Available From UC Press

Sanctuary Encounters traces migrants’ journeys across the corridor spanning Central America, Mexico, and the United States. Based on years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork within migrant caravans, grassroots shelters, civil associations, and networks of legal accompaniment, Martha Balaguera’s work offers a refugee critique of “sanctuary” from a transnational perspective. She posits that sanctuary is not just a state of protection enacted by civil society but a lived experience and set of practices—and one whose intention to protect and shelter unauthorized migrants has become imbricated in emerging regimes of border control. Through this lens, Balaguera probes how sanctuary can function as a shield from state and criminal violence yet remains intertwined with (and often reinforces) the very same carceral policy and violence. Most importantly, she shows how migrants enact their own solidarity, advocacy, and activism beyond these frameworks—and in doing so, lends us a new understanding of sanctuary that centers not just receiving communities but migrants themselves as political actors.
 

Martha Balaguera is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Mississauga.