Abolition and faith: embodying the sacred in migrant liberation narratives
Creators: name: Corona Aguilar, Itzel
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2022

description: “Abolition and Faith” tracks the violent histories that have produced racialized and gendered representation in the neoliberal immigrant rights movement, while identifying and examining the formation of what this project calls “migrant liberation narratives”—the narratives of those in immigrant detention centers or migrants impacted by detention—that produce alternative, and oftentimes, liberatory understandings of border politics, criminalization, migration, and faith. Employing an abolitionist framework, I consider how calls to “abolish ICE” rely on the language and goals of “abolition,” but fail to consider how contemporary anti-immigrant practices of incarceration, detention, deportation, policing, and surveillance are rooted in the histories and legacies of racial chattel slavery and the forced transatlantic trafficking of African Diasporic and Indigenous peoples. Against these racialized logics, I argue that notions of faith and the sacred play a crucial role in determining how detained migrants construct their understandings and visions of liberation—visions that I identify and explore through engagements with an archive of letters, drawings, paintings, films, and other material produced by detained migrants themselves and in collaboration with nonprofit organizations. As in prisons, migrant detention centers have served as active arenas of letter writing and art making, yet there is little scholarly research on these written and cultural testimonies of detained migrants in the U.S. over the past few decades, despite increasing detentions and deportations. Through an engagement with this archive, as well as analysis of scholarly constructions of the “migrant,” common tropes employed in migrant activism, the experiences of trans migrants and migrant and sex workers, and my own work in migrant advocacy and activist organizations, I reveal how religious and/or spiritual practices shape migrant understandings of detention and survival, and gesture towards what Ashon Crawley calls “otherwise knowledges,” in this case, of how the sacred shapes migrant subjectivities of detention. Informed by the intellectual work of abolitionist scholars like Dylan Rodriguez, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Nicole Fleetwood, and Crawley, alongside Chicanx and Black feminists scholars and thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldua and M. Jacqui Alexander, “Abolition and Faith” engages the fields of Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Religious Studies, and Queer and Trans Studies to ask how abolition as praxis can aid in developing a migrant justice movement that exceeds the narrative of rights, legality/illegality, citizenship, and the category of migrant. I show how it is the sacred that allows migrants to imagine a world without detention, thus revealing a more complex understanding of abolition, grounded in its historical praxis, which opens visions for a future without ICE or systems that manage and control migration. Ultimately, I argue that migrant liberation narrative express visions of abolition as praxis, shaped by sacred epistemologies, that we must acknowledge and account for in both migrant justice and abolitionist movements.