Faith Perspective Of Migrant Workers

Abstract

The dissertation explores faith perspectives and practices of Mexican migrant farmworkers inOntario using a social-science approach called “Lived Religion”. It uses qualitative data fromethnographic field research done by the author with Mexican migrant farm workers inSouthwestern Ontario, Canada from 2012-2017.The objective of the research was to interrogate faith perspectives of Mexican MigrantFarmworkers who come to Canada eight months a year from April to November under theSeasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). They are among approximately 20,000 migrantworkers who work in fields, orchards and greenhouses in Canada every year. Most of them self-identify ascatolicos(Catholics). They are generally between the ages of 25-40, male and married.The argument for the dissertation flows in three stages. Part 1 begins with a survey of the historyof mission and migration by looking at the historiography of six migrant groups: Nestorians,Huguenots, Puritans, Acadians, Mennonites and West Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. Theauthor argues that the plurality of christian faith expressions in the world today can be tracedback to migration and the many different inculturations of the gospel that was brought aboutbecause of it.A critical analysis of this historiography was done using social science concepts of “structure”and “agency”. The author critiques Euro-American and ethnocentric readings of migration,Christian history, culture and biblical narratives and the normalized practice of defining religionwithin Western frameworks and then applying them to non-Western cultures.Part 2 interprets four narratives from the Hebrew Bible: Joseph, Esther, Ruth and Daniel todetermine what the narratives say about the agency of God in the stories. Central to postcolonialreadings of the Bible is a critique of whose voices are included and/or excluded from thesewritings and who benefits from telling and reading these sacred stories in a certain way and notanother. The author uses insights from Ricoeur and Gadamer’s hermeneutics to affirm that nosingle hermeneutical lens is able to exhaust the manifold layers of meaning that can be found in these texts.This is followed in Part 3 by excerpts from interviews where Mexican Migrant workers describe faith in their own words. Participant responses were coded and clustered into five themes:1. lasalud(Health)2. la familia(Family)3. la fe(Faith)4. las remesas(Remittances)and 5. la lucha(Struggle). The author analyses the findings and suggests that religion is a dominant register inmigrant ways of believing and belonging