William Calvo-Quirós
· Associate Professor, Director of Latina/o StudiesUniversity of Michigan · American Culture
Active 2011–2023
About
William Calvo-Quirós is an Associate Professor and the Director of Latina/o Studies at the University of Michigan, holding a joint appointment in the Department of American Culture within the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and courtesy in the Stamps School of Art and Design. His research and teaching focus on the connections and intersections among the multidisciplinary fields of Religion, Latino Studies, Aesthetics, and both virtual and physical spaces. His key questions include how faith and religion manifest and evolve, how individuals engage with and change their religious practices, and the roles of empathy and care in motivating and inspiring the promotion of a different world. His early work examined car subcultures and their reflection of American values and histories, particularly through car customizations and design methodologies. His most recent book, 'Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions,' explores the translocation of popular saints and devotions into the U.S. and the evolution of their meanings, focusing on vernacular saints that have relocated from Latin America. This work has received awards such as the 2024 Best First Book Award in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion and the 2023 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. The book discusses how struggles for survival are expressed through faith and religiosity, emphasizing the creation of solidarity and self-validation within transnational and inter-religious contexts. His current research project, 'God 5.0: Digital Religious Practices in the Cloud,' investigates how digital platforms reshape religious experiences, documenting online prayer, worship, rituals, and the formation of digital religious communities. His interests include digital religious studies, methodologies, online spiritualities, and the power of empathy and forgiveness in fostering dialogue. He is actively involved in international scholarly communities, serving as co-president of Thematic Group 12: Social Love and Solidarity within the International Sociological Association, and as a board member of SocialOne and the Love World Index. Professor Calvo-Quirós also holds affiliations with the Program in Latina/o Studies, the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing, and international institutions in Italy and Mexico.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Humanities
- Philosophy
- Art
- Gender studies
- Literature
- Psychology
- Ethnology
- Political economy
- Aesthetics
- Religious studies
- Theology
- Environmental ethics
- Art history
- Law
- History
- Psychoanalysis
Selected publications
The Standpoint of Hope and the Decolonial Ethno-Poetics of Radical Love
Society · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Sociology
Chapter 11: Pathways of desire: The sexual migration of Mexican gay men
2023-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingSanta Olguita and Juan Soldado
2022-12-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract In the 1930s, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, Olga Camacho and Juan Soldado emerged as two folk border saints who manifested Mexico’s turbulent gendered and political relationship with the United States. The chapter begins with the story of Olga, an eight-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in Tijuana in 1938. It explores the strange circumstances surrounding her death and the popular riots that erupted after the arrest of Juan Castillo, a poor, low-ranking Mexican soldier, who was the main suspect in the crime. I then analyze how Castillo was popularly canonized, transformed from convicted rapist/murderer into Juan Soldado, a Baja California saint for undocumented immigrants. The chapter argues that Olga’s death and her invisibility in historical accounts are not anomalous but exemplary: they are consistent with the region’s prevalent sexual violence against women, stemming back to colonial times. The chapter ends by describing Olga’s recent feminist “resurrection” in the region as a saint protecting against injustice, police brutality, and women’s rape.
2022-12-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract The introduction sets up the book’s main theoretical argument: that the US-Mexico border is not only a political frontier but an epistemic battleground over the terrain of the spiritual and the imaginary. In particular, it analyzes how discourses on faith constitute a central component of US-Mexico relations despite both nations’ assertions that they are secular states. It explores how vernacular saints that have emerged over the last one hundred years serve as historical archives, condensing periods of political and economic transformation and crisis. This section puts the book in dialogue with the legacies and effects of imperial and capitalist exploitation related to race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship, specifically at the intersections of faith, spirituality, and power. It argues that in these communities, faith and spirituality are tools for survival, resistance and negotiation that allow migrants to envision and create a different world.
2022-12-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract The first “saint” is Jesús Malverde, a “generous bandit” famous for stealing from the rich and giving to the poor in the Mexican state of Sinaloa around the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter explores how Sinaloa locals use oral narratives about Malverde (1910) to navigate (and imagine) their encounters with late modernity and the anxieties generated by massive industrialization, land reforms, American economic intervention, and the decline of the peasant class during the tumultuous Porfírio Díaz dictatorship (1876–1910), leading to the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). The chapter follows how the figure of Malverde morphed in the 1970s, when the current canonical image of Malverde was created by using the face of one of the most famous men from Mexican cinema’s golden age, Pedro Infante, both as a way to represent the saint and as an expression of a nationalist “ideal masculinity.” The chapter culminates in a discussion of the contemporary veneration of Malverde as a narco-saint, examining his devotion within the contemporary context of narco-capitalism and the war on drugs—a context that in many ways reflects the turn-of-the-century conditions in which Malverde first emerged, because of income inequality in both periods, radical economic and social changes, political upheaval, rising authoritarianism, and so on. As the chapter explains, saints serve a need in the time and place in which they emerge. They tell us something important about what their devotees need and want.
2022-12-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Using the case of Phoenix, Arizona, the conclusion begins by analyzing how racial segregation, and its intersections with class, gender, and legal status, has shaped the experience of Latinx Catholic communities in the United States, and in particular the Southwest. It summarizes the main features of vernacular saints as we have examined them here, and articulates the challenges to studying them as cultural sites that navigate both secular and formal religious spaces. It explores how the spiritual and the profane are interconnected, how the battle for survival along the border is performed through the real and the imaginary, and how vernacular religiosity can be used to disseminate knowledge and receive information. The conclusion ends with a pastoral exhortation toward diversity and inclusion within the Catholic Church and those researching religious studies.
2022-12-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Since the 1990s, US and Mexican newspapers have occasionally reported on undocumented immigrants who say they have seen the ghost of a priest assisting those in distress as they cross the border into the United States. Known as El Santo Pollero, or the smuggler saint, Father Toribio Romo was a Mexican Catholic priest killed by forces supported by the government in 1928 during the Cristero War, an anticlerical conflict. The chapter begins by exploring the conditions that frame Romo’s death, then analyzes the profound transformation experienced by his hometown because of his skyrocketing spiritual popularity. I also show how his veneration has spread to the United States; since 2014, Romo’s relics—in the form of bone fragments—have circulated through the United States, where they are used both to campaign for comprehensive immigration reform and to promote the movement pressing for Catholic churches to offer sanctuary to undocumented immigrants. This chapter explores the evolution of El Santo Pollero within the political and economic intersections of migration and faith.
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 5 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Humanities
- Political Science
Abstract UnDocumented Saints follows the migration of popular saints from Mexico into the United States and the evolution in their meaning. The book explores how Latinx battles for survival are also performed in the worlds of faith, religiosity, and the imaginary and how the sociopolitical realities of exploitation and racial segregation frame popular religious expressions. It analyzes the emergence of interreligious states, transnational ethnic and cultural enclaves unified by faith/religiosity. Following a chronological approach, this book analyzes five vernacular saints who have emerged in Mexico and whose devotions have migrated into the United States in the last one hundred years: Jesús Malverde, a popular bandito turned saint caudillo; Santa Olguita, an emerging feminist saint linked to border women’s experiences of sexual violence and assault; Juan Soldado, a soldier who was a murderer and rapist, who was the main suspect in the death of an eight-year-old victim known now as Santa Olguita, and who is now a patron for undocumented immigrants; Toribio Romo, a Catholic priest whose ghost/spirit has been helping people cross the border into the United States since the 1990s; and La Santa Muerte, a controversial personification of the dead who is particularly popular among some LGBTQ migrants. Each chapter contextualizes a particularly popular saint with broader discourses about the construction of masculinity and the state, the long history of violence against Latina and migrant women, female erasure from history, discrimination against non-normative sexualities, and the United States and Mexico’s investment in the control of religiosity within the discourses of immigration in the United States.
2022-12-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter analyzes the spread of the veneration of La Santa Muerte, a controversial female personalization of the Grim Reaper, in both Mexico and the United States. The chapter contextualizes her modern public emergence in 2001 within the extreme precariousness that characterized the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Tequila Crisis.1 The chapter first explores how La Santa Muerte iconography has been (mis)interpreted and appropriated to promote anti-Latinx sentiments by various groups and agencies tasked with enforcing the power of both Church and state. Intimately connected to the case of Jesús Malverde, these groups range from the US Drug Enforcement Agency to for-profit, private, consulting groups within police forces in the United States and Mexico to newly emerged organized policing agents within the Catholic Church. This chapter then discusses how followers of La Santa Muerte and LGBTQ Latinx communities—communities that share similar experiences of discrimination and criminalization—have converged in venerating her as a beacon of affirmation and liberation for the outcasts of society. Drawing on queer performance and religious studies, I focus on the LGBTQ network of leaders who sustain and organize La Santa Muerte worship in Mexico and the United States, in resistance to the state and state-sanctioned forces that try to turn her veneration to their own ends.
Miríada: Investigación en Ciencias Sociales · 2021
1st authorCorresponding- Humanities
- Humanities
- Philosophy
En esta contribución se presenta el número monográfico dedicado a Acciones, interacciones y utopías. En el centro de esta crisis Covid-19, las preguntas clave del número son: ¿qué tipo de sociedad queremos promover, evidenciar y hacer visible? : ¿Pueden las ciencias sociales proponer una alternativa a la sociedad contemporánea?
Frequent coauthors
- 1 shared
Marcelo Salas
- 1 shared
Paolo Parra Saiani
University of Genoa
- 1 shared
Silvia Cataldi
Sapienza University of Rome
- 1 shared
Paolo Henrique Martins
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
Labs
Awards & honors
- 2024 : Best First Book Award in the History of Religions , A…
- 2023 : Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize , American Soc…
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