Sanctuary Everywhere

The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert

Barbara Andrea Sostaita

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781478030607, 9781478026365
• eBook ISBN: 9781478059592
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

In Sanctuary Everywhere, Barbara Andrea Sostaita reimagines practices of sanctuary along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to explore the possibilities for radical fugitivity in the face of militarized border enforcement. After the 2016 presidential election, churches, universities, cities, and even states began declaring themselves sanctuaries. Sostaita proposes that these calls for expanded sanctuary are insufficient when dealing with the everyday workings of immigration enforcement. Through fieldwork in migrant clinics, shelters, and the Sonoran Desert, Sostaita demonstrates that, as a sacred practice, sanctuary cannot be fixed in any one destination or mandate. She turns to those working to create sanctuary on the move, from a deported nurse offering medical care on the border to incarcerated migrant women denying rules on touch in detention facilities to collectives set up to honor those who died crossing the border. Understanding sanctuary to be a set of fugitive practices that escapes the everyday, Sostaita shows us how, in the wake of extreme violence and loss, migrants create sanctuaries of their own to care for the living and the dead.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Fugitive Sacred
• Chapter One: The Desert: Vanishing Time and Sacred Landscapes
• Chapter Two: The Detained: Contraband Touch in the Carceral Borderlands
• Chapter Three: The Deported: Lines of Flight through Nogales, Sonora
• Chapter Four: The Dead: Scenes of Disturbance and Disarticulation
• Closing Ritual: Presente
• Conclusion: Samuel Never Left Sanctuary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index