TUNE IN HERE to listen to Alyshia Gálvez talk about activism and devotion among Mexicans in NYC:

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Professor Gálvez is a cultural anthropologist (PhD, NYU 2004) whose work focuses on the efforts by Mexican immigrants in New York City to achieve the rights of citizenship. This talk asks: How do spaces of devotion become spaces of activism? What role does faith play in the construction of civic spaces and civil society among recent immigrant groups? What are the limitations of these forms of social mobilization? This talk will explore a decade of Guadalupan-based devotion and activism for immigration rights among recent Mexican immigrants in New York City. Based on Gálvez’s extended ethnographic research in New York City and many years of activism and advocacy, she will reflect on the changing immigrant rights movement and its intersection with faith based institutions and organizations.

Professor Gálvez joined the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College/City University of New York in the Fall of 2007, as an Assistant Professor. Her book Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants was released in December 2009 on New York University Press. Her second book, Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers: Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care and the Birth Weight Paradox, is in press in the series Critical Issues in Health and Medicine, on Rugers University Press. Other recent publications include Traveling Virgins/Virgenes Viajeras, a special issue of the journal e-misférica which she co-guest-edited; a volume she edited, Performing Religion in the Americas: Media, Politics and Devotion in the 21st Century (Berg/Seagull 2007); and articles in Social Text, International Migration, e-misférica and Revista Enfoques (Chile).

This talk was delivered on Tuesday, February 12th, 2013 at Columbia University in the City of New York as part of Fencing in God? – Religion, Immigration, and Incarceration.  Hosted by Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, this Spring 2013 semester-long series of events  focused on the ways in which religion and mobility intersect with immigration and incarceration.