Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Movement

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/ abstract=2516003 Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/ abstract=2516003 Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement Sasha Costanza-Chock The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2014 Sasha Costanza-Chock This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution — Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0 CC-BY-NC. For information on quantity discounts, please email [email protected]. This book was set in ITC Stone Serif and Stone Sans Serif 9/14 by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. Costanza-Chock, Sasha, 1976 – Out of the shadows, into the streets! : transmedia organizing and the immigrant rights movement / Sasha Costanza-Chock ; foreword by Manuel Castells. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-02820-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. United States — Emigration and immigration — Government policy. 2. Immigrants — Civil rights — United States. 3. Mass media — United States. 4. Social justice — United States. 5. Europe — Emigration and immigration — Government policy. 6. Immigrants — Civil rights— Europe. 7. Mass media — Europe. 8. Social justice — Europe. I. Title. JV6456.C67 2014 323.3′ 29120973 — dc23 2014013216 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 We are multitudes. No conocemos las fronteras. Contents Foreword by Manuel Castells ix Author ’ s Note xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction: ¡ Escucha! ¡ Escucha! ¡ Estamos en la Lucha! 1 1 A Day Without an Immigrant: Social Movements and the Media Ecology 20 2 Walkout Warriors: Transmedia Organizing 46 3 “ MacArthur Park Melee ” : From Spokespeople to Amplifiers 68 4 APPO-LA: Translocal Media Practices 86 5 Worker Centers, Popular Education, and Critical Digital Media Literacy 102 6 Out of the Closets, Out of the Shadows, and Into the Streets: Pathways to Participation in DREAM Activist Networks 128 7 Define American, The Dream is Now, and FWD.us: Professionalization and Accountability in Transmedia Organizing 154 Conclusions 179 Appendixes Appendix A: Research Methodology 205 Appendix B: Interviewees 215 Appendix C: Interview Guide 217 Appendix D: Online Resources for Organizers 221 Notes 223 Index 257 Foreword Manuel Castells Over the last few years, a wave of social protests has rippled across the world, and in its wake we have witnessed the profile of the social movements of the information age. Yet, because of the novelty of their forms of mobilization and organization, an ideological debate is raging over the interpretation of these movements. Since in most cases they challenge traditional forms of politics and organizations, the political establishment, the media establishment, and the academic establishment have for the most part refused to acknowledge their significance, even after upheavals as important as those represented by the so-called Arab Spring, the Icelandic democratic rebellion, the Spanish “ Indignant ” movement, the Israeli demonstrations of 2012, Occupy Wall Street, the Brazilian mobilizations of 2013, and the Taksim Square protests, which shook up the entrenched Islamic government of Turkey. Indeed, between 2010 and 2014, thousands of cities in more than one hundred countries have seen significant occupations of public space as activists have challenged the domination of political and financial elites over common citizens, who, according to the protesters, have been disenfranchised and alienated from their democratic rights. A key issue in this often blurred debate is the role of communication technologies in the formation, organization, and development of the movements. Throughout history, communication has been central to the existence of social movements, which develop beyond the realm of insti- tutionalized channels for the expression of popular demands. It is only by communicating with others that outraged people are able to recognize their collective power before those who control access to the institutions. Institutions are vertical, and social movements always start as horizontal x Foreword organizations, even if over time they may evolve into vertical organizations for the sake of efficiency. (This evolution is seen by many in the movements as the reproduction of the same power structures that they aim to overthrow.) If communication is at the heart of social mobilization, and if holding power largely depends on the control of communication and information, it follows that the transformation of communication in a given society deeply affects the structure and dynamics of social movements. This transformation is multidimensional: technological, organizational, institu- tional, spatial, cultural. We live in a network society in which people and organizations set up their own networks according to their interests and values in all domains of the human experience, from sociability to politics, and from networked individualism to multimodal communities. In the twenty-first century there has been a major shift from mass communication (characterized by the centralized, controlled distribution of messages from one sender to many receivers and involving limited interactivity, as exemplified by television) to mass self-communication (characterized by multimodality and interactivity of messages from many senders to many receivers through the self-selection of messages and interlocutors and through the self-retrieving, remixing, and sharing of content, as exemplified by the Internet, social media, and mobile networks). The appropriation of networked communication technologies by social movements has empowered extraordinary social mobilizations, created communicative autonomy vis- à -vis the mass media, business, and governments, and laid the foundation for organizational and political autonomy. In a world of 2.5 billion Internet users and almost 7 billion mobile phone subscribers, a significant share of communication power has shifted from corporations and state bureaucracies to civil society — a shift well established by research. However, we have only scant grounded analysis of the technological, organizational, and cultural specificity of new processes of social mobilization and community networking. Too often, there is a na ï ve interpretation of these important phenomena that boils down to descriptive accounts of the use of the newest communication technologies or applications by social activists. Instead, a complex set of distinct developments is at work. It is simply silly (or ideologically biased) to deny or downplay the empirical observation of the crucial role of networking technologies in the dynamics of networked social movements. On the other hand, it is equally silly to Foreword xi pretend that Twitter, Facebook, or any other technology, for that matter, is the generative force behind the new social movements. (No observer, and certainly no activist, defends this latter position; it is a straw man erected by traditional intellectuals, mainly from the left, as a way to garner support for their belief in the role of “ the party ” — any party — in leading “ the masses, ” who are deemed unable to organize themselves.) Moreover, my observations of movements around the world reveal that the new social movements are networked in multiple ways, not only online but in the form of urban social networks, interpersonal networks, preexisting social networks, and the networks that form and reform spontaneously in cyber- space and in physical public space. This networking consists of a process of communication that leads to mobilization and is facilitated by organizations emerging from the movement, rather than being imported from the established political system. However, to make progress in understanding these movements, we need scholarly research that goes beyond the cloud of ideology and hype to examine with methodological reliability how communication works in such movements and to understand with preci- sion the interaction between communication and social movements. From this perspective, the book you hold in your hands represents a fundamental contribution to a rigorous characterization of the new avenues of social change in societies around the world. The concept of transmedia organizing that Sasha Costanza-Chock proposes integrates the variety of modes of communication that exist in the real media practices of social movements. From the activists ’ point of view, any communication mode that works is adopted, so that the Internet and mobile platforms are used alongside and in interaction with paper leaflets, interpersonal face-to-face communication, bulletins and newspapers, graffiti, pirate radio, street art, public speeches and assemblies in the square. Everything is included in what Costanza-Chock calls the media ecology of the movement. This is the reality of the new movements and the foundation of their communicative autonomy, on which their very existence depends, particularly when repression inevitably falls on them. Costanza-Chock identified this novel interaction between the shifting media ecology and social movements long before the Arab Spring uprisings or the Occupy movement came to the attention of the mass media. He focused on a most significant social development, the movement for immigrant rights that exploded across the United States in 2006, with its xii Foreword epicenter

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