Faith and culture are intertwined and inseparable aspects of Latin American popular religiosity. When we speak of popular religiosity, we speak of tradition and heritage, but also of current identity experiences. In popular religiosity we discover a way of being and acting Latin American. Popular religiosity is a prominent feature of Latin America, partly because it is colourful and lively, but above all because it reveals the historical tensions associated with the region's cultural mestizaje. A complex term with no exact translation, mestizaje is the combination of Catholicism imposed by Europeans, Indigenous resistance and, later, African religions. As a result, native cosmo-visions and the African orishas have coexisted with Christianity, often posing as Catholic saints, Christs and Virgin Marys in order to go unnoticed.

Many traditions now lauded as part of Latin America's cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, stem from popular religiosity, such as the celebration of patron saints, pilgrimages and their sanctuaries, Indigenous dances and the Dance of the Conquest, traditional medicine, animism and related rituals of Afro-Latino religions, nature rites and shamanic knowledge. Yet popular religiosity does more than merely safeguard memory: for the new narratives and cosmologies circulating in an increasingly globalised world, it serves as an anchor to tradition while also yielding a range of transculturised spinoffs and cultural hybrids.

There is no single definition of the term ‘popular religiosity’, which has many contradictory uses and meanings. Therefore, in order to clarify how it will be utilised in this essay, our first task is to establish its heuristic value and outline some considerations regarding the term.

The first consideration is that the use of the term ‘religiosity’– rather than ‘religion’ – helps to avoid a Catholicentrist view that commonly equates popular religion with popular Catholicism. The term ‘religiosity’, conversely, makes room for the cosmologies often overlooked by the umbrella term ‘popular Catholicism’. These include Indigenous cosmovisions and others with African roots; different branches of spiritism, especially popular in Brazil; esoteric schools; new holistic and alternative spiritualities; popular versions of Pentecostalism; and other religious heterodoxies that have emerged of late. This enables a focus on other religions, both old and new, and on the identification of different ontologies with a growing presence in Latin America.