Borícua Muslims

Everyday Cosmopolitanism Among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam

Ken Chitwood

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Hardback

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English

University of Texas Press
04 November 2025

The stories and struggles of Puerto Rican Muslims in modern day America.

Among Puerto Rican converts to Islam, marginalization is a fact of daily life. Their “authenticity” is questioned by other Muslims and by fellow BorÍcua on the island and in the United States. At the same time, they exist under the shadow of US colonization and as Muslims in the context of American empire. To be a Puerto Rican Muslim, then, is to negotiate identity at numerous intersections of diversity and difference.

Drawing on years of ethnographic research and more than a hundred interviews conducted in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and online, Ken Chitwood tells the story of Puerto Rican Muslims as they construct a shared sense of peoplehood through everyday practices. BorÍcua Muslims thus provides a study of cosmopolitanism not as a political ideal but as a mundane social reality-a reality that complicates scholarly and public conversations about race, ethnicity, and religion in the Americas. Expanding the geography of global Islam and recasting the relationship between religion and Puerto Rican culture, BorÍcua Muslims is an insightful reckoning with the manifold entanglements of identity amid late-modern globalization.

By: Ken Chitwood
Imprint: University of Texas Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781477332436
ISBN 10: 147733243X
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 04 November 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at UniversitÄt Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture.

Reviews for Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism Among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam

""BorÍcua Muslims is a timely and groundbreaking study of Latinx Islamidad and the growing number of Puerto Rican Muslims in the Caribbean and the United States. Ken Chitwood brings his multilingual talents in cultural studies, ethnography, and journalism to bear in this expansive and joyful exploration of how AmeRÍcan Muslims negotiate their island lives, transnational migrant encounters, and cosmopolitan community belongings in the global Muslim ummah."" - Aliyah Khan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, author of Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean ""This expansive and powerful book sheds light on the everyday lives of AmeRÍcan Muslims by tracing their experiences, border crossings, and identities from Newark to BayamÓn to Houston. BorÍcua Muslims is intellectually rich, well written, and full of incredible stories that offer a compelling look at the varied and complex intersections of American religion, global Islamic studies, and Latinx Muslims."" - Felipe Hinojosa, Baylor University, co-editor of Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945