Muslim Women, Latinidad, and the Sacred Work of Belonging
By Melissa Maldonado‑Salcedo
When Zohran Mamdani placed his hand on the Quran to be sworn in as Mayor of New York City in January, something unexpected settled in my chest. The copy of the Quran he used had belonged to Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, an Afro‑Puerto Rican scholar, archivist, and historian whose life’s work preserved Black diasporic memory. Schomburg safeguarded evidence of belonging against erasure; Mamdani enacted that belonging in his first moment in public power. My own work lives between those acts, translating memory, faith, and diaspora into narratives that refuse disappearance and insist that presence does not need permission.
During Mamdani’s inauguration ceremony, Islam did not appear as newly arrived or narrowly defined. It appeared layered, diasporic, and already entangled with histories like mine. As a Latina woman, I felt seen not because the image was symbolic, but because it was truthful.
The Quran states, “O humankind, We created you from a single soul… and made you peoples and tribes so that you may know one another” (49:13)*.
Islam was never new to Latino communities. It has simply been managed, made visible within limits, and rendered invisible when inconvenient. When Islam is misrecognized within Latinidad, Muslim lives are treated as breaks from the past rather than part of what has always been present. When it is seen clearly, faith becomes continuity: a source of dignity, memory, and wholeness where belief and culture reinforce rather than erase one another.
Visible, but Bounded
Argentina helps make this tension visible. It is home to Latin America’s largest mosque, the King Fahd Islamic Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, where there has long been a public Muslim presence. The country twice elected Carlos Menem, the son of Syrian Muslim immigrants, as president. Although Menem converted to Catholicism decades earlier to meet constitutional requirements, his Muslim upbringing was never fully erased. When he died in 2021, he was buried in an Islamic cemetery, accompanied by Quranic prayer.
Even in death, his life reflected Islam’s position across the region: publicly acknowledged, politically limited. The Quran speaks directly to this kind of tension, stating, “They recognize the blessing of God, yet they deny it” (16:83).
That boundary continues to shift. In 2019, the Lebanese-born Soher El Sukaria became the first Muslim woman elected to Argentina’s National Congress. She represented Córdoba Province, a name so dear to most Muslim minds. A practicing Muslim and the daughter of a Sunni imam, she speaks openly about faith, gender, and citizenship not as contradictions, but as mutually reinforcing commitments. Her public life challenges the idea that Islam is foreign to Latino culture and reminds us that Muslim histories in the region are shaped by migration, race, and political constraint.
Yet faith does not remain fixed in place. It travels.
From Buenos Aires to Brooklyn
The Quran repeatedly reminds that faith is something people carry, especially under pressure: “Those who believed, migrated, and strove with their wealth and lives… are protectors of one another” (8:72).
Islam’s movement into U.S. cities like Brooklyn, Chicago, and suburban Maryland has not been seamless. What travels easily is belief; what must be rebuilt again and again is infrastructure: language, community, and methods of care. As Imam Khalid Latif, executive director and university chaplain of the Islamic Center at New York University, explained, Latino Muslims are not recent additions to the American Ummah but part of a layered hemispheric history shaped by conversion, migration, intermarriage, and inheritance. “What’s missing isn’t numbers; it’s recognition,” he told Islamic Horizons.
For Latina Muslim women in the U.S., auspicious occasions like Ramadan are often when that recognition becomes real. It is the month when faith converges with memory and labor, especially in homes where women are asked to translate Islam and make it livable. Ramadan, Latif reflected, is “a training ground for social solidarity,” where ritual and ethical formation are inseparable, and exactly what “God intends” (3:10).
Islam as Recovery, Not Replacement
When Wendy Díaz converted to Islam at 20, just one year before the Sept. 11 attacks, she found herself explaining her faith to others before she had the language to claim it fully for herself. She is Puerto Rican and moved frequently as an “Army brat.” Her first encounter with Islam came not through a mosque, but through The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book that has since been repeatedly banned , narrowing the pathways through which people encounter faith, dignity, and moral consecration.
Malcolm X’s account of Hajj affirmed a Quranic promise: “Indeed, the believers are brethren” (49:10).
Years later, as Díaz began raising children, she encountered something startling: there was almost nothing available for Muslim families in Spanish.
“When I realized there was nothing for children, I was flabbergasted,” she said. “So my husband and I said, ‘we’re going to have to take the matter into our own hands’.”
That decision became Hablamos Islam, a project producing bilingual Islamic children’s books rooted in Latino family life. For Diaz, language itself becomes religious infrastructure; without it, faith becomes inaccessible.
The Quran frames linguistic diversity as mercy, stating, “Among His signs is. . . the diversity of your tongues and colors” (30:22).
Diaz concluded that the absence of Spanish‑language materials for Muslims was not accidental. It reflected a broader assumption Díaz spent decades resisting: that Latino Muslims are perpetual newcomers.
“Latinos have been converting since the 1920s,” she said. “We’re not new, we’re just more visible.”
Visibility, here, is survival.
Building Spaces
For Alma Campos, embracing Islam came with a loneliness she hadn’t anticipated. A Mexican American woman raised Catholic, she encountered Islam as a teenager, but when she formally embraced it in college, she believed she was alone.
“I thought I was the only Latina in the world who had ever done this,” she recalled.
That loneliness eventually led Campos to Jordan, where she deepened her relationship to Islam and returned with clarity, not just about faith, but about belonging. She went on to co-found Latino Muslims of Chicago and later, the Ojalá Foundation, organizations devoted to affirming cultural identity within Islamic life.
“We can’t become someone else and expect to fully live as Muslims,” she said.
Her work reflects a Quranic ethic of care: “God does not burden a soul beyond what it can bear” (2:286).
Her organizations host Eid in Spanish, support youth leadership, and engage in service work from feeding unhoused communities to building interfaith coalitions. During Ramadan, that commitment is felt most richly in kitchens: tamales beside maqluba, tortillas alongside pita. These are not compromises. They are continuities.
Motherhood, Choice, and Ethical Faith
Stephanie Razza, 23, lives another version of this reality. As a Bengali American woman from Queens, N.Y., now raising a daughter in Chicago with her Puerto Rican husband, she navigates an interfaith marriage shaped by care and daily negotiation.
“Having a daughter feels like having a version of myself,” she said. “I just want to do it right.”
For Razza, “doing it right” means giving her daughter a living archive of language, stories, and resources from both traditions without coercion. The Quran is clear: “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256).
“We want to give her everything,” she said. “And if she decides she doesn’t want any of it, that’s okay too.”
For many women like Razza, often-dismissed online spaces have become portals of mutual care. “The internet has its issues,” she told me, “but it gave me pockets of peace.”
The Sacred Labor of Women
What binds these women is not a single theology but a shared ethic of care expressed through translation, community building, and domestic labor that is only rarely recognized as leadership. Across Muslim communities, women carry much of the work that sustains religious life: teaching, organizing, mentoring, and caring for others. This labor is often invisible but absolutely foundational.
The Quran names it, stating, “The believing women are protectors of one another” (9:71).
These women build classrooms, kitchens, storybooks, WhatsApp groups, youth programs, and Eid celebrations. In Islamic thought, knowledge is an amānah, a trust. For these women, knowledge isn’t about authority, it’s about responsibility: to translate faith into the ordinary textures of life.
This is why empanadas during Ramadan are not decorative. They are evidence that culture and faith are inextricable.
We Were Never New
For Muslim women navigating Latinidad, interfaith marriage, motherhood, and migration, the question is not whether Islam belongs to them. It is whether the institutions meant to serve the Ummah will make room for who they already are.
“We made duʿa years ago,” Campos reflected, “that one day we would have leaders who look like us.”
The Quran promises, “God does not let the work of those who do good go to waste” (18:30).
That future is already unfolding as seen in bilingual children’s books, Spanish‑language khutbahs, and kitchens where cultures meet without competing. In these homes, Islamic practices are not diminished by difference. They are deepened by it.
When Mamdani stood with Schomburg’s Quran beneath his hand, that depth briefly became visible in public life, a reminder that Muslim presence in this city, like Muslim women’s labor across the diaspora, did not arrive asking permission. It arrived carrying memory and claiming what was already ours.
*Quotes from the Quran in this article are derived from the author’s English translation of the Spanish-language Quran and may differ slightly from standard English translations.
Melissa “Mel” Maldonado-Salcedo is a Brooklyn-based artist, anthropologist, and educator at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. Her work explores the intersections of culture, community, and storytelling. Learn more about her projects at www.melthestorydoc.com.
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