For more than forty years the Sanctuary Movement has provided the basis for a historical narrative that bears comparison with the Underground Railroad of the 1840s and 1850s. While the religious motivations of nineteenth-century opponents of slavery have long been recognised, the part played by the Churches in protesting against the treatment of Central American refugees (and later of undocumented migrants) is less well attested. Mario García's biography of Luis Olivares, by contrast, offers an integrated picture of the religious substructure of the Sanctuary Movement, recording the life journey of one Mexican American priest from ‘company man’ to liberation theologian (albeit a practitioner rather than a theorist). This transition was partly inspired by his relationship with César Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers, whose Catholic faith was a guiding principle of his trade union activism (p. 164). It was in his relationship with Chavez, García argues, that Olivares rediscovered a Mexican American identity that he had been inclined to repress during his years of priestly formation. As Olivares himself put it: ‘In school they tell you [that Luis is] your Spanish name, your real name is Louis . . . But I was always Luis, I just used a different name for a while’ (p. 170). García thus provides an illuminating case history of the intersection of Chicano history and American Catholic history embodied in the life and ministry of Olivares. In compiling what even he concedes to be attenuated hagiography, it is striking that much of his ‘criticism’ focuses on his subject's ‘ego’. This is particularly noticeable in his discussion of Olivares's term as treasurer of his Claretian order, when he administered a multi-million-dollar stock portfolio and lived a lifestyle far removed from that which characterised his years as pastor of La Placita Church in Los Angeles. It was from La Placita that in 1985 Olivares formally declared its inauguration as a sanctuary parish, presenting a religiously inspired challenge to the federal government that would have resonated with William Lloyd Garrison a century earlier. The weightiness of this study (it runs to 500 pages) is not without its limitations. Relying heavily as he does on oral histories of family and associates to understand the man behind the clerical collar (little personal correspondence having survived), García frequently draws inferences about Olivares's theology and ministry which, though plausible, fall somewhat short of being definitive. For one desirous of celebrating Olivares's progressive credentials and his commitment to liberation theology's ‘preferential option for the poor’, moreover, he makes surprisingly little of aspects of Olivares’s theology that suggest an enduring commitment to traditional Catholicism, notably Olivares’s initial reluctance to receive an award from the American Civil Liberties Union for his work with refugees because of the ACLU's support for abortion (p. 372). Defence of the poor and the marginalised – the central plank of Olivares's ministry at La Placita – may consequently not have been predicated on the same values that informed the work of his liberal Protestant counterparts in the Sanctuary Movement.
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