Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement

Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!

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 special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu.

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.

   p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-02820-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-32281-2 (retail e-book)

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

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

d_r1

We are multitudes. No conocemos las fronteras.

Contents

Foreword by Manuel Castells

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Introduction: ¡Escucha! ¡Escucha! ¡Estamos en la Lucha!

1    A Day Without an Immigrant: Social Movements and the Media Ecology

2    Walkout Warriors: Transmedia Organizing

3    MacArthur Park Melee: From Spokespeople to Amplifiers

4    APPO-LA: Translocal Media Practices

5    Worker Centers, Popular Education, and Critical Digital Media Literacy

6    Out of the Closets, Out of the Shadows, and Into the Streets: Pathways to Participation in DREAM Activist Networks

7    Define American, The Dream is Now, and FWD.us: Professionalization and Accountability in Transmedia Organizing

Conclusions

Appendix A: Research Methodology

Appendix B: Interviewees

Appendix C: Interview Guide

Appendix D: Online Resources for Organizers

Notes

Index

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 institutionalized 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 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, institutional, 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 naïve 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 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 cyberspace 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 precision 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 epicenter in Los Angeles. He studied this movement between 2006 and 2013, beginning with his participation in the Border Social Forum, where the new realities of immigration were debated. Through a commitment to methods of participatory research, he partnered with organizers and activists from the immigrant rights movement, and worked with them as codesigners and coinvestigators in a range of popular communication initiatives. This courageous strategy of engaged scholarship allowed him to see the specific, sometimes contradictory effects of different communication processes in the dynamics of the movement. For example, he identified the centrality of critical digital literacy in grassroots social mobilization. In a world in which the fight for one’s rights can be shaped decisively by one’s ability to use the new means of communication, it is crucial to equalize access to the direct use of communication technologies by grassroots actors. By developing digital literacy, the movement can raise consciousness as well as find better uses for digital tools as they are adapted to movement goals. Otherwise the inevitable professionalization of transmedia organizers leads to the formation of a technical leadership that does not necessarily coincide with the leadership emerging from the grassroots.

The close analysis of these and related processes presented in the pages of this fascinating book is of utmost importance for understanding the new, networked social movements of the Internet age, as well as the potential of new communication technologies to broaden citizen participation in institutional decision making. In the midst of a widespread crisis of legitimacy faced by governments around the world, understanding these processes is crucial for activists, concerned citizens, open-minded officials, and scholars everywhere. This book engages us in a fascinating intellectual and political journey. It raises, and often solves, many of the questions now being asked about networked social movements. It is based on impeccable scholarship, in which the author’s commitment to the defense of immigrant rights does not impinge on the integrity of his observation and analysis. This is social research as it best: when normative values are not denied by a detached academic but are served by investigative imagination and theoretical capacity, yielding an accurate assessment of the ways and means of the new world in the making.

Author’s Note

The author will donate half of the royalties from the sale of this book to the Mobile Voices project. Mobile Voices (VozMob) is a platform for immigrant and/or low-wage workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. VozMob appropriates technology to create power in our communities and achieve greater participation in the digital public sphere. More information can be found at http://vozmob.net.

Acknowledgments

This book owes everything to those who struggle on a daily basis to build beloved community in the immigrant rights movement and beyond. First, grácias a María de Lourdes González Reyes, Manuel Mancía, Adolfo Cisneros, Crispín Jimenez, Marcos and Diana, Alma Luz, Ranferi, and the Popular Communication Team of VozMob.net. Your stories continue to travel around the world, providing insight and inspiration to everyone they touch. You are truly leyendo la realidad para escribir la historia. Amanda Garces, you taught me so much; it’s incredible to look back and see how far we came together. Thanks also to the tireless efforts of Raul Añorve, Marlom Portillo, Neidi Dominguez, Brenda Aguilera, Natalie Arellano, Luis Valentín, Pedro Joel Espinosa, and the whole IDEPSCA extended family. I feel honored to have been able to spend time building community with you. It’s been a true journey through difficult times, pero llena de amor, respeto, and also delicious food. Thank you for exploring participatory research and design, together with Carmen Gonzales, Melissa Brough, Charlotte Lapsansky, Cara Wallis, Veronica Paredes, Ben Stokes, François Bar, Troy Gabrielson, Mark Burdett, and Squiggy Rubio.

Thanks are also due to Virginia, Cristina, Cruz, Miguel, Consuelo, and everyone who participated in Radio Tijera, as well as to Marissa Nuncio, Delia Herrera, Luz Elena Henao, Kimi Lee, simmi gandi, and all the incredible past and present organizers at the Garment Worker Center. Danny Park, Eileen Ma, and Joyce Yang, thank you for hosting the CineBang! screenings and for providing a welcoming space at Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance. Odilia and Berta at the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales, and Max Mariscal: I still think about the taste of tamales y atole during APPO-LA protests and screenings at the Mexican consulate.

To Victor Narro, Saba Waheed, Stefanie Ritoper, Nancy Meza, and everyone at the UCLA Labor Center, I love the community you have created, and I hope to spend more time working, visioning, and playing with you. Nancy, thank you for providing feedback, encouragement, and insightful comments in the margins of my messy draft chapters. Ken Montenegro, Erik Huerta, and Maegan La Mamita Mala Ortiz: thanks for helping me sharpen my prose. You made me condense key arguments to 140 characters during our ongoing #twitternovela! Celso Mireles, I hope to see you again soon among red rocks; thanks to you and to the rest of the UndocuTech crew.

A big shoutout to Dorothy Kidd, Evan Henshaw-Plath, Biella Coleman, Mako, Luz y Timo Ruíz, Pablo Ortellado, Gaba, Mark Burdett, Jeff Perlstein, Marisa Jahn, Micha Cárdenas, and all those who I first met in the Indymedia network. You’ve transformed my life forever. To Bob McChesney, Joe Torres, and Free Press, thank you for supporting me to work with Seán Ó Siochrú, Bruce Girard, and so many other scholar/activists in the campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society. Big up to Media Justice visionaries Malkia Cyril, Amalia Deloney, Betty Yu, Steven Renderos, Andrea Quijada, Josh Breitbart, Kat Aaron, Shivaani Selvaraj, Adrienne Marie Brown, Pete Tridish, Graciela Sánchez, Myoung Joon Kim, Tammy Ko Robinson, Dalida María Benfield, and so many more. I have massive love for the Allied Media Projects Board: Emi Kane, Chancellor Williams, Hannah Sassaman, and Dani McClain; also for AMP staff Jenny Lee, Diana Nucera, and Mike Medow. You keep me focused on liberation, creativity, and transformative struggle.

Huge thanks are due to Marguerite Avery, my editor at MIT Press, whose vision of open access to knowledge I share. Margy successfully advocated in support of my desire to release this book under a creative commons license. I’m looking forward to the fruits of your plans to guide book publishers into the future—gently, if possible, but kicking and screaming if necessary! Thank you for believing in this project, from our first conversations onward. Let’s meet at Voltage soon to plan our next collaboration.

Special thanks to Deborah M. Cantor-Adams and Marjorie Pannell at the MIT Press, who helped shepherd the manuscript to publication with meticulous edits; to Ana and Michael Prosetti, who provided excellent transcription services; and to Naomi Linzer, who prepared the index.

I am thrilled to have found a home at MIT in the Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing. My colleagues have been deeply supportive, especially T. L. Taylor and Jim Paradis, who have both been unerring guides, mentors, and advocates for an unconventional junior scholar. T. L. and Jim also provided detailed and very valuable feedback on the manuscript, as did Otto Santa Ana, Virginia Eubanks, Nancy Meza, Chris Schweidler, and several anonymous readers from the MIT Press.

CMS/W faculty and staff, including William Uricchio, Vivek Bald, Fox Harrell, Nick Montfort, Ian Condry, Heather Hendershot, Junot Díaz, Helen Elaine Lee, Thomas Levenson, Kenneth Manning, Seth Mnookin, David Thorburn, Jing Wang, and Ed Schiappa, as well as Kurt Fendt, Sarah Wolozin, Scot Osterweil, Philip Tan, Andrew Whitacre, Susan Tresch Fienberg, Jill Janows, Mike Rapa, Becky Shepardson, Jessica Tatlock, Patsy Baudoin, Federico Casalegno, Jessica Dennis, Sarah Smith, Shannon Larkin, and Karinthia Louis, have created a welcoming space for deep discussion and debate around the questions that animate this book.

It was a pleasure to work closely with Rogelio Alejandro Lopez, who conducted a series of interviews with immigrant rights activists for this project and also for his own work. Rogelio’s master’s thesis, a comparative study of media practices in the farm workers movement and the immigrant youth movement, shaped my thinking about transmedia organizing as an approach that has been used throughout social movement history. I have also greatly enjoyed discussing the dynamics of media, publicity, and hidden resistance with Sun Huan, the history of consensus process and prefigurative politics with Charlie De Tar, networked social movements with Pablo Rey Mazón, and collaborative design with Aditi Mehta.

Dan Schultz egged me on to keep pushing the limits; I still insist he’s a dead ringer for Guy Fawkes. Joi Ito had me covered when there was blowback, and I can’t say more in public.

Thanks also to the brilliant and hardworking crew at the Center for Civic Media, especially Ethan Zuckerman, whose tweets urged me across the finish line, as well as Lorrie LeJeune, Rahul Bhargava, Ed Platt, Becky Hurwitz, and Andrew Whitacre. I am constantly amazed at the breadth and depth of knowledge across the Civic community. I have only one question for brilliant graduate students and fellows Chelsea Barabas, Willow Brugh, Denise Cheng, Heather Craig, Kate Darling, Rodrigo Davies, Ali Hashmi, Alexis Hope, Catherine d'Ignazio, Nick Grossman, Alexandre Goncalves, Erhardt Graeff, Nathan Matias, Chris Peterson, Molly Sauter, Sun Huan, Rogelio Alejandro Lopez, Matt Stempeck, Wang Yu, and Jude Mwenda Ntabathia: What does the fox say?

Bex Hurwitz, you’ve been an excellent partner in crime; it has been truly fabulous to work with you to develop theory and practice around collaborative design. I’m looking forward to many RAD projects to come!

Early stages of work on research that made its way into this book were supported by research assistantships with Manuel Castells, Ernest J. Wilson, François Bar, Holly Willis, and Jonathan Aronson, as well as by grants from the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition, the USC Graduate School Fellowship in Digital Scholarship, the Social Science Research Council Large Collaborative Grants program, and an Annenberg Center for Communication Graduate Fellowship. More recently, my research has been supported by John Bracken at the Knight Foundation, Archana Sahgal at the Open Society Foundations, and Luna Yasui at the Ford Foundation’s Advancing LGBT Rights Initiative.

Manuel Castells guided me during the earliest stages of this project, and continually urged me, with a twinkle in his eye, to struggle for liberation in the institutions, on the net, and in the streets. Ivan Tcherepnin taught me how to listen to the universe, and first turned me on to the political economy of communication. Silke Roth introduced me to social movement studies, Dorothy Kidd gave me hope that scholars could stay linked to movements, and Dee Dee Halleck inspired me with handheld visions. Steve Anderson pushed me to develop a practice of scholarly multimedia. Larry Gross, mentor and friend since we first met at the University of Pennsylvania, encouraged me to take up the path of engaged scholarship. This book would not exist if it weren’t for him.

My parents, Carol Chock, Paul Mazzarella, Peter Costanza, and Barbara Zimbel, always inspired me to dream of another possible world, and to take action to make it real. We have to make it happen, not least for my tiny niece, Colette Miele. Larissa, I love you; Grandpa Jack and Grandma Brunni, I miss you.

I could never have completed this book without the love, support, and sharp editorial eye of my partner, Chris Schweidler. Chris helped me shape this book from its earliest incarnation onward. Thank you for helping me finally push it out into the world! Among the boulder piles of Joshua Tree, the otherworldly red rock formations of Sedona, and the limitless skies of Abiquiú, you have guided me toward a new understanding of love and liberation. I want to walk beside you always.

As this book goes to press, President Obama has deported two million people. The immigrant rights movement is mobilizing across the country to demand an end to deportations and meaningful immigration policy reform. Yet the so-called comprehensive immigration reform bills that Congress is debating begin with $46 billion for the deadly political theater of border militarization: more walls, drones, and Border Patrol agents; more deaths, detentions, and deportations. In the face of such cruel absurdity, I only hope that this book can contribute in some small way to the long struggle for freedom of movement, social justice, and respect for the planet on which we all live and move, born sin patrón y sin fronteras.¹

Introduction: ¡Escucha! ¡Escucha! ¡Estamos en la Lucha!

"¡Escucha! ¡Escucha! ¡Estamos en la lucha!" (Listen! Listen! We are in the struggle!) The sound of tens of thousands of voices chanting in unison booms and echoes down the canyon walls formed by office buildings, worn-down hotels, garment sweatshops, and recently renovated lofts along Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. The date is May 1, 2006, and I am marching as an ally along with more than a million people from working-class immigrant families, mostly Latin@. We are pouring into the streets at the peak of a mobilization wave that began in March and swept rapidly across the United States, grew to massive proportions in major metropolitan areas such as Chicago, New York, L.A., Philadelphia, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, and reached much smaller towns and cities in every state. The trigger was the draconian Sensenbrenner bill, H.R. 4437. The bill would have criminalized more than 11 million undocumented people and those who work with them, including teachers, health care workers, legal advocates, and other service providers.¹ The movement’s demands quickly expanded beyond stopping the Sensenbrenner bill and grew to encompass an end to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, a fair and just immigration reform, and, more broadly, respect, dignity, and the recognition that immigrants are human beings.

Another chant begins to build: "¡No somos cinco, no somos cien! ¡Prensa vendida, cuentenos bien! (We aren’t five, we aren’t one hundred! Sold-out press, count us well!) While the Spanish-language media played a crucial role in supporting the mobilizations, the unprecedented magnitude of the marches caught the English-language media by surprise. Major English-language newspapers, television and radio networks, blogs, and online media outlets only belatedly acknowledged the sheer scale of the movement. Some, in particular right-wing talk radio and Fox News, used the marches as an opportunity to launch xenophobic attacks against immigrant workers, filled with vitriolic language about swarms of illegal aliens, anchor babies, and diseased Mexicans."² A forest of dishes and antennae bristles from the backs of TV network satellite trucks that line the streets near City Hall. As the crowd passes the Fox News truck, the consigna (chant) changes again, becoming simple and direct: "¡Mentirosos! ¡Mentirosos!" (Liars! Liars!)

Emerging from Broadway into the open area around City Hall, I feel a powerful emotional wave course through the air. As a committed social justice activist as well as an engaged scholar and media-maker, I’ve been to many protests before. Often, these are composed of the same relatively small group of familiar faces. The wave of historic mobilizations against the Iraq War in 2003 is the last time I can remember being surrounded by literally hundreds of thousands of people, many of them marching in the streets for the first time in their lives, joined in a broad coalition by shared demands.³ "¡Se ve, se siente, el Pueblo esta presente!" (You can see it, you can feel it, the people are here!) For decades, modern social movements have aimed to capture mass media attention as a crucial component of their efforts to transform society.⁴ Those who marched over and over again for immigrant rights during the spring of 2006 did so in large part to fight for increased visibility and voice in the political process, and they explicitly demanded that the English-language press accurately convey the movement’s size, message, and power. Yet over the course of the last twenty years, widespread changes in our communications system have deeply altered the relationship between social movements and the media. Following the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which eliminated national caps on media ownership and allowed a single company to own multiple stations in the same market, the broadcast industry was swept by a wave of consolidation.⁵ Spanish-language radio and TV stations, once localized to individual cities, built significant market share, attracted major corporate advertisers, and were largely integrated into national and transnational conglomerates.⁶ This process delinked Spanish-language broadcasters from local programming and advertisers while simultaneously constructing new, shared pan-Latin@ identities.⁷

In the 2006 mobilizations, Spanish-language print media, television, and radio stations provided extensive coverage, and also played a critical role in calling people to the streets. The massive demonstrations underscored not only the power of the Latin@ working class but also the growing clout of commercial Spanish-language media inside the United States.⁸ At the same time, the rise of widespread, if still unequal, access to the Internet and to digital media literacy provided new spaces for social movement participants to document and circulate their own struggles.⁹ Movements, including the immigrant rights movement, have rapidly taken to blogging, participatory journalism, and social media.¹⁰ Some immigrant rights activists, who recognize these changes while remaining wary of the exclusion of large segments of their communities from the digital public sphere, struggle for expanded access to critical digital media literacy. They also strive to better integrate participatory media into daily movement practices. Others, uncomfortable with the loss of message control, resist the opening of social movement communication to a greater diversity of voices. This book, based on seven years of experience with participatory research, design, and media-making within the immigrant rights movement, explores these transformations in depth.

A Book Born on the Border

This book was born on the southern side of an invisible line in the sand between Texas and Chihuahua. At the Border Social Forum in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, between October 12 and 15, 2006, almost one thousand activists, organizers, and researchers gathered for three days. We met to build a stronger transnational activist network against the militarization of borders and for freedom of movement and immigrant rights. I traveled to the Border Social Forum to connect with immigrant rights organizers who were enthusiastic about integrating digital media tools and skills into their work. Many were based in L.A., and after the forum was over, we followed up to meet and develop projects together. Over the next few years I worked with organizers from the Los Angeles Garment Worker Center, the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations, the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance, and other immigrant rights groups and networks. Together we developed workshops, tools, and strategies to build the media capacity of the immigrant rights movement in L.A.

These movement-based media experiences provided the foundation for my understanding of the core issues addressed in this book. Working with community organizers inspired me to undertake research that might help movement participants, organizers, and scholars better understand the shifting relationship between the media system and social movements. I participated in or led more than one hundred hands-on media workshops using popular education and participatory design approaches, conducted forty formal semistructured interviews, took part in dozens of actions and mobilizations, and assembled an archive of media produced by the movement. Some of the research that led to this book took place in partnership with community-based organizations (CBOs), some did not. A full description of the methods I employed can be found in the appendixes to this book.

In general, my work falls under the rubric of participatory research, a term subsuming a set of methods that emphasize the development of communities of shared inquiry and transformative action.¹¹ In other words, I consider the groups and individuals I work with to be coresearchers and codesigners, rather than simply subjects of research or test users. As an engaged scholar, media-maker, and technologist, I have used these methods to work with youth organizers, the global justice