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Religion, Place, And Identity At The Intersection Of Cultural Bricolage: The Miami Santo Daime Church Revisited, Alfonso Matas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an exploration of the Santo Daime Church in Miami, focusing on the challenges of balancing institutional stability with continual growth and innovation. Santo Daime—whose central ritual entails the consumption of the mind-altering ayahuasca brew—is a new religious movement that amalgamates indigenous Amazonian, Afro-Brazilian, and popular Catholic traditions. Between June 2016 and December 2018, I employed participant observation, semi-structured interviews, exegesis of sacred songs, and document analysis to investigate the meanings and lived experiences of church leaders and adherents as they relate to their religious identity and agency. Specifically, this study asks three research questions: What global processes …

Commemorative Bodies: (Un)Making Racial Order And Cuban White Supremacy In Little Havana's Heritage District, Corinna Jeanne Moebius

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation unearths memory- and place-making practices, processes and “racializing regimes of representation” in Little Havana’s heritage district, now a major tourism destination in Miami, Florida. It draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and consultations of various archives that span decades back to the 1960s and trace the origins of the district in plans for a “Latin Quarter.”

My analyses borrow from and combine various bodies of scholarly work to examine and deconstruct the use of always multi-vocal “commemorative bodies” for the production of racial narratives that are embedded in--and give shape to--acts of memorialization and commemoration.

By examining the …