The union within the union: Filipinos,Mexicans, and the racial integration of the farm worker movement

Throughout the twentieth century, California farm workers endeavored to build viable farm labor unionism. In 1966, Filipino and Mexican farm workers merged their respective farm labor unions, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the National Farm workers Association, which laid the foundational base for the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). The merger constituted a moment of interracial unity, which Filipinos and Mexicans had previously lacked; by 1970 the UFW would negotiate landmark collective bargaining agreements. This article demonstrates how Filipinos and Mexicans resolved deeply rooted racial division and that doing so built a path to successful farm labor mobilization. The study complements previous farm worker scholarship that concentrates on exogenous causal factors of success by drawing focus to endogenous causal factors, particularly racial identity within the movement.     

Early activism and work arrangements of young feminists in Mexico City

The study investigates the relationship between the activism and later work life of young Mexican feminist activists in the context of social movements’ institutionalization and the precarious employment situation. Using the biographical narratives of fifteen feminists in Mexico City who were core activists during the period of high mobilization of the abortion rights movement from 2007 to 2009, this study aims to answer two questions: How does activism impact contemporary activists’ work life in an era of professionalized and institutionalized social movements? And how do their feminist identities and practices differ according to the workplace? The results reveal that (1) young feminists joined women's movement institutions through their activism, although those employment opportunities were unstable, and (2) they used reflexive strategies to manage their feminist identities amidst the uncertainty and to reconcile their work life conditions and their feminist activist identities.     

A Canonical Correlation Analysis of Occupational Mobility Among Mexican Americans*

Studies of occupational mobility have generally ranked occupations on the basis of their socioeconomic status level or prestige component to measure movement between jobs. Two potential problems may limit the usefulness of that approach for racial and ethnic minority groups: (1) the relationship between occupation and socioeconomic status may not be the same as for the majority group, and (2) minority group members are more likely to be clustered at the low end of both socioeconomic and prestige scales. Canonical correlation analysis requires no prior ranking of occupations, so we use it to investigate intergenerational and career mobility among a sample of Mexican Americans. The findings indicate that mobility among Mexican Americans is about as frequent as among the total population, but that the pattern of movement differs considerably. As a result, the relative status of occupations among Mexican Americans has changed over time and, consequently, socioeconomic status scales developed for the total population do not provide accurate assessments of mobility for Mexican Americans. This discrepancy is less noticeable for career mobility, indicating that among the latest generation of Mexican Americans, mobility patterns are becoming more similar to those in the rest of society.     

Debunking Spontaneity: Spain's 15-M/Indignados as Autonomous Movement

The Spanish 15-M/Indignados have drawn global attention for the strength and longevity of their anti-austerity mobilizations. Two features have been highlighted as particularly noteworthy: (1) Their refusal to allow institutional left actors to participate in or represent the movement, framed as a movement of ‘ordinary citizens’ and (2) their insistence on the use of deliberative democratic practices in large public assemblies as a central organizing principle. As with many emergent cycles of protest, many scholars, observers and participants attribute the mobilizations with spontaneity and ‘newness’. I argue that the ability of the 15-M/Indignados to sustain mobilization based on deliberative democratic practices is not spontaneous, but the result of the evolution of an autonomous collective identity predicated on deliberative movement culture in Spain since the early 1980s. My discussion contributes to the literature on social movement continuity and highlights the need for historically grounded analyses that pay close attention to the maintenance and evolution of collective identities and movement cultures in periods of latency or abeyance in order to better understand the rapid mobilization of networks in new episodes of contention.     

Reclaiming,proclaiming, and maintaining collective identity in the #YoSoy132 movement in Mexico: an examination of digital frontstage and backstage activism through social media and instant messaging platforms

This article starts from the recognition that digital social movements studies have progressively disregarded collective identity and the importance of internal communicative dynamics in contemporary social movements, in favour of the study of the technological affordances and the organizational capabilities of social media. Based on a two-year multimodal ethnography of the Mexican #YoSoy132 movement, the article demonstrates that the concept of collective identity is still able to yield relevant insights into the study of current movements, especially in connection with the use of social media platforms. Through the appropriations of social media, Mexican students were able to oppose the negative identification fabricated by the PRI party, reclaim their agency and their role as heirs of a long tradition of rebellion, generate collective identification processes, and find ‘comfort zones’ to lower the costs of activism, reinforcing their internal cohesion and solidarity. The article stresses the importance of the internal communicative dynamics that develop in the backstage of social media (Facebook chats and groups) and through instant messaging services (WhatsApp), thus rediscovering the pivotal linkage between collective identity and internal communication that characterized the first wave of research on digital social movements. The findings point out how that internal cohesion and collective identity are fundamentally shaped and reinforced in the social media backstage by practices of ‘ludic activism’, which indicates that social media represent not only the organizational backbone of contemporary social movements, but also multifaceted ecologies where a new, expressive and humorous ‘communicative resistance grammar’ emerges.     

The New Anti-war Protests and Miscible Mobilizations

This paper analyzes the factors contributing to the relative success of the recent mobilizations against war despite the peace movement organizations' weakness and unfavorable political opportunity structures. I argue that these anti-war protests were shaped by two factors: first, by trigger events which created new grievances and, second, by the use of new information technologies such as the Internet. These factors contributed to what I call miscible mobilizations, or simultaneous mobilization efforts by movements with compatible ideologies and shared activist communities and SMOs. Results from an extensive study of the anti-war protests from September 2001 in the USA support this notion and call attention to the need to develop a synthesis between traditional resource mobilization, political process, and new social movement theories of mobilization and to focus research on the fluid processes of miscible mobilizations.     

Litigating Change? Social Movements and the Court System

Social movement actors increasingly turn to the law and pursue litigation in their efforts to bring about social change. Our article provides an overview of scholarship on collective and politicized litigation, drawing from sociolegal studies, political science, and sociology. We consider scholarship that illuminates why activists turn to litigation tactics in the first place and circumstances in which a social movement litigation strategy can be successful. We also consider additional impacts of movement litigation. Given that social movement researchers in sociology have, to date, paid only limited attention to activist litigation, we encourage scholars in the discipline to investigate further this important form of social movement mobilization.     

Social mobility among migrants between Mexico and the U.S. and within the U.S. labor market

This paper uses data collected in 4 Mexican communities (2 rural and 2 urban) in 1982 and 1983, using a sample of 200 households, plus an additional 25 households. This analysis supports these hypotheses: 1) a U-shaped pattern of occupational mobility exists among migrants to the US; 2) the reversal of the initial downward mobility is positively correlated with the accumulation of experience within the US; and 3) the relative steepness of both legs of the pattern vary across socioeconomic with rural origin, illegal, and poorly educated migrants experiencing the slowest reversal of fortune. The occupational mobility of Mexican migrants to the US has 2 distinct phases: 1) labor market entry and 2) that which occurs within the US labor market. Both phases are characterized by occupational immobility and by migrants' area of origin. Other important findings are 1) the slowness with which upward mobility occurs among migrants on their 1st trip, 2) the dominance of agriculture as an occupational group, and 3) an improvement in mobility prospects with increased US experience for repeat migrants. Immobility for 1st time entrants pervades all occupational categories and is exceptionally high for rural origin migrants in agriculture. Rural origin unskilled workers encounter greater mobility constraints, indicating a rural agricultural worker may accomplish an upward movement to the unskilled category, but the chances of further movement are remote. Upon entering the US, the probability of being employed in agriculture is over 25% for all groups except the unskilled. Adjusting successfully to US society is best accomplished by migrants whose Mexican occupation is professional, technical, skilled, or service or who have carefully timed their migration and have accumulated significant experience in the host society. It is only with exposure to the US society, either through a prolonged stay or many trips, that a migrant can overcome the debilitating effects of a disadvantaged socioeconomic background.     

Making Space at the Nations' Table: Mapping the transformative geographies of the international indigenous peoples' movement

Social movement scholarship has focused increasingly upon the roles played by symbolic resources and movement discourses in the process of social transformation. Current socio-political approaches, often characterized by an excessive focus on movement structure to the exclusion of larger cultural considerations, still struggle to address adequately the process of transmutation from idea to form, from symbolic shift to material change. Through an examination of the international indigenous peoples' movement, this article illustrates the ways that space constitutes a mediating dimension of the transformative processes through which the symbolic potential of movement discourses may be manifested. The alternative spatialities and new geographies generated, deployed and legitimized by this movement have provided critical locations for indigenous peoples to enact the creative work of mobilization. It is argued that incorporating the work of critical geographers into existing sociological and political perspectives will contribute to the better apprehension of these transformative processes as well as those associated with the particularly spatialized phenomena related to globalization, development, nationalism and geopolitics.     

Everyday politics,social practices and movement networks: daily life in Barcelona's social centres

The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non‐activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.     

The Impact of Anti‐Gay Politics on the LGBTQ Movement

Since the late 1970s, the Religious Right has mobilized to oppose the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) movement in the United States. Sociologists have studied the relationship between these two movements as a classic movement‐countermovement dynamic, in which the strategies, actions, and framing of one movement impact the other. I analyze the way Religious Right reactive and proactive opposition to gay rights has affected the LGBTQ movement. First, I provide an overview of the literature on the negative impacts of the Religious Right, including the diversion of movement goals, transformation of frames, and marginalization of queer politics. Second, I examine the way Religious Right activism may increase mobilization.     

Social Movement Rhetoric and the Social Psychology of Collective Action: A Case Study of Anti-Abortion Mobilization

This paper seeks to contribute toward anintegrated approach to social movement mobilization. Itdoes so through considering how a social psychologicalaccount of the determination of collective behavior (self-categorization theory) may be applied tothe mobilization rhetoric of social movements. Morespecifically it argues that as people may definethemselves and act in terms of social categy usefully conceive of social movement rhetoricas being organized so as to construct social categorydefinitions which allow the activists preferred courseof action to be taken on by others. Our theoretical argument is illustrated throughthe detailed analysis of category construction incontemporary U.K. anti-abortion argumentation.     

Mobilization and Meaning: Toward an Integration of Social Psychological and Resource Perspectives on Social Movements*

This paper presents a model of the mobilization of people into movements that is compatible with a resource mobilization perspective on social movement organizations as the unit of analysis, but substitutes a cognitive social psychology based on attribution theory and the sociology of knowledge for the incentive model typically used in this perspective. We focus on the problem, neglected by resource mobilization theorists, of explaining the translation of objective social relationships into subjectively experienced, collectively defined grievances. On a macro level, our model gives independent causal weight to ideology without discounting the role that resources also play in defining group goals. On a social psychological level, we identify three distinct organizational strategies–conversion, coalition, and direct action–for mobilizing persons as participants and examine some cognitive and organizational consequences of each strategy. We conclude that incorporation of a more adequate social psychology of individual participation is not only compatible with the organizational focus and emphasis on rationality of the resource mobilization perspective, but can provide important insights into problems both social movement theorists and social movement organizers see as significant.     

The uncertain connection: free trade and rural Mexican migration to the United States

"Will a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) decrease Mexican migration to the United States, as the U.S. and Mexican governments assert, or increase migration beyond the movement that would otherwise occur, as NAFTA critics allege? This article argues that it is easy to overestimate the additional emigration from rural Mexico owing to NAFTA-related economic restructuring in Mexico. The available evidence suggests four major reasons why Mexican emigration may not increase massively, despite extensive restructuring and displacement from traditional agriculture....NAFTA-related economic displacement in Mexico may yield an initial wave of migration to test the U.S. labor market, but this migration should soon diminish if the jobs that these migrants seek shift to Mexico."     

Social Movement Rhetoric and the Social Psychology of Collective Action: A Case Study of Anti-Abortion Mobilization

This paper seeks to contribute toward anintegrated approach to social movement mobilization. Itdoes so through considering how a social psychologicalaccount of the determination of collective behavior (selfcategorization theory) may be applied tothe mobilization rhetoric of social movements. Morespecifically it argues that as people may definethemselves and act in terms of social categories, we may usefully conceive of social movement rhetoricas being organized so as to construct social categorydefinitions which allow the activists preferred courseof action to be taken on by others as their own. Our theoretical argument is illustrated throughthe detailed analysis of category construction incontemporary U.K. anti-abortion argumentation.     

The Ambiguous Role of Welfare Structures in Relation to the Emergence of Activism Among Disabled People: research evidence from Northern Ireland

The boundary between the disability movement and traditional forms of welfare production, whether in the statutory or voluntary sectors is discussed in this article. Drawing on the resource mobilization paradigm in social movement theory, it discusses the role played by existing welfare structures in the formation of disabled people as activists and in the initial stages of mobilization. The article reports on the findings of interviews with activists in the emerging disability movement in Northern Ireland, a region with a very low level of movement activity. It concludes that in such areas, disabled people often lack the resources to mobilize on their own account and are heavily dependent on formal welfare for the necessary networks and opportunities. Although this can be a significant constraint, it is not necessarily so if these opportunities enable the infant movement associations to grow beyond the welfare settings lying behind their emergence. This is more likely to take place if other supportive factors are in place. Many of the required resources are to be found within more traditional voluntary organisations. Few of these organisations play any role in the process of mobilization. But where mobilization is taking place, they are invariably present.     

Global Civil Society and Ethnic Social Movements in the Contemporary World

Studies on ethnic movements have largely overlooked the global dimensions of ethnic social movements. Drawing on social movement theories and the world culture approach, I argue that linkage to global civil society gives rise to ethnic mobilization because it diffuses models of claim-making based on human rights ideas, while intergovernmental networks suppress ethnic mobilization as they enhance state power and authority. Tobit analyses on violent and nonviolent ethnic mobilizations show that, controlling for domestic factors, linkage to global civil society raises the potential for ethnic social movements, while intergovernmental networks do not have a strong impact on ethnic mobilization.     

Enclave deliberation and social movement mobilization: the DDays in Occupy Central

ABSTRACT

Scholars have called for a synergy between studies of deliberative democracy and social movements for their mutual enhancement. The existing literature generally applies the principle of deliberation to evaluate social movements, but few studies have examined the corresponding practice of deliberative democracy within a movement. The Occupy Central (OCLP) campaign in Hong Kong is a rare case in which the organizers incorporated Deliberation Days into a social movement; however, participant self-selection turned it into an instance of ‘enclave deliberation’. This paper studies the impact of enclave deliberation on social movements based on the case of the OCLP campaign and argues that enclave deliberation can be a powerful tool for mobilization, particularly for gaining public support and for recruiting core participants. However, the coherence and support of the movement can decline when enclave deliberation is used to make decisions for the general public, because enclave deliberation incorporates only a small spectrum of like-minded participants who might not seriously engage with opposing views. The findings of this study imply that enclave deliberation could facilitate mobilization, but it has its inherent limitations for decision-making in a movement. Given the selective nature of social movements, deliberation within social movements is likely to be enclave deliberation in most cases. This study thus has significant implications for the practice of deliberation in social movements in other contexts.     

Mobilizing in transnational space: a social movement approach to the formation of diaspora

Abstract In this article I suggest analysing the formation of diaspora communities as an instance of mobilization processes thereby countering essentialist concepts of diaspora that reify notions of belonging and the‘roots’of migrants in places of origin. Taking the imagination of a transnational community and a shared identity as defining characteristics of diaspora and drawing on constructivist concepts of identity, I argue that the formation of diaspora is not a‘natural’consequence of migration but that specific processes of mobilization have to take place for a diaspora to emerge. I propose that concepts developed in social movement theory can be applied to the study of diaspora communities and suggest a comparative framework for the analysis of the formation of diaspora through mobilization. Empirical material to substantiate this approach is mainly drawn from the Alevi diaspora in Germany but also from South Asian diasporas.     

Lessons from the Niagara Movement: Prosopography and Discursive Protest

This article uses a case study of the Niagara Movement, which functioned from 1905–1910, to demonstrate that the use of prosopography (collective biographies) is a propitious methodological tool, particularly for those interested in the social-psychological analysis of movement actors within networks. I present a prosopography of the founders of the Niagara Movement. Learning more about the identity of political actors provides clues to the ways strategic choices are made and how collective action frames are developed. The prosopography of the Niagara Movement also provides theoretical insights into discursive processes that are often lost in studies of long movement trajectories. I analyze potential explanations for the absence of organizations such as the Niagara Movement from the civil rights canon, and, through an analysis of talk as a resource for mobilization, pinpoint directions for future researchers interested in micro theories of mobilization.