The Effects of Immigration on Religion among Three Generations of Dominican and Puerto Rican Women.

This paper discusses several years of ongoing research of Dominican and Puerto Rican women and their commitment to religion over three generations. The first generation of our respondents were born and largely grew up in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The second and third generations grew up in New York and surrounding areas. We found that women were usually the ones that inculcated religious beliefs in their children and which did not change much over the three generations. We also found a decline over three generations in religious commitment as defined by attending church. However, we also speculate that rather than a decline in religious commitment, we might be observing a change in the way religion is practiced with more religious observance taking place in the home and less at church. We further found a decline in Catholicism and an increased participation in Protestant religious groups often of the fundamentalist variety. Two possible explanations for this are that the Catholic church rarely had priests in the continental United States at least in the beginning of both immigrations who spoke Spanish. Whereas fundamentalist religions may have seemed more appropriate for the new environment. We also suspect that non-Christian practices such as Santeria and Voodou are more wide-spread among our respondents than they admitted to. The denial of such non-Christian practices may have to do with the negative stigma attached to non-Christian practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]