Convenient Liaisons: Brazilian Immigration/Emigration and the Spatial-relationships of Religious Networks

In the late 1980s over one million Brazilians left Brazil without returning. Today, over 3.1 million Brazilians live abroad, and approximately 1.3 million Brazilians reside in the United States. Brazilian immigrants are not fleeing abject starvation or glaring economic troubles; nor are they political refugees seeking asylum, or fleeing a civil war. In what ways have Brazilian immigrants (re)interpreted religious practices in the United States, and how are they shaping new transnational identities? How are public perceptions on religious practices and inter-relationships among Brazilian immigrants impacting new U.S. religious and cultural landscapes? By using multiple methods, and a transnational theoretical perspective, this paper addresses these important questions inherently tied to topics related to space, place, and immigration studies. Respondents’ inter-relationships with religious practices provide important glimpses and insights into their idealizations, expectations and conflicts among and between Brazilian immigrants in the United States and returnees in Brazil. I conducted fieldwork research in four locations in two receiving communities: (1) Framingham, Massachusetts (an older destination), and, (2) Marietta, Georgia, (a more recent destination) both in the United States, and; (3) Governador Valadares, in the state of Minas Gerais and (4) Piracanjuba, in the state of Goiás - two sending communities in Brazil. Exposure to religious networks; globalized consumer markets; and U.S values, and imageries disseminated by returnees, and opportunities to increase economic capital, further exacerbated an idealization and a seduction to emigrate. Brazil is home to the largest number of Catholics in the world, with 74 percent of the total population self-identifying as Catholic. Yet unlike Europe, where most Catholics have become secular, Brazil has one of the highest rates of conversions to Protestant religions (mainly Pentecostal), where three in four Pentecostals were former Catholics. Religious spaces are instrumental in generating networks used to facilitate out-migration from sending communities (particularly the evangélicos) where the pastor plays a key role on many levels of migrants’ livelihoods, especially in the migration process