Sanctuary Everywhere: Fugitive Care on the Migrant Trail

Across the Américas, sanctuary emerged through Indigenous “sanctuaryscapes,” maroons who fled enslavement and formed autonomous communities, abolitionists who shepherded people through the Underground Railroad, activists who harbored conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War, and “Quaker coyotes” who smuggled Central American refugees across the Sonoran Desert to be received by church activists in the US Southwest during the Reagan administration. In recent years, calls for “sanctuary everywhere” have exploded this tradition and inspired restaurants, universities, hospitals, and cities to declare themselves safe spaces for migrants at risk of detention and deportation. Moving beyond approaches that locate sanctuary in places of protection or that position migrants merely as recipients of hospitality, this dissertation is an ethnography that maps how migrants and other activists in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands reimagine sanctuary as fugitive care. In these pages, I study how sanctuary is made mobile and distributed among the desert, the detained, the deported, and the dead. Sanctuary Everywhere: Fugitive Care on the Migrant Trail moves away from migration studies scholarship that focuses on arrivals and acculturation, and instead focuses on flight and fugitivity. Through observant participation, this work considers how people on the run shelter and defend each another—effectively interrupting the profane world of borders and bans.