Maya Muslims in Chiapas: Religious Conversion as Sociocultural Empowerment?

Abstract

This article explores evangelical Maya conversion to Islam, a phenomenon in Chiapas/Mexico since the 1990s. It shows that conversion was triggered by missionaries but soon turned into an autonomous defense strategy against religious discrimination, economic inequality and asymmetrical political power distribution under the dominance of Catholic Indigenous elites with ties to the corporate state. Through blending with their own culture, Maya converts transform local expressions of Islam (mostly mystical Sufi orders) into a cultural resource and use it to strengthen their collective identity. This assimilation of Islam is a recent example of cultural hybridization which demonstrates how in the Latin American context even far-fetched cultural resources can be operationalized as a means for sociocultural empowerment.