PERFORMING SUBJECTIVITY AND CITIZENSHIP:

El SEOR DE LOS MILAGROS IN THE PERUVIAN DIASPORA

Ulla Dalum Berg (Ph.D. candidate) Department of Anthropology New York University 25 Waverly Place, 1st Fl. New York, NY 10003

Draft version please do not circulate without authors permission

Paper prepared for delivery at LASA, Las Vegas, 6-8 October 2004 Panel: Desplazamientos Migratrios y Subjetividades Diaspricas I

INTRODUCTION1 The yearly procession of El Seor de los Milagros on 51st street in Manhattan is the largest public event organized by Peruvian migrants in the urban autumn landscape of New York City. Religious confraternities or brotherhoods (hermandades) devoted to el Seor de los Milagros has existed in Peru since the 18th century (Millones 2003), however, the Peruvian ethno-historian Maria Rostworowski argues that it has roots further back to the pre-hispanic indigenous cult of Pachacamac (Rostworowski 1992:135-48). With increased migration from Peru to the U.S., Europe and Asia in the past decades, Catholic brotherhoods devoted to different saints including Seor de los Milagros, San Martn de Porres, Seor de Muruguay, Santa Rosa de Lima and regional cults such as Seor de Qoullur Riti (Avila 2002), have mushroomed all over the Peruvian diaspora. Currently more than 50 brotherhoods devoted to Seor de los Milagros exist in countries like the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Japan, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela (Paerregaard 2001:3). In the United States, hermandades devoted to El Seor de los Milagros have emerged in major urban centers with large concentrations of Peruvian migrants as for example New York City where more than 6 brotherhoods in Manhattan and boroughs celebrate El Seor de los Milagros in the month of October.2 This paper will discuss the yearly procession of the Seor de los Milagros in New York City as a site of cultural and political mediation and explore some of the issues at stake in the preparation and staging of the event for participants, organizers, and spectators. What happens when a religious practice historically associated with one place (Pachacamac) and one city (Lima) gets lunched into transnational circulation? What kind of transnational links does this religious performance enable? In what ways does this kind of self-representation and self-objectification, as enacted discourses on Peruvianness, generate and mediate, an authentic way of being Peruvian in a global, multicultural setting like New York City? Does the event as mimetic spectacle, animating the urban landscape of Manhattan, provide an arena for the cultural construction and contestation over the parameters of citizenship and of national cultural politics in the United States? Through an analysis of this particular transnational practice, I will explore how this kind of public spectacle mediates not only the links between subjectivity and nations (Peru and the US), or between subjectivity and other forms of de-territorialized or transnational communities (for example Catholic Hispanics in New York City), but also of past and present Peruvian immigrant lives.

The material presented in this paper stems from a short-term fieldwork in New York City carried out in the fall of 2002 while shooting a documentary titled Waiting for Miracles (2003). Both the film and the research is part of my ongoing dissertation research on the intersubjective effects of new communicative practices on social life in the context of Peruvian migration to the U.S. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the SSRC Translocal Flows conference in Guadalajara in May 2003. I thank Marcial Godoy for this opportunity and Rossana Reguillo (ITESO) and Alejandro Grimson (IDES) for their useful comments and constructive criticism. 2 According to the Mayordomo of the Hermandad del Seor de los Milagros de Nueva York, Inc. there are 32 hermandades devoted to Seor de los Milagros in the U.S. (Interview, January 26). A quick web-search on Google identify processions in cities like Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Sarasota, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Denver, Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pasadena, San Diego, San Francisco, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Paterson (NJ), New York City, and Washington DC.

Scholars of transnational migration have argued that religious institutions and churches are crucial sites for the articulation of transnational networks (Levitt 2001; Mahler n.d.). Aihwa Ong for example has shown how church groups in receiving locations can be vital agents in converting immigrants into acceptable citizens by sponsoring, helping and socializing newcomers into the host society (1996:745). But rather than primarily seeing the Catholic Church as a powerful transnational organization converting immigrants into assimilated American citizens, I am here concerned with the ways in which religiosity is deployed transnationally by Peruvian migrants in order to make sense of their experience as migrant workers in the U.S. Instead of dismissing devotional practices as folkloric or as false consciousness, I wish to show how participants understand these as having not only symbolic but also material effects on their livelihood and everyday social lives. In the first part of the essay, I will discuss subjective aspects of this devotional practice. I am especially concerned with the ways in which participants see their own participation in the procession and in the activities of the Hermandad and how they explain occurrences related to their current or previous immigration status according to their faith in Seor de los Milagros. In the second part of the essay, I examine the Hermandad as an institution and the procession as a site for the articulation not only of transnational links with institutions and social groups in the homeland, but also a site for articulating relationships vis--vis a larger community of Latinos in New York City, providing Peruvians with a modality of belonging. SETTING THE SCENE: PUBLIC EVENTS AS AN ANALYTICAL LENS Public events have long been of interest to anthropology - often under terms as diverse as ritual, spectacle, processions, parades, carnivals, festivals, etc. Early studies of public rituals were influenced by the Durkheimian tradition of looking at rituals as collective representation and by Levi-Straussian structuralism, which interpreted these practices as reflections of an underlying normative and universal structure (Handelman 1998:9-10). Others highlighted that ritual and public events address, display and often contest and rework social discontinuities embedded in wider social contexts and relationships (see for example the works of Gluckman, Mitchell, Turner, and Leech). Poststructuralist and materialist critiques later dismantled the premises of anthropological studies which gave myth and belief systems analytical primacy over ritual as practice, arguing that these studies were a-historical and inaccurately saw ritual as simple reproductions of pre-existing social patterns without room for social change and renewal.3 The study of ritualized social and cultural practices has in recent years experienced a revival in anthropology with a renewed interest in public spheres and larger mediated spectacles. The idea that public events can work as an analytical lens to look at larger social formations which goes beyond the events

Catherine Bells term ritualization (1992) became very influential in ritual studies and in anthropological studies of ritual. Bell defines ritualization as practices or actions, which differentiate themselves from other kinds of more mundane social actions. Bells approach stresses the primacy of the social act in itself (ibid:67). She argues that a focus on ritualization can show not only the purpose of the ritual activity and its social efficacy but also the embodiment of ritual in complex situations, that is the interaction of the social body within a symbolically constituted spatial and temporal environment (ibid:93).

themselves are now articulated in a series of recent works (Guss 2000; De la Cadena 2000; Cnepa Koch 2001; Mendoza 2000).4 Works on Peruvian public performances outside the borders of the Peruvian nation-state have mainly focused on the composition and razn detre of the cultural associations, sport clubs, or religious confraternities which organize and stage such public events (Altamirano 1998; Ruiz 1999). These studies often assume that Peruvians are reproducing a Peruvian national identity or even a specific Peruvianness in order to insert themselves in the receiving society and thus somewhat echoes the immigrant to ethnic paradigm in immigration studies (Portes & Rumbaut 1990). Other scholars have chosen to track down social and cultural phenomena in global circulation by focusing on processes of deterritorialization (Avila 2002) and expatriation (Paerregaard 2001) of cultural practices and symbols as for example religious icons. These two latter studies, the first about the regional cult to Seor de Qoyllur Riti and the second about Seor de los Milagros, vary in the degree to which they attribute importance to horizontal transnational ties as shaping these social and cultural practices abroad. The conclusion in both cases is that whether used to sustain transnational ties with parallel institutions at home or to respond to relations of inequalities that shape the identities of participants as immigrants and ethnic minorities in the host country, such public events provides a source of collective identity through which Peruvians can assert themselves as such within global contexts. What I hope to show here is that when focusing on the performance of the event itself, this becomes a lens to look not only at the production of transnational relations between Peruvians in New York and institutions in Peru, but also at the ways in which Peruvian migrants articulate relationships with institutions of modernity in New York City while engaging in the cultural construction and contestation over the parameters of citizenship and of national cultural politics in the United States. Early scholarly work on ethnic parades in the US emphasized that such public events functioned as a staged presentation of an ethnic minority vis--vis a larger community. The performed or staged identities were seen as important moments of displaying symbolic unity across internal political and social differences of a given community even when the minority groups in question were not always in control of their own representation (Kasinitz and Freidenberg-Herbstein 1987; Schneider 1990). Recent studies have emphasized how the different stakes at work in the staging of such events are influenced not only by the cultural politics and the nationalist vs. transnational strategies of different immigrant groups and activists but also by transnational neo-liberal policies and politics (both government and corporate), which ties local community struggles to larger economic and transnational processes (Dvila 2004). Only recently, works on religious processions and devotional practices in contexts of migration and diasporic communities has started to appear (Glvez 2003, 2004).

Joseph Roach understands performance as coterminous with kinds of memory and history. He draws attention to how expressive movements or events can work as mnemonic reserves what he calls the kinesthetic imagination (1996:26) and thus work as acts of transfer (Taylor 2003) through which memory and history are reproduced, but also possibly transformed or collapsed.

Focusing on large public event always presents the danger of taking attention away from less visible quotidian localized struggles, which are equally tied into global forces. That is certainly not my intention here. I see the procession and the devotional practices related to it as part of a dense web of economic, political, and socio-cultural transnational relations connecting Peruvians in New York to their places of origin and vice versa. Devotional practices manifested in the participation of public religious processions are part of a large repertoire of transnational practices through which migrants maintain connections with family, friends, compadres and cultural and political institutions in the homeland and also through which they lead their struggles of insertion in U.S. society. While highly privileged in this paper, I do pretend to argue that public performances in urban spaces are the only sites for the production of locality, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has termed it, however, I find that they are very significant sites which lend themselves well as an analytical lens to examine how urban spaces and social geographies are produced and contested.5 MEDIATING DIASPORIC SUBJECTIVITY: THE POWER OF MIRACLES Although the hermanos laugh and brag about how the procession offers them the opportunity to close down Fifth Avenue for half an hour, the procession is not only about public ways of creating, inhabiting, and staging meaningful social and cultural worlds. A central motive for participating in the event is the fulfillment of individual promises made to El Seor de los Milagros in exchange for favors or for Gods mercy in difficult situations. Very early in my research, stories of miracles started to appear in the migration narratives I collected. A little note on the concept of miracles can be useful here. The first formal Christian definition of miracle, miraculum, is generally credited to St Augustine (354-430 AC). Anthropologist Michael Sallnow gives an excellent description of the historical development and regulation of the concept within the realm of the Catholic Church, which is worth quoting at length here:
Agustines initial definition cast the net wide: I call a miracle anything which appears arduous or unusual, beyond the expectation or ability of the one who marvels at it. Here the miracle is located in the subjective perception alone: it is a vehicle of personal revelation. Some years later, he offered a more exact and objective specification: We give the name nature to the usual and known course of nature; and whatever God does contrary to this, we call prodigies or miracles. The Augustinian notion of miracle has been elaborated, but not much altered by Christian theologians since. St Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, defined a miracle in Augustinian terms as an occurrence beyond the order of all created nature. He argued, though, that miracles were not necessarily prodigious; any effect, however, insignificant, was miraculous if it surpassed the powers of nature. It might do this in one of three ways: substantially that is, by producing a material effect, such as making the sun turn back; subjectively consisting in the subject

Most of the Peruvians who participate in the procession do not live in the area around 5th Avenue and 51st where the procession takes place. Most of them live in Flushing and areas around Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. In this sense the case of Peruvian migrants in New York City reflect Saskia Sassens argument about the microgeographies of global cities. Sassen argues that the main sites of production in global cities are financial goods and services and that these cities are in need of a large immigrant workforce in order to reproduce themselves as global cities (Sassen 1991:5).

rather than the substance, such as raising the dead to life; or qualitatively producing a natural effect in an unnatural manner, such as curing a long-standing illness (Sallnow 1987:53).

During the counter-reformation, the concept of miracle was further formalized by the Catholic Church who had a series of anxieties with regards to authentication still an issue until this day. The miracles that I am interested in here are obviously not those, which have been officially approved as miraculous and transcendent by the Catholic Church, but rather those occurrences, which are popularly perceived to be miraculous. According to Peruvian anthropologist Jos Luis Gonzlez Martinez, religious practices as miracles and favors often occur in high-stress situations where a person experience fundamental aspects of his or her existence threatened (1988:362). Others have shown how the violence and crudity of contemporary urban life at least in a number of Latin American cities have served as fertile ground for fostering a series of religious and devotional practices including the fetishization of religious objects (Reguillo 2003). It is common to start believing in the power of saints after experiencing unusual occurrences, especially when someone calls to their attention that their fortune or misfortune might be the work of a saint. Peruvian migrants in the United States, devoted to Seor de los Milagros, will more often than not ascribe both material or spiritual favors and misfortunes as doings of the sacred image. In other words, an eventual recovery from an illness, success in finding a job, legalization of immigration status, quick processing of green card applications, etc. are often interpreted and explained as miraculous intervention by El Seor. From this perspective, the participation in the procession honoring el Seor de los Milagros in October is often motivated by and indeed very linked to questions of health, employment or lack of employment, and other issues central to the everyday lives of Peruvian migrants in the US. Antonio is one of many Peruvians who have a miracle to report. He came to the United States for the first time on a tourist visa in 1986, which he overstayed for a few years before returning to Peru in 1988. At that time Peru was in the midst of a social, economic and political crisis due to the armed conflict between Sendero Luminoso and the Peruvian State. Antonio stayed for another two years in Peru and then he decided that there was no future for him in Lima. He migrated with his wife and her family to the US over Mexico. The trip took more than 6 months and they were passed on from coyote to coyote paying several thousand dollars for the trip. When Antonio finally arrived to the U.S. for the second time he arrived as mojado. It was extremely difficult for him to find work and to construct a livelihood. He narrates:
Despes de mucho tiempo, yo buscaba tener mis papeles. Ya estaba muchos aos en los Estados Unidos y no poda conseguirlos y era una trava, una amenaza hacia uno, con tantos problemas legales que uno vive. Siempre viv pediendo favores... mira necesito esto, ayudame porque no tengo papeles, o quiero cobrar un cheque, pero no tengo una cuenta... Inicialmente un abogado que me estaba llevando el caso cometi un error, no mand las copias que tena que presentar cuando immigracin te los pide. Entonces el departamento de labor cuando no tiene un documento a tiempo te da el caso simplesmente por terminado, te lo cierran, es as, es vertical la ley all. Entonces me llega una carta diciendo que mi caso fue terminado y no supe que hacer. Habl con el abogado y l me ofreci nuevamente seguir el caso, pero ya yo estaba incredulo. Ya no confiaba en esa persona. En ese momento tu te hundes en la depressin, en la desesperacin, porque ya pensando que todo est a medio solucionar, que ya ests ms cerca a romper esa cadena, de pronto te dicen no, vuelves a la linea. Y es una linea de aos, todava para ver si te aprueban o si

sale otra nueva ley que te cambie todo. Entonces uno a veces siente desesperacin.... Uno de esos das como dicen que te dan la sorpresa as de la nada, esa vez me recuerdo, yo le haba hecho una promesa al seor de los milagros de que si l me ayudaba a conseguir mis papeles por mi trabajo, yo le iba a hacer un anda. Un anda como la de Lima...Para esto yo le pedia ayuda de los hermanos de la hermandad aqu que me consigan fotos, que tomen las medidas ya que ellos pueden ir a Lima [e.g., those who had documents already] y estar all frente a la imagen y a la anda del Seor de los Milagros en Lima. Entre dos hermanos me ayudaron. Uno me proporcion los videos de cmo es que est la estructura, el otro me traj fotos y medidas, y as poco a poco empez a construir el anda. Todavia no haba tenido los papeles de trabajo pero dije: Seor yo te lo voy a hacer. Y bueno decid hacer el anda. Le ped permiso al dueo de la compania. Me qued trabajando horas durante la noche. Me recuerdo que para este entonces trabajabamos hasta un cuarto para las siete, haba que hacer overtime dos o tres horas ms, ya yo estaba cansado, cinco o seis de la tarde mi cuerpo ya no daba ms, pero tena la promesa de hacerle al Seor de los Milagros el anda. El tiempo pasaba y la presin segua. Compr la madera, empez a desarrollar el diseo y una de esas noches que ya tal vez el cansancio, no s, pero la cosa no me sala como yo pensaba. Se me haca todo dificil, los trazos, me equivocaba y todo, entonces le digo: Seor por favor, mira, tu fuiste carpintero como yo, yo no te voy a engaar, yo te estoy haciendo un buen trabajo, pero dame una manito, no te voy a fallar. Dicho y hecho. Todo empez como una rompecabeza a armarse, una pieza sobre el otro y as sali. Termin el anda y todo, pasaron los meses, sali la processin. Me emocion mucho ver que yo pude hacer algo as para el Seor. Entonces ya yo me sent satisfecho en ese momento, aun que no tena mis papeles, pero me llen el corazn saber que pude hacer algo para el seor de los milagros. Como tantas veces hay momentos de frustracin en la vida de uno y cambio de leyes de inmigracin, problemas ac en el trabajo hacan que mi estabilidad peligraba un poco, entonces desesperado de no poder conseguir nada, un da le reclam, le dije: Seor mira, yo ya te hice el trabajo, por favor ayudame! Yo te promet hacerlo y no falt a mi promesa, no te olvides de mi. Entonces, eso me recuerdo fue un da lunes, el da viernes de esa misma semana, me llega una carta del departamento de labor diciendo que mi applicacin fue aprobada y que dependa de seis meses ms para que me den una cita para inmigracin. No hizo falta los seis meses, me lleg la cita y present todo. Cuando fue a inmigracin, despus de presentar todo eso, te envan una carta diciendo que ya se ha recibido todo y que te dan 180 dias ms para responderte sobre tu greencard. De junio a julio pas un mes y pico, me lleg el greencard. Entonces yo no puedo dar otra explicacin ms que el seor me escuch. Es un testimonio vivo de que dios est con nosotros y si tu obras de f, de corazn, se lo pide con todo tu amor y tu sentimiento, te va escuchar. Y eso fue la respuesta de l. Puede pasar muchas cosas, pero yo siempre voy a estar all con el Seor de los Milagros, siempre voy a ayudar a mi hermandad, de lejos de cerca de donde sea, siempre voy a hacer un espacio para ayudarlos, para estar con l por que l me ayud. Eso es lo que puedo decir.6

RELIGIOUS SPECTACLE AND TRANSNATIONAL POLITICS It has often been claimed that there is nothing more emblematic of Peruvian identity in Peruvian migrant communities outside Peru than the organization of processions honoring El Seor de los Milagros (Altamirano 1998; Paerregaard 2001; Ruz 1999). The first brotherhood devoted to el Seor de los Milagros in NYC emerged in 1970 in the Church of San Benito on 53rd St. in Manhattan. According to one of the founding members, Julia Fernandez, this confraternity was divided into two independent organizations in 1972. One remained in the Church of San Benito while the other moved to the neighboring parish

Antonio became a member of the Hermandad in the United States. Although his parents took him to the procession in Lima as a child, he has never carried the icon in the streets of Lima (Interview, November 2002).

Iglesia del Sagrado Corazn de Jess.7 During the year the members of the Directiva gather to raise funds for the procession in October and to take care of all practicalities of the event in advance. Besides the usual cargos of a voluntary organization (president, secretary, treasurer, etc.), a religious confraternity like the Hermandad del Seor de los Milagros comprise of the following additional sections or groups related to the organization of the procession: Hermanos cargadores grouped in Cuadrillas (the original Hermandad in Lima has 20 cuadrillas with over 200 hermanos in each); the Saumadoras, who are the women carrying the incense during the procession and the Cantadoras who are women singing and praising the Lord during the procession. Finally, each brotherhood has a Mayordomo (main sponsor and chief), a vice-mayordomo, a patron de andas, a capataz general and subcapatazes, and mixtureros who are in charge of different tasks before, during, and after the procession. In Lima, being member of one of the cuadrillas of the original brotherhood - the Hermandad de Cargadores y Sahumadoras, founded in Lima in 1878 in the Igleasia de las Nazarenas (Rostworowski 1992:180-1) - is seen as a sign of respectability and good citizenship through the practice of Catholic values. 8 This Hermandad is primarily integrated by members of traditional families of the political and economic elite and being a member is generally interpreted as a sign of an elevated social position in the dominant social order. None of the members of the Hermandad in New York had ever been members of the Hermandad de Cargadores y Saumadores in Lima. Only some had been members of local brotherhoods in provincial cities of the coast. Throughout its institutional history, the Hermandad del Seor de los Milagros de Nueva York, Inc. has maintained links with Cuadrilla 17 in the Hermandad in Lima. This contact was originally initiated by the current Mayordomo of the Hermandad in New York whose brother-in-law is part of Cuadrilla 17. Now, every year, a delegation of hermanos travel from New York City to Lima to participate in the procession on October 28. Here, they are received as members of the Brotherhood of New York, which gives them access to a social and institutional space in the home country that they had never imagined possible while in Peru. In this sense, Peruvian migrants in New York City use their Hermandad and the entitlements that this institution provides them with vis-a-vis the home society as a way to assert social and cultural capital in Peru. James Clifford has argued that diasporic and transnational communities may wax and wane in diasporism, depending on changing possibilities and obstacles both in host countries and transnationally (1995:249). The yearly participation of US-based Peruvian migrants in the procession in Lima may be seen as an example of how Peruvians while lacking political enfranchisement and recognition of social claims in the US assert transnational participation in the public sphere of their home country through a US-based confraternity. However, no transnational links are unmediated and the participation in the procession in Lima requires that participants can leave and enter the US freely and return when the festivities in Lima are over. This hinders undocumented Peruvians from participating in the event in Lima. Only those who are documented in the US

I have mainly worked with the Brotherhood in the Sagrado Corazn Church, who organize the largest procession and celebrate their mass in Saint Patricks Cathedral. 8 The Hermandad de Cargadores y Sahumadoras in Lima was approved by the ecclesiastic authorities in 1911 and finally in 1920, this institution obtained formal legal status (Rostworowski 1992:181).

and who enjoy the benefits of permanent residency or citizenship and thus freedom of mobility can travel to the annual processions in Lima. Not only Peruvian migrants themselves use the confraternity to make claims to social participation and social mobility back in Peru. The Peruvian government who in recent years has been deeply concerned with effectively maintaining political and economic relationships with its diasporic citizens has cast their eyes on the Hermandad in New York as a central site for producing alliances and forms of solidarity between migrant communities abroad and the Peruvian national government back home. Already in the mid-1990s the Fujimori government donated a Placa de Oro to the Hermandad honoring them for their efforts to work for the progress and well being of the Peruvian nation. This has later been followed up by President Alejandro Toledo who chose the Peruvian community in New York City as one of the pilot project sites for the implementation of new consular policies through which the government attempts to include the Peruvian communities abroad in a new national imaginary el quinto suyo obviously motivated by the possibility of securing the flow of remittances and votes (Berg and Tamagno 2004). Every year the Hermandad in New York invite the Peruvian Consul, Vice-consul and other diplomats and government officials to participate in the procession. The members of the Hermandad see this as an honor that they are extending to the government officials of their home country. When interviewing workers at the Peruvian Consulate in New York, several of them talked to me about their participation in the Procession as a duty in which they engaged to maintain good relationship with the Hermandad and thus with la comunidad peruana in New York. RELIGIOSITY ON DISPLAY: CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP? Since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Catholic Church in the U.S. became a venue for mobilizations based on a pan-Latino ethnicity. Priests trained in Ponce (PR) came to serve in the more than one hundred and thirty parishes throughout the New York City diocese. It can be argued that whether bound to specific nationalities and ethnicities or not, religion has been a crucial variable in the social organization and political mobilizations of Latin American Catholic immigrants in New York City for at least the past 25 years (Glvez 2004). The Hermandad del Seor de los Milagros is such a case in point. In spite of their (often) undocumented status and their general disadvantaged position within the global political economy in New York City (see also Julca 2001), Peruvian migrants use the brotherhood not only to gain access to basic social services through the Church normally reserved for citizens and provided by the state, but also to articulate relationships with regulating urban regimes of the city of New York (for example city authorities) institutions for whom this particular community would otherwise have been invisible. Furthermore, for the members of the Hermandad, the yearly procession and all the meetings and socializing with fellow Peruvian Catholics that leads to it is in a sense a process of emplacement in which the city (or certain places in the city) becomes meaningful and maybe even home. But does these devotional practices and the social contexts in which they are embedded represent any kind of enfranchisement for Peruvian migrants to the U.S?

The debate on cultural citizenship engages some of the processes and problems facing transnational and immigrant communities in New York City (or anywhere in the US). Aiwha Ong defines cultural citizenship as the cultural practices and beliefs produced out of negotiating the often ambivalent and contested relations with the state and its hegemonic forms that establish the criteria of belonging within a national population and territory (1996:738). Ong is critical of the notion of cultural citizenship in the form of apparent cultural recognition and language democracy. She argues that while these dimensions of cultural citizenship are easily endorsed by state institutions who then free themselves from further obligations to real social and political enfranchisement of minorities, they work as a containment of immigrant communities preventing them from advancing towards full citizenship in spite of cultural difference from mainstream Anglo American society (1996:737-38; 1999).9 Renato Rosaldo (1994, 1997) and William Flores and Rina Benmayor (1997) take a different stand. Both Rosaldo and Flores and Benmayor have argued that although it may not ultimately alter the juridical or social status of minority citizens, the claim for cultural citizenship is an assertion of rights which can contribute to the construction of empowering cultural spaces in society at large from where, at some later stage, political and social rights can be claimed (Rosaldo 1997, Rosaldo and Flores 1997; Flores 1997; Flores and Benmayor 1997). Although the members of the Hermandad do not articulate themselves in terms of the cultural citizenship debate, the yearly procession in New York is part of a larger set of regularized cultural and religious celebrations in the New York, which mark the city as a culturally diverse city. As a ritualized public event, the procession contributes to putting Peruvians on the map of New York City both inside and outside of their own community. As David, the coordinator of the procession and a constant interlocutor during this research, stated in an interview: Queremos que la institucin cresca y que todos los peruanos y los dems Latinos sepan que hay un seor...[...]...Y adems nos da gusto cerrar la Quinta Avenida aun que sea por media hora (laughs). In the interviews I did about the organizational aspects of the procession and the strategies used for negotiating with municipal and state officials, the hermanos would often emphasize how they accommodated to the rules of the city and how everything they did was legal. Permits from police and city officials were always solicited in advance of the event and all the letters were proudly kept. David explained to me: Siempre nos gusta trabajar con el reloj. Queremos que todo salga bien para que nadie nos diga nada. In the context of the politics of space in immigrant New York, the procession is also about maintaining a public image of Peruvians as hardworking, docile and assimilated immigrants. Following Robert Bellahs argument of the importance of religion in American civic life (1970), the procession provides a legitimate public space from where Peruvian migrants many lacking legal status in the US - can articulate a sense of belonging and at times claim social rights.

It has been critiqued that the recognition of Latinos in the US has been mainly in their capacity as ethnic consumers and not through the recognition of this constituencys demands for full citizenship in spite of cultural difference from mainstream Anglo American society (Dvila 2001, 2004).

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CONCLUDING REMARKS Participation in the yearly procession is crucial for many Peruvians in order to fulfill individual promises made to El Seor de los Milagros. Often these promises, as the case of Antonio above, are made with the hope that they one day through miracles instituted by El Seor de los Milagros - will materialize in the improvement of legal status, employment, health, or other issues central to the everyday lives of thousands if not millions of migrant workers in the U.S. Through my description and brief analysis of some of the central issues at stake in the production and circulation of the procession honoring el Seor de los Milagros in New York City, I have aimed to show how the significance of this public event extends beyond the moment of collective effervescence of the procession itself. The procession can be used as an analytical lens to look at a larger set of questions concerning the complex social field of action, which links Peruvian migrants in New York City to their places of origin. As illustrated in my analysis of the event, Peruvian migrants in New York City do not only think about the event in terms of representing or displaying some kind of Peruvian essence. Rather, they bring other categories and considerations to bear on this event which ultimately works to make sense of their migration experience both in New York City and back home.

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