| This dissertation analyzes how religious activists have created a means and a language of protest through the U.S. sanctuary movement--a grass-roots religious-based network concerned about undocumented Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees. Most studies of protest have been limited by researchers' assumptions that protest consists of rational, strategic action designed to achieve clearly explicated goals. Recent analyses of Third World resistance to capitalist expansion have broadened notions of resistance by revealing that protest can be an implicit part of daily life in seemingly non-political domains. The present study applies such approaches to a modern social movement in order to examine the political implications of the cultural forms created in the process of protest.;Based on interviews and fieldwork among California and Arizona sanctuary workers, this dissertation treats sanctuary as an oppositional "subculture" whose practices, meanings, language, and rituals both draw on and critique wider society. First, refugee testimonies and screening procedures invoke immigration law to define Central Americans as refugees and sanctuary work as legal. While in some ways reinforcing the immigration system, these practices also empower citizens to interpret and enforce the law. Second, sanctuary workers use their knowledge of Central American reality to expose the shortcomings of U.S. society. This critique informs sanctuary work, yet does not change the middle-class basis of the movement. Third, by assisting refugees, participants cross a border of sorts to reinterpret their faith from the perspective of the poor. This reinterpretation of faith idealizes Central Americans while producing a justice-oriented people of faith who exist alongside institutionalized religious groups. Within the movement, culture, power and resistance are intertwined.;These results show that the sanctuary movement is not only about immigration and foreign policy, but also about U.S. society, culture, and religion. Emphasizing the process and experience of sanctuary work demonstrates that the daily practices of the movement are themselves a form of social change. Examining the political implications of movement culture breaks down the dichotomies which have led researchers to overlook the cultural forms of resistance practiced both within and outside of social movements. |
