New Books in Latino Studies · Marshall Poe

Ken Chitwood, "Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism Among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam" (U Texas Press, 2025)

March 23, 2026·1 hr 10 min·5 clips

Rejecting pork as a new Puerto Rican Muslim is more than a dietary choice — it becomes a personal reckoning with what it means to still be Puerto Rican.

1. New Books in Islamic Studies host Shobana Xavier interviews Ken Chitwood about "Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism Among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam," published by University of Texas Press in 2025. 2. Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Universidad de Beirut's Department of the Study of Religion and an affiliate of USC's Center for Religion and Civic Culture; he spent ten years on this project. 3. The book's central argument is that Puerto Rican Muslims construct a vernacular cosmopolitanism from the ground up — not because of elite mobility or Western moral frameworks, but because no existing identity category accommodates them. 4. Chitwood's origin moment was visiting a Houston mosque as a Houston Chronicle reporter and encountering Isa Parada, an imam at Centro Islamico, who introduced himself in Spanish despite visually appearing to be Arab. 5. The fieldwork spanned New York, Puerto Rico, Florida, Houston, and digital platforms simultaneously, with Chitwood conducting a parallel digital ethnography by logging in daily to online Puerto Rican Muslim communities for multiple years. 6. Florida emerged as an unexpected field site mid-project when an interlocutor who had relocated from Puerto Rico for economic reasons arrived at the Gainesville airport and asked Chitwood to pick them up, then lived with him briefly before more formal interviews resumed. 7. Chitwood made the unusual ethnographic decision to name many interlocutors in full, drawing on his journalism background and the need for sources that could be independently verified in an era of AI-generated text. 8. Puerto Rico's Islamic history has three overlapping layers: likely secret Muslim converts among 16th-century Spanish colonizers and enslaved West Africans; Palestinian migrants who arrived via Kuwait after 1948 and 1967 and built the island's mosques; and Puerto Ricans converting through exposure to Nation of Islam and Five Percent Nation movements in U.S. urban centers from the 1920s onward. 9. Palestinians now predominate in Puerto Rico's masajid and funded their construction through commercial success — Chitwood names specific businesses including an appliance store, IHOP, a butterfly museum, gas stations, and restaurants. 10. Alianza Islamica, the first Latinx-specific Muslim organization in the United States, was founded by Puerto Ricans in 1987 in East Harlem (El Barrio), and Puerto Ricans now make up roughly 25 percent of the broader Latinx Muslim community in the U.S. 11. The book's cosmopolitanism framework drew criticism from reviewers who felt the term was out of fashion, but Chitwood retained it because mainstream cosmopolitanism literature — including work by Kwame Appiah and Ulrich Beck — framed Muslims as inherently anti-cosmopolitan, a bias he wanted to directly address. 12. Food is a central analytical lens: pork is embedded in Puerto Rican culture through Spanish Catholic colonial history, and Puerto Rican Muslims face the challenge of maintaining cultural identity through food while navigating halal requirements. 13. Chitwood notes that U.S. fast food chains have more locations per capita in Puerto Rico than in any of the 50 states, meaning eating local Puerto Rican food has become an act of colonial resistance — a resistance complicated for Muslim converts who can no longer eat pork. 14. One interlocutor Chitwood describes went deep into Islamic jurisprudence to argue for the permissibility of drinking Medalla Light beer, partly by questioning whether a beer so weak counted as alcohol under Islamic law. 15. Chitwood frames Islam in the book as a verb rather than a noun — drawing on scholar Wendy Shah's work — meaning Puerto Rican Muslims are actively doing Islam rather than adhering to a fixed object, constantly negotiating what practice means in their context. 16. The Umma in the book is described through the Puerto Rican concept of vaivén (back and forth, in constant motion), reflecting the forced out-migration from the island due to economic collapse and political status, and the resulting dispersal across U.S. cities. 17. Two publishers sent the manuscript through peer review but rejected it at the editorial level because they could not categorize it as Puerto Rican studies, Latin American studies, Caribbean studies, or Islamic studies — which Chitwood read as structurally mirroring his subjects' experience. 18. Xavier notes that the book includes an accompanying Spotify playlist and is written in a journalistic style that shifts between theoretical density in early chapters and vignette-driven narrative in later chapters. 19. Scholars and students working on Islam in the Americas, Caribbean studies, Puerto Rican diaspora, Arab and Palestinian diaspora studies, and the anthropology of religion will find the book directly relevant. 20. Readers seeking a straightforward introduction to Islam or to Puerto Rican politics without theoretical framing may find the academic scaffolding demanding.

As heard by us

A patient account of Puerto Rican Muslim life, built from history, place, and identity.

The episode follows Puerto Rican Muslims from migration and conversion into the slower work of community-making: businesses, mosques, Black Muslim histories, and the way race, racialization, culture, and ethnicity shape religious identity.

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You want a patient, book-based conversation about Puerto Rican Muslims and identity.

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