Content:

Pilsen Community Books welcomes Barbara Sostaita and A. Naomi Paik to the store in celebration of Barbara's new book Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert.

In Sanctuary Everywhere, Barbara Andrea Sostaita reimagines practices of sanctuary along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to explore the possibilities for radical fugitivity in the face of militarized border enforcement. After the 2016 presidential election, churches, universities, cities, and even states began declaring themselves sanctuaries. Sostaita proposes that these calls for expanded sanctuary are insufficient when dealing with the everyday workings of immigration enforcement. Through fieldwork in migrant clinics, shelters, and the Sonoran Desert, Sostaita demonstrates that, as a sacred practice, sanctuary cannot be fixed in any one destination or mandate. She turns to those working to create sanctuary on the move, from a deported nurse offering medical care on the border to incarcerated migrant women denying rules on touch in detention facilities to collectives set up to honor those who died crossing the border. Understanding sanctuary to be a set of fugitive practices that escape the everyday, Sostaita shows us how, in the wake of extreme violence and loss, migrants create sanctuaries of their own to care for the living and the dead.

Barbara Sostaita is a formerly undocumented scholar of migration and religion. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her book, Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert, documents moments of care and intimacy that expose the impermanence and instability of border militarization. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship in Literature and her work on sanctuary and migration has appeared in The Nation, Bitch, Teen Vogue, and Remezcla among others.

A. Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length project, "Sanctuary for All," calls for the most capacious conception of sanctuary that brings together migrant and environmental justice. She has co-edited four special issues of the Radical History Review—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020), and “Alternatives to the Anthropocene” (Winter 2023). She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books alongside Cat Ramirez, as well as “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog of the Smithsonian Institution with Sam Vong. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a member of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, UIC.