Immigrants Riding for Justice

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier’s archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright Author's personal copy Political Geography 29 (2010) 381e391 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo Immigrants riding for justice: Space-time and emotions in the construction of a counterpublic Kristin M. Sziarto a, *, Helga Leitner b, y a b Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Bolton Hall 410, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, 414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA a b s t r a c t Keywords: Public sphere Counterpublic Social movements Immigrant rights movement Affect Emotions Space-time of movement building During the past two decades, a new immigrants’ rights movement in the U.S. has emerged, constructing a counterpublic that challenges hegemonic immigration discourses, policies, and practices. We show how a counterpublic is constructed in practice, using as a case study the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride (IWFR), an event in 2003 that helped further the momentum of immigrant rights activism. We examine how immigrant activists and their allies came together and worked to construct, articulate, and enact a shared political identity that we refer to as an identity-in-alliance. Space-time and emotions were crucial in the development of this identity as ‘Freedom Riders,’ as well as a sense of solidarity. We reflect on the vulnerabilities within the counterpublic and challenges it faced when inserting its discourses on immigration, race, and citizenship into the hegemonic public sphere. Taking the insights gained from these practices, we extend Nancy Fraser’s concept of the counterpublic by demonstrating the centrality of space-time and emotions to its theorization. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction During the past two decades new immigrants, in alliance with labor unions, religious institutions, and community organizations, have become a driving force in mobilizing for workers’ and citizenship rights in U.S. cities. This mobilization must be understood within the context of contemporary economic and political restructuring globally, nationally, and locally. Industrial and neoliberal political restructuring has resulted in an erosion of workers’ rights in the U.S. and abroad. There has been increased immigration to the U.S. by migrants whose livelihoods in their home countries have been threatened or devastated by neoliberal trade policies and/or structural adjustment (Moody, 2007). Once in the U.S., immigrants have filled jobs made undesirable by industrial restructuring and assaults on unions. The majority of new immigrants in the U.S. occupy low paying, insecure, mostly non-union jobs, and face discrimination in the labor and housing markets, and in access to various public services.1 Rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism fueled by conservative politicians have created an atmosphere where non-white immigrants in particular are considered unworthy of becoming members of the national * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 414 229 3941; fax: þ1 414 229 3981. E-mail addresses: sziarto@uwm.edu (K.M. Sziarto), eqj6139@umn.edu (H. Leitner). y Tel.: þ1 612 625 6080; fax: þ1 612 624 1044. 0962-6298/$ e see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.09.008 community and polity. Most recently, undocumented immigrants have become the central target of local nativist movements, pushing for the enactment of exclusionary local ordinances across the U.S., particularly in suburban communities (Walker & Leitner, in press). To contest these conditions, on May Day 2006 the new immigrants’ rights movement took to the streets of cities across the United States. The mobilization had roots in multiple campaigns and previous mobilizations. In the 1990s, unions, especially those turning to labor-community coalitions and rank-and-file organizing to revitalize labor as a movement, found themselves organizing immigrant workers (Milkman, 2006a; Sherman & Voss, 2000). Immigrant workers formed the core of the successful Justice for Janitors organizing campaign waged by Service Employees International Union in the 1990s (Erickson, Fisk, Milkman, Mitchell, & Wong, 2002). At the same time various assemblages of unions, community organizations, lawyers, and unorganized workers began setting up workers’ centers, which often serve and/or are run by immigrant workers. Some observers and participants consider worker centers’ networks themselves as a movement (Fine, 2006). Amid these mobilizations, the staff of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) Local 11 in Los Angeles conceived the idea of a ‘Freedom Ride’ for immigrant workers. The president of Local 11 took the idea to HERE’s 2001 national conference, where unionists’ imaginations were so incited Author's personal copy 382 K.M. Sziarto, H. Leitner / Political Geography 29 (2010) 381e391 by the ‘freedom ride’ idea that Local 11’s plan for a single bus traveling cross-country to Washington, D.C. blossomed into a campaign involving multiple buses from several U.S. cities (see Fig. 1). HERE, in alliance with other unions, community organizations, and immigrant advocacy groups, staged the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride in September and October 2003. Drawing on Nancy Fraser (1990), we conceive of the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride as an effort to construct a counterpublic. According to Fraser, counterpublics constitute “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses.” (67). The choice of the notion of a counterpublic as our conceptual frame is motivated by our desire to further the ongoing engagement between literatures on geographies of social movements and of public space, both of which have engaged with Fraser’s notion of the counterpublic. Recent theorizing on counterpublics within and beyond geography has focused on the content of counterhegemonic discourses, and less on the practices and spatialities involved in the construction of counterpublics. This has been accompanied by insufficient theoretical attention to the role of emotions in the construction of counterpublics, and the difficulties and hard work involved in negotiating across differences (but see Bosco, 2007 and Routledge, 2003 for exceptions). Normative radical democratic scholars such as Mouffe (2002) have postulated conflict as integral to democratic politics; Mouffe posits “a constant struggle between opposing hegemonic political projects” (10) and the need to rework antagonisms (struggle between enemies) into agonisms (struggle between adversaries) to accomplish political transformations. However, by and large radical democratic theories eschew engaging with how this reworking might be accomplished on the ground. The latter has been attended to by feminist scholarship on alliance politics, as we discuss below. Furthermore, we aim to build on work linking geographies of social movements with geographies of democracy and citizenship (Barnett & Low, 2004), and with geographies of affect and emotions (Barnett, 2008). The purpose of this paper is to show how the construction of a counterpublic works in practice, and to draw out the implications of the empirical knowledge gained for theorizing the formation and trajectory of counterpublics, and democratic politics more generally. We suggest that the theorizing of counterpublics should attend to: 1) the role of space and time, 2) the difficulties of, and hard work required in, negotiating across difference within alliances; and 3) the role of emotions in this process. We use the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride (IWFR), an event in 2003 that was important in furthering the momentum of the immigrant rights movement in the U.S., as a case study. We examine how immigrant activists and their allies came together and worked to construct, articulate, and enact a shared political identity. We demonstrate the role of space, time, and emotions in the construction of a counterpublic, but also reflect on the vulnerabilities within counterpublics and the challenges faced when inserting their discourses into the hegemonic public sphere. Our analysis of the IWFR and its aftermath relies on multiple sources. First, we gathered media coverage on the event, including coverage of its planning and organizing, the Ride itself, and the immediate aftermath (spanning a two year time period).2 We also obtained publications from the IWFR organizing committee, national sponsoring organizations, and local organizations that sent or hosted buses (all of which were available on the internet). From these we assembled the broad narrative of the IWFR from multiple perspectives. Second, for background on the internal organizing of the IWFR, we conducted interviews with two organizers and two Riders from the Minneapolis/St. Paul buses. We were also given access to another IWFR organizer’s files, including internal correspondence among organizers. These interviews and archival documents, while limited, gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the organizing work that went on before, during, and after the IWFR. Third, and most importantly, we analyzed weblog diaries, oral histories, and Rider-journalist accounts from Riders on the Washington State, Portland, Los Angeles, Minnesota, and Chicago buses (Atkin, 2005; Ehrenreich, 2003a; Tady, 2003a, 2003b; Sorce, 2004; Washington State IWFR, 2003; Workday Minnesota, 2003). These pieces, written by ten different riders on 5 buses during the IWFR or within six months afterward, offered personal (but publicized) accounts of the IWFR, rich in details of the embodied experience(s) of riding the buses during the IWFR. Fig. 1. Map of the routes and stops of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (Source: www.iwfr.org, reproduced by the Cartography Lab of the Department of Geography, University of Minnesota). Author's personal copy K.M. Sziarto, H. Leitner / Political Geography 29 (2010) 381e391 383 Counterpublics, space-time, and the politics of emotion Space-times(s) for constructing counterpublics ‘Counterpublic’ is a dynamic, double-edged term, denoting a simultaneous attachment to and critique of the notion of ‘the public.’ Fraser’s (1990) notion of a ‘subaltern counterpublic’ crystallized many of the emerging critiques of Habermas’s (1991) explication of the bourgeois public sphere. For Habermas, an adequate public sphere depends on the quality of discourse and the quantity of participation, where rationality and equality are the bases of deliberation (Calhoun, 1993). Fraser (1990: 57) views the notion of a public sphere, which is “conceptually distinct” from state apparatuses and markets, as “indispensable to critical social theory and to democratic political practice.” Yet in “actually existing democracy,” she finds not one but many public spheres, which have emerged in relation to not only the state, but also the bourgeois public sphere and its exclusions. Against Habermas’s insistence that the exclusivity of the bourgeois public sphere was a failure to attain an ideal, Fraser asserts that this exclusivity was itself constitutive of the politics of the bourgeois public sphere. The bourgeois public spheres of Germany and England, for example, as developed in gentlemen’s clubs for propertied males, allowed emergent bourgeoisies to formulate and universalize their own classed and gendered interests (Eley, 1992: 297). Fraser argues for the continued viability of the notion of the public sphere once it is subjected to critical interrogation and modification. First, rather than accept a single public sphere as the best configuration of participation for democracy, Fraser argues that multiple public spheres exist, and should be acknowledged. According to Fraser (1990: 67), “members of subordinated social groups e women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians e have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics.” Fraser (1990) proposes to call these alternative publics ‘subaltern counterpublics’ to denote their counterhegemonic qualities. A subaltern counterpublic is a political space e simultaneous and perhaps interacting with, but separate and somewhat autonomous from, the hegemonic public sphere e that allows individuals to come together to voice and communicate their grievances, needs, and desires within particular venues. These spaces in turn facilitate the development of counter-discourses, with the eventual goal of disseminating these to larger dominant publics. As the prefix ‘counter-’ implies, a counterpublic is understood as being in an agonistic relationship with the hegemonic public sphere and the state e working for political change and often for transformations in the way politics is done. Thus counterpublics are not merely spaces for the marginalized and/or oppressed to speak in their ‘own’ voices and be heard, but spaces for developing oppositional or alternative politics, with active participation in economic and political decision-making and social change as larger goals. The counterpublic is neither a simple reaction to the hegemonic public, nor completely free of hegemonic relations, but a political space formed through a multitude of intersecting processes. The focus of debate in the liberal bourgeois public sphere on matters of public interest and the common good sidesteps questions of how matters are defined as ‘public’ or ‘private’ (Fraser, 1990). Drawing the boundaries of the public is a political strategy of limiting what may be debated in the public sphere, and this strategy often operates to the disadvantage of excluded, oppressed, or marginal groups. Therefore, one task of a counterpublic is to politicize ‘private’ issues by making them matters of public debate. As we will illustrate in the case of the IWFR, publicizing the traumas of families separated because of immigration legislation, and of workplace abuses that have escaped public regulation, made two seemingly ‘private’ issues e domestic/familial and private property/ economy, respectively e public. Fraser’s account highlights different spatialities e boundaries, places, and networks e in the construction of counterpublics, but neither space nor time is explicitly theorized. We use the term space-time to emphasize that time and space are co-constitutive, and crucial in understanding the formation of counterpublics and political processes more generally (Thrift & May, 2001). Counterpublics are spaces with a dual character: they are spaces of withdrawal and regrouping, and spaces of publicity. This dual character must be examined in relation to the geographic scholarship on public space. One strand of this scholarship addresses the relationship of urban public space and the mass media. While counterpublics may address wider publics through the media, Mitchell (2003) argues that the exclusion of counterhegemonic discourses by corporate media means that access to material public spaces e the steps of city hall, the plaza, the streets, the parks e is more necessary than ever. Indeed, staging spectacles in public spaces is one way for a counterpublic to achieve publicity in the media (D’Arcus, 2006). Mitchell (2003) has argued that we have lost the anarchic and public spaces of the modern city to capital and the state. While it can be argued that all public spaces, even anarchic spaces, have always been policed by the state in some way (Fraser, 1990), recent geographic research suggests an intensification of the policing of urban public spaces. Laws addressing the use of public space in the U.S. have become more restrictive (Mitchell, 2003). Local governments, and especially business improvement districts (BIDs), increasingly target the homeless and/or sex workers for expulsion from public space and determine what political expression is permitted in public space (Clough & Vanderbeck, 2006; Mitchell, 2003). In the U.S. day laborers, congregating in public space, have become targets of surveillance, intimidation, and violence. To escape the surveillance of public space, counterpublics often utilize alternative public (e.g. internet) and quasi-private spaces. These spaces may serve as spaces of withdrawal and insulation from the hegemonic public sphere. This insulation is crucial for the counterpublic to imagine alternatives and to organize itself and the resources required to pose a consequential challenge to hegemonic practices. Furthermore, the separation of the counterpublic from the hegemonic public sphere, and even from the spaces of everyday life, can facilitate the reconstruction of emotional attachments and valorization of a collective identity. These ‘separate’ spaces of counterpublics are concrete places, often micro-spaces, which may offer protection by removing the counterpublic’s activities from public or state view, and provide sites for social interaction and cultural production (Brown, 2008). Places, ‘private’ and ‘public,’ may also become potent symbols for counterpublics. Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco is an important symbolic place because of its history of providing refuge for groups from gay worshipers and the Black Panthers in the 1960s, to activists protesting the detention of peaceful protesters after the Rodney King riots in 1992. These places of counterpublics do not exist in isolation from each other. Through mobilities and the construction of networks, individuals and groups can form alliances and develop collective identities (Featherstone, 2007; Routledge, 2003). Members of counterpublics construct and sustain their networks through distanciated communication via the internet, but also by intermittently gathering, often in symbolic places, such as the Plaza de Mayo (Bosco, 2007). Nevertheless, differences in mobility and access to communications technology and other resources may lead to internal differentiation within the counterpublic (Routledge, 2003). From local grassroots movements to activist networks spanning the globe, counterpublics are forced to address differences within. Author's personal copy 384 K.M. Sziarto, H. Leitner / Political Geography 29 (2010) 381e391 Fraser (1990) herself fails to take up the question of difference within the counterpublic. However, feminist scholars’ theorization of positionality addresses how subjects construct distinct identities through different experiences, and the individual and collective interpretations of these (Nagar & Geiger, 2007). Sheppard (2002) has extended the concept of positionality to socio-spatial positionality, arguing that a subject’s positionality cannot be reduced to her social location, due to the mutually constitutive nature of the social and the spatial. Socio-spatial positionality conceptualizes the unequal power relations (and possibly the emergence of new power relations) among socially and spatially situated subjects. In terms of the counterpublic, it makes a difference where the counterpublic and individuals within it are located in the spatial geometry of power (Leitner, Sheppard, & Sziarto, 2008). Scholarship in transnational feminism and feminist geography has explored the significance of social and spatial positionality in identity formation, such as in the blindness of Westerners, white women and men to their privileges, or the difficulties in conducting politics (and research) across difference (Mohanty, 2003). Relatively little has been written on the difficulties of negotiating differences in socio-spatial positionality in the construction of counterpublics. Jakobsen (1998) argues that many social movements begin as alliances among peoples with different identities, but under pressure from the hegemonic public sphere, they tend to become univocal and exclusive e or as Burack puts it, they tend to “sacrifice group members to unconscious unifying logics of authenticity and unity” (2001: 45). The feminist literatures on coalition and transversal politics offer ways of thinking about and practicing negotiating across difference in the constitution of counterpublics. Coalition politics and transversal politics argue that to contest the tendency toward movement fragmentation, counterpublics can construct “solidarity in difference” (Lister, 1998: 77) through dialog. Collins (1998) and Yuval-Davis (1994) argue that through dialog, participants become more capable of taking into account others’ perspectives and positionalities without renouncing their own.3 Such dialog is only possible with what Coles (2004: 695) terms ‘receptive generosity’: listening with an openness to engagement that creates space for new identifications to emerge. Black feminist scholarship has also highlighted how such engagements to construct commonality are “acts of will and creativity, rather than passive discovery” (Harris, 1991: 250, quoted in Burack, 2001), thus emphasizing the need for commitment to receptive generosity and determination in negotiating difference. The dialogic practices among Riders on the buses of the IWFR, we argue, promoted this kind of engagement and the production of a collective identity and solidarity. Many participants in the IWFR began to refer to themselves as becoming Riders (with a capital R), which we term an ‘identity-in-alliance.’ The term ‘Rider’ referred not only to their participation in this mobilization, but to a set of attitudes regarding solidarity around the politics of immigration, and a shared understanding of racial formation in the U.S. and the Riders’ socio-spatial positionalities within those power relations. Counterpublics and the work emotions do The literatures on the politics of emotion and emotional geographies aid theorization of counterpublic construction as not just bridging differences, but as transforming emotional attachments to identity and difference. Feminist scholars have drawn our attention the embodied nature of emotions and the work they do in shaping both individual and collective bodies. In Ahmed’s formulation, emotions are embodied experiences that “are shaped by the contact with objects, rather than being caused by objects” (2004a: 31). In other words, subjects’ feelings toward objects and other subjects are not intrinsic to the objects’ or subjects’ nature. Rather feelings are shaped by the encounters with objects and/or subjects. While encounters with difference are often confrontational because we tend not to welcome difference, encounters also hold open the possibility for destabilizing and disorienting us from the categories, stereotypes, and prejudices that we hold, thus creating conditions of possibility for change and transformation (Leitner, in press). Ahmed’s theorization of emotions and the work they do resonates with work on geographies of emotion, which has investigated the imbrications of the emotional and the spatial in the constitution of social relations, and emphasized situational perspectives on emotions (Bondi, 2005). Some geographers have argued for explicit studies of the emotional dimensions of collective action and political activism (see Pulido, 2003); however, few have taken up this call. Bosco (2007) argues that activists create emotional framings, or ‘emotional templates,’ that help in constructing and mobilizing networks across space. In our analysis of the IWFR, we do not focus on a strategically created emotional template, but examine the emotions unleashed in encounters and practices within the spaces of the IWFR e the buses and route stops e and the work these emotions do in opening space for the enactment of solidarity. Further, we show how, when traveling into other spaces e specifically to the offices of U.S. Congress members and a rally in New York City e practices of receptive generosity, and thereby the Riders’ stories, emotions, and visions, were marginalized within the space-time geometries of these spaces. Within geography there has arisen a distinction between work on emotional geographies and that on affect. Pile (2010) has usefully explored the gulf emerging between emotional and affectual geographies by pointing out their strengths and weaknesses. One of the crucial differences he identifies between them is the “presumed relationship e or non-relationship e between thought and affect.” (Pile, 2010: 16). He argues that in emotional geography there is no split between thought and affect, while affectual geography radically splits affect from thought. Without seeking to locate ourselves on either side, we argue with Ahmed (2004a) and other feminist scholars that the very distinction of emotions and affect is problematic. Some feminist geographers argue that the distinction re-maps the publiceprivate distinction onto an abstracted body vs. cognition; it divides the sensual from the intellectual, and ignores the power relations and historical memories that shape emotions (Sharp, 2009; Thien, 2005). For Ahmed the distinction is problematic because it posits emotion as mediated and affect as direct and unmediated. Yet sensations (though they may escape conscious recognition) are always already mediated by embodied experience, such that “even seeming direct responses actually evoke past histories, and . this process bypasses consciousness, through bodily memories” (2004b: 40, note 4). Thus the body, individual or collective, is a product of mediation, “representation, regulation, relationality, and performative reiteration” (Jacobs & Nash, 2003: 275e6). Thus, in this paper we reject the affect/emotion distinction and focus on the work embodied emotions and emotional geographies do in the construction of counterpublics. The IWFR: constructing a counterpublic Doreen Massey (2005) reminds us that space and time must be thought of together, as mutually constituted and as a product of social relations. This becomes visible when we examine the spatial and temporal origins of the IWFR. The idea of ‘a new freedom ride’ was hatched in Los Angeles in 2003 by a staff member of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) Local 11, an organization with a large immigrant membership. Author's personal copy K.M. Sziarto, H. Leitner / Political Geography 29 (2010) 381e391 Why Los Angeles in 2003? Since Proposition 187,4 the laborLatino coalition that has developed in California, particularly in Los Angeles, has been “a potent vehicle of Latino immigrant mobilization, both in the workplace and the voting booth” (Milkman, 2006b: 6). Given this history in place, it is not surprising that the president of the local at the time, Maria Elena Durazo, supported a staff member’s idea of a freedom ride for immigrant workers. Durazo brought the idea to HERE’s national leadership, who embraced it. HERE’s convention resolutions from 2001 explicitly linked immigration and civil rights, and announced the intention to stage an “immigration freedom ride” organized in concert with civil rights leaders and immigrant rights advocates (HERE, 2002). The idea of a ‘freedom ride’ captured the imaginations of so many members that the plan for a single bus traveling cross-country to Washington, D.C. was altered to include multiple buses from several cities (see Fig. 1). The stated short-term goal of the IWFR was to publicize a broad agenda for immigrants’ rights and U.S. immigration policy reform, including: 1) granting legalization status to working, tax-paying immigrants; 2) clearing the path toward citizenship; 3) restoring rights on the job; 4) reunifying families torn apart by immigration laws; 5) respecting and upholding civil rights and liberties for all (IWFR, 2003a). Beyond this, however, the IWFR aimed to build a movement for immigrants’ and workers’ rights, and to reinvigorate union organizing in an industry decimated by 9/11. Components of this movement building included the formation and strengthening of local labor-community coalitions, achieving visibility for unions’ support of immigrants’ rights and communities of color, inserting counterhegemonic representations of immigrants into the mass media, and building relationships between immigrant (especially, but not only, Latino) and African American activists. Negotiating racial differences e from freedom rides to the IWFR Local 11 and other HERE locals in California had repeatedly encountered hostility between Latinos and African Americans while trying to unionize, and so one goal of this freedom ride from the outset e indeed, a reason why it was conceived as a ‘freedom ride’ by the Latino and Asian American union staff e was to improve relations among Latino and African American workers. Organizers of the IWFR envisioned buses that would be ‘moving classrooms,’ in which a mutual education process would be facilitated and solidarity built. Immigrants would learn how the civil rights movement had accomplished social changes that benefited them today, and how that movement was not the work of a few heroes, but of “ordinary people [who showed] extraordinary courage” (IWFR, 2003b). African Americans would learn what impelled Latino (and other) immigrants to come to the U.S., and how Latinos, too, face racial discrimination. Though the goals of the IWFR as listed in press releases do not address racism explicitly, internal documents, quotes from spokespeople and Riders, and the popular education exercises introduced on the buses indicate that organizers intended the IWFR to incorporate anti-racist themes. These lofty aims did not defuse the potential danger in displacing the notion of ‘freedom ride’ from its origin in the struggles of Blacks for racial justice to immigrants’ struggles. Indeed, reception of the idea in African American publics was highly uneven. African American civic organizations responded differently to invitations to join the IWFR depending on both the rhetoric used to relate the IWFR to the civil rights movement and the positionalities 385 of those inviting their participation. IWFR organizing documents show recognition of the risks of equating today’s struggle for immigrants’ rights with the civil rights movement. The relationship promoted by IWFR organizers was of the IWFR following in the tradition of the civil rights movement: We can and should claim the IWFR, like the civil rights movement, is a justice movement. However, we should not give the impression that we are “stealing” that legacy away from AfricaneAmericans or lessening the impact of slavery.Talk about the IWFR as an opportunity to educate immigrants about the civil rights movement (IWFR, n.d.). But such statements were not necessarily sufficient to obtain African American leaders’ and organizations’ support. The sociospatial positionality of the person promoting the IWFR was important, in terms of that person’s race, status, and relationship with the local African American community, and his/her position within local racial and immigration politics. For example, in New York City, African American union leaders were themselves involved in IWFR planning, he renowned civil rights leader Rev. James Lawson made appearances promoting the IWFR, and the Black, Puerto Rican, and Hispanic Legislative Caucus had endorsed the event (Allen, 2003; New York Amsterdam News, 2003). In contrast, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the young white female organizer working to assemble potential riders from the Twin Cities got a chilly reception from a prominent African American organization in town e she was seen as equating the struggles of immigrants and the civil rights movement, and as an insufficiently prestigious emissary (Interview, Sandra, 2005). The failure to anticipate how her positionality would be read undermined the potential for Black-Latino alliance building in the Twin Cities through the IWFR. No major Black organization in the Twin Cities endorsed the IWFR. Once the IWFR buses set off, organizers and Riders were tremendously successful in negotiating racial and other social differences. This negotiation was certainly eased by the self-selection of the Riders: those who volunteered to spend days on a bus for immigrants’ rights were already interested in the IWFR’s goal of linking immigrants’ rights and civil rights. As we will show, great effort was put into addressing and negotiating differences on the buses, through the practices of memorialization, storytelling, etc. This success of these negotiations on the bus, however, does not mean that the deep-seated cleavages and antagonisms between the different social groups that participated in the Ride were erased. Space-times of the IWFR: networks, connectivities, and memorialization The spatiality of the plan for the IWFR, however spontaneously it evolved, was nevertheless strategic. Each city sending one or more buses was to assemble a cohort of Riders from among HERE union members, local immigrants’ rights activists, Black organizations, and other potential allies. Assembling a bus of Riders required the mobilization of local networks of activists, thus strengthening relations between HERE and other union locals, as well as of laborcommunity coalitions. Cohorts of Riders included members of multiple organizations, including unions,5 chapters of community organizing networks such as ACORN and Jobs with Justice; affiliates of church- or faith-based organizing networks such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Gamaliel, and Interfaith Worker Justice; chapters of United Students against Sweatshops; and immigrant organizations. In addition, cities along the route were chosen as stops for overnight stays and/or events. The planning of these stops also required networking among diverse local groups and organizations Author's personal copy 386 K.M. Sziarto, H. Leitner / Political Geography 29 (2010) 381e391 to organize joint activities with IWFR Riders including rallies, marches, prayer breakfasts or lunches, pickets, employer visits, and/or visits to immigrant workers in their homes. By staging these local events along the way to the national events in Washington, D.C. and New York City, the IWFR also aimed to achieve publicity across the national territory. The conception of the IWFR as a journey by bus made a symbolic and material connection with the Freedom Rides of the 1960s. The design of the route and stops along it reinforced this connection through visits at civil rights movement memorial sites. Riders on buses that originated in Houston stopped in Selma, Alabama, to visit the Slavery and Civil Rights Museum; walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where civil rights activists were beaten on camera in 1965; stopped in Montgomery, Alabama, for a rally at the church where the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott was organized; and traveled through Anniston, Alabama, where one of the 1961 Freedom Ride buses was firebombed. These practices in symbolic places re-worked the memory of the civil rights movement to cast it as the ‘ancestor’ of the IWFR in a long struggle for freedom. The equivalence of movements was crafted through emotive rituals at symbolic sites. Below a Rider talks to a journalist about the Ride after a stop at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site: One of the riders, who gave just her first name, Amelia, said the trip has brought her many tears as she learned in detail the violence that civil rights leaders faced in the 1960s.‘I am contributing my little grain of sand to obtain freedom, reunification of families, civil rights, and workers’ rights,’ Amelia said in Spanish, after a brief wreath-laying ceremony at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s crypt (Rodriguez, 2003: 3B). Through tears and words, Amelia memorializes and enacts a connection to the Civil Rights Movement. However, she does not simply equate the IWFR with the civil rights movement; rather, she constructs a connection of equivalence (pursuit of freedom) and difference (acknowledging the legacy of Civil Rights Movement) (Laclau, 2005). Buses without such historic sites on their routes made connections to the civil rights movement through the bodily presence of 1960s Freedom Riders recruited to ride on the IWFR, or of civil rights leaders who traveled to meet the buses along the way and spoke at rallies. Riders also engaged in the memorialization of immigrants’ deaths and immigrants’ struggles, to combat the discourses that dehumanize border crossers (see Loyd & Burridge, 2007). In Arizona, Riders on the Los Angeles buses participated in memorial services for immigrants who died trying to cross the MexicoeU.S. border. Activists in Tucson provided the Riders with wooden crosses, each marked with a name, age, and the date their body was found e or simply the word desconocido (unknown). Riders took the crosses with them to the border south of Nogales. These activities evoked strong emotions in immigrant Riders, and the Riders’ emotional expressions seized the attention of others at these events, including journalists. Journalist Ben Ehrenreich writes: I’ve seen crosses like these at other political events, representing other deaths, those of Iraqi children or East Timorese, and they’ve become almost invisible to me, a standard element of the vocabulary of protest, like the nearly exhausted rhetoric of freedom, justice, peace. But just as those words have real and concrete meanings to these people, so do these crosses.Edgar holds his cross in front of him there on the cathedral steps. There’s a new glow to his face, something more defined and certain about his bearing, as if through this white cross his trials have been recognized and somehow sanctified. “It could have been me,” he explains (Ehrenreich, 2003a, 28). This passage underscores several points about the emotional geographies of the IWFR. First, Edgar’s embodied emotional expression and his words give new meaning to symbols that had become banal for Ehrenreich. Second, the positionalities of the Riders are crucial to the impact of their emotional expression: Edgar, an immigrant from El Salvador, says that it could have been he himself who died, as his border crossing had taken a month, with 7 h of it in the desert. Thus, the emotional expressions of immigrants themselves, in combination with their face-to-face, extended interaction with journalists e persons with access to the hegemonic public sphere e were significant to the publicity of the IWFR. Such emotional expressions were also crucial to the building of solidarity between Riders and their hosts in the stops along the routes. Riders interviewed spoke of the warm welcomes they received e whether those welcomes were smiles and a hot meal, or an eruption of cheering from people crowded into a church, as a Rider from the Minnesota bus described their arrival at a church in Milwaukee: “.the filled church exploded into applause. We marched among the standing crowd to some reserved rows in the front of the church and then everyone chanted, ¡Sí se puede! ¡Sí se puede! for an eternity of minutes.we felt honored to be there. It was an experience I will never forget e walking on the energy and respect of so many people. I realized that millions of people across the country have been waiting for this Freedom Ride for their whole lives. Immigrants have been waiting for the chance to declare their own rights and now we are doing it!” (Sorce, 2004: 18) That the church was full of people cheering for the Riders not only energized Sorce, but impressed upon her the magnitude of the IWFR, and the “respect” she and other Riders were being treated with for their commitment to ride. Such expressions of honor and respect were crucial for the construction of a shared political identity, and for the Riders’ ability to confront the extant and emergent differences among them during the IWFR. These diverse emotional expressions e of encouragement, affection, and grieving e that were central to many of the events at the stops helped create affective grounds for solidarity. Space-time of the bus: storytelling, listening, and enacting solidarity While the sharing of lived experiences and the emotional support received at the stops along the route were important in movement building, we argue that it was particularly the counterpublic space-time of the buses e relatively autonomous from the state and/or hegemonic public e that helped construct and enact a shared political identity among diverse Riders. The bus provided a space for those gathered together to get to know one another, to learn from each other, to connect with each other in ways that otherwise would have been difficult, to develop relationships and to understand their relationships with other participants in new ways, allowing the construction of a sense of commonality. A central practice on the bus was storytelling. The Riders on any IWFR bus were from the originating city (or nearby), but had not necessarily met each other before. They were recruited from the local organizations mentioned above and/or had been activists in the 1960s. Riders were recruited for their experience and/or potential as organizers themselves; the bus was to serve as a training ground. From the time they boarded the buses, Riders were encouraged to tell each other their stories: who they were, and how they came to be on the buses. The most important stories were those of Riders who were immigrant workers themselves, and non-immigrants were urged to listen and learn. Of course, there Author's personal copy K.M. Sziarto, H. Leitner / Political Geography 29 (2010) 381e391 was no avalanche of personal histories upon boarding the buses. At first many conversations were popular education exercises6 introduced by the IWFR organizers as part of their ‘mobile classroom’ plan: immigrant and non-immigrant Riders talked about their families’ (im)migration histories and how that placed them into a larger history of U.S. slavery, labor repression, imperialism, the civil rights movement, and immigration policy. Thus racial differences, and their historical geographies, were explicitly addressed in the agenda and practice of the IWFR. As the Riders traveled together for days, they were moved to tell their stories on the bus. Riders from the Minnesota buses reported that once a few people had spontaneously gotten up to the microphone to tell their stories, and as the whole bus had cheered them on, more and more people were encouraged to take the microphone. Riders would call for a particular person to take her or his turn telling their story e or singing a song, or sharing anything they wanted to share with their fellow Riders. Some Riders were then persuaded by organizers, and gained the courage, to tell their stories at rallies at the stops along the way. Storytelling in the space-time of the bus did not simply prepare the Riders to ‘go public.’ It also involved attentive listening to each other’s stories. Suely, a Rider on the Washington State bus, describes her experiences in the Washington State Riders’ blog as follows: “This was a difficult day for me. As I become more comfortable on this ride I am overwhelmed with emotions. I am getting to know the other bus riders and their reasons for going on this ride. Every day I learn about families being separated, workers being abused, discrimination on the job due to race and religion, sexual discrimination amongst undocumented female workers and the list goes on and on and on. All of these things I have listed, I can put a face to each one. I am also replaying sad stories from my past over and over again. . And I shared it with the other freedom riders. And this was a good turning point for all of us. More and more people are able to express how they are feeling and cry” (Suely, 2003). Here Suely describes how emotions are unleashed by telling and listening to each others’ stories, and how she finds this ‘difficult,’ but good. Many Riders’ journals and blogs recount similar experiences of feeling ‘overwhelmed’ with emotions when listening to others experiences, as they found themselves ‘putting a face’ to each story, and telling their own stories of sadness. While the Riders’ personal and family histories diverged, common threads emerged. Repeated themes in oral histories, interviews, media reports, and blogs included pain and anger over separation from family, discrimination and the denial of equal opportunity, oppressive working conditions, and detention upon suspicion of terrorism. Further, the very notion of family emerged as a lens through which immigrants from different countries and non-immigrants sought to interpret each others’ experiences. Megan Tady on the Chicago bus makes a connection between the narrator’s and her own family: “I interviewed Isidro Muñoz on the bus. Six years ago, he was crushed under a forklift for 15 minutes.He had four fractured vertebrae, two possible herniated disks, a separated AC joint. He had lost the ability to move 65 percent of his body and he was 28 years old. When he went back to work at the auto factory in Chicago, where the accident happened, his doctors told him he could only lift up to 15 pounds. Most engines weigh well past 65 pounds. He was fired two weeks later. .He doesn’t cry when he tells his story. But when he tells me he was 16 when he left his parents’ Mexico to come to the United States, I think of my brother, not yet driving, and I turn my face to the window” (Tady, 2003b). 387 Through association between Munoz’s story and her brother, Tady, although not an immigrant herself, builds an affective relationship to the immigrant experience. Thus, through such interactions and associations on the buses, Riders developed emotional investments not merely in “immigrant justice” in the abstract, but in people they knew, had sat next to, and sung songs with. A sense of collective identity as Riders emerged. It was the bus ride e the hours together on the bus e that made it possible for Riders to get to know one another, to learn from each others’ life-experiences and struggles, to build affective relationships, and to develop a sense of commonality of perspective and experience e an identity-in-alliance. As Briana, a student on the Minnesota bus, said, “The bus made all the difference, being packed on.People really have to commit time, energy, focus” (Interview, 2006). The Riders had dedicated the time to ride together for several days, with all the inconveniences and discomforts that entailed: little freedom of bodily movement in an enclosed space for hours at a time, adherence to the IWFR schedule, and in some cases malfunctioning toilets and other mechanical difficulties. Under these circumstances Riders had to make serious efforts to embrace one another, lest the discomforts e physical and emotional e lead to a collapse of the Ride. Although most Riders’ accounts of telling their stories show increasing comfort with storytelling and listening to others, differences emerged. Some Riders reported feeling discomfort with the religiosity expressed by many fellow Riders, but accepted the religious practices that accompanied these expressions, and even participated in them. These Riders did so because they were willing to submerge their emotional discomforts, which were temporary, and seemed minor in comparison with the pain, terrors, and hardships that so many of the Riders had experienced in their lives and told of on the bus. The solidarity that developed on the buses was not only a matter of the practices and interactions among Riders, however. The constitution of ‘Others’ was equally important to the formation of a ‘Rider’ identity. These ‘Others’ are often not explicitly named in the Riders’ stories, which emphasize their own survival and determination to fight injustice, but they are absent presences that were important in the construction of an identity-in-alliance. These ‘Others’ included repressive agents of the state (from racist white sheriffs of the 1960s, to paramilitaries in immigrants’ home countries, to the U.S. immigration authorities of today), nativist groups such as the Minuteman, and exploitive and abusive employers. Riders on the IWFR buses also prepared themselves to respond to possible encounters with some of these ‘Others.’ Encounters with nativist groups were few. But every bus had a plan in place in case of being stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and/or ‘La Migra’ (the Border Patrol, in Latino/Chicano parlance). Immigrant rights’ activists knew from experience that any gathering of brown-skinned people could be labeled ‘immigrants,’ implying that they were possibly undocumented, criminal, terrorist, thereby rendering them vulnerable to detention by ICE.7 Since the IWFR buses advertised themselves as carrying immigrants, organizers had Riders practice what they would do when stopped by agents of the state. Riders taught each other the words and tune to “We Shall Overcome” from the civil rights movement and sang it over and over. Riders practiced being silent, while organizers played the roles of Border Patrol agents. Each Rider stowed all legal identification in the buses’ locked luggage compartments, and wore only her/his IWFR identification card with a first name (possibly a nickname or fictitious name) on it. And (if they did not already know) they learned the consequences of deportation for anyone undocumented among them. The Los Angeles Riders saw their preparations put to the test. On their fifth day on the road, the buses were stopped at a permanent checkpoint, about seventy miles southeast of El Paso, Texas. Border Author's personal copy K.M. Sziarto, H. Leitner / Political Geography 29 (2010) 381e391 388 Patrol agents boarded the bus. Outfitted in green uniforms with black leather gloves, they demanded identification from all the Riders of color, ignoring white Riders and brushing past white journalists who addressed them. The Riders sang, “We Shall Overcome,” and held out only their IWFR badges, which read, “I am a participant in the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, a peaceful campaign by citizens and immigrants in support for equal rights for all workers. I wish to exercise my right to remain silent.” (Ehrenreich, 2003a: 19). After nearly an hour of consultation with senior officers, the Border Patrol ordered all the Riders off the bus and into detention cells at the checkpoint station. The riders were taken out of the cells one by one for questioning. They were threatened with arrest unless they revealed their names and citizenship. None of the Riders answered, and those in the cells kept on singing “We Shall Overcome.” This act of civil disobedience by the Los Angeles Riders was a performance of embodied solidarity, made possible by their time together and practices on the buses, and the IWFR’s invocation of and inspiration by the civil rights movement. The practice of the IWFR Riders cited an event from the civil rights movement, a protest in which the jailed protestors refused to cooperate with police, but would only sing “We Shall Overcome” (Ehrenreich, 2003a). All the Riders symbolically gave up their names and citizenship or immigration status; the privileged e white, Anglo-named, citizens or immigrants with papers e were for a brief time treated as potentially undocumented immigrants and detained. Allies of undocumented immigrants stood with and for the undocumented, and experienced a little of what thousands of undocumented workers face daily. For a brief time the Los Angeles Riders were neither immigrants nor citizens, but people without papers challenging the authority of the nation-state. By cell phone, word of the Los Angeles Riders’ detention reached the other buses, whose Riders imagined themselves in the places of the LA Riders e an imaginative move that strengthened their resolve to stand together should they face detention (Atkin, 2005). On the buses, away from their everyday lives and therefore the often naturalized and invisible power relations operating within them, the Riders were able to construct alternative social and political imaginaries and craft solidarity. After about three and a half hours of detention, the Los Angeles Riders were told by an INS agent that they were free to go. The IWFR’s press liaison on the bus had called politicians and community leaders as the bus was being stopped (Ehrenreich, 2003b). These calls had activated connections that led to the Riders’ release. The Los Angeles bus traveled on to Washington, DC, where their tactics would, sadly, prove less effective in the halls and offices of Congress, as we detail below. No space for stories, no time for listening? These social and political imaginaries and the solidarity developed on the bus faced serious challenges when the buses arrived in Washington, DC, and New York. Upon entering these centers of political and media power, the Riders were inserted into power geometries quite different from the spaces of the bus and the route. In Washington the Riders were to visit with members of Congress, but in many cases the Congressional representatives used the visit as a publicity stage, or a welcome photo opportunity e some even skipped the meeting and delegated it to an aide. Megan Tady (2003a) from the Chicago bus, recalling the Riders’ meeting with Senator Dick Durbin, reports and reflects in her journal: “Durbin shakes everyone’s hands and sits in a chair in the middle of the room. The riders have rehearsed what they’ll say, what questions they’ll ask, who will present Durbin the letter. They have driven six days for this moment. A moment is what it is. Or rather, it’s five minutes of the greatest theatrical event, every minute staged to perfection. Three minutes are spent while Durbin, glancing at the ticking clock, passes around his mother’s naturalization certificate. It’s a distraction tactic, a time filler. On cue, his secretary opens the door, announcing we have two minutes left. It’s a frantic 120-second finale as Maria speaks quickly in Spanish, the story she’s been waiting to tell cut off by the credits rolling. He has to vote today. He’s a busy man. As he leaves, I think about the way the crowd cheered in Chicago when he wished the riders luck. I think of the cameras flashing, of the newspapers printing his name.” This sentiment that grievances and imaginaries of Riders were not taken seriously by Washington power brokers was voiced by many others. A student activist from the Minnesota bus expressed it as follows: “In DC it was about getting the diverse backdrop for these senators. .We were trying so hard to make it not be about us, but there was so little consideration of the commitment we had made, we were upset” (Interview with Briana, 2006). The feeling of marginalization in the centers of power among Riders was not restricted to meetings with politicians. At public rallies both in Washington DC and New York a parade of union leaders and politicians took central stage, while Riders’ social and political imaginaries and stories were, with few exceptions, marginalized. The human rights discourse e No Human Being is Illegal e developed on the bus ride, was replaced by a discourse of ‘hardworking, tax-paying, play-by-the rules immigrants’, in line with discourses framing the two proposed immigration reform bills then under discussion, the CraigeKennedy farm workers’ bill and the McCaineKennedy immigration bill. While this can be interpreted as a purely strategic move, many Riders found this shift problematic. This division on strategy and rhetoric, between those determined to forge solidarity among all immigrants on the basis of human rights, and those acceding to the neoliberal “tax-paying immigrants” language, plagues the immigrant rights movement to this day (Loyd & Burridge, 2007; Sharpe, 2008). These events and experiences of the Riders after arrival in the centers of power show the importance of socio-spatial power geometries. When inserted into the hegemonic public sphere of the centers of power, the social and political imaginaries developed during the IWFR were marginalized as pre-existing power asymmetries between differently positioned IWFR participants, in particular between union organizers and Riders, asserted themselves. The collective practices of storytelling and generous listening developed in the buses could not be performed in these spaces, where Riders were not granted the space-time such practices require. Conclusion In this paper we have examined how the IWFR, staged by a diverse group of organizations and people, was an important vehicle to articulate, advance, and enact alternative social and political imaginaries promoting social justice and recognition, thus constituting an important event in the forging of a counterpublic. In particular we have shown how space-time and emotions were crucial in this political mobilization and the development of a common political identity as ‘Freedom Riders,’ and a sense of solidarity. The mobility of the IWFR simultaneously enabled a symbolic recreation of the civil rights movement, the localization of the issue of immigrant workers’ rights by forging and/or Author's personal copy K.M. Sziarto, H. Leitner / Political Geography 29 (2010) 381e391 strengthening local alliances, and a scaling up from local actions and alliances to political action at the national scale. Most important in terms of constructing a sense of commonality and solidarity was the space of the buses. Mobile, and capable of connecting the Riders with activists from across their cities and the country, while disconnecting Riders from their everyday lives, the space of the buses allowed for alternative modes of communication and learning, the articulation of alternative visions, and the crafting of solidarity. The time spent together on the bus also allowed Riders to understand their relationships with others in new ways, thus facilitating negotiations across power-knowledge divides, while at the same time sustaining diversity and complexity. Riders’ diverse emotional experiences of grieving, affection, and hope on the bus and at the stops along the route were vital for the construction of this sense of solidarity, and have provided a lasting inspiration for their activism. This suggests that in order to build a movement among diverse groups and individuals, it is necessary to create multiple spaces that allow for alternative inter-personal modes of communication, learning, and articulations of visions. Translocal networking in cyberspace, while an effective tool for organizing particular actions and crafting some kinds of identities, is not a substitute for the lived, embodied experience of personal interaction. We have also learned about the challenges to the alternative visions and solidarity constructed during the bus ride that the Riders encountered as they arrived at their final destinations, revealing power differentials within the movement and unequal geographies of power. The emotions unleashed during the Ride, and Riders’ practices of receptive generosity, enabled them to cope with the physical discomforts of the ride and their frustrations in Washington D.C. and New York. As the IWFR entered these centers of power, the voices and experiences of the Riders were marginalized as members of the lead organizations took the stage. This shift points more generally to the difficulties in negotiating the diversity of interests and identities within alliances, which, as we discuss below, also plagues the new immigrant rights movement. In terms of outcomes, there is no question that the IWFR accomplished its immediate goal of mobilizing highly diverse groups and individuals across the country in support of immigrant rights. Not only the ride, but also the subsequent dispersal of Riders back to their home towns, was an important move in further developing an immigrants’ rights counterpublic. This is evidenced in the formation of numerous local and national civic organizations in support of immigrant and workers’ rights that followed in its aftermath. The organizational infrastructures put in place or further developed in the aftermath of the IWFR and the continued activism of many of the Riders also helped to lay the foundation for the mass mobilization of immigrants and U.S. citizens who peacefully marched in the streets of cities across the U.S. and engaged in walkouts, boycotts, and work-stoppages in spring 2006.8 Unprecedented in American history, these mass demonstrations were not simply contesting the punitive immigration bill, but advocating for justice for immigrants, and supporting legislation allowing undocumented immigrants to regularize their status, thus drawing on the imaginaries furthered by the IWFR. While these activities failed to achieve the desired policy outcome of comprehensive immigration reform, the political space of immigration debates has been expanded through grassroots organizing and collective action at the local and national scale. The immigrant rights movement faces numerous challenges from without and within. The past five years have seen a wave of raids of workplaces and homes of immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detaining and deporting immigrants; anti-immigration ordinances are metastasizing across the U.S. as cities, counties, and states pass laws that attempt to drive 389 and keep out undocumented immigrants by punishing those who employ or rent to individuals who cannot prove their status to the local authorities; and members of the anti-immigrant Minuteman and the Ku Klux Klan are harassing migrant workers. Most recently, the passage of Arizona’s immigration law (Arizona SB1070) criminalizing undocumented immigrants has sparked protests in Arizona and cities across the U.S. to demand the repeal of this law as well as federal immigration reform. This mobilization reminds us that restrictive immigration policies and harassment of immigrants not only create fear and a sense of vulnerability among immigrants, in particular among the undocumented, but also reinvigorate the counterpublic fighting for immigrants’ and workers’ rights. Within the movement, cleavages exist between well-established immigrant organizations focusing on immigrant inclusion through legal rights and grassroots immigrant movements promoting more radical democratic change; between unions and between national unions and their locals; and along racial/ethnic lines (La Botz, 2006; Sharpe, 2008) e again highlighting the difficulties in building alliances among groups with diverse interests, identities, and visions. While these challenges are real, it is important to note that social change always occurs slowly and is rife with conflict and antagonisms. As some commentators have suggested (Hing & Johnson, 2007; Kyriakou, 2006), only time will tell whether the IWFR and the mass demonstrations of 2006 signaled the birth of a new multi-racial civil rights movement that, like its predecessor, contributes to social change through its demands for equality and social justice for all, and its recognition and respect for racial and cultural diversity. From a theoretical and ethico-political perspective we suggest that conceiving of social movements as counterpublics avoids associating social movement spaces, people, and activities with “the fringe,” thereby dismissing them as marginal to the formal political process. Instead, we need to constitute them as legitimate political arenas that can lead us to rethink issues central to democracy and citizenship. The notion of ‘counterpublics’ also serves as a reminder that the various counterhegemonic collectivities to which it refers are always negotiating their relationships to other publics, hegemonic or not. In order to understand such movements as counterpublics, and account for their formation and trajectories, it is important to go beyond the emphasis in the current counterpublic literature on the rhetorical content of counterpublics. We argue, as demonstrated in our case study, that space-time and emotions are crucial in the formation and trajectories of counterpublics. Specifically, we have shown the variegated and interconnected public and private spaces that counterpublics construct, occupy, and claim in their struggle; the importance of distinct, counterhegemonic space-times for formulating oppositional social and political imaginaries of what constitutes a good society and for inserting these into the hegemonic public sphere; and the work emotional geographies do in negotiating across difference within the counterpublic to construct solidarity. Acknowledgments The research that forms the basis of this paper was supported by the Graduate Research Partnership Program of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. We wish to thank Ron Aminzade, Lisa Disch, Eric Sheppard, and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Endnotes 1 Two 1996 pieces of federal legislation restricted legal immigrants’ access to state welfare services. Author's personal copy 390 K.M. Sziarto, H. Leitner / Political Geography 29 (2010) 381e391 2 LexiseNexis was used to search for the term “Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride” in all major U.S. newspapers, as well as major regional U.S. newspapers, for 2001e2005. Over 250 articles were collected and analyzed. 3 For this reason we follow Asen (2000) in omitting ‘subaltern’ from Fraser’s term. 4 Proposition 187, popularly known as the ‘Save Our State’ initiative, was a 1994 California referendum that aimed to bar undocumented immigrants from receiving social services, including education and emergency medical care. Though a U.S. district judge’s injunction blocked enforcement of Prop. 187, its passage indicated the high level of racial and ethnic tension around immigration in California. 5 HERE was joined by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), and Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU). 6 Many of these exercises were from the Bridge curriculum developed by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. 7 The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was merged into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. What was the work of the INS is now handled by Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Border Patrol. 8 These mass actions came on the heels of the passage of the punitive immigration reform bill HR 4437. 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