Growing Numbers of Latinos ‘Revert’ to Islam

In 2014, the PBS program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly visited the Islamic Center of Greater Miami in Miami Gardens, Florida, to cover a growing phenomenon: Latino converts to Islam. Many were raised Catholic, but felt more at home in their new faith. “The Trinity was very confusing to me,” one woman said. “I didn’t understand how God was a man or how a man could become a god.”

The report said that around 50% of the converts of Hispanic origin at the time were women, and many were choosing to wear head coverings. “The reason I wear the scarf is because I expect to be respected by the opposite gender,” said another Latina convert. “I don’t want to be catcalled and I don’t want to be judged by my appearance. In fact, I want to be judged by my intellect.”

In the past decade, the number of Latino converts to Islam has grown—and so has the proportion of those converts who are women.

Today, in Miami, as in the United States at large, a substantial number of converts to Islam are Latino—about 9% nationwide according to a 2020 survey, an increase from 5% in 2017. Estimates of the Latino Muslim population in the United States range from 50,000 to 70,000. Many are of either Mexican or Puerto Rican descent, but conversion to Islam is a phenomenon across Latin America, where multigenerational Lebanese and Palestinian migrant communities have settled. This phenomenon reflects shifting U.S. Latino attitudes toward religion, culture, and gender roles in the 2020s.

Like many Americans, Latinos find themselves seeking stability in an uncertain time. Growing numbers are leaving the Catholicism in which they were raised—and they face unique cultural challenges and have distinct cultural affinities that make Islam attractive. Hispanic women in particular find themselves drawn to Islam. Anecdotally, and according to reports from Islamic centers around the country, Latinas today constitute the clear majority of converts in the U.S. According to the findings of the Latino Muslim Survey published in 2017, the overwhelming majority (73%) of 560 Latino Muslims across 33 states who responded were women.

Those women, said author Ken Chitwood, who has written about and researched the Latino Muslim community extensively, “are right at the forefront and often, you might say, pioneras—they’re pioneers in that community.”

The golden-colored domes of the Islamic Center of Greater Miami shone in the afternoon sun on a recent Friday, crowning the horizon of a landscape that is clustered with apartment complexes and strip malls. The mosque itself is surrounded by tall, lush privacy hedges and palm trees. When I arrived after Friday prayers, except for the imam’s used 2017 Hyundai, the parking lot had mostly cleared out. Crossing the welcoming courtyard with a graceful murmuring fountain at its center, I was greeted by two older men who had stuck around to chat under the shade of a colonnade.

Abdul Rashid and Ifran Khan are both grandfathers, who beamingly showed me pictures of their grandchildren on their phones. Rashid, 72, is originally from Pakistan, and has lived in the U.S. for 50 years. In that time, he has picked up Spanish and become an unofficial translator at the mosque. He told me that because he spoke Spanish, he was the first contact for a Cuban man when he arrived at the mosque 15 years ago, a man who he said has since “reverted” to Islam. (Muslims speak not of conversion but “reversion”—humanity is born Muslim, and when a person chooses Islam, they are returning to their original state.) Both men assured me that there is a substantial Latino revert population at the Islamic Center of Greater Miami, most of whom are not recent immigrants but longtime U.S. residents. And it’s not just Latinos, the men told me, saying that there is a reversion almost weekly. A man converted earlier that very day by publicly reciting the Shahada, the Islamic profession of faith, in Arabic and English: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is his last messenger.” This kind of output, however, is not the result of a grand missionary project. “We’re not really doing any work,” Rashid said. “It’s God.”

“My family was very devout Catholic,” said Latina Muslim convert Monica Traverzo in a November 2020 episode of the podcast Mommying While Muslim. But in her recollection, this devoutly Catholic family didn’t attend church often. “My family was still very rooted in their Catholicism, but it was more of like an agnostic approach.”

Traverzo tried out different Christian denominations before converting to Islam in college. “It was just attractive to me to live a God-conscious lifestyle,” she said. While she said her family was “taken aback” when she began wearing hijab, in other respects they were very pleased with the positive changes they saw taking root in her life. Culturally, she saw a lot of overlap that she thinks helps explain the number of Latinas coming over to Islam. “I feel like Islam has this sense of family that Latinos really admire because Islam teaches us about having these healthy, nurturing family life environments,” she said. “That’s also part of Hispanic culture.”

A March 2020 episode of the podcast Me & My Muslim Friends featured two Latina converts, Kathia Guerrero and Shirley Puente. Puente comes from a Peruvian background and converted in 2011. She describes her religious upbringing as culturally Catholic. “I wouldn’t say that we were super religious,” she said. “We weren’t the type that went to church every Sunday.”

Like Traverzo, Puente experimented with different religions before converting to Islam after befriending a Muslim girl in college. Seeing her friend moved to tears when speaking about her faith, Traverzo was intrigued. “I was like, you know what?” she said. “I kind of want that type of spiritual connection. Like, I don’t have it. I don’t feel any type of, I guess, emotion when I talk about Christianity like that.”

Guerrero is a single mother who converted in 2015. Her family came to the United States from Mexico when she was 10 years old. Guerrero’s father was a Christian pastor, and her family was very religious growing up. Music, pants, makeup, jewelry were all forbidden. She said that after her father left the family when she was 13, “my family just kind of fell apart completely,” once her mom went to work full time. She began engaging in risky behaviors.

“The time that I decided to convert was in a time when I was down. I was very depressed. At that time, I was not practicing anything,” she said. Guerrero came to Islam through independent study, watching Muslim prayers on YouTube, and practicing Ramadan on her own. “I fasted and it gave me the peace that I was looking for,” she said. “And a month later I converted.”

When I described these women’s stories to Rashid, he was unsurprised. The converts who come to his mosque are affected by the same institutional decline as everyone else. “When the marital institution fails, the society fails, and that is the fortress for the child,” he said. The materialistic culture of instant gratification are not American values, he said, but “Satanic values.” His daughter, he said, is a counselor for lower-income families, many of whom are Latino. He said she regularly encounters families dealing with domestic abuse and the consequences of absentee fathers.

Rashid’s theory is that wider cultural forces are bringing people in. He likens the wider cultural forces—of materialism, instant gratification, failing institutions, and the deterioration of the traditional family—to a hurricane. “A hurricane affects everybody,” he said. “We are all in the same boat.” And although even Muslim youth are not immune to these pressures, Rashid said, Islam still has what he calls “social pressures” that provide social structure and expectations to ground its adherents.

He suspects that the emphasis on religion and family in Islam is what attracts Latinos and Latinas, who may have been raised in large, religious families. They are searching for strong religious and family networks of the kind they enjoyed growing up, but which they now find falling away for various reasons. “There is an emptiness,” Rashid said, and they are “not getting the answer at church.” In Catholicism, the faith in which the majority of Latinos are raised, believers go through priests for sacraments—baptism, confession, communion. By contrast, Rashid said, he observes that Latinos are attracted to the direct connection to the Creator they find that Islam offers (prayer—a direct relationship between the believer and God—is one of the five pillars of Islam, along with a profession of faith, fasting, almsgiving, and the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca).

The sermon that Rashid and Khan had just heard that Friday was on the importance of reading in the Islamic tradition. The affable, youthful preacher, originally from Yemen, conducted his sermon in English. “A brother asked me the other day about how to handle the problems in the Muslim community with the youth,” he said. “Issues like mental health, issues like identity challenges, [in] the Muslim American space, people who are born and raised here.” He responded with four characteristics of a successful community: a strong family, next, a strong faith community with shared norms and values, then investment in education, and finally, an understanding of the law and of dominant culture, which he defined as “a way and style of life.”

In the CDC’s most recent National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 42% of Hispanic women reported experiencing contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetimes. According to U.S. Census data, almost a third of Hispanic-origin families in 2023 were led by a single parent, the overwhelming majority of which was the mother, a number that has trended upward overall both among Latinos and wider U.S. society in recent decades.

By contrast, although just as likely to be married as the general U.S. population, American Muslims are less likely to be divorced. And while it is tempting to say that traditional family values are what is pulling Latinos, also known for their social conservatism, the 2014 survey of Latino Muslim attitudes showed something different: While just over half said that a personal crisis led them to convert, 69% said it was Islam’s emphasis on gender equality that led them to the faith.

Rashid blames the media for the perception that Islam is a repressive faith for women. Indeed, the Latina voices on the Mommying While Muslim and Me & My Muslim Friends podcasts said the same thing. Even though Guerrero grew up in a strict religious Christian home that prohibited expressions of vanity, she sees wearing hijab as a form of self-assertion. “I did a lot of explaining when I was in the process of converting. And now, I feel like I don’t have to give anyone explanations,” she said. “I don’t have to, you know, convince anybody that I’m Mexican. I’m Mexican. And I am Muslim, because I chose to be.”

Guerrero said that hijab is an outward sign of an inward reality, and a personal reminder of their connection to the divine. “I’ve always been an independent woman, and I feel like because I had the choice to wear it, I wore it,” she said. “For me, it’s like a limit, like a line that reminds me personally where I should be and what I shouldn’t be doing, or what I shouldn’t be portraying as.” In a parallel development, some young Catholic women have begun wearing veils to Mass. Indeed, Hazel Gomez, a Latina Muslim convert of over 20 years, said that the hijab brings her closer to her Hispanic Catholic culture—the Virgin of Guadalupe wore a veil, after all. “I wear a scarf to be like La Virgencita,” she said. “Every woman has a choice. And so my choice was I wanna be como la Virgen Maria. I wanna be como la Virgen de Guadalupe.”

Chitwood acknowledges that the prospect of marriage to a Muslim man is a factor for some Latina Muslim converts who have grown dissatisfied with attitudes among Latino men in their own community. “What’s been really fascinating to me is hearing from Latina converts who say that they converted to Islam as a way to push back on the sexualization of women within the cultures that they were born into or live within.” He noted that not all Latinas change their dress or begin wearing veils when they convert, but some who do feel more liberated. “One woman said to me that she now can be heard because of her voice, because of who she is, not what curves she has,” he said. “And so she feels that she can get more respect as an activist, as an outspoken woman, because she now veils and she wears modest, you know, baggier clothing, that doesn’t show off her figure as much.”

But marriage is not the primary motivation for the Latina trend toward conversion; 95% of respondents in the Latino Muslim Survey, the majority of whom were women, said that it was belief in one God, and 94% said it was a desire for a direct connection to the creator.

This tells a wider story of Latino American disaffiliation from Catholicism, both among U.S.-born and foreign-born Hispanics. According to Pew Research, although 65% of Hispanic adults say they were raised Catholic, only 43% identify as Catholic today. Hispanic Protestants have made modest gains, now accounting for 21% of Hispanic adults, and 30% now say they are religiously unaffiliated.

“It is important to keep in mind that most Hispanics in the United States are either unaffiliated to a traditional Christian denomination or simply belong to one in a nominal or tangential manner,” said Hosffman Ospino, professor of Hispanic ministry and religious education at Boston College. “We cannot assume that all or most Latinos are Catholics; we cannot assume that all or most are interested in religion. We are at a point in the history of this population in which the search for God is happening largely as a search for meaning without the pressure of family life or cultural traditions. This is where organized religion comes in. Churches and religious leaders must make a case as to why their convictions should appeal to young Latinos/as and other young people. Many of these churches and leaders seem to be falling short. Islam may be appealing to many Latinos for various reasons. It is not a tradition as structured as, say, Catholic Christianity is. Latinos may have found Islam in their neighborhoods and have observed that it has transformed the lives of their friends, so they may want some of that experience. A good number of Latinos see in Islam, as lived in the United States, a faith experience that allows them to advocate for themselves and their communities. This is something similar to what one can see among some Black people in the U.S. who have embraced Islam.”

Alejandro Aguilar-Titus is the assistant director for the Secretariat of Cultural Diversity in the Church under the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the convening for all the American Catholic bishops. He attributes the loss of Latino Catholics to a variety of factors: to religious groups from other denominations who have ministries aimed at attracting migrants to their faith, and to marriage outside of Hispanic communities. He is responsible for a national initiative, Por Tu Matrimonio, a Spanish-language ministry aimed at building healthy relationships and families, both before and after marriage. One blog post, “How many hours does the woman work at home?” attempts to address the tension that traditional expectations of gender roles in a marriage can generate when a wife works outside the home.

This is an important initiative because, Aguilar-Titus tells me, one in five Latinas marry non-Latinos. And, in 2023, among Hispanic newlyweds born in the U.S., 40% married non-Hispanics. Aguilar-Titus attributes this in part to a reality among U.S. Latinos that mirrors a broader societal trend: higher educational attainment among Hispanic women than Hispanic men. While they lag behind both white men and women, Latinas are twice as likely to have bachelor’s degrees than they were 20 years ago. And although they don’t participate in the labor force at the same rates as Latino males, Latinas’ participation rates have increased 5 percentage points since 2003, to 69%. Moreover, in the last 15 years, the number of Latinas who are in financially equitable relationships or even breadwinners has increased modestly. At the same time, many U.S. Latinas still face pressure to perform traditionally feminine roles—cooking, cleaning, marriage, and motherhood—all while looking fantastic.

According to USCCB statistics, both parents are employed in nearly 60% of Hispanic marriages with children under 18. “That, I know, has created tension,” Aguilar-Titus said, with regard to traditional expectations of gender roles.

According to the USCCB, over 80% of Miami’s Catholic churches offer Mass in Spanish. That is higher than the national average—according to Aguilar-Titus, 4,500 out of 16,000 Catholic parishes in the United States, or around 28%, offer Mass in Spanish.

“The ability to speak Spanish is the leading indicator about maintaining Catholic identity,” said Aguilar-Titus. “The more you lose that cultural inheritance, if you will, the less likely you will be to understand maintaining practices and beliefs in the Catholic context.”

“In the United States,” said Phillip Carter, a sociolinguist at Florida International University in Miami, “languages tend to shift due to generation by generation, such that they disappear for the most part by or within third generation.”

This, Aguilar-Titus contends, leads to the dwindling of Catholic identity in Hispanic families. “While 69% of foreign-born Hispanics are considered Catholic, this number decreases to 59% for second-generation Hispanics and to 40% for third-generation Hispanics,” he wrote in a 2015 article. “In other words, these young people are more likely to remain Catholic if they are bilingual and bicultural.”

Carter’s research found that a preference for English endured among Spanish speakers in Miami, even among immigrant groups. “The language tends to hold on, at least in liturgical situations, a little bit longer,” Carter said. And while they don’t do services in Spanish at the Islamic Center of Miami, “I bet you eventually they’ll start doing stuff in Spanish, too, because Spanish and English all live in the same household [in Miami],” he said, particularly if whole families start to attend Islamic services together.

“One way in which language and religion are similar to one another, is that they can be really, really symbolic,” Carter said. For women who are looking to shed some negative associations their Hispanic Catholic identity holds, the lack of Spanish language may even be part of the appeal. “[Language] can be really, really symbolic of how I’m, you know, positioning myself,” he said. “My identity.” He points to Polish using Latin, rather than Cyrillic characters, to distance itself from Russian and Orthodox Christianity.

There are Spanish-language resources and organizations for Latino Muslims. The very first, Alianza Islamica, started in the 1970s in Spanish Harlem. This past May, the annual Islamic Circle of North America convention, which attracts tens of thousands from around the country, conducted parallel Spanish-language sessions in Spanish and hosted a “Latino Community Reunion.” Islam in Spanish is an Islamic literacy organization aimed at the Hispanic community that is fundraising to build the United States’ first Latino-led Spanish-speaking masjid (mosque). The LADO Group promotes Islam in Latino communities.

Another, the Ojala Foundation, represents a clever play on words.

“There’s thousands and thousands of Arabic loanwords in Spanish,” said Brian Catlos, the director of the Mediterranean studies group at University of Colorado, Boulder and author of Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain. “Ojala is an Arabism,” which means, “hopefully,” and comes from “inshallah,” an Arabic phrase meaning, “if God wills it.”

Castilian Spanish is “like a mixture of Latin romance, grammar, vocabulary with Arabic vocabulary,” he said. “I compare it to Spanglish.”

“What we call Spain today,” said Catlos, “for much of its history, that entire peninsula was, you know, under political domination of Islam.” Even today, that influence endures in Spanish culture, cuisine, and language.

Religion, too. “There are some components to Latin American Catholicism that has some commonalities with some of the practices of Islam,” Aguilar-Titus said. He points to chanting at Mass, and similarity between the rosary and Muslim tasbih prayer beads.

“Latino Muslims do feel like there is what they call a return to Al-Andalus,” Chitwood said, “that before they were Catholic, that they were Muslim. This of course ignores significant Jewish populations in Spain, the Iberian Peninsula at the time.” Still, there is an element of postmodern meaning-making in this romantic view of conversion as harking back to the golden Age of Islam. “It takes some imagination to do so,” Chitwood said wryly. In Spain itself, Spanish converts to Islam have increased by a factor of 10 in the last 30 years.

“It’s difficult to separate, you know, what you might call a sort of historical cultural affinity,” Catlos said, from “a modern kind of nostalgic, perhaps reappraisal of that history, which maybe you know, emphasizes certain aspects of it [but which] may not sort of really represent cultural continuity.”

Catlos identifies a danger in treating religion as a latent atavistic tendency, what he calls “almost a genetic view of religion,” which risks categorizing people based on ancestry. More likely, he said, the trend toward conversion in the Latin world has more to do with what he calls “the history of cultures, the history of appropriation and borrowing and imitating.”

Chitwood contends that globalization and the IT revolution supercharged a long tradition of cross-culturalism and creolization in Latin America and the Caribbean. Where once indigenous belief systems intermingled with each other, with Catholic Christianity, and, to a lesser extent Protestantism (Pentecostalism is growing exponentially in South America), today residents have access to religions the world over. Accordingly, Chitwood seeks with his work to expand both popular and academic understandings of Islam as a purely Middle Eastern phenomenon. To his point, the Latino-Muslim affinity seems to work both ways—TikTok videos of Saudi guys imitating Los Angeles 1990s cholo culture made the social media rounds last month, a trend that is unlikely to originate from a collective unconscious rooted in the babbling fountains and perfumed gardens of the Alhambra.

On a sunny, humid Saturday morning in Miami’s Little Havana, a rainy mist came in and out of hiding. I bought a cafecito on Calle Ocho and walked past the old guys playing dominos. The tourists were scheduled to arrive at 10 a.m. sharp, the earliest it seemed most of the cigar shops and restaurants opened. Spanish-speaking Jehovah’s Witnesses had set up their Spanish-language literature stand on the saturated sidewalk in anticipation of the day’s activity. Indeed, I recall seeing more Jehovah’s Witnesses than Catholic religious symbols, aside from one small storefront selling Virgin Mary statues. The paucity of Catholicism stuck out to me, a Mexican granddaughter for whom La Virgencita was simply part of the wallpaper of Hispanic life growing up.

I took off the light linen blazer I had brought for my flight later that day, and a man’s voice called to me from a storefront. It was a catcall with a Spanish accent, which I returned with a frown that I hoped managed to convey both my disapproval and incredulity. Catcalling? At a woman in her late 30s? In 2024?

I thought back to the older men at the Islamic Center in Miami Gardens the day before. They had called out to me, too—in greeting, and to ask if they could assist me. Soon we had been immersed in a thoughtful conversation about religion and culture.

I wasn’t about to take the Shahada—the Muslim profession of faith necessary for conversion to the faith. But I feel like I got a small insight into why another woman might.