Devotional Arts on the Border

Liturgy of the Streets

I still have residual PTSD and probably always will from two decades ago, when Border Patrol invaded my town south of Tucson. With its foul checkpoint and paramilitary-style occupation, it was a training ground for such a world as this. What I experienced there, especially the cruelty I witnessed firsthand, lies just under my skin. Like a child of war, I startle at the slightest sound or sudden movement, and bright lights terrorize me. For countless families locked in detention facilities, PTSD is a daily reality, a nightmare without cease.

It was just this past winter that the world watched Empire’s henchmen invade Minneapolis, break car windows, drag, beat, murder people, and then lie about it. Straight-up lie. No, you did not just see us killing people with your own eyes. Like in my neighborhood long ago, paramilitary thugs acted with utter impunity.

When I saw videos of citizens gathering by the hundreds in below-freezing weather on the streets of Minneapolis, to sing to their neighbors locked inside: “Hold on, hold on, my dear ones, here comes the dawn…” I wept. I played Instagram reels of the singers over and over, and each time, great, bittersweet tears washed over my face like rain, melting the stone in my chest.

“Singing Resistance,” the healing grassroots phenomenon born in the snowy streets of Minneapolis, was medicine we needed then and now. The group’s songs for and about community have spread across the U.S. The local Tucson chapter of Singing Resistance leads us in song at monthly vigils organized by the Good Neighbor Interfaith Coalition (GNIC) as we hold space for our neighbors kidnapped in the streets, in stores, at court, and in their homes in the old Pueblo.

Good Neighbor Interfaith Vigil, May, 2026

On a day-to-day basis, most people in Tucson are not aware that masked officers in unmarked cars stalk our neighborhoods. Hundreds of encounters and multiple kidnappings have been reported in the first half of 2026. We fear that this is only the beginning.

At the June GNIC Vigil, in the blazing sun, students, elders, and clerics gathered on the West side of town outside of a restaurant where 49 people were taken in a raid. As a group, we prayed in silence that felt thick with their absence. Together, we chanted the time-honored Presente. Here, in Tucson, in the vast Sonoran Desert so many have died crossing, paying with their lives for the opportunity to be in the U.S., we never forget.

How do we now, as allies, stand up for our neighbors over the long haul? How do we sustain our own moral hearts and souls?

When I decided to go on retreat to a monastery earlier this year, I had reached a point of overwhelm. Like so many of us, I felt assaulted by the cruelty porn playing out non-stop on screens. My daily contemplative practice, a long-time saving grace, felt distant and unattainable. At random times in the day, I caught myself holding my breath.

The first few days on a silent retreat with no Internet onsite, my tangled thoughts felt like yarn wrapped too tightly around a spindle. I took long walks in the foothills surrounding the high desert monastery, redolent with the scent of juniper and pine. At the gloaming of the day, I joined the Sisters to chant the Liturgy of the Hours. Slowly, the world’s grip on my soul began to soften.

As each day faded into night, the Sisters’ voices, sweet and mournful in equal measure, ushered in a palpable sense of peace and safety. The Sisters singing the Psalms in an ancient call-and-response felt the same as community using song to reassure their frightened neighbors.

During GNIC vigils, we harmonize in collective devotion. We attune to each other’s voices and into agape, the lifting up of our neighbor’s dignity as our own. Resistance as a leaning into Reverence. Reverence: a most powerful antidote to the politics of inhumanity. Reverence ultimately trumps Evil.

GNIC June Vigil

One of the books I read during my monastery retreat was How to be Brave, by Marian Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., who is famous for standing up to President Trump in 2025 and calling on him to show mercy to immigrants. In the book, Budde writes about the necessity of spiritual retreat. Her soft-spoken, steady manner, the Marion way she speaks truth to power, helps steady my resolve. Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, and many others, an ancestral cloud of witnesses, have prepared the way for this era’s non-violent civil disobedience.

At the vigil, the crowd is quiet and thoughtful as we wrap handmade crepe paper flowers around a light pole. Las flores están presentes, but our community members are not. The simple makeshift ofrenda is an ache of beauty.

We close with the lead voices of Singing Resistance singing us out. Just as gospel and folk music have sustained the Civil Rights movement, and liturgy amplifies the ongoing struggle for the soul of humanity, Good Neighbor Vigils transmute our collective heartbreak, revive our spirits, and restore an unbreakable chain of truth and remembrance that cannot be disappeared.

To learn more about GNIC’s monthly Vigils and how to use the Tucson Migra Map – como usar el mapa de la Migra de Tucson to find the spots where people have been taken (private property excepted), to host your own neighborhood vigil, email goodneighbortucson@gmail.com . Find Tucson’s Singing Resistance on Instagram.

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