Lxs Caravanerxs and Nonsecular Protest: Rethinking Migrant Family Separation with Un llanto colectivo

Lxs Caravanerxs and Nonsecular Protest: Rethinking Migrant Family Separation with Un llanto colectivo

Marcelle Maese

Written and directed by Celia Herrera Rodríguez and Cherríe Moraga in 2018, “Un Llanto Colectivo: Press Conference & Performa-Protesta” took place in front of ICE headquarters in downtown San Diego (September 15th) and then in front of Otay Mesa Detention Center (September 16th). Envisioned as an act of consciousness raising around family separation, Central American caravans, and the detentionindustrial-complex, the yer invitation read, “[T]his is ceremonial resistance.” This writing is an extension of my witness of and participation in Un llanto colectivo. I provide a historical context for lxs caravanerxs, as well as interviews with Maestras Celia and Cherríe. The meeting point for each of these different modalities is the PerformaProtesta, while the fragments of my own migrant history of family separation act as an invitation to the reader to consider intergenerational healing within and beyond biological family and chosen forms of solidarity.

Keywords: Central American caravans / Chicana Feminisms / Queer Migration Studies

my mother taught me to say thank you for another day of life

(as soon as my eyes open from sleep) and

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 268 –292

whenever possible wake up go outside thank the sun for rising

She taught me to look at la luna para ver si hay agua o viento. I can still feel the calm and closeness I felt with her those nights she would open the kitchen door facing the backyard. We would stand in the doorway and look up at the sky.

I did not inherit my father’s love of the ocean.

Maybe because I never sat near the water with him. I never learned to swim. His stories of running away from whatever responsibility he had for the day to spend time at the beach did not make me carefree. I worried. What would make him run away?

I have always found solace and adventure in the solidity of desert mountains and rocks. The ocean moved too much. It would undo me, kill me. I used to hate the feeling of sand being pulled out from underneath my feet, of water and salt pushing me around.

I was driving to El Paso when I received the call that my father died.

I knew when my phone rang why it was ringing. I was thankful for the solitude in knowing I had hours of driving through the desert colors. I was relieved that the glaring heat just outside my window and the steering wheel gripped by both my hands was how I would begin being on the other side of having waited for this phone call my whole life. I heard cursing, and I heard someone screaming, “I want to live,” when I realized the person screaming was me.

But I could not cry.

Y eso que soy bien llorona.

Two months later, I found myself facing the ocean thankful for the sinking feeling of wet earth, for the canto Yemaya coming in from very far away, por estar sola y bien acompañada, por llorarle a mi papá, I’ve always missed you, What’s new?, por un llanto colectivo.

Come home.

Come on.

It’s time to live.

Un Un llanto colectivo: September 15–16, 2018, San Diego, California

Commonly referred to in the media as the Central American caravans, the Viacrucis del Migrante is a yearly pilgrimage joined by those who nd it safer to cross the Mexico-Guatemala border and travel through Mexico in organized mass rather than migrate alone. Foregoing the high price of a coyote, a strategy that remains outside mechanisms of accountability and that too often ends in violence and exploitation, lxs caravanerxs prefer the accompaniment of human rights organizers, church members, and fellow migrants who know the route. Some sources date lxs caravanxs as early as the 1980s, coinciding with the civil wars of Guatemala and El Salvador, and as part of the emergence of the Sanctuary Movement in the United States (Thornton 2019, 34). Others contextualize lxs caravanerxs within a concerted effort to raise political awareness around the danger of traveling through Mexico and cite the 1999 caravanx of Central American mothers as an important precursor to the 2010 organization of the “viacrucis migrante” or “Way of the Cross” (McKee and Silva 2020, 21). For the most part, the yearly Viacrucis del Migrante organized during Holy Week received little to no attention by the United States mainstream media, perhaps because the route was not focused on reaching the US-Mexican border. For many, the nal destination was México City. By contrast, the 2017 Viacrucis de Refugiados “culminated with a televised livestream on Facebook when 78 migrants presented themselves at the San Ysidro Port of Entry to claim asylum” (Thornton 2019, 34).

The 2018 Viracrucis del Migrante also marked a turning point in this yearly practice when the newly elected US president created unprecedented media attention when he enlisted the caravans as antagonists in his “Build The Wall” campaign. Despite the number of anti-immigrant Executive Orders and the hatespeech circulated through Twitter, May 2018 also marked a turning point given that it was the largest caravanx up until that date. The various organizations that supported lxs caravanerxs throughout their journey recognized that the work of accompaniment was far from over given that detention centers awaited those asylum seekers that were viewed as lucky enough to enter the United States.

Understanding that this incredibly powerful mobilization would require new forms of thinking and collaboration, on August 24, 2018, Celia Herrera Rodríguez and Cherríe Moraga visited Centro Cultural de la Raza for “Un Llanto Colectivo en Dos Voces,” “an act of collective remembering and political

I will not tie you down. I will play and love.

resistance.” In their roles as cofounding directors of Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought & Art Practice, this fundraiser and plática was publicized through social media as a prelude for “the September 15–16 ‘Un Llanto Colectivo’ against family separations event.” Likewise, Otay Mesa Detention Resistance (DR) was established following the culminating events of the Viracrucis Migrante en la Lucha in May of 2018 as a committee within Pueblo Sin Fronteras that would provide focused support to those imprisoned in Otay Mesa Detention Center (OMDC). The press release circulated by DR and Las Maestras Center called on “all persons of conscience, including artists/performance artists, youth, familias, community members, students, teachers, workers, professionals, organizers and activities,” and described the “actions and testimonial performances” as a ceremonial, theatrical and community-based two-day action. The yer invitation read, “Please NO PROTEST PLACARDS—this is ceremonial resistance.” Las Maestras Center (U.C. Santa Barbara), partnering with organizations throughout the San Diego-Tijuana region (Pueblo Sin Fronteras, National Domestic Workers Alliance, American Friends Service Committee, Families Belong Together with Indivisible San Diego), as well as with support from Centro Cultural de la Raza (San Diego) and Chicano/a Studies of San Diego State University, coordinated a press conference and PerformaProtesta 5 in front of ICE Headquarters in downtown San Diego (Saturday) and at Otay Mesa Detention Center (Sunday).

On Friday, September 14th, I joined over 40 participants at Centro for a day long rehearsal and workshop in preparation for the PerformaProtesta to take place over the weekend.6 At Centro, we practiced the script of the PerformaProtesta that Cherríe had written by editing and revising testimonios taken directly from caravanerxs. We also rebuilt the altar Celia had prepared as a way to begin and enter the nonsecular space of ceremonia, an altar that we carried with us as we moved across the different spaces of detention, as well as the location of where we closed our ceremonia: Playas de Tijuana/Border Field State Park (Sunday).7 The need to go to the water emerged organically after spending three days together, and how we closed our ceremonia was also improvised: each of us in solitude and prayer offered owers to the ocean, some of us concluding in silence, others in ancestral song. As the interviews with Celia and Cherríe explain, each element of that weekend—the altar, the script, the relation between PerformaProtestors and performa-audience/witness—was open to collaboration. As Celia explains, everyone was allowed “to bring what they know and to use that the way they know rather than impose an art form or an altar or some idea. That was a lesson in terms of collaboration: how to adjust and allow people to bring their best and allow what it is that they have.”

This writing is an extension of being a witness to and participant of un llanto colectivo, a pathway for (re)entering a way of being that is grounded in the teachings offered by ceremonia and the history of my own family separation. This nonsecular ontology of collaboration grounded in an “adjusting to” and

“allowing people” to bring their best selves, coupled with an epistemological return home, that is, a form of deep listening to narratives of state violence that enables a self-re exive valuing of “what” and “how” displaced families know, more broadly characterizes the new and ancestral form that Cherríe names PerformaProtesta. Because the naming of llanto colectivo as “PerformaProtesta” emerges from the need to address the historical speci city of contemporary forms of imprisonment and family separation, I situate llanto colectivo within the relation between aesthetic and political form that Alicia Schmidt Camacho explains in her foundational text Migrant Melancholia: “[T]he defense of rights has entailed a new search for form—for a politics that might carry forward [our] desire for justice and preserve the integrity of [our] communities across the border. The demand for a different framework of governance doubles as a search for political and aesthetic forms that can perform the work of representation in all its sense” (2008, 12). To this end, I understand the PerformaProtesta as an invitation to a grieving of our dead that enables a remembering of how to live, a politics of interweaving ancestral knowledge with strategies of selfdetermination. More speci cally, I claim that for those of us who are committed to organizing against the necropolitics of nation-state violence, we must be willing to collectively grieve those that we have lost personally if we are to remain politically vigilant and intellectually open to new and historical forms of collaboration and solidarity.

In what follows, I provide a brief historical context for lxs caravanerxs, as well as interviews with Maestras Celia and Cherríe. The meeting point for each of these different modalities is the PerformaProtesta, while the fragments of my own migrant history of family separation act as an invitation to the reader to consider intergenerational healing within and beyond biological family and chosen forms of solidarity. I am grateful to have experienced how we can collectively relearn the life-saving importance of uncensorship, of digni ed and dignifying collaboration, of not having to justify credible fear. I know I have to remember this feeling of un llanto colectivo, carry this drop of water with me for a long time.

Historicizing lxs caravanerxs’ Route: Moving Beyond the Binary of Legal and Illegal Migration

I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border, do not come.

Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce

our laws and secure our border. There are legal methods by which migration can and should occur, but we, as one of our priorities, will discourage illegal migration.

—Vice President Kamala Harris Guatemala City, June 7, 2021

While refugees register with the United Nations and then wait in their home country, asylum seekers present themselves to the US government. “Regardless of whether they come to a port of entry or are caught crossing, once asylum seekers tell US immigration of cials that they are afraid to return home, of cials are required by law to process the cases as potential asylum claims” (Morrissey 2017). Their case is then evaluated through a credible-fear interview that determines if they face persecution in their home country “because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a speci c group” (Morrissey 2017). If credible fear is established, asylum seekers are allowed to proceed with a court process. If US immigration determines that migrants are not credible, they are deported instead of being given a hearing. If they are allowed to continue with a hearing, ICE must also determine the likelihood of showing up to court. If ICE determines that they not only face life threatening danger, but, just as importantly, are capable of legal behavior, migrants must then also “prove their identity” by submitting “government-issued identi cation,” documents that many do not have given the conditions of traveling and the political context of their home countries from which they escape (Morrissey 2017).

This brief description of the asylum process is enough to disprove any notion that there is a simple or quick “catch and release” of caravanerxs, a misleading and hateful phrase popularized and weaponized by the 45th president. The crimmigration8 narrative of illegality is founded on a discourse that claims that caravanerxs are composed of those who are either too ignorant or too violent to follow rules. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the democrats’ win over Trump did nothing to indict or interrupt this narrative. As noted above, Vice President Harris’ statement made in Guatemala City refuses to clarify that to seek asylum is one of those “legal methods by which migration can and should concur.” Paradoxically, it is precisely the incredible reach and complex network of legal redress that the routes clearly demand that warrants the need for an ideology that works toward characterizing lxs caravanerxs as inherently unruly and therefore deserving of the violent imposition of “law and order” and incarceration. One such example is the “Adelanto 8.”

After arriving in Tijuana on May 9th as part of the 2017 Viacrucis Refugiados, the “Adelanto 8” were imprisoned at the Adelanto Detention Center located in Victorville, California. Following the death of eight detainees earlier that year, Adelanto drew further attention as arriving caravanerxs refused to quietly submit to in ated bond amounts, medical neglect, and physically abusive staff. The

Adelanto 8 demanded “good faith negotiations with ICE” that included a lawyer and immediate release because according to US immigration law, “immigrants do not need to be detained pending administrative hearings” (Rebels 2017). The Adelanto 8 were part of a growing number of hunger strikers speaking out across various detention centers across the country. In response to the organized political movement against illegal imprisonment and human rights abuses, the for-pro t business The CEO Group (Global Leader in Evidence-Based Rehabilitation) retaliated against hunger strikers at Adelanto—a group that had grown from 8 to 50 hunger strikers—by denying visitation to family members, lawyers, and political watch groups, and shutting down phone privileges. However, the spectacle of hate speech and repression against imprisoned caravanerxs failed to deter the growing intranational political movement. On the contrary: it built the groundwork for a new nonpro t and grassroots network of resistance.

2018 Viacrucis Migrantes en la Lucha

I want to say this prayer for each and every one of you, and all the people that are going to be there tomorrow. May the creator look down on each and every one of us here. Bless each and every one of these people from the four directions. Bless each and every one of them in their hearts and their minds and their bodies. As these spiritual warriors, as these physical warriors, come.

—Stan Rodriguez

Chicano Park

April 28, 2018

March Without Borders

Walk from LA to TJ in solidarity with 2018 Refugee Caravan

The prayer offered at Chicano Park by Kumeyaay elder Stan Rodriguez provides a localized example of a transnational coalitional politics that undoes simple or normative understandings of the struggle for migrant self-determination. In contrast to the limited gesture of humanization and legal rights that depend upon a secular and nation-state authority, Elder Stan’s prayer opens a decolonial pathway that situates the organized response in the San Diego Tijuana border region. The undoing of migrant-native binaries offered by our elder’s prayer is part of a multiracial and anti-border praxis of transformative justice. In this way, intranational solidarity, accompaniment, and coalition are materialized through the strength of shifting networks of resistance.

While it is important to understand this expansive existential and political set of methodologies that inform lxs caravanerxs as part of the longer history of resistance in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, my focus is limited to

a brief outline of the various stops and coordinated intranational efforts that accompanied lxs caravanerxs route from their crossing of the Guatemala-Mexico border in March of 2018, to their arrival to the US-Mexico border town of Tijuana in mid-April of 2018. My overview of this particular historical moment provides the political context that immediately precedes the PerformaProtesta in September of the same year. I also claim the multiple routes as mobile sites of economic resistance, national conviviality, and intranational collectivity that clearly contest narratives of criminality. In contrast to a liberal view that aims to humanize asylum seekers while remaining uncritical of the coloniality of nation-state borders, the routes traveled by lxs caravanerxs teach the importance of including Central America as part of the US popular consciousness of “border politics.” Hence, the crossing of the Mexico-Guatemala border marks an important site of protest against the US Mexican border.

Consider that while maintaining a particular sense of national culture and history, lxs caravanerxs make it a point to cross in intranational solidarity across the Mexico-Guatemala border. On March 16th, 2018, caravanerxs marched in protest in the border town of Tapachula, Chiapas, demanding that Mexico stop deportations and accept refugee and asylum applications. When the Mexican Commission of Refugee Aid refused to speak to them, they marched to the Honduras consulate where they protested the unlawful election and violent regime of President Orlando Hernández. Still waiting for the of cial start of the “Way of the Cross” to begin on Easter (April 1st), thousands remained in Tapachula, Chiapas, exasperating resources of governmental, nongovernmental, and grass roots organizations. Caravanerxs therefore depended on the “care of neighbors and other migrants” (2018c) who created improvised kitchens outside the Bethlehem shelter located in Tapachula to provide just one example of the various informal and uid networks that emerge along the routes in intranational solidarity. These networks also inform the various modes of travel that are determined by shifting availability of resources and volunteers, and the ongoing and different arrival and departure times of caravanerxs.

Consider, for example, how according to CE Noticias Financieras, Maya Zepeda leaves Honduras in December of 2017, remains in Tapachula, nds work as a waitress, and then becomes part of the community that provides mutual aid for lxs caravanerxs passing through in March of 2018. When interviewed by a journalist, Maya explains that she is waiting on documentation because “I really want to be Mexican” (2018a). It is unclear what the path for Maya will be: will the Mexican government follow through with promises of documentation and employment? Will she join lxs caravanerxs, perhaps ending up in a different border town or in a US or Mexican detention center? What is clear in her response to the reporter is a strategic crafting of a public image that refutes criminality while teaching the political history of Honduras. She is careful to self-represent as a “good migrant” who promises to work and dutifully assimilate to the (Mexican) nation-state, and, paradoxically, is also critical of the

nation-state when she explains that she and her husband lost their maquiladora jobs making T-shirts because of the economic and social instability created by the violent regime of Honduran President Hernández. Moreover, Maya is but one example of the strategic participation in the transnational dialogue across borders and between various actors that include national governments, activists, and caravanerxs. In response to Trump’s Tweets, for example, “Mexico has the absolute power not to let these large ‘Caravans’ of people enter their country,” and “Democrats do not want borders, that’s why we have drugs and crime,” caravanerxs held signs that read “We are all American by birth,” making political claims to the continent while circumventing the logic of nation-state plenary power (2018c).

When the caravanx of cially left Tapachula, Chiapas on April 1st, the plan was to walk to the “municipality of Mapastepec, where they would board the cargo railroad” that would take them to Ixtepec, Oaxaca (2018b). While there were plans to meet with lawyers in Puebla from April 5–7, at that time, it was still unclear, or at least not made public to the media, if the route would conclude in Mexicali or Tijuana. Upon arrival to Mexico City on April 7, 2018, there was a protest at the US Embassy and the Angel of Independence, and a planned meeting with representatives of the United Nations and the Organization of American States at the Basilica. Later that week, on April 9th, a meeting was scheduled with La COMAR (La Comisíon Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados) (Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance) where the following demands were made: increase the budget for La COMAR, improve processing claims and treatment of migrants who are often placed in detention for up to seven months, and provide identi cation papers (2018b). The arrival to Mexico City announced both the conclusion of the traditional route of the yearly pilgrimage, and the publicized statement that those moving forward to seek asylum in the US would continue to Tijuana. At this point, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, an organization that has historically played an important role in accompanying the yearly pilgrimage, and continues to provide an important site for intranational coalition in the Tijuana-San Diego area and beyond, estimated the number of caravenerxs at 600, a signi cantly smaller group than the 1200 that cohered at the Mexico-Guatemala border a few weeks prior (Santiago 2018).

Given the long history of transborder organizing across the Tijuana-San Diego border, coupled with ICE arresting more than 4,000 immigrants between October 2017 and May 2018, making San Diego among the “top ve counties where ICE arrests [were] concentrated” (James Daria 2019, 24), the transborder region was particularly attentive to the arrival of the 2018 Viacrucis Migrante. Already in place was the aforementioned Pueblo Sin Fronteras decades experience with lxs caravnerxs, the American Friends Service Committee, Al Otro Lado, Casa del Migrante, and the more recently formed San Diego Rapid Response Network (SDRRN).9 The scrutiny of the border was intense given that for the rst time the yearly pilgrimage was broadcast for an international

audience. As part of a proudly anti-immigrant government led by the 45th president, scenes of caravanerxs de antly climbing the partition at Border Field State Park Beach, sitting on top as they waived the Honduran ag and speaking through the gaps in the border fence to the thousands that welcomed them, replayed through the various media outlets as evidence of “crisis at the border.” Whether seen as the manifestation of the hordes of criminals Trump’s border wall could protect us from, or as part of a convoluted policy debate amongst the more liberal, of little interest was how witnessing lxs carvanerxs’ de ant resistance and mass organization reopened wounds and recommitted hearts for so many of us. Absent from the international consciousness were the quieter forms of political praxis and theoretically complex encuentros such as the “March Without Borders” event at Chicano Park where Elder Stan offered prayers in preparation to receive all those that were heading toward the Border Field State Beach to welcome lxs caravanerxs.10

Interviewing Las Maestras: Self-Determination and the Right to Grieve

After my rst interview with Celia (October 8th, 2021), she suggested a follow-up with herself and Cherríe (November 3rd, 2021), so that I could better understand the writing process for the PerformaProtesta. I was curious about where the dialogue came from, how the cantos were composed, and what the process was for improvised revisions since the original script is quite different than what we performed. And, as someone who has never acted before, I was also curious about how the days we spent together were organized. According to Cherríe, the script for the PerformaProtesta was based on testimonios that Detention Resistance collected from caravanerxs incarcerated at Otay Mesa Detention Center. Her students helped transcribe the testimonios which were “all in Spanish, and all [by] men.” She then adapted the transcripts, using a mix of English and Spanish, incorporating the role of two elder teatristas, Elvira and Hortencia. But, as Cherríe explains, the key to the adaptation process happened at the Enclave Caracol in Tijuana where they went with a group of students to speak to organizers and caravanerxs. There she spoke to three women who “were very forthcoming about their lives, about crossing, and la bestia. It was so dense. They experienced so much it could have been several people as much as they experienced.”

Celia also credits Cherríe’s years of experience as a dramaturge for enlisting foundational teatristas and experienced cultural workers that came prepared to guide and improvise the kind of acting workshop that, like the space of ceremonia, enables a healing return to the body. On the rst day of our gathering at Centro, I was incorporated into the process and practiced my lines as part of the “coro.”

The PerformaProtestaa is divided into three parts. Part one—“Lloro”— begins with, “Mi llanto tiene una trayectoria de muchos, muchos años.” As

different actors read the reasons for their llanto, I joined in with the rest of the coro —or Caravanerxs—in a form of call and response and repeated the word “lloro”:

ACTOR: Yo lloro porque abandoné mi tierra.

CORO: Lloro.

ACTOR: Porque dejé a mi madre

CORO: Lloro.

ACTOR: Porque estoy lejos de mi hija

CORO: Lloro.

ACTOR: Por la libertaded que nos robaron las fronteras.

CORO: Lloro.

ACTOR: Porque no sé si regresaré.

Part Two—“The Interrogation/Testimonios” restages the credible fear interview that, as the rst section of this essay explains, is a key component of the asylum process. For example, “The Interrogator” asks

“Did someone harm you?”

“How did they harm you?”

“Did something happen to you on your way towards the border?

“What would happen if you would return?”

But unlike the scene of interrogation, here, caravanerxs are accompanied by ancestral song and a coro that expresses their uncensored digni ed rage. In unison, the coro yells

Porque

Soy gay

Soy indígena

Soy activista en mi pueblo

Soy trans

¿Tenemos que repetirlo? We run the risk de que nos maten. In this way, the PerformaProtesta shifts the scene of interrogation from the violent and solitary encounter with Border Patrol to the collectivity of caravanerxs, the form initially chosen to mitigate fear and express political solidarity. Beyond the immediate temporal and political context, the PerformaProtesta also incorporates the “credible fear interview”—renamed interrogation—into the place of ceremonial practice: the accompaniment and placement of the altar, the movement of the sahumadoras that weave in and out of the formation of the PerformaProtestors, praying over us with the smoke of copal, the repetition of ancestral songs learned through previous ceremonias. The coro refuses to perform the good worker trope, reclaiming their identities that are the cause of their prosecution. They refuse the script of retraumatization the

nation-state insists upon when asylum seekers are forced a type of confession designed to permanently criminalize rather than ever granting credibility as the title suggests (Luibheid and Cantu 2005; Luibheid 2015).

In what follows, I provide a small selection of the interviews. Far from utopic, the interviews, like the PerformaProtesta itself, raise several questions around intergenerational solidarity between Mexicans and Central Americans, between pueblos originarios in the US and in Latin America, between university politics and community organizing, to name a few sites of contestation. Celia’s and Cherríe’s experience of “Entry Denied” to ceremonial life, for example, epitomizes the tenacity of border thinking to migrate beyond the secular parameters of the nation-state. In an act of de ance, however, it is precisely their long history with the labor of ceremonia, a pathway aligned with decades of Xicana internationalist organizing, that enables envisioning new forms of political solidarity with lxs caravanerxs. As a pedagogy of solidarity, Celia and Cherríe do not attempt to humanize caravanerxs nor do they seek “to save the children.” Instead, the PerformaProtesta enables a conscious (re)commitment to a political and nonsecular engagement with the wounds of ancestral, historical, and contemporary family separation that rejects the imposition of family as de ned by the nation-state (Luibheid and Chávez 2020).

“I’m not performing for anybody”: Historicizing el acto and Xicanx Indigena Internationalism

Marcelle: You have such a long history with activismo, Celia, from el movimiento and CASA, to the UN and La Red Xicana Indigena. Can you tell me more about it?

Celia: When I was organizing [with Bert Corona and] for CASA, we would go into restaurants and have these very loud “Know Your Rights” discussions about the different ways in which as an undocumented person you had civil rights. We could feel the audience, just people sitting around us, eating, their little ears would just start listening. We were very loud and very boisterous, and then we would hand out our cards and we would leave. And sometimes people would come after us and say, what do you mean, where are you going, where can I go. And that’s how we used to get people interested at bus stops, on busses, in the garment district.

Bert would send us to the State Department where there were undocumented people waiting for deportation. If people wanted someone to advocate for them, we would go with them into the immigration hearing. Those immigration judges were just like the Luis Valdez characters with the baton, rude and loud and big. And they would scare the shit out of you, for those who are so respectful of authority. You learned how to face them, and defend the people

you were standing with, and not run away even though everything in your body was saying run as fast as you can.

Bert always said that my time at CASA was equivalent to a college education. I worked for them for years as a volunteer. I lived with them, ate with them. We were not necessarily a family but united in the work that we did. I worked with salvadoreños, nicaragüenses. I met people from Chile, Argentina. I met people from Nigeria, Uganda. I met folks that were all dealing with immigration issues. He opened an of ce for me, and said, “Here’s the legal room, and you’re in charge. You and a lawyer. You’re going to create the defense system.” What the hell? We just did it. There was no doubt. He kind of had a way: here’s $50 go over there and do that. He used to give you a little piece of paper with somebody’s phone number, money for gas, and then a mission. You got sent out and you had to go accomplish and gure out how do it. That form of advocacy, that form of being engaged, of not having everything done for you, [it’s not] like service learning [where] everything’s organized for you. [With service learning,] you just arrive, and you feel like you’re empowered but you don’t really get an opportunity to really know what it’s like to build the pathway.

Our generation dealt with colonial projects in Africa and South America and in the Americas and Asia. So [working with the UN] was just the next piece of Indigenous peoples really looking at those politics and really trying to reckon with how they were not only going to survive but impact and speak for planetary survival.

I have to say that other than the [Venceremos Brigade] to Cuba and working for Bert, and ceremonial life, the UN experience was the most eye opening and expansive I have had. Listening to Indigenous people from all over the world and realizing that the identity of indigeneity is much broader than what we know here in the north and North America. There are so many different ways each government, each country, contends with its Indigenous peoples, and many different ways Indigenous peoples contend with their governments.

What really interested me was that we as Chicanos shared a common experience with many Indigenous peoples around the world in diaspora removed from their lands, in dealing with the nation-state, in dealing with capitalism, in trying to identify a sense of who we are outside of the original markers and accepted notions of who we are.

[In participating in the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, I thought about] how would we agree upon the word indigeneity? How would that be for Indigenous children that are coming from Mexico and Central America? I was reading through the DRIP [Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] and it was very dif cult to apply because we’re a transnational people. It would look different than in the US because there they guide themselves by Federal law—what is native, how it applies to native children protected by their native tribes, who gets to foster and who gets to adopt if something happens to the child’s family.

Flor Crisóstomo made a comment before the UN oor that because her children were Mexican born and still in Mexico, nobody cared about them in the same way that they cared about the children that are here. In other words, US-born children still count on migrating their parents on some level even if it’s psychological. We always talk about these are American US citizens and their families are being deported. That kind of discussion appeals to the idea of the American citizen having the right to their family and children. But she commented that nobody really cared about her as a mother being separated from her children because their children being in Mexico did not have a right to their family because they were not US citizens. How can we apply the DRIP to her? Because she is Indigenous, she is Zapotec. It didn’t.

I was watching children being incarcerated and knowing there is protection for Indigenous children, but not for migrant children. How can we protect the rights of migrant Indigenous children. How do you differentiate that? What happens to the rest of the kids who are urban, native children, mestizo children and our separated?11

Does the colonizer care if I cry?: Ceremonia, Collaboration, and Collective Grief

Marcelle: How did the project emerge?

Celia: I just felt so sad. Seeing the children, it really opened up wounds that I thought I had worked so hard to reckon with. I had gone to healers, years and years of ceremonial work, of ceremonial commitments. I kept asking myself, why am I not storming those doors? Why am I not over there, storming those doors? Why am I so passive? I see this happening. What am I doing? Just standing here? I couldn’t understand why we as a society were not knocking down those doors. I’m still asking that question.

What am I going to do when those kids come home? When they return, some of them surely will, what will we have to say to them? How will we explain what we did or didn’t do? I felt I had to let go of the grief. I felt like I had to go over there, on that dirt, on that ground where all those little feet had traveled. I needed to let go of this pain, this llanto, this rage, and pain. I felt those kids. I just felt them: what it’s like to be separated, to lose, to not know what’s going to happen tomorrow, to be beset upon by adults, to not really have a way to defend yourself. I knew that.

That’s why I wanted to do the piece, and then I spoke with Cherríe. I said to her, if it were up to me, I would just go take my blanket, go over there, light a re, go cry. Then I thought, maybe, maybe this is not just about me. Maybe this is about us. Maybe we can call on all of us who call ourselves warriors for the people because there are some of us who have had that language in our mouth at one time or another: warrior for the people.

I felt like as women, all the work that we’ve done, that maybe we needed to come together. Maybe that one prayer, that one llanto, would at least allow us to see one another. Cherríe helped me organize it in such a way that we could bring our students, we could gather with other women. I asked her if she could organize as a director. Cherríe devised a way of calling on the women that she knew. The word began to spread that way: calling on the curanderas, on the re keepers, las maestras, the people that keep the re going in our ceremonies. We started thinking about what it would actually be like. It was very interesting for me because when I was little, I really couldn’t cry. I couldn’t cry in front of my grandmother because her grief was bigger than mine. You know how it is with adults. Her grief was bigger than mine, but I couldn’t ever really have it. With my stepfather, he just refused to allow me to have any expression of feeling whatsoever. He just bullied me into not showing him my humanity. So to cry in front of people that I love is the hardest thing I can do. I can cry at a commercial, or a cartoon, but to cry in front of someone I love is very hard. So I was telling Cherríe that, which is why we moved into the acto, into theatre. And that was really interesting because it challenged so much of our Mexicanness, of who we are, how we have been trained to hold on to our shyness. I saw so many of the muchachas, they were really really challenged with the idea. Even my own granddaughter, she said, hmmm, I’m not performing for anybody. It was really deep, to see how that aspect of us, that letting go. Expression is a privilege, and so many of us don’t have that privilege of free expression. Our attempt was to come together in our grief, and to think of it as power. To think of it as a way of enacting our power even in our grief. Does the colonizer care if we cry? I doubt it. But I felt that the children might care. Maybe they might see it, hear it.

I want us to feel again. It’s the llanto that allows us to feel. We have to see each other, witness each other, join together in our release. I’ve always believed from ceremonial life that the healing that we do in community is as important as the work we do on ourselves individually.

Cherríe, with her experience as a dramaturge, and the years she has in directing and also writing, she helped organize and brought some folks that worked with us to allow us to be able to do that llanto, to be able to get in our bodies and to be able to release it. We took the component of the healing aspect that was coming together to release, and then utilized that as part of the acto, the kind of acto-practice that is in our cultura.

Marcelle: Can we talk about the days we spent together? What do you remember about the rst day at Centro?

Celia: [Doris Difarnecio] pressed so many of us into service. The idea of dancing across the room is my worst nightmare. You realize how hard it is for us to take up space and trust each other in the taking up of space and that mattered. That

in itself was a ceremony. That piece of it, even resisting, however we responded, as preparation for us in terms of our own relationship to our own bodies and our own voices.

It was interesting having to collaborate with all of the mujeres that worked the altar: the purpose of the altar, where it needed to be centered, how it needed to be worked. I didn’t really know whether I needed to push the altar or not push the altar. There was the altar that I brought, and then I realized, the mujeres, in their practice, have their own way of doing things. We had to allow everyone to bring what they know and to use that the way they know rather than impose an art form or an altar or some idea. That was a lesson in terms of collaboration: how to adjust and allow people to bring their best and allow what it is that they have. The people that came around were really wonderful, really sincere, very practiced, and they owned it, grown mujeres. The women that had worked together before and the women who had not worked together before knew and assembled themselves around the altars. And kept doing it over and over again. I was very honored, very blessed that they came.

The medicine of it, the real medicine of it was the call. That we called out to all these folks and they came. The fact that these women came, that medicine itself was really important. It taught me so much about how you make a call, and then how you let go. That was the prayer. Besides the altar making and the time we came together, it was the fact that everybody came. The fact they felt it in themselves. That to me was the start of the ceremony.

Cherríe: The trust was overwhelming. That people can show up and just trust. It’s amazing.

Marcelle: Can you talk about the second day? Why downtown San Diego?

Celia: What really caught my attention was how innocuous it looked. Everything was in the basement, below ground, and that everything just looked like a regular business park. It reminded of those regimes, those Nazi regimes, those repressive regimes that reminded me of Chile, reminded me of the disappeared. You can’t see in the surface that something is happening, and right there in our very own city below the surface. These folks are being arrested, they’re lives are at stake really, their whole life is at stake in that moment, in that decision to escape whatever they were trying to escape. Whether it was hunger or poverty, or political repression, only to nd themselves again facing the might of the United States immigration system. And lost, they are faceless, we don’t know who they are. We don’t see it. We really don’t pay attention to it. We think that somehow, it’s not important if those people go missing, those bodies. It’s amazing to me that politically that we’ve accepted this so much so in our society. So that’s why we went there. I wanted us to make it visible.

Cherríe: My feeling was, when we were there, all that work that we went through with the script wasn’t needed. I felt like the real deal was the ceremony. All of those parts: the making of the altares, walking in and out, we didn’t really need any words. We had to have microphones, we had to have all these things to be heard, and right in the middle I’m going, throw that out. There is a relationship between ceremony and performance because it’s all ritual. That is the origins of performance and theater—ritual. In this moment, it was a rito. That’s what was required. The words were not required.

What really moved me was the ceremonial part. For all the rehearsals we did, ironically, I think that was all good, because we spent time together. And we got to know each other. I don’t think it was that training that got people to feel the way they felt. It was going down to Otay Mesa, being there, and hearing that man call in and call us compañeras.

The trouble is that we were disconnected from our real audience, which is them, the people inside. So performance to perform that wasn’t the point, the point was to protest. And to protest you have got to stir up some trouble. But fundamentally, it was really the llanto, it was the prayer. Even going to the beach, that was just fabulous, wonderful. It was just right. You know when things are right.

Marcelle: How did you feel the difference between being at the federal building, being in the city, and then being at the detention center? It felt very different to me to be in those different spaces.

Celia: It was very different because we could see the prison, what we think of as prison already. You could see the barbed wire, you could see the stone walls, you could see the desolation around it. When you go to any prison, you start to really feel it, the barrenness of it and what that means. We also got more into our prayer. The rst day we basically started that prayer, by the second day we were in it. I think that’s why, to me, we felt it more. I think I expected more people to come out. I was surprised when we weren’t joined by folks and community. I wondered about that.

Marcelle: As you were talking, I began thinking that it wasn’t just that a lot of people didn’t show up. Walking up to the detention center, but mostly walking away. Walking away was the hardest part.

Celia: Me and Cherríe, we tease each other. Sometimes we say, I really want to reoccupy my Mexican Americanness. I never referred to myself as a Mexican American. I always felt I was Chicana. I was Mexican, and when I got to college I liked the terminology, Chicana, because it connected me up with other young people like me, that understood what we had grown up through. There was a politic in it that I still love and hold on to. That self-naming and that decision

that it’s a political spiritual journey that we’re on toward self-determination. So being alone in that, it’s how I have been feeling all along. I feel the kind of hatred, desprecio, that our people have been shown over these years. It’s not the rst time or the only time. We all grew up with it in one way or another we felt it. But now it’s just so loud. It’s just so loud. And it’s unexamined.

Even amongst ourselves. I feel like now we have divisions between us and Central Americans. I’m speaking about that a little bit because I was really surprised. I went to a meeting with these young folks that were talking about wanting Central American Studies. They were busy talking about their experiences with Mexicans, talking about Mexican hegemony. They kept looking at me every time they talked like somehow, I had broken it. You may call it hegemony, but we don’t have that kind of power. And I’m wondering: who is brokering this? Who is bringing this conversation to bear? How can we see one another again? And see that this generational struggle over 40 years is nothing? If we think of ourselves as continental people, then we can say that we have been engaged in this struggle for 500 years. We have 30,000 years of relationship, 60,000 years of relationship, with the last 500 in con ict maybe. And what’s the con ict? It’s the nation-state con ict. Not us. Not ours.

So politically speaking, the experience I’ve had is not only having the state, and racialized society looking at things Mexican either as victims, as invisible, or as the enemy, then having those of us who we should be in league with also looking at us as if we have something that we’re not sharing or that we’re standing in the way of. This is who we are at this moment, this political moment, and it’s something we must pay attention to. It’s almost like saying you can show solidarity, but we’re not in league. You can just be an ally. What the hell are we talking about ally? What does that mean?

We’re in need of plática and education. This is the only medicine for what’s happening right now: the process of educating ourselves about what is going on in the world and what our role in it is. As teachers, this is the next generation of issues that are coming to our desk, how are we prepared to handle it?

Not all Ceremony is Healing: Rethinking Family Separation

Marcelle: I want to talk about sexual desire. How do you see that in your practice, and in your ceremony? For me it feels very different. I don’t know if it’s because I came to these things very late in life, in my mid 40s, but I have always had the real privilege of being around queer women and queer Chicanas. It’s a very different experience of ceremony. It’s a very different experience of even being taught something. I don’t know if you see it as just who you are, just as part of your practice. I don’t know how to say it but I want to recognize the difference and not take it for granted because not all ceremonies are healing. Not all people are welcoming in this way. Not all people allow you your politics fully. So I feel very lucky, and I don’t know how it happened but I want

to recognize that difference in some way. I don’t know if that’s a question or something you can speak to.

Cherríe: Celia and I, next year is 25 years that we’ve been together, and then there was ve years before that of being friends, of knowing each other. It’s a curious thing because as you get older, people think they can forget you have a sexuality. You’re supposed to smile when I say this because it’s funny. We laugh at it. Because it’s actually not true. Many of us continue to have a sexual life. It’s so integral to who we are at this age in our lives.

Speaking for myself, the work of being out, and owning it, for most all of my life, and then when Celia and I got together, and we began to go to ceremony, we experienced so much homophobia. We came in as a family, and we were not really. Even when it wasn’t blatant you felt it anyway, you always felt like an outsider, because things were so masculinist. Then we started working with road women. The best medicine ceremonies we were going to is when Celia sat in the position of the road woman because then it was not an issue. The men were there, and the women were there, and it was ne. But everything was so heterosexual from the young ones to the old ones. It was better to get the young boys into ceremony instead of young women. And you saw young parejas that were heterosexual, but we remained invisible.

But you’re absolutely right if you think about the llanto collectivo, there were so many heterosexual women, and plenty of queer women, and it was all ne because we aren’t studying men. Nobody was deferring to men. And sexuality, if you’re talking about desire, this is the thing with both Celia and me, what I have always felt since the time I was coming out and writing about being a lesbian, I always felt really very strongly that what queer women were doing for heterosexual women was allowing them a sexuality. Because we’re the ones that were forced to talk about desire, and they weren’t talking about desire. We talked about desire because we had to. All these years later, now you see how Chicana heterosexual women are not threatened by us. They are feminist in really integral way and there is a ceremonial life attached to that as well. We’re hermanas.

And as we’ve grown older there’s a different kind of energy that happens with people also feeling the component of [us] being elders in that context, but it doesn’t desexualize us. Me and Celia are a pareja in public. If they want to desexualize that, that’s their problem. If you would have asked me 30 years ago if this was possible, that you could be with heterosexual Chicanas and queer Chicanas, that we could make ceremony together and share and it wouldn’t be an issue, I never would have believed it then because the homophobia was so rampant.

Celia: Well, I think I have to back up from where you started because I always have to start with my mother’s language. I mean I call her my mother because

my grandmother was my mother because my mother died so young. My grandmother always spoke of us being women alone in the world. She said because of that, I should never expect to have support, not even from other women. She said that because she felt that other women all took their power from men. We have no men in front of us, and we have no men behind us, therefore you have to be self-sustaining and have great integrity.

This idea of not having a male gure behind me, really began to in uence me as I started to grow up and I started to see that there were many invitations by men for partnering up for power. I kept saying I have my own thing; I have my own road. I have things I have to do; I don’t have time for that. It had nothing to do with desire or sexuality. I just knew I had my own road, and I knew my road was pretty female. It took me a long time to admit that to myself because I was being in uenced by the politics and homophobia and my own fears. I had to through my own healing. My own healing had to do with getting me back to myself.

What I realized in the healing, very publicly, was that for me to take the rst step toward having come toward wholeness, I had to admit I was a lesbian publicly. This was important. This was me. This was the result of the healing which kind of freaked out the medicine people a little bit. Because they said don’t go tell people that I did that to you. Don’t go tell people that you became a lesbian at my sweat lodge. There was a lot of, keep it on the down low. Are you sure? Shouldn’t you have more interpretations? No, no. I’m sure, I know this because I got the word. I saw it from the spirits. I saw it in myself.

That was my early formation in the medicine ceremonies among the culture of Chicano Indigenous world, way back in the 1970s. So, there was no place to put this until I started to really encounter that there were other women. There was a woman’s world that I was not aware of, having three children, being in my little Sacramento world, then the political world that I occupied among Chicanos. But I quickly began to see that in many ways I was an empowered person, many things had empowered me. I kept trying to nd my way to a woman healer which I eventually did.

We learned to make res. People taught us to make re, that was very important, that was essential. People began to be able to pray for themselves, and hold ceremonies for themselves, and not have to necessarily ask permission of men. They themselves felt as they began to practice this because they felt they couldn’t do it any other way. Because it was not necessarily always men’s homophobia. It was women’s internalized sexism, that male identi cation. You knew that there was a man at the other end of their leadership, the elder, the grandpa, the uncle, that they checked in with. So, it was a mixed bag. Sometimes they were open, sometimes they always have to ask permission. This fear, this you need to be careful with what you do, was one of those little metaphors for you need to ask permission of a man.

Because when you ask permission of the grandmas, many of them really didn’t know. Then you really start to realize that some women’s practices were obliterated, were fragmented. What was left was what was assembled after colonialism with patriarchy already making a deep mark on women’s leadership. I saw that the grandmothers couldn’t really tell us necessarily how to free ourselves because they weren’t free.

When I met Cherríe, a lot of language came with that meeting, a lot of understanding. Walking in together to a ceremony, as soon as you walk in with Cherríe, all of a sudden, we’re suspect, we’re there to change things, we’re there to do something, they don’t know what. That’s how deep the patriarchy is in terms of our spiritual practice. As we’ve gotten older, we haven’t been quite as shocking to people. I always gured it’s because the older you get people don’t assume you as a sexual person anymore.

That political aspect of the spiritual—sexuality—that is a politic. There’s something there that really matters that we have to get back to as women. We have to come back to our bodies. That’s Cherríe’s work, the real basis of her work that I’ve seen over the years. It’s still hard to reconcile. I don’t think it’s all done yet. I think we’re still dealing with that issue so thank you for asking that question because it matters. This idea of the body and desire and who we are as women, why we can have ceremony and why we can sit in front of the re. I don’t have any problem with it. I can sit in front of that re. I can hold the medicine. I’m not afraid of holding that space. But it creates this issue around other people who begin to question what right I have to that. And I always say I don’t, it’s not a right, it’s a responsibility. There’s something about the language we have around us being more important than our relationships to each other. As women, we know how to pray. We know how to pray and let other people say their prayers. It’s as simple as that.

feet sinking into sand

I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean Oigo el llorido del mar, el respiro del aire.

—Gloria Anzaldúa

I imagine my dad as a little boy.

He used to tell me how he remembers his parents, afraid of the concentration camps arriving to Tunisia, sent him to hide in a Catholic orphanage. On one of his dad’s visits, he remembers the beating he got when he said, “The Jews killed Jesus.” It’s hard to explain the laughter and complete joy in my father’s voice when he would imitate my grandfather saying, “I’ll kill you myself before I let you talk like this.” The beating didn’t matter because that’s the day my grandfather decided to take him home.

There were many episodes of what I now recognize as immobilizing depression for my father. Days, weeks . . . maybe months of silence. Sometimes I would sit next to him, stare at the thick scar on his neck, and ask, What happened there? He would say, That’s when they left me for dead in the streets.

A French police of cer had slit his throat and left him to bleed out in the street.

Then stories of the Tunisian revolution, of losing and nding the jacket where he taped all of his family’s money at the bus stop where he got too hot, of refugee camps, of sur ng and the wood surfboard that broke his nose, see, it’s still crooked, laughter, of sleeping in unlocked cars, of running away from home and moving to the states, and always the same advice: you’re going to have to work double or triple just to be able to sit at the table next to Joe Shmoe, to prove you’re someone to anyone. If you want to make something of yourself don’t look to a man and good luck because I have nothing to give you.

There are many ways to die. To stop living.

I nally know what you mean by Joe Shmoe… laughter.

I want to live.

Your grief is not bigger than mine because it is not yours or mine.

Merecemos y sabemos cómo politicizar nuestro llanto colectivo.

Nuestra lucha es por la vida.

Marcelle Maese is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of San Diego. She is part of Red Feminismos, Cultura, y Poder, a transnational collective of decolonial feminist scholars and artists, and is a member of Detention Resistance, an abolitionist collective that works in accompaniment with those imprisoned at Otay Mesa Detention Center. Her writing has been published in Frontiers, Arizona Quarterly, and qui parle. Her chapter, “Historical Materialism, The Decolonial Imaginary, and Chicana Feminist Theories in the Flesh” appears in Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to US Latino/a Literature (2018) and is also available in translation as part of the collection, Perspectivas feministas de la interseccionalidad (México, Logos Editores—UAM Xochimilco, 2021). She is currently writing her book manuscript, Xicanx Poetics: Confession, Song, Criminality, and the Coloniality of Gender, a study of the

relationship between song and confession, social and literary forms that historicize the colonial relation between legal redress and nonsecular protest.

Notes

1. In place of the English term the caravans, I use the term lxs caravanerxs as a textual strategy for signaling the long history of decolonial resistance that connects asylum seekers to Indigenous land and water rights. In contrast to the chaotic spectacle of third world poverty produced and circulated by mainstream reporting on the caravans, the term lxs caravanerxs names a desire to study the political strategies that inform mass movements for self-determination that think beyond humanization within the secular parameters of the nation-state. I also claim that in an act of self-naming, caravanerxs question the legal categories of migrant, refugee, and asylum seeker while advancing a erce negotiation of governmental frameworks for legal redress. For histories of resistance, see Suyapa Portillo Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras (2021), Roberto Lovato Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas (2020), and Alicia María Siu’s artist talk for her mural “From Our Ancestors” presented at Centro Cultural de la Raza (October 11, 2020).

2. While the yearly pilgrimage during Holy Week is known as the Viacrucis Migrante, with each year sometimes given a particular name, for example, Viacrucis de Refugiados in 2017, and Viacrucis Migrante en la lucha (2018), caravanxs are also coordinated throughout the year. The widely circulated image of Maria Meza running from teargas, pulling her two daughters, Celia and Saira, by the hand, happened in November 2018, two months after the llanto colectivo PerformaProtesta. See “Honduran Migrant Seen Fleeing Tear Gas With Her Toddlers is Now in US”

3. For a succinct overview of the violence faced when migrating through Mexico, see Daniela Barba-Sánchez “On Crossing Deserts and Hostile Territories: Sources of Vulnerability for Central American Immigrants in Mexico” in the 2018 –2019 study The Migrant Caravan: From Honduras to Tijuana: An Analysis by the Center of U.S.-Mexican Studies Fellows. For an overview of transborder organizing in the Tijuana/San Diego region in response to the 2018 Viacrucis Migrantes en la Lucha, an introduction to the asylum process, and cursory history of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, or “The Northern Triangle,” see the same report. For an overview of Executive Orders, see “A Timeline of the Trump Administrator’s Efforts to End Asylum” provided by the National Immigrant Justice Center (National Immigrant Justice Center).

4. Shortly after, Detention Resistance became its own grassroots abolitionist collective.

5. Throughout this essay, I use the difrasismo PerformaProtesta. The use of difrasismo allows me to situate the historical speci city of the form of Un llanto colectivo— el acto —within a tradition of Xicanx poetics. See Alfred Arteaga’s Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (1997).

6. For additional writing on Un llanto colectivo, see publications by Jade PowerSotomayor (forthcoming 2023), as well as Alexis Meza’s and Leslie Quintanilla’s “No Estan Solxs: Mourning Anti-Migrant State Violence as Countersurveillance Praxis” in Violence, Migration, and Detention during Trump’s Reign of Terror and Beyond, edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Jessica Ordaz. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, (forthcoming 2024).

7. Of course, I am indebted to Xicana feminist theorizing of the relation between the political and the sacred: Gloria Anzaldúa, Amanda Ellis, Elisa Facio, AnaLouise Keating, Irene Lara, Cherríe Moraga, Laura E. Pérez, Christina Garcia Lopez, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, and Suzy Zepeda to name those I have studied most closely.

8. See de nition of “crimmigration” in Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, César. 2013. “Creating Crimmigration.” Discretion & Deference: Immigrants, Citizens, and the Law (6): 1457-1515. https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2013/iss6/4.

9. Cofounded in December 2017 by “the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties, the San Diego Organizing Project, and SEIU local 221 in partnership with a coalition of more than 40 immigrant rights and social service organizations, attorneys, and faith and community leaders,” the San Diego Rapid Response Network operates a hotline for “ongoing immigration emergencies such as checkpoints, raids, arrests, and harassment,” and provides temporary housing, “travel assistance, nutrition services, medical screenings, legal assistance, and nancial support for asylum seekers” (Sand Diego Rapid Response Network).

10. Dr. Stanley Rodriguez received his doctorate from the University of California, San Diego, and currently teaches at Kumeyaay Community College. For information on March Without Borders see https://www.facebook.com/events/112509286275967/ and https://www.facebook.com/PuebloSF/videos/2145493692143987

11. See Toro-Morn, Maura I., and Nilda Flores Gonzalez. 2011. “Transitional Latina Mother—Activists in the Americas: The Case of Elvira Arellano and Flor Crisostomo”. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement 2 (2): https:// jarm.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jarm/article/view/34540; and The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, especially “Plight of Migrants” https://www .un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/unpfii-sessions-2/sixth.html. On Xicana Indigeneity, see Luna, Jennie. 2012. “Building a Xicana Indígena Philosophical Base” Hispanic/ Latino Issues in Philosophy 11(20): 9 –16.

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