In Sanctuary , Cruz Medina presents a powerful counterstory to dominant narratives surrounding Latin American and Global South im/migration by bringing attention to the displacement of Indigenous Guatemalan Maya people who seek refuge in the United States. These migrants have exchanged gang and narcotrafficker violence for the dehumanizing and exclusionary rhetoric of US political leaders, militarized immigration enforcement, false promises of empowerment through literacy, and further displacement from gentrification. Medina combines decolonial critical race theory with autoethnography to examine white supremacist policies that impact US and transnational Indigenous populations who have been displaced by neocolonial projects of capitalism. Taking a Northern California community of migrants from Guatemala as a case study, Medina demonstrates the ways in which immigration policy and educational barriers exclude Indigenous migrant populations. He follows the community at the “Sanctuary”―a Spanish-speaking church in the East Bay Area that serves as a place of worship, English language instruction, and refuge for migrants. Medina assembles participant observations, interviews, surveys, and other data to provide points of entry into intersecting issues of immigration, violence, language, and property and to untangle aspects of citizenship, exclusion, and assumptions about literacy. “ Sanctuary is a piece of vital scholarship that teaches us how to maintain analytic focus at varying levels of the social scale to address the dangerous colonial nexus of power, while simultaneously introducing us to real people with real names and faces to whom we are fundamentally connected.” ―Christina Cedillo, cofounder of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics “ Sanctuary is rhetorically engaging, emotionally honest, and intellectually accessible. Medina resists reducing complex findings to academically overdetermined and theoretically overwrought explanations. His rich description and grounded analysis open up new insights into questions about geopolitical sanctuary and spiritual sovereignty while humanizing both the author and the stakeholders.” ―Michelle Hall Kells, author of Vicente Ximenes, LBJ’s Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric “Cruz Medina’s Sanctuary is an expert uptake of storytelling and counterstorytelling. This work is a needed contribution to Central American rhetorics theorizing from lived reality that answers important calls by scholars such as Maritza E. Cárdenas and Joanna E. Sanchez-Avila for more content by, for, and about Central Americans.” ―Aja Y. Martinez, author of Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory “ Sanctuary ...offers a compelling examination of the multifaceted challenges faced by Indigenous Guatemalan Maya migrants in Northern California and beyond. It is a poignant and necessary contribution to contemporary discussions on immigration, race, and decoloniality.” ―Kyle Boggs, Constellations “This book offers a complex and holistic analytical lens for parsing US complicity in neocolonial acts of violence and exclusion to complicate our understanding of a colonial matrix of power and to deepen our understanding of what is at stake in English language teaching in migrant contexts.” ―Katie Silvester, Composition Studies “Recommended. General readers, advanced undergraduates through faculty, and professionals.” —N. M. B. Kraus,  CHOICE Cruz Medina is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Santa Clara University and faculty at Bread Loaf School of English. He is the author of Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examining the Rhetoric of Cultural Deficiency and coeditor of Racial Shorthand: Coded Discrimination Contested in Social Media. This book is about the intersection of citizenship, violence, language, and property affecting migrants from Central America, aspects widely overlooked in the United States. As an examination of exclusionary rhetoric and policy in the US, this book takes us to Christa Olson’s call that “rhetoricians working in the United States ought not only look southward when we invoke American rhetorical history but also re-examine U.S. domestic rhetorics with an eye toward Latin America.” In my analysis of antimigrant policy in California affecting Central Americans in the US, I highlight the culpability of the US government’s interests in causing many to migrate north. But I also ask how the abuse of the visa system by companies in Silicon Valley reinforces categories of “good” and “bad” immigrants. This work builds on those works by rhetoric of immigration scholars who “have found that the meaning-making practices of immigrants can call into question issues of exclusion, including racialized hierarchies of citizenship and the criminalization of immigration.” These US interests contribute to and, in many cases, leave no other option than for migrants to risk their lives by making the journey to the US for an Ameri