UC Irvine

The following dissertation explores the intersections of religion and daily life among Latino migrant day laborers in Santa Ana, California. Drawing from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant-observation and interviews, conducted in a retail parking lot, this study illuminates the struggle for faith among individuals denied traditional forms of economic, social, and institutional stability. The men on whom the dissertation focuses—migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador—must live and believe without steady employment, housing, familial networks, basic legal rights and, significantly, membership in churches. Their expressions of faith reveal a drive not merely for divine guidance, but for the foundational terms of faith itself.

For these migrant workers, faith is more than mere adherence to doctrine or passive acceptance of God's Word. It is a dynamic and precarious negotiation: a conversation both deeply personal and irreducibly social, practiced and disciplined amidst near total instability. The workers’ narratives of faith—including the most rapturous and sublime experiences—reflect the empirical and deeply human realities of their terrestrial lives. These stories shed light on their identities as racialized migrants, as exploited workers, and as men. They touch on themes of family, history, memory, life, death, and mourning, all within the context of Southern California today.

The spiritual journeys of these laborers are grounded in Southern California’s socio-historical landscape, itself unstable and prone to sudden shocks, shifts, and upheavals. Touching on the history of land, development, and culture in the region, coupled with insights into U.S.-Mexico border migration, this study gestures outward to macro-level phenomena through the particularities of lived experience.

“Challenging Orthodoxies” evokes both obstacle and action. It underscores the intricate ways in which faith, both social and personal, collective and euphoric, plays out in the lives of those to whom community and, in many cases, personhood are routinely denied. Highlighting the resilience, agency, and redemption of migrant day laborers as they found and find the paths of spiritual voice, the dissertation tracks the interplay between understanding and obscurity, discipline and prophecy, light and dark.