Stories of Some of the Early “Latino” Muslims (Part 1)

By Yahya Abdul-Latif Figueroa Director, Alianza Islamica Reclaiming heritage lends itself to the false impression of dwelling on the past. The next few lines are about the future flowing from the past. Hopefully a reopening to a humble beginning that accomplished a number of great starts yet confronted many challenges and now must map a…

By Yahya Figueroa Intellectual fads and cultural truism are very hard to detect. These false trends often have a grain of truth but the final product is distorted truths and fabulous falsehoods. The larger society has in so many ways lost its mind morally and intellectually. Our minority groups are usually in the rear but…

By Jorge “Fabel” Pabon aka Brother Shukriy As salaamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu, Alianza Islamica helped form the Muslim I am today. After embracing Islam in August of 1989, I began to mosque hop (going from one mosque to another) in an effort to find my rightful place in an Islamic community. My journey…

Pioneers of the Latin American Muslims Conversion to Islam in North America By Al-Hajj Yusuf Abdul Rahman Padilla-Alvarez February 2016 An early review of the beginnings of the first conversions of Puerto Ricans from the Latin American dispensation in North America into the religion of Islam from Newark, New Jersey. My name is Al-Hajj Yusuf…

By Wendy Diaz The Message International August 7, 2024 On the scorching summer day of July 9, 2024, high above the clouds at 35,000 feet, I finished the book Alianza Islámica: Spanish Harlem’s Hispanic Odyssey. I was traveling back home to what the pilot called “El Calentón,” the sweltering Caribbean heat of Puerto Rico. The story…

This presentation is a comprehensive look at resistance movements from the Sixties through to the present day. It mainly focuses on the roots of resistance and how they influenced early indigenous Muslim communities. Rahim Ocasio presented it at Darul Hijra in Northern Virginia about 2008/2009 as part of a youth program.