In early 2024, events at the U.S.–Mexico border once again made national news when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the El Paso-based Catholic organization, Annunciation House, accusing it of human trafficking. Paxton’s lawsuit shocked many in the region. Historically, faith organizations like Annunciation House have provided crucial assistance (from food to medical care, shelter to legal services) when state and federal officials are unable to meet migrant needs at the border. Insisting that Annunciation had illegally harbored unauthorized migrants as part of a “criminal enterprise,” Paxton demanded that its directors turn over internal records. They refused. The previous year, more than 2.5 million migrants encountered the U.S.–Mexico border, overwhelming government resources. Annunciation aided tens of thousands of them, most of whom were Central and South American women and children brought to the organization by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or the United States Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) after processing. This arrangement between Annunciation, ICE, and the CBP is not new. Nor is Annunciation a recent arrival to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Indeed, Annunciation has partnered with government officials in the borderlands for nearly fifty years.Footnote ¹

Its work began in the 1970s, when a handful of Catholic lay members “answered a spiritual call to provide shelter and hospitality to refugees,” here guided by the Gospel of Matthew: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.”Footnote ² Annunciation’s prophetic vision is part of a century-long tradition of faith organizations cooperating with government officials by providing material and legal resources to migrants in the borderlands. Despite faith organizations’ impact on migrants, border politics, and immigration policy, this history remains largely absent from our collective understandings of the modern United States. Such a knowledge vacuum seems impossible during a day and age when headlines about immigration enforcement raids, so-called “invasions” at the border, and the impact of faith leaders on U.S. national politics dominate news cycles. Yet U.S. historians’ incorporation of borderlands, immigration, or Latinx history into common narratives of the modern United States, to say nothing of religion’s role in these histories, remains patchwork at best.

Such a problem is not unique to these subfields of U.S. history. When Jon Butler observed in 2004 that historians had failed to incorporate the history of religion into mainstream narratives of American history, he might well have been speaking to historians in nearly every subfield. Not only had religion remained stubbornly on the fringes of mainstream historical narratives, he argued, it also failed to inform narratives generated by specialists in their particular corners of the profession. When it did appear, it appeared only in brief episodes. This was only part of the story. Just as many historians had not engaged religion in their post-1870s studies of the United States, so too had historians of religion overwhelmingly disregarded the work of scholars in subfields like immigration, borderlands, or Latinx history.Footnote ³

There are, of course, notable exceptions that predate or coincide with Butler’s article—historians of religion who meaningfully engaged a breadth of scholarship across fields, and historians outside of religion who used religion to understand their communities of study. Robert Orsi’s Thank You St. Jude traced devotion to St. Jude by Catholic immigrant women during the early decades of the twentieth century. Thomas Tweed’s Our Lady of the Exile used the shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami to reveal the potency of religion in the Cuban diaspora. Catholic Studies scholar Jay P. Dolan authored books that painted the Catholic Church across the entirety of U.S. history as an immigrant church. George Sánchez’s Becoming Mexican American showed how religion shaped Mexican American identity, politics, and community formation in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles. Vicki Ruiz’s canonical From Out of the Shadows highlighted religion in women’s lives, and particularly the role of the Catholic Church as an organizing space—this despite its complicity in colonization and patriarchy. In essence, some scholars of immigration, borderlands, and Latinx history were using religion as an analytical lens prior to 2004, and some religion experts were engaging immigration, Latinx, and borderlands history.Footnote ⁴

Studies of religion in these subfields have only increased since 2004. What scholars of immigration, Latinx, and borderlands history have found constant, however, is that their work remains largely absent from wider narratives of U.S. history. There are several possible reasons for this, but some reticence can surely be attributed to U.S. historians’ continued discomfort at imagining religious institutions as serious political actors. These historians display a similar reluctance to see churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques as sites central to the faithful for housing material rather than just spiritual resources. Such material resources have played an extraordinary role in the history of migration into and throughout the United States. They also provided organizing spaces for Latinx civil rights leaders, many of whom held no religious identity, in cities like San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York during the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, faith institutions have remade the U.S. political landscape. Nowhere is this truer than in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands where the exercising of state authority depends on the partnerships between state and nonstate actors.

Still, it would be too easy to say that the lack of attention to religion’s role in the history of immigration or borderlands or Latinx people is simply due to a failure to reimagine who or what counts as a political actor. A much larger piece of this puzzle has to do with historians of religion’s longstanding tendency to largely restrict the nation’s immigrant past to the story of white European migration. This comes in the face of decades of scholarship by immigration, borderlands, and Latinx historians who have demonstrated the extent to which the United States’ past must be understood in the context of a multiracial, transnational framework. Failing to do so reproduces exclusionary, ahistorical narratives of the modern United States.

What, then, is the role of religion in modern U.S. immigration, borderlands, or Latinx history? And by that same token, what do historians of the modern United States have to gain by paying more attention to the impact of faith in each of these contexts?

It is impossible in such a short essay to fully capture the developments in each of these subfields. There are, however, notable examples that illustrate how historians in each subfield have used religion to understand their respective historical actors. Recent books by Jane Hong, Maddalena Marinari, and Edward E. Curtis offer guidance for how historians of immigration and religion can create an intellectual dialogue that recasts benchmarks of modern U.S. history. Brendan Shannahan, Gráinne McEvoy, and Deborah Kanter have likewise demonstrated religion’s centrality to the making of twentieth-century U.S. immigration policy, the bilateral labor agreement known as the Bracero Program that spanned 1942–1965, and the formation of Latinx communities in the twentieth-century Midwest. Each of these historians has shown that religion is foundational to understanding U.S. immigration history, but Hong’s and Marinari’s scholarship is particularly illustrative in terms of thinking about how paying attention to religion and immigration can change historians’ knowledge about the modern United States.Footnote ⁵

Hong’s Opening the Gates to Asia offers a transnational account of Asian exclusion and its repeal from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Hong shows that the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, and the later decrease in Asian exclusion, relied on an unusual coalition commonly referred to as the China Lobby. Led by individuals such as Minnesota Representative Walter Judd (R-MN) and publisher Henry Luce, many members of the China Lobby used their experiences as Protestant missionaries (or as children of missionaries) in China to advocate for an end to Chinese, and later Asian exclusion. The repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act marked a new beginning in the United States’ global presence, but the role of religion in this scenario is still poorly understood.Footnote ⁶

Similarly, Marinari’s study of U.S. immigration restriction from the 1880s to 1960s demonstrates how people of faith on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean resisted and reshaped such U.S. immigration policies as the 1924 Quota Act and 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. It should not come as a surprise that faith organizations protested the 1924 immigration law, which historians of the United States agree targeted Jewish and Catholic immigrants from “less desirable” European nations. Yet Marinari’s book is the first to fully demonstrate the extent to which common narratives of this period in U.S. history have overlooked the role of religion. In that same way, the contours of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act depended partly on Nevada Senator Patrick McCarran’s combination of conservative Catholicism and antisemitism. The conflict between McCarran, the American Jewish Committee, and the National Catholic Welfare Conference helps to explain how and why this landmark piece of Cold War legislation failed to address the race-based quota system used to exclude “less desirable” immigrants, provided the infrastructure to militarize the U.S.–Mexico border, and simultaneously endorsed a permanent end to Asian exclusion. The resulting legislation, then, was one that enshrined U.S. Cold War values of containment and heteronormativity but also contained glimpses of what a post-exclusionary legal landscape might look like.

Historians like Hong and Marinari are not marginal to the profession, but rather highly visible and active within the guild’s most prominent associations. Each has published in high-profile journals, and in 2022, Marinari co-edited a special issue of the Journal of American History. Yet it is also fair to suggest that their critical contributions to immigration history have not yet been fully appreciated in the broader parameters of modern U.S. history.

A similar problem persists in borderlands history. Since 2004, borderlands historians have increasingly turned to religious-based archives to better understand both the creation of U.S. immigration policies and historical events located far beyond national seats of power. For example, in her 2017 book, The INS on the Line, S. Deborah Kang shows how U.S. immigration agencies in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands implemented many of the nation’s most important immigration policies in the first half of the twentieth century. While Kang’s work utilizes federal and university archives to trace the explosive growth of the regulatory state, it also relies on the records of faith organizations that acted as partners with government in enforcing immigration restriction. Like Hong and Marinari, Kang enjoys renown in the profession; in 2025, the Organization of American Historians awarded her its inaugural Award for Contributions to Public Policy for her “extensive efforts to make immigration policy more humane and equitable.”Footnote ⁷

Drawing attention to the political actions of faith organizations can change how we think about U.S. immigration policy as well as U.S.–Mexico relations in the post-1840s period. Studies like Julia Young’s Mexican Exodus place religious politics and U.S. diplomacy at the center of Mexico’s civil war of religion (the Cristero War) in the 1920s. In Young’s recounting, U.S.-based Catholic leaders not only tried to sway President Calvin Coolidge’s administration to enter the war, but also used moral suasion to ignite support for Catholic rebels across the Americas. Using the press and nearly weekly meetings with members of the U.S. State Department, Catholic leaders deployed a well-worn trope of the United States as a haven for religious freedom to argue that the U.S. federal government had an obligation to intervene when people of faith faced state-sponsored persecution in the Americas. When Coolidge and, subsequently, President Herbert Hoover proved unsympathetic to these arguments, U.S. Catholics unabashedly (and illegally) smuggled arms, supplies, and religious refugees between the United States and Mexico, igniting diplomatic tensions between the two nations. By integrating religion, politics, and borderlands histories, Young recasts the Cristero War as an international conflict with competing religious political motivations. Young is not alone. Anne Martínez’s Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire, 1905–1935 blends borderlands, Latinx, and religious history to show how, in the early twentieth century, Catholic leaders like Rev. Francis Kelley helped drive U.S. dreams of imperialism in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Mexico. These studies offer ideas for how examining religion in the borderlands can expand narratives of the modern United States.Footnote ⁸

Recent scholarship in U.S. Latinx history provides additional clues for how historians of immigration, borderlands, Latinx communities, and religion might rethink their relationship with one another, and what that portends for U.S. history broadly. When my colleagues Felipe Hinojosa, Sergio González, and I sat down to plan what became an edited volume, Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945, we deliberately envisioned contributions from historians outside of religious history who had come to see religion as essential for understanding not just Latinx history, but post-World War II U.S. history more generally. Each of the contributors, few of whom would identify as a historian of religion, found that they could not tell their respective histories absent religion. So it is that religion became essential for understanding the domestic policy decisions of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in World War II, Mormonism held clues to help explain Arizona’s post-WWII racial politics, religion and faith became drivers of social change for Latinx activists involved in civil rights movements, and the appointment of faith leaders to presidential commissions in the 1970s set the parameters of late twentieth-century U.S. immigration and refugee policy.Footnote ⁹

In essence, what I mean to suggest in this essay is that the jack-in-the-box religion problem that Butler astutely noted plagued modern U.S. history circa 2004 can and should be applied to numerous subfields. Instead of only asking when historians of the modern United States will sit up and take note of religion, we might also ask: Why have religious historians failed to take note of those who write outside of their subfield? When will historians of religion or the modern United States begin to pay attention to the border or to migrants or to Latinx people more broadly? In short, why should historians of Latinx people, immigration, or borderlands engage Butler’s charge so long as historians of religion and the modern United States continue to ignore Latinx, immigration, and borderlands history?

Historians cannot and should not be experts on every topic—but there are ways that we can meaningfully incorporate our colleagues’ research into our own scholarship and teaching, allowing us to craft mainstream narratives of U.S. history that are more inclusive and representative of historical experiences. Doing so requires that we reimagine major benchmarks in history, bring seemingly disparate bodies of literature together, and treat religious-based archives with the same seriousness as those administered by the universities, the federal government, and counties across the continent.

What happens, for instance, if we tell the history of the United States’ involvement in World War II through the experiences of Black G.I.s or Latino G.I.s, as Vicki Ruiz suggested in her 2006 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians? This history, well known to African American and Latinx historians, reveals both the United States’ long-standing and existential struggle with the meaning of inclusion as well as historians’ discomfort with framing race beyond a Black-white binary. Yet unveiling this history requires bringing together multiple subfields, including Latinx history, U.S. diplomatic history, and modern U.S. political history. Re-narrating this benchmark in U.S. history offers historians a model for understanding different institutions, historical actors, and geographical spaces as change makers or sites of historical importance. If we add religion to this story of World War II, for example, then we see how religious ideas about human dignity shaped the federal government’s first efforts to end race-based employment discrimination and how those ideas shaped later, more successful federal initiatives.Footnote ¹⁰

Uniting seemingly disparate bodies of literature in this way ignites new questions that challenge conventional historical narratives that exclude minoritized communities and ignore the undercurrents of religion in American life, but it offers other possibilities as well. Asking new questions can lead historians to new or less used archives. Consider, for instance, Lizbeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal, a canonical study of the New Deal in Chicago. Cohen shows how social service agencies with religious affiliations became recipients of federal funds and partners in administering New Deal programs. By using documents held by the Archdiocese of Chicago alongside federal and municipal records, Cohen definitively demonstrates the extent to which the New Deal relied on a form of collaborative democracy that included faith leaders alongside second generation immigrants, merchants, and union leaders. Cohen’s work challenges us to consider the extent to which rapid state expansion relies on established associative partners, particularly during moments of economic crisis.Footnote ¹¹

Turning to religious-based archives, especially those located in the U.S. Southwest or northern Mexico, likewise offers historians a new set of resources to better understand the experiences of communities that did not always leave a strong archival imprint in national or university archives. For example, a real challenge that historians of the modern United States face is understanding how federal policies have impacted migrant communities in the post-1960s period. One issue here is historians’ limited access to federal records that document the history of laws and programs like the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act or the Amnesty Program. Turning to agencies that partnered with the federal government to implement these policies and programs offers historians a workaround to the limitations posed by federal archives.Footnote ¹²

Let me return briefly to the border and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s war against migrants and their supporters like Annunciation House. Religious organizations’ interest in U.S. immigration politics did not start in recent years, as Paxton suggests. Beginning in the early twentieth century, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish organizations protested restrictive immigration policies and contracted with federal immigration agencies to provide social and legal services to those entering the United States. In other words, when it comes to regulating the border, church–state partnerships are a long-standing American tradition.

In my own historical scholarship, I show that faith organizations have been vital partners to the United States’ efforts to control the border for more than a century. Migrants have consistently challenged these same faith organizations to defend their rights. In so doing, migrants have acted as agents of historical change, pushing faith leaders to assume policy stances that they might not otherwise take. For instance, during the Great Depression, when the United States expelled more than 500,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans to Mexico, Catholic social workers created a documentation process separate from that of the U.S. federal government, which did not consistently document the movement of Latinx people into and out of the United States. Maintaining a separate set of documents that recorded the movement of people across the border allowed faith agencies to create a mechanism whereby U.S. citizens could reclaim their birthright citizenship, which they did in increasing numbers beginning in the 1940s. When U.S. federal officials found that they lacked sufficient records to decipher border crossers’ immigration status, they instead relied on the records generated by faith groups. But faith leaders did not act of their own accord. It took the efforts of migrants, who demanded that faith leaders uphold their theological charge to “welcome the stranger in their midst,” to convince faith leaders to challenge federal laws and to create their documentary processes. Telling this story, which has profound implications for contemporary border politics and U.S. immigration reform, has only been possible by integrating multiple subfields of U.S. history (political, borderlands, immigration, religious, legal, Latinx), recasting major narratives of U.S. history through the experiences of Latinx migrants in the borderlands, and anchoring my research in religious-based archives alongside federal and university archives.

Religion matters. It has not just shaped the lived experiences of migrants and immigrants. Religion has reshaped the socio-political-legal landscape that migrants and immigrants have traversed when crossing the border. It has simultaneously served as a source of subjugation and sustenance for Latinx communities in their fights for self-determination. And it has reshaped the modern American political landscape. If immigration, Latinx, or borderlands historians want to understand how enforcement agencies like ICE or the Border Patrol came to partner with religious organizations, then they must take religion seriously. By that same token, if historians of religion want religion to be widely adopted as a lens of analysis, then they must incorporate the scholarship of their colleagues in fields like immigration, borderlands, and Latinx history.