Our humanities lab draws together a multidisciplinary research team of faculty, artists and filmmakers, and students, convened as a series of “mobile think tanks.” We attend, observe, and participate in these festivals together: interviewing participants, organizers, and political leaders. The mobile think tank gathers in situ with local intellectuals in a seminar workshop format to discuss, analyze, and interpret each particular religious event in relation to the themes of immigration, race, globalization and political and civic culture.
Our eclectic group of researchers includes students, professors, artists, filmmakers, and journalists. We have spent the better part of three years participating in public ritual events, attending dozens of religious festivals across the state. We have thrown colors at Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, with those who have inherited Hindu traditions and those who have adopted them in the United States. We have processed in the streets of downtown Los Angeles with Peruvian immigrants as they sway to and fro under the heavy weight of their penitential andas. We have wept at altars for the dead on Dia de los Muertos. We have waited for the Virgin to appear in a desert sky in the middle of the Mojave. We have joined aging internees on their annual pilgrimage to Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp, where we braced against the harsh winds and dust to chant, and dance, and pray.