Father Luis Olivares, a Biography

In 1987 Father Luis Olivares received a death threat from the Escuadron de la Muerte, one of several death squads operating in Los Angeles in the 1980s, which targeted leftists involved in Central American politics. When Olivares's close friends, including César Chávez, learned of the threat, they pleaded with him to hire bodyguards, but Olivares refused. “If they want to kill me,” he said, “they know where I live” (p. 384). Olivares and his parishioners at La Placita, a historic Mexican parish in Los Angeles, had entered into covenant to protect Salvadoran refugees, and they would continue to “support our brothers and sisters from Central America” no matter what (p. 331). Drawing on more than ninety oral histories and various unarchived papers, Mario T. García has produced a rich biography of the priest who established the first sanctuary church in Los Angeles open to both Central American refugees and undocumented

Biography · Covenant · Faith · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Theology · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies