The Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s was a faith-based effort to aid the nearly one million refugees fleeing violence and civil war in Central America. Churches and parishes nationwide banded together to shelter migrants from deportation by federal authorities. As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House in January, immigrant communities are again confronting the possibility of mass deportations, potentially on an unprecedented scale. Journalist and author Rubén Martínez is the co-creator of the play, “Little Central America, 1984,” which recalls the Sanctuary Movement of that decade and pays tribute to some of its leaders. For Martínez, the current political moment demands that a new generation pick up the torch.
What inspired the play?
So, 2018 would be the origins. In 2018, the issue of family separations was still making headlines. Kids, unaccompanied minors in detention centers, unaccompanied minors dying in detention centers for lack of care. And the darkest of the first Trump years in terms of immigration policy, the tremendous cruelty.
The original Sanctuary Movement started in 1982. A Few Berkeley parishes and parishes in Tucson, Arizona were what became a nationwide movement of churches literally offering shelter both in their churches and in the homes of parishioners in clear defiance of federal law. There were court cases, some people were convicted, and some people did time. But this became a nationwide movement during the Central American civil wars of the 1980s.
The connection being that the wars in Central America were driving large numbers of refugees into the US, right?
Yes, that’s exactly it. Refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador. And so, in 1982, on the anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero, these parishes make a public declaration of sanctuary.
That original movement came to mind during the first Trump administration because of the dire circumstances surrounding the turning away of people at the border, rounding them up, the family separations, and all these cruel acts the state was taking against these people, many of whom were once again refugees from Central America.
Things have changed since then, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. Here we are with a second Trump administration and we’re about to see if there is a bite to his bark about mass deportations.
All of which makes the production that much more salient.
Right. So, we premiered in Los Angeles during the first Trump administration. It’s a site-specific project, meaning we perform it at sites of sanctuary from the original movement. The first was at Echo Park Methodist Church in Los Angeles, which was a site of sanctuary in the 1980s. My co-creator, Elia Arce, knew the pastor there back in the 1980s. She knew a refugee family that was given sanctuary there. So, our first show was there right before the pandemic. Then the pandemic came, and a couple years later we regrouped. We got a touring grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts to take it on the road. So, we went to places where the original Sanctuary Movement had been strong. And a lot of these places, today, are where you find Little Central Americas a generation later. Houston, Texas has a massive Central American population.
And are these places where you’ve brought the show?
Yes, we performed at the First Unitarian Church of Houston, a former sanctuary site. From there, we went to Washington, DC, one of the oldest and most well-known Central American barrios in the US, in the Mount Pleasant and Adams Morgan area.
There is a throughline in the ideal of sanctuary that goes back to antiquity with sanctuary for persecuted Christians, and across the Middle Ages and all the way to today. The Church is founded on the ideal of sanctuary.
Of course, some of these places would later declare themselves as sanctuary cities during Trump’s first term. What is the through line with the earlier movement?
The Sanctuary Movement put the term “sanctuary” on the map. Sanctuary cities specifically refer to municipal authorities, police departments not collaborating with federal agencies on immigration status. So, if someone gets caught on a misdemeanor, not turning them over to the Feds if they are undocumented for deportation. Los Angeles had a policy going back to the 1970s, predating the Sanctuary Movement, forbidding the LAPD from turning people over to immigration. And there is a public safety reason there. If you’re scared to call the police for anything, crimes will go unpunished, people will be more unsafe. It is a public safety issue. So, sanctuary cities took up the symbolism of the early Sanctuary Movement and made it specifically about, you will not be deported when you interface with local authorities.
It’s been forty years since the initial Sanctuary Movement. Is it still there, among the churches? Who is there to take up the mantle?
The networks still exist, communication between progressive parishes across the country still exists. But a lot of mainline protestant churches — Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists — their congregations have dwindled. Catholic churches probably maintain their numbers, especially in immigrant communities. You still see filled pews on Sundays in Fruitvale, or the Mission. But the mainline white, Anglo-Saxon protestant churches have seen their numbers dwindle dramatically. And those churches, for example, St. John’s Presbyterian on College Avenue in Berkeley… that’s a very small congregation today compared to what it was in the 1980s. Dozens rather than hundreds.