The Latino Crescent

Image Gallery image by Gerard Burkhart / The New York Times

A woman wearing a hijab rushes up the stairs of a mosque in Union City, New Jersey. She is frantically murmuring, “Empanadas, empanadas, empanadas!” as if to remind herself to pick up the savory Latino pastries for the crowd waiting inside. The sixth annual Hispanic Muslim Day event is about to begin.

More than 60 percent of Union City’s population is Latino, and the storefronts in this neighborhood proudly display flags from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. This stately columned building used to house the city’s Cuban community center, once a popular venue for traditional Hispanic celebrations like quinceañeras. For 17 years, it’s been the Islamic Educational Center of North Hudson.

Unlike churches and synagogues, mosques do not keep rosters of their worshippers. Where one goes to pray is more fluid in the Islamic tradition. Shinoa Matos, one of the young women in attendance, estimates that of the thousands of people who pray at the Union City mosque in any given week, more than a hundred are Latino. “Just like how there are Albanian mosques in Albanian neighborhoods,” she explains, “we are a Latino mosque because we are in a Latino neighborhood.” Islam, however, discourages differentiation among ethnic groups, she says, so Muslims try not to do it.

Inside the mosque the aromatic scent of steaming empanadas, spiced beef stuffed inside shells of puffed pastry, inundates the first floor auditorium. About a hundred people of various ages mingle around a dozen round tables covered with white plastic cloths and topped with cream-colored ceramic vases holding bouquets of purple silk pansies. Grandmothers coo over infants while a group of young men plug a laptop into the sound system to play nasheed, a traditional form of Islamic music. There are more women than men, and only a few women are not veiled. By what seems like an act of natural separation, the men sit on the left of the auditorium, the women on the right, with a few scattered in between.