Barbara Sostaita is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, where she is editing a manuscript titled Sanctuary Everywhere: Fugitive Care on the Migrant Trail. This book is an ethnographic experiment that traces practices of mutuality and intimacy in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands. She is a formerly undocumented alien, the daughter of a minister and baker—people committed to healing with their words and their hands. She is an abolitionist who agrees with Assata Shakur that, “If I know anything at all/ It’s that a wall is just a wall/ And nothing more at all/ It can be broken down.'”
Abolition is a process of imagining alternatives to the settler colonial, carceral present; it requires modes of kinship and care to replace prisons and policing.