Latina Muslim Spotlight: Marta Khadija Felicitas
Latina Muslim Spotlight: Marta Khadija Felicitas, Founder of LALMA
October marked the end of Latino Heritage Month: a time to learn, celebrate, and uplift the vibrant and multifaceted cultures and subcultures within the Latino community. But this October also marked the beginning of the Presidential Election.
We are at a crossroads. At the same time we try to celebrate this community, we must mobilize to protect it and other marginalized communities during this election.
Here at MWP, we wanted to do so through extending our understanding of our Latino Muslim sisters and brothers. A growing, underrepresented and often forgotten community, Latino Muslims are a segment of our ummah that deserves greater attention and support from the greater Muslim community. And that can only start with education and awareness.
So this month, we reached out to Marta Felictas Khadija Galedary, founder of La Asociación Latino Musulmana de América (LALMA) or Latino Muslim Association of America. Founded in 2000, LALMA is a non-profit organization dedicated to disseminating Islamic teachings and knowledge to both the Latino Muslim and non-Muslim Spanish-speaking community. From hosting Spanish-speaking Quran classes to leadership workshops for presenting Islam in the public sphere, LALMA works to educate and uplift new and old Latino Muslims alike.
We spoke with Marta to learn about her journey to Islam, her experiences as a Latina Muslim, her inspiration for creating LALMA and most importantly, what we can do to transform our own communities into ones more welcoming and inclusive of Latino Muslims.
October 23, 2020
Tell us about yourself: What part of Latin American are you from and how was your upbringing? Did you know about Islam at a young age?
I was born in Guerrero State, Mexico in a small village located three and a half hours south of Mexico City. My father owned a ranch, and every year the people from the village would come to my father and trade corn for renting a piece of land so that they could grow their own corn. I am the youngest of eleventh daughters in the family, one brother died in his infancy.
My mother was a devout Catholic. My Dad left the religious teaching to my mother. Culturally, the practice of Catholicism is left to be taught by the mother. I practiced Catholicism until my adolescence, I used to go to catechism (classes on Catholicism dogma and practice) every Saturday, attended Mass every Sunday and did the confession with a priest before receiving communion. During Easter week, I was not allowed to go to the movies or listen to music nor was I permitted to eat meat on Fridays. The concept of God for me at this time was a punitive God.
After finishing secondary school in Iguala, I moved to the capital, Mexico City. My mother and two sisters decided for me to attend a women-only Catholic school. From there, I then graduated and earned my Baccalaureate in Humanities. But I had no knowledge of Islam at this stage of my life.
If you converted/reverted, how did you learn about Islam and what made you decide to convert?
My trip to England was the most important event in my life. God had reserved for me the opportunity to meet three Muslim students from Brunei. I spent one summer in Bath, England to study English in 1982. But my new friends there from Brunei never talked to me about Islam.
It was their actions towards me that got my attention: I was treated with respect, kindness, caring and a clean attitude, feeling safe with them. The only question they asked me was if I believed in God and after giving a positive answer, I was told that I was a Muslim, a word that I had never heard in my life and I did not ask the meaning.
The summer course ended quite soon, I returned to Mexico City. I did keep in touch with those friends and I asked them to teach me how to talk to their God. In reply to my question, I received the book Islam in Focus. Also, I was told that communicating with God was done by praying and the section on prayers was marked in the book. I started reading the book. The transliteration of Arabic to English was so difficult for me, the fasting sounded too long and unhealthy. However, I was going through such difficult times and I needed something to makes my difficulties easier.
I did memorize two sentences from the Arabic transliteration: There is no god, but God (La Illaha Illalah) and I seek refuge in Allah from evil (A’uthu billahi mina shaytan ir rajim). I invoked these words every time I needed, and to my surprise, it seems that my difficulties or danger situations were solved smoothly.
Later on, in the summer of 1983, I arrived in the USA as a tourist. I enrolled in an adult English School. I met a teacher who was a Muslima and married to a Senegalese Muslim. She introduced me to a mosque and as soon as I stepped into it, I experienced mixed feelings of peace and fear; my heart started beating faster. I was so impressed to observe so many men praying and prostrating their faces on the floor. I said to myself this must be a powerful religion, to have so many men praying. (Culturally in Mexico, most of the men do not regularly attend church).
You lie at the intersectionality of many identities: Latino, Muslim, woman, etc. What has your experience been like in the US?
The identity that I chose is Mexican-American Muslim. In order for me to internalize this identity, I went through a process of awareness and understanding the concept of being a Muslim in the United States. Due to the multiple ethnic groups in the Muslim community, I realized that everyone follows and gathers among each other according to their own ethnic group.
I have not encountered hostility as a woman nor as a Muslim living in Southern California, though. But I did not adopt a dress style where I would be recognized as a Muslim (i.e. never wore an abaya or other outrightly Islamic attire). I was not discriminated against among Latinos because my facial features “say” my background; I look Mexican and therefore, I’m assumed as a Catholic. This is a general assertion: all Mexicans are Catholics.
Since I decided to follow Islam as my way of life, I came across Muslims who taught me to discover the rich culture of the multiethnic community of Muslims in Southern California and how their own cultural practices are so intertwined with Islam.
This election is impacting every voter, but especially communities like the Latino and Muslim communities. Why is it important for our community to be involved?
It’s important how we address the Latino Muslim community. Not everyone’s experience will be the same, of course. For example, I can’t outrightly say for everyone to go vote. For some, it’s complicated, because we have undocumented members of our community. That’s why we decided to form LALMA as a coalition with other grassroots orgs like LA Voice, ones that’ll advocate for undocumented communities as well. All the training we get from orgs like theirs and give to Latino Muslim communities, they’ll address same needs as the overall Latino community. Our Latino Muslims and non-Muslim Latinos have the same concerns.
I also realized the Muslim community, even more specifically the immigrant community has a long way to go. Many other immigrant Muslims are far from understanding how important it is to be part of the community of people unlike themselves. Everybody is in their little cocoon and you don’t come out of there; you’re cozy and you just protect yourself. We have not been doing the right thing for years, even since LALMA started. We still don’t do enough with the non-Muslim Latino community, too.
But I think a major awakening was when, in 2018, Ilhan Omar was elected to Congress. Here you have a someone, a naturalized Somalian Muslim immigrant in our goverment. Everyone got impacted by seeing it’s possible. We realize it’s important that we have a voice. In other countries you don’t get to have a voice. Sometimes many think, “Well, I don’t really care, I’ll let others do the job (social justice work)”. But that major election proved, no, we can do it, we can do the job and we should.
Still, our Muslim community isn’t as involved in anything in our backyard. So we, at LALMA, try to be involved in trainings for the Muslim community. LA Voice, for example, created a supergroup that includes the Muslim community. And other groups have made strides for the Muslm community to support. We now haive CAIR, Muslim Public Affairs Council, these other orgs giving trainings in California as well.
Ultimately, you cannot separate yourself. You can’t separate your civic duty from your religion. Our prophet extended treaties with everyone and he did it in a pluralistic society. Even in Medina, they had the Jews, in Mecca there were Christians, and he was able to still unite and work together. That’s the only way to take care of your community. Their problem is our problem. We’re part of the community, so we should be concerned about our neighbors.
As a Latina Muslim, what are some of the obstacles you face personally?
In California, we have a lot of residential Mexicans. As I mentioned before, I don’t feel that personal discrimination actually and it’s because I didn’t adopt the style of dress that would indicate me as “Muslim”, like the headscarf. I don’t wear it in my daily life but when I go to the mosque or when we have interfaith events or trainings, I’ll wear it. But when I don’t have it on, I’m just another Mexican, so they assume I’m Catholic. I don’t really have that specific obstacle personally.
Did you always feel welcomed by the Muslim community? Why or why not?
In general, I’ve (we’ve) always been welcomed. We’re newcomers and immigrants and adults, we came as adults with our own experiences. Still, I remember one of our Latino Muslim brothers who took Shahadah (oath to Islam, the prayer to officially become Muslim) five years ago. We were going to an Orange County mosque where other immigrants attend. And this brother looked maybe Pakistani or Arab, people couldn’t really “tell” he was actually Mexican. But when someone asked what part of that country he was from, he told them, “No, I’m Mexican.” And that individual flat out told him that meant he really wasn’t Muslim. And that brother was in tears from hearing that. So it does happen. But not all the time.
But then there’s our women; when do Muslim men like to see when we’re successful? Many of our men do not like to deal with any women and that’s their own personal bias. When we try to take up leadership, we’re seen as threatening their authority, but we don’t care about that at all.
And then we don’t have a “Latino Muslim” mosque. We do offer classes in Spanish and jummah (Friday prayer) in Spanish. But yeah sometimes in our mosques, there are Arabs who want to keep distance from us; and that’s their decision. Sometimes that does happen, of course.
In general though, we still feel welcomed, and even moreso from other communities. In my experience, the Indonesion community has been the most welcoming, actually. The Indonesion community bought a building that used to be a church and we asked them if we could host classes there. They bought it in the Spanish-speaking community. So we ended up collaborating, doing things like distributing school supplies and other charity/community events. And it’s great because more Indonesians get to meet the Latino community and we together introduce the community to Muslims.
Latino Muslims are the fastest growing group within the Muslim community. Why do you think that is?
It’s an interesting question. To my understanding, many of us (Latino Muslims) here in the West coast of the U.S. came as adults with no special skills (no English, no school education, no profession). This population that comes from rural areas in Mexico, they get to work with multiethnic Muslims in California, immigrants like themselves.
There, you could encounter your future husband or maybe a coworker who talks about Islam. By melting together cultures in California, we can get more exposed to Islam. Maybe in the East there are more professional Latinos and they come across Muslims too and they have their own experience.
But Allah has chosen who is going to be a Muslim. When someone comes to us for knowledge on Islam, yes we talk about it and clarify the doubts about Islam. But whatever they feel is with Allah. They come on their own curiosity or spiritual need and then they find out that Catholics and Muslims aren’t all that different.
Also, for some reason, some people like structure. Our five prayers a day, that is structure. Some people really gravitate toward that. But it’s all the will of the Allah. And we’ll just be there to give the information. It’s very emotional because I know how a new Muslim feels; when you find Allah and you find the reason for your existence, it’s beautiful.
What Latino Muslim issues do you feel need more attention?
It depends on each issue but one that comes to mind is our need to address the language barrier. There are newcomer Latinos who may be shut out of learning about Islam because they cannot understand English. So our aim is to offer more classes and support to those current and potential Latino Muslims that have that language barrier.
At least around me, no Islamic centers have Spanish-speaking programs. We at LALMA are the only ones in L.A. that have a Spanish program on Islam. So t,hat can depend where you are too.
So how do you bridge that gap? Well, I’m sure every mosque has bilingual Muslims. If they step up, and mosques support them, have them be trained to be a tutor for new Muslims or teach classes, that could be an enormous help. Use your resources in your own masjid and build it from there! Also, Islamic centers should get involved the niches of other communities.The best way to give dawah (invitation to Islam) is to understand other communities, to work alongside organizations to serve the wellbeing of the entire community, regardless of who they are or what religion they have.
What do you think the Muslim community needs to do to be better allies to Latino Muslims?
We just need to show up and be involved with the social justice initiatives that they need support for. For Latinos and Latino Muslims in general, just offering more health education, lessons on how to defend yourself against eviction, economic assistance; just more outreach overall. But whatever community you serve, that community needs to feel your true concern. That’s with everything; there’s a trust that has to be there. You need to build a trustworthy community first, that is what our religion taught us.
What inspired you to create an organization for your own?
As I said, the need for Latino Muslims regarding language barrier. In California, the grand majority of the community speaks Spanish. I was aware of the necessity of forming a group of Spanish-speaking Muslims to learn Islam and our own language. There was the major need for moral support among each other as soon as a new Latino enters Islam. At present, we at LALMA share language, our culture and Islam in Spanish.
What is your hope for the future of the Latina Muslim community?
LALMA is formed by Latino Muslim brothers and sisters, and we do not segregate women or men. We would like to have a space for a Community Center, where we can offer job training, counseling for youth and adults, a space to perform Salah (daily prayer). We hope at least in our organization, we can have a space for Latino Muslims where our actions will continue to be inspired by the teachings of prophet Muhammad and the Qur’an as a guide. This is the best practice of dawah: No preaching, just putting our faith into action.
