Marta Felicitas Galedary

Marta Felicitas Ramirez de Galedary is a co-founder of the La Asociacion Latino Musulmana de America (LALMA) in 1999.[1] LALMA is at the forefront of providing information and support to Latinos in Southern California.[2] She is a former nursing director at the UMMA Clinic in Los Angeles. Galedary also works with LA Voice, and MuslimARC, (Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative.)[3] She is also a registered nurse.[4]

Biography

Marta Felicitas Ramirez was born into a ranching family in Guerrero, Mexico. She was the youngest of eleven daughters and was a student at a Catholic school.[5] She attended the Colegio Hispano Americano in Mexico City, studying philosophy, art, psychology, and western literature. Galedary then married and had a son. She later took English lessons at a British Embassy institute before becoming an exchange student in Bath, England in 1981. There she first learned of Islam and befriended three of her Muslim classmates.[5]

Galedary divorced her husband and moved to the United States through an exchange program. She says that she came to Islam through much soul-searching and study and embraced the religion in 1985.[2][6][7] [8] In September 1999, Galedary joined four other Muslim women at the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles to start a Latina Muslim study group and Spanish language library.[5] She has been leading Spanish-language classes for new Muslim converts.[9] She is also a khateebah at the Women's Mosque of America.[3]

Her conversion story is featured in "Latino Muslims: Our Journeys to Islam."[10]

See also

References
  1. Reddy, Mrinalini (23 August 2007). "Even as Islam Booms, Its Many Faces Can Deter Converts - News21 Project". news21.com. Retrieved 2017-06-29.
  2. Amel S. Abdullah (2006-02-01). "Latino Reverts Add to Mosaic of Islam". Southern California InFocus. Retrieved 2017-01-07.
  3. "Meet Our Khateebahs". WomensMosque.com. Retrieved 2017-01-07.
  4. Fielding, Courtney (10 October 2006). "A changed view on Islam". Pasadena Star-News. Archived from the original on 2018-11-20. Retrieved 29 June 2017 – via HighBeam Research.
  5. Abdo, Geneive (2006). Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11. Oxford University Press. pp. 179–180. ISBN 978-0-19-531171-6.
  6. Anthony Chiorazzi (2007-05-08). "From Cross to Crescent". Busted Halo. Retrieved 2017-01-07.
  7. Wimbush, Vincent L. (2013). MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199975426. Retrieved 2017-01-07.
  8. Morales, Harold Daniel (2012). Latino Muslim by Design. University of California, Riverside. ISBN 9781267729910. Retrieved 2017-01-07.
  9. Nieves, Evelyn (2001-12-17). "A New Minority Makes Itself Known: Hispanic Muslims". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-06-29.
  10. Galvan, Juan, ed. (2017). Latino Muslims: Our Journeys to Islam. LatinoMuslims.net. ISBN 9781530007349. Retrieved 15 January 2018.
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