Religion and immigration in comparative perspective: Catholic and Evangelical Salvadorans in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Phoenix.

In this article I examine religious institutions in the lives of Salvadoran immigrants, focusing on how they view their participation in the church and the role the church plays in their lives. Religious rituals infuse important events in the immigrants' lives with transcendental meaning, but religious institutions also respond in practical terms to the immigrants' needs and afflictions. Thus, religion is highly significant for immigrants - past and present, an idea that lies at the core of the sociological study of immigration and religion (Warner 1998:15). Consequently, religious participation was a major theme in sociological studies of turn-of-the-last century immigration, when the church occupied a prominent place in the lives of immigrants through the provision of an intricate welfare system to serve the needs of many newcomers. The massive migration of Catholics, Jews, and German Lutherans contributed to increase the sociological relevance of religious identity itself (Warner 1993:1058).

This earlier research interest gave way to new foci in studies of post-1965 immigration. These have concentrated on the ever-increasing diversity that "new" immigrants have brought to American soil, their participation in the labor force, the sociodemographic composition of the flows, the effects of immigration policy on the immigrants' lives, family and gender relations, and social networks among these immigrants (Menjivar 1999). (1) These new foci do not mean that religion is no longer important for immigrants. Religious institutions have remained central in immigrant life, as reflected in a recent resurgence of studies of immigrant religious communities (Kim 1991; Kim 1994; Warner and Wittner 1998; Menjivar 1999; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Levitt 2001). As Herberg (1960) observed in Protestant, Catholic, Jew, religion is a fundamental category of identity and association in society through which immigrants can find a place in American life. Thus, religion still provides an important lens to understand immigr ant life as well as the place of immigrants in the receiving society.

Following the tradition of recent scholarship on religion and immigration (cf. Warner and Wittner 1998; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000), the present study focuses on "what immigrants do together religiously in the United States" (Warner 1998:9), what they do for and within their congregations. Sociologically this is important, as through this lens we can examine how immigrant communities are developing and, thus, we can avoid a focus simply on individual action and perception. Recognizing the importance of a comparative perspective that the work of Ebaugh and Chafetz (2000) has revealed, this study compares the same immigrant group in three different locations and within these sites in two different types of congregations. This approach permits us to hold constant certain factors and examine the effects of those that vary; it also allows us to bridge insights gained from recent scholarship in the field of religion and immigration with those from immigration research more generally.

Immigration research has pointed to the context of reception - shaped by immigration policies, the local labor market and the organization of the receiving community - as key in understanding processes of immigrant incorporation (Portes and Zhou 1993; Portes and Rumbaut 1996; Menjivar 2000). And Rollwagen (1975) criticized the assumption that cities are similar and thus the city in which immigrants settle has no impact on their lives. Based on these analytical insights, in this study I examine the role of religious institutions in the lives of Salvadoran immigrants in three cities -- San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Phoenix -- a comparison that offers a...

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