Organized within the larger II Congreso Sulamericano de Historia to be held in Passo Fundo, Brazil on October 19-21, 2005, the symposium is composed of three panels that analyze the uses and significance that the local non-European populations gave to European-origin religions and religious institutions in Ibero-America in the colonial and republican periods.

Panel 1: Indians, Castas and the Colonial Church
Panel 2: Africans and the Church in Latin America
Panel 3: Faith and Nation in the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries

Paper proposals (title, description of 25 lines, and name and institutional affiliation) can be submitted in Spanish, English, or Portuguese by e-mailed to leo.garofalo@conncoll.edu by June 15, 2005. Keep in mind that the organizers of the Congreso plan to publish the texts of papers and require their submission by September 15 (length 20.000-70.000 characters). As organizers of the symposium, we will ask to see the texts at least a week before that date.

Description:
The symposium analyzes the uses and significance that the local non-European populations gave to European-origin religions and religious institutions in Ibero-America (South America) in the colonial and republican periods.

We propose the following themes and questions for examination in the symposium:

• What space for action did ecclesiastical institutions allow non-European populations to forge ethnic identity? To what extent did ecclesiastical and religious personnel give power to non-European groups?

• How and in what cases did these social grups appropriate and resignify both Christianity and non-Christian concepts and elements?

• To what measure did the transformations of state-church relations contribuye to the consolidation of an identity rooted in relgion?

• How did nineteenth-century European migrations contribute to the diversification of these identities and popular religious practices in South America?