Sanctuary Cities, Assemblages, and the Politics of Meaning: Situating the So-Called

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, the idea of sanctuary has been critical to the work of immigration activists and local governments in the United States. While the utilization of sanctuary as both an activist practice and municipal policy has waxed and waned over the past 40 years, reflecting more extensive shifts in immigration patterns and federal policies, the notion of sanctuary has remained an important feature of debates surrounding US immigration laws, enforcement practices, and the contested meanings of belonging within the country. Following the major overhaul of the US security apparatus post 9-11, immigrant sanctuary practices and policies have again become an important vehicle for immigrant rights advocates to highlight the cruelties of the US immigration system and campaign for change. Likewise, local governments have adopted a variety of pro-immigrant policies (broadly couched under the sanctuary moniker) to improve trust between immigrant communities and local police departments, with varying levels of success. This dissertation explores the tensions between these practices and how multiple and distinct iterations of sanctuary across time and space have been researched and theorized by geographers. Importantly, it argues that an approach grounded in Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage thinking provides the most salient spatial analytic for understanding sanctuary’s many permutations. Following this tact and utilizing archival data from US news media articles, this research also works to excavate the ways that sanctuary as an idea has become territorialized within a set of discursive practices, rendering homogenous what is actually incongruous and messy. Here, the work interrogates the frequent use of the adjectival phrase “so-called” to point to how many sanctuary and immigrant welcoming practices operate as a form of cruel optimism, wherein desires for sanctuary qua protection rarely live up to their promises. Lastly, the work engages with immigrant rights activism in Tucson, Arizona and discusses the 2019 Tucson Families Free and Together ballot proposition, which would have instituted meaningful and palpable sanctuary protections for the city’s undocumented. While the proposition did not pass, I argue that it was still an important campaign, working to articulate a theory of belonging rooted in presence, rather than legal status.