In a political moment defined by mass detention, accelerated deportation, and the militarization of immigration enforcement, this session examines the religious and theological imaginaries that contest the carceral state's hold on migrant life. Papers explore how neoliberal economic logics commodify migrants and incentivize their incarceration, and how Catholic social thought, particularly the work of Pope Francis, offers resources for reimagining economic life around human dignity rather than exclusion. The session moves into the specific spaces of immigration detention, theorizing them as sites where divine presence is actualized through acts of abolition geography and freedom-as-placemaking. Finally, ethnographic research with a Queer Latine congregation reveals how anti-carceral vigils and devotional practices cultivate ethical imaginaries that transform undocumented vulnerability into collective solidarity. Together, these papers illuminate how Latine religious worlds resist the foreclosure of migrant futures and sustain life under conditions of carceral violence.
U.S. discourse around migration often centers economic debates that position vulnerable citizens and migrants as opponents for limited economic resources and opportunities. The financial valence of policies is especially relevant with increased detentions and deportations closely related to economic gains for a few at the harm of many lives. In response, Catholic social thought provides valuable resources to interrogate the assumptions laden in neoliberal economic analysis and re-orient conversation towards the ethical values of human dignity and the common good. Pope Francis especially articulates the harms of consumption and exclusion while also offering a counter-vision of economic life that centers human flourishing of all. As such, I propose that Pope Francis’s social teaching helps us recognize the problem of current economic structures that incentivize harmful treatment and exclusion of migrants and offer creative alternative modes of economic life that center the human person, regardless of citizenship status.
Immigration detention centers form what Michel Foucault termed “heterotopias,” real spaces whose characteristics reveal new aspects of the surrounding spatiality. Engaging theologically with these heterotopias has great urgency in the face of policies of mass detention and deportation in the United States. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of “abolition geography,” “making freedom as a place” within these heterotopic sites, in dialogue with concepts from decolonial theorist María Lugones, offers an alternate spatiality within these sites to their intended carceral design. Correlating the human act of “abolition geography” with theologian Mary Emily Duba’s concept of God as room-making place in situations of displacement and theologian Loída Martell’s theorizing of the Reign of God as located with sojourners in border-spaces demonstrates how divine presence is embodied through human acts of life-affirming resistance and place-making. This presents a new paradigm for interpreting how God’s presence, more broadly, is actualized in creation through human freedom-making.
This project examines how Queer Latine Christians in the U.S. cultivate ethical imaginaries through ritual practice in response to migrant carcerality. Focusing on the church Nuestra Cuir Chingoña and its devotion to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, I analyze anti-carceral vigils held for migrants who have been detained, deported, or killed. Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with thirteen interlocutors, I argue that these ritual gatherings produce a minoritarian counterpublic in which undocumented vulnerability is transformed into collective ethical obligation. In these spaces, prayer and devotional practice become technologies of protection, remembrance, and solidarity. Bringing queer of color critique into conversation with ethnographic research on Latine Christianity, I show how the church’s ethical imaginaries challenge White Christian nationalist deportation logics that discipline migrant belonging. These rituals do not simply mourn loss; they cultivate forms of collective life that resist carcerality and imagine futures of migrant survival.