Reconciling Liberation and Charity: Central American Leadership in the 1980s Philadelphia Sanctuary Movement

Central American leadership in the 1980s Philadelphia Sanctuary Movement was cultivated through long experiences with social injustice, along with deeply political religious sensibilities rooted in Latin American labor organizing and the base Christian community movement. While it is sometimes assumed that they carried with them only an undifferentiated past of victimization and violence, Central American sanctuary activists and collaborators brought refined community organizing skills, which they intentionally employed to expand solidarity and sanctuary coalitions across Northern America. This paper explores some of the ways in which displaced Central American human rights workers moved within this international, interreligious context to further their goals. In a religious environment steeped in long histories of racialized missionary intervention and human exploitation, Guatemalans and Salvadorans asserted a different vision of sanctuary not only concerned with personal safety, but also with the opportunity to educate the U.S. public while they transformed the practice of sanctuary from the inside out. Harnessing the resources of their own cultural and religious histories and experiences, Central American human rights workers gained access to certain critical segments of the human, social, and political capital of the Philadelphia region to advance the cause of their collective survival and flourishing.