When Cruz Medina, associate professor of rhetoric and composition, started volunteering at a Spanish-speaking church in the East Bay in 2013, he did not expect to publish a book about it more than a decade later.
He’d moved to the Bay Area that year for his postdoctoral fellowship at Santa Clara University, and was teaching English to the congregants, many of whom were migrants from Guatemala. Sanctuary: Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay documents Medina’s interviews with them and places their experiences within a broader context of violence and displacement of Indigenous Maya people in the U.S.
Medina chose to anonymize the church, calling it only “Sanctuary” in order to protect members’ identities but also communicate its broader function—a refuge far from home that provides basic necessities like food, housing, and community.
His research on this group challenges dominant narratives about migrants, offering a nuanced perspective. Using Sanctuary as a case study, Medina highlights the legal and educational barriers migrant populations continue to face even after escaping violence.
“I found myself trying to address these global transnational historical elements, while also kind of bringing it to the radically local moments I was a part of during my time there,” Medina says.
