Sanctuary in America: How Activists Defied the Government and Defended Immigrants―And Why It Still Matters

In Sanctuary in America, Lloyd D. Barba and Sergio M. González tell the story of how sanctuary activists have, for nearly half a century, organized one of the most robust civil disobedience movements in American history. This book speaks to those attempting to navigate the trying and tumultuous present.

Lloyd D. Barba is Associate Professor of Religion in the Americas and Core Faculty in Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. His ongoing research on the Sanctuary Movement brings together questions from religious history and immigration studies to understand the context of social activism and politics. Barba is the author of Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (OUP, 2022), which won the 2024 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award and the 2024 Pneuma Book Award for Best Book in the Study of Pentecostalism. He is also editor of Latin American and US Latino Religions in North America: An Introduction (2024) and co-editor of Oneness Pentecostalism: Race, Gender, and Culture (with Andrea Shan Johnson and Daniel Ramírez, 2023).

Sergio M. González is Associate Professor of History at Marquette University. A historian of twentieth-century U.S. migration, labor, and religion, his scholarship explores the intersections between faith and social movements as well as the development of Latino communities in the U.S. Midwest. González is the author of Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging and Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (2024) and Mexicans in Wisconsin (2017) and co-editor of Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945 (with Felipe Hinojosa and Maggie Elmore, 2022).