Sanctuaryscapes

The southwest borderlands are often imagined as rife with border walls, immigration raids, checkpoints, and migrant detention centers. But the borderlands are also a place of refuge. Across generations, Indigenous people, migrants, faith communities, and grassroots organizers have created sanctuary in the face of colonialism, border militarization, and state violence. Their stories feature resistance, mutual aid, and collective action that have shaped and continue to expand the meaning of sanctuary.

Focusing on the New Mexico borderlands, a vital region often left unexamined in studies of migration and immigrant rights activism, native anthropologist Aimee Villarreal redefines sanctuary as a canopy for a broad range of activities in which people create places of refuge, build community, and make or remake homeplaces in hostile territory. In doing so, she offers a series of case studies, grounded in archival sources and homeplace ethnography, that illustrate what she calls “sanctuaryscapes”—examples of how migrants, refugees, and their allies protect vulnerable people from state violence. From church asylum and Indigenous regions of refuge during the Spanish colonial period, to the 1980s movements that inspired the establishment of sanctuary cities and states, to today’s immigrant-led social movements, these overlapping stories show how sanctuary animates the sanctity of place and cultures of resistance.