Since the 2016 presidential election, the number of churches calling themselves sanctuaries has nearly doubled. Restaurants, universities, hospitals, cities, and even states have turned to this tradition to defend undocumented migrants. Calls for “expanded sanctuary” from groups like Mijente and BYP100 advocate for an abolitionist approach to sanctuary, refusing borders, policing, and militarization. The American Friends Service Committee mobilized under the rallying cry of “sanctuary everywhere,” insisting that this tradition could look like harboring migrants in places of worship but it could also point to a set of mobile practices rooted in care and mutuality. To be everywhere means sanctuary cannot be captured, caged, or pinned down. By the time you think you’ve caught it, sanctuary has already moved on and fled elsewhere.
Though at first I was drawn to places that call themselves sanctuaries—churches, restaurants, hospitals, campuses—in this book I honor moments when migrants and other artists or activists create sanctuary in flight. I trace how sanctuary emerges not when migrants arrive at a singular place of refuge, but as they and their collaborators traverse the Sonoran Desert’s sinuous routes. And, while inspired by sanctuary movements that pursue legislative change and political transformation (and indeed, they are a sort of prelude to this text), I study the ways sanctuary plots against the profane and forces open gaps in the everyday.
Sanctuary Everywhere follows the ways people on the move practice sanctuary in the Sonoran Desert. The book turns to four scenes: moments when land disobeys or disregards the policy named Prevention through Deterrence; incarcerated migrants practice an illicit or contraband touch inside detention centers; a deported nurse heals migrants in Nogales, Sonora; and the migrant dead haunt the living and refuse closure from humanitarians. In these pages, I theorize sanctuary as a sacred practice, one that is set apart from or incompatible with the profane, everyday world. Following Jose Esteban Muñoz, I consider the ways the everyday or “here and now” “is a prison house.” Turning to practices of flight and escape in the Sonoran Desert, I propose that sanctuary “thinks and feels a then and there.” Sanctuary exceeds institutions and charters, defies mandates and ordinances. It pursues proximity. It is unintelligible and unsettled, everywhere.
“Sanctuary Everywhere is a subtle and insightful exploration of the sacred that moves discussions of ‘sanctuary’ toward new intellectual and physical spaces to reveal its unexpected fugitive dimensions. An illuminating book not only for students of the immigration and sanctuary movements, but also for those pondering the meaning of the sacred in an unjust world.” — Mayra Rivera, author of Poetics of the Flesh
“In this captivating and impactful book Barbara Andrea Sostaita conceptualizes the tradition of sanctuary in more expansive terms than usual. Suggesting that sanctuary is not a place but a fugitive practice, Sostaita invites readers to see sanctuary in spaces and practices far beyond those places that have long been designated as sanctuaries like houses of worship and into the lines of communication among detained migrants and the loving ritual of planting crosses where people perished. This singular book will make a splash!” — Karma R. Chávez, author of The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance
