For the Record: The American Friends Service Committee’s US-Mexico Border Program, Roberto Martinez, and the Fight against Militarization at the San Diego-Tijuana Border

This paper explores how migrant rights activists have drawn on and performed religion at the San Diego-Tijuana border to counteract anti-immigrant political sentiments and militarization by focusing on the case study of Roberto Martinez and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). It is derived from my larger dissertation project that traces the history and politics of faith-based organizations involved in immigrant rights activism in the region. Two throughlines have emerged in my research that tie this history together: the work of Roberto Martinez (former director of the AFSC’s U.S.-Mexico Border Program in San Diego) and the space of Friendship Park. Martinez, a devout Catholic strongly driven towards social justice by his faith, was a prominent political activist in San Diego. He became the first U.S. citizen to receive an International Human Rights Monitor award in 1992 for his documentation of abuses of migrants by U.S. Border Patrol and San Diego Police. His work left a lasting legacy for migrant rights activists in the region and he founded other initiatives beyond the AFSC such as the Ecumenical Migrant Outreach Project in 2000. 

Located within the larger Border Fields State Park, Friendship Park also features as a binational space with great symbolic meaning that faith-based and left-wing organizations have utilized to respond to immigration policies, express hope for improved US-Mexican relations, and contest the militarization of the border. Examples of resistant performances in and around the park include religious communities’ responses to migrant caravans (such as “sanctuary caravans”), holding transnational religious services, and the abundance of religious and secular murals on both sides of the US-Mexico border fence. By tracing these histories through a combination of archival research, oral histories, and ethnographic research; I unpack the interconnected nature of religious and secular political activism for migrant rights in the region. 

The history of Christianity in North America–particularly in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands–is intrinsically tied to histories of immigration, reception of migrants, and immigrant rights. Extant literature highlighting this important history of immigrant rights tends to focus either on the 1980s or 2000s Sanctuary Movement or on faith-based activists providing humanitarian aid to migrants attempting to cross the Sonoran desert in the Arizona-Sonora region, with some similar work being done in border communities in Texas. My project adds to and builds off of this work by focusing on the San Diego, Tijuana border, which has a particular history of militarization and enforcement that differs from Arizona. I have chosen to focus this paper on my primary case study of the AFSC, particularly the work of Martinez due to his subtle yet pertinent faith-based approach to activism. Martinez, who passed away in 2009, was noted by his contemporaries to be particularly soft-spoken but strong willed. Perhaps due to his soft-spoken nature, he has been overlooked and understudied by historians so far. This paper seeks to remedy this by examining his work with the AFSC in the 1980s and 90s, which led to the International Human Rights Monitor Award in 1992. 

Despite there being ample evidence of his work being inspired by his faith, and his position the director of one of the branches of a Quaker organization, he was rarely recognized as religiously affiliated by media outlets. Furthermore, it appears he didn’t frequently use religious rhetoric on public performances of his activism nor was frequently acknowledged as affiliated with the AFSC. Even when he was identified as the director of the AFSC’s US-Mexico Border Program, few media outlets acknowledged that the AFSC was a religious organization, instead labelling it a civil, immigrant, or Chicano rights organization. Media outlets only understood and presented his work through a secular lense, but I argue that his work is an extension and application of both his Catholic beliefs and the AFSC’s Quakerism and thus is a performance of religion and ought to be understood as one of the ways the border, particularly enforcement of the border, has shaped religion in the Southern California borderlands.

Martinez partook in traditionally-secular activism, such as speaking to the media, recording abuses committed by law enforcement against Latinx people and migrants, organizing rallies, and forming alliances with other secular organizations. At the same time, he was reportedly very involved in religious immigrant rights activism and organized events such as La Posada Sin Fronteras (the first one of these events occurring in 1993), in which participants on both sides of the boundary at Friendship Park partake in La Posada celebrations as an allegory to the larger immigration debate. This paper argues that Martinez and the AFSC reimagined the physical border as a space of religious significance to counteract the state’s increasing militarization of the southern border. This activism set the stage for later groups to utilize Friendship Park as a religious space and fight for its preservation, such as the Border Church, which holds transnational services every sunday. Although not frequently acknowledged as religious work, I form the arguement that Martinez understood his work to be an extension of his faith based on archival research and oral histories. By examining his work through a religious studies lens, we can come to understand the nuanced, occasionally subtle, ways radical manifestations of Christianity are shaped by the U.S.-Mexico border.