For the Record: The American Friends Service Committee’s US-Mexico Border Program, Roberto Martinez, and the Fight against Militarization at the San Diego-Tijuana Border

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization, is important in the history of immigrant rights activism in San Diego because of their U.S.-Mexico Border Program’s documentation of human rights abuses against migrants and Latinx people committed by law enforcement. This paper particularly focuses on Roberto Martinez, an understudied local immigrant rights leader strongly mobilized by his Catholic faith who won international awards for his work as the director of the AFSC’s Border Program in San Diego (a position he held from 1982-2003). Martinez and the AFSC combined often secular methods of activism, such as organizing protests and testifying of abuses on a local and federal level, but also organized religious events at the San Diego-Tijuana Border in defiance of the state’s militarization of this space. Sometimes overt but oftentimes subtle, Martinez’s faith was influential and integrated into his work countering state violence and militarization.