Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting, speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences. we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.
Thank you, Dr. Stokan, and thank you also to Amy Barnes CS3's program coordinator who, as as you all know, takes care of the logistics of these events, and I apologize for the technology issues here. I know that it will seem that I'm not looking at you, but in my mind, I'm looking at you, at least to get a better view of this beautiful Peruvian tapestry that I have here in the back of my room. All right, so this book is about religion and immigration. I think these are two very light, non controversial topics that I decided to write about. And I'm glad to see so many people here who are interested in hearing what I have to say about it. I see some students, my UMBC professor, friends and staff. I think I even have some neighbors and friends from church here. So that's great, great mix of people. So back to religion and immigration. I decided to write on these two very easy topics, and on top of being two contentious issues, and that reminds me of, you know, when I was young, growing up in Brazil, every Saturday or Sunday, we would get together my grandparents to to have lunch with the extended family. So you can imagine this big table, you know, it's an Italian, Brazilian family. So everyone is, you know, being loud, talking with their hands, talking over each other. And now and then someone would bring up politics or religion, and one of my grands would always intervene and say, no politics or religion at the table, and I clearly didn't listen to her advice, because here I am talking about religion and a very political topic, immigration. And on top of that, I decided to investigate these two topics, their relationship, using a community based research approach. Research, which meant that I had to be in close collaboration with faith communities in Baltimore, in this case, collaborating with their lay members, their clergy members. And as a case scholar, you you can imagine how, how much anxiety that probably gave me, considering how now welcoming to LGBTQ people, some faith communities have been thankfully in this project that happened that turned out to be a problem in only one case, and I can talk about that later in the Q and A, if you so wish. So back to the how this project originated. In 2017 I started to volunteer with a group called the Latino racial justice circle. This is a was back then, a faith based group of volunteers. Now they are a nonprofit organization that I still volunteer with and allergy See, that's how I'm going to call them from now on. First when I found them on Facebook, on social media, I was like, oh, Latino racial justice circle. That sounds like a very interesting group. I was just curious about these, you know, all these words together, so I show up to one of their meetings, and they started and finished every meeting with a prayer. It was originally a faith based group, mostly folks from different Catholic congregations in the Baltimore area. And I remember in one of the first meetings, one of the prayer handouts that we received, there was a prayer that included praying for multicultural families, praying for immigrants and refugees, praying for LGBTQ people. And I was like, wow, this is a certain kind of Christianity here, right, quite different from, you know, what we see on the on the news, you know, the intersection of right wing conservative politics with Christianity, what today we call Christian nationalism. What I found there was actually Christian cosmopolitanism. So this constellation of religious beliefs, ideas, practices and institutions grounded in the Christian faith that try to build the kingdom of God on earth across boundaries of religion, race, nationality, ethnicity, language, culture and so on. So this idea of the kingdom of God as the Cosmopolis, where everyone belong. This belongs, this universal community. And the lrjc had a sister organization called the racial justice circle. And the racial justice circle was a group that was founded to address issues of racism that African Americans had experienced in Catholic communities in that that belong to the Baltimore archdiocese, and it was a quite successful program. So the LGC wanted to create a program that was about immigration and Latinos in the church. So we got together, and I designed that as and I led that program as a community based research program. So intersecting my service, my community service, with my research interests, and in the process of designing this program, I did research on what already existed in the country. And turns out that many organizations across the country, some secular, some religious, have used dialog to promote mutual understanding and collaboration between immigrants and people born here, also to help people discern how to act, how to approach immigration. And many of those organizations are religious. That was when I did my research, there was a significant growth in the number in the frequency of dialog events in faith communities about immigration around the year of 2016 you can imagine why. And so, inspired by this work that has been happening across the country, this dialog tradition we designed here for our Baltimore context, a program consisting of three weeks of dialog, one meeting per week. In the first session, people will talk about their personal stories about immigration and their feelings about immigration, both positive and negative. So we had specific questions in the dialog guide about tensions on immigration, so discomfort that some people feel about the presence of undocumented immigrants in our country, or the perception that immigrants take jobs or compete with us born people For not only for jobs, but also for housing, for welfare. So all these perceptions or misperceptions, but anyway, not just the positive opinions on immigration, but also things that ideas that are built around these tensions between groups that integration can. Bring to communities where they can emerge because of immigration. So that's the first session. In the second week, the participants talk about similarities and differences between immigrants and people who are born in the United States. And in the third session, they think about the future, so they come up with a vision for excellent inter group relations in their communities, for how immigrants and non immigrants are getting along, and they decide on one collaborative project that they would undertake in their communities after the dialog to bring their communities closer to that vision, that ideal vision for the future. So we designed this program, and between 2019 and 2022 we implemented that program seven times, so seven dialogs, each with three weeks. Members of 14 congregations participated, congregations, all Christians, but from different denominations across Baltimore, urban, suburban and on. Total, around 100 people participated in those dialogs. With the help of my UMBC students who worked as research assistants, we record every dialog session, transcribed word by word, what everyone said and then analyzed the conversations, not only to understand the substance of what people were saying, but also to investigate how they were talking to each other, right? So the process of dialog, not just the substance. I'm going to share with you a few of the findings that were more striking to me, and that, you know, in the book, there is, of course, a very much more expanded version of that.
First, we found no evidence of systematic domination of these dialogs by any particular group. We look specifically to whether clergy people that were participating if they were going to dominate the conversations or not, and whether people who were born here, the non immigrants, will be also taking more space in the conversation than the immigrants. And that turned out not to be the case. There was no evidence of systematic domination on the part of any of those those groups, and when we went, when we went deeper into the substance of what people were saying, looking at, you know, the events of immigrant participants and the statements of non immigrant participants, we found that immigrants, when they were talking, they were usually giving perspective, so sharing to other people about how they see the world, the challenges, the opportunities that they face in the United States will lead them to move here. You know how how their life is, and US born participants. A lot of times, they were taking perspective, and they took much more perspective than they gave meaning. They were trying to express empathy. They were asking questions to immigrants, and they were trying to put themselves in their shoes, right? And to me, the combination of on one hand, no group is dominating the conversation systematically. We have US born participants, taking more perspective than giving. There's more room for immigrants to give perspective to me that signals an equitable conversation, and then looking back, the explanation that I give for that is based on the theory of intergroup dialog, and it's an explanation based on the model of dialog that we adopted. It's a model that I call diversal, bringing together diversity and the universal right? So it's the idea of a dialog that tries to integrate unity and diversity without privileging anyone. It is tempting in the practice dialog in communities, and especially in situations of conflict, to focus just on what people have in common, their shared interests, their commonalities, their common goals, their shared spaces. And it turns out, research has shown that that type of dialog tends to marginalize the voices of people who are already marginalized because you're talking only about the beautiful things that everyone has in common, and you don't have space for people who are from historically marginalized groups to express their grievances, to talk about their challenges, to discuss inequality. And of course, we didn't want that, so we created a dialog model that, yes, people talk about their similarities, they discuss common interests and come up with a collaborative plan at the end of the third session. But we also had on talk about inequality, differences, diversity, tensions that people experience in their communities that are associated with integration. I'm going to do a. Two examples of how this diversity, right, diversity and universality appeared surfaced in some of the dialogs. One is, one of the main findings of the book is the black, black, brown solidarity that emerged in the in the dialog. So basically, Latinos and African American participants bonding over their experiences of shared marginality in the United States. So that's something I've observed in several of the dialogs. Any one dialog in participant, there was this moment, this exchange started by an African American participant, a woman. She said something like, Well, when I go to an immigrant neighborhood and I enter a store shop, I try to buy something, and they're talking to me, you know, if it's a Latino neighborhood, they're talking to me in Spanish, even though they can tell that I'm American and I cannot, you know, I don't understand why that's the case. You know, it's a place of business. You know, shouldn't they speak in English with me? Why do they keep speaking Spanish? So she expressed discomfort with that, and in response, several of the Latino participants explained to her, why is it that that happens, that in those ethnic enclaves, you have a persistent persistence of immigrant languages. And why immigrants, you know, of, you know, different nationalities, keep speaking in their home, their homeland, language. And that change continued. And in the following session, I think she was, you know, she had time to reflect this African American woman, and then she started, know, like, you know, going back to something that we had discussed in the previous in the previous session, I realized that both Latinos and African Americans, we're both discriminated on the basis of language. US African Americans, we don't speak the King's English, and we are discriminated because of our accidents. Latino people realize, hearing from them that they face similar situations. So that was, you know, a very interesting moment where we move from attention over linguistic differences to a solidarity on the basis of language, right? So this diversity at play. Another example of that integration of diversity and unity was an awareness that a lot of the US born participants expressed of their of the privilege that comes with just having been born the United States, something that you it's it's not earned, right? You don't have to work to be born United States. You just are right. So that's a privilege, and that emerged usually in the second session, when we had two questions about similarities and differences. So one question was, why do you think that immigrants moved to the United States, and if you were born here, why is it that you moved to Maryland, or why is it that your ancestors moved to here? And then the other question was, what are the problems that immigrants face in the United States, and what are the problems that US born people face in the United States so different participants shared and connected over their similarities or differences, and in many instances, it was a humbling experience for the US born participants To listen to the immigrants, because then they realize, yes, all of us here, for instance, care about our children. We care about more education. We care we want our children to have better economic opportunities in the future. We want good schools. Yes, but then when they hear from the immigrant parents, they hear from the undocumented parent who takes the kid to the same school but is afraid of, you know now, dropping the kid off and picking the kid up from school, or there is the parent that goes to talk to the school counselor or the teacher, and then it's the little child that is bilingual, that has to do the translation, the interpretation for both, or that immigrant parents have to deal not only with those challenges and educate their children, but also with the fact that their children are growing up in a culture that is different from theirs, and all the intergenerational conflict that can come with that, right? So imagine they were talking this about education, and then there were the healthcare versions of this, then there were the workplace versions of this. And so it was a very humbling experience, and you left to us born participants to see, yeah, we are all human beings. We all care for our families. We're all one, one good health. But then you know, when it comes to day by day? Of life. They were humbled by the challenges that immigrants face and that immigrant participants were sharing, and they couldn't come up with something that, you know was equivalent to that, right. So they became aware of their privilege. So again, another example of similarity and difference, you know, unity and diversity getting combined in interesting, interesting ways you can learn more about that in the book and other findings. So now I'm going to jump to the limitations, right? Because it's not like this type of program, even though there was mutual understanding and collaboration that emerge because of those, those dialogs, because of that civic experiment, right? There are also limitations that I found in this in this type of work, first looking at the conversations, there was not much disagreement between people. And on one hand, that can be a good thing, because it's a sign of mutual understanding. And the goal of dialog is to generate mutual understanding, people understanding each other, sharing understanding about whatever is being discussed. And most instances of agreement that I found in the conversations, they were not just people saying yes, ma'am, right, or just, you know, simple, simply with, simply agreeing, you know, with someone else without actually giving thought to it. People are actually elaborating on arguments, uh, corroborating each other points with through storytelling, right? So it was not just a blind, you know, disagreement you know, or something that you know. Didn't involve much critical thinking. People were thinking critically even when agreeing with each other. However,
too much agreement can be a problem. It can be a sign that maybe some people are self censoring, right? Maybe some people are here in the front of this priest pastor, and they don't want to share something very controversial about that they think about immigration. Or maybe there's not enough ideological diversity in the in the dialog. And that turned out to be the case to an extent. You know, we most participants, self identified either as liberal or moderates. It was a smaller portion that I then self identified as conservative or conservative leaning. We also did not have many evangelical congregations participating, only two out of the 14, and we know that evangelicals within across Christian denominations, evangelicals tend to be more conservative than the average Christian Right? So that that pointed to me to a limitation in terms of the type of congregation and the type of people that this program tends to attract. So that's one limitation. And I can you know, for every of these limitations that I mentioned, I'm happy to discuss them further in the Q and A, including how we might overcome them right to an extent. The second limitation that I found that was significant was that not much of the collaboration that emerged between participants after the dialogs was sustained or deep. Sometimes they were their case communications that participated in the same dialog is because sometimes that would pair two congregations together or three. Even some of the dialogs happen within only one congregation. But you know, quite often I brought two congregations together, and some of these pairs of congregations, they are still collaborating. Today. They still have joint prayer services. You know that there are some relationships between their congregants that have stayed and, you know, are still alive. So that's great, right? Sustained, deep, meaningful collaboration. But in other cases, you know, in one case, for instance, we had only a multicultural pot luck, which was one single time event, right? And we know how food, ethnic food, can be fetishized, right? A lot of people can. A lot of people may love Mexican food, but don't love Mexicans. So I was, you know, I'm not letting you get away just with, you know, having multicultural potluck. So I created a trivia game about immigration with some good questions about the realities of undocumented immigrants in the United States. But my point here is that these dialogs, you hope that they will plant a seed for future relationship and collaboration. But in some cases, you know that will happen. In other cases it will not. Also all of the collaborative projects that I that emerged in this program over those two years were either religious or cultural in nature. They were not civical, civic or political. And that is despite. Fact that throughout the dialogs, people talked about the politics of immigration, immigration politics, immigration policy, you know, all the you know, challenging political issues around immigration. They were discussed, and still, at the end, no one was choosing to Okay. Our collaborative project will be for us to get together and write letters to elected officials asking for an immigration reform, right? No, there was no. The projects were all mostly around culture and religious services within the congregations, not really interacting with the, let's say, the public sphere and civic life on immigration. So those are two limitations. I'm happy to discuss that further in terms of next steps. So the book was published, but the ministry continues. I'm currently facilitating book club in my own church here in Towson Trinity Episcopal Church, we are discussing a book called The ungrateful refugee. And I designed the program with our Rector, and it's a program for people to not only build community within the church, but also to learn about immigration and refugees and discern how to approach this issue, individually and as a community in a way that is aligned with their faith later, right? So, again, a process of conversation for action. It's not I'm not using the guide that I used for the conversations in the book, but I'm generally open to any type of conversation for action on immigration, and that's why I keep I stay open to facilitating those now we are at 30, almost 30 minutes, and before we open to the Q and A, I just want to express my gratitude, because I know that some of those Folks are here to the people who've had the courage of welcoming a stranger into their faith community to facilitate our conversation about a topic that is highly political, that has biblical significance, and that is also very, very personal for some people, including for me, Thank you, and I'll be happy to take your questions.
Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. EricStokan, and our undergraduate production assistant is Jean Kim. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland of the UMBC class of 2024. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3- sponsored events. Until next time, keep questioning.
