Fourteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

As migratory routes become increasingly dangerous, successfully overcoming militarized border regimes, and arriving to one’s desired destination, requires as much physical endurance as spiritual strength. In this essay, I reflect on clandestine migration from Brazil to the USA drawing on migrant’s oral histories of faith. In the United States barriers to migration and anti-immigrant policies have a long history of racial and political discrimination. Criminalizing and policing migrants as dangerous and undesirable subjects, rest on claims of protecting, securing, and enhancing the rights of those who are construed as “natural” citizens despite being themselves descendants of migrants. In the present climate of labor disposability and political vulnerability, migrant’s rights— including the universal human right to mobility— are undermined as Europe and North America enhance border militarization determining who should be allowed to perish before reaching the country of destination. In contrast with anti-migration nationalism, religious institutions have been offering alternative narratives that legitimate human global mobility. Here, I intertwine spirituality and migration in an attempt to interrogate—how undocumented Brazilian migrants use religion to redeem themselves from the criminalization of clandestine border crossing and alter their entrance into a state of illegality and marginality. Unlike national ideologies, religion and spirituality liberate subjects from state-enforced borders. As such, migration becomes part of a larger prophecy prolonged from biblical times to the present, where God—as opposed to the migration police or the state —becomes the main arbitrator of history and human mobility.