fundamental institutional nucleus around which Swedish immigrantsstructured their lives. But the massive migration of Catholics, Jews, and German Lutherans alsoincreased the sociological relevance of religious identity itself (Warner, 1993: 1058). This earlier research interest in the role religion and religious institutions in the lives ofimmigrants gave way to new foci in studies of contemporary immigration. Post-1965immigration studies have tended to concentrate on the ever-increasing diversity that the newimmigrants have brought to American soil, addressing issues related to these immigrants’participation in the labor force, the sociodemographic characteristics of the immigrants, theeffects of legality and immigration policy on the immigrants’ lives, family and gender relations,and social networks among these immigrants (Menjívar 1999).1 These new foci, however, havenot signified that the importance of religion for immigrants has diminished. Religious institutionshave remained central in immigrant life, as reflected in a recent resurgence of studies ofimmigrant religious communities (Kim 1994; Kim 1991; Levitt 1998; Warner and Wittner 1998;Menjívar 1999, 2000; Ebaugh and Charfetz 2000). Throughout the world, religious groups nowconstitute some of the most important forms of social organization and sources of worldviews(Rudolph 1997). And as Herberg (1960) observed in Protestant, Catholic, Jew, religion is afundamental category of identity and association in American society, capable of forgingsolidarities and identities, and through which immigrants could find a place in American life.3Thus, religious institutions provide an important lens to understand immigrant life moregenerally and, at the same time, the place of immigrants in the host society.The present work examines the centrality of religious institutions in the lives of Catholicand Evangelical Salvadorans in three locations—San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Phoenix.I examine how the immigrants’ church and their religiosity contribute to their settlement in thereceiving society across different receiving contexts, an evaluation based on the immigrants’own views. Thus, rather than assessing (with my own lens) whether the church and participationin religious activities are more or less conducive to immigrant assimilation, I focus on what thesereligious spaces represent in the lives of the immigrants, which of course, may reflect moregenerally the role of religion in the incorporation of immigrants. Given the importance of thecontext of arrival for the lives of immigrants I will gauge the place of the church and religiousactivities in three different receiving contexts for Salvadoran immigrants. San Franciscorepresents a well-established receiving area for Salvadorans; this city has the longest history ofSalvadoran migration to the United States (Menjívar 2000). Washington D.C. is a relativelynewer receiving point, with the overwhelming majority of Salvadorans arriving within the pasttwo decades. Yet Washington is the only U.S. city where Salvadorans comprise the majority ofthe Latino population and are, therefore, highly concentrated in this city. And Phoenix differsfrom both in that it is one of the newest points of destination for Salvadorans—the majorityhaving arrived in the 1990s—and they are neither the majority of the Latino population nor arethey highly concentrated in this locale. This comparison offers a unique opportunity to examinethe same immigrant group in different locations, which allows disentangling the effects thatcontexts of reception and receiving communities may have on the importance of religiousinstitutions in immigrant life.4This study focuses on two different religious