Politicized RefugeChicago and the Transformation of the Sanctuary Movement Nathan Ellstrand (bio) "We are writing to inform you that today our congregation voted to declare our church as a sanctuary for undocumented refugees from El Salvador. On Saturday, July 24, we will openly receive a refugee family into the care and protection of the church. We realize in so doing that we will be in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act Section 274(A)."1 In a letter to United States Attorney General William French Smith dated July 18, 1982, leadership at Chicago's Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ took a public stand on the rampant violence in El Salvador. It was the first place of worship in the Midwest to declare sanctuary, acting in clear defiance of the federal government and its intervention in Central America during the Cold War of the 1980s. The literature on the sanctuary movement concentrates on U.S.-Mexico border region organizers who provided refuge in Tucson and across southeastern Arizona, highlighting the actions of the Manzo Area Council, Jim Corbett, and the Reverend John Fife in declaring public sanctuary through the Tucson Ecumenical Council (TEC) in 1982. Lawyers, journalists, and anthropologists have focused on these individuals, emphasizing their religious and moral convictions.2 Since the 1980s, historical scholarship on the sanctuary movement has evolved from hagiographic accounts of leaders to works that place the movement in a broader context of transnational and borderlands history. Only one work examines the sanctuary movement in Chicago rather than Arizona; it emphasizes the internal organizational structure and gender dimensions of the movement instead of historicizing its politicized origins in the city a decade before.3 Although the initial movement to provide sanctuary—in the form of shelter, aid, and consultation—to Central American refugees emerged out [End Page 25] of the southwestern U.S., the push for expanding sanctuary came from political, solidarity-based organizing centered in the Midwest in Chicago between 1980 and 1983. Chicago sanctuary activists built on both the Central American solidarity movement and sanctuary in Tucson. They moved away from Tucson's localized, defensive approach of providing refuge on the border. Instead, Chicago organizers were steeped in the Central American solidarity movement, creating an interfaith coalition to proactively reject the Cold War priorities of the U.S. government abroad. Chicago activists politically weaponized sanctuary, using it not only to protect refugees, but to turn Central Americans' lived experiences into a sharp critique of U.S. foreign policy. This resulted in more than three hundred sanctuaries created nationwide by 1986, an example still widely invoked by immigrant and refugee advocates today. The Situation in Central America and Sanctuary in Tucson U.S. political involvement in Central America dates back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. However, starting in the 1960s, Central America became a regional battleground of the Cold War. The U.S. and Soviet Union competed globally for hearts and minds, and a range of "hot wars" occurred within many Central American nations. The U.S. government actively sought to prevent the spread of communism and, ultimately, leftism. Guatemala's civil war between the state and left-wing organizations extended from 1960 to 1996. Ethnicity as well as ideology divided individuals of Spanish descent from the country's Indigenous poor and mixed-race people. The civil war in El Salvador occurred from 1980 to 1991 between the military government and a coalition of leftist organizations known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. Nicaragua suffered its own prolonged period of revolutionary conflict from 1961–1990, starting with the overthrow of the Somoza family by the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Later, the Sandinistas fought the Contras, a coalition of right-wing paramilitary organizations. During the 1980s, Honduras served as a U.S. training ground for the Salvadoran military and for the Nicaraguan Contras; moreover, the Honduran state combatted its own leftist guerrillas.4 The U.S. intervened in all of these political conflicts, aiming to prevent the rise of leftist regimes in the region during the Cold War. The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 heralded U.S. government expansion of intervention in Central America, as the president [End Page...
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Apr 27, 2024
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