Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return examines contemporary migration in the context of a Roman Catholic Church eager to both comprehend and act upon the movements of peoples. Combining extensive fieldwork with lay and religious Latin American migrants in Rome and analysis of the Catholic Church’s historical desires and anxieties around conversion since the period of colonization, Napolitano sketches the dynamics of a return to a faith’s putative center. Against a Eurocentric notion of Catholic identity, Napolitano shows how the Americas reorient Europe.
Napolitano examines both popular and institutional Catholicism in the celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe and El Senor de los Milagros, papal encyclicals, the Latin American Catholic Mission, and the order of the Legionaries of Christ. Tracing the affective contours of documented and undocumented immigrants’ experiences and the Church’s multiple postures toward transnational migration, she shows how different ways of being Catholic inform constructions of gender, labor, and sexuality whose fault lines intersect across contemporary Europe.

Valentina Napolitano is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Migration, Mujercitas, and Medicine Men: Living in Urban Mexico (California).

Valentina Napolitano's profile page

• Long-listed, Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion

In Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return, Valentina Napolitano offers her readers a complex portrait of the diasporic world of trans-Atlantic Catholicism, told through the stories of particular Latin American immigrant communities in Rome. Napolitano is singularly positioned to perform the ethnographic work that underlies this study, and she has written a moving account that contributes to the growing field of the anthropology of Christianity and that will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of anthropologists, religionists, students of migration and globalization, and women’s and gender studies scholars.---—Elizabeth Castelli, Barnard College

Napolitano’s book is a rich ethnography of the historically fraught relationship between the Vatican and its Latin American flock. In this moment of heightened anxiety about immigration and shrinking church following in Europe, Napolitano deftly tracks the fissure between communitas and otherness that haunts European Catholicism today. Told through the lives of Latin American immigrants to Italy, this wonderful book shows us what it means to live a faith that is losing hold of its civilizational mission.---—Saba Mahmood, University of California, Berkeley