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Following the 2016 US presidential election, the number of churches calling themselves sanctuaries nearly doubled. Restaurants, universities, hospitals, and cities also declared themselves sanctuaries for undocumented migrants. The American Friends Service Committee launched a campaign titled “sanctuary everywhere,” insisting that sanctuary could mean harboring someone in a place of worship but might also point to practices that are mobile. Inspired by the call for “sanctuary everywhere,” this introduction embraces a fugitive theory of sanctuary, one that transgresses the prohibitions of the everyday or profane world. Tracing sanctuary to the sacred, it shows how this tradition is inseparable from that which disrupts the ordinary and the routine. This introduction offers various origin stories, or histories, of sanctuary—without settling on any one of them as the beginning or root of the tradition. It proposes a meandering methodology for researching and writing about the fugitive movements of migrants, activists, and others traversing borderlands.
Following the 2016 US presidential election, the number of churches calling themselves sanctuaries nearly doubled. Restaurants, universities, hospitals, and cities also declared themselves sanctuaries for undocumented migrants. The American Friends Service Committee launched a campaign titled “sanctuary everywhere,” insisting that sanctuary could mean harboring someone in a place of worship but might also point to practices that are mobile. Inspired by the call for “sanctuary everywhere,” this introduction embraces a fugitive theory of sanctuary, one that transgresses the prohibitions of the everyday or profane world. Tracing sanctuary to the sacred, it shows how this tradition is inseparable from that which disrupts the ordinary and the routine. This introduction offers various origin stories, or histories, of sanctuary—without settling on any one of them as the beginning or root of the tradition. It proposes a meandering methodology for researching and writing about the fugitive movements of migrants, activists, and others traversing borderlands.
In 1994, the United States implemented Prevention through Deterrence (PTD)—a policy that further militarized the southern borderlands and redirected migration to the Sonoran Desert, leading to an unimaginable loss of life. While many scholars have written about this policy, they largely describe the desert as complicit with the government, its temperatures and remote landscape a weapon against people attempting to cross state borders. The author draws on theories of the sacred to understand how the Sonoran Desert escapes capture, meandering in ways that often defy and unsettle PTD. The chapter draws on water drops with humanitarian groups and interviews with Tohono O’odham and Hia-Ced O'odham activists to think about the desert as sacred, a meaning at odds with the profane world of metal beams, roadside checkpoints, and surveillance technologies. The desert, both positive and negative sacred, exceeds state attempts to turn its forces to utilitarian, profane ends.
Eva Contreras had been incarcerated at Eloy Detention Center for three months. As the young Venezuelan woman waited for her asylum hearing, she shared the long journey she and her husband made along Mexico’s vertical border and the fugitive strategies she deployed to survive immigrant detention. Eva narrated how she has been smuggled—kidnapped by Venezuelan maras, handled and managed without her consent in the borderlands, and drawn into a contraband, or illicit, touch inside Eloy. The chapter, by relating conversations with Eva and her husband, argues that touch facilitates an excess sociality, a contagious feel that circulates among the smuggled—a concept inspired by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Touch is outright banned between those inside the prison—a contraband intimacy that has the potential to inspire disruption and escape. Here, the author focuses on the sacred as illicit, dangerous and prohibited from contacting the profane.
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