(Image source: Tristan Sosteric/Medium)

As was often the case, José and I met at an Olive Garden in Gainesville, Florida.

In our many conversations since meeting at the San Juan Convention Center in Puerto Rico for Eid celebrations a couple years before, we had settled on the chain as our go-to spot for confabs once José moved to Central Florida in search of work.

And so, for hours one spring evening as we refilled bowls of salad and tore apart warm breadsticks, José sketched a vision of the future.

Between sips of sweet tea, José—a half-Puerto Rican and half-Haitian convert to Islam in his forties, living between Puerto Rico and Central Florida—leaned forward and said, “The Islamic renaissance will start here in the Americas, among us, among Black, Caribbean, and Latino Muslims.”

As converts minoritized in multiple directions, he explained, they had learned hard lessons about marginality, suspicion, and survival. That was precisely why they would lead the way forward—not by force, but “through kindness and compassion, fairness and justice.”

For the 15,000–20,000 Puerto Rican Muslims living in Puerto Rico and the United States, marginalization is a fact of daily life. Their authenticity is questioned by fellow Muslims and by fellow Boricua (meaning “Puerto Ricans,” derived from Borikén, the Taíno indigenous name for the island), many who view Islam as a foreign entity. They also live under the shadow of U.S. colonialism and within the threat-centered, law-and-order logics of American empire.

To be a Puerto Rican Muslim then, is to negotiate everyday being and belonging at numerous intersections of race, religion, class, and political status.

When I asked José how Puerto Rican Muslims fit into the renaissance he envisioned, he smirked. “We are pure hybrids, man. Nobody planned to make Puerto Rican Muslims. We just happened.” Then, more seriously: “We are the next stage in the ummah’s [Muslim community’s] evolution.”

For José and others like him, conversion is not a break from their ancestry and traditions but a collision of cultures, customs, and communities. The process is rarely easy.

While stereotypes often suggest marriage or incarceration are the most common pathways to conversion, most Puerto Rican converts actually encounter Islam through everyday relationships with friends, coworkers, or neighbors, which then leads to personal study and spiritual exploration. Many are drawn to Islam’s strong monotheism, daily discipline, and emphasis on equality before God. Others arrive through broader social and political concerns such as experiences with racialization or solidarity with global issues such as the Palestinian struggle, which can spark curiosity about Muslim communities and their beliefs. For some Puerto Ricans, these political or ethical entry points resonate with their own histories of marginalization and colonization.

Ultimately, their conversion narratives often weave together spiritual searching, personal relationships, and social justice commitments, allowing converts to frame Islam not as something foreign but as a meaningful extension of their existing cultural worlds. Although they see Islam as compatible with Puerto Ricanness, the Puerto Rican Muslims I met rarely felt entirely at home in masjid or barrio, on the archipelago or in the U.S. And yet they drew on variegated lineages to craft ways of belonging that refused singular definition. In doing so, they just might point the way toward the futures José imagines.

Fiction, Power, and the Powerless

When I began researching what would become Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam, I found myself reaching for literature—from the archipelago, the diaspora, and broader Puerto Rican and Muslim worlds—to interpret what I was witnessing.

During early fieldwork in Puerto Rico, I met author Joel Feliciano, who handed me a copy of his debut dystopian novel, Los Impoderes (“The Powerless”). The story unfolds in a future world ravaged by a war whose origins have faded from memory. Its characters wander through landscapes that are as psychological as they are physical, yearning for connection and common purpose. They are haunted by destiny and by the illusion that they might control what comes next. Ultimately, Los Impoderes suggests that identity is not secured through domination but forged in relation. Mastery of our lives, our destinies, is futile. Meaning instead emerges in connection.

Although my book is ethnographic rather than speculative science fiction, the lives of Puerto Rican Muslim converts echo similar themes. Many described periods of profound searching for theological coherence, moral discipline, and communities capable of holding their experiences of race, migration, and colonial marginalization all at the same time. Like Feliciano’s characters, they were not simply seeking belief, they were seeking a place to belong.

In large part, that is what drew me to their stories. In a world where diversity and difference force us all to consider who “We” are and who “They” may be, Borícua Muslim stories show us there is immense creative potential and humility to be found in the tension between “outsider” and “insider.”

Take my relationship with Khadijah, an artist and documentarian in New Jersey. A convert to Islam whose son was taken from her by gun violence, she and I did not share much in common when my project began. But after meeting at a coffee shop in Newark, we became consistent conversation partners and, later, collaborators on a mini-documentary about the Puerto Rican Muslim experience.

Through our interactions, we were able to share not only narratives about how Borícua Muslims navigate their multiple marginalizations, but—in the spirit of the Quranic injunction to “get to know another”—build a friendship where difference of background, belief, and experience did not disappear, but became productive. Our work together was not just about documenting a community, but discovering together how relationships across creed, confession, “tribe and nation” can generate new stories, new solidarities, and potentially, new futures.

Latinx Muslim Cosmopolitanism

Public discourse about Islam and Muslims in the Americas tends to rely on two dominant frames: immigrant communities from Southwest Asia and South Asia, and Black Muslim—or so-called “indigenous”—movements. Both are indispensable to understanding Islam and Muslim communities in the U.S. But this binary also obscures the complexities of Latinx Muslim experience, including that of Puerto Ricans.

Puerto Rico itself is often seen as religiously homogeneous—overwhelmingly Catholic, with Protestant evangelicalism as the primary alternative, alongside Afro-Caribbean traditions such as Regla de Ocha or Espiritismo. With such demographics, Islam appears foreign, imported, anomalous. A Puerto Rican Muslim woman who dons hijab may be racialized as Arab or South Asian by Puerto Rican coworkers. Family members may accuse her of abandoning her culture. In the diaspora, people may presume she is an immigrant. A Puerto Rican man who converts may be welcomed at a mosque yet subtly marked as religiously inauthentic because of his accent, cultural commitments, or socio-economic standing. My goal was to circumvent these assumptions by centering Puerto Rican Muslims’ experiences in the archipelago and in the U.S. Rather than demographic curiosities, they are agents negotiating recognition across overlapping identifications (Latinx, Muslim, American, Black, decolonial, immigrant, queer, and otherwise). In fieldwork conducted across Puerto Rico and diasporic hubs in New Jersey, New York, and Florida, I encountered individuals acutely aware of these intersections.

To account for such negotiations, I draw on the concept of everyday cosmopolitanism. Classical notions of cosmopolitanism—rooted in Greek philosophy and later Enlightenment thought—imagine the “citizen of the world,” bound by universal reason or rights. But the Borícua Muslims I met did not inherit cosmopolitanism from abstract frameworks. They labored for recognition across difference with limited socioeconomic and political resources. Their cosmopolitanism is vernacular and pragmatic. It appears in bilingual khutbahs weaving Quranic Arabic with Spanish commentary. It surfaces in Eid celebrations featuring halal habichuelas and pasteles alongside dates and dabke dances. It animates debates over whether modest dress must mirror Arab styles or can incorporate Caribbean aesthetics.

These are not superficial accommodations. They are acts of world-making that assert Islam’s compatibility with Puerto Rican culture while transforming what being Boricua can mean.

Puerto Rican Muslim Futures

I resisted portraying Borícua Muslims either as heroic boundary-crossers or as perpetual victims. Their lives are marked both by constraint and creativity. They do not passively absorb categories imposed upon them. Instead, they reinterpret and sometimes subvert them.

As the book has made its way into the world, I’ve started to find it fruitful to place its contents in conversation with Muslim futurism.

As numerous scholars and artists suggest, Muslim futurism reimagines Islamic traditions within various speculative, technological, and aesthetic futures. Drawing on Afro-futurist discourse and traditions, it responds to Western science fiction’s tendency to depict Muslims as archaic or antagonistic to modernity. Alternatively, authors and artists foreground themes of liberation, joy, ethical technology, and various understandings of what it means to belong.

AmeRícan Muslims embody these same impulses. Their everyday practices gesture toward futures in which Islam is neither foreign to the Caribbean nor confined to inherited cultural forms. When Puerto Rican Muslim communities mobilize zakat [obligatory charity] and sadaqa [voluntary giving] for local hurricane relief and collaborative projects to provide services where basic necessities (electricity, water, healthcare) are increasingly perilous, they enact a form of Muslim mutual aid amid climate vulnerability and colonial neglect. When Spanish-language Islamic podcasts and online study circles proliferate, they challenge the predominance of Arabic, Urdu, and English within American Muslim communities. As they organize alternative, Spanish-specific or mixed gender spaces for prayer or re-imagine their relation to Islamic legal traditions, they seek to build, embody, or otherwise shape the futures José forecast from that Olive Garden in Gainesville.

Technology, in these processes, acts as both a tool and a theater of contestation. On the one hand, digital networks enable isolated converts to find solidarity, connection, and instruction. On the other hand, Muslim communities remain subject to surveillance and algorithmic bias. But, Muslim futurism’s ethical engagement with technology—asking how Islamic values might guide innovation toward justice rather than domination—resonates with the surrender-to-God ethos many converts describe.

Joy as Resistance

A striking feature of my fieldwork, one that rarely appears in media portrayals of Islam and Muslims, is joy. There were Eid celebrations filled with Caribbean music and pinchos by the beach in Piñones, Muslimah activists marching in San Juan’s Pride parade or presiding over same-sex weddings, TikTok trend videos that humorously address the many stereotypes that come with conversion to Islam in Puerto Rican contexts.

I am reminded in particular of Sumayah. Sitting on Escambrón Beach, as she was drawing henna tattoos to raise funds for Palestine, Sumayah shared her dreams of one day owning and operating a halal food truck. The idea would be to combine the best of Puerto Rican cuisine with the ethical sensibility of Islamic tradition and flavors from Southwest Asia and North Africa. Having lived in Egypt before returning to Puerto Rico, she felt uniquely placed to bring that combination of cultural influences and seasonings together.

Surveying the people stretched out in the sand before her, Sumayah was pretty sure alcohol-free piña coladas that combined pineapple juice, coconut cream, a splash of lime and rosewater or heaping sandwiches made with a fusion of mofongo filled falafel would sell.

Even if they didn’t, she said, it would be a lot of fun making those meals in any case.

These are not marginal moments. They are assertions of presence. Points in time that create opportunities for surprise, a wry smile, or simple delight. In a climate where Muslims and people of color are often framed through crisis and negativity—terrorism, radicalization, security—such joyful interludes are subversive.

Muslim futurism’s emphasis on joy aligns with this reality. It refuses dystopian inevitability and insists on the possibility of beauty and communal flourishing. For Borícua Muslims, joy does not negate struggle. Rather, it coexists with it. It is a refusal to allow anti-Muslim suspicion or colonial marginalization to define the horizon of the possible. They are small acts within a statistically insignificant constituency. But they matter beyond their immediate impact.

In my research, many converts described Islam as a form of surrender that paradoxically liberates them from anxious self-sovereignty. Submission to divine unity reframes responsibility rather than erasing it. If destiny cannot be mastered, the task becomes ethical participation. Borícua Muslims cannot dictate how they are racialized or categorized. But they can cultivate solidarity, charity, worship, and cultural creativity that shape communal futures.

In a recent interview, community leader Hazel Gómez reframed philanthropy from the Puerto Rican, Mexican, or broader Latinx Muslim perspective not as charity bestowed from the powerful to the powerless, but as an ethic of solidarity rooted in shared vulnerability. Reflecting on her work among Latinx Muslim communities, she challenged the idea that giving is measured primarily in dollars, noting that marginalized Muslims, often without institutional or generational capital or wealth, have long practiced forms of care grounded in relationship, reciprocity, and dignity.

Drawing on Quranic teachings about humanity being created “into nations and tribes so that you may know one another,” Gómez described mutual aid after hurricanes and other crises not simply as emergency response but as world-building. Her vision pushes beyond transactional models of aid toward a future in which diverse communities, both Muslim and non-Muslim, recognize one another as co-laborers in justice. In doing so, Gómez offers a lived example of Puerto Rican Muslim futurism, an imaginative yet practical reorientation of Islamic ethics toward collective flourishing, where solidarity itself becomes a blueprint for the future. Like Feliciano’s wanderers, she muses, we may not control what is happening around us – whether that be climate catastrophe, political upheaval, or technological transformation.

And if José is right, the renaissance he and Hazel imagine will not arrive with spectacle. But through everyday cosmopolitan labor and speculative imagination, Borícua Muslims demonstrate that the future is not merely something that happens to us. Instead, they show us how our futures will be made and unmade in the context of everyday relationships; in how we decide to be and become this people or that people, “Us” or “Them,” or something beyond or in between. And that, Borícua Muslims stories make clear, is not a contradiction or endless source of insecurity, but a generative friction that is full of possibility.

Ken Chitwood is the author of Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism Among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam. He is a postdoctoral researcher pursuing Habilitation with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth, an Affiliate Researcher with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, and a Visiting Scholar with the University of Edinburgh’s Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 68 of The Revealer podcast: “Puerto Rican Converts to Islam.”