Living Redemption

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.