Description:

Please join the Global Religion and Politics Research Group as they host Barbara Sostaita (UIC)

Barbara Andrea Sostaita is a formerly undocumented writer and scholar of migration and religion. She grew up in the US South, the daughter of a baker and evangelical minister—learning from a young age the importance of ritual in the lives of migrants. Her work traces sacred mobilities and fugitive routes that yearn for, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes, “connection in the face of utter disconnection.” Currently, Sostaita is an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she teaches courses on Latinx religions, transnational migration, and undocumented-led social movements.

Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert, documents moments of care and intimacy on the migrant trail. Her collaborators include migrants melting the border’s steel bars through curative touch, artists summoning the migrant dead, and activists leaving water in the Sonoran Desert—in defiance of prevention through deterrence, in celebration of life that exceeds walls and bans. The book also traces her own journey to becoming an American citizen. She is also at work on her second book, An Infinity of Traces, a collection of essays on my father's conversion to Christianity, his work ministering to undocumented people in the rural south, and the reasons her family left Argentina.

Professor Sostaita's writing has appeared in The Nation, Bitch, Teen Vogue, and Remezcla among others. When she is not writing or teaching, Sostaita serve as the Higher Education Director for Migrant Roots Media—a platform that centers the voices of migrants, children of migrants, and people struggling to stay and thrive in their homelands.