A Liturgy in the Borderlands
For the Christian Century, Isaac S. Villegas reports that a man named Alvaro Enciso creates and plants crosses at the death sites of migrants who perished shortly after they crossed the southern U.S. border. Enciso, himself a Colombian immigrant, conducts the ritual to memorialize and honor those who would otherwise be forgotten in the deserts of the Southwest. Villegas writes, “Alvaro’s liturgies in the borderlands are prayers, prophecies for a polity that doesn’t require the blood sacrifice of migrants. Every crucifix planted in the wilderness is an act of devotion to a stranger who should have been our neighbor.”