1. travel
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3. mexico and central america

Columbia University’s Center for Mexican Studies
and the Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life
invite you to the conference
Emergent Forms of Religious Life in Contemporary Mexico
Mexico’s democratic transition of the past three decades developed in tandem with deep
structural change at all levels of society, including in the sphere of religious belief, organization
and practice. A field of religious choice and competition has rapidly developed, alongside the
new field of competetion between political parties. This two-day seminar explores the emergent
religious forms in contemporary Mexican public life, and includes themes such as: new narratives
and social practices for coping with changing forms everyday life; the nature of engagement of
religious organizations and trends in Mexican public life—ranging changing strategies within the
Catholic Church to Pentecostalism and beyond; and the proliferation of cults ranging from the
Santa Muerte and Michoacán’s Knights Templar, to multi-level marketing organizations.
Thursday, April 2
Buell Hall, East Gallery
515 West 116th Street
8:30am
Doors open for registration and coffee
9:00am
Welcoming Remarks
 Karen Barkey and Claudio Lomnitz, Columbia University
9:30—10:30am
Keynote
 Kevin Lewis O’Neill, “On Hunting: Pentecostalism and Predation in Postwar Guatemala”,
Univeristy of Toronto
10:30am-12:30pm
Session 1: Plurality and Diversity—Initial Panorama
 Moderator: Claudio Lomnitz, Columbia University
 Roberto Blancarte, “The New Challenges for Catholics and Catholicism in a Plural Mexico”, El
Colegio de México
 Carlos Garma, “Perspectives on Religious Diversity in Mexico”, Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana (UAM Iztapalapa)
 Hugo José Suárez, “Religious Diversity in a Popular Mexico City Neighborhood”, Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
 Andrew Chesnut, “The Pentecostalization of Latin America”, Virginia Commonwealth
University
12:30-2:00pm
Break
2:00-4:00pm
Session 2: New Economies, Justice and Emergent Forms
 Moderator: José Moya, Columbia University
 Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga, “Entering the Sacred Economic Cosmos of Capitalism Through
Network Direct Selling Organizations”, El Colegio de Jalisco
 José Carlos Aguiar, “Only Death is Fair: Crisis, Popular Justice, and Legibility in the Devotion to
Santa Muerte in Mexico”, Leiden University
 Judit Bokser Liwerant, “Changing Profiles of Judaism in Mexico: Ethnocultural Diaspora and
Religion’s Revival”, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
 Alyshia Gálvez, “Post-Guadalupanismo and Nuevo-Guadalupanismo: Mexico and the United
States Now”, Lehman College, The City University of New York (CUNY)
Friday, April 3
Knox Hall, Room 509
606 West 122nd Street
8:30am
Doors open for registration and coffee
9:00-11:30am
Session 3: Conversion, Awakening, Apostasy
 Moderator: Caterina Pizzigoni, Columbia University
 Renée de la Torre Castellanos, “Neo-Mexicanismo: the New Age Indian Spiritual Awakening”,
Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS Occidente)
 Graciela Mochkofsky, “The Rise of a New Judaism in Latin America”, New York University
 Claudio Lomnitz, “The Knights Templar—Notes on the Cartel as Religious Cult”, Columbia
University
 Carolina Rivera, “Evangelic Indigenous Peoples’ Eviction After their Religious Adscription
Change”, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS
Sureste)
11:30am-2:00pm
Break
2:15-2:45pm
Session 3 (continued): Conversion, Awakening, Apostasy
Wrap-up and discussion from previous session
2:45-3:00 pm
Break
3:00-5:00pm
Round-Table Discussion on Emergent Forms: Setting An Agenda for the Formation of a
Working Group
 Discussion Leaders: Roberto Blancarte, Renée de la Torre Castellanos, Kevin O’Neill, Claudio
Lomnitz, and Karen Barkey.
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Summaries and Bios
Keynote
 Kevin Lewis O’Neill, “On Hunting: Pentecostalism and Predation in Postwar Guatemala”,
Univeristy of Toronto
The millitarization of Mexico has helped to make Guatemala a principal point of transit for
cocaine produced in the Andes and bound for the United States. One effect has been a spike in the
use of crack cocaine in Guatemala. Drug trafficking countries, the literature notes, often become
drug consuming countries. Another effect is the proliferation of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation
centers. These informal and largely unregulated centers warehouse users (often against their
will) in the name of both security and salvation. This talk, deeply ethnographic, details the
practice of hunting, or bringing users to rehab, to consider how and to what effect predation
underlies pastoralism in but also beyond the Guatemalan context.
Kevin Lewis O’Neill is an associate professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the
Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He is author of City of
God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (2010) and Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and
Gang Prevention in Guatemala (2015). He is also co-editor of Genocide: Truth, Memory, and
Representation (2011) as well as Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space and Insecurity in Postwar
Guatemala (2011). His essays have been published in journals such as Public Culture, Social Text,
Cultural Anthropology, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.
Welcoming Remarks
 Karen Barkey and Claudio Lomnitz, Columbia University
Karen Barkey is Professor of Sociology and History at Columbia University. She has been codirector of the Center for Democracy, Toleration and Religion (CDTR) with Alfred Stepan, and is
member of the Board of Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life
(IRCPL) since its foundation. She has been engaged in the comparative and historical study of
states, empires and state-society relations. Her main empirical site has been the Ottoman Empire,
in comparison with France, the Habsburg, and the Russian Empires. She also pays attention to the
Roman and Byzantine worlds as important predecessors of the Ottomans. Her latest
work, Empire of Difference (2008), is a comparative study of the flexibility and longevity of
imperial systems. She is now working on different projects on religion and toleration. She has
written on the early centuries of Ottoman state toleration and is now exploring different ways of
understanding how religious coexistence, toleration and sharing occurred in different historical
sites under Ottoman rule.
Claudio Lomnitz is A Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at the Department of
Antrhopology and the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia
University. He is the Director of Columbia University’s Center for Mexican Studies. His line of
research is in history, politics, and culture of Latin America, particularly of Mexico. He is former
editor of Public Culture and, prior to joining Columbia University, Lomnitz was distinguished
Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School of Social Research. He has
also taught at the University of Chicago and New York University. He received his Ph.D. in
Anthropology from Stanford University.
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Session 1: Plurality and Diversity—Initial Panorama
 Moderator: Claudio Lomntiz, Columbia University
 Roberto Blancarte, “The New Challenges for Catholics and Catholicism in a Plural
Mexico”, El Colegio de México
The increasing religious pluralism in Mexico has brought many challenges for Catholics and
Catholicism in the area. The most important is that, although still with a big majority and
culturally hegemonic, Catholicism can’t claim the centrality that had for centuries. And this is due
to a triple transformation. The first one is the drastic reduction of membership in the Church. The
second one is the consequence of the increasing secularization of society manifested by the fact
that religion covers a smaller area of social, economic and cultural life. The third one refers to the
reduction of the weight of the Catholic Church in the political arena due to the secularization of
State’s institutions.
Roberto Blancarte is Professor of the Center of Sociological Studies at El Colegio de México, and
Associate Professor in the Society, Religion and Laicism Group at the Centre National pour la
Recherche Scientifique in France. He is member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers
(level 3), founder of the Center of Studies of Religions in Mexico, and was president of the
Sociology of Religion Committee of the International Sociological Association. Other positions
include Professor at El Colegio Mexiquense (1989-1995); Counselor at the Mexican Embassy to
the Holy See (1995-1998); Chief of Advisers on religious affairs at Mexico’s Ministry of the
Interior (1998-1999); and Dean of El Colegio de Mexico (2006-2012). Blancarte is author of
numerous books, including La construcción de la República laica en México (2013), Para entender
el Estado laico (2008), Libertad religiosa, Estado laico y no discriminación (2008), Historia de la
Iglesia católica en México (1992), among others. He currently has a weekly column in the
Mexican newspapers Milenio and Noroeste, and conducts the TV show República Laica. He
obtained his B.A. in International Relations at El Colegio de México, and his Master Degree in
History and Civilizations and Ph.D. Degree at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in
France.
 Carlos Garma, “Perspectives on Religious Diversity in Mexico”, Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana (UAM Iztapalapa)
This presentation will give basic recent censal data to understand the current situation of
religious pluralism and diversity in Mexico. First, we shall show how religious diversity has
grown on a national level during the last 40 years. afterwards, we will discuss 5 specific cases.
Mexico city shows growing religious diversity with diverse pluralism. In contrat, Puebla shows
the strong predominance of official catholicism, as does the most catholic state in the country
guanajuato. Nuevo leon allows to see the situation of an important borderstate. Chiapas will
demonstrate the case of the most religiously plural state in mexico, with the strong presence of
evangelical groups among indian communities. To conclude we will mention how mexico now
presents a situation religious plurality that varies greatly by region and state, and which heralds
the end of the catholic monopoly in the country.
Carlos Garma is Professor at the Departament of Antropology at the Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana (UAM Iztapalapa) since 1984. His books include Protestantismo en una comunidad
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totonaca (1987), Las Peregrinaciones Religiosas, una aproximación with Robert Shadow (1994)
and Buscando el Espíritu, pentecostalismo en Iztapalapa y la Ciudad de México (2004). He has
published many articles on religious groups in various international journals, and is member of
multiple international scientific associations. He has directed over 70 dissertations at B.A, M.A.
and Ph.D. levels. He obtained his Ph.D. in Anthropology, where he studied religious minorites.
 Hugo José Suárez, “Religious Diversity in a Popular Mexico City Neighborhood”,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
In the last few decades, the Mexican religious scenery has been considerably transformed. In my
work I will show the results of a research took place in the Ajusco neighborhood in Mexico,
between 2009-2014. The main objective was to look out the various forms of religious
experiences in an urban and popular environment. The first dimension was the construction of
the religious field, the diversification of the religious offer and the interaction between salvation
enterprises. The second dimension will show the results of a quantitative survey, where we can
observe the principal believes and religious practices. Finally, on the third dimension I will
analyze fragments of qualitative interviews. All three dimensions lead us to a series of theoretical
questions about contemporary religious believes in Mexico. These will be presented as the
conclusions.
Hugo Suárez is researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México (UNAM). His research lines include sociology of religion and culture,
religious practices in Mexico, qualitative methodology, and culture and politics in Bolivia. Among
other books he has published and coordinated Creyentes urbanos. Sociología de la experiencia
religiosa en una colonia popular en la ciudad de México (2015), Creer y practicar en México (2014),
Sociólogos y su sociología (2014), Las formas de pertenecer (2014), La sociedad de la
incertidumbre (2013), Sueño Ligero. Memoria de la vida cotidiana (2012), Ver y creer. Ensayo de
sociología visual en la colonia El Ajusco (2012), El nuevo malestar en la cultura (2012), Tertulia
sociológica (2009), El sentido y el método. Sociología de la cultura y análisis de contenido (2008).
He has also published scientific articles in multiple international journals. He has taught in
several universities in Latin America, Europe and the United States, and has been Visiting
Researcher at Columbia University (2013-2014). He is member of Mexico’s National System of
Researchers (level 3). He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at the Catholic University of Leuven,
Belgium in 2001.
 Andrew Chesnut, “The Pentecostalization of Latin America”, Virginia Commonwealth
University
Since the 1970s tens of millions of predominantly poor Latin Americans have exited Catholicism
for such Pentecostal denominations as the Brazil-based Universal Church of the Kingdom of God
and the gargantuan Assemblies of God. In fact, Pentecostalism has proved so attractive that the
Christian landscape in Latin America has pentecostalized over the past few decades. As recently
as 1950, 99 percent of Latin Americans were Catholic. Today, only 69 percent are. While the
percentage of Catholics has plummeted, the Protestant population has mushroomed from 1
percent to 19 percent during the same period. Pentecostalism dominates the Protestant
landscape, comprising approximately 70 percent of all Protestants in Latin America. It also exerts
great influence in Catholicism through the Charismatic Renewal movement. For example, more
than 60 percent of Guatemalan and Brazilian Catholics claim to be "charismatic." Thus, here we
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will explore the contours of the pentecostalization of the Latin American religious landscape,
asking how and why Charismatic Christianity achieved hegemonic status over the past four
decades.
Andrew Chesnut holds the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies and is Professor of
Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is a leading expert on Mexican folk
saint, Santa Muerte and Charismatic Christianity in Latin America. His latest book, Devoted to
Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (2012) is the only study of the skeleton saint in English
(https://global.oup.com/academic/product/devoted-to-death9780199764655?cc=us&lang=en&). His previous two books examined the Pentecostal boom in
Brazil and religious competition throughout Latin America. He lectures at universities and
institutes throughout the Americas and Europe, and is a featured blogger for Huffington
Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/r-andrew-chesnut/ Professor Chesnut is currently
working on the the sequel to Devoted to Death.
Session 2: New Economies, Justice and Emergent Forms
 Moderator: José Moya, Columbia University
José Moya is Professor of History at Barnard School, Columbia University, where he teaches
courses in Latin American history, Latin American civilization, and world migration. Previously
he taught at the Universicy of California, Los Angeles for 17 years. He is affiliated with the Human
Rights Studies Program at Barnard. He has written extensively on global migration, gender, and
labor. He has received three Fulbright Fellowships, a Burkhardt Fellowship, and a Del Amo
Fellowship. His research and scholarship have also been supported by the National Endowment
for the Humanities. His book, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 18501930, received five awards. The journal Historical Methods devoted a forum to its theoretical and
methodological contributions to migration studies. He is currently editor in Latin American
Historiography for Oxford University Press. Moya is the Director of the Barnard Forum on
Migration, and Director at Columbia University’s Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS).
 Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga, “Entering the Sacred Economic Cosmos of Capitalism Through
Network Direct Selling Organizations”, El Colegio de Jalisco
This is an ethnographic study of two Network Direct Selling Organizations (DSO) in Mexico:
Nikken, who sells magnetotheraphy devices and Omnilife, who sells mainly nutritional
suplements. These companies create communities that although not coinciding with the social
representation of religion, come to be key pieces in understanding the cultural transformations of
our time. Belonging to these network DSOs in a Latin American city as Guadalajara, permits a
flexible labor opportunity to women, not only promising them greater income, but also proposing
the transformation of economic ethics and traditional gender models. By transforming their
social and family network into marketing networks and appropriating a the therapeutic model
used by the companies to explain illness and health through training workshops, this workforce
newcomers adopt a new concept of the economic cosmos, which was identified by Pierre
Bourdieu as “the symbolic universe of capitalism”. The distributors discover and create the use of
the products as a therapeutic resource in the process of breaking old
consumption/nutrition/work/attitude patterns conceived of as illness sources, at the same time
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adopting a new wellbeing and health ideal, a contemporary “state of grace”, compatible with
women’s original religious belonging, Catholicism.
Cristina Gutiéerez Zúñiga is Professor and researcher at El Colegio de Jalisco, Zapopan, Mexico.
Her work is centered on the pluralizing of religion in Mexico, the new religious and spiritual
movements, and the transnationalization of the Aztec dance. Among her books include Nuevos
movimientos religiosos. La Nueva Era en Guadalajara (1996) and Congregaciones del éxito.
Interpretación socio-religiosa de las redes de mercadeo en Guadalajara (2005). As co-author, she
has published Una ciudad donde habitan muchos dioses. Cartografía religiosa de Guadalajara
(2011), Raíces en movimiento. Prácticas religiosas tradicionales en contextos translocales (2008).
Other highlited articles, in collaboration with Renée de la Torre Castellanos, include New
landscapes of Religious Diversity in Mexico (2013) and Chicano Spirituality in the Construction of
an Imagined Nation: Aztlán (2013). She obtained her Ph.D. in Social Sciences.
 José Carlos Aguiar, “Only Death is Fair: Crisis, Popular Justice, and Legibility in the
Devotion to Santa Muerte in Mexico”, Leiden University
Since the early 2000s, shrines and altars devoted to Santa Muerte, the skeleton saint, have
mushroomed across Mexico. Until the 1990s, Santa Muerte was believed to be the protector of
satanists, drug barons, prostitutes, piracy and street sellers, and her veneration was clandestine.
However, in the current crisis of expanding violence and impunity in Mexico, Santa Muerte has
‘came out from the dark’ and conciliated her ‘criminal’ flair as she turns into a folk saint widely
visible in marketplaces, streets and ‘sanctuaries’ specially built for the worship. Santa Muerte can
be described as a fetish representing a loved one who (violently) passed away; a miraculous
healer and protector; or a broker who brings a ‘quick death’ to young drug traffickers or anybody
else in the pursue of justice. Influenced by Cuban santería, indigenous millenarianism,
Catholicism and the cultural expressions of drug trafficking, this emerging form of religious belief
synthesises the ongoing security crises and implosion of institutional life in Mexico. This research
is part of the project ‚The Popular Culture of Illegality: Criminal Authority and the Politics of
Aesthetics in Latin America and the Caribbean’, financed by the Organization for Scientific
Research NWO (number 360-45-030).
José Carlos Aguiar is an anthropologist specialized in urban studies, street economies, illegality,
piracy, intellectual property and borderlands. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Latin
America and China. Aguiar holds a tenured position at Leiden University, where he is member of
the Board of Directors of Latin American Studies. He is member of Mexico’s National System of
Researchers (level 1). He has been Visiting Professor at the Free University of Berlin (2012,
2013), and El Colegio de México (2015). He has also served as Counselor for the Society for Latin
American and Caribbean Anthropology, section of the American Anthropological Association. He
obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam in 2007.
 Judit Bokser Liwerant, “Changing Profiles of Judaism in Mexico: Ethnocultural Diaspora
and Religion’s Revival”, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
Judaism and Jews in Mexico shaped their communal life, built their associational and institutional
profile as well as their collective consciousness as part of a shared cultural and symbolic world.
Its historical profile may be characterized in terms of a secularized ethno-national and ethnocultural diaspora. In the national social configuration, its roads and limits to national integration,
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impelling collective energy to provide for material, spiritual, and cultural needs was at the core of
building communal life. Regions and countries of origins were defining criteria of organization.
Religion, though differentially, played a minor role; the scarcity or even absence of religious
functionaries characterized the communal dynamics. In the last decades, religious revival,
diversification of options and de-secularization processes took place. Into a well established
secular-traditionalist-national scene, Conservative and Reform religious currents first arrived,
followed more recently by more observant Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox currents and by the
arrival and local offer of religious functionaries. The meaningful rise of religious institutions in
the diversified educational system has further enhanced this reconfiguration of Mexican Judaism
and the changing role of religion. My presentation will analyze main traits of these overall
processes in collective and religious life in the light of national, global and transnational
parameters, addressing the interaction between the public and the private spheres as alternative
places in which identity and difference as well as visibility and recognition are built.
Judit Bokser Liwerant is Full Professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Her main research topics are Jewish responses to modernity;
contemporary Jewry and Latin American Jewish communities; collective identities, globalization
processes and transnationalism. She is a member of Mexico’s Academy of Science, and the
National System of Researchers. She is author of many books, book chapters and scientific
articles, including Reconsidering Israel- Diaspora Relations (2014); Belonging and Otherness.
Jews of/in Latin America (2011); Identities in an Era of Globalization and Multiculturalism
(2008); Identity, Society and Politics (2008); and Community, Society and Politics. Pathways of
Latin American Jews (Forthcoming). She is Director and Editor of the Mexican Journal of Political
and Social Sciences. She has been Visiting Professor at Mac Gill University, Arizona State
University, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Boxer Liwerant was awarded the Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz Award (2007); Max Fisher Prize in Jewish Culture and Education (2008), and the
Life Award of the Journal of Studies on Antisemitism (2014).
 Alyshia Gálvez, “Post-Guadalupanismo and Nuevo-Guadalupanismo: Mexico and the
United States Now”, Lehman College, The City University of New York (CUNY)
In past work, I theorized that guadalupanismo provided a vocabulary for the reclaiming of rights:
the rights of personhood guaranteed by divine power, superseding petty and shortsighted
laws. Today, it is rare to see image of Guadalupe at a protest. We can look at protests about
Ayotzinapa, Immigrant rights, deportations, etc., and we don’t see the image being carried as she
was in early to mid-2000s. However, it is arguable that Guadalupanismo provides a departure
point for specific claims for rights that are very relevant today (the sanctity and political
subjectivity of the family; the value of human life vs. the disposability of some lives, etc). In this
talk I will examine some ways that guadalupanismo has provided a necessary subtext for claims
made in the public sphere today, at the same time that her image has been sullied, sidelined and
replaced by other figures in a semantic, symbolic and also very material struggle that is occurring
on both sides of the border.
Alyshia Gálvez is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor of Latin American and Puerto
Rican Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY). She is also CUNY’s Director
of the Jaime Lucero Mexican Studies Institute. Her research focuses on the efforts by Mexican
immigrants in New York City to achieve the rights of citizenship. She is author of two books on
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Mexican immigration in New York, Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers Mexican Women, Public
Prenatal Care and the Birth Weight Paradox (2011) and Guadalupe in New York (2009). Her
second book Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers, was awarded with the 2012 Association of
Latino and Latin American Anthropologists Book Award.
Session 3: Conversion, Awakening, Apostasy
 Moderator: Caterina Pizzigoni, Columbia University
Caterina Pizzigoni is Associate Professor at the History Department of Columbia University. She
specializes in Latin American history. Her research interests include indigenous populations in
colonial Latin America and the study of sources in Nhuatl (indigenous language of central
Mexico), household and material culture, gender issues, church and government policies with
respect to conversion, education, and integration of indigenous populations. Her publications
include many academic articles and book chapters. Her most recent books include The Life
Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico's Toluca Valley, 1650-1800 (2012) and Testaments of
Toluca (2007). She obtained her Ph.D. at King’s College, United Kingdom in 2002.
 Renée de la Torre Castellanos, “Neo-Mexicanismo: the New Age Indian Spiritual
Awakening”, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social
(CIESAS Occidente)
This presentation describes the General trends of Neomexicanismo. A spiritual-cultural
movement based on the recovery of Pre-Hispanic cultures which are resignified and
reappropriated in terms of an interpretive framework for the ideology and basic notions of the
New Age movement. I will describe and compare two movements of the neomexicanidad: 1) The
Reginos, inspired by the novel and Best Seller Regina. 68 no se olvida, written by Antonio Velasco
Piña, who is considered the intellectual leader of a new spiritual movement that combines a
holistic interpretation of the New Age, influenced by Tibetan Buddhism, with the recovery of the
indigenous traditions and rituals of Mexico; and 2) the rainbow tribes, the environmental hippie
circuit of the neomexicanidad, led by Alberto Ruz, who founded Huehuecoyotl, the first eco-aldea
in Mexico, that promote an alternative lifestyle ecological community in Tepoztlán, Morelos and
undertook the Caravan Arcoiris by the South American continent. From this community a
number of pilgrimages set out to reopen the ancient spiritual centers in the main archaeological
zones as part of a worldwide New Age movement, at that time led by José Argüelles, who is
recognized as one of the main promoters of New Age and of linking it to the initiation movement
of American Indian cultures.
Renée de la Torre Castellanos has been researcher and Professor of Anthropology at the Centro de
Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS Occidente) in Guadalajara
since 1993. She specializes in the study of religious change in Mexico and Latin America, spiritual
movements, laicism and secularization, and new urban identities. She is member of Mexico’s
National Science Academy and the National System of Researchers (level 3). She is co-founder of
the Network of Researchers of the Religious Phenomena in Mexico (RIFEM), was member of the
Council of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (2010-2012), and Mexico’s
representative at the Mercosur Religion Scientist Association (2012-2014). She has published
the awarded books Los hijos de la Luz (1995), La Ecclesia Nostra (2006), as well as Guadalajara:
Una ciudad donde habitan muchos dioses (2011) and Religiosidades nómadas (2011). De la Torre
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was Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, la Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III, and the
University of Río Grande do Sul. She obtained a Ph.D. in Social Sciences with a specialization in
Social Anthropology at the CIESAS and the University of Guadalajara.
 Graciela Mochkofsky, “The Rise of a New Judaism in Latin America”, New York
University
An unprecedented wave of mass conversions is creating a new kind of Judaism in Latin America.
We are seeing the rise of Jewish communities without any historical connection to Judaism--no
memory of the Holocaust, no connection to Zionism, not a Jewish cultural identity. They are
mostly made up of poor or low-middle-class people who have come to Judaism out of a larger
continental conversion: of Catholics searching for meaning in Evangelical and Pentecostal
Protestantism. Rejected by traditional Jews in their countries, new communities all across Latin
America are creating their own institutions, some sending their leaders to Israel to be trained as
rabbis, some migrating en masse to Israel with the help of Israeli NGOs and yeshivas.
They
are offering an unexpected answer to one of the oldest questions in Judaism: Who is a Jew? And
they one of the many outcomes of the continent's changing religious landscape.
Graciela Mochkofsky is an Argentine journalist and author. Her forthcoming book, The prophet of
the Andes will tell the story of an unprecedented wave of mass conversions into Judaism
throughout Latin America. A reporter since 1991, her articles and columns have appeared in
most of her country’s publications, in Spain’s El País, Mexico’s Letras Libres, and Brazil´s Piaui,
among many others. She has contributed articles to Index of Censorship, The Paris Review blog
and The Forward. She was fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University
(2008-2009) and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New
York Public Library in New York City (2013-2014). She is currently a visiting scholar at New York
University, and fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. She holds a Masters
degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (1996).
 Claudio Lomnitz, “The Knights Templar—Notes on the Cartel as Religious Cult”,
Columbia University
The presentation is a preliminary interrogation of the problem of communitarianism and religion
in the drug wars in the state of Michoacán. Political analysis have broadly seen the drug war in
Michoacán as a symptom of the crisis of the state and of rule of law in that region. I argue that
events of the past decade also reveal a parallel crisis of community, that can be tracked in several
dimensions, including the form that drug organizations have taken, as illustrated by the two
cases of La Familia Michoacana and the Knights Templar. The turn of these cartels to a quasi cult
or religious form is the object of inquiry.
Claudio Lomnitz is A Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at the Department of
Antrhopology and the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia
University. He is the Director of Columbia University’s Center for Mexican Studies. His line of
research is in history, politics, and culture of Latin America, particularly of Mexico. He is former
editor of Public Culture and, prior to joining Columbia University, Lomnitz was distinguished
Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School of Social Research. He has
also taught at the University of Chicago and New York University. He received his Ph.D. in
Anthropology from Stanford University.
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 Carolina Rivera, “Evangelic Indigenous Peoples’ Eviction After their Religious
Adscription Change”, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología
Social (CIESAS Sureste)
This presentation aims to explore in the first place, the evolution of the Mexican Catholic Church
during the last decades, in order to understand the current composition of the religious realm in
Chiapas, the State with the largest faith diversity and the smallest catholic population. In the
second place, it examines the consequences that this diversity has had in several indigenous
localities within two regions in Chiapas: Altos and Fronteriza. In the third place, it will address
the subject of people eviction due to their religious believes (forced displacement). The way how
many Mayan Indigenous people, have been forced to leave their community after leaving Catholic
tradition and joining another Christian, non-Catholic, church.
Carolina Rivera is Professor and researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios
Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Mexico. She researches about religion and religiosity
of social groups in the Southeast of Mexico, specifically on the analysis of popular Catholicism and
charismatic Catholicism, as well as various non-Catholic Christian expressions, such as
Pentecostalism and its polyvocal presence. In recent years she has ventured into the research of
labor migration in the Southern border of Mexico; studying the employment and living conditions
of Central American workers that travel to work in the Soconusco region of Chiapas, Mexico. She
obtained her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
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