I’m a white pastor in San Diego, and it’s easy for me to forget that what’s happening to immigrant communities is still happening. Marcos Canales doesn’t have that luxury. He’s the pastor of La Fuente Ministries, a bilingual congregation in Pasadena and Altadena that lived through the Eaton fire in January 2025 and, within weeks, a surge of ICE enforcement that Canales describes not as a culture of deportation but as an enforcement of terror. We talked about what that’s doing to his people and what the rest of us can do.
Fire, ICE, and Compounded Trauma
Marcos Canales grew up across Latin America, and he explained that for many first-generation immigrants today’s enforcement echoes the dictatorships and military violence they fled, and that their kids carry it too as intergenerational trauma. What surprised me was his insistence that none of this is unprecedented (the logic runs from the Chinese Exclusion Act back to Aristotle’s category of the barbarian), and that what’s different now is that it’s out in the open and happening with impunity.
A Theology of Suffering That Doesn’t Rush to Easter
Canales is suspicious of any theology that hurries people toward easy hope, and drawing on Gustavo Gutiérrez’s On Job, he argues that theology’s task isn’t to explain suffering but to help people keep talking to God while everything falls apart. At La Fuente that means workshops on loving God with your anger and fear, bilingual grief stations for adults and kids, and naming gratitude right alongside grief. And Marcos pointed me to the risen Jesus in John’s Gospel, who keeps showing his wounds, which made me wonder how many of us leaders are still hiding ours.
Solidarity Without Centering Yourself
I asked Marcos Canales what pastors like me can do without making it about ourselves, and he gave me four things: listen first and be honest about what you represent, shift your time toward real relationships with people living this, follow the lead of migrant organizers even when your name isn’t on anything, and if a Latino congregation shares your building, offer to build an emergency plan before they ask. And if you can’t move your whole church yet, he said, start with one family.
Discussion Questions
- Marcos Canales describes current immigration enforcement as “an enforcement of terror” rather than a culture of deportation. How does that language change the way you see what’s happening?
- Canales argues that the dehumanization of working-class Brown people isn’t new, only more visible. What in your own church’s history or community makes that claim easier or harder to accept?
- How does the idea of intergenerational trauma shape the way you think about pastoral care for immigrant families, including those born here?
- Marcos says theologies that rush people toward superficial hope are “more wounding.” Where have you seen well-meaning words make suffering worse?
- Gustavo Gutiérrez says the task of theology is to help people keep talking to God in the midst of suffering. What would it look like for your congregation to treat questioning and wrestling as signs of faith rather than a lack of it?
- The risen Jesus in John’s Gospel keeps showing his wounds. What wounds do you carry as a leader that you’ve never let anyone see?
- La Fuente builds grief stations and practices naming gratitude alongside grief. What would a communal practice of lament look like in your context?
- Canales talks about “re-existence” alongside resistance, creating alternative spaces of life and not only pushing back. What might re-existence look like in your community?
- Of Marcos’s four steps for majority-white churches, which feels hardest for you or your church, and why?
- If you can’t yet move your whole congregation, what would it look like to start with one family?
