Convivencia as Sanctuary: Faith, Humanitarian Governance, and Solidarity at a Seattle Migrant Shelter

Abstract

This study examines the limits and possibilities of radical solidarity between faith communities and migrants at El Refugio, an improvised faith-based migrant shelter operating out of a Christian church outside Seattle, Washington. Drawing on eight months of participant observation and eleven semi-structured interviews with asylum seekers, the findings reveal that El Refugio simultaneously reproduced the dynamics of humanitarian governance, in which care was conditioned upon compliance and deference, and generated forms of solidarity that exceeded that framework. The most durable solidarities were not produced by the institutional church but by the horizontal relationships migrants built with one another and by the pre-existing Latinx immigrant community. This study contributes to scholarship on the U.S. sanctuary movement by documenting how Latinx migrant community leaders are frequently the animating force of sanctuary work while remaining invisible to dominant frameworks, and introduces convivencia as an analytical concept naming the ground-level condition from which transformational solidarity most consistently emerged.