
Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return
Valentina Napolitano
Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return examines contemporary migration in the context of a Roman Catholic Church eager to both comprehend and act upon the movements of peoples. Combining extensive fieldwork with lay and religious Latin American migrants in Rome and analysis of the Catholic Church’s historical desires and anxieties around conversion since the period of colonization, Napolitano sketches the dynamics of a return to a faith’s putative center. Against a Eurocentric notion of Catholic identity, Napolitano shows how the Americas reorient Europe.
Napolitano examines both popular and institutional Catholicism in the celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe and El Senor de los Milagros, papal encyclicals, the Latin American Catholic Mission, and the order of the Legionaries of Christ. Tracing the affective contours of documented and undocumented immigrants’ experiences and the Church’s multiple postures toward transnational migration, she shows how different ways of being Catholic inform constructions of gender, labor, and sexuality whose fault lines intersect across contemporary Europe.
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About Valentina Napolitano
Reviews for Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return
-Elizabeth Castelli Barnard College "Napolitano's book is a rich ethnography of the historically fraught relationship between the Vatican and its Latin American flock. In this moment of heightened anxiety about immigration and shrinking church following in Europe, Napolitano deftly tracks the fissure between communitas and otherness that haunts European Catholicism today. Told through the lives of Latin American immigrants to Italy, this wonderful book shows us what it means to live a faith that is losing hold of its civilizational mission."
-Saba Mahmood University of California, Berkeley "...the project of injecting Catholic realities into the burgeoning field of the anthropology of Christianity is vital, and Migrant Hearts demonstrates the kind of sophisticated studies it can produce." -Marginalia