‘We’re Still Traumatized’: Queer Latine Christian Ethical Imaginaries Against Migrant Carcerality

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.