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. 

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.”

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