Mobile sanctuary

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

Bibliographic Data

ID3637546
AuthorsMelissa Guzman Garcia (Latina Center, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume47
Issue19
Pages4515-4533
Publication date2021-12-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Community (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369183x.2020.1761780
OpenAlexW3025310200
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited45

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

Criminology · Deportation · Ethnography · Immigration · Immigration law · Immigration reform · Negotiation · Political science · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Religion, Society, and Development

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