Second: My book has been out in the world for a little over a month. Thanks for all your support. For a few days at the end of March, Amazon listed it as the #1 bestselling new book for their immigration/emigration category.

If you have the time and are so inclined, my publisher tells me that ratings and reviews on Amazon are helpful for the book-selling algorithm.

If you’re still on the fence about buying a copy, I wrote a couple of short pieces relating themes of the book to the current moment:

“Churches and Immigration” (Faith and Leadership)

“Sanctuary Politics” (UK-based Premier Christianity)

I’ve also been making the rounds on podcasts. I can’t bear to listen to my own voice so I can’t really tell you if they’re any good, but at least they’ll help you get a sense for what’s going in my book. So far, the podcasts below have posted their interviews (with others in the pipeline):

~ Shifting Cultures

~ Faithful Politics

~ The Current

~ Truth, Trauma, Theology

~ Freedom Road

As I wrote last month in The Christian Century, we’re living through hellish times. We have no guarantees about the political form that of our civic life will take over the course of the next few years. We will have to work together for what we care about, for the people we care about—for neighbors who’ve become part of our lives, for the wholeness and health of our society.

I can’t say with any confidence what these months will have in store in terms of anti-immigrant policies and enforcement operations. But I do know this: there are churches where documented and undocumented people have joined their lives through Christ to one another, and that union has become a blessing too good to give up without a struggle.

While listening to his renewed threats against undocumented neighbors and queer people and the environment (and the Gulf of Mexico?), I heard a knock at the door. A delivery worker left a package on the porch. With Trump’s inaugural speech in my ears, I cut open the padded envelop and found this:

When I finished writing the book in early 2023, I don’t think I thought—with any seriousness—we’d be here again, with Trump in the White House and his tirades against people I care about, his damage of a world I care about.

My book is mostly storytelling, and some theology. I introduce readers to people I’ve found inspiring in their work for immigrant justice. I also attend to the suffering that our anti-immigrant politics have caused—from deaths in the borderlands to the incarceration of migrants.

Here’s a description of the book from the publisher:

Centering the stories of migrants and citizens who have been transformed through their dedication to the work of collective wholeness, Villegas begins each chapter “on the ground” as people organize protests in the streets, offer hospitality in migrant shelters, and share meals in home kitchens. He engages in biblical, theological, and political reflection to elucidate the significance—for our faith and our world—of these sites of collective work. Migrant God is a stirring read for anyone who wants to shift conversations about immigration toward a more holistic Christian vision of life lived in solidarity with migrants.

If you’re interested, here’s a link to pre-order the book: Migrant God.

Every week Alvaro Enciso journeys into the Sonoran Desert along the U.S. border with Mexico to plant crosses in honor the lives of people who’ve died while crossing. This is his spiritual discipline, he told me. I wrote about the day I joined him and his crosses in the borderlands. If you’re interested in his work as a spritual artists, my article about him is the cover story for the Christian Century magazine this month.

Here’s a link to the online version of the piece: "A Liturgy in the Borderlands.”

This is Miguel, the chef of Casa del Migrante in Tijuana, Mexico. He lives the commitment written on his apron. Feed Everyone.

I wrote about my experience this past summer in the kitchen for The Christian Century magazine. Follow this link for the piece: “In Miguel’s Kitchen.”

At 7:30am I pull into the BorderLinks parking lot in South Tucson, the meetup spot for Alvaro Enciso’s weekly pilgrimage into the borderlands with his crosses. We load the two Samaritan SUVs with jugs of water, then the eight of us pile in and head down Interstate 19 toward the border. Our caravan takes an exit west somewhere before Nogales—still twenty miles from the border. As we drive into the desolate landscape, a makeshift checkpoint appears around a bend. A federal agent stops us, plods around our vehicles while peering through the windows, then asks each of us if we’re citizens. We’re twenty miles from the border, which is within what’s known as “the constitution-free zone” where the Border Patrol has been granted authorization to conduct searches and seizures, despite the protections of the Fourth Amendment. (See the 1976 Supreme Court decision, United States v. Martinez-Fuerte.)

With the checkpoint far behind us, we turn onto a dirt road that first runs along the property lines of cattle ranches, then cuts into a wilderness of mesquite groves and washes. The route takes us up and down hills carved with gullies from season after season of monsoon downpours. The speedometer hovers at 10 miles per hour for most of our bumpy journey deeper into the hinterlands of the Sonoran desert, somewhere between Arivaca and Amado. Our guide is a handheld Garmin GPSMAP navigation device. We’re on our way to where the remains of Lucio Sanchez-Zepeda were found. An organization called Humane Borders, in partnership with the medical examiner’s office, hosts an online database that tracks deceased migrants. The website provides GPS coordinates for the spot where human remains were recovered; God only knows how many haven’t been noticed, those who remain undocumented even after death.

We pull over into a clearing and unload our supplies: a bag of cement, jugs of water, a shovel, and a cross. The next stage is on foot. Our single file line snakes around creosote bushes and palo verde trees. With the GPS device in her hand, the person at the front of our group leads us to the place where Lucio Sanchez-Zepeda’s remains were found a decade ago. The entry in the database notes that he most likely died of hypothermia.

We circle around the spot. One person digs, another pours the cement, then the water. Alvaro pushes his cross down into the hole, takes several steps back, pauses to look, then nods to the rest of us. We gather stones and place them at the foot of the cross. “When you add a rock you honor his memory,” Alvaro tells me. “You add your humanity to this place, something of your self to this memorial.”

On the long drive back to Tucson, Alvaro tells me that he’s installed over a thousand crosses in these borderlands. He assembles them in his studio at home, he explains, each one a piece of art made with items found near other death sites in the desert. “I use what people have had to leave behind, what they’ve dropped while on the run further north.” Photos from a wallet, metal from cans, canvas from backpacks, glass from bottles, rubber from a shoe. “Each of those objects marks part of someone’s story, artifacts from a plot we’ll never know,” he says. “I include these fragments as a form of acknowledgment, of reverence, to honor them, for material from their lives to become relics on a cross.“

He informs me that the database includes 3,600 deaths. “At this rate, four crosses per week, I’ll finish this work when I turn 127,” he shrugs. “But that doesn’t even include the fact that more people die out here every week, every month, every year—227 migrant deaths on the official record for 2020.” He stares out the widow for a while. “Let’s just find a way to stop letting people die out here.”

In the border town of Douglas, Arizona, in the McDonald’s parking lot along the Pan American Avenue, I meet up with people from an organization called Healing Our Borders. Every Tuesday evening for the past twenty years this group has been hosting a vigil to remember migrants who’ve died in the desert. The first gathering happened on December 10, 2000, as a community response to the growing number of corpses found in remote regions of Sulphur Springs Valley, where the twin cities of Agua Prieta and Douglas are located, a community divided by a massive border wall of steel slats.

The vigil usually draws twenty to thirty people—residents of the town, neighbors from Mexico who cross the border for the service, and immigrant justice pilgrims from elsewhere. Due to pandemic safety protocols, this time there are only four of us.

We begin our procession at dusk. One of the organizers takes out his iPhone, opens up his Zoom app, and welcomes the online participants—almost a hundred people log on, a diaspora from across the continent. I offer to push the shopping cart with the crosses, a third of the 317 that the community has—each cross painted with a name of someone whose corpse was found in this part of the Sonoran desert. Many of the crosses have the words “no identificado” or “no identificada” to represent human remains that were unidentifiable.

We walk in a single file line down the sidewalk toward the border crossing station, the Raul Hector Castro port of entry. The person at the front of our procession reads out the name written on the cross as she lifts it above her head. We respond in unison, with a shout. “Presente!” She then bends her body toward the ground to place the base of the crucifix in the street, at the edge of the pavement, leaning it upright against the curb, on display for the passengers of cars on their way to and from Mexico. After this bowed reverence, she steps out of the way and walks slowly to the back of our procession, awaiting her next turn. The second person in line, now at the front, calls out another name and places one more cross several yards further down the sidewalk.

We process like a dirge, our crosses as memorials, the avenue hallowed with our lament—remembrances for the the named and unnamed people lost to the wilderness, victims of U.S. border enforcement and immigration policy.

We veer from the walkway into a clearing before the kiosks where U.S. officers check identity documents to determine who may pass legally across the border. Our group forms a circle for the closing ritual. A person takes three crosses from the shopping cart. He steps into the center and reads aloud the name from one of them. All of us respond, “Presente!” He calls out the next name. We reply, “Presente!” The last of the three doesn’t have a name, only the word “no identificado.” He lifts the crucifix and shouts into the night, “Jesucristo!”—four times, facing East then North then West then South, bearing witness to the corners of the earth. And each time we answer, “Presente!”

After the ritual we link hands and silence ourselves in honor of the dead. In the middle, on the ground, the three crosses declare the area as another Golgotha, with the militarized border as the crucifer.

"Si Aritoteles hubiera guisado, mucho mas hubiera escrito." ~ Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, 17th century

I’m up at 5am—just me and the neighborhood roosters. My morning responsibilities at La Casa del Migrante in Tijuana include the essential task of making sure the coffee is warm before the shelter’s residents who work throughout the city rush to catch their buses.

I unlock the kitchen and flip on the lights. The cauldron rests on the gas burner. I had already mixed the instant granules into water and brewed the coffee the night before. Enough for the fifty adults in the compound, as well as the dozens of people from the streets who wait at the gate for breakfast—cafe y pan.

While the cauldron warms, I set out bread and cereal for the morning, then I pull yesterday’s leftovers from the walk-in refrigerator and start scooping food into containers for the residents to take with them for lunch at work. Soon other volunteers make their way down to the kitchen in time for the steady stream of residents—first the people who depart early for jobs, then everyone else a couple hours later: parents with children and adults without work. They linger after breakfast in the open-air courtyard until 9am when the staff gather the kids for a educational activities while the adults begin their community chores.

I stick around to help Miguel, the chef, with the prep work for dinner. He instructs me in the art of making aroz y frijoles for a hundred while he also darts around the kitchen, methodologically enacting the ingenious dinner plan he had devised for two turkeys the shelter received the day before, turning donated items into delicacies. “I try to make food they can’t afford,” he explains, “because everyone should get a chance to experience the delight of food.”

The morning shift, which began before daybreak, ends at 2pm. In the shower I wash away the layers of cooking grease then rest for a while in the volunteer lounge on the fourth floor. Soon, later in the afternoon, I hear the bustle of life from below and return to the ground floor, to the courtyard. I join a longterm volunteer—Anny from Costa Rica—as she serves anyone around a bowl of jicama con tajin, a pre-dinner snack. In the kitchen new arrivals to the shelter make Salvadoran guacamole which, to the surprise of Anny and me, includes hard-boiled eggs. A woman from Sinaloa, Mexico, rolls out her masa for tortillas—de harina, hecho a mano—and passes them to her son who fries them on la plancha. Later she squeezes a lime and sprinkles salt on the warm tortilla in my hand, and she tells me that she fled her home a couple weeks ago after the cartel had tried to recruit her sixteen-year-old son. “Pastor, ¿podrías orar por mí?” She has a sister in Fresno, California.

Life at La Casa revolves around the kitchen—from before dawn until after bedtime. Someone’s always there preparing for the next meal or cleaning up after the last. Around the stove, food and stories pass from person to person. I fall asleep full.

Miguel gently scatters chunks of red onion into the shimmering oil. I stir them with a wooden spoon the size of an oar as the onions blister, then blacken. “Para darle sabor,” Miguel explains as he fishes the onions out of the massive pot and sets them aside for another dish.

He dumps a bucket of rice into the pot. The grains crackle in the oil. “The rice needs to brown but can’t stick to the bottom,” Miguel says as he shows me how to stir. I get the spoon stuck, then work it free with a bang against the metal rim—all while the rice clumps and clings and almost burns. Miguel demonstrates the technique again, the rhythm of how to push and pull the rice in an unbroken movement, a dance with the rice around pot.

I lose track of time as I focus on the rice and trip over my feet. Ten minutes go by, twenty minutes—at some point Miguel sneaks over and pours in a bucket of caldo, leftover water from the chicken he had boiled. As the rice simmers he adds the contents of another bucket, this one filled with the tomatoes and onions and garlic he had asked me to liquify in the blender earlier. Then he sprinkles into the pot a handful of salt in two perpendicular lines. An outline of a crucifix floats for a moment, like a blessing, before dissolving into the mixture. I wonder if I’m also supposed to cross myself, en el nombre del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo, because this work feels like a prayer.

There, in Miguel’s kitchen, with the both of us gathered around una olla de arroz, a scene about Heraclitus flashes into my mind. When pilgrims search for the great philosopher of Ancient Greece, the visitors find him in the kitchen near the stove. “Come in,” Heraclitus invites them, “for there are gods here, too.”

After everyone in the shelter had enough to eat, with the dishes cleaned and the floors mopped, Miguel hands me a beer and I ask him what’s his favorite food to make. “Rice and beans, arroz y frijoles,” he answers without a second thought, “porque nunca van a faltar.” This kitchen comes with a huge responsibility, he explains, because so many people depend on us for their food. “We cook to sustain the gift of life, as strength for the journey,” he says, “cocinando como una bendición para los que tienen que cruzar.”

His 3,000-mile trek began with a bus ride from his village in Honduras to the coastal town of Puerto Cortés, just south of the Guatemalan border. There he joined a group headed to the U.S. They crammed into a small boat which took them to a remote landing in Chiapas, Mexico, as a detour around Guatemala, then through jungles and across mountain ranges, in buses and on foot, all the way to the Arizona border. All the way to the outskirts of Phoenix, almost to the house of a cousin who had crossed years ago, almost to a job that would pay for a coyote to bring his wife and daughter. Almost.

He gently pulled a picture out from his wallet. “That’s my daughter,” he said. “She’s eight.” I felt like I was intruding on a private moment as he smiled at her smile. “My country is no place to raise a daughter now.” He told me that he planned on resting at the shelter long enough for his body to recover, for his feet to heal. Then he’d try to cross again. He slid the picture into a plastic sleeve, then back into his wallet.

We finished organizing the bedding supplies for whoever might arrive that night—another U.S. Border Patrol bus with people taken into custody from across the 372 miles of Arizona borderland.