For centuries stone sanctuaries illuminated by sunlight flowing through stained glass have served as wombs of reflection and safety. For some. For many Native peoples across the Americas these centers of Christian faith have often been engines of displacement, forced conversion, kidnapping, and genocide.
So on the surface, the Coates Chapel, center of a former Catholic convent and girl’s boarding school in downtown San Antonio, was a complicated locale for a convening about "the practice of hope" that called in—both in the discussion and lyrical animation—the ancestors of people who have been resisting colonial domination for 500 years.
“The Practice of Hope” was convened as a community dialogue last weekend by Azul Barrientos, a revered Mexican singer and songwriter, as part of a series of gatherings hosted by the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center.
Discussion highlights and three songs from Azul Barrientos and Agarita chamber ensemble's evocative performance. Deceleration video. Follow Deceleration on YouTube.
The event opened with a panel discussion about the accelerating harms manifesting via President Donald Trump’s promised “largest deportation operation in American history” creating chaos across the country. It featured experienced community organizer Rebecca Flores, whose roots of resistance stretch back to the farmworker’s struggles of the 1960s and into today's fight over immigration policing, and local artist Mauro de la Tierra, whose provocative mural dedicated to ICE violence on the city's West Side was recently vandalized with a can of spray foam.
As Barrientos and members of Agarita, a local chamber ensemble, performed their sound check the warm reverberation from those heavy stone walls, with the Christian imagery complicated and accentuated by De la Tierra’s equally colorful paintings of icons of community life and victims of state violence, infused the chapel with a new resonance.
In the haunting incantations of the quartet’s strings and Barrientos’s lyrical resurrection of so many dispatched souls (particularly in the song Indio Toba with lyrics by Félix Luna), it became, somehow, the exactly correct location for these new conversations: a chapel re-sanctified.
The vision for this event flowed from a desperate time, Barrientos told attendees. For the world and inside of herself.
In 2025, ICE was murdering with impunity and assumptions of free speech were being met with a new level of brutality. These attacks, along with the steady undoing of refugee status and protective orders, were creating crisis in the immigrant community—papered or otherwise. And against this backdrop was a personal story: a familiar unraveling that comes to all experiencing the blessing of age.
“It was the first time I realized that my mother was starting to lose memories that had been the pillars of the identity of my family,” Barrientos told those gathered in the chapel.
“I felt at that moment like there’s no control, that I had no control over anything and I was helpless. I felt so helpless.”
And yet in her reflections she discovered an innate hopefulness generated, she realized, through an understanding of her ancestors’ determined continuance through cycles of revolution and colonization and policing.
“All of my ancestors continued, right?” she observed. “And I am here because of them, because they continued.”
As the youngest member of the panel La Tierra said he took a moment to consider the attitude of some of his artist peers in the wake of Trump’s reelection and the rise of ICE. Stay neutral, they cautioned. Stay neutral in order to better catch the next federal or state grant.
“I dug in my feet. I was like, ‘Absolutely not,’ you know? Now more than ever I’m going to utilize my voice,” he said.
All this in a city with an active campaign to prevent ICE expanding further via a 640,000-square-foot warehouse on San Antonio’s East Side.
Flores used her time to highlight the large number of deportations happening in San Antonio, calling it the fourth most active of U.S. cities. And she excoriated the ICE raids and growing deportation-industrial complex as a massive project of “human traffickers,” ticking off the names of several local cities that are actively working with ICE through 287(g) agreements that imbue their police officers with federal immigration powers.
“The only way we’re going not change this is if we vote in the November elections in big numbers," Flores said. "We can’t just go ourselves. We have to take everybody with us.”
