Mobile sanctuary: Latina/o Evangelicals redefining sanctuary and contesting immobility in Fresno, CA

ABSTRACT

Scholars have examined how illegality operates spatially to constrain immigrants’ movements and how immigration laws spark new tactics for immigrants’ survival and resistance. This paper examines how undocumented Latina/os strategically enact their religious practices to spatially navigate illegality. Building on ethnographic research and interviews conducted across two Latina/o Evangelical religious organisations in Fresno, California, I advance the concept of mobile sanctuary to capture the process of how immigrants embody, perform, and negotiate their religious commitments and practices to mitigate the ongoing threat of deportation. Taking a new direction towards theorising sanctuary, this paper shows how religious organisations enable a mobile sanctuary that immigrants carry within their bodies and psyches as a strategy to disperse anxieties and fears related to deportability. In the process of enabling mobile sanctuary, I argue that Latina/o Evangelical immigrant churches reinforce and socialise immigrants into problematic ideologies about immigration law, deportation, and spatial mobility. Ultimately, mobile sanctuary intervenes in recent scholarship on social illegality, crimmigration, and deportability by documenting how the US deportability regime influences Latina/o immigrants’ spiritual practices, and by theorising sanctuary beyond a static space of refuge, and instead, as an embodied and collective process of surviving spatial captivity and immobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Sanctuary
• illegality
• migration
• Latinos
• religion

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the following people for their support and sharp feedback on this manuscript: Susila Gurusami, Ranita Ray, the scholars in the Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network (RDCJN), The Latino Protestant Congregations Project, the anonymous reviewers and editors, and the men, women, and families who made these research projects possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See DHS 2011 Memo: https://www.ice.gov/doclib/ero-outreach/pdf/10029.2-policy.pdf.

2 All names of places and people in this paper are pseudonyms to protect the anonymity and privacy of my participants.

3 https://www.ice.gov/doclib/secure-communities/pdf/prosecutorial-discretion-memo.pdf.

4 https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-sanctuary-cities-trump-20170202-story.html.

5 https://www.kvpr.org/post/fresno-sanctuary-city-it-depends-who-you-ask.

6 Carmen George, Fresno Bee, 6 March 2017.

7 https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/temporary-protected-status-overview.