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Se ve, se siente: transmedia mobilization in the Los Angeles immigrant rights movement

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SE VE, SE SIENTE: TRANSMEDIA MOBILIZATION IN THE
LOS ANGELES IMMIGRANT RIGHTS MOVEMENT

by

Sasha Costanza-Chock
________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Sasha Costanza-Chock

ii
COPYRIGHT

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Copyright: Creative Commons By-Nc-Sa 3.0, Sasha Costanza-Chock, 2010

iii
DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to Christine Schweidler, my partner, best friend, true home,
and companion. I love you.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I could never have completed this dissertation without the love, help, and support of
my partner, Christine Schweidler. She read and edited numerous proposals, drafts, and
chapters, guided me past bouts of paralysis, and helped me sharpen and refine my
arguments. In the remote mountains of Northern California, the crowded streets of Saigon,
and on the shores of Southwestern México, somehow she always found a way to provide
encouragement, reassurance, and perspective.
My parents, Carol Chock, Paul Mazzarella, Peter Costanza, and Barbara Zimbel,
have always inspired me to dream of a better world and to find a way to reach for that
dream. They all encouraged me to complete the Ph.D., and they were right. I am truly
blessed to be able to count on all of them, and on my sisters and brother, Larissa, Kate, and
Brian.
I am deeply grateful to the members of my dissertation committee. Manuel Castells
helped me formulate the project and design the research, and provided valuable feedback on
multiple drafts of each chapter. I have learned a great deal from him about how to develop
and use theory within social movement research. Not least, I have benefited from his sense
of humor and optimism in the face of too-often depressing data about the crises that
humanity visits upon itself and planet Earth. Larry Gross has been a mentor and friend
since we first met at the University of Pennsylvania, and has constantly encouraged me to
grow as an engaged scholar. He has been impossibly generous with his time, and the
dissertation owes a huge debt to his willingness to engage in ad-hoc meetings to discuss
broad themes, minutae, or really, anything under the sun. Steve Anderson inspired me to
develop a practice of scholarly multimedia, and to do so even if it means forging ahead
v
while the University plays catch-up. When they finally do, it will be because of his tireless
efforts to drag them into the 21
st
century.
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 committed to struggle, and
Dee Dee Halleck inspired me with hand held visions. Shivaani Selvaraj showed me the
power of organizing in community.
This project owes much to everyone who has been part of Indymedia, where I
learned about comunicación popular and Free Software; to the campaign for
Communication Rights in the Information Society, where I learned about the rich history of
ICT activism; and to the visionaries of the Media Justice network, who kept me focused on
how all of this can be part of a broader transformative vision.
USC Annenberg has been an amazing environment in which to work, learn, and
grow. The faculty and doctoral student body - especially my cohort - is full of brilliant,
supportive people. Thanks especially to Travers Scott, Deborah Hanan, Joyee Chatterjee,
Jade Miller, Lauren Movius, Steven Rafferty, Don Waisanen, Drew Margolin, Cindy
Shen, Helen Wang, Jae Eun Chung, and Shawna Kelly. Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser
helped me at an early stage of this project and in the quals process, and helped me gain
greater depth of theoretical understanding. Professor François Bar guided me, hopefully
with some degree of success, towards conceptual precision. Jonathan Aronson created a
richly interdisciplinary space at the Annenberg Center, where initial seeds of this project
were planted. Holly Willis and everyone at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy created a
wonderfully supportive space for my own praxis of digital media and scholarship. I am
deeply grateful to Dean Ernest J. Wilson, who supported my work, made me approach my
vi
research topic from new directions, and challenged me to think more broadly about the
policy implications.
My ability to work on this dissertation was supported at different stages 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 University of Southern California Graduate School
Fellowship in Digital Scholarship, the Social Science Research Council Large Collaborative
Grants program, and an Annenberg Center for Communication Graduate Fellowship.
Ana and Michael Prosetti helped with transcription.
I have to end with heartfelt thanks to all those in the movement community who
shared valuable time, skills, insights, stories, and friendship with me during the last few
years, starting with Virginia, Cristina, Cruz, Miguel, Consuelo, and everyone who
participated in El Proyecto de Radio / Radio Tijeras. Thanks also to simmi gandi, Delia
Herrera, Luz Elena Henao, Kimi Lee, and all the incredible organizers at the Garment
Worker Center. Madelou Lourdes Gonzales, Manuel Mancía, Adolfo Cisneros, Crispín
Jimenez, Marcos & Diana, Alma Luz, Ranferi, and all the community corresponsales of
VozMob.net: may your stories travel far and wide to melt the icy hearts of the anti-
inmigrantes. I have no doubt it will happen, thanks to the tireless efforts of Amanda
Garces, Natalie Arellano, Raul Añorve, Marlom Portillo, Neidi Dominguez, and the whole
IDEPSCA extended family, who constantly fight for justice while always remaining
grounded by love. Carmen Gonzales, Melissa Brough, Cara Wallis, Ben Stokes, François
Bar, Mark Burdett, Veronica Paredes, Brenda Aguilera, Troy Gabrielson, and everyone
else who has been part of VozMob, I feel privileged to have had the chance to try to
develop a practice of community engaged research and action together with you. Danny
vii
Park, Eileen Ma, and Joyce Yang at KIWA, thank you for sharing your space for the
CineBang! screening series and for welcoming Chris and I into the KIWA community.
Odilia and Berta at FIOB, and Max Mariscal and everyone from APPO-LA, keep the
tequio strong. Social justice has never tasted better than tamales y atole outside the Mexican
consulate.
As I prepare to defend this dissertation, the immigrant rights movement is
mobilizing across the country against SB1070, a harsh new anti-immigrant law signed by
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. The Obama administration has signaled its opposition to the
law, and indicated that it plans to introduce a new ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ bill
into Congress in 2010, but the bill begins with massive spending for the deadly political
theater of new border walls, expensive surveillance technologies, and more border patrol
agents. I only hope that this research may prove useful in the long struggle for freedom of
movement, justice for all human beings, and respect for the planet on which we live. ¡Si Se
Puede!

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COPYRIGHT ii

DEDICATION iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv

LIST OF TABLES xii

LIST OF FIGURES xiii

ABSTRACT xv

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
Genesis and goals of the project 3
Chapter overview 5
Research Approach 6
Research question 6
Analytical Framework 7
The Social Shaping of Technology 9
Methods 12
Communication for Social Change 12
Workshops 15
Interviews 15
Field recordings 16
Movement Media 16
Limitations of the research approach 17

CHAPTER TWO: SITE, CASE, AND CONTEXT 19
Unit of analysis 20
Intersectionality 21
Site: Los Angeles 22
Immigrant labor in Los Angeles 22
Garment Work 25
Day Labor 28
Organized immigrant workers 29
Context: digital inequality 33
Global 33
ix
Nationwide 36
California 41
Los Angeles 48
Access: Digital Youth? 54
Site, Case, and Context: Summary 58

CHAPTER THREE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE MEDIA
OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURE 60
Media opportunity structure: theoretical framework 61
Critical Political Economy of Communication 62
Citizen Media 1.0 66
Critical political economy of Web 2.0 68
Autonomist theory 71
Composition of the media opportunity structure for the immigrant rights
movement in Los Angeles 72
Lack of access to mainstream media 73
Ethnic media 75
The continued importance of radio 79
Social and mobile media 80
Real-time social movement media 83
Composition of the media opportunity structure: summary 84
Media opportunity structure: The Sensenbrenner Bill and the Walkouts 85
The Walkouts 88
Appropriation of MySpace 90
The media opportunity structure and the Sensenbrenner Bill: summary 95
Media opportunity structure: Macarthur Park 95
From spokesman to aggregator, curator, and amplifier 102
The media opportunity structure and Macarthur Park: summary 108
Aftermath 109
Media opportunity structure: Conclusions 110

CHAPTER FOUR: TRANSMEDIA MOBILIZATION 113
Transmedia mobilization: theoretical framework 114
Transmedia mobilization and social movements 116
Transmedia mobilization practices 120
Make media, make trouble 121
Transmedia mobilization and cultural solidarity 123
Hubs of transmedia mobilization 124
Media bridging work: Indymedia Los Angeles 125
Broadcast and social media combined: The Basta Dobbs campaign 127
Mass media or popular communication? 129
“How do we deal with a thousand people producing media for us?” 130
Transmedia mobilization: The FIOB and APPO-LA 131
APPO-LA 139
Transmedia mobilization: Walkout! 145
x
Transmedia mobilization: conclusions 149

CHAPTER FIVE: THE PRAXIS OF DIGITAL MEDIA LITERACY 153
Praxis of digital media literacy: theoretical framework 154
The growth of read-write digital media literacy 155
Praxis of digital media literacy: informal learning, key sites, and barriers 157
Informal learning 158
Key sites: computer labs, universities, schools, and home 160
Barriers to the praxis of digital media literacy 161
Resources 162
Strange new tools 163
Generational divide 165
Moral panic 166
Vision 168
Praxis of digital media literacy: the MIWON network 169
Garment Worker Center (GWC) 171
Radio Tijeras 173
Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA) 177
Vozmob (Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices) 179
Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA) 183
Praxis of digital media literacy: AB540 students and DREAM Act organizing 186
Flow of tools and skills across movement formations 193
Peer-to-peer learning: PR skills 194
Coming out as undocumented on Facebook 195
Praxis of digital media literacy: conclusions 196

CHAPTER SIX: MOVEMENT STRUCTURE 200
Movement structure: theoretical framework 201
Horizontalism 203
Social movement professionalization: the revolution will not be funded 205
Movement structure: horizontal logics 208
Horizontalists 209
The political and cultural logic of the tequio 211
Anarchogeeks 213
Being on the outside can move new initiatives 216
Volunteers & Staff 218
Creating space 220
Movement structure: vertical logics 221
Professionalization 221
Social media strategists 223
Social media as underpaid labor in the NPIC 225
Capacity building 225
Controlling Funders 228
Social practices of sharing 229
Top-down Tweets: social media as a broadcast tool 231
xi
Taking Credit: “Who gets the credit for this?” 233
Structure: “I cannot believe he just said that.” 234
Fear of Haters 235
Blurring the personal and professional 236
Digital culture 236
Movement structure: The Fast for Our Future 238
Digital Solidarity 240
FFOF: the role of leadership 246
Movement structure: conclusions 247

CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSIONS 252
Summary of findings 253
Revised analytical model 260
Knowledge gaps 262
Implications for social movements 265
Analysis of the media opportunity structure 266
Transmedia mobilization strategy 267
The praxis of digital media literacy 268
Horizontal movement structures 269

BIBLIOGRAPHY 273

APPENDICES 289
Appendix 1: Partial List of Movement Actors Connected to the Study 289
Appendix 2: Interviewees 291
Appendix 3: Interview guide 292

xii
LIST OF TAB LES

Table 1: Low wage workers, respondent characteristics, L.A. County, 2008 23

Table 2: Computer and Internet use, California 43

Table 3: Activities online, California 44

Table 4: California’s Digital Divide, 2009 46

Table 5: Demographics of Teen Content Creators, 2006 57

xiii
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Analytical model of social movements and media 7

Figure 2: Minimum wage violations by gender, nativity, and legal status,
L.A. County, 2008 25

Figure 3: Garment Workers in L.A. County, 1990-2004 27

Figure 4: Persons using Broadband in the home by Race, 2007-2009 37

Figure 5: Persons using Broadband in the Home by Family Income, 2007-2009 38

Figure 6: %Online and Level of Internet Involvement, by Race 39

Figure 7: %Hispanics Online, by Language Proficiency and Nativity 39

Figure 8: % Hispanics Offline, by Key Characteristics 40

Figure 9: Californians with Broadband at Home 42

Figure 10: % Households Without Internet vs. % Online Community, 2007 48

Figure 11: Selected ICT access indicators by census tract, 2006 50

Figure 12: Estimated Percent Adults Owning Cellular Phone, 2006 51

Figure 13: Composite Technology Index, 2006 52

Figure 14: Composite SES Index vs. Composite Technology Index, 2006 53

Figure 15: Mayday 2006 in Los Angeles 86

Figure 16: Spring 2006 Walkout flyers 90

Figure 17: Anti-HR4437 MySpace Groups 93

Figure 18: MySpace profile pictures and display names changed in political protest 93

Figure 19: AIM discussion of 2007 walkout, posted to MySpace user’s wall 94

Figure 20: Graphic from MIWON flyer for May Day 2007 97
xiv
Figure 21: Fox News coverage of Mayday 2007, reposted to YouTube 99

Figure 22: Macarthur Park May Day images posted to LA Indymedia 100

Figure 23: Mouse-follow text from MIWON site, 2007 107

Figure 24: 2501 Migrants 136

Figure 25: Stills from “La Toma de Los Medios en Oaxaca” 140

Figure 26: Brad Will 141

Figure 27: APPO LA 143

Figure 28: Promotional image for the HBO film Walkout 146

Figure 29: MySpace wall post re: walkout film and walkouts 147

Figure 30: MySpace Walkout wall post 148

Figure 31: MIWON mural 170

Figure 32: Image of Discos Volantes 174

Figure 33: Building the transmitter for Radio Tijeras 175

Figure 34: VozMob 181

Figure 35: VozMob workshop 181

Figure 36: DREAM Act social media tools 188

Figure 37: RISE movement Flickr photostream 241

Figure 38: RISE movement YouTube Channel 242

Figure 39: Revised analytical model of social movements and media 261
xv
ABSTRACT

This project examines transmedia mobilization in the immigrant rights movement in
Los Angeles. Utilizing semi-structured interviews, participatory workshops, and rich media
archives, this analysis provides an in-depth view of the communication strategies, tools,
and skills used by immigrant workers, students, and movement allies of many different
backgrounds who live, struggle, and organize in streets, homes, workplaces, and
community centers throughout the city. The research employs Communication for Social
Change methods to help movement actors articulate their media and technology goals,
analyze their most important obstacles, and develop a stronger praxis of digital media
literacy. The goal of this project is to understand the conditions under which social
movements successfully use networked communication to strengthen movement identity,
win political and economic victories, and transform consciousness. The key findings of this
analysis suggest that effective use is possible when the media opportunity structure
provides openings, movement formations engage in transmedia mobilization, the movement
develops a praxis of digital media literacy, and movement formations shift from top-down
structures of communicative practice to horizontal, participatory structures that include their
social base. The project contributes to social movement theory and practice as well as to the
political economy of communication.
1
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

“¡Se ve! ¡Se siente! ¡El pueblo esta presente!” (“You can see it, you can feel it, the
people are here!”) The sound 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 1st, 2006, and millions of people from working class immigrant families,
mostly Latino/a, are pouring into the streets at the peak of a mobilization wave that began in
March and swept rapidly through towns and cities across the United States. The trigger for
the mass mobilization was the draconian Sensenbrenner bill, H.R. 4437, a Republican
proposal to Congress which would have criminalized 11 million undocumented people as
well as those who work with them to provide education, health care, legal counsel, and
other services. The movement’s demands soon expanded beyond stopping Sensenbrenner
and grew to encompass an end to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, fair
and just immigration reform, and more broadly, respect, dignity, and recognition by Anglo
society that immigrant workers 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 100, sold-out press, count us well!”) The
magnitude of the marches was unprecedented, and caught most sectors of the English
language media by surprise. Major English language newspapers, TV, and radio networks,
as well as blogs and online media, only belatedly acknowledged the sheer scale of the
movement. Some of these outlets, 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
2
“diseased Mexicans.”
1
Lining the streets near City Hall, a forest of dishes and antennae
bristle from the backs of TV network satellite trucks. As the crowd passes the Fox News
truck, the consigna (chant) changes again, becoming simple and direct: “¡Mentirosos!
¡Mentirosos!” (“Liars! Liars!”)
For decades, modern social movements have aimed to capture media attention as a
crucial component of their attempts to transform society. Those who marched over and over
again during the spring of 2006 did so in large part to fight for increased visibility and
voice in the political process, and they made explicit demands that the English language
mass media accurately convey the movement’s size, message, and power. Yet during the
last two decades, widespread changes in the communication 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.
2
Spanish-language radio and television stations, once localized to
individual cities, built significant market share, attracted major corporate advertisers, and
were largely integrated into national and transnational communication conglomerates.
3
This
process delinked Spanish broadcasters from local programming and advertisers, while
simultaneously constructing new shared pan-Latino identities.
4
In the 2006 mobilizations,
Spanish language print, television, and radio stations participated directly in calling people
to the streets, in a demonstration not only of the power of the Latino working class but also
of the growing clout of commercial, ‘pan-Latino’ Spanish language media inside the United
States. At the same time, the rise of social media, participatory journalism, and the

1
Chavez, 2008; Huang, 2008
2
McChesney, 1999
3
Albarran, 2007
4
Dávila, 2001
3
‘read/write web’
5
provide new spaces for social movement actors to circulate their own
struggles, and new real-time tactical tools for mobilization. Some movement actors,
recognizing these changes and yet cognizant of the exclusion of large segments of their
social base from the digital public sphere, are taking bold steps to expand their access to
digital media tools and skills. They are also struggling to better integrate digital media into
daily movement practices. Others, uncomfortable with the loss of message control, resist
the opening of movement communication to a greater diversity of voices. This dissertation,
based on three years of research and participation in the immigrant rights movement,
explores these transformations in depth.
Genesis and goals of the project
The genesis of this project can be traced to the Southern side of an invisible line in
the desert. At the Border Social Forum in Ciudad Juarez, México, between October 12th
and 15th, 2006, almost one thousand activists and organizers from the U.S. and México
gathered for three days to meet, share experiences, strategize, and build a stronger
transnational activist network against the militarization of borders, for freedom of
movement, and for immigrant rights.
6
As a communication researcher and media activist
with the Indymedia network,
7
I connected with immigrant rights organizers who were
enthusiastic about integrating new digital media tools and skills into their work. A few of
these organizers were based in Los Angeles. After returning from the Forum, I became
linked to the movement networks of which they were a part. Over the next few years, we
worked together to help integrate digital media tools, skills, and strategies into the
immigrant rights movement’s existing popular communication practices. This experience of

5
Gillmor, 2005
6
See http://www.forosocialfronterizo.blogspot.com
7
See www.indymedia.org
4
working hands-on within the movement provided the foundation for my understanding of
the core issues addressed in this dissertation, and inspired me to undertake systematic
research that might help movement participants, organizers, and scholars better understand
the shifting relationship between the media system and social movements.
Both scholars and organizers recognize that media and communications have
everywhere become increasingly central to social movement formation and activity.
8

However, both scholarship and practice in this field have suffered from three basic
shortcomings. First, most studies of social movements have focused exclusively on the
mass media as the arena of public discourse, and tend to measure social movement
outcomes by looking at articles in elite newspapers or sound bites in broadcast channels.
Second, when scholars do turn their attention to social movements on the Internet, the
spotlight on new communication technology often obscures the reality of everyday
communication practices within social movements, which tend to be multimodal, cross-
platform, and as we shall see, increasingly transmedia in nature. Third, the rise of the
Internet as a key space for social movement activity cannot be fully theorized without
sustained attention to persistent inequality in ICT access and digital media literacies. This
project, then, aims to better understand the conditions under which social movements are
able to effectively use networked communication to strengthen movement identity, win
political and economic victories, and transform consciousness. It also examines the key
barriers to realizing effective use. The site of research is Los Angeles, and the focus is the
immigrant rights movement.

8
Downing, 2001; Gamson, 1995; Castells, 2007, 2009
5
Chapter overview
The following chapters are organized around the key concepts that emerged from
interviews and action research within the immigrant rights movement. Chapter one, the
introduction, provides an overview of my research approach, and chapter two describes the
site, case and context of the research. Chapter three examines the transformation of the
media opportunity structure. Chapter four looks more closely at transmedia mobilization.
Chapter five unpacks the praxis of digital media literacy. Chapter six investigates the
relationship between transmedia mobilization and movement structure. Each analytical
chapter begins with a general theoretical framework, is developed with insights, examples,
and case studies drawn from the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, and
concludes with a summary of findings. Chapter three elaborates on the changing
composition of the media opportunity structure
9
as ethnic media gains power and reach
while social media become an integral part of daily communication practices. Chapter four
explores how social movement actors engage in transmedia storytelling
10
across converged
communication spaces shaped by the political economy of communication,
11
in practices
that I call transmedia mobilization. Chapter five situates immigrant rights organizers’
attempts to overcome persistent access inequality to digital media tools and skills among
working class immigrants within a long view of the growth of literacy,
12
and connects the
efforts of movement actors in L.A. to a larger praxis of digital media literacy. Chapter six
employs the concept of horizontalidad,
13
or horizontalism, to probe the relationship between
transmedia mobilization and movement structure. The overarching theoretical framework is

9
Sampedro, 1997; Gamson, 1998; Ferree, 2002
10
Jenkins, 2003
11
Mosco, 1996; Dyer-Witheford, 1999
12
Williams, 1961
13
Sitrín, 2006
6
based on three larger bodies of work: social movement studies, the critical political
economy of communication, and the social shaping of technology. The methodological
approach is grounded in action research, specifically Communication for Social Change. I
remain focused throughout on the core question: under what conditions do social
movements effectively use networked communication to strengthen movement identity, win
political and economic victories, and transform consciousness? Finally, the concluding
chapter summarizes the research results and ends with a discussion of implications for the
future of transmedia mobilization in the immigrant rights movement and beyond.

Research Approach
This study can be characterized as an action research investigation of the political
economy of social movement media. This section posits the research questions, outlines the
analytical framework, and notes the limitations of the research approach.
Research question
The primary research question addressed in this study is: under what conditions do
social movements effectively use networked communication to strengthen movement
identity, win political and economic victories, and transform consciousness? When I began
this project, I worked from the following set of hypotheses about the preconditions for
effective networked communication by social movements.
Effective use of networked communication for social movement outcomes is
possible:
• When the social base of the movement gains basic access to digital media tools and
skills, and when these tools and skills become incorporated into daily life;
7
• When movement actors develop a communication strategy that includes social
media;
• When the movement adopts new tactics in the heat of crisis or mass mobilization;
• When the movement includes technology-literate activists who have specialized
knowledge and skills;
• When the movement has access to sufficient resources;
• When movement actors shift from vertical communication practices (‘control the
message’) to horizontal communication practices (‘engage in conversation’).

The next section discusses the analytical framework.

Analytical Framework
The following figure presents my initial analytical model of the relationship between
social movements and the media system:

Figure 1: Analytical model of social movements and media

8

In this model, social movements operate by mobilizing resources including people as well
as political, cultural, and economic capital. Resource mobilization produces a movement that
may be composed of various interested individuals, groups, organizations, institutions, and
networks. The movement can be characterized by various forms of movement culture and
by the existence of formal or informal accountability (governance) structures. The
composition and culture of the movement heavily influence the mobilization tactics it
deploys, during moments largely determined by the broader political opportunity structure.
The primary goal of most mobilizations within this model is to put pressure on political
decision makers through participation in the public sphere, which primarily means
generating coverage in the mass media system. The media system may be theorized as more
or less complex, especially as social media becomes more visible, but ultimately the goal is
to create coverage in the most important newspapers and television channels, since this is
the key to public attention and places pressure on decision makers. The broadcast media
system generates attention, sets social and policy agendas, frames issues, and includes or
excludes movement spokespeople by providing them with (or withholding) opportunities to
speak, also called standing. Successful coverage by the media system thus produces social
movement outcomes including political, cultural, and social change, and strengthens the
movement since attention brings additional resources to the table. As we shall see, the
dynamics of networked communication in the immigrant rights movement turn out to be
somewhat different than this model would suggest.
In general, models that make strong predictive claims about social movement
activity tend to find the ground beneath their feet washed away by the shifting sands of
9
social, economic, technological, and environmental change. Human agency often defies
prediction. Models are thus useful as contingent tools, in this case to help us better
understand the relationship between social movements and the media system. As this
project unfolds, components of the analytical model will be modified, altered, or abandoned
according to the reality of practice, and new components will be integrated as necessary. It
is important to challenge the assumption that specific media technologies automatically
produce movement outcomes. Media technologies are not external ‘objects’ that can be
somehow sprinkled on social movements to produce new, improved mobilizations. Given
the temptation of technological determinism, it is worth elaborating this point further.
The Social Shaping of Technology
Raymond Williams’ classic study of television as a technology and as cultural form
helps us traverse the path between the ideology of technological determinism and its flawed
opposite, determined technology.
14
Williams writes against the notion that technology is
either an ‘engine of history’ or that it can be reduced to an ‘effect’ of existing structural
factors:

While we have to reject technological determinism, in all its forms, we must be
careful not to substitute for it the notion of a determined technology.
Technological determinism is an untenable notion because it substitutes for real
social, political and economic intention, either the random autonomy of
invention or an abstract human essence. But the notion of a determined
technology has a similar one-sided, one-way version of human process.
Determination is a real social process, but never (as in some theological and
some Marxist versions) a wholly controlling, wholly predicting set of causes.
On the contrary, the reality of determination is the setting of limits and the
exertion of pressures, within which variable social practices are profoundly
affected but never necessarily controlled.
15

14
Williams, 1974
15
Williams, 1974: 133
10
Technology is developed by specific groups at particular moments in order to be used in
ways that benefit their interests. Williams’ cultural materialist approach focuses primarily
on class as a category of determination, but later thinkers extend this analysis with an
understanding of how class, gender, and “race” operate in a mutually constitutive matrix to
perform the social shaping of technology. For example, Judy Wajcman explores women’s
(invisible) contributions to science, feminist critiques of the patriarchal culture of scientific
and technological institutions, the use of technology by men to either displace women from
the labor force or deskill women’s work, and the gendered process of professionalization
by which women’s knowledge is appropriated or displaced.
16
Her core question is how to
replace the current patriarchal, capitalist deployment of scientific knowledge, processes, and
objects with a more liberatory system. To better understand this question, Wajcman
advocates looking beyond the liberal critique that ‘neutral’ technologies can be used for
good or evil, and the increased access and participation of subordinated groups (women,
poor people, people of color, developing countries, and so on) will lead to more ‘good’ use.
Instead, she urges us to politicize technological development and social processes and to
understand that real transformation in science and technology requires transformation of
power relations. Technology “is the result of conflicts and compromises, the outcomes of
which depend primarily on the distribution of power and resources between different
groups in society.”
17

This approach is drawn out further in Sandra Harding’s compilation of texts on the
racial economy of science. Harding reminds us of how ‘Western’ science and technology
appropriated a great deal of knowledge from ‘non-Western’ scientific traditions; how
science is used to construct race and gender; of the unequal race, class, and gender

16
Wajcman, 1991
17
Wajcman, 1991: 162
11
composition of scientific practice and institutions; of the long history of the application of
science and technology to control or destroy racialized and gendered subalterns; and of the
permeation of race and gender bias in the philosophy of science.
18
The approach that
Harding and Wajcman advocate considers technologies in terms of knowledge, processes,
and objects, the development, deployment, and social uses of which are shaped by key
forces including capitalist profitability, militarism, racism, and gender.
At the same time, Harding, Wajcman, and Williams all emphasize that technologies
may later be adopted, adapted, modified, appropriated, hacked, and reused in ways never
conceived by their initial developers. For example, in thinking about who gets to do
science, Harding demonstrates structural exclusion by race and gender from access to
scientific education, research institutions, foundation and state support, and participation in
the scientific community, but also documents ways in which people who have been raced
and gendered as subordinate have nevertheless been able (to some degree) to gain access.
To take another example, Williams explores television: its historical development, its path
into the home, and the ideological and aesthetic contents of its audiovisual ‘flow.’
19
While
recognizing that the most powerful players exercise the ability to shape technical form, the
organization of production and distribution, and framing, he urges us to also look at
people’s radical and subversive practices using media technology. Williams is especially
interested not just in ‘radical readings’ of popular culture by media consumers, but in
alternative practices, processes, and technology use. In that vein, this dissertation
emphasizes varied and radical uses of media technologies within the immigrant rights
movement, focusing on specific practices that emerge from the lived needs of migrant
workers and their movement formations.

18
Harding, 1993
19
Williams, 1974
12

Methods
The methodology employed is action research, working within a Communication for
Social Change framework. Within this framework, primary data was gathered using
multiple techniques including interviews, field recordings, the creation of archives of online
movement media, and participatory media workshops.
Communication for Social Change
This project differs in several respects from many partnerships between scholars and
community based organizations (CBOs). Typically, a CBO with an existing campaign
collaborates with the researcher or research team to generate a detailed study that documents
and validates community knowledge and demands. Such studies provide legitimacy to
community knowledge that can then be used to generate attention from mass media and
policymakers, with the end goal of a specific campaign victory. For example, in Los
Angeles Andrea Hricko’s work with community based environmental justice organizations
and Gary Blasi and Jacqueline Leavitt’s work with the LA Taxi Workers’ Alliance follow
this model.
20
By contrast, my work with the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles
has been focused on building long-term communication capacity, rather than on winning a
specific campaign. All of the movement formations I became involved with already had
histories of popular communication practice, as well as the desire to build digital
communication capacity. To varying degrees, all had made previous attempts to train
immigrant workers in media production. My role was to help in conceptualization,
planning, and seed fundraising stages of several communication projects. I attempted as

20
Hricko, 2004; Blasi and Leavitt, 2006; Los Angeles Taxi Workers Alliance, 2006
13
much as possible to do this not by imposing my ideas of what kind of project might be
most fruitful, but by using the methodology known as Communication for Social Change
(CFSC) to develop digital media projects and practices together with the immigrant rights
movement.
Communication for Social Change (CFSC) is both theory and method, and is
influenced by the work of Paolo Freire, especially the Freirian focus on conscientization or
political education through literacy.
21
In this theoretical and practical tradition, literacy is
seen as a process through which people acquire not only a technical skill (reading and
writing) but also an increased awareness both of themselves as actors who have the ability
to shape and transform their world, and of the structural (systemic) forces that stand in their
way (Freire, 1993). CFSC is a subfield of development communication that emphasizes
dialogic communication rather than a one-to-many 'knowledge injection' approach.
22
It
overlaps with participatory research approaches, and has been elaborated over time by
several generations of communication scholars and activists. Contemporary proponents of
CFSC include Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, John Downing, Cees Hamelink, and Clemencia
Rodriguez, among many others.
23
CFSC emphasizes principles of community ownership,
horizontality (as opposed to verticality), communities as their own change agents, dialog
and negotiation (instead of persuasion and transmission), and outcomes measured by
changes in social norms, policies, and social structure, rather than by individual behavioral
change.
24
Present practitioners of CFSC are also attempting to rethink critical literacy for an
age of digital communication technology. Practitioners work with community partners to
develop a shared analysis and vision, create strategy, construct curriculum, work on media

21
Gumucio-Dagron and Tufte, 2006
22
Freire, 1970
23
Gumucio Dagron and Tufte, 2006; Downing, 2001; Hamelink, 1997; Rodriguez, 2001
24
Figueroa et al., 2002
14
production and circulation, and evaluate project impacts.
25
The community actively
participates in each aspect of the communicative process, as far as possible. The outside
researcher thus acts as a catalyst for a shared process with the community, rather than
solely as an observer of the community as an object of study.
I have been working with this methodology in Los Angeles since May of 2006. In
January 2007 I received a Collaborative Grant in Media and Communications from the
Social Science Research Council to map the communication ecology of immigrant rights
organizations in L.A. using CFSC methods. That process provided the foundation for this
dissertation, and also catalyzed the creation of the Garment Worker Center radio project that
would later become Radio Tijeras. It also planted the seed for a larger university-
community partnership. The following year I worked with Radio Tijeras organizers, USC
Annenberg faculty members, and other PhD students to secure a follow-up Large
Collaborative Grant from SSRC, which later became the basis for a Macarthur/HASTAC
Digital Learning grant to explore the use of mobile phones for digital storytelling by day
laborers and household workers. That project continues today as VozMob (Mobile Voices
/ Vóces Mobiles: http://vozmob.net). These projects are not at the center of my dissertation,
but several of my interviewees are participants in them. In addition, my own involvement in
these projects in weekly face to face workshops over the last three years has provided me
with a great deal of contextual knowledge, given me opportunities to hear key insights from
workers and organizers, and has grounded this research in an understanding of day-to-day
communication practices within the movement.

25
Ibid.
15
Workshops
Both as a function of my participation as a movement actor, and in order to more
deeply understand the dynamics of popular communication practice in Los Angeles, during
the course of 2006-2009 I took part in more than 75 skill-sharing workshops in multimedia
production and distribution. In Los Angeles, the workshops include a three-year ongoing
digital audio production and radio workshop at the Garment Worker Center and a weekly
workshop in mobile digital storytelling that began in June 2008 at the Institute of Popular
Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA) and continues today. Workshop participants
were always aware of the fact that in addition to contributing to workshops with hands-on
skillsharing, I was also researching and writing my own dissertation.
Interviews
The bulk of the project data analyzed in this dissertation was gathered in semi-
structured interviews with 30 people who consider themselves part of the immigrant rights
movement. Interviews were conducted both with individuals and small groups, and
interviewees were drawn from immigrant rights movement organizations, tech/media
activist groups, labor unions, funders, and others. The vast majority were face-to-face
interviews, but in a few cases interviews were conducted by phone, videochat, or IRC
(chat). Interviews were recorded using a small digital audio recorder, with the explicit
permission of interviewees. These audio recordings were fully transcribed, some by the
author and the majority by a professional transcriber.
26
The full questionnaire that guided
the semi-structured interviews is available in the Appendix. The confidentiality of

26
The complete transcriptions follow the oral history guidelines available at
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~ccfriday/tools/transcribing.htm. Selected quotes that appear in this dissertation
also follow these guidelines. In some cases, bridge words (“um,” “uh”) and crutch words (“like,” “you
know”) have been removed to improve sentence clarity.
16
interviews and Institutional Review Board requirements preclude inclusion of a full list
identifying individual interviewees, unedited transcripts, or audio recordings. Anonymized
transcripts are available on request.
Field recordings
I took photos and recorded video and audio material during many movement
mobilizations, meetings, and events, both to use as primary source material and to
incorporate into multimedia presentations of the research findings. At no point did I make
recordings of non-public meetings or events without seeking explicit permission from those
present.
Movement Media
Movement-produced multimedia texts were used extensively as primary source
material for analysis. As with interviews and field recordings, clips, stills, and short
excerpts of movement-produced media were incorporated into digital presentations of
dissertation findings. Multimedia texts include photos, audio, video, and texts posted to
movement websites as well as to popular social networks and videosharing sites. Some
SMS messages are included in the movement media archive for this project. I also gathered
a large number of movement media texts that were circulated on physical media, such as
flyers, posters, and newspapers, as well as a number of physical CDs and DVDs produced
by mediamakers linked to the immigrant workers’ movement.

17
Limitations of the research approach
My own subject position as a white, male, U.S. citizen, doctoral student, and media
activist with extensive formal and informal training in multimedia production shapes both
my theoretical and methodological approach as well as my interactions with activists,
organizers, and community members in the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles.
The limitation introduced by my own standpoint is further complicated in the context of the
increasing importance of social media to movement communication, since social media is
deeply embedded in existing face-to-face family and friendship networks. My own
participation in both off- and online networks of immigrant rights activists, as both activist
and researcher, is thus doubly fraught.
Language also limits my research. Although not all of the actors I worked with,
interviewed, and talked to were Latino, the fact that my language fluency is limited to
English and Spanish means that all of my formal interviews were conducted in those two
languages, and the movement media materials I examined were also almost all in English
and/or Spanish. Given the immense diversity of immigrant workers in L.A., this fact
undermines the generalizability of my study. That said, I did work with and interview
activists from immigrant rights organizations, collectives, and networks that organize
Korean, Chinese, South Asian, and Southeast Asian immigrant workers, and their
perspectives also inform this work.
Finally, this study does not employ a comparative design. This fact limits any
strong claim that my findings in the immigrant rights movement in L.A. necessarily hold
for other social movements, or even across geographic locations. It may be that the analysis
in the following pages is unique to the movement formations I worked with and studied, in
this particular location and in this particular historical moment. In the future I plan to
18
develop comparative analysis of the framework developed here by testing its applicability to
other movements with varying compositions and locations. I invite other scholars to do the
same.
Specificity can limit our ability to generalize, but can also provide us with richly
detailed understanding of social movement processes. The next chapter prepares the ground
for the close analysis of primary materials with an in-depth examination of the site, case,
and context of the research.
19
CHAPTER TWO: SITE, CASE, AND CONTEXT

This study is an analysis of the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles. The
focus is primarily on networks, groups, and individuals active in independent worker
centers, immigrant rights organizations, service sector labor unions, indigenous
organizations, immigrant student networks, and day laborer, household worker, and
garment worker associations and unions. Activists, organizations, and networks that
constitute the immigrant rights movement field are, for the most part, not ‘single issue’
organizers; they also fight for workers’ rights, indigenous rights, the rights of youth,
gender justice, environmental justice, access to health care, access to education, the right to
the city, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (GLBTQ) rights, sex workers’
rights, lower remittance tariffs, against ICE raids and police brutality, and much more. In
seeking interviewees, I began with key independent worker centers that are focused
primarily on organizing immigrant workers, then snowballed out to include individuals,
groups, and networks that my initial interviewees considered important to the immigrant
rights movement.
This chapter provides context about the study site and case. It begins by defining
the social movement formation as the unit of analysis, and intersectionality as the
framework for understanding identity. The next section reviews the literature on low-wage
immigrant labor in Los Angeles. The chapter ends with an overview of the data on
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) access inequality.

20
Unit of analysis
The unit of analysis is the social movement formation, as distinct from individual
social movement organizations. A movement formation may be composed of various kinds
of movement actors, including (but not limited to) individuals, collectives, nonprofit
organizations, projects, formal networks of organizations, political parties, and more.
Movement formations may also include a range of actors focused on media making:
bloggers, professional journalists, newscasters or show hosts, independent or community
media makers, filmmakers, and other content creators. A movement formation may be short
lived or ongoing, and may coalesce around a particular event, target or goal, or shared
practice. Movement formations can and often do overlap with one another. As used here,
the concept of movement formation is somewhat similar to the idea of a mesomobilization
organization,
27
since it links multiple movement actors, but is more flexible in the sense that
a movement formation is not necessarily a formal organization, may be ad-hoc in nature,
and is not necessarily organized around a particular mobilization. Immigrant rights
movement formations are located within the broader field of protest
28
of Los Angeles, and
many of the actors involved do not limit their political activity solely to issue based
organizing. Most are active in a range of organizing across labor, feminist, queer,
environmental justice, global justice, youth, education, health, and many other political
projects. Within the immigrant rights movement, I interviewed individuals from
organizations, networks, and ad-hoc formations based on their own claims of engagement
in immigrant rights work within a multiracial social and economic justice organizing
framework. This excluded those organizations that identify as only service providers, or as
cultural- or ethno-nationalists. Within any particular social movement formation, I selected a

27
Gerhards and Rucht, 1992; Roth, 2003
28
Ray, 1999
21
number of participants to interview, with attention to age and gender balance and to a range
along the spectrum from vertical to horizontal organizational culture and political practice.
Intersectionality
Throughout this study I deploy race, class, gender, and age categories from a non-
essentialist position and from the perspective of intersectional analysis. Intersectionality is
the understanding that class, race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of identity, power, and
resistance never operate independently.
29
All subjectivity is located at their intersection. For
example, there is no categorical subject position of ‘woman’ who experiences gender
oppression independent of her race and class position: therefore, a white middle class
woman will experience different forms of gender oppression than a working class Latina.
At the same time, identity categories are themselves constructed and performative.
30
Sandra
Harding describes how social scientists have come to understand race, class, and gender as
interlocking axes that form a matrix, rather than as parallel but basically separate systems.
31

Each axis operates on 3 levels: the individual, structural, and symbolic; and every person is
located ('raced,' 'gendered,' 'classed') by society in a particular position within this matrix.
These categories are mutually interlocking and reproduce each other, as well as divide
subaltern subjects from seeking solidarity and constructing a unified project for social
justice.
Intersectional, anti-essentialist analysis often conflicts with institutional data
categories and standard research methodologies. Data gathered by state agencies or
researchers that use essentialist identity categories often provide the best available indicators

29
Crenshaw, 1991
30
Calhoun, 1994; Butler, 1999
31
Harding, 1993
22
of the impacts of structural inequality, even as they tend to reify reductive views of
subjectivity. I invite the reader to see such data through the lens of intersectional analysis.

Site: Los Angeles
Immigrant labor in Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a key regional and global location for migrant labor, especially from
Mexico and Central America (primarily Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and
Honduras), but also from China, Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines. There are also large
numbers of immigrant Armenians, Bangladeshis, Iranians, Arabs, and Jews, among dozens
of other groups.
32
L.A. has long been a ‘majority minority’ urban system: the 2000 Census
found the population to be about 46% Hispanic, 30% non-Hispanic White, 11% Black,
10% Asian, 1% Native American, and less than 1% Pacific Islander. Over 40% of the
population was born in a foreign country, against a national average of 11%, and over 22%
of the population lives in poverty, against 12% nationwide.
33
In 2009, the official
unemployment rate for the County was 12.5%.
34

A large number of migrants who do find work in L.A. are employed in the low
wage service sector, especially the garment industry, household work, restaurants and
hotels, and day labor. About 17 percent of all workers in L.A. County, or 750,000 people,
are front-line (non-managerial) workers in these low wage industries; over 625,000 of

32
Census 2000 data; for summaries see http://cityplanning.lacity.org/DRU/HomeC2K.cfm.
33
Ibid.
34
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010; see http://stats.bls.gov/eag/eag.ca.htm.
23
these are foreign-born.
35
A recent survey of 1,815 low-wage workers found the
distribution of low-wage employment to be as follows:
Table 1: Low wage workers, respondent characteristics, L.A. County, 2008

Source: Milkman, González, and Narro, 2010

35
Milkman, González, and Narro, 2010
24

The great majority are foreign born, Latino/a, with less than high school education. Among
these workers, the study found regular and widespread violations of the most fundamental
aspects of labor law: workers are regularly paid less than minimum wage, receive no
overtime pay, are given inadequate breaks, and are subject to late payment, tip stealing, and
employer retaliations against worker complaints. 30 percent of low wage workers in L.A.
County are paid less than minimum wage; 80 percent of those who work overtime are not
paid legal overtime rates; three quarters are denied meal breaks; and 80 percent are denied
breaks or given breaks that are shorter than the law requires. Employers regularly deduct
pay and appropriate their workers’ tips illegally, from 20 percent of tipped workers, and
nearly half of the time retaliate against the 15 percent of workers who complain. Only half
of those seriously injured on the job seek medical treatment and of those, only half receive
assistance from their employer in paying the bill
36
. These violations vary across the
workforce by gender, nativity, and legal status:

36
Ibid.
25
Figure 2: Minimum wage violations by gender, nativity, and legal status, L.A. County, 2008

Source: Milkman, González, and Narro, 2010

As can be seen from the figure above, foreign-born undocumented women bear the brunt
of wage violations in L.A. County. It is interesting to note that the disparity between
foreign-born unauthorized men and women is far greater than between any other categories.
When it comes to violations of workers’ rights, gender continues to matter far more than
documentation status or citizenship, despite widespread assumptions that citizenship status
is the primary determinant of wages and working conditions.
37

Garment Work
Nearly a quarter of low wage immigrant workers in Los Angeles find employment
in the garment sector. In California, apparel is an industry worth over $20 billion, and Los
Angeles is the primary hub of U.S. garment production
38
. The largest concentration of
garment manufacturing lies in the Garment District just southeast of Downtown L.A.’s

37
Ibid.
38
Garment Worker Center, 2007
26
financial district. In 2004, the Garment Worker Center (GWC), an independent worker
center based in the Garment District, released a study of the local industry that found:
90,000 workers employed in more than 4,500 sewing shops. These workers
are newcomers from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, China, Vietnam,
Thailand and elsewhere. 75% of garment workers in Los Angeles are women.
70% are Latina/o, and 20% are Asian. Generally between 30 - 50 years old,
some are in their 20’s or teens. Most are monolingual in their native languages.
They are contingent workers, paid by the piece and often employed
seasonally.
39

On average, the GWC found that workers worked 52 hours per week and were paid just
$3.28 per hour. At this rate, well below the (then) State minimum wage of $6.75 per hour
(now $8), each one of these workers was underpaid by an average of $9,202.44 per year.
Besides low wages, unpaid wages, long hours with no overtime, and lack of breaks,
garment workers in L.A. suffer cramped, overheated sweatshop conditions, high rates of
workplace injury, illegally blocked exits, unclean bathrooms, and sexual abuse by
employers
40
. Despite efforts by sweatshop managers to drive costs down through
underpaid wages and minimal spending on worksite health and safety, the garment industry
in Los Angeles suffered severe decline following the passage of NAFTA and the
subsequent outsourcing of production to even cheaper facilities, many along the
U.S./Mexico border:

39
Garment Worker Center, 2004
40
Garment Worker Center, 2007; Bonacich and Appelbaum, 2000
27
Figure 3: Garment Workers in L.A. County, 1990-2004

Source: Garment Worker Center, 2004.

This decline only increased after 2005, when all WTO members were required to end
apparel export quotas. Multinational apparel producers were the major victors from this
global policy shift, reaping great profits by consolidating production in fewer countries,
driving wages and working conditions down everywhere, while workers in those countries
(including the U.S.) abandoned by the industry lost their jobs
41
. However, due to the nature
of the industry, certain segments of apparel production remain physically located in L.A.
Most remaining garment manufacturing in L.A. produces items that require small
production runs and rapid turnaround
42
. Overall, the elimination of garment manufacturing
jobs has exerted steady downward pressure on wages and conditions in an industry already
characterized by widespread and dramatic violations of worker rights, safety, and basic
human dignity.

41
Garment Worker Center, 2004; Bonacich and Appelbaum, 2000
42
Ibid.
28
Day Labor
Many immigrant workers in Los Angeles seek work as day laborers; best estimates
are between 10 and 20 percent of low-wage workers.
43
Day labor jobs are seasonal and
contingent, primarily in residential construction and landscaping, and conditions are harsh.
Valenzuela, Theodore, Meléndez, and Gonzalez (2006) conducted the only nationwide
survey of day labor in the United States to date. They surveyed 2,660 randomly selected
workers at 264 hiring sites in 20 states, including sites in Los Angeles. They found that
nationwide, about 118,000 workers are looking for or engaged in day labor on any given
day; 80% of them do so at informal hiring sites; half are hired by homeowners and renters
and most of the rest (43%) are hired by contractors. Day laborers earn a median wage of
$10 an hour, but monthly earnings are volatile since work is intermittent, and few make
more than $15,000 per year. Wage violations and abuse are widespread, with half of day
laborers reporting wage theft within the past two months and nearly half reporting denial of
food, water, or breaks. Day labor is dangerous: one in five day laborers are injured on the
job, and more than half of those injured receive no medical care.
44
The authors also found
that “[m]erchants and police often unfairly target day laborers while they seek work.
Almost one-fifth (19 percent) of all day laborers have been subjected to insults by
merchants, and 15 percent have been refused services by local businesses. Day laborers
also report being insulted (16 percent), arrested (9 percent) and cited (11 percent) by police
while they search for employment.” Among their survey respondents, 59 percent were
Mexican, 28 percent Central American, and 7 percent U.S. born. 75 percent were
undocumented, with 11 percent in the process of applying to adjust their status.
45
The

43
Milkman, González, and Narro, 2010
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.
29
collapse of the housing bubble in 2008-2009 dramatically reduced demand for day laborers
as new home construction slowed to a crawl. Even many existing construction projects
froze due to a lack of capital. Shrinking availability of day labor employment reduced
wages and working conditions even further below the already marginal levels documented
in 2006.
46

Immigrant employment in household work, restaurants, and other major low-wage
sectors is characterized by similar widespread violations of wage law, health and safety
regulations, and human dignity. Yet despite these harsh conditions, heavy competition for
jobs, an unfavorable global political economy, and rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the
U.S., the last two decades have seen a resurgence in immigrant organizing in Los Angeles.

Organized immigrant workers
Historically, organized labor in L.A. at worst attacked and at best ignored new
immigrant workers. In addition to low wage service work, Los Angeles has the largest
remaining concentration of manufacturing in the United States,
47
and labor unions focused
for decades on a losing battle to maintain their existing base in the private manufacturing
sector. After the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) hamstrung the U.S. Labor movement, regulated
strike actions, banned the General Strike, and outlawed cross-sector solidarity, the old
guard labor unions, especially the AFL-CIO, shifted vast resources away from organizing
new workers into a losing strategy of pouring money into Democratic Party electoral
campaigns in hopes of winning new federal protections, or simply maintaining existing
protections. Big Labor continued to do this even as the Democratic Party moved ever closer

46
Personal communication, Añorve, 2010
47
Kyser, 2007
30
to the business class, repeatedly sold out the labor movement, and adopted neoliberal
economic policy. Union membership steadily declined as free trade became the consensus
mantra within both major political parties, and former union jobs in sector after sector were
outsourced to cheaper production sites.
48

Yet starting in the 1990s, Los Angeles emerged as one of the key centers for the
development of new models of labor organizing. This dynamic operated in parallel with the
rise of new leadership inside the massive service-sector unions, including the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU), the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees
International Union (HERE), and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile
Employees (UNITE). These unions, along with United Farm Workers, United Food and
Commercial Workers, and the Laborers International Union of North America, began to
shift resources towards organizing new workers, including immigrants.
49
In 2005, they
launched the Change to Win coalition, an umbrella campaign designed to link service sector
workers across the country. As a result of organizing new immigrant workers rather than
attempting to exclude them, these unions saw a rise in new membership, rather than the
steady decline suffered by manufacturing sector unions. SEIU, for example, has grown
from 625,000 members in 1980 to over 2.2 million in 2010.
50
L.A.’s SEIU Local 1877
pioneered a string of internationally visible campaigns with low wage immigrant workers at
the center, such as Justice for Janitors, Airport Workers United, and Stand for Security
(Walters, et al., 2003). However, the major labor unions, including SEIU and UNITE-
HERE, have so far been unwilling to devote significant resources to organizing garment

48
Harvey, 2007
49
Tait, 2005
50
See http://www.seiu.org/a/ourunion/seiu-history.php
31
workers or day laborers in L.A. They have seen these workers as unorganizable, based on
their assumptions about the high proportion of undocumented workers in these sectors.
51

Despite the assumption that undocumented workers are unorganizable because they
fear deportation, a number of scholars have demonstrated that there is no easy relationship
between workers’ immigration status and their propensity to unionization.
52
Hector
Delgado (2000) analyzed unionization campaigns in the light manufacturing sector in Los
Angeles and found that other factors, such as state and federal labor law, organizing
strategy, resources committed to the effort by labor unions, and the resources deployed by
the employer to fight unionization are all far greater determinants of unionization outcomes
than workers’ immigration status.
53
In fact, in many cases new immigrant workers come
from cities of origin with much higher rates of unionization, more militant unions, and
stronger social movement cultures than their new home; they may arrive with more concrete
class identity than U.S. born workers and, in some cases, may themselves have been
trained as organizers. To take one example, day laborers in L.A. have historically been
largely unorganized, but this has begun to change in recent years. A quarter now participate
in worker centers, and the number of worker centers is growing. Day laborers in L.A. were
the first to organize worker centers, and the model has spread around the country. In 2006
there were 63 day labor centers in cities across the United States, with an additional 15
community based organizations working with the day laborer community.
54

LA has also been a site for innovative partnerships between the Catholic Church
and labor, as well as for models of organizing that focus not only on the workplace but also
on the importance of building community more broadly. Faith-based organizing in L.A. is

51
Personal communication, KL, PG
52
Bonacich and Gapasin, 2001
53
Delgado, 2000
54
Valenzuela, Theodore, Meléndez, and Gonzalez, 2006
32
closely tied to the history of U.S. imperial adventures in Latin America. In the 1980s, many
priests and laity trained in liberation theology who were active in Central American popular
movements against U.S. backed military dictatorships were forced to flee their countries of
origin. Of these, many sought asylum in the United States and ended up in Los Angeles,
where they have continued to organize their communities through the practice of liberation
theology.
55
These and other influences have shaped immigrant organizing in community
centers, worker centers, faith-based coalitions, multiethnic organizing alliances, and other
innovative forms of community organizing. During the last two decades, there has been a
series of shifts away from ‘turf-war’ unionism towards attempts to organize entire sectors
of the workforce at once, through coalitions and networks between various unions,
community based organizations, churches, and universities. For example, in 1994 unions
sunk more than $250,000 into the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project (LAMAP),
an attempt to organize about 700,000 mostly Latino workers in the light manufacturing
industry that clusters along the Alameda Corridor from Downtown L.A. to the Long Beach
/ Los Angeles Ports. That project fell apart largely due to internal conflict between
participating unions, but the approach - industry wide, labor and community together,
geographically focused - became a model for future victories in other parts of the country.
56

L.A.’s racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity has also generated innovative organizing forms,
tactics, and structures. The rich history of multiracial social movements in Los Angeles has
been extensively documented by Laura Pulido.
57

Aside from the labor movement and the churches, the immigrant rights movement
in Los Angeles includes a vast and diverse array of less visible but highly active

55
Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2008
56
Delgado, 2000
57
Pulido, 2006
33
community based organizations, student groups, cultural activists, nonprofit organizations,
media and filmmakers, progressive law firms, radical professors, musicians, punks and
anarchists, hip hop artists, mural painters and graffiti writers, indigenous rights activists,
queer collectives, and many others. The literature on social movements in L.A. is massive,
and we will not explore it further here. Given the nature of this project, however, it is worth
spending time to review what we know about digital inequality in Los Angeles.

Context: digital inequality
The immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles operates in a context of radically
unequal access to digital media tools and skills. As we shall see, the movement uses digital
media in innovative ways despite the general lack of ICT access among its base. In order to
better understand the magnitude and potential impacts of digital access inequality on social
movement formations, this section provides a detailed overview of recent studies in the
field. It ends with an examination of recent ICT access data specific to Los Angeles.
Global
In the early years of the information ‘revolution,’ policymakers framed Internet
access inequality in terms of a growing ‘digital divide,’ both domestically and
internationally.
58
During this time, a few scholars focused attention on the relationship
between race, class, gender, and Internet access.
59
However, the debate was largely
drowned out by what initially appeared to be the steady diffusion of networked
communication technology across all populations. The Internet and mobile phones gained
massive uptake in the first decade of the new millennium. In OECD countries, for example,

58
National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 1998, 1999
59
Hoffman and Novak, 1998
34
higher penetration rates shifted the Internet user base from a highly educated, mostly
young, male demographic to one that now includes more than half of all women. During
the same time period, computer use in developing countries soared. Indeed, Internet use in
developing countries accelerated so rapidly that some believed the North-South gap might
be closing. For example, in China the Internet usage rate jumped from 1.7% to 19.0%
between 2000 and 2008; in Brazil, the same rate climbed from 2.9% in 2000 to 35.2% in
2008.
60
The unprecedented rate of diffusion of mobile phones also raised hopes for an
additional path to equitable network connectivity. For example, India jumped from 1.2%
mobile penetration in 2002 to 20% in 2007, and is now adding between 7 and 9 million
new subscriptions per month, while most African countries - long plagued by the lowest
levels of ICT connectivity in the world - also displayed robust mobile growth.
61

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration replaced the term ‘digital divide’ with ‘digital
inclusion,’ published reports emphasizing how many Americans were online rather than
how many were excluded, cut funds for programs aiming to increase Internet access among
underserved populations, slashed community technology center funding, and deactivated
the website digitaldivide.gov.
62
This is not to say that moves away from the term were
entirely ideologically driven. Scholarly work emerged that questioned the concept of a
binary ‘divide’ and emphasized the multidimensional nature of ICT access, appropriation,
and use. Scholars emphasized the need to reframe the digital divide as a complex
phenomenon in which access to hardware and applications play an important role, but so do
access to financial resources, knowledge, social networks, and formal Internet training.
63

As Steve Cisler (2000) argues, the term oversimplified a complex field of widely variable

60
International Telecommunications Union, 2008
61
Ibid.
62
Jaeger, et al., 2005
63
Norris, 2001; Warschauer, 2004; Wilson, Best, and Kleine, 2005
35
access to ICT tools and skills, while masking underlying inequalities of race, class, and
gender that shape access to capital, resources, and life chances more broadly.
64
The NTIA
study “Falling through the net: Toward digital inclusion” (2000) to some degree succeeded
in shifting city agencies, nonprofits, and community technology centers towards a graded,
non-binary view of ICT access and use,
65
while Warschauer expanded the argument into a
widely cited book length, cross-cultural comparative study that spans the globe and finds
the ‘divide’ unhelpful in most contexts.
66
More recently, Livingstone and Helsper
67
found
that quality of Internet access and use among 9-19 year olds in the UK varied according to
age, gender, and socioeconomic status. They too argue for a theoretical framework of
digital inclusion that sees access and use along a continuum, rather than as a binary of
‘access/ no access.’ Jack Qiu
68
examines ICT use by workers in China and argues for an
analysis of the ‘Digital Have-Less.’ The key point for all of these scholars is that access to
digital tools and skills is not a binary, is increasingly widespread, and is unevenly
distributed. However, in moving away from the ‘digital divide’ formulation, the press and
policymakers in the U.S. seemed to revert to the default position that the market, left to its
own devices, would in time provide universal Internet access.
A more sober assessment of the data reveals that, while Internet usage is rapidly
becoming more widespread across the globe, access remains deeply unequal. Income,
gender, geography (especially urban/rural location), race/ethnicity, level of education, age –
all continue to be significant predictors of ICT access and skill levels.
69
Indeed, global
figures of access inequality are stark. In 2008, ITU data shows just 5.3% of the world’s

64
Cisler, 2000
65
NTIA, 2000
66
Warschauer, 2004
67
Livingstone and Helsper, 2007
68
Qiu, 2007
69
Mossberger and Tolbert, 2006
36
population with broadband subscriptions, and only about 20% of the world's population
with any form of Internet access at all. In addition, these users are distributed very
unevenly: at the beginning of 2007, “just over 10 percent of the world’s population in
developing countries were using the Internet, compared to close to 60 percent in the
developed world.”
70
Unsurprisingly, broadband Internet access is concentrated almost
exclusively in the world’s wealthiest countries, or in the hands of local elites in major urban
areas in middle income and poor countries. For example, in 2007 the African continent had
just 0.2 broadband subscribers per 100 people, compared to 3.4 in Asia, 4.2 in Brazil, 14 in
the EU, and 21 in the USA.
71
Ubiquitous Internet access, let alone broadband access,
remains a distant dream in most parts of the world. As we shall see in detail in this section,
the largest ICT divide - that between the wealthy and the poor - remains firmly in place
regardless of the level of geographic analysis.
Nationwide
Nationally, Pew Internet surveys continue to document a long-term upward trend in
home broadband adoption by all demographic groups. In 2009, 63% of all adults in the
USA reported that they had broadband in the home, up from 42% in 2006. In 2008, White,
Black, and Latino households reported broadband at home at rates of 57%, 43%, and 56%,
respectively.
72
The most recent survey by the National Telecommunications and
Information Administration
73
found continued growth in broadband access for all groups,
with 68.7% of all households having computers and Internet connections, and 63.5% with
broadband connections at home. However, broadband access continues to be stratified by

70
ITU, 2008
71
Ibid.
72
Horrigan, 2008: 3
73
NTIA, 2010
37
race, with 66% of White (Non-Hispanic) and 67% of Asian persons reporting broadband at
home, compared to 46% of Black, 43% of American Indian, and 40% of Hispanic persons:
Figure 4: Persons using Broadband in the home by Race, 2007-2009

Source: NTIA, 2010

The study also found that 84% of college educated people above the age of 25 had
broadband in the home, compared to just 28% of those with no high school diploma. The
widest gap was based on family income: persons in households making under $15,000 per
year. These homes, supported by those with minimum wage or less-than-minimum wage
jobs, the underemployed, or the unemployed, reported just 29% broadband penetration,
compared to 70% of households making above $50,000, 85% of those making above
$100,000, and 89% of those with incomes above $150,000.
38
Figure 5: Persons using Broadband in the Home by Family Income, 2007-2009

Source: NTIA, 2010

In other words, middle class and upper middle class households are twice or even three
times as likely to have broadband access as working poor households.
74

We also know that nationally, Latino/as are behind all other ethnic groups in
broadband adoption:

74
Ibid.
39
Figure 6: %Online and Level of Internet Involvement, by Race

Source: Pew Hispanic/Pew Internet, 2007

A 2007 Pew study found that 71% of Whites used the Internet and 43% had home
broadband, compared to 56% and 29% of Hispanics, respectively. A closer look at this
study’s findings reveals that among Latinos, those who speak English or are bilingual are
far more likely to be online than Spanish speakers:

Figure 7: %Hispanics Online, by Language Proficiency and Nativity

Source: Pew Hispanic/Pew Internet, 2007
40

Nearly 80% of those who either speak English or are fully bilingual report that they are
online, with relatively little distance between the native born and foreign born. However,
those who primarily speak Spanish are less than half as likely to have Internet access, with
less than 30% reporting that they are online. If we drill down further into the dataset, we
can see that new immigrants from Central America and Mexico are less likely to have
Internet access (50% and 52% online, respectively) than those from Puerto Rico (66%),
Cuba (64%), the Dominican Republic (59%), or South American countries (70%).
75

Figure 8: % Hispanics Offline, by Key Characteristics

Source: Pew Hispanic/Pew Internet, 2007

Pew also examined key demographic characteristics of those Hispanics who reported that
they were not Internet users. They found that 83% of those older than 71 were offline; as
well as 69% of those with no high school degree, 68% of those who lived in Spanish

75
Pew Hispanic/Pew Internet, 2007: 12
41
dominant households, and 57% of those who were foreign born. In contrast, 44% of all
Hispanics reported not using the Internet, and just 24% of Native-Born Hispanics were
offline.
76

Thus, we know that nationwide, it is low-income, foreign born, non-English
speaking Latinos from Mexico and Central America that are least likely of all demographic
groups to have computers, Internet, and broadband at home. Mexican and Central
American low wage immigrant workers have the lowest digital literacy rates in the country.
As we have seen, it is precisely this demographic group that makes up the vast majority of
low wage immigrant workers, and the vast majority of the immigrant rights movement, in
Los Angeles.
California
Access inequality in California follows the national trend. A June 2009 statewide
survey of 2,502 California residents by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC)
found that “just over half of Latinos (52%) say they have home computers, far lower than
the percentage of Asians (89%), whites (87%), and blacks (75%) who do. Only 39 percent
of Latinos have a home broadband connection, compared to 75 percent of whites, 74
percent of Asians, and 62 percent of blacks.”
77

76
Pew Hispanic/Pew Internet, 2007: 15
77
Public Policy Institute of California, 2009: 5
42
Figure 9: Californians with Broadband at Home

Source: PPIC, 2009

The same study found a growing digital divide between Latinos and other ethnic groups,
with Latino Internet use on the increase (from 48% in 2008 to 53% in 2009) but at a slower
rate than among whites (from 81% in 2008 to 88% during the same time period). Income
remains a key predictor of access, with 89% of Californians who have household incomes
above $80,000 reporting broadband at home, compared to just 40% in households with
incomes below $40,000. This data reveals a persistent divide, with those at the upper end of
the income spectrum more than twice as likely to have broadband connections as poor and
working poor households. The PPIC survey also provides a breakdown of computer and
Internet use by age, household income, race/ethnicity, region, and rural/urban location:

43
Table 2: Computer and Internet use, California

Source: PPIC, 2009

In addition to income and race/ethnicity, age remains a significant predictor of ICT use in
California, with those between 18 and 34 reporting computer use at 86% and Internet use at
83%, while those over 55 report computer use at 71% and Internet use at 68%.
78

The PPIC study also provides us with key data about new media literacies, in the
form of questions about what people do online. Survey respondents were asked if they use
the net to access government resources, contact elected officials, use social networking
sites, use Twitter, or blog:

78
Ibid.: 6
44
Table 3: Activities online, California

Source: PPIC, 2009

PPIC summarizes the key findings for online activity as follows:

37 percent of Californians use a social networking site, but fewer report going
online to use Twitter (18%) or to create or work on their own blog (14%).
Compared to last year, Californians are about as likely to report going online to
visit a government website (50% 2008, 53% today), but more likely to report
going online to access government resources (43% 2008, 51% today), or to use
a social networking site (26% 2008, 37% today). Once again, Latinos are one
of the least likely groups to participate in such activities. Black respondents are
more likely than others to use a social networking site, while Asians are most
likely to blog or use Twitter. Across regions, Central Valley residents are the
least likely group to do any of these things. Less affluent Californians are less
likely than others to report going online to do any of these activities and
45
younger Californians are the most likely to go online to use a social networking
site, work on their own blog, or use Twitter.
79

As for production of new media content in the form of blogs, microblogs, and Social
Network Sites (SNS), PPIC found significant disparities based on age and ethnicity. Just
one in five adults use Twitter, compared to a third of 18-34 year olds. Three out of five 18-
34 year olds use a social networking site, compared to one in three of those age 35-54 and
just one in seven of those older than 55. A quarter of 18-34 year olds blog, while just one
in ten of those older than 34 do so. As for race/ethnicity, “Blacks are more likely (53%)
than others (44% Asians, 39% whites, 28% Latinos) to use a social networking site.
Asians are most likely (22%) to blog (14% whites, 13% blacks, 11% Latinos.)”
80
The
PPIC study provides evidence that the gap for Latino households in California is almost
entirely explainable based on the low rates of computer, Internet, and broadband use by
Spanish speaking, noncitizen, low-income immigrant workers:

79
Ibid.: 13
80
Ibid.: 7
46
Table 4: California’s Digital Divide, 2009

Source: PPIC, 2009

47
PPIC reports that the largest divide is between less-educated, immigrant, low-wage, Latino
residents and all others. Overall Latino Internet use is increasing, but computer, Internet,
and broadband use remain at 61%, 53%, and 39%, respectively. Among Spanish speaking
households in California, just 31% are online and just 17% have broadband; in households
with less than $40,000 income per year, 44% are online and 29% have broadband. Of all
California residents, those born in the United States remain more likely to use the Internet
and have broadband at home (85%, 71%) than either naturalized citizens (68%, 57%) or
noncitizens (45%, 31%).
81

Finally, some of the most compelling work on access inequality in California comes
from Ali Modarres and the Pat Brown Public Policy Institute,
82
who have extensively
analyzed the geography of ICT inequality in the state of California (and in Los Angeles,
specifically). Using data sets from the US Census as well as private data firm Claritas,
Modarres examines the spatial distribution of communication technology access and use in
California and demonstrates that this distribution mirrors existing patterns of social and
economic inequality. Census tract level analysis of the distribution of Internet connectivity
show that lack of Internet access is concentrated overwhelmingly in rural areas and in low-
income neighborhoods in the cities:

81
Ibid.
82
Modarres and Pitkin, 2006; Modarres, 2009
48
Figure 10: % Households Without Internet vs. % Online Community, 2007

Source: Modarres, 2008

Unsurprisingly, the spatial distribution of Internet access provides an inverted mirror to the
spatial distribution of online activity, as evident in the map of percent households that visit
or publish to online communities.
Los Angeles
What does all of this data tell us about networked communication access and digital
literacies among low wage immigrant workers in Los Angeles? Clearly, across the country
and in California this is the population with the least amount of access: incomes below
$40,000, Latino, often foreign-born, many speaking Spanish at home. The only group
nationwide with less access is probably low-wage immigrant workers in rural areas that
completely lack broadband infrastructure: farmworkers. A large proportion of immigrant
49
worker households in Los Angeles have incomes below $40,000 and their rates of
computer, Internet, and broadband at home are well below the general rates for ‘low-
income’ (below $40,000) households provided by PPIC.
Modarres and Pitkin
83
analyzed available geospatial datasets about communication
technology access in Los Angeles County, and found that Latino and African American
neighborhoods, low-income neighborhoods, and neighborhoods with low levels of
educational attainment had the lowest level of access to all forms of communication
technology, including personal computers, notebooks, Internet access, broadband access,
use of rich media services like audio or video streaming online, number of cell phones per
household, and landline telephone access. For example, they mapped estimated percent
households with Desktop PCs, Laptops, DSL, and Cable Modems:

83
Modarres and Pitkin, 2006
50

Figure 11: Selected ICT access indicators by census tract, 2006

Source: Modarres and Pitkin, 2006

They found that ICT access in LA County is distributed unequally. Those neighborhoods
with a high proportion of low-income Black and Latino/a residents have far less access to
desktops, laptops, and broadband Internet connectivity than other communities. In addition,
despite the much touted prediction that lower income communities can ‘leapfrog’ personal
computers and broadband Internet modems by taking up cell phones as primary network
51
connectivity devices,
84
the data indicate that cell phones are unequally distributed along the
same lines as other ICTs:

Figure 12: Estimated Percent Adults Owning Cellular Phone, 2006

Source: Modarres and Pitkin, 2006

Modarres and Pitkin produced a Composite Technology Index based on ten indicators
(cable modem, DSL, dial-up, own laptop, own desktop, own cell phone, wireless Internet,
local phone service, satellite or cable TV, and Internet at home for work) and mapped this
index onto census tracts in LA County:

84
Foster, 2007
52
Figure 13: Composite Technology Index, 2006

Source: Modarres and Pitkin, 2006

The areas that score highest on the Composite Technology Index lie mostly in the Santa
Monica mountains and along the coast, as well as some parts of the San Fernando and San
Gabriel Valleys. The areas with the lowest scores are downtown along the Figueroa
Corridor, South, South Central, and East Los Angeles, and the central areas of the San
Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys, as well as some neighborhoods in the South Bay.
Census tracts that score low on individual technology access indicators, or on the
Composite Technology Index, map very closely onto indicators of socioeconomic
inequality. For example, the authors used factor analysis to create a Composite SES Index
that combines Census measures of income, poverty, ethnicity, language, home ownership,
and education, and this composite provides a near perfect fit to the spatial distribution of
technology access:
53

Figure 14: Composite SES Index vs. Composite Technology Index, 2006

Source: Modarres and Pitkin, 2006

The Composite SES Index accounts for over 43% of the variation in the Composite
Technology Index data. The authors also performed regression analysis and found the least
access to ICTs in neighborhoods that were more than 75% Latino. In addition to
concentration of Latino households, the strongest predictors of access to technology at the
neighborhood level were educational attainment, household income, and poverty. They
conclude that:

Clearly, inner-city neighborhoods, as well as other low-socioeconomic status
tracts in East San Fernando Valley, the South Bay communities, and the heart
of the San Gabriel Valley have some of the lowest levels of access to
technology (at least for the ten variables we examined) […] not only can we
visually detect the spatial relationship between access to technology and
socioeconomic status but also, statistically speaking, we can observe a high and
significant correlation between the two. In fact […] there is nearly a perfect
relationship between the two indicators. This brings us to the conclusion that
the geography of access to technology simply mimics that of SES, and as such,
the current buzz about the role of technology in improving the social and
economic structure of communities would become another utopian promise,
54
whose delivery rests on our ability to integrate social equity considerations in
our pattern of service delivery and infrastructural investment.
85

They argue further that covariations in race and ethnicity with socioeconomic status are
reproduced in the spatial distribution of access to communication technologies in L.A.
County. Specifically, they demonstrate that African American and Latino/a neighborhoods
suffer from low levels of technology access. Put bluntly, the geography of class and race
inequality is reproduced almost perfectly in the spatial distribution of access to technology
in Los Angeles County.
86

The authors conclude with the argument that digital equity therefore cannot be
separated from broader struggles for social justice. They argue against using the framework
of a ‘digital divide,’ since “[t]he geography of digital divide, as presented by this research,
suggests that to produce sustainable solutions for the existing patterns of inequitable
conditions, we must deal directly with the sociospatial contexts that produce them.”
87
They
conclude that an equitable distribution of technology access cannot take place without also
addressing underlying class and race inequalities.
Access: Digital Youth?
While there may currently be a divide in access to and use of communication
technologies, many believe that the divide is sure to disappear as young people who have
grown up with these technologies become the new heads of household. There is certainly
much truth to the ‘digital natives’ formulation (Prensky, 2001). For example, Pew surveys
continue to find steady growth in the percentage of teenagers who are online content
creators:

85
Modarres and Pitkin, 2006: 42
86
Ibid.: 50
87
Modarres, 2008
55
39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork,
photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004; 33% create or work on web
pages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or
school assignments – essentially the same number as reported this in 2004
(32%); 28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in
2004; 27% maintain their own personal webpage, up from 22% in 2004; 26%
remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19% in 2004.
88

Young people are without question increasingly capable content creators. Even in low-
income households, American youth are increasingly finding ways to get online. The
Macarthur-funded Digital Youth study echoes this point:

In 2005, the Kaiser Family Foundation published data from a nationally
representative survey of 8- to 18-year-olds showing that most American youth
lived in households where media technologies were varied and numerous. […]
More recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted a survey
that showed 94 percent of all American teenagers--which it defines as 12- to
17-year-olds--now use the Internet, 89 percent have Internet access in the
home, and 66 percent have “broadband” Internet access in the home (Lenhart et
al. 2008). In 2008, the USC Digital Future Project reported that broadband was
now used in 75 percent of American households (USC Center for the Digital
Future 2008) […] The Pew, Kaiser, and USC studies each report on the
increasing prevalence of “new media”--notably the Internet and the mobile
phone.
89

Study after study finds that young people in the United States are increasingly networked
both via personal computers and mobile devices. At the same time, communication
technology use by youth remains challenged by the reality of persistent access inequality,
even among youth. The Pew, Kaiser, and USC studies all found wide variations in access
and use among youth as well as adults. The main determinant of youth access is
socioeconomic status: both the Pew (2007) and Kaiser (2005) studies found that “youth
living in the most economically disadvantaged households had significantly lower rates of
Internet access in the home and tended to rely on non-home locations, such as schools and

88
Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, and Smith, 2007
89
Ito et al, 2009
56
libraries, to access the Internet.”
90
Two-thirds of teens living in households with less than
$30,000 income per year had home Internet access, compared to nearly 100 percent of teens
in households with more than $75,000 yearly income.
91
Both studies found that three
quarters of wealthier youth go online daily, compared to less than half of low-income
youth.
92

Access inequality determines which youth voices can be heard in online spaces. For
example, a 2006 study by Pew found that only 13% of teen content creators came from
households with less than $30,000 of annual income, compared with 38% from households
with more than $75,000 of income. There are thus three times as many wealthy teen content
creators as low-income teen content creators. Also, Pew found that suburban teens make up
a higher percentage of content creators than urban and rural teens combined.

90
Horst et al., 2009
91
Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, and Smith, 2007
92
Ibid., 2007; Rideout et al. 2005
57
Table 5: Demographics of Teen Content Creators, 2006

Source: Pew, 2006

In addition, race and ethnicity retain predictive power for whether teenagers have Internet
access in the home. African American and Latino teens are less likely to have broadband at
home (56% and 60%) than white teens (70%), and youth of color are more likely to access
the Internet from non-home locations than Anglo youth.
93
Ethnicity also predicts use
frequency: “a significantly greater share of white teens went online daily than black teens,
reporting 67 percent and 53 percent respectively.”
94
Disparities in digital literacies are also

93
Ibid., 2007
94
Ito et al, 2009
58
evident, for example, in studies of online video, where three out of four young adults report
viewing video online but just 20% of 18-29 year olds report uploading video to the net.
95

Perhaps most important, the Digital Youth study also provides compelling ethnographic
evidence that young people who do not have broadband access in the home are less able to
participate in what the authors call ‘geeking out:’ exercising advanced digital media skills
like video editing, software coding, and the like.
96

Overall, young people from all backgrounds are increasingly active online, but with
significant disparities along class, race, and urban/suburban/rural lines. In the case of the
immigrant workers’ movement in L.A., children and youth who are either themselves
recent immigrants or whose parents were born in Central America or Mexico are likely to
have less access to digital media literacy than their peers.

Site, Case, and Context: Summary
Los Angeles is a hub for low wage immigrant workers, who come from across the
globe but especially from Mexico and Central America. Many of these workers find
employment in light manufacturing or garment work, in the service sector, especially hotels
and restaurants, health care, and household work, and in construction and gardening, often
as day laborers. They face widespread wage and safety violations as well as abuse from
employers, police, and the Anglo media. After many decades of antagonistic relations with
labor unions, the situation has shifted and immigrant workers now make up a growing
proportion of new union members and organizers, especially in the service sector unions.
They are also increasingly active in the fight for immigration reform, as well as in other

95
Lenhart, et al., 2007
96
Ito et al, 2009
59
social struggles, and constitute a large and growing political force both in Los Angeles and
nationwide.
However, even as the Internet steadily gains importance as a communication
platform, a workplace, a site of play, a location for political debate, a mobilization tool, and
indeed as a necessity in all spheres of daily life, low wage immigrant workers have less
access to the net and to digital tools and skills than any other group of people. The majority
are not online, and less than a fifth have broadband access in the home. While most do have
access to basic mobile phones, few use those phones to connect to the net.
What are the implications of such extreme access inequality for social movements in
general, and for the immigrant rights movement specifically? Does the general lack of
access of the social base mean that the Internet can be discounted as an important factor in
the immigrant rights movement? Chapter three probes these questions more deeply, and
finds that despite all of the challenges, the immigrant rights movement does indeed use
networked communication in innovative ways that are profoundly effective.
60
CHAPTER THREE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE
MEDIA OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURE

In previous patterns of social movement communication, the main mechanism for
advancing movement visibility, frames, and ideas was individual spokespeople who
represented the movement through interviews with print or broadcast journalists working
for Anglo mass media. This is now undergoing radical transformation. Ethnic media,
especially Spanish language radio and television, are gaining power and visibility, and they
provide important openings for the immigrant rights movement. At the same time, social
media has gained ground as a new space for the creation and circulation of movement
media, as the tools and skills of media creation spread more broadly among the population.
The media opportunity structure has also been altered by the growth in translocal media
practices, where migrants use the Internet to access and sometimes to circulate stories in
media outlets based in their hometowns, cities, and communities of origin.
In this new context, individuals, collectives, organizations, and networks that learn
to participate in digital mediamaking and to help gather, circulate, and amplify community
voices are better able to mobilize participation, visibility, shared identity, and credibility.
Those that try to cling to an exclusionary role as ‘spokesperson for the movement’ may
find themselves increasingly vulnerable to public critique from, or even irrelevance to, their
base. This chapter examines the transformation of the media opportunity structure for the
immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles. The analysis draws on two social movement
formations during the period 2006-2007: the mass marches and high school walkouts
61
against HR4437 (the Sensenbrenner Bill) in the spring of 2006, and the aftermath of the
police attack against the Mayday 2007 celebration in Macarthur Park.

Media opportunity structure: theoretical framework
What does the term media opportunity structure mean? The term is an extension of
the concept of political opportunity structure, defined by Sydney Tarrow as “consistent –
but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national – dimensions of the political environment
which either encourage or discourage people from using collective action.”
97
Tarrow, and
most social movement scholars, argue that the key factors that alter the political opportunity
structure are shifts in access to power, changes in the ruling coalitions, the presence of
powerful allies, and splits between elites.
98
When these factors change, key actors can take
advantage of the moment to build new social movements. Some scholars have theorized
social movement access to the media through the lens of political opportunity structures.
Sampedro
99
proposed the idea of media opportunity structure, but did not define the term.
In an analysis of 25 years of anti-military draft campaigns in Spain, Sampedro finds that
mass media may provide a “space of representation”
100
for new demands, but are almost
completely subordinate to the political opportunity structure defined by elites, other than
during initial moments of spectacular protests when the mass media can be used by the
movement to broaden the boundaries of elite disagreement. Gamson extended this idea to
the study of the cultural impact of social movements, and in this context defined the media
opportunity structure as “the linkage between the mass media subsystem and the various

97
Tarrow, 1994: 18
98
McAdam, 1982; Klandermans, 1990; Tarrow, 1994
99
Sampedro, 1997
100
Melucci, 1996
62
carriers of symbolic interests.”
101
Myra Marx-Ferree et al.
102
mention the media opportunity
structure within a comparative analysis of the discursive opportunity structure for abortion
rights activists in Germany and the United States. They find that abortion rights activists in
the U.S. have more access to framing and standing in U.S. mass media than in German
mass media. However, the rapid transformation of communication technologies and
practices requires that we question past framings of the media opportunity structure as, for
all intents and purposes, the ability of social movement actors to achieve visibility in the
mass media, usually defined as elite newspapers and broadcast television. Rather, effective
deployment of the concept today begs analysis of the composition of the media opportunity
structure. Social movements now have access to a wide range of media outlets, platforms,
and channels, as we shall see when we analyze the composition of the media opportunity
structure for the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles. The assumption of a relatively
static media system, made in the existing literature on media opportunity structure and
underlying the broader literature on political opportunity structures, must therefore be
revised. A brief summary of changes in the broader political economy of communication
will help us fully understand the transformation of the media opportunity structure.
Critical Political Economy of Communication
The most well known strand of political economy to focus on media and
communication has been the discussion of the cultural industries. Some of the most
interesting ‘prehistories’ of the present-day cultural industries include Daniel Headrick’s
103

study of imperialist technology transfer in the expansion of European colonialism across

101
Gamson, 1998: 63
102
Ferree, 2002
103
Headrick, 1988
63
the globe; Paul Starr’s
104
social and political history of the rise of the telegraph, radio, and
print press in the United States; and Raymond Williams’
105
analysis of the growth of the
reading public and the popular press in England from the 1800s through the middle of the
20th century. Robert McChesney’s
106
work also provides an important overview of
repeated waves of battle between grassroots activists and corporate power in the
commercialization of each new media technology in the US. In the modern (electronic) age,
political economists of media and communications divide the cultural industries into three
main periods of development. The first is the age of mass culture, which extends roughly
from the emergence of commercial radio broadcasting through the appearance of television
and the rise (in the US) of the three major networks. The second period is the multichannel
universe of cable television, followed by satellite television. The third, and present, period
is the increasing fragmentation and infinite multiplication of the segmented online audience,
with the potential end goal of the individual as market segment.
During the first stage (mass culture), the primary critique from the left was articulated
by the Frankfurt School theorists. Fleeing Nazi Germany, and having seen the power of the
national socialist propaganda machinery, in the US they were dismayed by the rise of what
they termed the culture industry. They saw in the Hollywood studios a mechanism by
which the ideology of the ruling class would be fed to the duped masses, undermining their
ability to develop class consciousness and make the socialist revolution.
107
During the
second stage, the unitary conception of mass culture held by the Frankfurt School broke
apart as media firms increasingly pursued strategies of segmentation and target marketing.

104
Starr, 2004
105
Williams, 1961
106
McChesney, 2004
107
Horkheimer and Adorno, 1944
64
Curtin and Streeter
108
describe the period of restructuring away from the 'high network' age
of the 50s through the 80s, built around creating mass audiences between the three national
networks, over to a multichannel, satellite and cable environment from the 1990s onward.
The new industry buzzwords became market segmentation and diversification of content. In
their view, by the 1990s there were two main strategies: the blockbuster, that shot for
nonchallenging content to aggregate the largest possible audience, and tight market
segmentation, which shot for 'edge' and intensity to attract a particular niche.
109

Over time, communication scholars also developed a more sophisticated analysis of
market segmentation. Dallas Smythe writes about the fact that the commodity produced by
commercial television is the audience itself: 'eyeballs' aggregated by particular programming
flows, packaged and sold to advertisers.
110
At the time he first advanced this analysis, the
implication was that mass media content produced a homogenizing effect, since the goal
was the aggregation of large numbers of eyeballs. However, Symthe also advanced the
notion of multiple publics (or rather, viewers/consumers) as a viable marketing strategy.
Each segment needed to be potentially large enough to be a lucrative eyeball package for
advertisers, but space began to open for cultural content that diverged from the hegemonic
(white, middle class, patriarchal heteronormative) norm. Oscar Gandy extends this line of
thought by examining the way that race, class, and gender inequalities are both reflected in
and constructed by the advertising structure of commercial media. For example, examining
the advertising rates (the price per eyeball) of different groups of people (young white
males; middle age Latinas, young Black males, and so on) Gandy demonstrates that it is
actually possible to quantify the unequal value ascribed to each group by the cultural

108
Curtin and Streeter, 2001
109
Ibid.
110
Smythe, 1981/2006
65
industries. The evidence, unsurprisingly, shows that white eyeballs remain the most
valuable.
111

The new strategy of diversification had important implications for identity politics and
the increased representation of formerly invisible or ‘marginal’ subjectivities in the new
multichannel arena. For example, Larry Gross describes the long struggle of GLBTQ folks
for representation, employment, and visibility within the cultural industries; Katherine
Sender examines the role of advertising agencies in the creation of a ‘homogenized’
Lesbian market, and Arlene Dávila documents the creation of a unified 'Pan-Latino' market
in the United States.
112
In each of these cases, the construction of the market, and hence of
nationally distributed (mass, but segmented mass) cultural reference points, came about
through a combination of social movement activity, activist demands for increased
representation and employment within mass media, and 'cultural entrepreneurs' within the
advertising industry who managed to serve up a convincing promise of minority eyeball
platters to content producers, content distributors, and advertisers. At the same time, in
parallel to the ongoing cycle of minority demands for representation in the broadcast media,
followed by incorporation, definition as a new target market, and the resulting modification
of subaltern subjectivities, there also lies a rich historical fabric of counterhegemonic
cultural production rooted in communities outside the orbit of corporate conglomerates:
Halleck’s ‘Hand-Held Visions,’
113
or what might be called citizen media 1.0.

111
Gandy, 2000
112
Gross, 2001; Sender, 2004; Dávila, 2001
113
Halleck, 2002
66
Citizen Media 1.0
Halleck provides a detailed history of community video in the US context, and
documents the rise of radical videomakers and their influence in creating the public access
TV movement that during the 1980s and 1990s gained access to production facilities,
training, equipment, and cable channels for thousands of people across the U.S.
Rodriguez
114
takes a transnational comparative approach to roughly the same time period
and documents what she calls citizen’s media. Rodriguez emphasizes that in addition to
challenging state or corporate media hegemony, citizen’s media has components usually
undertheorized by communication scholars: “the survival of cultural identities, the
expression of marginalized social and cultural symbolic matter, and the growth of
subordinate groups in terms of empowerment and self-esteem.”
115
Her main project is to
challenge prior analyses of alternative and citizen’s media, on the basis that most scholars
see only failure in these forms since they seek a counterhegemonic project that will be able
to challenge the domination of the cultural industries. Indeed, after a utopian moment in the
1970s, the failure of liberation movements and their associated communication projects to
deeply and radically transform power relationships (between nation states in the South and
North, between men and women, against the expansion of capitalism at the hands of
multinational corporations, and so on) led many academics of the old Left to pronounce
'alternative media' a failure. However, Rodriguez argues that this is due to the limitations of
a binary conception of power in which each party is thought of as occupying a static
position, dominant or subordinate, with the media produced by each interest group (class,
gender, race, etc.) 'winning' or 'losing' based on whether it achieves the hegemonic position.

114
Rodriguez, 2001
115
Ibid.: xii
67
Instead, she invites us to begin with Chantal Mouffe's conception of radical
democracy, where subject positions are not fixed, essential, or mutually exclusive,
subjectivity is historically and contextually specific, and power operates as a social
relationship between people rather than as a fixed binary. The same individual may pass, in
the course of a day, through many different subject positions and power positions, through
intersectional axes of class, race, gender, age, and myriad other coordinates. From here,
citizen media - which Rodriguez prefers to 'alternative media' because the latter implies a
binary opposition to Corporate Media - should be retheorized based on its contribution to
radical democracy, rather than its ability to compete with the cultural industries head to
head. Citizen’s media, as a process that people engage in and through which they learn to
speak and articulate their own subjectivities, helps regenerate cultural identity and produces
empowerment and self-worth in marginalized people who take it up. In a symbolic universe
where they are condemned to invisibility, citizen media enable speech for those in positions
of relative powerlessness. Crucially, Rodriguez shows us how a focus on identity and the
symbolic does not need to be a retreat to the 'active audience' stance:

[C]hronicling the mediascape in terms of active audiences who negotiate the
homogenous products of a few transnational media corporations would not
only be narrow but also incomplete. Indeed, in a move that cannot but be called
myopic, media academics have decided to almost entirely neglect a multitude of
sites where media communication happens. Sites where women, men, and
children are not exiled to the moment of reception, but where they have also
colonized media production. Sites where a group of citizens has gained control
over an electronic communication medium and uses it for its own agenda,
whatever that is. Labeled with terms as diverse as "community-based media,"
"alternative media," "local media," "média libres, or "minority media," these
sites of media production bloom in an astounding variety of contexts,
complicating a scenario made up exclusively of media conglomerates and their
active audiences.
116

116
Rodriguez, 2001: 26
68
Rodriguez wrote these lines in 2001, and it is striking that by 2010 we can say that the
historical myopia of communication scholars has given way to, if anything, a new
overenthusiasm for citizen media, now that citizen media practices have gone digital and
become visible in the online spaces of so-called Web 2.0.
Critical political economy of Web 2.0
After a brief moment (1999-2003) when the global justice movement pioneered the
leading edge of online participatory journalism through projects like the Indymedia
network,
117
major media corporations assumed ownership of all of the most popular ‘social
media’ platforms, even as these platforms came to be used increasingly by social
movements. By 2010, a new layer of private firms has come to firmly dominate the
infrastructure for online cultural production. On the one hand, we can see this as the
appropriation of ‘bottom-up’ innovations in social media practices by the cultural
industries; on the other, we might think of it as a paradigm shift produced by net users
whose social media practices (including self-publishing, sharing, remixing, and
collaborative information production and circulation) have massively infiltrated and, to
some extent, partially displaced the old top-down model of the cultural industries.
At the same time, social movement use of corporate social media sites poses a
number of dangers, namely exploitation, surveillance, censorship, and lack of
accountability. In this context, activist-theorists have embarked on an attempt to interrogate
the political economy of Web 2.0. Tiziana Terranova
118
approaches this project through the
concept of immaterial labor, which she traces from Marx's “Fragment on Machines” in the
Grundrisse through Italian autonomist thinkers like Mauricio Lazzarato and Paolo Virno.

117
Downing, 2002; Kidd, 2003; Nogueira, 2002; Pickard, 2006; Whitney, 2005
118
Terranova, 2006
69
For Terranova, immaterial labor in the age of general intellect is not a way to force affect
and subjectivity back into class analysis, but to trouble the false analytical division between
economy and subjectivity. She argues that much of the writing on immaterial labor in the
early 2000s went too far in over-privileging the 'knowledge worker,' somehow collapsing a
wide range of 'immaterial' labor practices into a catch-all category attractive to intellectuals
but missing the degree to which division of labor persists and intensifies in 'knowledge
industries.' 'Immaterial labor' is broad enough to include highly skilled software
programmers and call center workers; so vague as to apply to nearly any form of
managerial work as well as to data entry. In addition, there is nothing ‘inherently’ liberatory
about immaterial labor. Quite the opposite:

Immaterial labor, in fact, is not immune to new diagrams of control, on the
contrary. As the experience of the digital economy and network culture
demonstrate, such diagrams work by reimposing centres and hierarchical
distinctions against a much larger background of continuous variation (as the
work on scale free networks demonstrate); by preemptively assigning
objectives, outcomes, and deadlines against the uneven temporality of
processes of autonomous organization which do not always follow their
rhythm (as in the software industry); by channeling desire to prop up identities
against the threat of dissipation (as in movements such as evangelical and
nationalist blogs); by policing the rights of property against the indiscipline of
nonlinear circulation (as in the legal wars against peer-to-peer systems).
119

Following Terranova, we might say that there is a bifurcation, or split, between immaterial
labor that self-organizes in autonomous formations, and the move to capture, control,
monitor, monetize, and extract value from immaterial labor, as well as to mobilize
immaterial workers towards the reproduction of older subjectivity formations
(ethnonationalism, religious fundamentalisms).

119
Terranova, 2006: 33
70
Put in de Certeau’s terms, Web 2.0 as a larger project is about the monetization, or
capture, of procedures of everyday creativity. Social media monetizes not just the creative
content produced by the 'users,' but more importantly, their browsing time. In addition, we
can say that this is increasingly true both in online spaces and in ‘real’ space. De Certeau's
tactical stroll through the city, in which the urban walker writes their own personal narrative
of the city through his/her paths, becomes a monitored and monetized browse through the
walled gardens of the corporate net, even as the real-space stroll increasingly becomes a
focal point for surveillance, tracking, and data mining by both the security state (CCTV,
face recognition, algorithmic surveillance, cell phone triangulation) and the advertising
industry (RFID, geolocative advertising).
Media activists have also been grappling with these problems: in Mute magazine,
Dmytri Kleiner and Brian Wyrick denounce Web 2.0 as “a venture capitalist’s paradise
where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users, ride on the technical
innovations of the free software movement, and kill off the decentralising potential of peer-
to-peer production.”
120
Andrew Lowenthal of Engage Media dissects the business model of
Web 2.0 media darlings like YouTube and MySpace:

One of the key business models for these “Web 2.0” start ups has been the
basic idea of providing an infrastructure and technology for users and then
selling those eyes to advertisers and the contributor community to a larger
company – it happened with Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and more. There is a
huge rush of companies trying to create the next big site to bring in the people
and make their pot of gold. Users need to become far more savvy as to the
imbalance in power that is being generated and who they are helping make
millionaires.”
121

120
Kleiner and Wyric, 2007
121
Lowenthal, 2007
71
Moving from critique to action, Lowenthal is part of the team responsible for producing
Plumi, a customized version of the FOSS content management system Plone, tailored to the
needs of video activists (http://plumi.net). This is part of a broader recognition by
networked tech-activists that the construction of autonomous infrastructure must continue
despite the current domination of online cultural infrastructure by corporate providers. The
rise of Web 2.0 firms also forces media activists to abandon once and for all the discourse
of technotopia or ‘digital democracy,’ and to return to the long, difficult, but ultimately
crucial and rewarding work of engaging with social movements of the marginalized base.
Autonomist theory
These critiques and creative responses are important, as long as we resist any
totalizing vision of a social media sphere completely controlled by corporations and the
state. This vision is far too simplistic, and on the face of it ignores or marginalizes much of
the truly liberatory potential of social media. Indeed, the spread of horizontal
communication can be understood in another way by tracing a specific sub-strand of critical
political economy, autonomist thought. In this view, well summarized by Nick Dyer-
Witheford,
122
the accumulation of human knowledge and labor in the form of, first,
industrial machinery, and later, information systems, constantly increases our productive
power. Information and knowledge work become an increasingly important part of the
globalized economy, as automation replaces many kinds of skilled labor and as globalized
firms, enabled by information technology, shift production at will to sites of lowest labor
cost. This global mobility of capital poses great challenges to workers in their quest to make
effective demands on wages, working conditions, and job stability. However, the
development of informational capitalism does require a great increase in the informational

122
Dyer-Witheford, 1999
72
skills of most workers; at the same time, information technologies including mobile phones,
personal computers, camcorders, and so on, as well as access to communication networks,
become more accessible to more people. As immaterial labor takes on an increasingly
generalized and important role, some people use their new information skills and tools to
challenge social and economic inequalities and environmental devastation. So far, the
autonomist branch of critical political economy has failed to fully examine the implications
of radical inequality in the distribution of increasingly segmented information work. This
has left the theory open to critique of being unduly ‘optimistic’ about oppressed peoples’
ability to mobilize information technology in their social struggles. The next section
addresses that critique by examining the real-world practices of social media appropriation
within the broader media opportunity structure of the immigrant rights movement in Los
Angeles.

Composition of the media opportunity structure for the immigrant rights
movement in Los Angeles
For the purposes of this dissertation, assessment of the media opportunity structure
is based on responses by my interviewees to questions about the relationship between the
immigrant rights movement and the media. I asked all interviewees to describe the
relationship of the movement to mass media, ethnic media, and social media, and to give
examples of how these relationships function in practice. Based on their responses, the
media opportunity structure for the immigrant rights movement in L.A. can be characterized
as follows.
73
Lack of access to mainstream media
All of my interviewees expressed frustration with what they generally called
‘mainstream media.’ By mainstream media, they were almost always referring to English
language newspapers and television networks with national reach. Most said that they had
occasionally managed to gain coverage in mainstream media, but that such coverage was
scarce and only happened in exceptional circumstances. One organizer who works with
indigenous immigrant communities put it this way: “It’s rare that we get the attention of the
mainstream media unless there’s blood or something. Then they’ll come to us if it’s related
to indigenous people.”
123
She was called on to speak as an ‘expert’ about indigenous
immigrants, but only in order to add ‘color’ to negative stories about her community. She
also emphasized that the difficulty in getting mainstream coverage was specific to L.A., and
claimed that local partners of her organization in other cities in California had more luck
with mainstream media. Many expressed frustration that movement victories, in particular,
are almost never covered. They also found it especially galling that mass media would flock
to cover the activities of small anti-immigrant groups, while ignoring the hard day to day
work done by thousands of immigrant rights advocates:

I think there are very few instances where the work that is, or the victories that
are being won, you don't hear about them in the media, in mass media. In fact
you hear the negative side of it. I think about Mayday, and how it's televised,
how we talk about it, and I feel like a lot of the great work that's going on with
organizations, say day laborers won a huge settlement or claim, you're not
going to hear about it in the mass media. What we do hear about immigrant
rights is anti-immigrant rights and anti-immigrant sentiment. That's pretty
across the board, that's how it's presented.
124

123
Interview, PS
124
Interview, NB
74
A few felt that the anti-immigrant rights activists got more coverage because they were
more savvy about pitching their actions to journalists, and that the immigrant rights
movement could do a much better job of placing its stories and frames in Anglo mass
media.
125
Others felt that mainstream outlets consistently rejected even their best media
strategies.
126

A few interviewees, primarily those who participate in more radical or politicized
social movement formations, shared an explicit analysis of the mass media as a powerful
enemy, but one that could occasionally be used to the movement’s advantage:

We have an understanding that the media is not on our side. The corporate
media is not on the side of the people, and they're actually an extension of the
State, of these corporations. For us, because we don't want to be dependent on
them, but we know they can reach way more people than we can at this point.
Until we take over their TV stations, we're not gonna be able to trust them. But
around specific cases of police murder, for example an incident that happened
in East L.A. recently was Salvador Cepeda who was an 18 yr old murdered by
the Sheriffs in the Lopez Maravilla neighborhood. We were able to, we put out
a press release and they came out to the vigil that we had. We try to encourage
the families to speak out, to get it out there, but it's just one thing we don’t,
we're not gonna be dependent on them.
127

Whether they believe mass media to be antagonistic to the immigrant rights movement or
not, most are frustrated by the way that they feel the mass media either ignores them or
twists their words. Indeed, a recent comprehensive literature review on the framing of
immigration in the U.S. strongly supports my interviewees’ perceptions that even when
they are able to gain access to the mass media, they are still confined within narratives that
portray immigrants and immigration as dangerous, threatening, ‘out of control,’

125
Interview, XD
126
Interview, TX
127
Interview, KB
75
contaminated, and in otherwise dehumanizing terms.
128
However, only two of my
interviewees, from a collective called Revolutionary Autonomous Communities, said that
they had moved beyond anger and frustration and made a principled decision to no longer
speak to ‘the corporate media:’

At the same time we want to focus on creating, like you mentioned, popular
media, other forms of communication, so you know, we don't want to be
dependent on the State in anything we do. So why are we gonna use them?
RAC has the position that as RAC, we're not gonna rely on the corporate media
at all. We're not gonna speak to them. Anything we do, it's not gonna be
popularized through the corporate media. Because they're gonna, you know, try
to tell our stories their way. Definitely censor what we're doing and try to create
their, you know, leaders, through their handpicking people to speak to. So we
definitely feel that they are not our friends. In RAC, when we do outreach,
anything we do, any project we have, is not gonna be done or popularized
through them.
129

One of the reasons RAC made this decision was to avoid what they described as the
problem of mass media ‘creating’ movement leaders through selective decisions about who
to interview for ‘the movement’s perspective.’ Social movement scholars have documented
this effect before.
130
Most immigrant rights organizers, however, would like to receive
more and better coverage from Anglo print and broadcast media, but generally find
themselves turning to other outlets that are more receptive: ethnic media.
Ethnic media
Nearly all of the organizers and movement participants spoke about how important
ethnic media is to the immigrant rights movement:
I think the Spanish media has a closer connection to immigrant rights. In terms
of, they come out to events and press conferences, at least you hear about, like
my mom told me, she was telling me about these vendors who basically their

128
Larsen et al, 2009
129
Interview, RF
130
Gamson, 1998
76
food was all thrown out, "It happened in L.A., did you hear about it, were you
there?" I didn't even know about it! So I think that sometimes the Spanish
language media does, it's very limited, but at least in Hoy they have a vendor or
a day laborer to highlight. So I think it's really great that they can do that.

Q: So Hoy, who else in Spanish language media does some coverage?

La Opinion, and Spanish TV, like news coverage. When students are
organizing and have press conferences, one thing that we've noticed is that
usually it's Spanish language media that comes out. And then they have been
featuring a lot of students, and interviewing students. Definitely they could be
doing more, but I feel like the English media has, you know, could highlight
these issues more of working class or immigrants, and I don’t think they do as
good a job as Spanish language.
131

Immigrant rights organizers across the spectrum - students, unions, indigenous
communities, independent worker centers, radical collectives, and everywhere in between -
all say that commercial Spanish language media provides coverage where English language
media is nowhere to be found. When they talk about media use by the communities they are
organizing, interviewees usually mention the largest Spanish language papers (La Opinión)
and television channels (Univisión, Telemundo) as well as papers or stations focused
around their city, state, or community of origin. For example, many Oaxacans follow the
major ‘pan-Latino’ media but also read Oaxacan newspapers El Oaxaqueño or El Impulso
de Oaxaca.
132
These patterns are also generational: younger indigenous people, especially
those born in L.A., are more likely to “go to MySpace, listen to Rage Against the Machine,
everything else.”
133

This dynamic is not limited to Spanish language press, but applies to some degree
across all immigrant communities in L.A. For example, organizers from the Koreatown
Immigrant Workers’ Alliance (KIWA) talked about how they were able to gain coverage in

131
Interview, DH
132
Interview, PS
133
Interview, PS
77
Korean language media outlets during the Koreatown supermarket workers’ campaign, and
ultimately to secure a living wage agreement in five different supermarkets in Koreatown:

In that campaign, actually, because it was after KIWA had been established for
10, 11, 12 years, definitely we were not only on their radar screen but it was a
very hot issue in Korean American community. Therefore everything was
covered each step of the way. We got a lot of highlight from Korean American
community. However, because the scope of the campaign was focused on
geographic concentrated area Koreatown we were not able to get as much
stories written in mainstream media. One of the attempts to overcome that was
getting our good visible named ally to write an Op Ed into L.A. Times. La
Opinion covered it at the beginning a few times. It was because we spinned it
in a way that, during April 29th a lot of the saigu [1992 L.A. Uprising] was
kind of highlighted as a racial issue and therefore we used one of the saigu
anniversary events as ‘this is something that Korean employer firing 56 Latino
workers, therefore we don't want what happened in 1992 to repeat itself’ and
the employer has to do the right thing to have racial harmony in Koreatown.
134

This interviewee described strategies for gaining coverage in English and Spanish language
newspapers, including relationships with individual reporters, calling on favors from high
status allies, and the use of timely or familiar frames. These strategies were less necessary
for Korean language ethnic media, who covered the campaign “every step of the way.”
There is a long history in the United States of immigrant communities creating
media for their community of national origin, published in their first language. However,
many of my interviewees talked about a shift during the past decade, during which they
experienced an increase in access to these media outlets. For example, one described how
ethnic media have emerged over the past decade as a key space for community based
organizations to gain coverage, where previously Anglo print journalists and broadcasters
ignored them:

For us, we always have to stop and think, “What’s the best way?” Right? And
even till now, we still hit that mainstream newspaper, and then we realize other
things that work because the mainstream doesn’t show up, but the ethnic does,

134
Interview, EQ
78
you know? So for us ethnic media was this huge opening, which I would say
was six, seven years ago. They were the place to go to when you didn’t have
access to mainstream. And now there’s this whole other even deeper, wider
place that you can go to, then how do you navigate that? And the way that we
eventually learned how to navigate ethnic press, really, pretty soon the
mainstream were going to the ethnic press to get the information. A lot of that
reversed.
135

Crucially, this interviewee not only described how ethnic press is important because it
covers stories that mainstream media ignore, but also pointed out that ethnic press have
become a source of stories for mainstream press. This closely mirrors the more widely
heard argument that mass media now draw stories from blogs and online-only publications.
As an example, she described the press strategy around a campaign to gain increased fares
for Taxi workers in New York:

So I worked on a project in New York, with Taxi Workers, and pitched it to
the New York Times, so this was a very traditional strategy. You know, did all
of our messaging, this is what we want the paper to cover. We want to make,
it’s not a 9/11 story ‘cause its post 9/11, it’s an analysis of the industry, it’s
about immigrant workers, it’s about families, and we really wanted to highlight
the family part. And the reporter bought it, and he was totally down with it, had
the cover of the local news, you know, ‘taxi drivers can’t support their
families.’ And we’re like ‘could it have been more perfect?’ That morning that
it came out is when we sent out the press release for the wider ‘report comes
out today.’ We got thirty media, local radio, I mean sorry, TV, radio,
newspaper, tons of ethnic press, and that led to both New York Daily News
and the New York, the two smaller, the weeklies, to actually write editorials
that support taxi workers in getting a fare increase. They never, ever, ever, ever
say anything nice about the drivers. Which led to the fare increase victory.
136

To gain this level of press coverage, this interviewee emphasized the continued importance
of the mainstream print media (the New York Times), and the importance of personal
relationships with reporters in securing that level of coverage. Like other interviewees, she

135
Interview, TX
136
Interview, TX
79
also noted that relationships with individual reporters are key to gaining good coverage.
137

At the same time, her example illustrates how even coverage by a major media outlet is now
situated within a changed media opportunity structure that savvy organizers have learned to
exploit. The initial NYT story provided important momentum and credibility to the
campaign, which organizers then used to get increased visibility for the release of a full
report on conditions in the industry, thereby generating a flurry of coverage across local
Anglo and ethnic press and securing a fare increase for (mostly immigrant) taxi drivers.

The continued importance of radio
Above all, everyone agreed that Spanish language radio plays a decisive role in the
immigrant rights movement:

I mean we saw it with the 2006 marches, where the radios had, I mean they,
some would say that they had most of the push. Not the organizations that were
organizing. They’ve been doing their work for a long time, but that whole thing
of being able to be on the radio in front of millions of people really motivated
the majority of people to participate in the economic boycott, and in the walk
outs.
138

Commercial Spanish language radio represents a significant opportunity for immigrant
rights movement formations, even though my interviewees felt that in general, these
stations remain escapist, sensationalist, sexist, racist, and homophobic.

Those are very commercial outlets. They don't, they're not, they're in favor of
immigrant rights but in kind of a very general way. And then sometimes they'll
talk about raids and things like that, which is a big concern in the immigrant
community and in the immigrant rights community. But they don't do what I
would want them to do, which would be very proactive about warning people,
having people call in when they see ICE vans, warning people where they see
them, that's what I would really like to see those media outlets do. But they're

137
Interview, KB
138
Interview, NB
80
not political, they're commercial […] They’re as bad or worse as the
mainstream media in English. It's very sensationalist or semi-informed
people.
139

Beyond occasional support from big-name locutores (radio hosts), some organizations have
developed relationships with specific radio outlets over time. For example, the Frente
Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations,
FIOB) has a longstanding relationship with Radio Bilingue, based in Fresno. They are
often able to provide audio content, interviews, and Public Service Announcements (PSAs)
that the radio network will air. For a time, they had a show called Nuestro Foro (Our
Forum) on the air. The FIOB coordinator in Santa Maria, Jesus Estrada, was also able to
secure a regular TV show on Telemundo for a time.
140
In a similar fashion, KIWA was
able to secure a monthly hour long radio show called “Home Sweet Home” on Radio
Seoul, a Korean language radio station that broadcast in the Koreatown area.
141
Minority
language radio thus remains a key media outlet for many actors across the immigrant rights
movement.
Social and mobile media
We have seen that the media opportunity structure in Los Angeles generally denies
the immigrant rights movement access to the Anglo mass media, but provides it with some
openings in the ethnic press and minority language radio. In addition, despite the low levels
of digital media access and literacy, many grassroots media activists, immigrant rights
organizers, and movement participants do use the net extensively to promote, document,
and frame the mobilizations they take part in. By 2006, social movements everywhere,
including the immigrant rights movement in L.A., had widely adopted Social Networking

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140
Interview, PS
141
Interview, KZ
81
Sites (SNS). In the US, the first SNS to gain significant visibility was Friendster, soon
followed by MySpace, and at time of writing, Facebook (as well as a host of other, smaller
or nationally specific SNS, such as Orkut in Brazil or Cyworld in Korea). Social movement
organizations have appropriated these spaces almost since the beginning. For example,
MySpace was originally marketed as a site for independent musicians to promote their
music and connect with fans, but soon became the most popular SNS for young people in
the USA.
142
By 2006, a wide spectrum of activist networks and social movement
organizations including anarchists, vegans, environmentalists, and feminists all had
MySpace profiles.
143
Activists use SNS as tools to announce meetings, actions, and events,
distribute movement media (especially photos, and increasingly video), and to reach out to
young, Internet savvy demographics.
144
Some SNS focus explicitly on facilitating face-to-
face meetings based on shared interests. The earliest example that reached widespread mass
media awareness in the US took place in 2004, when Howard Dean’s campaign recognized
that MeetUp and other social networking tools could help their base to self-organize during
Dean’s bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
145
The use of MeetUp
emerged first from the base of Dean supporters and was then encouraged and fostered by
campaign leadership.
146
This case, and of course the social media savvy strategy of the
2008 Obama campaign, illustrate how horizontal communication practices have been used
to restructure and revitalize vertical political organizational forms. Movement appropriation
of SNS takes place even while these sites are also spaces where users replicate gender,
class, and race divisions (for example, see danah boyd on how Indian Orkut users have

142
boyd, 2007
143
See http://myspace.com/infoshopdotorg (anarchist infoshop); http://myspace.com/gpus (Greenpeace),
and http://www.myspace.com/feminists, for example.
144
Jesella, 2006
145
Sey and Castells, 2004
146
Trippi, 2004
82
replicated the caste system and on the class division between MySpace and Facebook.)
147

The net and mobile phones are also used extensively as tactical mobilization tools,
especially by Latino youth. For example, students in LA Unified School District used
MySpace and SMS (text messaging) to help communicate and coordinate walkouts that
saw 15-40,000 students take the streets during the week following the March 25th, 2006
marches.
148
We will return to this in the next section.
Just as commercial media outlets turn increasingly to ethnic media for original story
ideas, they also frequently appropriate and repackage coverage initially created by
community journalists and posted online to blogs or SNS. One interviewee described his
reaction to the plagiarism of one of his stories by a major media outlet in this way:

If one of our independent media stories gets into the mainstream media, even if
they don't give us credit it's good because at least word is getting out. So I think
there's a little bit of exploitation going on. I think that mainstream media and
mass media exploit us a little bit. All of our volunteer efforts and our labor.
149

Another organizer mentioned that the most effective way to get commercial television
coverage of movement activity is to provide them with sensational video footage, especially
footage of police or protestor violence.
150
These social movement participants found it easy
to insert violent video footage of protest activity into broadcast or network TV coverage,
but difficult or impossible to effectively frame such clips in ways that would support their
goals.

147
boyd, forthcoming
148
Goodman and Gonzalez, 2006; Loyd and Burridge, 2007
149
Interview, CX
150
Interview, KB
83
Real-time social movement media
Another important transformation that has taken place over the last few years is the
shift from the use of the web to document past actions and mobilizations to real-time social
media practices. As one interviewee states:

I think right now we’re at this point where suddenly we’re kind of moving into
this, this different area of real time web […] I mean I’m finding with video for
example, how feasible it is to make a video and put it up the day that it happens,
you know? In the past, I think in 2006, we wouldn’t really have thought like
that.
151

He described how a few years ago, activists would have mostly relied on commercial TV
stations to provide video coverage of an action or mobilization, then recorded that coverage
and perhaps used it later to point to evidence of successful organizing. Today, by contrast,
social movements are increasingly able to provide real-time or near-real-time coverage of
their own actions. It is not uncommon, for example, for movement media makers to
document a day’s action, then post the video to the web within a few hours.
Finally, much of the most dynamic movement media is multimodal or cross
platform. This is especially true for radio. Several of my interviewees talked about
movement radio projects they were involved in, and all of them mentioned streaming radio
live over the net. Live radio streams are often picked up and rebroadcast locally via FM
transmitters.

We have a show on killradio.org. We just started in on Tuesday nights from 9-
12. On the one hand, it's good, because it's international. People anywhere can
listen to it. But at the time we're on, I'm pretty sure people in other parts of the
world are sleeping (laughs). But we get some listeners. We're able to do our
own reporting, interviews with people that are in different cities, organizing
around ICE raids, immigration, indigenous rights, police brutality, other things
that are happening, which is a good thing. Eventually I think we want to maybe

151
Interview, XD
84
even do it where, I know one of our members from Copwatch he has
raisethfist.org that he has an Internet news show and then it's through FM dial.
He's gonna rebroadcast some of our shows too. It's heard throughout
Compton, Long Beach, Southeast LA.
152

Composition of the media opportunity structure: summary
The composition of the media opportunity structure for the immigrant rights
movement in Los Angeles has undergone an important transformation. The movement has
scant access to Anglo print and broadcast outlets, although coverage is possible during
exceptionally large mobilizations or in cases of extreme violence by protestors or police.
However, during recent years movement actors have managed to gain increased access to
ethnic media, especially Spanish language outlets. Some movement organizations have
developed valuable personal relationships with reporters that can be called upon at key
moments to increase the likelihood of coverage. Organizers have also become more savvy
about how to generate coverage in the ethnic press, and how to further push such coverage
until it ‘bubbles up’ to wider circulation via the mainstream media. At the same time, social
media, blogs, and online news sites have steadily grown in importance. Sometimes, digital
media coverage generates stories in ethnic or mainstream media. Most recently, online
digital media practices are shifting from documentation after the fact to real-time or near
real-time movement coverage and tactical media, especially valuable at moments when the
mass media ignores the movement.
How does this media opportunity structure play out during moments of mass
mobilization? The next section examines the implications of the changed media opportunity
structure for two movement formations: the 2006 wave of protest against the
Sensenbrenner Bill, and the May Day 2007 police attack on Macarthur Park.

152
Interview, KB
85

Media opportunity structure: The Sensenbrenner Bill and the Walkouts
The militarization of borders and the expansion of the state apparatus of surveillance,
raids, detentions, and deportations are key mechanisms to control low wage immigrant
workers in the United States of America.
153
The consolidation of Immigration and
Naturalization Services into the Department of Homeland Security was followed post-9/11
by so-called Special Registration, then by a new wave of detentions, deportations, and
“rendering” of “suspected terrorists” to Guantánamo and other secret military prisons for
indefinite detention and torture without trial.
154
In 2006, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) increased the number of beds for detainees to 27,500, opened a new
500-bed detention center for families with children in Williamson County, Texas, and set a
new agency record of 187,513 “Alien Removals.”
155
By the spring of 2006, it became
politically feasible for the Republican House of Representatives to pass the infamous HR
4437, the proposed Sensenbrenner bill. Sensenbrenner would have criminalized
undocumented persons and the act of providing shelter or aid to an undocumented person,
making felons of millions of undocumented individuals, their families and friends, as well
as service workers, including clergy, social service workers, health care providers, and
educators.
156
The Republican Party used the bill and the debates around it to play on white
racial fears, in an attempt to gain political support from nativists. The proposal abandoned
economic rationality: a Cato Institute analysis of the economic impacts of an enforcement-
heavy policy as opposed to a legalization policy found that reducing the number of low-

153
Andreas, 2001
154
Twibell, 2005; Buff, 2008
155
ICE, 2006
156
Immigrant Legal Resource Center, 2006
86
wage immigrant workers by a third would cost the U.S. economy about $80 billion. By
contrast, legalizing undocumented workers would grow the U.S. economy by more than
1% of GDP, or $180 billion.
157

The response to Sensenbrenner was the largest wave of mass mobilizations in U.S.
history. March, April, and May of 2006 saw major marches in every metropolis as well as
in countless smaller cities and towns. Half a million people took to the streets in Chicago, a
million in Los Angeles, hundreds of thousands more in New York, Houston, San Diego,
Miami, Atlanta, and other cities across the U.S. In many places, these marches were the
largest in history.
158

Figure 15: Mayday 2006 in Los Angeles

Source: la.indymedia.org

The surging strength of the immigrant rights movement was built through the hard work of
thousands of organizations, including those that work to organize the base directly, those
that function as regional or national coordinating hubs, and those that intervene in policy
debates. Yet one of the most decisive factors was the changing composition of the media
opportunity structure.

157
Dixon and Rimmer, 2009
158
Pulido, 2007
87
English language television news channels (FOX and CNN) played important roles
in the information war around migration and immigrant rights, alongside right wing talk
radio. However, as we have seen, all major English language media outlets completely
failed to anticipate the strength of the movement and the scale of the mobilizations. By
contrast, Spanish language press, including nationally syndicated networks Telemundo and
Univisión as well as commercial radio stations, provided constant coverage of the
movement. Spanish language commercial radio not only covered the protests but also
played a significant role in announcing them and mobilizing participation. This was widely
reported on in the Anglo press, after the fact.
159
Carmen Gonzalez surveyed mobilization
participants in L.A. and found empirical evidence to support the claim that commercial
Spanish language radio was the most important media influence on march turnout in Los
Angeles (friends and family were the primary source of information, followed by radio).
160

A recent study by Graciela Orozco for the Social Science Research Council also analyzed
coverage on Radio Bilingue, a more than two-decades old nonprofit network of Latino
community radio stations with 6 affiliates in California and satellite distribution to over 100
communities in the US, Puerto Rico, and México. The study found that the nonprofit
network played an important role in circulating information and encouraging people to join
the mobilizations.
161
Although many of the organizations and networks active in the
immigrant workers’ movement in L.A. participate in organizing yearly Mayday marches
that often turn out several thousand people, when speaking of the spring of 2006, everyone

159
Del Barco, 2006
160
Gonzalez, 2006
161
Orozco, 2007
88
I interviewed agreed that the involvement of the commercial locutores was the decisive
factor in the vast scale of the marches against the Sensenbrenner bill.
162

The Walkouts
While the mass marches were largely organized via broadcast media, especially
commercial Spanish language talk radio, text messages and MySpace were the key
platforms for the student walkouts that swept across the city alongside the mass marches.
163

While the anti-Sensenbrenner mobilizations provided a great deal of fuel for the fires of the
(Anglo, middle class) blogosphere, MySpace and video sharing platform YouTube opened
possibilities for movement appropriation, especially for autorepresentación (self-
representation) via text, photos, videos, and audio, as well as for real-time tactical
mobilization via SMS. Student organizers who I interviewed made it clear that both SMS
and SNS played important, but not decisive, roles in the walkouts.
164
Existing face-to-face
networks of students organized the Walkouts for weeks beforehand, preparing flyers,
meeting with other student organizations, doing the legwork and spreading the word. Many
said that text messages and posts to MySpace served not to ‘organize’ the Walkouts, but to
provide real-time confirmation that actions were really taking place. One interviewee told
me about checking her MySpace during a break between classes, and said that it was when
she saw a photo posted there from a walkout at another school that she realized the Walkout
was “really going to happen.” That gave her the courage to gather students at her school
(students who already had been organizing for a Walkout) and convince them that it was
time to take action.
165

162
Interviews, NB, XD, KB, BH, DH, CX
163
Yang, 2007
164
Interviews, BH, XD, NB
165
Interview, EN
89
Another high school student activist explains:

It was organized, there was fliers, there was also people on the Internet, on chat
lines and MySpace people were sending fliers also. So that’s also one of the
ways that it was organized. The thing is that students just wanted their voice to
be heard. Since they can’t vote, they’re at least trying to affect the vote of
others, by saying their opinion towards HR4437 affecting their schools and
their parents or their family.
166

This student, like many of my interviewees, emphasizes the pervasive and multimodal
nature of movement communication practices during the spring of 2006. In contrast to
many movement actors’ comments about the singular and decisive role that radio played in
mobilizing non-student immigrant workers, my interviewees mentioned SNS as one among
many factors that contributed to the walkouts.
Middle school students as well as high school students participated in the walkouts.
One organizer I interviewed was a middle school teacher at the time of the walkouts, and
told me about daily conversations that she had with her students about their plans to
participate. She noted that there was wide disparity in access to mobile phones among
middle and high school students, both based on income but also age. Most of her younger
middle school students did not have access to mobile phones or digital cameras during
the walkouts. They heard about the walkouts through parents, elder siblings, or existing
student chapters of organizations like MeCha. When they walked out, their lack of access
to digital cameras meant that police repression of middle school walkouts went largely
unreported.
167
A few of the student activists I talked to also mentioned email (especially
mailing lists) and blogs, but most of them emphasized that organizing took place through
a combination of face to face communication (with friends, family, and organized student

166
SourceCode, 2006
167
Interview, TH
90
groups), paper fliers, text messages, and MySpace. All of them described a context of
pervasive and persistent messaging across all channels, urging them to take action to
defeat Sensenbrenner and stand up for their rights.
Appropriation of MySpace
When we say that students appropriated MySpace during the 2006 walkouts, what
does that really mean? Some commentators at the time seemed to indicate that immigrant
rights organizations used Social Network Sites to push their organizing efforts out, from
the top down, to a new youth constituency. However, for the most part my interviews and
documentation suggest a different story. For example, almost none of the fliers circulated
on MySpace were created by established immigrant rights organizations. Instead, these
flyers were produced and circulated by students themselves:

Figure 16: Spring 2006 Walkout flyers

Source: reposted to multiple MySpace walls and bulletins

Students created a wide range of these virtual fliers using graphical styles and techniques
ranging from hand-drawn art or scanned paintings, to remix and photo collage, to mostly
text with varied fonts, font sizes and colors, and clip art. I found very few examples of
91
MySpace flyers created by existing political organizations; the vast majority were made by
students and circulated through their friendship networks in the form of wall posts and
bulletins.
MySpace also functioned as a kind of (commercial, circumscribed) digital public
sphere for students to debate the broader issues of immigration as well as the specific tactic
of the walkouts. An activist from Watsonville High described how after the first day of
walkouts, another student posted anti-immigrant commentary on MySpace which was then
printed out and posted up around her school. The printed anti-immigrant MySpace bulletin
generated a firestorm of anger among immigrant students and prompted a second day of
walkouts.
168

After the first round of walkouts took place (in early March), students used
MySpace posts, bulletins, chat, and forums to document their actions, post and circulate
photos and videos, and debate tactics for further actions:

BIGGEST WALKOUT IN STUDEN HISTORY ON MARCH 31, 2006)*~

EVERYONE SPREAD THE WORD THAT THERE IS TO BE NO MORE
WALKOUTS THIS 2 DAYS COMING UP (WEDNESDAY AND
THURSDAY) LET THE SCHOOL TEACHERS, POLICE MEN AND
GOVERNMENT THINK THAT WE STUDENTS HAVE STOPED
PROTESTING LET THEM THINK WE ARE NOT SEAKING ANYMORE
TROUBLE AND ON FRIDAY MARCH 31, 2006 ALL
MEXICANS/LATINOS/HISPANICS/CHICANOS ARE TO WALKOUT OF
CAMPUS AFTER 1ST PERIOD AND ARE TO MARCH TO EVERY
POLITICAL BUILDING THEY CAN REACH. IF YOU GOT FRIENDS
THAT AREN'T MEXICANS INVITE THEM TO PROTEST TOO TELL EM
THEY COULD BE LOSING FRIENDS/GIRLFRIENDS ECT...WEATHER
THEY BLACK, WHITE, JAP., ECT...TELL EM TO HELP OUT THIS
FRIDAY IS GONNA BE THE BIGGEST STUDENT PROTEST THE
GOVERNMENT HAS SEEN BUT THERE IS TO BE NO WALKOUTS
(WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY) LET THE SCHOOL AND THE
GOVERNMENT THINK WE HAVE STOPED PROTESTING AND THIS
WAY THEY WON'T PUT SCHOOLS ON LOCKDOWN SO LET THINKS
COOL DOWN AND ON MARCH 31,2006 REMEMBER EVERY
MEXICAN/LATINO/CHICANO/HISPANIC AND ANYONE ELSE THAT

168
Hernandez, 2006
92
WANTS TO HELP THIS CAUSE TO WALKOUT RIGHT AFTER 1ST
PERIOD SO LET ALL YOUR FRIENDS KNOW WAT IS GOING ON
THIS FRIDAY COMING UP..........................WE GONNA MAKE
HISTORY THIS MONTH.
169

MySpace became a venue not only to discuss tactics, but also to contextualize the walkouts
within larger histories of colonization, indigenous rights, and the ongoing wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan:

This is all bullshit.....the senate has just approved that bill enforcing...the
immigration law....this is bullshit...cuz there is no real american in this
country....the real americans were those natives, and they even immigrated.....so
fuck this shit....i am here to stay and there is no fucken law that is going to
change...that.....so fuck it....lets do it for everyone; mexicans, salvadorenos, and
everybody throught out latin america...we can't let them throw us off here.....the
land of freedom???what muthafucken freedom is this???so fuck it.....lets make
something out of it and lets have our voice be heard.....this is the time when we
have to stand together and unite......yeah we can't have our liscenses but yet they
want us to go fight a war that isn't ours......fuck this shit.....WEDNESDAY
WALKOUT.......many school are going to walk out and have completely
chaos.....another walk out------- but a real one this time....do it for a cause….
170

In addition to posting comments and images to friends’ walls, creating and sending
bulletins, and using forums, students also created numerous MySpace groups with names
including NO on HR4437, FUCK THA HR-4437, UNITED MEXICANS, !~PrOuD
BeAnErs~!, Indigenous Resistance, Protest Bill HR4437!, undocumented immigrants'
rights, Say No to HR 4437, and the like:

169
From
http://forum.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=messageboard.viewThread&entryID=14832951&categoryI
D=0&IsSticky=1&groupID=100077050
170
Wall post by anonymous MySpace user
93
Figure 17: Anti-HR4437 MySpace Groups

Source: MySpace.com

Student activists also found ways to appropriate technical functionality originally designed
for personal expression and repurpose it for collective expressions of political engagement
or group solidarity. For example, many students changed their profile pictures to ‘No on
HR4437’ images or flyers, and changed their display name to walkout related terms such as
‘nohr4437,’ ‘walkout,’ or ‘4 A Reason.’

Figure 18: MySpace profile pictures and display names changed in political protest

Source: MySpace.com

Students also used real-time tools like AIM and other chat clients to discuss past and
upcoming walkouts, share experiences and tactics, and spread the word about future
actions:

94
Figure 19: AIM discussion of 2007 walkout, posted to MySpace user’s wall

Source: MySpace.com

This MySpace user not only employed AIM to discuss the walkout with other students, but
documented this practice and then circulated it via wall posts to MySpace. In moments of
mass mobilization, new media are simultaneously appropriated towards tactical movement
ends and also used to document, remediate, and share media tools and skills. Interviewees
described not only practices of documenting their own walkouts with still and video
cameras as well as mobile phones, but also how they also learned new media skills as
friends showed them how to transfer documentation from capture devices to computers,
edit photos and video, and upload photos, audios, and text posts to the web. Other
interviewees described spending extensive amounts of time online during the mobilization
wave, learning new skills in terms of photo and video editing, ‘profile pimping,’ and so
on.
171

The Sensenbrenner crisis and the Walkouts thus became a generative space for
appropriation of social media tools to circulate information about the struggle in real time.
Simultaneously, the crisis provided a crucible for the development and diffusion of
emergent sociotechnical practices like modifying display names or profile pictures to make
political demands. These practices, created organically by the students themselves and only
later adopted by formal political organizations, networks, nonprofits, and policy advocates,

171
Interviews, TH, BH, EN
95
take advantage of the changed media opportunity structure to generate collective
consciousness, enhance movement identity, and circulate knowledge of key processes,
actions, and events.
The media opportunity structure and the Sensenbrenner Bill: summary
Although initially ignored by English language media, the movement against the
Sensenbrenner Bill was able to grow rapidly by leveraging the new media opportunity
structure. Commercial Spanish language broadcast media reported on the movement in
detail, and in the case of L.A.’s Spanish language radio hosts, actively participated in
mobilizing millions to take the streets. At the same time, middle school, high school, and
university students appropriated commercial social media spaces to circulate real time
information about the movement, help coordinate actions, and develop new practices of
symbolic action. As these practices spread rapidly from city to city, the mobilizations
continued to grow in scope and intensity. Taken together, the vast scale of the movement
was reflected in the slogan 'the sleeping giant is now awake!' Its power briefly caught the
political class off guard, and the Sensenbrenner Bill died, crushed by the gigante of popular
mobilization.

Media opportunity structure: Macarthur Park
Quickly reorganizing after the defeat of Sensenbrenner, anti-immigrant formations
within the State launched a new wave of ICE raids.
172
Simultaneously there was an
explosion of right-wing information warfare, stretching from the mass base of talk radio up
through the national news networks, spearheaded by a parade of racist, anti-immigrant

172
Hing, 2009
96
talking heads on Fox News and by Lou Dobbs on CNN.
173
The renewed attack from the
right came to a crescendo by May Day 2007. On the anniversary of the historic 2006 May
Day marches, hundreds of thousands of people again took the streets across the country.
This time, though, the Los Angeles Police Department prepared to deal a crushing blow in
downtown Los Angeles. In this section I describe the events of Mayday 2007 and analyze
the response of the immigrant rights movement through the lens of the changed media
opportunity structure. The main goal of this section is to demonstrate how, just as
movements no longer need to rely entirely on broadcast media, they also no longer need to
rely entirely on movement spokespeople to create their frames and messages.

173
See http://www.bastadobbs.com
97
Figure 20: Graphic from MIWON flyer for May Day 2007

Source: http://miwon.org

Macarthur Park, only a few city blocks to the west of L.A.’s main business district,
was initially built in the 1880s as a white, middle-class vacation destination surrounded by
luxury hotels. The area around the park became a working-class African American
neighborhood during the 1960s, and once this transition took place, the city withdrew park
maintenance resources.
174
By the 1980s the park had gained a media reputation as a
dangerous and violent place. In the 1990s the area was again transformed, this time into a
working-class Latino neighborhood. It is currently represented in the Anglo press as a

174
Interview, CZ
98
danger zone of “gangbangers,” drug dealers, sex workers, and general racialized urban
chaos, and is especially infamous as an area where fake identification cards can be easily
purchased. This portrayal of Macarthur Park persists despite the actual decline of violent
crime in the area over the last decade
175
and the park’s present-day heavy use by Latino/a
immigrant families, especially by children and teens on the soccer field, picnickers with
food and blankets, and young lovers who relax under the park’s shade trees.
On the afternoon of May Day 2007, Macarthur Park’s usual crowd of hundreds
was multiplied tenfold as people streamed in for a post-march rally organized by the Multi-
Ethnic Immigrant Worker Organizing Network (MIWON), a coalition that included the
Garment Worker Center (GWC), Koreatown Immigrant Worker Alliance (KIWA), Pilipino
Worker Center (PWC), Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA),
and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), with
participation by South Asian Network (SAN). White-clad families, including many small
children and elderly folks, were relaxing in the park with the bells of ice cream vendors
ringing in the air and the smell of bacon-wrapped hot dogs wafting in the breeze. The
soccer field was transformed into a dance floor as bands performed from the MIWON
sound truck. Then, suddenly, people were screaming and running in a mass panic as nearly
450 officers, many in full riot gear, used batons and rubber bullets to attack the peaceful
crowd, injuring dozens and hospitalizing several.
176
Members of the media, including
Christina Gonzalez of Fox News affiliate KTTV 11, Pedro Sevcec of Telemundo, Patricia
Nazario of KPCC, Ernesto Arce from KPFK, and reporters from L.A. Indymedia, were
also attacked and injured by police.
177
The fact that reporters from mass media outlets were

175
LAPD, 2007
176
Ibid.
177
Goodman, 2007
99
also attacked resulted in broadcast TV coverage that looked like police brutality footage
usually only visible to followers of the independent media, and these TV news reports were
then widely circulated on YouTube:

Figure 21: Fox News coverage of Mayday 2007, reposted to YouTube

Source: YouTube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=v7xO-GKmH2c

However, the LAPD moved quickly (and, at first, successfully) to reframe the brutal attack
as a ‘melee,’ with the official line from LAPD chief William Bratton being that a
communication breakdown in the chain of command led to a “...significant use of force
while attempting to address the illegal and disruptive actions of 50 to 100 agitators who
were not a part of the larger group of thousands of peaceful demonstrators.”
178
The police
commission’s own report found that the use of force was inappropriate, but continued to
justify it as a ‘response’ to agitators. However, many observers who I interviewed,
including two National Lawyers’ Guild members who were present as legal observers,

178
Bratton, 2007
100
recounted that by the time the riot squad was deployed on the edge of the park, the decision
had already been made to clear the crowd by force.
179
Regardless of whether the attack on
the peaceful crowd and reporters was a breakdown of communication or a calculated and
premeditated tactic, the result was the same: images of the brutal police riot filled TV
screens in L.A. for days, sending a clear message that it was time for the Gigante to sit
down, shut up, and get back to work. The repressive atmosphere continued to escalate
nationwide for the duration of the summer of 2007.

Figure 22: Macarthur Park May Day images posted to LA Indymedia

Source: http://la.indymedia.org

179
Interview, ND, WO
101

Immigrant rights formations engaged in a wide range of media practices immediately after
the police attack. The event also had a lasting impact on the consciousness of many
organizers. I interviewed members of the Copwatch LA Guerilla Chapter and asked them to
describe communication practices during a recent mass mobilization. One described the
Macarthur Park events in this way:

To me, I always think about Mayday, 2007. Because there was a lot of, you
could call it chaos. It was a police riot. There was bullets flying, there was tear
gas, there was batons flying everywhere, and Copwatch LA, we were asked to
observe, right? So we were there observing, and it was hard because we were
trying to get our people out of the way. Our children were there, we were
trying to get them out of the way. Pull them out, get women, family members
out of there, right? A lot of our folks were getting hit with batons while
observing the police. People were getting their cameras smashed by the batons,
and stuff like that. So it was hard to organize amongst ourselves and do what
we had to do, get our folks out of harm's way and then observe the police at the
same time, and film that. It was just, you know, it was rebellion and chaos,
right? And then there was, we had to get those images because one, that's what
we were there to do, and two, we knew that the media wasn't going to show
that. Even though they showed a little bit of what happened, because they got
the worst end of it too, but they ended up changing their story.
180

Movement communicators like Copwatch, who engage in daily practices of documenting
the abuse of power by the police in low-income communities of color, take on a special role
during mass mobilizations. They come prepared to document the worst in terms of State
repression of peaceful protest. In this case, Copwatch activists gathered a great deal of
video footage of the police attack on the crowd. However, most crucial for our discussion
of the changed media opportunity structure, they immediately recognized that protest
participants had themselves documented the police from nearly every angle, and that

180
Interview, KB
102
gathering this material together would be critical both to creating a narrative of what had
happened and to the legal strategy against the police.
From spokesman to aggregator, curator, and amplifier
Whereas in the past, movement documentarians may have seen their primary role as
shooting and editing footage, by 2007 even an organization dedicated to documentation,
that counts many trained videographers within its ranks, was able to recognize the
importance of serving as an aggregator of video documentation produced by the multitudes.
Copwatch ultimately worked with other anitauthoritarian activists to create a full-length
documentary about the events of May Day 2007, entitled “We’re Still Here, We Never
Left.” The film not only told the story from the viewpoint of mobilization participants by
gathering footage from over a dozen cameras, it also focused on disrupting the frame
introduced by the LAPD.

We put out a call for people to send us their video, and we got a lot of it
through our site. Indymedia got a lot of it as well. That was pretty successful
[...] We were able to put together the people's side of what happened, through
the help of the People's Network in Defense of Human Rights that was created
after Mayday. I guess we took the initiative to put that together, interview folks;
we got the stories from the people in the community. We did a survey. It was
good; we were able to get that out there. We haven't got the film out there as
much as we wanted to, but right now we're working to do a speaking tour with
the film. We want people to see it. We want people to see it, and discuss it. Not
only see that these things are happening within the Empire, but also how can
we stop it from happening again? How can we stop that type of brutality from
happening, ever. So I think that's one thing that has been successful, in terms of
communications and I guess getting video and audio together for something,
for a project. It was a lot of hard work […] It meant a lot for our organization,
because we were getting blamed for it, you know? The police were saying it
was the anarchists, and so were some of the organizations. So it was important
for us to get it out there.
181

181
Interview, KB
103
Much of the work that Copwatch and other movement activists and organizations did
around popular media in the Mayday aftermath took place through the ad-hoc People’s
Network in Defense of Human Rights (PNDHR). The network emerged out of a popular
assembly held at Pilipino Workers’ Center within days of the police riot. As this
interviewee indicated, video was gathered through the Copwatch LA site but also through
sites like Indymedia Los Angeles, as well as through the extended network of immigrant
rights activists and organizations throughout the City. This process was coordinated not by
an individual organization but through a loose working committee of the PNDHR, itself an
ad-hoc network. [Note: I participated in this committee]. One of the key tasks of the
PNDHR communication committee was to systematically comb through videos from
Mayday that people posted on YouTube and MySpace, then contact the videographers to
see if they would be willing to share higher quality versions of their footage as well as full
access to their source tapes and files. All but one of the many videographers we spoke to
were happy to contribute copies of their footage to the legal team, and several people joined
our working committee. This group spent time locating more footage and videographers as
well as logging and tagging to make it all more useful to the legal team. During this
process, video capture, logging, and transcoding skills were shared back and forth between
group members, as well as concrete knowledge about how to use video in court. A moment
of great crisis thus provided, in this case, a hands-on, peer-to-peer learning opportunity for
new media knowledge and production skills to circulate between movement participants.
Some organizers I interviewed described explicit internal debates about whether and
how to relate to the mass media in times of mass mobilization or crisis. While logging and
tagging footage, the group came across many shots that were compelling examples of
police brutality. In one of the most memorable, a cop in full riot gear chops at the legs of a
104
10-12 year old boy with his baton until the boy falls to the ground, then waits for him to
stand before shoving him away violently. They discussed whether to send clips like these
to the mass media for broader distribution. This kind of conversation is common among
horizontalist and autonomist factions of the immigrant workers’ movement.

The better resourced nonprofits, the huge nonprofits that have huge funding
and bigger ties to the State, the Mayor, these huge corporations, the ones that
are non-threatening, they're the ones that have a little bit more connections to
the media. It seems like anytime the corporate media is out there, they want to
be in front of them. They want to be the ones talking to them, telling their side
of the story. I guess they've built a relationship with the media. Our focus is not
mainly on the corporate media, so we don't have those connections. I mean we
have some connections. Of course when we put Copwatch LA behind
something the corporate media flocks to it, you know. But yeah, they were all
out there, even on some progressive media too, they have connections. They
use their connections to take the side of the police. To say the same things the
police were saying, which to us was like, wow. I guess it showed what side
people stand on. On the other hand, we had a huge conversation and debate
within the organization, whether we should respond by doing a press
conference ourselves or should we do grassroots media or grassroots
communication. Getting our story out there ourselves, getting out flyers to the
community, talking to people, setting up workshops, which became the film
too. The film we created was through that debate. I was one of the people that
thought maybe we should do a press conference ourselves because look,
they're doing it. I'm pretty sure, the media have been calling us and wanting us
to respond, to do a press conference or whatever. I felt like it was an
opportunity for us to tell our story even though probably they weren't gonna
tell our story like we told it. So you know, for me it was like, alright, doing
that, at the same time, doing our own media, that has always been my personal
position with that.

Q: so did you end up doing that?

We ended up just, because collectively we decided we're not going to rely on
the corporate media for Mayday. Which was, I think, maybe it was problematic
too, because we didn't do the film til a year later, and these folks continued to
put out the same story. And people think that alright, this must be true, because
nobody else is saying anything. I felt like this was a problem, you know? But it
turned out to be a good thing too, because we were able to focus our energy
towards […] our own media. People have liked the film when they watched it.
We got it out there internationally, to other countries, to Chiapas, Mexico, to
Argentina, and Venezuela, and South Africa, so that's a good thing.
182

182
Interview, RF
105

The RAC made a conscious decision to avoid the corporate media and instead focused their
efforts on aggregating video, photos, audio, and other documentation of the police attack by
doing systematic outreach to people who were posting media on social media sites like
YouTube and MySpace, on LA Indymedia, and on local blogs. They decided to focus all
their energy on this strategy even though it meant turning down a rare opportunity to
receive visibility in broadcast television. They reviewed the aggregated media and acted as
curators, remixing the most compelling media elements into new texts that could then be
circulated more widely both via social network sites and in some cases, by broadcast media.
By contrast, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA)
worked hard in the hours, days, and weeks after the police attack to implement a more
traditional, top down media strategy to control or at least influence the mass media framing
of the event. They did this by holding press conferences and distributing press releases to
broadcast and print reporters. Perhaps in an attempt to anticipate the typical police strategy
of blaming police violence on protesters, CHIRLA made repeated statements to journalists
denouncing the violence but also taking care to distance the majority of ‘peaceful protesters’
from ‘violent anarchists’ who ‘provoked’ police violence.

The first thing that I just want to say is that, first and foremost, over 25,000
people gathered in the evening to demand their rights and to demand
legalization, a path to citizenship, and to peacefully assemble to ensure that their
families have a better future in this country. And I want to make sure that their
efforts are highlighted. It was unfortunate, and we are indignant at the manner
in which the police decided to deal with a group of people who were causing
disturbances. These were young anarchists who often join our marches, who in
every single march in the past in Los Angeles--this is the seventh May Day
march [inaudible] have been isolated away from the crowd.
183

183
Angelica Salas, Executive Director of CHIRLA, speaking on Democracy Now, May 2 2007.
106
These remarks, and others like them, caused intense controversy within the immigrant
workers’ movement in Los Angeles, with heated debates in face to face movement
meetings as well as online between those who attacked Salas and demanded a public
apology for repeating a police lie in hopes of gaining ‘mainstream credibility,’ and those
who defended the statement either on the grounds that they believed it to be true or (mostly)
because they respected the work that CHIRLA and MIWON member organizations do.
While CHIRLA never issued a public apology for laying blame on anarchist youth of color,
after a month of heavy internal debate the MIWON network coordinators changed their
tone. Subsequent public statements and press releases on the MIWON website and on
movement listservs emphasized that the LAPD were the instigators and needed to be held
accountable for the Mayday attack:

LAPD must take Responsibility as the only instigators of the
violence on Mayday

Chief’s Bratton’s Report does not address the systemic and cultural changes
needed in the LAPD to counter racist and anti-immigrant sentiment plaguing
the department.

(Los Angeles, Ca) One month after the violence inflicted on the public by the
Los Angeles Police Department at Mac Arthur Park on May 1st, no officers
have been disciplined. The Multi-Ethnic Immigrant Worker Organizing
Network (MIWON) stand with other community groups and union to demand
a full-scale review of internal procedures within the LAPD as well as concrete
policy changes to counter the blatant racism and anti-immigrant sentiment
within all ranks of the police force. Chief William Bratton preliminary report to
the Los Angeles Police Commission and City Council reflects the
department’s unwillingness to take full responsibility for the unnecessary attack
on the crowds of families, youth and Marchers on May 1st.
184

184
From http://www.miwon.org/mayday2007page.html
107
Indeed, MIWON website owners even made the phrase “LAPD must take responsibility as
the only instigators of the violence of Mayday 2007” into a stream of red text that followed
site visitors’ mouse around the page:
Figure 23: Mouse-follow text from MIWON site, 2007

Source: http://miwon.org

However, even a year later, CHIRLA continued to push the frame that police responded
inappropriately to a band of youth agitators:
There was a small group of people that started kind of taunting the police [...]
The organizers approached the police and asked them, why not separate this
small group, isolate them, because they’re disturbing everybody else that’s
having this, you know, peaceful event […] And then, suddenly, you know,
there were rubber bullets flying.
185

While top down movement organizations spent time and energy trying to control the
event frame via broadcast media outlets, horizontalist ad-hoc network formations used the
new media opportunity structure to draw attention to media produced by march participants
and thereby to shape a more radical frame. Participatory media practices of aggregation,
remix, and circulation amplified this alternative frame to the point that it was able to
challenge the official narratives repeated by the LAPD, broadcast media, and professional
nonprofits. Photos, videos, and personal interviews of mobilization participants all

185
Anike Tourse, Communications Coordinator for CHIRLA, on Democracy Now, May 1, 2008.

108
demonstrated a peaceful crowd attacked by riot police. By 2009, once the police review and
class action suits were all complete, the verdict was clear: the police use of force was
unwarranted and the demonstrators’ rights had been deeply violated. As of this writing,
based on LAPD’s internal review and massive public pressure, Chief Bratton has
apologized, demoted the commanding officer, and imposed penalties on 17 of the
participating officers. The LAPD settled a massive class action suit for 13 million dollars,
and other lawsuits for undisclosed amounts.
186

The media opportunity structure and Macarthur Park: summary
In the immediate aftermath of Mayday 2007, the more top-down (vertical)
nonprofits focused on disseminating their frame of police ‘overreaction’ to an ‘anarchist
threat’ via the mass (broadcast) media. This approach capitalized on the extensive broadcast
coverage by both English and Spanish language television news, based on the fact that
broadcast television reporters were among those who suffered police brutality. At the same
time, an ad-hoc movement formation composed of horizontalist collectives and
organizations used social media spaces to aggregate, curate, remix, and amplify the rich
media texts produced by people who had been attacked. Rather than claim that one of these
approaches was more successful, we can say that online audiences, especially youth, were
more likely to have seen one version of events, while those watching broadcast media saw
another. For television viewers, police violence did receive extensive coverage during the
first few days, but by the time the story reached a national broadcast TV audience via short
sound bites and clips, it typically carried the headline ‘Macarthur Park Melee’ and

186
LAPD, 2007
109
implicated youth protesters as violent provocateurs.
187
Nonprofit organizations such as
CHIRLA, who used a traditional media strategy by acting as movement spokespeople and
aligning their frame with the official frame, were able to gain standing and have their voice
carried widely in broadcast media. Ad-hoc movement formations such as PNDHR, who
advanced a more radical frame while aggregating and circulating video produced by the
social base of the movement, were marginalized from broadcast spaces, as they expected
and in some cases chose. Yet their framing persisted and arguably prevailed, at least among
the social base of the movement in Los Angeles. Because of the changed media opportunity
structure, nonprofit organizations and networks faced intense pressure from an ad-hoc
movement formation to radicalize their frame, and ultimately some of them (such as
MIWON) did.
Aftermath
Many of the worst aspects of the Sensenbrenner Bill were proposed again in the
Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S. 1348).
This bill was portrayed as a “compromise” but continued to focus on border militarization
and policing: it included funding for 300 miles of vehicle barriers, 105 camera and radar
towers, and 20,000 more Border Patrol agents, while simultaneously restructuring visa
criterion around “high skill” workers for the so-called knowledge economy.
188
It fell apart
by June, but in July of 2007, three billion dollars in new “border security” funding was
approved.
189
The transition to the Obama administration raised hopes among some in the
immigrant rights movement for a progressive restructuring of immigration policy, but at the

187
Note that the Wikipedia entry about the incident
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_May_Day_m%C3%AAl%C3%A9e) remains ‘Mayday Melee,’
most likely based on an LA Times article that used this phrase.
188
Gaouette, 2007
189
Miller and Dinan, 2007
110
time of this writing it is growing increasingly clear that border militarization will continue,
as will raids, detentions and deportations. There seems to be little to no chance for a just
and humane immigration bill during the first years of the Obama administration. There has
also been a complete, and completely unsurprising, failure of the mass media to discuss
either the root causes of immigration or the possibility of alternative solutions like an open
border policy in an age of unrestricted cross-border capital flows.

Media opportunity structure: Conclusions
This chapter has shown how recent transformations in the media opportunity
structure provide key conditions for effective networked communication by social
movements. The immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles has had little success gaining
access to Anglo mass media, and when movement actors or events do receive coverage,
they are often framed in ways that do not help them achieve their goals. However,
immigrant rights organizers in Los Angeles are increasingly able to access ethnic media,
even as ethnic media, especially commercial Spanish language radio and television, grow in
reach and political power. At the same time, the explosion of social media allows immigrant
rights formations to directly involve movement participants, allies, and supporters in the
production and circulation of their own rich media texts. The rise of Spanish language
commercial media and the spread of social media thus both provide important openings for
the insertion of movement narratives into public consciousness. In addition, translocal
media practices modify the overall media opportunity structure in ways that facilitate
movement building, as migrants increasingly access and sometimes create content for media
outlets in their hometowns, cities, or communities of origin. Agenda setting, framing, and
standing have all become more flexible in the shift from broadcast hegemony to diversified
111
channels, translocal media, and the social media space. However, this flexibility can only be
effectively leveraged when movement actors recognize the new media opportunity
structure, rather than remain focused solely on Anglo broadcast media.
During times of crisis and mass mobilization, countervailing logics clash: on the
one hand, hierarchical movement formations exert pressure to maintain control of
communication, as they seek to capitalize on the mass media attention generated by the
crisis to amplify their own frames and messages. At the same time, horizontal practices of
transmedia mobilization (a term that will be developed in the following chapter) blossom, as
key media texts created by movement participants circulate rapidly through face to face
social networks, amplified by digital media tools and platforms like social network sites and
mobile phones. While control of messaging and framing in mass media remains a powerful
and contested terrain, hierarchical organizations that once were able to enforce a significant
degree of communication control now find such control increasingly difficult to maintain
across a fragmented mediascape, especially online. Where the police, or even
professionalized nonprofits with dedicated PR staff, might have once been able to largely
control messaging through press conferences and relationships with mass media
journalists, the shifting media opportunity structure now allows smaller collectives,
networks, and decentralized horizontal movement formations to rapidly circulate their own
media, frames, and narratives. Social movement actors that embrace horizontal models of
transmedia mobilization and dedicate resources to increasing the speed of circulation and
reach of media texts produced by a digitally literate base, who self-document critical
moments of mass mobilization, are more able to effectively strengthen their own transmedia
narratives and transform consciousness. Those who attempt to maintain vertical control and
ignore or even actively contradict the popular networked narratives that emerge during
112
crisis may win short term victories in the form of quotes in mass media, but in the long run
will find their credibility undermined by their own increasingly media-savvy and media-
making base.
Ultimately, those movement actors that are open to including diverse voices from
their social base, and are willing to shift from vertical models of centralized communication
control towards more horizontal or directly democratic models, are more able to take
advantage of the new media opportunity structure. In the next chapter, we will look more
closely at how movement formations do this through practices of transmedia mobilization.
113
CHAPTER FOUR: TRANSMEDIA MOBILIZATION

The previous chapter explored the transformation of the media opportunity structure
for the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles. Despite continued lack of access to
mainstream English language media, the growing power of ethnic media and the rise of
social and mobile media provide potential openings in the media opportunity structure for
the immigrant rights movement. In what ways are immigrant rights formations actually
using new openings in the media opportunity structure to strengthen movement identity,
win political and economic victories, and transform consciousness? This chapter looks at
daily movement media practices during the translocal protests of the Associación Popular
de los Pueblos de Oaxaca, Los Angeles (The Popular Association of the Oaxacan Peoples,
Los Angeles, or APPO-LA) in solidarity with a wave of popular rebellion in the Mexican
state of Oaxaca. It then revisits the high school walkouts of 2006, and finds that the
efficacy of movement formations is greater when they adopt transmedia mobilization
strategies. Transmedia mobilization involves engaging the social base of the movement in
participatory media making practices across multiple platforms. Rich media texts produced
through participatory practices can be pushed into wider circulation to produce multimodal
movement narratives that reach and involve diverse audiences, thus strengthening
movement identity formation and outcomes. Yet many organizations continue to find
transmedia mobilization risky, because it requires opening movement communication
practices up to diverse voices rather than relying only on experienced movement leaders to
frame the movement’s narrative by speaking to broadcast reporters during press
conferences. In the changed media opportunity structure for the immigrant rights movement
in L.A., effective transmedia organizers are shifting from speaking for movements to
114
speaking with them. Transmedia mobilization thus marks a transition in the role of
movement communicators from content creation to aggregation, curation, remix, and
circulation of rich media texts through networked movement formations. Those movement
formations that embrace the decentralization of the movement voice can reap great rewards,
while those that attempt to maintain top down control of movement communication
practices risk losing credibility.

Transmedia mobilization: theoretical framework
What do we mean by transmedia mobilization? The term is a mash-up between the
concept of transmedia storytelling and ideas from social movement studies about the ways
that movements use networked communication to support their mobilization efforts.
Marsha Kinder developed the term transmedia intertextuality to discuss the flow of branded
and gendered commodities across television, films, and toys.
190
Henry Jenkins reworks the
concept for an era of horizontally integrated transnational media conglomerates, and defines
transmedia storytelling as follows:

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a
fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the
purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally,
each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story
[…]
191

He goes on to articulate the key points of transmedia storytelling in the context of a
converged media system. Chief among them: transmedia storytelling is the ideal form for
media conglomerates to circulate their franchises across platforms; it involves ‘world

190
Kinder, 1991
191
Jenkins, 2003
115
building’ rather than closed plots and individual characters; it involves multiple entry points
for varied audience segments; it requires co-creation and collaboration by different
divisions of a company; it provides roles for readers to take on in their daily lives; it is open
to participation by fans; and it is “the ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective
intelligence.”
192

Recently, Lina Srivastava proposed that activists and media artists might apply the
ideas of transmedia storytelling to social change, through what she terms transmedia
activism: “There is a real and distinct opportunity for activists to influence action and raise
cause awareness by distributing content through a multiplatform approach, particularly in
which people participate in media creation.”
193
To build on this proposal, extend it from the
media arts context to a community organizing context, and reframe it through social
movement theory, I suggest transmedia mobilization:

Transmedia mobilization is a process whereby a social movement narrative is
dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms, creating a distributed
and participatory social movement ‘world,’ with multiple entry points for
organizing, for the purpose of strengthening movement identity and outcomes.

I argue that transmedia mobilization is a critical emerging form for networked social
movements to circulate their ideas across platforms; it involves consciousness building,
beyond individual campaign messaging; it requires co-creation and collaboration by
different actors across social movement formations; it provides roles and actions for
movement participants to take on in their daily life; it is open to participation by the social
base of the movement, and it is the key strategic media form for an era of networked social
movements. While the goal of corporate actors in transmedia storytelling is to generate

192
Ibid.
193
Srivastava, 2009
116
profits, the goal of movement actors in transmedia mobilization is to strengthen movement
identity, win political and economic victories, and transform consciousness.
Transmedia mobilization and social movements
Early theories of social movements focused on the irrational and animalistic ‘mob
rule’ of the crowd. Social movements were not theorized as such, and mobilization events
were explained away as unpredictable explosions of violence by the poor.
194
Marx,
famously, and generations of theorists of working class revolution after him, theorized
working class social movements as the ineluctable outcome of the contradictions inherent in
the capitalist system.
195
Working class identity would naturally form on the shop floor.
These ideas were modified by the theory of the vanguard (the ‘professional militant’) or
later, the organic intellectual, who would emerge from the working class and whose role
would be to rupture the hegemony of ruling class culture, develop broader class
consciousness, and build a cultural strategy for the revolution.
196
Economistic analyses of
movement creation were later altered, but not escaped, by the theory of resource
mobilization, which foregrounds the role of organizations and political parties.
197
The
relationship between movements and the State was brought to the front in the concept of
political opportunity structures, discussed in Chapter 3. With the rise of the ‘new social
movements,’ identity formation became more widely recognized as a key component of
movement building.
198
Intergroup interaction within social movements was revisited in the

194
McClelland, 1989
195
Marx and Engels, 1967; Lenin, 1999
196
Gramsci, 1971
197
McCarthy and Zald, 1977
198
Melucci, 1996; Gamson, 1992; Castells, 2004
117
concept of the field of protest.
199
By the 1980s, a number of theorists also argued for
bringing emotions ‘back in’ to the study of social movements.
200

There is by now a growing literature that describes how social movements use ICTs
in general and the Internet specifically.
201
Costanza-Chock
202
developed a typology of the
repertoire of electronic contention, and a tactic-outcome matrix for social movement Internet
use, that was then remixed by media activist and web designer John Emerson into the
online guide “Introduction to Activism on the Internet.” The categories included self-
representation; independent media; research; outreach; lobbying; fundraising; tactical
communication; and direct action (electronic civil disobedience).
203
More recently, Castells
and Costanza-Chock
204
worked on an analytical note reviewing the current tools and
practices of horizontal communication (many-to-many media) as deployed by social
movements around the world. The key findings can be summarized as follows:

There is extreme access asymmetry to communication tools and skills both within
and between social movement organizations; this is true both in the global North
and South. There is widespread multimodality (cross-platform or transmedia use) in
social movement communication practices; social movements all over the world are
actively using ICTs across media platforms including audio, video, mobile, and
social networking sites. The biggest impacts of ICT use often come via agenda
setting for the broadcast media. New ICT tools and practices circulate through
networked movements via key events (major mobilizations), tech-activist networks,
face-to-face places (like hacklabs), online spaces, and recorded resources like
toolkits and how-to materials.
205

Given the widespread adoption of networked communication, State and corporate actors
face a new series of threats from non-state actors, including NGOs, social movements, and

199
Ray, 1999
200
Goodwin et al., 2001; Gould, 2004
201
See e.g. Sey and Castells, 2004; Downing, 2001; Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Juris, 2008; and Kidd, 2003
202
Costanza-Chock, 2003
203
Examples are available online at http://www.backspace.com/action
204
Costanza-Chock, unpublished
205
Costanza-Chock, 2009
118
terrorist networks. In general, the increasingly global nature of the networked
communication system also facilitates transnational activist networks (TANs). Some social
movements, such as the environmental movement, have organized transnationally for
decades, and others - such as labor, the first wave of the women’s movement, and the
abolitionists - have arguably organized across borders for well over a century.
206
More
recently, the transnational network form has become one of the most visible modes of
social movement activity.
The most influential account of this development is that by RAND analysts Arquilla
and Ronfeldt,
207
who coined a key term for ICT-enhanced social movement activity:
netwar. These authors describe what is now the most frequently cited example of an
information age insurrection that successfully took advantage of the net to gain leverage
over state and military decisions: the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, which began
on the day NAFTA went into effect (Jan 1, 1994). Ronfeldt and Arquilla argue that to
understand social netwar it is necessary to examine three 'layers' of the Zapatista movement:
the indigenous base, leftist Mexican intellectuals, and transnational NGOs. They describe
how initially, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (The Zapatista Army of National
Liberation, or EZLN) was a more traditional Marxist (Maoist) insurgency with a guerilla
strategy of 'war of the flea.' Heavy participation by transnational NGOs, including both
issue-based (human rights, indigenous rights, environmentalists, labor) and 'infrastructure'
focused (The Association for Progressive Communications, La Neta, and other ICT
training and capacity building NGOs), helped transform the Zapatista uprising into a
transnational media event, keep developments in Chiapas in the eye of both alternative and
mass media, and generate sufficient pressure to force the Mexican military to back down

206
Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Gilroy, 1993
207
Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001
119
from their initial strategy of crushing force deployment. The authors identify transnational
NGO activity as a 'War of the Swarm,' in which vast numbers of relatively small and weak
actors converge in a nonhierarchal organizational form of solidarity activity that has the
potential to modify state or corporate actions. Further, they posit that social netwar and
swarm tactics may be the key innovation of Internet enabled social movements, and
encourage movements to consciously adopt and develop swarm theory and practice.
The social netwar of the Zapatistas inspired a new generation of anarchist activists
to seize ICTs and deploy them at a strategic moment in a highly visible media event-scene:
the 1999 mass mobilization of anti-corporate globalization protesters against the World
Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial in Seattle. This was the birthplace of the
Independent Media Center (IMC, or Indymedia) network of anarchist journalism, which
spread rapidly across the world and continues to exist today with over 160 IMCs, on all
continents. The Indymedia phenomenon has been well documented elsewhere
208
and we
need not spend much time on it here, other than to note a few interesting components. First,
the IMCs continue to spread, with the latest appearing in Kenya following the recent
politico-ethnic violence. It is interesting to note that Indymedia Kenya appeared after the
State decreed an end to all live television and radio broadcasts, and that this IMC appears to
have pioneered new tactics based on the specificity of the Kenyan mobile telephony market
- for example, attaching call credit to SMS in order to allow voice reports, which are then
recorded and posted to the web for rebroadcast via radio.
209

In general, the rapid spread of the techniques and tools pioneered by groups like
Indymedia and mainstreamed by commercial ‘Web 2.0’ firms does not work to the
advantage of those who try to vertically control communication. The social media explosion

208
Downing, 2001; Halleck, 2002; Kidd, 2003
209
See http://kenya.indymedia.org.
120
is a severe challenge to informational hegemony. During an initial stage, from about 1999-
2003, most State and corporate actors tried to ignore the spread of horizontal
communication. Traditional vertical communication actors were sure that these new media
forms were so marginal as to be unimportant, and indeed even today it remains true that the
majority of people get most of their news and information from one-to-many channels.
However, during the period from 2003 to the present day this changed rapidly, especially
among younger demographics. Overall, it is undeniable that horizontal communication
(social media) is spreading wider and faster than ever before. In this new media space, we
have example after example from around the world of the appropriation of new media tools
and techniques by social movements. What do they do with new media tools? There is a
growing literature on this subject that suggests that networked social movements use ICTs
in the cultural/informational, financial, and tactical spheres.
210

Transmedia mobilization practices
While most conversations about social movement use of ICTs emphasize their
importance as tactical tools for mobilization, fundraising, or information circulation, and
many focus on the ways in which social movements are able to reach new audiences on the
net, few emphasize the importance of the process of mediamaking itself. Making media,
especially making media together with others in shared production practices, can be a
powerful force for social movement identity formation
211
. As media making tools and skills
become more widely available, more people than ever before are using these tools and skills
to create and circulate rich movement media texts, with largely unstudied implications for

210
See Sey and Castells, 2004; Juris, 2008; for a recent literature review see Costanza-Chock,
unpublished.
211
Downing, 2001
121
movement identity formation. Many of the actors in the immigrant rights movement
expressed the idea that the mediamaking process itself is a powerful force for building
movement identity.
Make media, make trouble
For one interviewee, active participation in documentary video production was a
key site of movement identity formation. She took part in the creation of an award-winning
documentary about garment worker organizing, called “Made in LA,” and described this as
a crucial aspect of her own politicization and connection to the immigrant rights movement.
She emphasized that she was proud of participating in the project, and that one of the most
important outcomes was the connections that were made between people and organizations
that worked with the filmmakers:

I became involved with the anti-sweat shop student movement at Cal State L.A.
because I worked at a sweat shop, my mother worked at a sweat shop, my
whole family, my uncles, they worked for, they had a little business. They were
the costureros (clothesmakers) themselves, right? But aside from that, it was
just an industry that my mom got into, and then eventually I had to go to over
the summer because I had to work. So anyway, working with them at the
university was good, but I think the one project that I was the most proud of
was helping Almudena Carracedo transcribe interviews with garment workers
for her film, “Made in LA.” She actually interviewed me, but gosh! That
woman interviewed a bunch of people and it was a 3, 4 year project that took
her 4 years to finish. And it was great! And I liked the outcome, and especially
the connections that she made. And the fact that that film got distributed all over
the world. Over television. Ironically my mom still hasn’t seen it [laughs]. But
it just goes to show that Almudena really pulled her equipment together to catch
these stories; you know? So just knowing that I helped with that was a good
beginning I guess.
212

Following this experience, she became increasingly involved in social movement activity.
Currently she works with the Amanecer Collective, an anarchist affinity group that she calls

212
Interview, TH
122
her ‘political home.’ The group meets regularly via phone conferences, and once a year face
to face. They also have a radio collective, Echos de Libertad (Echoes of Liberty), that
produces a two hour radio show for the online radio station Killradio.org, and are preparing
to begin regular broadcasts on a new pirate FM station in East L.A.
Media production practices in the immigrant rights movement thus generate new
movement participants. Digital media tools enable these practices, and the media produced
through shared production practices is widely circulated via the net. However, the Internet
is not always the primary point of connection for the media makers, and transmedia
mobilization practices do not require always-on Internet connectivity. Another interviewee,
who works as a social media consultant for immigrant rights organizations, emphasized that
he has found the process of collaborative video production to have great value, even in
situations of limited Internet connectivity:

I feel like the process of making is such a great experience, and because it’s
such a collaborative experience, which I think in some ways is why I like
video, per se, more is because I feel like video has the potential of being very
collaborative, in the sense of, people can make decisions about what’s gonna be
filmed, when are we gonna do it, who’s gonna do what, things like that. I think
that the process of making it can be, you know. Video is also in some ways
done offline, I mean it requires equipment, but it’s not created in an online
space. It’s not like blogging or e-mail, or things that require you to be on the
Internet at that moment. Video you can do some other time, edit it, and then put
it online, and to me that’s why I kind of see potential in it, in the sense of
making it more accessible to other people, you know?
213

Of course, the videos produced in his mediamaking workshops are later circulated online,
but this interviewee emphasizes that a significant part of the value for movement building is
in the actual experience of collaborative production.

213
Interview, XD
123
Transmedia mobilization and cultural solidarity
Many organizers find value in simply including the faces and voices of their
communities in multimedia movement texts. They point out that this is especially true for
immigrant communities, so often ignored or misrepresented by the mass media, but may
also apply to any group that feels excluded from broader visibility. Community based
organizations within the immigrant rights movement regularly use digital media tools to
help generate feelings of group identity. For example, one KIWA staff member talked
about the power of visual media in connecting people to the movement:

Newsletter used to be offline, just writing the same thing, however doing the
layout, printing, mailing, cost was really really high and it took a lot of staff
time to do those logistical work. We've switched to e newsletter and that seems
to get to people much faster and you know, very dependable. Also, costwise
it's amazing, it doesn't cost almost anything […] In our website there's, you
know, photo and other slideshows, whatever was generated gets put on there.
And I think all of that really helps the members as well, or people that just
wants to find out more about KIWA. It's not just kind of writing or talk that
you hear or read, but you actually see in firsthand what had happened or what
is currently going on, that really helps […] I think when folks see their activity,
their face or people that they know doing that are engaged in different
campaign, I think it really brings them together as a kind of one unique part of
the organization and that's always been, whether it's 5 minute or 10 minute I
think it really helps.
214

When asked about whether this kind of inclusive media practice was something new, or
simply the latest incarnations of existing practices, he answered:

It is very new. Nowadays those clips can be taken even with camera or
telephone. We do use the digital camcorder, so that's been really helpful.
Versus in the past, we have boxes and boxes of VHS or small, those small
recording tapes, which just sits there and nobody ever takes a look at it. So in
old days it was just regular people have no access to editing those clips so it
just sits there in the boxes. One of these days we're gonna digitalize all that.
215

214
Interview, EQ
215
Ibid.
124
Most video, audio, and photos recorded on analog media simply sit in boxes, unused.
When asked if KIWA had ever screened the older VHS tapes, he replied:

Never. Never. Because say if it’s a clip of action, 2 hour long, unless you kind
of edit it there's no reason or no way, people sitting down and watching that
just didn't make sense. Same goes with the photos, right? Before digital camera
came in, it was just paper photos. We have probably 4-5 large boxes of those
photos, but it just sits in there. One of our projects with a volunteer is to scan
all those so it can be digitalized and used.
216

Digital photography and digital video, especially, offer small organizations huge advantages
over their analog equivalents in terms of time, money, and equipment. In the last few years,
the usability of multimedia production software has greatly decreased the skill level needed
to transform the 'raw material' of recorded moments into forms that can be shared and
individually or collectively experienced in order to strengthen cultural memory and feelings
of movement belonging.
Hubs of transmedia mobilization
Movement formations can also act as hubs of transmedia mobilization. Another
interviewee talked about how both online and face-to-face strategies were both crucial in the
Garment Worker Center campaign against clothing label Forever 21. She, like other
younger people and students, learned about the campaign via an email list, but face to face
organizing was the key means of reaching garment workers themselves. Social movement
formations often contain people from a mix of backgrounds, and transmedia mobilization
practices must provide forms of connectivity and points of entry for all of them:

I was involved in [the Forever 21 campaign] back in 2001. And we were a
pretty small group. […] I remember the first protest; the first anti-sweatshop

216
Ibid.
125
protest against Forever 21; I found out like through the Internet; and I was like,
“I have no idea where Alhambra is. But I guess I’m gonna drive out there.”
217

When asked if she learned about the protest via email, she responded:

Yeah it was an email. It was some list. I remember there was this group; this
huge group that got formed back in 2000 for the DNC here in Los Angeles. It
was called the Fair Trade Network. And they had, it’s probably one of the
oldest lists I’m on; and I think they still circulate some info. Yeah it was just an
email. They had weekly events posted, or something like that. So I found out
through that. But when I showed up to the protest I noticed that it wasn’t
sweatshop workers that were at the demonstrations. I mean you would think
that -- ah, but it’s sort of stereotypical to say that young people have more
access to that sort of information; but I think it’s because the Garment Worker
Center does both. They do the online outreach, but also the face-to-face
outreach because they’re in the middle of the sweatshop district. The garment
district. It’s a combination of both. I still believe that it’s strong to do the face to
face organizing with workers mainly, because there’s a lack of resources for
obtaining that sort of information through the Internet.
218

Those most affected often organize with solidarity and support from other movement
organizations and networks across a range of identities, and communication practices may
be very different between them. In fact, movement formations often serve as transmedia
mobilization nodes. Media texts and information are translated across platforms, including
online, broadcast, print, and more, and then become spreadable across new movement
networks. Some people and organizations focus on playing this role.

Media bridging work: Indymedia Los Angeles
Activists and groups that focus on transferring media and information across media
platforms and between networks perform what might be called media bridging work. This
work has become increasingly important, as day-to-day communication practices within the

217
Interview, TH
218
Ibid.
126
immigrant rights movement have become deeply multimodal. For example, a participant in
LA Indymedia described how, while posting stories and calendar events to
la.indymedia.org is the main activity of the collective, working on the site is tightly bound
up in participation in multiple channels of movement communication across media
including email, radio, print, and telephone. SNS are also appropriated as key venues for
the circulation of movement media. The same interviewee stated that he systematically uses
both MySpace and Facebook to distribute links to protest reports, articles, action alerts, and
upcoming activist events:

MySpace, everything I do, every time I write an article I'll put it as a bulletin.
And on Facebook, too, I'll put a link to it. And any event, any actions going on,
I'll always bulletin those. A lot of times people will repost my bulletins. I'll
even compile lists of events that are going on and I usually post them on
Fridays cause people want to know what's going on for the weekend. So
Friday I'll have, when I'm reading the paper, when I'm reading my listservs,
when I'm listening to the radio, everything that's coming up I'll put it on my
calendar. Then I'll take my calendar, make a list of the stuff going on that week,
and Friday post it as a bulletin, and then a lot of people repost those. So yeah, I
use those sites. I probably should have mentioned, but yeah, obviously.
219

Transmedia organizers thus engage in daily practices of media bridging work by taking
information from one channel, reformatting it for another, and pushing it out into broader
circulation across new networks. Certain individuals and groups spend more time focused
on media bridging work, but in transmedia mobilization, all movement participants are able
to participate to some degree in media bridging work. Movements can also take steps to
make this kind of activity as easy as possible. In the social media space, Jenkins calls this
principle spreadability.
220
I found that some of the most interesting media bridging work
was done, and the greatest spreadability achieved, by organizers who understood the
importance of linking broadcast and social media strategies together.

219
Interview, CX
220
Jenkins, 2009
127
Broadcast and social media combined: The Basta Dobbs campaign
When asked to describe an effective use of social media by the immigrant rights
movement, one interviewee described a national campaign to remove anti-immigrant
commentator Lou Dobbs from CNN. The campaign, organized by Presente.org, deployed a
sophisticated transmedia strategy across the web, mobile phones, and broadcast radio, and
rapidly built a database of tens of thousands of email addresses and phone numbers.
Participants were encouraged to write and call network executives, and made thousands of
calls.
221
The campaign ended when Lou Dobbs announced the early end of his CNN
contract, and organizers were able to declare a major victory. This interviewee emphasized
that the campaign’s success was largely due to the combination of broadcast radio with
mobile and social media:

The Basta Dobbs Campaign, I think that was one of the first times. I mean we
had organizations or groups like Move On, and all these different groups that
were doing advocacy and very successful, Moms Rising, all these groups that
have huge Internet power bases. But the immigrant community wasn’t really
involved in that, and neither were their supporters. So what we saw in Basta
Dobbs was this, kind of this new model.
222

The Basta Dobbs campaign was targeted at engaging Latino/a activists first, and the
Latino/a community more broadly. Organizers appeared on Spanish language radio and
television, and asked listeners and viewers to sign up to the campaign by sending an SMS:

They had a text messaging hub, through their web site. So they wanted
everybody to sign up on that, so they went really heavy for a month on a
campaign where, it was interesting because it was, Jet Blue was offering $600
flights, you could buy a $600 flight, and you could travel all over the, any
where you wanted to in the country, where ever they flew for a month as many
times as you wanted for the $600. So they took advantage of that and they did
this country tour. And they went on all the radio spots, all the TV shows, and

221
Interview, LN
222
Interview, NB
128
they were able to bring, build up a list within a little bit over a month, maybe
two months, about a hundred thousand people to join Basta Dobbs.
223

After several months of growing momentum, the campaign claimed victory when Dobbs
announced that he would be leaving his contract with CNN.

Lou Dobbs quit […] I think that moment in the movement was so strong that
this politico, or this like demi-god saw that hundreds of thousands of people
would go against him if he continued spewing his rhetoric. So I think that’s, at
least in the most recent times, that’s where we really seen the power of
technology in the immigrant communities.
224

The Basta Dobbs campaign illustrates the importance of relationship between broadcast
media and new media. It was only through a nationwide speaking tour broadcast by local
radio stations that Basta Dobbs organizers were able to quickly build a critical mass of
hundreds of thousands of people willing to sign up to receive SMS action alerts for the
campaign. SMS alerts not only called on people to take actions like signing petitions,
calling CNN headquarters, and writing letters to the editor, but also drove views for videos
produced by the campaign. The campaign itself, because of the rapid growth of its SMS list
and the high number of views on its videos, quickly became a story that both Spanish
language and English language mass media outlets were interested in covering. Effective
transmedia organizing thus builds a narrative around the momentum of the movement itself,
even while providing multiple points of connection to further engagement. In this case,
people initially became aware of the Basta Dobbs campaign via local radio or SMS, later
through social network sites, and once the campaign was growing, via mass media.

223
Ibid.
224
Ibid.
129
Mass media or popular communication?
Although the combination of broadcast media and the new digital tools is the most
effective form of transmedia mobilization, most organizations, if they devote resources to
communication strategy at all, still focus on traditional P.R. strategies. For example, one
organizer felt that there was increasing success in the immigrant rights movement at using
digital media for top-down communications, but far less activity in the sphere of horizontal
or participatory mediamaking:

I think they’re seen very separate from each other. So that’s a perfect example
of what people consider media work, but I guess when I speak of media, its
something very different, and so maybe that’s important for me to define. So
when I think of media or using media, I’m thinking really grassroots, very
collective oriented, so very popular, popular communications. So that I think,
when I see people not moving towards that, that’s what I mean. There’s
definitely a lot of the other stuff, press conferences and all the PR stuff, and
creating videos about the message, and putting it out there, and things like that,
there’s stuff more than before, right? Using those tools in that way. But I think
that’s very narrow. You’re more likely to have a communications person in
your staff that does all of this, then to have a popular media or multi media
coordinator or something like that […] they’re treated like two different things,
but I think it will be really powerful to see what could they look like when they
come together.
225

Many who do think about participatory media making tend to see it as a world apart from
their overall, traditional communication strategy. In other words, most immigrant rights
movement formations are not taking full advantage of the possibilities of transmedia
mobilization. Instead, they use the new tools of networked communication primarily to
augment existing top-down media practices. This tension is discussed in depth in Chapter
Six.

225
Interview, OE
130
“How do we deal with a thousand people producing media for us?”
Finally, there are a handful of organizers who in the past saw themselves as
movement documentarians, but are increasingly realizing the need to shift their role to
content aggregation, curation, and amplification. One interviewee described what happened
when organizers discussed how to deal with media during an upcoming mobilization of
about 10,000 people:

In the whole process of being like, “Oh my god, tomorrow 10,000 people are
coming,” we came up with the idea of creating these flyers. You know, if
you’re putting your video up this way, tag it, send it here, or send it to this e-
mail or whatever, tag your photo or photography this way. We made I think
about a thousand of those flyers, and we pretty much handed them all out,
cause it was probably that many people filming and taking video. I mean
everybody had a small video camera or something. And within that same day,
and then for the next few days, all we were doing was kinda compiling all
those videos and photography that they had, that people had individually put up
on the Internet. So it was a way where we were centralizing stuff, but at the
same time it wasn’t centralized, because people were just putting things up on
their channels, or on their Flicker accounts, and all we were doing was just
kinda linking it […] It definitely forced us to be like, how do we deal with the
situation of like having a thousand people producing media for us, or not for
us, but yet having people have access to that media, and it just doesn’t get lost
in the sea of the Internet?
226

Social movement organizers thus develop concrete practices and strategies to promote
popular participation in transmedia mobilization. In this case, they promoted particular
mobilization tags across social media platforms by printing out and distributing physical
flyers during the mobilization itself.
In the next section, we will look at how transmedia mobilization played out in two
movement formations: the APPO-LA, and the Walkouts.

226
Interview, NB
131
Transmedia mobilization: The FIOB and APPO-LA
In Chapter 3 we saw how the ethnic media, in particular Spanish language radio, as
well as social media transformed the media opportunity structure in Los Angeles in ways
that opened new avenues for social movement mobilization. Yet the media opportunity
structure is also undergoing radical shifts in geographic scale, as on the one hand major
corporate players become transnationally converged media firms, and at the same time
ethnic media take on an increasing role in maintaining connections between migrant
communities and their places of origin. As media goes global, and ethnic media link
diasporic communities, social movements can take advantage of the translocal media
opportunity structure to circulate their struggles and leverage support from their
geographically dispersed but highly networked allies.
The Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Indigenous Front of
Binational Organizations, or FIOB) provides us with a key example of the dynamics of
transmedia mobilization within the translocal media opportunity structure of the immigrant
workers’ movement in Los Angeles. Indigenous immigrants who had come to the U.S.
from Oaxaca founded the FIOB in 1991. Starting in the 1970s, thousands of indigenous
Oaxacans migrated to northern Mexico and to the US in search of work and better living
conditions; currently, about 500,000 of Oaxaca’s 3.5 million people live outside the state
where they were born.
227
FIOB was created in order to provide a transnational structure for
indigenous communities, split between Oaxaca and the United States, to better organize
around their needs and advocate for resources. FIOB communications director Berta
Rodríguez Santos states:

FIOB has approximately 5,000 accredited members in both Mexico and the

227
Fox and Rivera-Salgado, 2004
132
United States. FIOB members come from various ethnic groups including
Mixtecos from Oaxaca and Guerrero, Zapotecos, Triquis, Mixes, Chatinos,
Zoques from Oaxaca, and Purépechas from Michoacán. The members are
organized into community committees in the Mixteca, Central Valleys, and
Isthmus regions of Oaxaca as well as in Mexico City, Estado de México, and
Baja California. FIOB is also present in Los Angeles, Fresno, Santa María,
Greenfield, Hollister, San Diego, Santa Rosa, and Merced, California. Support
groups can be found in the states of Oregon, New York, Arizona, and
Washington as well.
228

Jonathan Fox and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, indigenous academics who work with
the FIOB, have done extensive work on emergent transnational civil society among
indigenous migrants, and have described how media practices play an important role. For
example, they talk about the newspaper El Oaxaqueño. Founded in 1999, produced
binationally in Oaxaca and Los Angeles, the paper is circulated in both places with a
biweekly print edition of 35,000 copies. The paper reports on everything from “local village
conflicts and the campaign to block construction of a McDonald’s on the main square in
Oaxaca City, to the binational activities of hometown associations (HTAs) and California-
focused coalition building for immigrants’ right to obtain driver licenses and against
cutbacks in health services.”
229
They discuss the radio program produced by FIOB,
Nuestro Foro (Our Forum), which ran for a time on KFCF 88.1FM in Fresno; narrate the
history of El Tequio magazine, designed to share stories of activism across the US-Mexico
border; and argue that “migrant-run mass media also report systematically on other
community initiatives [and] they promote ‘virtuous circles’ of institution building within
indigenous migrant civil society.”
230
A key term for these authors is cultural citizenship,
which is not necessarily tied to a particular geolocation but instead may be centered on
cultural, ethnic, gender, and class identities. They also emphasize the importance of

228
Rodríguez Santos, 2009
229
Fox and Rivera-Salgado, 2004: 22
230
Ibid.: 22
133
transnational community, which for them means binational identity sustained over time, but
their preferred focal point is translocal community citizenship. The term refers to “the
process through which indigenous migrants are becoming active members of both their
communities of settlement and their communities of origin.”
231

One example of translocal community citizenship is a case, in 1991, where Nahua
migrants from the Mexican state of Guerrero were able to organize a campaign that blocked
the construction of a hydroelectric dam that would have resulted in the destruction of their
villages, the displacement of 40,000 people, the submersion of an important ecosystem, and
the loss of a major archeological site in the Alto Basas Valley. This movement capitalized
on the upcoming quincentennial of the Spanish Conquest to mobilize funds, social
networks, and media attention; they also purchased video cameras (at the time, bulky
shoulder mounted VHS cameras) in order to document their direct actions.

This tactic not only served to inform paisanos [countrymen] in the United
States, it also inaugurated what became the Mexican indigenous movement’s
now widespread use of video to deter police violence. Migrant protests in
California also drew the attention of Spanish-language television, which led to
the first TV coverage of the Alto Balsas movement within Mexico itself.
232

Thus, we see that the appropriation of video technology by FIOB began nearly two decades
ago with a tactical media victory. What is more, tactical media circulates through the migrant
workers’ movement not only within the geography of Los Angeles but as part of ongoing
practices of translocal community citizenship.
The FIOB has a long history of media and communication efforts across various
platforms, not only video. Beginning in 1991, FIOB began to publish a newspaper called
Puya Mixteca; in 1995, they inaugurated a radio show called “La Hora Mixteca,” broadcast

231
Ibid.: 27
232
Fox and Rivera-Salgado, 2004: 29
134
across the San Joaquin Valley; more recently they began to coproduce another show called
Nuestro Foro (Our Forum) on KFCF 88.1.
233
FOIB also helped create two community
radio stations in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca.
234
As early as 1997, FIOB set up a web
presence at http://fiob.org, with help from La Neta, a Mexican NGO that is part of the
worldwide Association for Progressive Communications and that also helped network the
Zapatista communities.
235
As an explicitly binational organization that organizes indigenous
migrant workers both in Los Angeles and in their communities of origin, FIOB faces
severe digital access challenges. ICT access in rural Oaxaca, where many of the HTAs
operate, is much lower than among even the most excluded populations of urban Los
Angeles; as one FIOB staff member emphasized, many of the communities they work with
do not even have access to electricity.
236
In this context, FIOB organizers see the website as
primarily a resource for movement leadership and allies, rather than membership and base:

Definitely the leaders and people that aren't at the base, because unfortunately, I
mean Oaxaca is the third poorest state in Mexico, so it's hard in a village up in
the Sierras to have access to Internet. But sometimes when they come to the
local city there, the FIOB members show them hey, this is what we have. They
might not be able to fully access it all the time, but they know its out there
because when they come to our meetings, when we have a binational meeting,
we show them the Internet, this is how it works, this is where everything is at.
But not everyone has access to it, it's actually for others. Friends and allies of
the Frente to know our work. And also to make a political stand that we are
here as indigenous people, there's an indigenous organization that does all this
work.
237

For FIOB staff, the fact that their membership is not online does not diminish the
importance of the net as a tool for information circulation and mobilization. Like many

233
Interview, PS, CS
234
Interview, PS
235
Stephen, 2007
236
Interview, PS
237
Ibid.
135
organizations with a low income base, they use the net extensively in their work, spending
most of each day online, communicating across their network, circulating key information
and working on strategy and campaigns. At the same time, they have intentionally
developed other forms of media in order to reach their base. For example, in 2000 FIOB
began production of a TV show called El Despertar Indigena (Indigenous Awakening) for
Fresno’s KNXT. In 2003 they entered a coproduction partnership with filmmaker Yolanda
Cruz, who completed the documentaries Mujeres que se organizan avanzan (Women who
organize make progress), Sueños Binacionales (Binational Dreams), and 2501 Migrants: A
Journey. Cruz continues to create documentaries about the FIOB and the indigenous
communities that make up its base, using participatory video methods to involve the
communities in the filmmaking process.
238

238
Interviews, PS, DS, and CS; Rodriguez Santos, 2009
136
Figure 24: 2501 Migrants

Source: petate.org

FIOB and its allies, who have a long history of using VHS for social movement ends, are
now appropriating web video for new daily practices of translocal movement media. They
deploy a broad range of media, including web videos, theatrical documentary releases, and
community screenings, as well as radio, print, popular theater, and other media, to create a
movement media ‘world’ with space for participation by their social base. In other words,
they engage in practices of transmedia mobilization. These daily communication practices
within the FIOB help inscribe indigenous identities across media platforms and articulate
translocal community citizenship.
Yet the main reason migrant indigenous communities appropriate digital media tools
is not as a tactical innovation for social movement activity, but through the desire to share
137
records of cultural events with people in their home town of origin. One interviewee
described how Oaxacan hometown association members communicate extensively through
YouTube by putting up videos of musical events, celebrations of saints, funerals, and other
cultural activities, then sending links via email to people in their hometown.

In my community it started probably in what, 2004, 2003? We started seeing all
these events, whatever was happening back home. Somebody's funeral, they
would put it there, you could go see it. Or if something happened here, a saint
patron's party or celebration, they would put it on the YouTube and the people
back home would kind of — you kind of know now that you go on YouTube
and you find it. My mom, she doesn't know how to read and write. So she says
hey, can you go to the computer and put the pueblo stuff on there? And I say
"sure, let's put it on!" So she'll have other comadres call and say hey, can you
tell [your daughter] to teach me how to get into our webpage? So it's really
interesting that YouTube is a way to maintain, to inform and gossip on your
HTA [Home Town Association].

Q: when was the first time you saw something like that? Or, what was the first
thing that you saw?

Oh, the parties! Because, well I shouldn't call them parties. They're celebrations
of the Saint. So if someone donated a cow to feed the community, a certain
band showed up to do their guelaguetza [celebration of indigenous culture] in
the community, it would be put on the YouTube. This is how we receive the
banda [group] from tzotzil communities that came to the Guelaguetza with us.
They would put it there and you would see it. Or this is what's happening in
their town. So they would have a blog and everything with the YouTube
videos.
239

Social media spaces are thus adopted in practices that reproduce migrant binational or
translocal identities. At the same time, it would be an oversimplification to suggest that web
2.0, or the web in general, has introduced 'radically new' tools or completely transformed
the communication practices of FIOB and the HTAs. Another interviewee described how
essentially the same practice, of videotaping and sharing recordings of key family and
cultural events across borders, were formerly done using VHS camcorders and mailing the

239
Interview, PS
138
physical tapes back and forth. In fact, this practice continues today and exists alongside
video sharing via the net.

Everybody records [videos]! It's like a thing that the HTAs do. They have
everything recorded with the pictures, you know everybody takes pictures.
There's tons of information there of the HTA activities that are some put on
YouTube, others not, but they have been documenting. I remember those huge
video cameras when they first came out. Everybody had one to document all
their events, all of the meetings.

Q: Oh, at that time would they send the tapes to each other?

Uh huh!

Q: Like between here and there in the mail?

Yeah. And they still do now, some. Like quinceañeras. For example my sister's
one in the US was completely like this big thing and it was sent to all my
family in Mexico, so when something happens, a wedding happens there,
everybody gets a copy here.
240

The experience of FIOB also illustrates how audiovisual tools and skills are developed
through the desire to document and share life experiences and popular cultural practices
such as weddings, quinceañeras, guelaguetzas, and funerals. These same practices are then
later applied to transmedia mobilization. Daily community media practices thus accumulate
over time to shape new pathways through the media opportunity structure. We might also
read these practices (with De Certeau, Scott, Fox, and Rivera-Salgado) as everyday forms
of digital resistance against the erasure of translocal community citizenship. Yet it would be
a mistake to limit our analysis to daily cultural practice. As we shall see in the following
section, it is the combination of the regular use of digital video to circulate cultural practices
with the FIOB’s long history of using video as a tool for struggle that proves decisive for

240
Interview, PS
139
immigrant workers’ effective use of digital video during moments of translocal
mobilization.
APPO-LA
In the previous section, we looked at the translocal media opportunity structure
occupied by the FIOB and by Oaxacan migrant workers in L.A. In this section, we shall
see how that structure enabled transmedia mobilization among indigenous migrant workers
who otherwise have very limited access to digital media tools and skills. This transmedia
mobilization took place during the creation of a movement formation called the Asamblea
Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca de Los Angeles (APPO-LA).
Ulises Ruiz Ortíz, governor of Oaxaca, took office in 2004 following a
questionable election.
241
By June of 2006, a mass mobilization by the Oaxacan Teacher’s
Union against job cuts was joined by other unions as well as by indigenous, women’s,
student, and other sectors in a general strike and occupation of Oaxaca City. The movement
coalesced around the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), a social
movement formation that demanded the resignation of Ortíz and a constituent assembly to
rewrite the state constitution.
242
In August of 2006, at the end of a women’s strike and
cacerolazo (a march to the sound of beating pots and pans) with 20,000 participants,
Oaxacan women in the movement leadership entered and took control of the studios of
Channel 9, Oaxacan Radio and Television Corporation, as well as multiple commercial
radio stations. When the government responded by expelling activists from the first radio
station they occupied, the movement generalized the media insurrection and seized

241
Norget, 2008
242
Ibid.
140
commercial radio stations across the state
243
. Police attempts to invade the station and shut
down Radio APPO were met with dedicated resistance by a blockade of several thousand
people who fought a pitched battle that lasted for days and ended with the police in retreat,
and with the radio station still in the hands of the movement. This series of events, now
known as the toma de los medios (taking of the media), inspired movements and media
activists around the world, and increased the visibility of media infrastructure as a key
space of contestation for Oaxacan activists both in Oaxaca and in diaspora in Los Angeles.
The toma is documented in the film Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad (A Little Bit of So Much
Truth) as well as in “The Taking of the Media in Oaxaca,” two films that screened widely
around the world at events organized by local nodes in global justice networks.
244

Figure 25: Stills from “La Toma de Los Medios en Oaxaca”

Source: La Toma de Los Medios en Oaxaca, http://vimeo.com/6729709

'Traditional' forms of movement media such as full length documentary film thus continue
to serve as key vehicles for the global circulation of media strategies and tactics, within
transmedia mobilization practices.
As the cycle of struggles in Oaxaca City intensified, the state government escalated
tactics and began to employ armed gunmen to attack APPO. On October 27th of 2006,

243
Gold & Renique, 2008
244
Freidberg and Mal de Ojo, 2007; and see http://vimeo.com/6729709.

141
NYC Indymedia video activist Brad Will was shot and killed in Oaxaca City, in the
neighborhood of Santa Lucía del Camino, while filming an armed attack by undercover
state police.
245
Will’s death, although only one of a long string of political murders during
the 2006 cycle of struggles, catapulted the mobilizations in Oaxaca to international
prominence in the left and radical press. At least 18 Oaxacan activists were murdered, with
more detained and disappeared, during this mobilization wave.
246

Figure 26: Brad Will

Source: New York Indypendent

Since Brad was connected to the global Indymedia network, his death brought the situation
in Oaxaca to the attention of global justice movement networks overnight. In Los Angeles,
the FIOB organized a series of protests and actions against the increasingly violent
repression of the movement, first by the Oaxacan government and later by the Mexican
federal forces. APPO-LA appropriated the Christmas tradition of the posada, in which
groups of friends and family gather and walk together to other community members’
houses, play music and sing carols, and in return are entitled to enter the house and eat and

245
Simon, 2006
246
Physicians for Human Rights, 2009
142
drink anything they find. On December 16th, 2006, APPO-LA organized an APPOsada at
the St. Cecilia Church in Santa Monica that gathered 300 people to celebrate and participate
in cultural resistance against the slayings in Oaxaca City. This event, and many others,
raised thousands of dollars that were sent to support the movement in Oaxaca. During the
height of APPO-LA mobilizations, the Koreatown Immigrant Worker Alliance (KIWA)
regularly lent out its sound system and video projector to FIOB. In part this was because
one KIWA staff member, himself Oaxacan, spent a great deal of time organizing the
Oaxacan community in the Koreatown area. Video screenings of material from Oaxaca
(much of it shot by video collectives Mal de Ojo and Indymedia Oaxaca) were regular
events during the winter and spring of 2006-2007, with screenings taking place both at
KIWA and also outside in the evenings in front of the Mexican Consulate on the
Northwest corner of Macarthur Park.
At one action, about 40-50 people gathered in the park across the street from the
consulate. Several musical groups performed, as well as Aztec dancers. People were eating
tamales and drinking atole sold by FIOB members to raise funds to send to the movement
assembly in Oaxaca City. Signs and banners were hung around the space, crosses were
placed on the ground to signify those killed in political violence, and a video screen was set
up. One of the FIOB organizers placed a mobile phone call to an activist in Oaxaca, then
amplified the conversation through the sound system. Those present heard an update about
the situation on the ground and the movement’s efforts, and then watched video from the
previous day’s mass march of 10-20,000 people in Oaxaca City. One FIOB interviewee,
who was also a key organizer of the APPO-LA, described media practices in this way:

143
Q: what about in the political work that FIOB does? Do people document that
with video cameras, and send the tapes back, or did they used to send tapes
back and forth around that stuff?

We do. We don't document everything because we do so many things, but that
mobilization that I was talking to you about on November 11th, we got video. I
actually have the video how they leave, and show up to Oaxaca City. And the
pictures, I could share with the members here.

Q: so would someone be responsible during the mobilization to document it?
Or people would just bring what they had and then after you edit it together and
put it up?

Well, we've had some really good experiences of people […] that have taken
pictures and given them back, or recorded something and given it back, and
other than that we have a lot of allies binationally that record some stuff and
send it back to us.
247

At one point activists also printed out photos of the violent repression in Oaxaca,
downloaded from Indymedia Oaxaca and other sites (such as the blog El Enemigo Común),
then taped them onto the gates of the Mexican Embassy. Similar actions took place at
Mexican Embassies and Consulates around the country (with especially vibrant actions in
New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Portland) and around the world.
Figure 27: APPO LA

Source: Images from http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/11/186082.php

247
Interview, PS
144
The figure above illustrates the mobilizations that took place in Los Angeles on the North
edge of Macarthur Park, across the street from the Mexican Consulate. Notice the video
screen that was used to show highly produced videos by FIOB and allies (such as Sueños
Binacionales), as well as to screen raw footage from recent mobilizations in Oaxaca City,
often shot just hours or days before the screening.
248

All of these examples illustrate transmedia mobilization in a translocal space
between Oaxaca and Los Angeles. In other words, the repertoire of digital contention is not
limited to online space, but includes the spreadability of media elements between digital
distribution channels as well as into offline (‘real world’) spaces. At the same time, while it
is true that digital literacies make possible new practices of richly mediated translocal
mobilization, previous media practices provide an important foundation. Everyday practices
of media use (for example, VHS) by the transnational Oaxacan migrant indigenous
communities served as important precursors, if not preconditions, for effective movement
use of new digital media during key moments of mobilization. This is especially important
in the context of a community that has among the lowest general levels of Internet access of
all demographic groups in the country. The immigrant rights movement is best able to use
digital media when the base of a particular movement formation is already familiar with the
tools and practices of network culture.
249
For indigenous migrant workers, this familiarity
evolves out of practices of translocal community citizenship. Within APPO-LA, everyday
practices of video sharing by indigenous migrant workers laid the groundwork for
transmedia mobilization.

248
On October 14th, 2009, the Mexican Supreme Court found Governor of Oaxaca Ulises Ruiz Ortiz
“culpable for the human rights violations that occurred in Oaxaca as a result of teacher protests and political
and social unrest in May 2006-January 2007 and July of 2008.” (See http://americas.irc-
online.org/am/6579).
249
Interviews, CS, PS, DM, BH
145

Transmedia mobilization: Walkout!
In Chapter 3, high school students effectively appropriated MySpace as a platform to
circulate calls for walkouts, document their experiences, and discuss strategies for political
action, as well as to reflect on the emotional power of mass mobilization. Yet it would be a
mistake to assume that social network sites were the primary generative space for the
success of the walkouts as a tactic. In fact, walkouts are a longstanding part of what
McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly
250
would call the repertoire of contention of Latino/a high
school students in Los Angeles. In 1968, more than 20,000 Latino/a (especially Chicano)
high school students across L.A. walked out against racism and to demand equal treatment,
justice in the public school system, the inclusion of non-European cultural history in their
curriculum, and an end to 50% drop out rates
251
. High school students took up the same
tactic during the battle against Prop 87. Walkouts are part of Chicano movement history in
Los Angeles, and that history was recirculated and pushed back into the popular imaginary
in mass mediated form immediately before the 2006 walkout wave. In March of 2006,
HBO aired the docudrama Walkout, directed by Edward James Olmos, which told the story
of Chicano high school teacher Sal Castro and student activist Paula Crisostomo, both key
actors in the 1968 student movement.
252

250
McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001
251
Crisostomo, 2006; Bernal, 1998
252
See http://www.hbo.com/films/walkout/
146
Figure 28: Promotional image for the HBO film Walkout

Source: HBO.com

Although the broadcast of the film did not take place until the cycle of walkouts was
already underway in March, prerelease versions of the film were seen by groups of high
school student activists in Los Angeles in December and January.
253
Beginning in
December of 2006, student groups around the city, some (like the Brown Berets) that had
first been established during the wave of civil rights organizing in the late 1960s, organized
prerelease screenings and discussions of the HBO film. Indeed, an article about the making
of the film put it this way:

[T]he persistent educational problems faced by Latino students is one reason
[director Edward James Olmos] wanted to make this film -- scheduled to air
March 18 -- about events that for most people remain lost in L.A. history. “The
dropout rate is higher than it was when these walkouts took place,” says

253
Gurza, 2005
147
Olmos, citing recent (and disputed) statistics that have stirred new debates
about the quality of education here, especially for ethnic minorities. “That's why
we're making this movie. We're hoping that the kids will walk out again.”
254

The film - in prerelease screenings organized by student activists, as well as in student
promotion on MySpace - contributed to the broader circulation of tactics during the lead-up
to the mobilization against Sensenbrenner. For example, one post on the wall a MySpace
user:

Figure 29: MySpace wall post re: walkout film and walkouts

Source: MySpace.com

Walkout was not the only film that contributed to the political atmosphere during the
spring of 2006. The fictional feature A Day Without a Mexican was also widely referenced
in the lead up to Mayday 2006. In fact, many organizers and coalitions promoted the largest
march either under the rubric Gran Boicott (The Great Boycott) or, in a direct reference to
the film, as “A Day Without Latinos:”

254
Ibid.
148
Figure 30: MySpace Walkout wall post

Source: http://groups.myspace.com/NoOnHR4437

The flow between filmic texts and street mobilizations was not unidirectional. Several
independent film projects actively sought to weave video created by participants in the
immigrant rights marches and walkouts of 2006 into music videos: “Cazador” by
Pistolera,
255
“Marcha” by Malverde;
256
film compilations like Gigante Despierta;
257
and
feature length documentary films including Undocumented.
258

For the most part, the larger, vertically structured social movement organizations only
noticed the organic appropriation of SNS as a result of the walkouts. Some then attempted
to strategically adopt SNS as a distribution platform for their messaging, with varying
degrees of success, but none were able to effectively drive future mass mobilizations by
students. In informal conversations with activists as well as formal interviews, immigrant
rights nonprofits noted that they began to set up or more actively promote their own
MySpace accounts only following the success of the walkouts, based on what they had
seen of students’ tactical innovation [Interviews, AG, WC]. An organization called BAMN

255
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqZcSt-gjI8
256
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgT9TE7CTek
257
See http://gigantedespierta.org
258
See http://www.myspace.com/undocumentedmovie
149
(By Any Means Necessary) was perhaps most successful in this strategy, but they were
never able to mobilize more than a few hundred students. In some cases they were even
attacked in MySpace posts by students denouncing them as “opportunists” and gabachos
(whites) attempting to capitalize on the Latino student movement in order to advance their
own political ends. BAMN serves as an example of how organizations that attempt to adopt
social media tools pioneered by ad-hoc movement formations run the risk that the tactic will
backfire. This can happen if the existing online community, in this case students, perceive it
as inauthentic, forced, or opportunistic. Simply becoming present within the space of a
horizontal platform is not necessarily an effective transmedia mobilization strategy. The
appropriation of networked communication tools in this case was most effective for the
loosely linked, spatially distributed, informal network of student walkout participants.

Transmedia mobilization: conclusions
We have seen that the changing media opportunity structure provides openings for
new forms of transmedia mobilization within the immigrant rights movement in L.A. Some
immigrant rights movement formations already deploy transmedia mobilization to circulate
media across platforms, while engaging their base in mediamaking that strengthens
movement identity and builds towards stronger movement outcomes. Participation in
movement media production often provides an entry point to further politicization and
movement involvement, as was the case for many who took part in the production of the
documentary film “Made in L.A,” and for those involved in participatory video, audio, and
mobile media workshops. This has always been the case, but the growing accessibility of
digital media tools and skills has greatly expanded the ease with which movement actors are
able to create and circulate rich media texts. Some organizers described how videos and
150
photos, especially, that used to sit invisible in boxes are now more easily used to reflect
movement participants’ faces and voices back to them and thereby strengthen their
identification as part of the movement. At the same time, many emphasized the importance
of using multiple communication platforms to reach various audiences, as well as the
fundamental and irreplaceable importance of face to face communication in community
organizing and movement building.
We saw that movement formations often serve as transmedia mobilization nodes
within broader networks, transporting movement media from one platform, location, or
modality to another. This media bridging work has become increasingly important as
movement participants and audiences fragment across the hypersegmented and multimodal
mediascape. In addition, effective transmedia mobilization in the immigrant rights
movement works across broadcast platforms, especially radio, to build participation via
social media and SMS, as we saw in the Basta Dobbs campaign. At its most powerful,
transmedia mobilization also manages to engage journalists across all media platforms in
generating a narrative about the growing momentum of the movement itself, while
providing concrete actions and entry points for diverse audiences. However, many
organizations and formations in the immigrant rights movement continue to operate with a
firewall between their participatory media practice, if they have one, and their
communication strategy, which is often exclusively based on top-down P.R. tactics
designed for the previous media opportunity structure.
Analysis of the FIOB and APPO-LA shows that transmedia mobilization can also
take advantage of translocal community citizenship by migrant workers, who remain linked
to their communities of origin through remote access to the media outlets they identity with,
existing practices of translocal video sharing, and via new digital media tools and platforms.
151
Indigenous immigrant communities and their organizations have long deployed a wide
array of media across platforms including radio, print, video, and more recently, the web.
Daily practices of digital media making and translocal community citizenship, an existing
community of documentary filmmakers based in the community, and previous experiences
of successful transnational tactical media combine to provide a rich foundation for present-
day transmedia mobilization by indigenous migrant movement formations.
Under these conditions, the crisis and mass mobilizations in Oaxaca served as a
crucible for tactical innovation. When the movement in Oaxaca physically occupied state
radio and television stations, the experience was rapidly circulated through transnational
networks of diasporic indigenous communities via a wide range of media platforms. Live
radio streaming over the net from Oaxaca City allowed these networks to follow and
identify with the movement in real-time, while raw video footage from actions and mass
marches was uploaded, downloaded, and screened sometimes within hours of capture at
protests outside Mexican consulates in Los Angeles and around the world. In transmedia
mobilization, each form of movement media thus serves as a key audience entry point. The
murder of Indymedia activist Brad Will also generated a rapid and massive spike in the
visibility of the struggles in Oaxaca City, catapulting the events into the forefront of the
consciousness of transnational activist networks and the anti-corporate globalization
movement. Activists in these networks performed extensive media bridging work, boosting
circulation of movement videos, photos, audio, and text even further across platforms.
A closer look at the student walkouts against the Sensenbrenner Bill provided further
insight into the dynamics of transmedia mobilization. Rather than attribute the success of
the walkouts solely to social networking sites and text messaging, it is possible to locate
them within the historical repertoire of contention of the Chicano movement in Los
152
Angeles. The walkouts also function as part of a larger transmedia story that has been told,
retold, remixed, and recirculated by movement participants across broadcast and social
media platforms. In this case, transmedia mobilization serves to represent and strengthen
social movement identity, as well as to reproduce and encourage participation in specific
movement tactics. The student walkouts against Sensenbrenner were organized in a
horizontal, ad-hoc movement formation with networked participation across the city, linked
by student activists who used social media (especially SMS and MySpace) to circulate calls
to action, file near-real time reports from the streets, and generate multimedia texts
documenting their actions. Their actions were rooted in the larger wave of street
mobilizations against Sensenbrenner, circulated via new participatory spaces in the
changing media opportunity structure, informed by the tactical repertoire of the Chicano
movement, and facilitated by the students’ fluency in the skills, tools and practices of
network culture.
If fluency with digital media is the key to transmedia mobilization, and thus to the
most effective practices within a changed media opportunity structure, what has the
immigrant rights movement done to ensure that its social base does not remain largely
excluded? Many movement actors struggle with this very question, and Chapter Five
examines the efforts of organizers and educators to develop an effective praxis of digital
media literacy within the immigrant rights movement in L.A.
153
CHAPTER FIVE: THE PRAXIS OF DIGITAL MEDIA
LITERACY

Transmedia mobilization takes advantage of recent transformations in the media
opportunity structure to heighten the visibility of participatory movement media and bring
new voices to the table. Yet which new voices are heard? The data reviewed in Chapter
Two provide a sobering reminder of the deep and persistent inequality of access to ICT
tools and skills. While it is undeniable that a growing number of people have access to
multimedia tools and skills, digital media literacy remains a key challenge for the immigrant
rights movement. Indeed, at a moment when transmedia mobilization is shaping up to be a
crucial strategy for achieving movement goals, access inequality to digital media literacies is
more important than ever. Digital inequality may have growing impacts on the trajectory of
social movements, as transmedia mobilization becomes especially decisive to movement
outcomes including the circulation of struggles, movement identity construction, and the
transformation of public consciousness. This chapter grounds recent developments in
digital media literacy within Williams’
259
long view of the rise of print literacy, engages
Freire’s ideas about popular education, and traces the emergence of a praxis of digital media
literacy within the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles. The chapter begins by
laying out a theoretical framework, moves to examine formal and informal digital media
learning practices, key sites and barriers, analyzes digital media literacy projects within the
MIWON network, and ends by considering the implications for ad-hoc movement
formation in the case of the DREAM Act campaign.

259
Williams, 1961
154

Praxis of digital media literacy: theoretical framework
The term praxis originates from the ancient Greek for ‘practical knowledge for
action,’ but it is used here in the more widely applied sense developed by Paolo Freire, who
defined it as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.”
260
For popular
educators in general, praxis describes a spiral process whereby liberatory theory is used to
inform action, which creates social change, in turn requiring the modification of theory and
action to reflect and reshape the new reality. Concretely, Latin American popular educators
informed by the concept of praxis taught hundreds of thousands of peasants and urban
poor how to read and write through texts and methods that expose and question
relationships of power and oppression. For popular educators, literacy is a key tool that can
enable oppressed individuals to become subjects able to act upon the world and transform
their conditions of oppression.
261
Popular education has long played a role in U.S. social
movements, from labor organizing to the civil rights movement and beyond.
262
Many
popular educators linked to Latin American liberation movements fled U.S.-backed state
repression in the 1970s and 1980s; some ended up in the United States, and in Los Angeles
specifically.
263
A new wave of ideas, strategies, and practices of popular education thus
made their way into CBOs and social movement formations in Los Angeles. One popular
educator from Honduras, for example, connected with L.A.’s Institute of Popular
Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), and is now actively working to incorporate
digital media tools and skills into IDEPSCA’s popular education efforts. If print literacy

260
Freire, 1970: 36
261
Kane, 2001
262
For example, see the history of the Highlander Center and Project South.
263
Interviews, NR, SB]
155
was a primary tool of liberatory pedagogy during a previous stage of mass based struggle
against the centralized power of authoritarian Latin American nation-states, digital media
literacy assumes central importance as a tool of liberation against the networked state or
corporation in the information society.
The growth of read-write digital media literacy
If we take the long view, the present moment is perhaps the beginning of the
growth of read-write digital media literacy. The tools of audiovisual production,
manipulation, and circulation are being distributed, although unevenly, across a constantly
growing proportion of the population. What can we learn from the history of print literacy
about the implications of this transformation for social movements? In his discussion of
“The Growth of the Reading Public” and “The Growth of the Popular Press” in The Long
Revolution, as in his work on television, Raymond Williams
264
draws evidence from a
wide range of sources to make arguments about the impact of the spread of mass (print)
literacy. Williams marshals yearly book sales figures, newspaper and magazine circulation
data, information about the technological evolution of the printing press, changes in
publishing law, taxation, and licensing, quotes from contemporary authors, and other
sources to trace the evolution of print literacy. He follows the long shift from the Roman
system of slave dictation that allowed the production of up to 500 copies of a text in a day,
to the printing press, the rise of ‘penny dreadfuls’ and radical texts in the 1800s, the
emergence of public education, the creation of both commercial and public circulating
library systems, the importance of the railway stations in creating a market for cheap pulp
paperbacks, through 1958 when over 22,000 books were published in England.
265

264
Williams, 1961
265
Ibid.: 170
156
Williams analyzes the class needs fulfilled by the expansion of print literacy. Initially,
literacy is the province of the church and the aristocracy, or a small group of elites. The
growth of the middle class in the 1800s, and the rise of a commercial class that requires
accurate accounting and the exchange of trade knowledge, expands literacy, lays the ground
for new forms of literature, and socializes reading publics that come to see themselves as
political actors.
In a similar way, we might discuss the intersectional (class, race, and gender)
interests fulfilled by the rise of digital media literacy: first, capital requires an ever larger
number of knowledge and information workers, so they must be trained and given access
to advanced ICTs; second, the production of ICTs as mass commodities for profit impels
their diffusion to the widest possible consumer base.
266
However, the structure of the
global economy until very recently limited that consumer base to the ⅓ world: residents of
the wealthiest countries and local elites in the global South. In the new millennium, the
profit logic for ICT technology diffusion has taken hold on a global scale, so that unlike an
earlier stage where powerful computers were only available to nation states, multinational
firms and large institutions, they are now pushed out for home (under)use in ever greater
numbers. Even more than the personal computer, the arrival of the mobile phone further
extended this logic and has for the first time placed networked ICTs in the hands of the
majority of the planet’s population. Put another way, the present moment is a historic
expansion of digital literacy far beyond the small class of cultural producers who dominated
the arts of audiovisual manipulation until the end of the 20th century. Broadcast media
continue to retain the most power over the creation and circulation of symbols and ideas,
and the incumbent players in the increasingly globalized cultural industries have moved

266
Dyer-Witheford, 1999
157
rapidly to monetize and extract value from the new wave of popular digital
communication.
267
Nevertheless, even that activity works in favor of social movements, by
promoting digital media literacy as a requirement for participation in popular culture. If the
spread of print literacy was a key enabling factor in the revolutions of the new middle class
against the old aristocracies, it is by now clear that the spread of read-write digital literacy
(the ability to produce, remix, and circulate multimedia texts, not just consume them), while
it does not determine a new wave of social transformation, certainly is a key enabling
factor.
Yet as we have seen, digital media literacies are unevenly distributed. Uneven
distribution has important implications for networked social movements, especially
movements whose social base are among those traditionally excluded. Many of the
individuals, organizations, and networks that constitute the immigrant rights movement in
Los Angeles are taking concrete steps to realize the potential of transmedia mobilization by
not only adopting digital media in their own practices, but by attempting to help their social
base gain access to digital media tools and skills. In the following sections we will examine
these practices in detail.

Praxis of digital media literacy: informal learning, key sites, and barriers
Nearly all of the immigrant rights movement actors in L.A. hope to increase digital
media literacy among the populations they organize, although only a handful of them see
this as a primary goal. Increasingly, movement actors have also come to see digital media
literacy as a potential organizing tool. This section reviews findings from interviews with
immigrant rights movement actors about their practices of informal learning, the key sites

267
Hindman, 2009
158
for digital media literacies, and the most important barriers to an effective praxis of digital
media literacy.
Informal learning
We will see in the next section that many CBOs involved in the immigrant rights
movement are working to develop a praxis of digital media literacy with their social base,
largely through formal classes and workshops in computer labs. Yet scholars have shown
that a great deal - perhaps the majority - of digital media literacies circulate via peer to peer
learning and informal skill sharing.
268
I found this to also be the case in the immigrant
rights movement in L.A., where informal and peer to peer learning takes place constantly
between friends and within families.
When I asked movement participants how they learned new digital media tools and
skills, they often mentioned peer to peer learning from friends and coworkers, rather than
formal training:

From my friends, I think that’s the truth […] in work, definitely work settings
you’re exposed to a lot of different technol-, well, technology if the
organization has access to those things. But in general, to think of media as a
tool for organizing I don’t, like I said, it’s never a basic, it’s not like you learn
base building, campaign strategizing, and media, you know, it hasn’t become
that yet. But I have been exposed to this because of friends, of people who
have an interest in it. And then school, yeah.
269

Peer to peer learning also takes place between family members. Younger family members
often spend time teaching parents or grandparents how to use computers, the Internet, and
mobile phones:

268
Ito et al., 2009
269
Interview, OE
159
I also think that it’s becoming more and more accessible too, so I think
nowadays we get more parents coming and be like, “oh mira, I just got Internet
but I don’t know how to use it,” or something like that. And so there’s been a
few times where we’ll come into the home and set it up, or teach them how to
do their e-mail, setup their account. Even in my family I still get phone calls
from my tio or my mom. And then, I was trying to get my grandma to learn
how to text, and that became a project on its own. [My uncle got Internet]
because he wanted to be able to look up Mexico in a satellite and be able to
point to where he grew up […] I mean it was exciting, it was such an emotional
moment when we were able to look up Cuernavaca Morelos in the computer,
and then hit satellite and he could see the neighborhood where he grew up, but
then I was like, “but you can do so much more!” [laughs].
270

Informal learning remains important even for organizations that do offer formal
digital media literacy trainings. One staff member at IDEPSCA, an organization that has
adopted popular communication as a strategic goal, set up computer labs in their main
offices and in day labor centers, and has a digital media literacy project (VozMob) built
around using mobile phones for popular communication, emphasized that informal learning
remains important:

For me it’s really amazing actually to see some of the workers very interested
in computers. Now the non-Mobile Voices workers in the past month and a
half since [a staff member] has been more visible at the centers, and [the project
coordinator] too […] A lot of people are coming to learn computers very
informally.
271

In some cases, formal digital media literacy projects thus serve to gather resources and
capacity that then become more readily accessible to the social base of the movement, even
to those who do not ‘officially’ participate in such projects.

270
Interview, OE
271
Interview, BH
160
Key sites: computer labs, universities, schools, and home
Both formal and informal digital media learning take place in key learning sites,
where people gain access to computers, broadband connectivity, digital cameras, audio
equipment, and other digital media resources. This is true of digital media learning in
general, but is especially important in the context of the low levels of home computer and
home broadband access in low-wage immigrant worker households in L.A. Many of my
interviewees talked about how they learned to use new digital media tools in sites including
libraries, schools, universities, and the computer labs of CBOs.
Schools and universities, especially, remain critical sites for the acquisition of digital
media literacies that can later be applied to movement building. One organizer shared that
despite her lifelong involvement in the immigrant rights movement, she did not think
seriously about how digital media could be used as an organizing tool until pushed to do so
by the university environment:

I gotta be honest […] technology is not my strength. But I realized that I had to
even when, little things like being able to share documents and things like that.
I had to learn how to do it, and that even though I had been organizing here in
L.A. for so long, it was really in [the University of California at] Santa Cruz
that I learned that all these tools existed for me to be a better organizer. That
was because I was around all kinds of people that were all about technology
and things like that, so I got to learn a lot. And I think, it’s not that I didn’t have
hope for it, but I didn’t take media as seriously. Because I hadn’t seen it.
People were not taking media seriously to organize until I was there, then I was
able to really see what it could do.
272

Another interviewee, who had worked as a high school teacher, related her experience with
working class youth who only had access to the Internet at school or in public libraries:

This is a really poor working class community, and in Wilmington you’re
either really, really poor, or your dad is a longshoreman that makes some thing
like $40 per hour, and makes a lot of money, so there’s very few kids that have

272
Interview, OE
161
a cell phone in middle school. Definitely they’re not listening to the radio or
watching T.V., and actually for lunch time, I would have at least ten of my 30
students ask if they could use my computer during lunch time because they just
wanted to be on the Internet, you know? When I would take ‘em to the library,
they would just go straight to the Internet. They wanna be on the Internet but
they’re just not allowed to.
273

Formal educational institutions are often the most important sites for the informal
acquisition of digital media literacies.
Computer labs at worker centers are also key sites. Another interviewee discussed
how computer labs at day labor centers were often the only site where day laborers could
access computers and the Internet:

There’s no access really, many people that I speak with at the centers don’t
have a computer at home. Only the ones that have kids that are born here, or
that have kids in school, have computers.
274

We will return to a more detailed discussion of CBO computer labs later, in the case study
of the MIWON network organizations. Digital media literacy spreads through both formal
and informal learning, between friends, family, coworkers, and peers in the movement.
Digital tools and skills are sometimes accessible to participants in the immigrant rights
movement in key sites, including schools, universities, public libraries, and workplaces.
Yet many barriers remain.

Barriers to the praxis of digital media literacy
Many immigrant workers’ organizations in L.A. are attempting to build digital media
literacy into their training and organizing efforts. Yet for the most part these efforts remain

273
Interview, TH
274
Interview, BH
162
small in scale, sporadic, and limited to a handful of members. When asked to describe the
most important barriers to the praxis of digital media literacy, interviewees mentioned
resources, training capacity, fear of technology, generational divides, and a lack of vision.
Resources
One of my initial assumptions was that the main barrier was access to resources:
computers, digital cameras, and high bandwidth Internet. To some degree, this was true.
For example, one FIOB staff member hoped to make their flagship communication
platform, a print and web magazine called El Tequio, self sufficient. I asked her what she
saw as the biggest obstacle to realizing that goal, and her answer was unequivocal:

Money. We don't have money. Money's a challenge. But you know, one of my
wishes is for the ally organizations, the immigrant movement, to buy ads in this
magazine that could make us self-sufficient.
275

While this organizer, and some others I interviewed, said that money was the biggest
obstacle to strengthening their communications capacity, many others talked about the need
for increased capacity in the form of training, skills, and knowledge about how to make
effective use of networked media technologies. This was the case for KIWA’s attempts to
increase new media literacies among both staff and membership. When asked about barriers
to media and technology capacity, one staff member responded:

Our own capacity, I think. If we can hire someone to be just assigned to do
something like that, it'll benefit the organization a lot. Someone like that who
could train the staff and members to be able to do that. Cell phone type of, like
phone messaging system, that would be helpful. Like we were talking about
earlier, the computer class, if you have someone that could dedicate their time in
terms of curriculum development and running it, it would be really helpful.
276

275
Interview, PS
276
Interview, EQ
163
Another interviewee emphasized that the inconsistent nature of volunteer teachers was a
major obstacle to successful new media capacity building, and expressed hope that a new
grant KIWA received to teach computer classes would allow them to hire a teacher and
therefore improve the quality and consistency of the program.
277
One of the chief barriers to
an effective praxis of digital media literacy among CBOs is resources to hire dedicated, paid
staff in order to build computer labs into hubs of training, online organizing, and
transmedia mobilization.
Strange new tools
In several cases, CBOs and movement organizers said that fear of unfamiliar
technology is the biggest barrier to access.

I know my mom went to school to get trained on computer lit [laughs] […]
They just have this fear, and I think the scary part is that technology and this
tech equipment changes so much that they don’t understand the fact that if they
learned the skill, it could be applied to any machine. To my mom it’s like ‘Oh
my God it’s a new machine, I can’t touch it, I have no idea where to turn it on.’
And I feel like it’s probably the literacy part that a lot of these groups lack, but
also just trying to catch up to what comes up year after year, it’s so difficult,
you know?
278

The perceived rapid pace of technological change and the constant marketing cycle of new
digital media technologies exacerbates this fear.
Access to credit to purchase ICTs is also a barrier to adoption and use, as well as
access to information about specific technologies:

I have another uncle that, a woman was selling computers door to door, and
they bought one for $2,000 bucks, a piece of shit, because along with it came a
program, I don’t know, 20 CDs for pre-school kids to learn how to read faster
or some shit like that. And they bought it, you know, they bought it because

277
Interview, KZ
278
Interview, TX
164
first, they were afraid that if they went to a big store, they were gonna ask them
to pay with a credit card. Because of course they’re not carrying a thousand
bucks for a computer. Second, there’s no literacy when it comes to knowing
what computer is doing what, and because they all claim to take you to the sky
and back, and you’re gonna know everything in like a minute, so they got
ripped off. And they still haven’t paid it, they went into debt for it. And it just
gets me so angry to think that it’s easy to find out, but also the newer
generation is, could care less about what the older generation has learned, or
how to help them catch up.
279

Even for those movement actors who are unafraid of digital media, have relatively
high levels of access to ICTs and digital media literacies, and actively seek to incorporate
digital media into their organizing, figuring out how to do so can be confusing, time
consuming, and unsettling. Organizers often feel pressure to stay up to date with emerging
social media tools, practices and norms. They frequently end up participating in new social
media spaces even though the practice and its value feel vague or unclear:

We started this project and we had an intern who created a blog for us. I mean
we should check to see if anyone actually visits us, but we’re pretty sure
[laughs] no one does. And I think that that’s the thing, it was great because we
had someone who could do it, but there’s actually, you can’t just create it, right,
there’s a maintenance level. There’s a participation, there’s a relationship that
you have to build within it for it to work. And this was a project, you know we
actually talked to PTP, do you know them? Progressive Technology Project
[…] And he was trying to give us a lot of support in terms of how to better use
social media, you know, create, do the Twitters […] So he was trying to help,
he was like ‘create a blog, create a Twitter persona,’ I think those were the two
main things. Or webinars, that was the third thing that he thought would help
get the project more outreach support. Then we created an online survey, so we
used Survey Monkey, and used our newsletter, our outreach list to put it out
there. Listservs, I think Listservs are actually still good old fashioned [laughs]
outreach tools […] MySpace we don’t do. Face Book, we’re still trying it out, I
don’t know, I don’t know how it works [laughs]. Like if it’s working well or
not, you know, we’re trying to keep updates and keep people informed.
280

279
Ibid.
280
Ibid.
165
Frequently, staff at CBOs in the immigrant rights movement talked about how they felt
pressure to adopt new digital media tools without a clear understanding of how the tools
worked, what the value would be, or how to judge whether they were effective.
Generational divide
Although the immigrant rights movement increasingly uses digital media tools and
skills, younger organizers especially expressed frustration at the slow pace of incorporation
into all levels of movement activity. One put it this way:

I think more and more it’s happening, I see more organizations using video and
all these things to bring more awareness or put themselves out there. But still in
the most immediate ways we could use it, it’s sort of on the back burner. And
some one will bring it up and then we’ll address it and try to use it. But it’s
never how we think of, you take minutes every meeting, somebody has to
facilitate and take notes, and blah blah blah. It doesn’t become something that
basic: “well, can we just have a recorder and record the meeting, or somebody
could just be actually videotaping it, and can we do that?” It always is that one
person that is into it that brings it up, but it hasn’t become a basic tool, you
know? […] People don’t think about it or don’t take it as seriously.
281

For many organizations, social media has not yet become understood as one of the key
elements of organizing in general. Yet many movement actors, as the interviewee above,
see social media as a basic tool that all organizers should be trained in, just as they are
currently training in meeting facilitation, note taking, and door knocking.
Since older organizers are often unfamiliar with the application of digital media to
organizing, it is younger staff members who often act as de facto 'online organizers,' and
end up working to adopt and integrate online tools into the life of movement organizations.
This has the advantage of being organic. At the same time, older staff who may have more
experience with campaign communications, effective messaging, and movement strategy

281
Interview, OE
166
may not work together with younger, more tech savvy staff to figure out how to
strategically appropriate new tools and online spaces for movement goals.

I can never figure out what they are [laughs]. I just have brief idea, very
limited. So KIWA has MySpace,

Q: Who set that up and who maintains it?

Our youngest staff.

Q: Does she find it a useful tool for the organization?

I think it's still in the process of building. I heard something about a lot of
people have to be connected into it, however the number is not that large. One
is Facebook, the other is blog.

Q: So who writes on the blog?

[Youngest staff member]. I don't even know how to get in there yet.
282

At the same time as younger movement actors are often frustrated by the slow pace of
technology adoption, they are expected to act as de facto online organizers. A few enjoy
this role; however, others pointed out that although ‘youth’ and ‘students’ are often reified
as a homogenous category familiar with all digital media tools and skills (so-called ‘digital
natives,’)
283
there is a wide range of digital media literacy among young people. Part of this
difference is simply interest based, but it is also shaped by structural forces including race,
class, and gender:
Moral panic
Differences in youth digital media literacies are also influenced by parental attitudes
to technology, and by moral panic induced by sensationalist broadcast media accounts of

282
Interview, EQ
283
Prenksy, 2001
167
online spaces. Moral panic about SNS, specifically, has in some cases resulted in adults
limiting young people’s access to key tools of political participation.
284
Parents and teachers
sometimes restrict young people’s access, either because they are not comfortable with the
technology or because their primary information source is the mass media, which tend to
emphasize stories about scary, sensational, and negative uses of the net.
285

Well, because these were middle schoolers, these are what, 11, 12, 13, 14?
Well first there was a whole craze of not allowing kids to go on MySpace
because you know, crazy men go after girls. Or even, what was the one
controversial case of a mom harassing a teenager and the teenager killed
himself? I forget if it was a boy or girl, anyway so of course [laughs]. And it’s
just so T.V. perpetuating this craze about MySpace being a bad space. […] I
think a lot of my students hadn’t seen that was just crap the media was putting
in their parents’ eyes. And then their parents weren’t allowing them to do
that.
286

Even when parents are not afraid of digital media, they may not recognize its educational
value.
287
Parents sometimes push back against educators and organizers when they attempt
to spend time developing children’s digital media literacies. One organizer noted:

Parents don’t necessarily feel that teaching their kids how to use a camera to
take pictures is as important to teaching them how to do math, you know? And
it’s not that we’re replacing either or, it’s that we, they could do everything,
they could do all of it. And so even to get parents to be excited about
photography as a way of documenting, or what we were teaching the kids was
a way of documenting their lives, was very interesting because I would have
parents come in and be like, ‘No quiero que mijo pierde treinta minutos en eso.’
Like ‘I don’t want them to just waste,’ pretty much saying, ‘waste thirty
minutes,’ they should be doing homework instead.
288

284
Roush, 2006
285
Ibid.
286
Interview, TH
287
Ito et al, 2009
288
Interview, OE
168
In order to convince these parents that digital media literacies are important, the organizers
of one youth program explained that they were not replacing more traditional literacies, but
supplementing them by teaching the children new skills with computers and digital media
technologies.

What I told them was, “look, there’s so many people out there that write about
our lives, that document our lives, that come into our communities and then all
of a sudden, write about it to try to create change. And it’s in a good intention,
but at the same time what makes us so different that we can’t do it ourselves
when we have these tools now much more accessible to us than before?” And
it’s a scary thought to use something that you don’t know how to use, and you
feel like its gonna break really easily, that’s always a fear, they’re always
scared of damaging it. But we feel that it’s important for your child to feel
empowered that they can document their own lives in different ways, and also
do the same with your life.
289

Vision
Finally, many talked about vision as the most important obstacle. They felt that
resources were available, but that organizational leaders failed to effectively grasp the
strategic and tactical possibilities of appropriation of networked media tools and skills.
When I asked [C] what she thought the biggest obstacle was to reaching her goal of
teaching the workers who came to the UCLA labor center how to effectively tell digital
stories, she had this to say:

I think getting people on board. Like is this something the Labor Center would
like to dedicate resources to, is this something the FIOB would like to do, that
the FMLN, you know? I think with different orgs it’s different things but
through the Labor Center, can we dedicate resources to this? Is this in line with
the work we want to do? I think that definitely would be a challenge.
290

289
Interview, OE
290
Interview, DH
169
In this case, one of the movement actors with the greatest access to resources remained one
of the furthest behind in implementation of new media literacy training. Vertically organized
movement organizations that operate mostly as service providers may be too constrained by
service mandates that come from their funders to effectively innovate around digital
communication technologies, even when socializing these tools and skills among their
constituency would enhance service provision. This is a theme we will return to in Chapter
Six.
How do these various practices of, sites for, and barriers to digital media literacy
mentioned by interviewees play out in the immigrant rights movement? The next section
examines formal media workshops and the praxis of digital media literacy within a key
component of the movement in Los Angeles: independent worker centers in the MIWON
network.

Praxis of digital media literacy: the MIWON network
The first series of interviews I conducted for this dissertation took place between
January and April of 2007. At that time, I interviewed staff from organizations that were, at
the time, members of the Multi-Ethnic Immigrant Worker Organizing Network (MIWON)
about their communication practices in general and about formal computer and media
literacy trainings specifically.

170
Figure 31: MIWON mural

Source: KIWA

MIWON is a pioneering multi-ethnic network of immigrant worker centers that came
together in 1999 to support each other’s organizing efforts and to create a space where
workers of different races and ethnicities could build relationships. Their mission:

The Multi-ethnic Immigrant Worker Organizing Network (MIWON) is a
network of low-wage immigrant worker-based organizations in Los Angeles
committed to the struggle for dignity, justice, and the human rights of
immigrant workers and all peoples. We ground our work in the experiences
and leadership of immigrant workers in Los Angeles, an international
perspective, and a commitment to build alliances with U.S.-born low-wage
workers and other communities fighting for justice. We seek to transform the
171
conditions in which we live through campaigns that build the power of low-
wage workers, expand the worldview of workers and residents of Los
Angeles, build worker-to-worker alliances, and win concrete victories for
legalization and worker rights.
291

The founding MIWON members were the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance
(KIWA), the Pilipino Workers’ Center (PWC), and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant
Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA); the Garment Worker Center (GWC) joined in 2000 and
the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA) joined in 2005. I
interviewed key staff at all of these worker centers, and their responses provide a snapshot
of their communication capacity at the time as well as an overview of their thoughts about
digital literacy and strategies to address digital inequality.
Garment Worker Center (GWC)
The Garment Worker Center (GWC) organizes among LA’s approximately 80,000
workers who labor in the apparel industry, largely concentrated in the fashion district just
south of downtown’s financial district. In Chapter Two, we discussed the composition of
the garment industry and the extensive abuses and violations suffered by garment workers.
GWC, created in 2001, is an independent worker center that has trained over 100 garment
workers as organizers, successfully pushed for the implementation of anti-sweatshop laws,
conducted a three-year boycott against clothing label Forever 21, and won more than $3
million for workers in back wages and penalties. Their mission: “to empower garment
workers in the Los Angeles area and to work in solidarity with other low wage immigrant
workers and disenfranchised communities in the struggle for social, economic and
environmental justice.”
292

291
MIWON, 2010
292
GWC, 2007
172
In 2007, GWC had a computer lab with 5 computers and a DSL connection. One of
the computers was a G4 tower capable of running Final Cut Pro (professional grade video
editing software); this was donated by a film student from USC who occasionally came in
to help with technical support and who started a video workshop with workers during the
fall of 2006. GWC staff said that the video workshop fell apart due to lack of planning and
lack of staff capacity to help. At the time, GWC also had two recording devices: one digital
camera, and one “old school” camera (VHS or Hi8). They estimated that about 50% of
garment workers had cell phones, mostly prepaid, and in their experience workers kept
them turned off a lot due to the high cost of credit. In general, garment workers at GWC did
not have access to the Internet, although a few said they were connected. A few young
adults came in to the GWC space on Saturdays to use their computer lab, mostly for email
and video games. There were sporadic computer classes, but the organization did not have
staff capacity to keep the machines maintained or to turn the lab into a real media production
and distribution hub. GWC often tried to get volunteers to come in and do projects or
trainings, but found it difficult to get people to commit to projects over the long term on a
volunteer basis.
293
GWC workers also played key roles in, and participated extensively in
the production of, the award-winning documentary Made in L.A.
Garment workers, volunteers, and staff produced a semi-regular newsletter, but also
said that they would like to see a lot more happen with multimedia production. Specifically,
they dreamed of having a radio station, since radio remains the most popular form of media
used by the majority of garment workers. GWC’s long-term aim was for worker-produced
audio to reach the 60-90,000 workers concentrated in the Fashion District. GWC workers
said that they listened to the radio with headphones at work, especially when employers

293
Interview, TH
173
told them that they were not allowed to talk to each other.
294
A worker interviewee added
that in some shops they were neither allowed to talk nor listen to music using headphones.
Staff felt that audio content circulation would ideally be via FM radio, but might also be
done initially via CDs.
Radio Tijeras
Beginning in 2007, GWC and IDEPSCA created a digital media literacy workshop
focused around audio production.
295
From 2007 through 2009, the group met every week
(sometimes every other week) with 3-8 garment workers and 1-2 community organizers in
an ongoing workshop initially called El Proyecto de Radio (The Radio Project), later Radio
Costurera (Radio Garment Worker), and finally Radio Tijeras (Radio Scissors). Between
2007-2009 the workshop produced interviews, PSAs (public service announcements),
know-your-rights clips, news, poems, calls to action, oral histories, and a range of other
audio material. Audio material was initially distributed via CD audio magazines dubbed
Discos Volantes.
296

294
Interview, TH; and personal communication w/GWC members
295
I was a cofounder of this workshop and participated on a monthly or biweekly basis.
296
A play on words: the term means ‘flying saucers’ in Spanish, but also means ‘CD flyers.’
174
Figure 32: Image of Discos Volantes

Source: http://garmentworkercenter.org/audio

We pressed hundreds of copies of CDs packed with worker-produced audio materials
mixed with music, and garment worker organizers distributed these CDs inside downtown
L.A.’s garment sweatshops. Workers also designed and completed an evaluation survey,
where they documented the number of CDs distributed, the number of ‘contacts’ during the
distribution process, and the number of new workers that came into the Garment Worker
Center based on the process of distributing the CD.
In fact, this distribution process provides a powerful example of how the principles
of social media can apply offline as well as online. GWC workers saw the value in the
audio materials not only in the recordings per se but also in the opportunity they provided
for person-to-person (in this case, face to face) contact between garment workers. Worker-
produced media was thus valued not only for the technical skills gained by the workshop
175
participants or the content of the audio clips, but also as an organizing tool, to provide a
focal point for face to face conversation about industry conditions, rights, and the GWC’s
organizing efforts.
297
During the summer of 2008, the group also built a low power FM
transmitter with the help of activists from the Prometheus Radio Project. They later set up
and used this transmitter for live microradio broadcasts from the Fast for Our Future in
Placita Olvera (see Chapter Six).
Figure 33: Building the transmitter for Radio Tijeras

Source: Garment Worker Center

In 2009, members of Radio Tijeras were invited to present some of their interviews and
other material on Pacifica affiliate KPFK (90.7), which reaches the entire city. In the week
leading up to the KPFK appearance, once again GWC organizers took the broadcast as an
opportunity to initiate face to face contact by distributing flyers on the streets and inside the
factories, announcing the air date and time for garment worker-produced radio segments. In
many ways, this project was a success: garment workers gained skills in digital audio

297
Interview TH; personal communication with GWC members
176
recording, mixing, editing, and distribution, as well as increased computer literacy and live
radio broadcast experience. Audio produced by garment workers was distributed inside
sweatshops and over the air, spreading important messages about labor law, right to wages,
health and safety, immigration policy, and organizing strategies. However, at the time of
writing, Radio Tijeras has not yet managed to meet one of the main objectives of the GWC:
to become self-sufficient, with a process entirely run by garment workers themselves.
While low initial levels of digital literacy contributed to the challenges, the problems
in building Radio Tijera into a self-sustaining project were not primarily problems of
resources or technology skills. It was not difficult to gather the resources necessary to
purchase digital audio recorders, microphones, a mixer, the radio transmitter, and other
equipment. Rather, the biggest challenges were those faced by any organizing effort in an
industry with long hours, bad conditions and low pay: limited time and energy. No garment
workers were able to step forward to consistently lead the project. In the world of national
labor organizations, this problem is to some degree mitigated through the use of paid
organizers - a solution that introduces its own problematic relationship between workers
and organizers. However, in 2006-7 the GWC collective decided to move away from a
nonprofit model of paid staff or a union model of paid organizers. This decision was made
based on the ideal that any sustained organizing effort must be firmly rooted in the desires
and organized efforts of garment workers themselves, and eliminating paid organizer
positions would ensure the greatest possible degree of accountability to the base. At the
same time, this model is very difficult to sustain, and the experience of Radio Tijeras, where
three different groups of garment workers came into the project and produced material, but
then left the project, reflects this broader difficulty.

177
Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA)
The Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA) is a nonprofit,
community-based organization that uses popular education methodology to educate and
organize low-income immigrant families from Mexico and Central America. Established
two decades ago during a struggle to organize for better schools in Pasadena, in 2010
IDEPSCA has grown and expanded to a number of organizing projects across the city.
IDEPSCA has a contract with the City to operate 6 day labor centers around Los Angeles;
has a K-6 children’s educational program called Aprendamos; trains community health
promotoras (promoters) who provide basic health care and education around the city; runs a
green gardener’s cooperative and a household cleaning co-op called Magic Cleaners;
provides ESL and Spanish Literacy classes for adults in a program called La Escuelita de
La Comunidad; and has a youth organizing component called Teens In Action, among other
programs and initiatives.
In addition to volunteering on a weekly basis for IDEPSCA’s popular
communication project during 2007-2010, I formally interviewed a number of IDEPSCA
staff and workers. Organizers from IDEPSCA described their long term efforts to develop
what they call comunicación populár (popular communication) capacity among their base of
low wage immigrant workers. They had a long history of training day laborers and
domestic workers to create and distribute their own media, including several radio and
audio projects, video projects, and a newspaper called Jornada XXII. Crucially, one
IDEPSCA staff member had a long history of using popular communication in social
movement struggles in Central America during the late 1970s and 1980s. He described
popular communication as his main activity in those times, during which he worked with a
team of three other organizers to create a nationwide network of social movement radio and
178
a newspaper that collected and distributed articles by students, workers, peasants, and
women’s organizations throughout Honduras.
298
This organizer migrated to the USA as a
refugee fleeing right wing political violence. Once in LA, he connected with IDEPSCA and
during the early days of the organization helped create a newspaper, a radio program, and
later a short video documenting their activities. More recently, IDEPSCA produced a video
called Neidi's Story with help from the Bay Area Video Coalition. They posted this video
to YouTube, but did not promote it widely. In 2007, IDEPSCA owned one video camera
and one audio recorder.
In 2007, IDEPSCA staff said that at one point they had four computer labs, but at
the time of the interview had three, since a lab in Pasadena had recently closed. IDEPSCA
labs included six computers located in their main office in Pico Union, four computers in
the Hollywood day labor center, and four computers in the Downtown day labor center. In
the past there were basic computer literacy classes, but at the time of our interview no
classes were taking place. They had an IT staff of just one part-time person, and according
to interviewees had so far been unable to incorporate many new developments in ICTs into
their communication strategy. My interviewees felt that there was a lack of staff capacity to
conduct trainings, as well as a general lack of an overarching vision of what might be
possible. In addition, the computers themselves were very old and slow, in part due to a
lack of upgrades and maintenance.
299

IDEPSCA occasionally showed videos to workers, using TV or a video projector
that they had at the main office. In 2006 they had a screening series about the Minutemen,
with screenings taking place in the day labor centers and at one point in the community.
One interviewee described how seeing the way that the Minutemen and other anti-

298
Interview, NQ
299
Interview, BH
179
immigrant hate groups use the Internet to spread their message and to circulate racist
depictions of Latino/as filled her with rage but also inspired her to learn how to appropriate
the web. She wanted to see IDEPSCA’s base become digitally literate and gain access to
ICTs so that they could “become subjects who speak and authors of our own history.”
300

When we discussed strategy, IDEPSCA interviewees said that their long term
organizational goal was to reach and include LA's 26,000 day laborers, using the network
of day labor centers and organizing corners spread throughout the city. They would be
excited to use radio, and would like to experiment with Low Power FM (LPFM) stations at
the day labor centers in order to reach workers on the corners. However, they also said that
mobile phones were the communication technology that day laborers had the most access
to, and that they were very interested in developing the possibilities of phones as a media
making and delivery platform.
In 2007, when these interviews began, IDEPSCA had no overall strategic
communication plan. The Executive Director was the main press contact, with others,
usually staff, talking to the press as well. According to one interviewee, the organization
had a hard time consistently turning out effective press releases. Some of this changed by
2009, when popular communication was incorporated into their strategic planning process.
Vozmob (Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices)
While the audio workshop began to unfold at GWC, a research team interested in
participatory research with immigrant worker organizations grew to include additional
doctoral students and a faculty member at USC's Annenberg School for Communication.
301

The team chose to focus on researching the potential of mobile phones as a key platform for

300
Ibid.
301
I was a member of this team.
180
media production, and together with IDEPSCA staff planned, then implemented, a
preliminary survey of mobile phone use by day laborers at IDEPSCA's 5 day labor centers
around the city. They surveyed 58 workers at 5 of IDEPSCA’s day labor centers and
found that:
78% of the workers currently own a mobile phone. When asked how many
times a day they use their phone, 36% reported using it between 5 to 10 times
day, 31% reported 1 to 5 times a day and 25% reported more than 10 times.
Only 3 workers reported using their phone less than once a day. Workers
reported using their phones for: family – 82%; friends – 73%; work – 98%;
emergencies – 49%. Texts: 31% send texts, 50% receive texts; Photos: 47%
take photos and 24% do not have cameras on their phones; Videos: 20% take
videos, 33% do not have video recorders on their phones. Half of the workers
(29) have never used a computer.94% said they would like to learn how to use
a computer. 23% currently own a computer.
302

In addition, the team was able to work with IDEPSCA to produce a successful application
to the SSRC's 2008 Large Collaborative Grants cycle, followed by a successful application
to the Macarthur-funded HASTAC Digital Media and Learning initiative. VozMob (Voces
Móviles / Mobile Voices) now has several components, including digital media literacy
trainings, popular education curriculum development, participatory research, and free
software development through participatory design. VozMob has also begun to work with
other CBOs, with workers and staff from IDEPSCA leading trainings for low income
downtown residents at the offices of Los Angeles Community Action Network, as well as
for youth at the Southern California Library.

302
VozMob, 2008
181
Figure 34: VozMob

Source: VozMob.net

The VozMob team met (and at the time of writing continues to meet) every Tuesday
evening at IDEPSCA’s main office, and spends time learning together how to use mobile
phones as tools for popular communication.
Figure 35: VozMob workshop

Source: VozMob.net
182

IDEPSCA viewed VozMob as a means to incorporate new technology into their existing
popular communication practice. Another framing for the project is that it helps immigrant
workers appropriate mobile phones for digital storytelling, or for community journalism.
The VozMob project coordinator described these efforts:

I always believed in Pop ed [popular education]. IDEPSCA is a perfect
example of why these stories that happen here everyday at the centers are not
told and that the media obviously doesn’t have the workers humanity in mind.
There have been several attempts to do that – we’ve had newspapers for
example–but nothing technological. I feel that orgs like this need to have this
tech in mind cause we don’t have resources, but we are behind all the tech and
all the great things that can happen. MV is a great start. […] [VozMob is] a
pilot program to see how we can use open source tools to empower workers to
tell their own stories. Using cell phones, but other tech as well. It’s cheap.
Everybody can use […] To create open source mechanisms not only for day
laborer community, but also immigrant community as a whole to use for digital
storytelling – and to find out in the long run what the workers would want to
use it for beyond storytelling.
303

Asked about the goals of the project, she responded:

Empower them to share their story. To counter anti-immigrant voices of
community at home. When you google day laborers, it comes out as if they are
criminals. We want to be able to counter that. It’s a political goal. We use pop
ed at IDEPSCA so a goal is for whoever we work with to not only be
empowered but have a political agenda as well.
304

Organizers from IDEPSCA thus developed an intentional approach to new media literacies
that links these literacies to struggles over representation of their communities, to
community organizing, and to the long history of popular communication as articulated
through Latin American social movement struggles. At the same time, they learned how to
engage with foundation and academic discourses of digital inclusion, digital storytelling,

303
Interview with VozMob project coordinator, conducted by Cara Wallis
304
Ibid.
183
and technological empowerment, and to gather resources for popular education approaches
to a praxis of digital media literacy.
Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA)
The Koreatown Immigrant Worker Alliance (KIWA) is an independent worker
center and CBO that was formed in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. The goal
was to create a multiracial worker center in the heart of one of the country’s most diverse
neighborhoods, to organize the community around labor, housing, education, gender
justice, and other forms of progressive social change. Koreatown has around 200,000
residents, and is one of the most densely packed and diverse areas in the entire United
States. More than 2/3rds of Koreatown residents are working poor. In 1997, KIWA
organized to help win over $2 million in back wages for sweatshop workers.
305
The
organization has won significant gains for Koreatown’s restaurant workers, hotel workers,
and supermarket workers, and has struggled to increase affordable housing, gain
legalization, maintain affirmative action, raise minimum wage, increase access to public
transportation.
When interviewed about their approach to increasing access to ICTs and new media
literacies among immigrant workers, KIWA staff said that they had a computer lab that was
built mostly from a donation by one of the members' mothers. There were six functioning
PCs with monitors set up in a small room in KIWA's office, wired with broadband (DSL)
connectivity. Danny Park, KIWA's Executive Director, set these up several years ago
(during 2003). KIWA staff said that usage of the lab had been up and down since that time,
varying between weekly classes for workers in which they learned basic computer literacy
skills, Microsoft Word, and Excel, to nothing or almost nothing. In 2007, the room mostly

305
KIWA, 2007, 2009
184
sat empty except for an occasional person using a machine to check their email or surf the
web. KIWA staff had not created a strategic plan for how to better utilize their computer lab
or how to integrate worker media training and production into a larger communication
strategy.
306

One interviewee felt that the main obstacle to more effective popular communication
training and social media was not access to equipment or connectivity, but staff capacity for
trainings. This was a repeated theme, as most of the groups I interviewed had no dedicated
staff to focus on either IT needs in general or hands-on training with staff and/or
membership. Usually, volunteers offered trainings focused on ESL and basic computer
literacy, but these were invariably difficult to sustain over time.

Hand in hand, ESL class and computer class, is something that our members
ID as something, not because you want to learn but because it's a necessity for
survival in their job place or in order to advance in the job or elsewhere. We've
set up a computer class a number of years ago. However, that has been really
challenging to sustain or grow. System is an issue, all the network, all the
things that need... however, also, to sustain the class the instructor has been
always challenging. These classes start with large number of participants. They
registered, they were really gung-ho about learning this. However, their work
schedule is, our members have 2-3 jobs, family to take care of. Eventually, the
number dwindled down to few very quickly. By having a unpaid volunteer
instructor it really kind of impacts them, ‘I must be a bad instructor, only two
people showed up today, I don't want to do this anymore,’ things like that. So
the overturn of the instructor was so rampant that it became really hard to
sustain these classes.
307

Lack of resources for regular trainings was a consistent theme throughout all of my
interviews, as was the difficulty of training people who have very little time and energy
after work and domestic responsibilities. Another KIWA staff member that I interviewed
later (in 2009) went into more detail about the computer classes and the difficulties that

306
Interviews, EQ, KZ
307
Interview, EQ
185
KIWA had faced in trying to make digital literacy training a sustainable part of their
organizing model.
308

The computer class is just these basic, your basic word processing, basic
Internet service. We're thinking of working with SCOPE, because they just
opened their computer lab and they have a training curriculum that's already set
and we're hoping to work with that. The grants manager at California
Consumer Protection Fund, where we're getting this grant, also recommended
that we work with KRC.
309

As this interviewee indicates, organizers try to remain aware of potential funding sources
for computer literacy as well as other organizations that they might potentially partner with.
However, many remain focused on trying to teach their members basic computing skills,
despite a very clear desire to teach digital media skills. So far, they had not been able to
successfully do this. When asked if classes were ever built around social networks,
communication with friends and family, or other digital media entry points, staff responded:

I think that's really interesting. We definitely want to do that, because we want
eventually to organize people online, and to have a web presence and to make
sure that immigrants aren't missing out on that dialogue, as with everything
else. So we definitely want them to be able to ultimately advocate for
themselves online, and like on message boards, or to be able to petition online,
to be able to write on KIWA's boards, saying this is what we want, this is what
we need.
310

KIWA organizers see digital media literacy as a method for community organizing, and
potentially as a way to increase the Koreatown community’s ability to self-organize. They
were inspired in part by other digital media literacy initiatives in Koreatown, including a
youth film project at KYCC, a video called ‘grassroots rising’ produced at KIWA during
campaigns to organize restaurant and supermarket workers, and a youth group organized

308
Interview, KZ
309
Ibid.
310
Interview, KZ
186
by South Asia Network that created a video about the “Lost Voices” of Bangladeshi people
in Koreatown.
311
KIWA also had a video projector, and during the time of this study used
it regularly for screenings and events attended by workers. KIWA also provided AV
equipment for APPO-LA in the spring of 2007.
312

Overall, KIWA actively took steps to develop a praxis of digital media literacy.
They set up computer labs, gathered resources to conduct basic computer literacy trainings,
and were able to produce a wide range of multimedia materials. However, they were
frustrated by the lack of IT support and the lack of a staff person dedicated to improving
their multimedia capacity, and were not able to transform their computer lab into a hub of
transmedia mobilization.

Praxis of digital media literacy: AB540 students and DREAM Act
organizing
According to the US Census Bureau, in the year 2000 more than two and a half
million youth under the age of 18 were undocumented. Most of them were brought as
children by their parents, either without documentation or with temporary visas that have
since expired. In California, there are about 26,000 undocumented youth; nationwide, each
year about 65,000 undocumented students graduate from US high schools.
313
Without
access to federal or state financial aid, many are unable to go on to universities even if they
are otherwise prepared to do so; they are also denied access to drivers’ licenses and are not
allowed to participate in the formal labor market. Over the last decade, undocumented
immigrant students, along with their families, communities, and supporters, have organized

311
Ibid.
312
See Chapter Four.
313
Amaya, et al., 2007
187
an increasingly visible campaign to normalize their status, attain access to higher education,
become eligible for drivers’ licenses, and gain entrance to legal work.
In California, the campaign has crystallized around several key legislative initiatives.
Assembly Bill 540 (AB540), which became law in 2001, does not provide access to
financial aid but does allow undocumented students to qualify to pay in-state tuition fees for
the California university system (community colleges, California State colleges, and the
University of California system). The federal Development, Relief, and Education for Alien
Minors (DREAM) Act, with some support from both Republican and Democratic parties,
would authorize temporary legal residence for young people who were brought to the
country without documents before they were 15. Under the federal DREAM Act,

Once a qualifying student graduates from a U.S. high school, he or she would
be allowed to apply for conditional status that would authorize up to six years
of legal residence. During this time period, the student would be required to
graduate from a two-year college, complete at least two years toward a four-
year degree, or serve in the United States military for at least two years.
Permanent residence would be granted at the end of the six-year period if the
student has met these requirements and has continued to maintain good moral
character.
314

At the State level, the California DREAM Act (SB 65) would allow AB 540 students to
access financial aid to attend any of the State institutions of higher education.
A network of student activists has grown and spread around the DREAM Acts.
This new generation of immigrant youth organizers has appropriated social media and other
networked communication tools to build their movement, gain greater visibility, and push
for the passage of the federal DREAM act and the ratification of SB 65. They make

314
Ibid.: 5
188
extensive use of dedicated sites,
315
blogs, social network sites (especially MySpace and
Facebook), YouTube, twitter,
316
and text messaging.

Figure 36: DREAM Act social media tools

Source: dreamactivist.org

Transmedia mobilization by DREAM Act organizers provides an interesting
counterpoint to the MIWON network in part because the DREAM Act organizers are
nearly all students: immigrants to the United States, but ‘digital natives.’ As we have
discussed, it is important to be wary of assumptions about young people’s ‘natural’ facility
with computers and digital media. However, many of my interviewees expressed that in
their experience, youth and student activists in the immigrant rights movement have indeed
been the first adopters of digital tools and skills. For example, one interviewee who was a

315
See http://www.dreamactivist.org.
316
See http://twitter.com/DREAMact.
189
student DREAM Act organizer had this to say:

Again with Underground Undergrads we actually have our own blog. We're
constantly updating on the legislation, where it’s at, what students are doing on
other campuses, just immigration in general. So that's Underground
Undergrads blog. Then there's also the United We Dream coalition, they have
their own set of bloggers that are nationwide. There are a lot of contributors to
that and Underground Undergrads is a contributor. So that's one of the ways
that we've definitely been able to talk about and spread the issue.
317

This interviewee also described the origin of the nationwide blogger network:
That's a really interesting story because in terms of, it actually was a small
group of students that came together and realized the power of media, and
really felt like they could contribute to the DREAM Act and to issues of
undocumented students through a blog. So they feature a lot of stories of
students, they have YouTube videos, and then they just are updating people
about the issue. It's also a place where they conduct polls, things like that. That
started as something small but spread because this issue obviously effects a lot
of students nationwide. Underground Undergrads, the blog, actually came out
of, one of our interns decided to put a blog together because we do have a
student publication about undocumented students. We thought this would be a
good way to update people but also to keep students that we talk to on a regular
basis through high school presentations, that they could actually go on the site
and get more information and resources and tools […] What’s good about it is
that there are eight student contributors. Most of them are from LA and a lot of
them are from UCLA. They're constantly posting stories, there are a few people
on the East Coast. There's a diverse amount of stories on there. This is
something they do on their free time. They either write their own stuff, or they
post stuff they think is of interest.
318

As this interviewee indicates, the DREAM Act students who participate in the
Underground Undergrad blog network began as essentially a zero budget, ad hoc
formation. Yet in comparison with some immigrant workers’ organizations that invest a
great deal of resources, time, and energy in attempts to develop digital media literacies
among their base, or in efforts to develop a top-down online P.R. strategy, the visibility,
size, and impact of the DREAM Act campaign has grown rapidly. This can be attributed in

317
Interview, DH
318
Ibid.
190
large part not just to the ‘natural’ technological skills of young people, but to the
Underground Undergrad’s approach to the praxis of digital media literacy within
networked culture. DREAM Act organizers systematically share media making and
communication skills across the network in both formal and informal workshops and skill
shares. Rather than attempt to produce a homogenous message and convince others to
disseminate it, they appropriate commercial blogging and video platforms to create spaces
for conversation by students across the country who occupy similar positions and share
political goals. They focus on featuring the stories of other undocumented students and on
sharing information about the legislative process across the network, and use social media
space to build a conversation, shared identity, and participatory strategy. In addition, the
project is not online-only, but is tightly linked to print publications and physical
presentations to high school students. The online space was initially conceived as a way to
maintain contact with high school students across the country who initially connect with the
DREAM Act network in face-to-face presentations. DREAM Act students, and
Underground Undergrads, thus engage in their own forms of transmedia mobilization, by
providing multiple entry points to a larger narrative that extends across platforms, into face
to face space, and encourages participation.
As in any movement formation, DREAM Act organizing has its share of internal
tensions. One interviewee described a split between student organizations at one of the UC
campuses:

There’s definitely two models of organizing at UCLA. And one of them is an
organization run by law students, who do have a critical perspective on what’s
going on, but because of their background as law students, career wise, they
feel that the meeting has to be lead by the law students. This is a coalition of
students, workers and professors, teachers, ranging from TAs to post docs, to
full time professors and retirees. But the whole scheme is still there. We show
up and the agenda is already set up for us, there’s already people that are
191
leading the conversation, you are just there to just give feedback and not
necessarily be seen. Or there’s no critique, really rotating. So another group
was formed. And this group mainly projected the discontent from various
campuses. And the way to connect, over the phone, or text messaging, over the
Internet or whatever, and people gave us an identity. They gave us an identity,
because we formed a Facebook group we were automatically a group. Even
though we don’t consider ourselves a group, right? It’s just a loose network.
But because of that structure that came as a critique to that other group we were
like ‘we can’t do things like that.’ First of all, the agenda should be decided by
everyone because we’re not all one head. Second of all, we should be open to
constructive criticism over anything. Third of all, this is a thing that we’re
trying, you know, like a task, like a long term project that we’re taking on that
we can not figure out or define in a meeting. So this has to be ongoing, an
ongoing discussion and it has to shift meeting after meeting, or whatever. So I
think I’m going off on a tangent, but what I was trying to say is, yes; the
meeting became a very participatory meeting; and we decided that we can no
longer organize only as UCLA students. This is an intercampus …and not just
UC, I mean not just university level; we’re including like K thru 12 and
whatnot. And it’s been kind of tough to have the kids come to meetings, but I
think we have the best of intent to do so. Just the fact that we’re listening to
what they’re saying, it’s definitely changed the perspective and what we can
realistically do.
319

This interviewee provides a key insight into the way that digital media literacies facilitate the
development of ad hoc movement formations. Students frustrated with a vertical organizing
model formed a Facebook group initially as a kind of backchannel where they could
express discontent and critique, but this group was soon perceived by others as a new
organization. This took place despite the fact that the initial creators of the group considered
it a ‘loose network.’ The influx of students who were interested in developing a more
participatory movement space brought additional energy to further develop this group, and
soon the membership expanded beyond UCLA to additional campuses and also to students
from high school, middle school, and even younger. Other interviewees also gave examples
of how SNS facilitate ad hoc formation of new movement groups; for instance, in the
aftermath of Proposition 8, the organizer of a Facebook group called Queer Koreans

319
Interview, TH
192
contacted all of the members individually. Almost overnight, they agreed to launch a new
organization called KUE (pronounced ‘Q’ for queer), Korean-Americans United for
Equality.
320

Another one of my interviewees supported the DREAM act organizing, but was
concerned by its role as a highly visible movement formation because she felt it tended to
delink immigrant students from workers. First, she noted that the students involved in the
campaign are what she called the ‘cream of the crop,’ the most successful immigrant youth
who have managed to make it through to higher education. She worried that the outcome of
organizing undocumented students primarily around their own ability to advance in
employment might separate them from the larger immigrant rights movement.
321

Several interviewees also voiced critiques of the actual DREAM Act legislation,
especially the provision that offers citizenship to students who directly enter military
service. Many voices from the left and below question the DREAM Act and the
organizing around it, since it divides the immigrant movement by allowing a small group
of students with higher education to become citizens while requiring a larger number of
immigrant youth to enter the military directly out of high school in order to achieve the
same benefits.
322
The DREAM Act thus falls short of the core demand of the immigrant
workers’ movement: legalization for all undocumented people.
323
At the same time, the
media organizing strategies by DREAM Act students are clearly among the most
effective within the broader field of the immigrant rights movement.

320
Interview, KZ
321
Interview, BH
322
Interview, BH, XD, OE
323
Interview, BH
193
Flow of tools and skills across movement formations
While some interviewees felt that certain kinds of student organizing had a tendency
to split the interests of immigrant students away from those of workers, others noted a
reverse dynamic. Students organizing against the UC fee hikes, specifically, went to great
lengths to link student and worker organizations. In addition, these partnerships
occasionally challenged the assumption that digital media appropriation by youth organizers
always lies at the cutting edge. In at least one case, interviewees pointed out that student
organizers were learning digital media practices from migrant worker organizations. For
example, when I asked about where student activists get ideas about how to use new media
as an organizing tool, one interviewee had this to say:

[O]ne thing that they also like to do is, what is it? Oovoo? Are you familiar
with it? It’s like Skype, it’s just I guess easier. It’s like a combo of YouTube
and Skype. Oovoo pretty much is Skype really. They set up a television in the
park while there was a basketball game, like this Oaxacan town was battling
another Oaxacan town, and in the basketball court, around the side, the research
center had a huge television with that program running. So that way, they made
a convocación [invitation to participate] out in the town saying “There’s gonna
be a basketball game in Los Angeles in this hour, if you wanna talk to your
family, come to the plaza, and there’ll be a television and you could see your
family.” So there, first to teach them how to use a phone over Oovoo, but also
so they could just say hi. So a lot of people would be like “oh God, I haven’t
seen you in ten years” and they would see each other over television and we
would all have to watch them [laughs]. It was just great because it was a way to
reconnect emotionally.
324

Watching the Oaxacan community appropriate digital media to maintain translocal
community ties inspired student organizers to use videoconferencing tools at their own
movement events. Through everyday digital practices, new media tools and skills flow
across interconnected cultural and social movement formations to be deployed for
organizing or mobilization ends when the moment arises.

324
Interview, TH
194

Peer-to-peer learning: PR skills
Another DREAM Act organizer talked about the important role played by both
specialist training and peer to peer learning in gaining the skills to insert stories into mass
media by cultivating press contacts, creating press releases, and organizing press
conferences.

It's really neat because students that we work with don't have these skills, you
know? But they learn them along the way with other student interns that we've
worked with longer. They actually have a huge press list that they call, that they
fax, that they email, so they know how it works. They are constantly calling
and they have established some great relationships. They learn how to write
press advisories, how to be spokespeople, so they pass on that information. A
lot of the times they take it back to their campus and to their organization and
they can duplicate that work.
325

When asked about who organized and participated in this kind of skill sharing, the
interviewee noted:

Underground Undergrads, part of the UCLA labor Center. Interns that are
working around issues of AB540 and access to education. So what they do is
try to train people on media because we noticed that sometimes the media
doesn't know how to talk about undocumented students, and can put their lives
at risk by featuring their names or disclaiming too much information. So we
had a training with a media person and she went through the whole process of
press conference, how to establish contacts, and also how to tell your story
[…] That was the one and only time we worked with her, because then the
students who took part in that training were able to train other students.
326

In this case, the ‘train the trainer’ ideal seemed to function effectively, with the first training
provided by a media consultant through the UCLA labor center, but subsequent trainings

325
Interview, DH
326
Ibid.
195
given to new students by students who had already been trained and then gained hands-on
experience during campaigns.
Coming out as undocumented on Facebook
DREAM Act students organized a national day of action where undocumented
students came out by publicly declaring their immigration status on Facebook:

The danger it exposes you to is that it’s on Face Book, and then anybody could
just copy/paste what you just wrote. And then, if they really wanted to be
malicious, they could ICE or put a finger on you or something, right? Or ICE
might just be looking at it, right, and they might just go for it. And I think that’s
a very true and valid concern, and I think that for a lot of us we don’t only have
to think about ourselves, but our families too. So it becomes a multi-layer
decision because you might be cool with it, but you gotta check in with your
family. So it took a long time. The DREAM Act has been around for more than
ten years, and it had taken a whole decade for us to do something like this. And
not even publicly, although in Chicago they had a public event where seven
students went to the federal plaza and had a whole press conference, and one
by one said ‘my name is blah blah blah, and I’m undocumented, and I support
the DREAM Act.’ […] The conversations were tough. There’s a lot of fear.
Some people said it’s the perfect way of just giving ourselves up […] So it’s a
risk, but I think for many of us it’s just been too long. So that I think more and
more we’re looking at those kind of strategies.
327

We discussed the genre of coming out videos on YouTube, and this interviewee said that
Underground Undergrads had extensively discussed and been inspired by these videos’
power as a strategy to build queer visibility in online spaces. Their Facebook campaign
made conscious and intentional references to the long history of the queer movement, and
to the YouTube genre of the ‘coming out’ video.
328

Overall, DREAM Act students thus mobilize their own fluency with digital media
tools and skills in service of strategies of visibility adapted from other social movements. In
part because of their familiarity with the practices, skills, and norms of network culture,

327
Interview, OE
328
Alexander, 2010
196
they are able to create ad hoc movement formations to route around top-down
organizational structures. They also consciously build media and communications skills
into both formal and informal learning within a networked movement formation.

Praxis of digital media literacy: conclusions
Digital media literacy is deeply unequal in Los Angeles. Low wage immigrant
workers, who form the social base of the immigrant rights movement, for the most part
have very little access to the tools and skills of networked communication. Movement
formations and organizations that work with them have for the most part not yet tightly
integrated digital media literacies into their broader organizing efforts.
However, all of the movement actors I talked to considered computer literacy and
social media important, and had taken some steps to try and heighten these skills among
their base. Most now have computer labs and have made some efforts to teach computer
literacy classes. Indeed, falling costs of equipment and connectivity have meant that even
less resourced organizations are increasingly able to access computers, mediamaking
equipment, and network connectivity. At the same time, mobile phones are approaching
near ubiquity even among the poorest and otherwise least connected populations of
immigrant workers. The immigrant rights movement in LA has for the most part failed to
take advantage of high mobile use rates, despite a handful of innovative media projects that
do take advantage of mobile phones.
329
There is thus great untapped possibility for the
immigrant workers’ movement to fully integrate mobile communication strategies into their
organizing efforts. This work is just beginning at the time of research and writing. A few

329
Interviews, NB, BH, LN
197
organizers have created popular education workshops around digital media and are actively
working to build a praxis of digital media literacy among their social base.
Besides formal digital literacy trainings, the tools and skills of networked
communication circulate through the immigrant rights movement via informal and peer to
peer learning between friends, family, and co-workers. Digital media literacies develop in
key sites including universities, schools, and the computer labs of CBOs. The key
challenges to the effective praxis of digital media literacy are funding, training capacity, and
unfamiliarity with strange new tools. Language issues, trust, and low-wage workers’ lack
of time and energy to participate also make the praxis of digital media literacy a challenge.
Fear of digital media and moral panic induced by television coverage of digital culture
create additional obstacles. There is also a generational divide. Younger people and students
who volunteer with immigrant rights organizations, as well as younger staff, are often the
ones who innovate online organizing strategies for these organizations, networks, and
movement formations.
Digital media literacy is usually seen as peripheral not only to organizing, and even
to communication strategy. Online tools are still considered experiments and are not
necessarily part of strategic communication plans, when strategic plans exist. This is
beginning to change in 2010. Overall, besides low levels of access among the immigrant
worker base, the greatest barrier to adoption and integration of transmedia mobilization by
the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles is probably a lack of vision on the part of
social movement actors.
As seen the case study, all of the CBOs in the MIWON network are interested in
developing digital media literacy trainings for workers. However, while some have done
this on a short-term or project basis in the past, few have been able to sustain this work.
198
Access to hardware is not the major challenge, since each CBO has computers and
broadband connectivity. The major challenge is staff capacity, both in terms of staff media
production skills, lack of time to develop these skills, or even time to think about how to
transform the mostly empty computer labs into hubs of transmedia mobilization.
Radio is the most important communication platform in most low-wage immigrant
workers' lives, but there is no access to LPFM licenses in Los Angeles, even with the
expanded LPFM bill passed by Congress. Learning how to produce audio and radio shows
is an important skill set, and the GWC has moved to address this systematically with an
ongoing radio workshop. In terms of distribution, workaround strategies like CD
distribution and lobbying for time on larger FM stations are currently feasible, and GWC is
now pursuing this approach. While radio is the most popular media platform among low-
wage immigrant workers in LA, mobile phones are by far the communication tool that most
have access to. IDEPSCA and the VozMob project are taking advantage of this fact to
develop a popular education approach that begins with the mobile phone as a point of entry
to broader digital media literacies.
In the case of the DREAM Act campaign, student organizers leverage youth
familiarity with digital media practices and network culture to strengthen their organizing
efforts. Digital media literacies make it easier for them to create ad hoc movement
formations and route around top-down organizational structures. At the same time,
DREAM Act organizers have made conscious efforts to share media and other organizing
skills both informally and via ‘train the trainer’ workshops and skillshares. They also learn
from and adapt rich media practices by other social movement formations, such as the
translocal video practices of immigrant indigenous communities and the genre of the
199
‘coming out video’ on YouTube. Through these and other efforts, the DREAM Act
campaign has developed an effective praxis of digital media literacy.
Overall, digital media literacy is a precondition for transmedia mobilization and for
the ability to take advantage of the changed media opportunity structure. In the long run,
digital media tools and skills are becoming available to an ever broader section of the
population, but the distribution of skills and tools remains highly inequitable. Some actors
in the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles are developing a praxis of digital media
literacy that has the potential to help transform the lives of immigrant workers, students,
their allies, and the broader movement networks of which they are a part. However, as we
shall see in Chapter Six, one of the strongest barriers they face is resistance from vertical
movement structures.
200
CHAPTER SIX: MOVEMENT STR UCTURE

The previous chapter examined the praxis of digital media literacy within the
immigrant rights movement in L.A. Trainings, workshops, skill shares, and informal
learning practices increase the ability of immigrant communities to adapt digital media tools
and skills to their daily needs. As we saw in Chapter Four, in times of crisis, these practices
then provide a bedrock for transmedia mobilization, whereby immigrant workers are able to
articulate local struggles across media platforms (and across borders) via the circulation of
rich media in both physical and virtual spaces. In parallel, youth organizers appropriate
social media spaces, draw on shared identities, and rapidly build ad hoc movement
formations towards specific outcomes linked with larger political and cultural projects of
immigrant rights and translocal community citizenship. In many of the cases described so
far, the movement formations involved tend to operate either on an ad-hoc basis or with
formal consensus structures in place. Is it a coincidence that the most interesting and
effective examples of transmedia mobilization by the immigrant rights movement tend to
take place within movement formations governed by participatory structures? This chapter
focuses more closely on the relationship between the structure of social movement
formations and transmedia mobilization practices.
Analysis of interviews and other primary materials reveals that the immigrant rights
movement in L.A. is shaped by contradictory organizational logics: vertical and horizontal.
This chapter begins with a brief review of current theoretical approaches to social
movement structure, governance, and power sharing, with special attention to ideas about
horizontalism on the one hand, and the dynamics of funder-driven social movement
professionalization on the other. Next, it examines contradictory horizontal and vertical
201
organizational logics within the immigrant rights movement. The penultimate section is an
analysis of tensions between these logics within a movement formation called the Fast for
Our Future. The chapter concludes with an examination of the importance of social
movement structures for transmedia mobilization.

Movement structure: theoretical framework
This section lays out a key set of interrelated theoretical tools: horizontalism and
social movement professionalization. In the wake of the collapsed so-called Communist
experiment in the former Soviet Union, the rise of state-led capitalism in the People’s
Republic of China, and the general failure of self-identified Socialist states throughout the
2/3rds world to successfully advance a political alternative to capitalist globalization, the
horizontalist left and the global justice movement emerged in the first years of the new
millennium as one of the most promising sites for the articulation of a shared
counterproject.
330
Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau
331
prefigured these developments
when they argued for a turn towards radical democracy, differentiated from the formalized,
representative democracy that has achieved hegemonic status within the globalized system
of nation-states. Hardt and Negri’s widely discussed texts Empire
332
and Multitude
333

posited a polycentric, networked, movement of movements as the only possible response to
a networked process of capitalist globalization that could no longer meaningfully be said to
have a center. Indeed, following the 1999 Battle of Seattle, the ‘movement of movements,’
in increasingly visible fora, emphasized the need to shift away from top-down structures of

330
de Sousa Santos, 2006; Fisher and Ponniah, 2003; Sen, 2004
331
Mouffe and Laclau, 1985
332
Hardt and Negri, 2001
333
Hardt and Negri, 2005
202
movement organization, governance, and power towards new models that are bottom up,
participatory, networked, and directly or radically democratic.
334
Many of these principles
also gained strength as they spread transnationally through an increasingly networked
feminist movement.
335
By 2000, the World Social Forum process had become one of the
most visible articulations of a broader transformation in organizing structures for
networked movements, as many movement formations turned away from political parties
and state power as the end goal of the revolutionary project.
336
For organizers within the
immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, this shift is perhaps best articulated in the
Zapatista slogan “One No, Many Yeses.”
337
In this context, the increased appeal and
visibility of directly democratic movement structures has become a key aspect of
information age social movements. Jeff Juris
338
argues that this is also due to the adoption
of networked communication technologies. In what he calls a ‘militant ethnography’ of the
global justice movement, Juris observes that the net is both tool and mirror of the
organizational forms of new radical activist networks. He explores clashes in organizational
culture and structure between political parties, vertical organizations, social democratic
NGOs, and the radical anarchist or autonomist collectives and networks that provided much
of the momentum, innovation, and technology adaptation that drove the mobilization wave
from 1999 in Seattle, past a stutter and confusion following September 11, 2001, into the
global antiwar movement and the World Social Forum process. Juris concludes that there is
a new cultural logic of activist networking: “The introduction of new digital technologies
significantly enhances the most radically decentralized all-channel network formations,

334
Kidd, 2003
335
Mohanty, 2005
336
Smith, et al., 2008
337
Kingsnorth, 2004
338
Juris, 2008
203
facilitating transnational coordination and communication among contemporary
movements.”
339

Horizontalism
Within this broader shift towards polycentric politics, then, the antiauthoritarian left
has enjoyed a major resurgence, facilitated by the growing availability of the net and by
increased digital media literacies. Key recent moments of antiauthoritarian organizing have
burst with unprecedented visibility into international consciousness. One key moment, well
documented elsewhere, is the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas that inspired the birth of
the worldwide Indymedia network and rekindled the revolutionary imagination of a
generation. Another is the Argentine social movement wave that emerged following that
country’s economic collapse in 2001. The popular rebellion of December 19th and 20th,
2001 in Argentina and the subsequent wave of worker occupied and managed factories, the
movement of the unemployed, and other networked forms of participatory power were
closely observed by a post-millennial, transnationally networked antiauthoritarian left
340
. A
number of texts that document, theorize, and explore these movements were published in
rapid succession during the last few years, some by the movements themselves and others
by social movement scholars from Argentina or elsewhere.
341

In her in-depth account of Argentina's new social movements, Marina Sitrin
342

weaves together interviews with activists from occupied, recuperated, and worker-managed
factories, unemployed workers' movements, neighborhood assemblies, cultural collectives,
students, mothers of the disappeared, and other Argentine activists to paint a vivid picture

339
Juris, 2005: 197
340
Dark Star, 2002
341
Sitrin, 2006; Lavaca Collective, 2007
342
Sitrin, 2006
204
of the social movement experience in Argentina since 2001. Sitrin organizes this
compilation around a series of concepts and theoretical / practical proposals that emerged
from these movements and that remain in continual elaboration. Key terms and processes
include horizontalidad (horizontalism), autogestión (self-management), autonomía
(autonomy), política afectiva (affective politics) and protagonismo (protagonism).
343

Horizontalism, the key term of the new networked forms of political action in Argentina,
implies not only a negative (the absence of power organized in vertical or hierarchical
forms), but also a set of constructive counterprojects that operate on the day-to-day
(micropolitical) level and also manifest as demands for the reconstruction of failed
institutions along directly democratic lines. Horizontalism can be seen as the attempt to
radically transform all relationships and institutions, private and public, through consensus
based decision-making processes and direct democracy.
It is in this sense that I have tried elsewhere to describe horizontalist communication:
not as simply the negative or counter to mass media organized in corporate hierarchical
form, but as concrete practices of power sharing and consensus that enable individual and
group forms of richly mediated creativity within dense webs of social relationships and
community accountability. This differentiates horizontalist communication from terms such
as ‘User Generated Content,’ participatory media, or even citizen journalism. The first
places the text, rather than the subject, at the center of analysis; the second is an umbrella
for a wide range of new networked media forms that are mostly used to enable enhanced
practices of individuation, and the third is a genre. The key difference between these terms
and horizontalist communication is that it applies only to those embedded in and
accountable to social movements.

343
Ibid.
205
Many of those interviewed by Sitrin express that horizontalism, while perhaps
closely related to earlier theories of direct democracy, anarchism, and practices of
consensus, emerged from the neighborhood assemblies during the financial crisis of 2001,
when residents spontaneously organized assemblies on street corners throughout the city
following the popular uprising of the 19th and 20th known as the cacerolazo (kitchen pot
uprising). Rather than theory put into practice, horizontalism is a way of describing
collective practices that emerged in response to mistrust of the entire political class, the
system of representative democracy, and the disempowering tradition of clientilist politics
and caudillismo (strongmen as leaders of political parties). Horizontalism means learning to
listen to each other with respect, taking decisions by consensus, figuring out how to
mobilize and take action and engage in long term constructive collective practices without
leaders. Hernán from Asamblea de Pompeya says, “The social structure of political parties
is like a pyramid- it forces you to obey the person right above you, unless you're the boss.
Here, when the police came to the building our neighborhood assembly occupied and asked
who was responsible, we looked at each other and said everyone, everyone. I think this
shows the main difference between us and vertical systems of control.”
344

Social movement professionalization: the revolution will not be funded
At the same time as horizontalist organizing has gained visibility, social movements
have undergone a process of professionalization and specialization. In the context of social
movement formation in the United States, it makes little sense to discuss changes in
organizational structure over time without discussing funding and the role of private
foundations. In the wake of the civil rights, antiwar, gay liberation, and feminist movements
during the 1960s and 1970s, social movements in the United States underwent a period of

344
Sitrin, 2006: 42
206
increasing professionalization as private foundations stepped in to fund, mediate, and
increasingly shape social movement activity.
345
Social movement criticism of foundations
and nonprofits in the United States has grown over the last two decades, and in some ways
came to a head with the 2004 conference “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” organized
by the national network INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. The conference
proceedings were published as the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the
Nonprofit Industrial Complex.
346
The main argument of the authors is as follows: all
foundation money is in a sense ‘stolen’ public money, funds that otherwise would have
become available to the state (and thereby to some form of formal democratic
accountability), but instead were used to establish privately governed organizations with
mandates to spend funds according to directives written at the will of their individual
(white, male, ruling class) founders. They go on to argue that the creation of
professionalized nonprofits has in many ways served to actually weaken social movements
in the United States and, increasingly, internationally. Case studies of the civil rights
movement, women’s movement, and environmental movement demonstrate how what the
authors term the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) has systematically drawn
movement leadership away from radical or even broad-based progressive social movement
building and into issue-specific, organization-centric, professional careerism.
347
People who
otherwise might be building value driven social movement networks able to mobilize large
scale societal shifts instead end up isolated into issue silos, competing with one another for
limited foundation funds, and spending much of their time writing proposals and project

345
McCarthy and Zald, 1973; Staggenborg, 1988
346
INCITE!, 2007
347
INCITE, 2007; Staggenborg, 1988
207
reports instead of organizing and movement building.
348
Another crucial aspect of the
critique is that organizations registered as nonprofits under section 501(c)3 of the US tax
code are prohibited by law from engaging in many forms of political activity, including
lobbying and supporting political parties or candidates. Nonprofits are thus quite formally
and explicitly institutions of depoliticization.
349
Manuel Castells makes a related argument
in the City and the Grassroots, when he observes that “the disintegration of a complex,
powerful, and multisegmented urban movement leaves its trace in the urban scene where it
took place, in the form of community-based, single-purpose organizations that represent the
different dimensions of the movement,” in which he includes Neighborhood, Poverty, and
Minority groups in various combinations. What is more, Castells observed that multi class,
multi issue urban social movements lose much of their force once fragmented and siloed,
when “all of them are submitted to State Power without any real capacity” to challenge that
power.
350

In the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, almost all of the movement
actors I interviewed, whether they worked inside nonprofits or not, had critiques of
foundations and of the nonprofit system. Some use their experience within the NPIC to
develop new movement structures with strong internal policies that govern who they will
accept funds from, and under what conditions. A few have actually decided not to accept
any funds from either the State, the corporate sector, or private foundations, based on their
critique of the NPIC, or simply because they desire to maintain autonomy and avoid the
professionalization of social movement activity. For example, when I asked a FIOB
organizer about foundation support, she had this to say:

348
Faber and McCarthy, 2005
349
INCITE!, 2007
350
Castells, 1983: 349
208

No, we're pretty much autonomous. We don't want any foundation money,
we're not a nonprofit, we want to maintain our autonomy, but not committing
with anyone on what stand we're gonna have on any issue, don't want to owe
anybody a favor. So basically member, volunteer organization, I’m here as the
general coordinator […] We have a joke that says to be a member of the FIOB
you have to pay your lifely dues, you know?
351

Another collective, the Garment Worker Center, was initially incorporated as a 501(c)3
nonprofit but recently underwent a process of de-professionalization. The organizers made
a conscious decision to transition from paid staff to volunteer, and to move further and
further away from a hybrid services and organizing model towards one that would require
garment workers themselves to take on leadership of the organization. However, this was
the exception that proves the rule
352
. Overall, the immigrant rights movement has
undergone a process of professionalization.
Like all social movements today, the immigrant rights movement reflects the larger
forces, pressures, and debates between vertical movement politics and new modes of
horizontalism. We now turn to an in-depth analysis of the contradictory organizational
logics within the immigrant rights movement in L.A.

Movement structure: horizontal logics
The immigrant rights movement in L.A. includes many networks and formations that
are horizontalist in structure, and many actors who are sympathetic to horizontalism. These
include a broad array of anarchist collectives and networks, horizontalists and Magonistas,
libertarian socialists, indigenous organizations and assemblies, Zapatistas, and queer
collectives. Some of the organizations that consider themselves part of the movement began

351
Interview, PS
352
Ibid.
209
as more directly democratic movement formations, but over time have become more
professionalized and adopted more top down decision-making structures, as we shall see.
However, many staff within these nonprofit organizations also have horizontalist values
and work to transform vertical structures from within. These are the often the same actors
that are responsible for the most effective use of social media for movement ends.
Horizontalists
Some movement formations in LA are explicitly based on horizontalist principles.
In my interviews with Revolutionary Autonomous Communities, Copwatch LA,
Indymedia LA, and the Zapatista La Otra Campaña del Otro Lado, interviewees repeatedly
emphasized how their internal structures are consciously and formally as horizontal as
possible, based on principles of consensus and power sharing.
353
A few directly cited
Argentine social movements and the concept of horizontalidad as an influence:

I think internationally, inter-regionally, and even in LA we are building with
different movements. It speaks to the times we living in, we actually have a lot
to learn too from movements in the Third World that I feel are light years ahead
of us […] Also because we look at the Zapatista movement, the horizontalist
movement, the Magonista movement, movements in Africa, throughout Latin
America, the specifista movement, which are anarchists in Latin America. We
learned a lot from them but also we have different conditions here within the
Empire. We can learn from that and apply it to our own conditions but also we
have different experiences, so we need to have also our own road to build,
right? It's never been done. We have for example the 60s to look to, and also
before that the movements in the 1800s from the anarchist-syndicalist
movement and things like that. But it's a different time as well, and a different
experience, and from all that how can we learn from it? Take some of the good
things and continue to learn from some of the mistakes.

Q: You mentioned Horizontalism. Do you use that term or ideas in your work?

Definitely. I think in our mission statement, when RAC wrote the mission
statement collectively, we try to speak to that. Not only things we've learned,
but also this terminology, even though it's not yet a part of popular culture. We

353
Interviews KB, CS, TH
210
feel that we can popularize these ideas and people can take these up themselves
and create something on their own […] In terms of horizontalism, it comes
from Argentina but to us it means creating those relationships, creating anti-
authoritarian models of organizing in general.
354

Translocal community citizenship thus can extend beyond ethnic identity: it applies to
political imagination as well. Los Angeles based horizontalists explicitly position
themselves as connected to translocal communities of networked organizers who share and
circulate participatory political strategies throughout the Americas and beyond.
Horizontalists attempt to use direct democracy, consensus decision-making, and
active power sharing throughout their activities, including media and communication
practices. RAC’s commitment to horizontalist communication is reflected in their approach
to the May Day documentary film project described earlier: to act as aggregators and
amplifiers of social media produced by participants in the action, rather than as ‘spokesmen
for the movement.’ RAC interviewees also emphasized that collective decision-making is
not the same as decisions made ‘by committee,’ and that communication projects taken on
by ‘specialists’ are not the same as those created by the broader movement formation:
Also the radio, and the zine, it's all been a collective process that to us has been
important, because people have always given their input collectively. It's not
done by a central committee, it's not done by one person, one specialist. It's
done by the people collectively, and by the people in the organization
collectively. That’s important.
355

People involved in various structures of movement organizing attempt to replicate their own
governance models through the type of media trainings and workshops that they do. For
horizontalists, this means spending significant time and energy on skill and power sharing.
For example, Copwatch LA not only conducts community patrols and documents brutality

354
Interview, RF
355
Interview, RF
211
by police or ICE agents against communities of color, youth of color, and migrant workers,
but also works to teach and empower people from these communities to do their own
patrols and documentation:

We feel that we can't do patrols in neighborhoods we don't live in or we're not
invited to. But people themselves, when we do the know your rights trainings,
the youth themselves, or one example: Copwatch in Macarthur Park. At first,
how people are taught to look at the police is that when they see them they're
afraid of them. When we see them harassing somebody, they just look the other
way. Since we're out here, and we do patrols when we do the food program,
people have actually stood up to the police themselves.
356

As a network that operates by principles of horizontalist communication, Copwatch LA’s
goal is not to become the hegemonic ‘documentarians of police abuse,’ although the
broadcast media often attempts to portray them in that way
357
. Rather, they hope to transfer
read-write digital media literacy to the most affected communities, and thereby arm them
with tools to transform their power relationship to the State.
The political and cultural logic of the tequio
Other movement formations do not use the theoretical term ‘horizontalism,’ but do
operate with decision-making structures that are essentially either consensus based, run by
popular assembly, or otherwise involve a significant element of direct democracy. For
example, the structure of the FIOB is based on the cultural and political logic of the tequio,
an indigenous term for “community work for the benefit of all.” Formally, it could be said
that FIOB is internally a kind of representative democracy, with the membership electing
officers to three year terms. However, the overall decision-making process is more directly
democratic. The FIOB follows indigenous law (Uses and Customs), and makes decisions

356
Interview, KB
357
Ibid.
212
about goals, strategies, campaigns, and resource allocation after extensive discussion during
a General Assembly of the FIOB base, rather than via a simple ballot or through
representatives. Leadership is also considered accountable to the base and is responsible for
reporting back on organizational activities, keeping members informed about the work of
the FIOB, and otherwise remaining accountable to the Assembly
358
.
For some of the FIOB organizers I talked to, the idea of separating out media work
from other aspects of organizing made little sense based on the general structure of their
work. They described how for them, media is a kind of supporting activity that ends up
‘just happening’ based on community members and supporters stepping up when
necessary.

I think one quality of the FIOB actually for being indigenous, maybe, I don't
know, is the fact that everybody does everything. As far as a strategy on how
do we shoot, do outreach through the media, independent media, we don't have
one. But everything happens because we have so many allies. Eduardo, Stanley
will probably write something about the mobilization and send it to us. Or
somebody else will document the mobilization and send us pictures. But we
don't have a strategy. We need that.
359

The communities FIOB organizes (migrant indigenous people living and working in Los
Angeles) do have members who are considered to be ‘specialists’ in video production. My
interviewee talked about one man who in fact receives regular payment to shoot and
produce videos of community events. Thus, it would be inaccurate to assume that FIOB
has no dedicated movement videographers because their community ‘lacks capacity.’
Rather, as a migrant indigenous social movement organization, FIOB draws on existing
community norms to operate with a cultural structure of decision-making that is more
horizontal than most of the incorporated nonprofit organizations in the immigrant workers

358
Interview, PS
359
Interview, PS
213
movement in LA. Hiring a videographer to document social movement activity is just not
something that fits within the FIOB’s ethic of the tequio. Yet, the FIOB were more
effective at using a wider range of media to circulate their activities, and able to build a
bigger base over a longer period of time, than most other organizations.
Anarchogeeks
Communication specialists do not necessarily operate to reinforce vertical
structures. Indeed, radically horizontalist, worker-owned and run tech/design/activism
collectives have long played key roles in the diffusion of innovations in communications
activism through networks of social movements. Tech activist collectives serve as nodes or
hubs in transnational social movement networks, and tech-activists are often themselves
linked in networks articulated to local, national, and transnational social movement
organizations. During the last decade, newer networks like Indymedia and Netsquared have
joined those with decades of experience in training social movements to use horizontal
communication.
360
Older networks include the Association for Progressive Communication
(APC), the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC), the World
Association of Christian Communicators (WACC), and others.
361
Over the course of two
decades, AMARC World Conferences have functioned to strengthen horizontal radio
networks in Vancouver, Dublin, Mexico, Dakar, Milan, and Kathmandu. These networks
have recently made efforts to link to the new generation of communication tech activists,
especially through the World Social Forum process and to some degree around the World
Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). For example, the campaign for
Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) emerged around the WSIS to

360
Surman and Reilly, 2003; Hadl and Hintz, 2006
361
Cammaerts, 2005
214
promote a vision of people-centered ICT policy and a social justice framework for thinking
about the globalization of communication systems. During WSIS, CRIS took up an
organizing role to promote communication as key theme within the Social Forum process.
CRIS also became one point of connection between different regions, older existing
networks, and new networks of younger media activists.
362
Another example is the
transnational network of feminist activists focused on gender and ICTs that coalesced
around the 1995 Beijing Summit on Women, and then continued and carried forward their
activity through the 2005 WSIS process and beyond. This network developed a shared
analysis of ICT policy around gender justice, and forged ties to a new generation of
feminist tech activists.
363
Most recently, groups like Eggplant Active Media Workers’
Collective, the Design Action Collective, and Cooperativa del Sur have joined the ranks of
longstanding radical collective printing presses like Red Sun Press and AK Press.
364
Many
of these tech/activism/design collectives provide services to a wide range of social
movement organizations, from small grassroots groups through large-membership social
movement organizations, and sometimes including professionalized international NGOs
like Greenpeace and Amnesty International.
Anarchogeeks also support and operate within the immigrant workers’ movement
in Los Angeles. However, LA has a surprisingly weak network of tech-activists, given the
size of the city and the amount of social movement activity. For example, LA Indymedia
counts the regular participation of only two software developers, neither of whom spends
much time on the site.
365
The tech-activist collective Slaptech, which was involved in the

362
Benfield and Arevalo, 2010
363
Gurumurthy, 2004
364
See www.eggplant.coop, www.designaction.org, www.coopdelsur.org, www.redsunpress.com, and
www.akpress.org.
365
Interview, CX
215
founding of LA Indymedia and in the early 2000s provided web hosting and tech support
for a number of local social movement organizations, by 2006 existed mostly in name only,
as its various members devoted more and more time to paid employment in service-oriented
professional nonprofits, the private sector, or university contracts, and less and less time to
volunteer radical tech activism.
366
Since 2008, there has been some renewed interest in
linking tech activists to nonprofits, in part through monthly NetSquared Los Angeles
meetings.
367
However, the ‘nonprofit technology community’ is largely disconnected from
social movements, and those who identify with this community tend to work instead within
a charity or social service focused model. As one interviewee put it:

I have been frustrated by the non profit tech community because I find that it’s
very charity focused, and its not justice, social justice focused. Which is kind of
the reason for this group too, is that my experience with a lot of Netsquared
groups is that they tend to be a lot about fundraising for charity, but not
questioning why these inequalities exist, and whether or not, how these things,
these tools can be used to address that.
368

Only a handful of ‘nonprofit techies’ in Los Angeles are linked to social movement activity
beyond service-oriented nonprofits, and of these only a few individuals are connected to the
immigrant rights movement.
369

Although tech-activist collectives play a relatively small role in the immigrant
workers’ movement in Los Angeles, there are many individuals with technology and media
skills and horizontalist politics who support various movement formations in LA. Many of
my interviewees described relationships that their organization or network had with specific
individuals that they might call on for support in media or technology areas, for example to

366
Ibid.
367
Interview XD, LN
368
Interview, XD
369
Interview XD, LN
216
make a video, develop a website, or even develop new software. Another interviewee from
RAC put it this way:

There are people who are maybe more skilled around that field because they
took some schooling, they built their skills around those things. But we want to
democratize that knowledge so everyone is able to use these programs. We
don't want to have to be dependent on specialists. I mean they are our comrades
and they are willing as well to democratize those skills. Hacking skills,
filmmaking skills, whatever.
370

When asked what concrete steps they take to democratize media skills, he said:

I think we've tried to do skillshares amongst ourselves, amongst people here.
[…] If they are specialists who aren't part of the movement, I think you'll have
that problem [of pushback]. But because we only work with people who have
maybe the film editing skills and the websites, maybe script writing skills,
whatever, they're willing to share their knowledge. Also make these things to
further help the movement, further help the cause that we're fighting for. I think
that goes to the reasons why we're working with them, because they are willing
to share that knowledge and those skills, and build these things for the
people.
371

Horizontalist organizers thus emphasize that sharing knowledge, skills, and tools is an
explicit part of both their communication strategy and also of their broader political strategy.
Rather than a political and cultural logic of specialization and professionalization, they
operate according to the logic of skill sharing, power sharing, and networking.
Being on the outside can move new initiatives
In a few cases, social media consultants who are paid to come in and provide
‘expert’ advice can move new media initiatives forward with much more success than if
they were working from a staff position within the organization. One interviewee
previously worked as a paid staff member inside nonprofits that consider themselves part

370
Interview, KB
371
Ibid.
217
of the immigrant rights movement. He said that he ultimately left full time employment with
a nonprofit in order to work more independently with different organizations and networks
on a contract basis.

I just found within organizations there’s a strange dynamic that, when you’re,
(laughs), when you’re in an organization it’s really hard to move through new
initiatives and new approaches, yet when you’re on the outside, and they have
to pay for it, they’re more interested.
372

In his experience, organizations or networks willing to hire a consultant to build their social
media strategy often take the recommendations more seriously than if they were to come
from paid staff. Thus, in some cases horizontal media strategies make headway in vertical
organizations when pushed by someone operating from outside that organization’s
structural constraints.
The same interviewee pointed out that media makers who have come to understand
the importance of creating a conversation within the social media space, but who work
within movement formations that are afraid to open up, sometimes find that the only way to
move social media strategies forward is to “ask forgiveness rather than permission:”

I had this funny relationship with [a national immigrant rights network], its
kinda like, I asked forgiveness rather than permission [laughs]. They were just
kinda like yeah sure, go ahead, do it, so I started this MySpace page and tried
to reach out to a lot of these kids, cause a lot of what those kids were saying
was stuff about enforcement issues. It was not, I mean yes there was
legalization, and I think this is part of the problem that we’re finding now with
the whole immigration reform debate is that there’s this very superficial
statement about the need for reform, but nothing about necessarily what that
means, you know? So a lot of the groups very focused on enforcement feel
shut out a lot because we’re seen as kind of too radical. We wanna release all
the criminals or something like this. But a lot of these kids, they were saying
things like ‘don’t criminalize my family,’ you know, and ‘don’t take my
parents away from me.’
373

372
Interview, XD
373
Interview, XD
218

This interview also highlights the fact that conversations in social media spaces, as framed
by those most directly affected by immigration enforcement policies, are often more radical
than the ‘safe’ messages put forward by national immigrant rights organizations. Other
interviewees described how national messaging in 2006 often emphasized a “We Are Not
Criminals” frame that emphasized ‘hardworking, Christian immigrant families who pay
taxes and just want a shot at the American Dream,’ while conversations by young people
on MySpace often included critiques of racism, colonialism, genocide, and cultural
imperialism.
374
Organizers that hope to engage in social media spaces must be prepared to
engage in difficult conversations with their base about framing, and cannot assume that the
frames they have chosen will be the same frames generated by bottom-up communication
processes. Effective transmedia mobilization thus requires a significant cultural shift for
movement formations and organizations that are used to a top down strategy of message
control.
Volunteers & Staff
Most of the independent worker centers and smaller organizations I talked to did
not have dedicated communication or IT staff. Some of them had a volunteer techie who
had been consistent over time; others found ways to rotate student volunteers in and out of
specific ICT tasks. In general, smaller organizations often found themselves choosing
between spending scarce resources on web specialists, or having to live with slow,
inconsistent web development and IT help on a volunteer basis:

We bought a domain for Soul Rebel Radio. And then no one in the collective
really knew or had time to develop our website. So then I think we did as much

374
Interview, NB, LN
219
as we could do, we had all the information that we wanted to put on the
website, and then a friend of a friend was kind of hired voluntarily, not paid.
So they worked on the website a little bit but we wanted to add all of these
elements, and we just couldn't because this person didn't have time, wasn’t
getting paid, wasn't really that dedicated to it, so we just kind of left it at that.
We had another person who worked on our MySpace, uploaded a lot of our
sound, worked on flyers, more professional looking flyers or nicer flyers I
should say. But of course this person was a volunteer with Soul Rebel Radio
so we didn't pay that person either. I feel like because we don't have income,
we don't wanna hire people to do things. Maybe the website isn't completely
necessary. Maybe MySpace is enough. Actually we don't even have a
Facebook. I feel like, you know, there's nothing wrong with experts. But I feel
like definitely people can learn those skills and then help to pass them on.
375

The most important aspect for this interviewee was not that the radio collective in which she
participates have a ‘professional’ web presence, but rather that the media and tech
specialists they work with be willing to share their skills with others. This reflects the
horizontalist logic that privileges skill- and power sharing over an instrumentalist approach
to online communication strategy.
Some organizations attempt to capture the energy of horizontalist communication
even when they do have professional communications staff. For example, the FIOB has a
dedicated communications director, but also often brings in volunteers from universities to
work on media projects. Students often come to FIOB through one of their advisers,
Jonathan Fox, who is a professor at UCSC in the Latin American and Latino Studies
Department. One interviewee described a UCSC student who redesigned the FIOB
webpage, and then stayed on to become part of the Frente.
376

Everyone I talked to hoped to increase their own capacity to do online media work.
The idea of ‘train the trainers’ circulates widely among movement networks.

375
Interview, DH
376
Interview, DH
220
I feel like experts are definitely necessary, because if we don't know how to do
that work then we do need someone to teach us. But then that whole idea of
train the trainers, it definitely is something that at least for Underground
Undergrads we've been able to put into practice. I feel like that is important, to
learn those skills so that we can continue to develop other people to use those
skills.
377

As in this interview, many organizers who work for less resourced nonprofit organizations
describe a similar experience of tension between the horizontalist aims of knowledge
sharing and the need to ‘get work done.’ Those working with smaller organizations often
express a desire that communication and technology skills be taught more broadly to
movement participants, but also feel pressure from funders to complete communication
projects and to become more visible online. Yet they lack resources to hire full or even part
time specialist staff with multimedia production skills, and so they move from volunteer to
volunteer, with an occasional small contractor, in efforts to release more ‘professional’
looking multimedia materials, without internalizing these skills.
378

Creating space
Ultimately, the broader organizing structure of the movement formation shapes the
approach to transmedia mobilization. In transmedia mobilization, just as in participatory
organizing, the organizer creates a space within which people can themselves make media
and/or organize:

It goes back to looking at it as a tool for organizing. It’s not about going into a
community and being like, ‘okay everybody, you all have to get together now,
and you have to think this way and do it this way because we’re right,’ even
though a lot of people follow that model in organizing. And it’s ridiculous
because that shit falls apart anyways. The whole thing about organizing is, I
think, and at least the people I’ve worked with that I really respect, it’s about
the creation of a space in conjunction with the people that you’re working for

377
Ibid.
378
Interviews DH, KZ, EQ, BH
221
[...] And I think it’s the same thing with this media stuff, and looking at
communications as not just this department of ‘oh, I’m the guy that just shakes
hands with the press, and I give them a press packet or I write the press
release.’ I think that’s a very, more of a corporate way of looking at it.
379

The participatory organizer in both cases sets up a space or platform and then facilitates
conversation, but does not impose one model or idea from the top down.

Movement structure: vertical logics
While some actors in the immigrant rights movement organize according to
horizontal logics, including in their media and communication practices, many others do
not. Within a larger professionalized social movement sector, incorporated nonprofit
organizations with paid staff often present themselves, and are presented by the mass
media, as ‘the immigrant rights movement’ in Los Angeles. Yet almost all of my
interviewees, including most nonprofit staff, recognize that the movement is much broader
than the organizations that operate within it.
380
What is the relationship between the
structure of these movement organizations and the broader movement formation’s ability to
leverage the changed media opportunity structure via transmedia mobilization? Many of my
interviewees described vertical organizational logics as one of the main barriers to more
effective use of networked communication tools by the movement.
Professionalization
Several interviewees discussed their own experience of the ongoing shift to
professionalization and centralization within the immigrant workers’ movement in Los
Angeles. They talked about how the last 10 to 15 years, especially, have seen a transition

379
Interview, NB
380
Interviews BH, LN, TH, DM, OE, TX, NB
222
from social movement formations governed directly by those most directly affected to
incorporated nonprofit organizations ultimately controlled by boards of directors, executive
directors, and paid staff.
381
One interviewee described the transformation of day laborer
organizing in Los Angeles, from a Day Laborer’s Union that was governed directly by
general assembly, to the current situation of a formal network governed by a committee of
executive directors of immigrant rights organizations:

As an organizer that has been in the community for a long time, I’ve seen how
that has shifted. Specifically I’d say, within the day laborer movement, when I
started working in the day laborer community, we had the Sindicato de
Jornaleros, which was a broad based kind of a organization of day laborers
throughout the L.A. County, where they would sit down, have meetings, and
really direct the political work. Now there was a lot of drama, there was
tension, there was arguments, all this stuff happening. And once the
organizations that were hosting became more formal, they started cutting that
out little by little, to the point where the union dissolved and then the power got
very centralized by the representatives, which became the executive directors of
the organizations. So they may have good intentions, and they may understand
what is it that the community needs, but that’s never gonna replace the actual
voice of the communities that are in struggle. Because socio-economic things
change, people in these organizations start getting paid more, everything
changes, class changes, you’re no longer on the street looking for work, you
know? That right there is, if anybody’s an expert on the situation, it’s the
people that are actually going through it […] I think a lot of people are starting
to see how the industrialization of our movements have become like this.
They’ve become a, well I mean they become corporate structures, and so within
that, the CEO or the board of directors has the final say, you know?
382

He stressed that the intentions of the directors remains good, and that many of the directors
initially came from the base they now represent. However, he pointed out that the
consolidation of organizing within formally incorporated nonprofits led, over the long run,
to the progressive removal of decision-making power from the hands of day laborers
themselves.

381
Interviews NB, BH, TH, DH, KB
382
Interview, NB
223
For this organizer, the implications for movement media strategies were clear:

Classically what tends to happen is that there’s a centralization, you know?
And so, within that centralization there, even within the messages, even if the
base is asking for another message, once that request gets filtered through their
communications department, through their EDs, and through their board, it’s
changed completely. It’s become maybe a little bit more acceptable, or more
responsible of a message, or not as extreme a message. I think what that’s
done, it’s definitely affected the organizing, the base organizing within the
communities that these organizations work with. Even though I think they still
claim, and there’s still a connection to the communities because they’re still
doing work with them, when it comes down to decision of messages, decisions
of strategies, and being in the process of the creation of strategies and
messages, the community is no longer included in that.
383

The professionalization of immigrant rights organizations thus tends, over the long run, to
distance the social base of the movement from decision-making over strategy, messaging,
and communication.
384

Social media strategists
In addition to the broader process of social movement professionalization, the last
decade has seen the emergence of a new layer of nonprofit and social movement
technologists, information technology experts, and most recently, social media strategists
and nonprofit application service providers. Like most social movements, the immigrant
rights movement is characterized by wide differentiation in communication infrastructure,
between those actors who primarily use autonomous infrastructure or commercial sites,
those who outsource to professional social movement application service providers
(SMASPS), and those who have internalized communication technology capacity either
through staff or volunteers. As discussed above, smaller, poorer resourced organizations
tend to appropriate commercial sites and have a basic web presence based on volunteer

383
Interview, NB
384
Melucci, 1994
224
labor or a one-time web design contract. Medium and larger organizations have more
resources to devote to SMASPs and to nicer websites, including Content Management
Systems that make it easier for them to update and maintain a ‘more professional’ web
presence. The largest organizations sometimes internalize technical and web capacity with
full time ICT staff, web designers, and ‘online organizers.’ However, despite the resources
they are able to bring to bear, larger vertically structured organizations have not necessarily
done a better job at integrating social media into their communication strategies. In some
cases, larger organizations have been slower to adopt decentralized, networked, popular or
social media practices into their communication efforts. Based on my interviews,
horizontally structured collectives, organizations, and networks were often more innovative
in their adoption of popular media into the core of their communication practices, although
this was not universally true.
Some of the organizations that do have professional communication or PR staff
members are currently developing what they call ‘social media strategy.’ This process is
advanced by funders and by communication consultants who constitute a sub sector of the
professional nonprofit field. Better resourced, more professionalized nonprofit
organizations approach ‘social media strategy’ from the perspective of fundraising,
professional capacity building, and constituent relationship management. They hope to
appropriate some of the functionality of ‘web 2.0’ tools while retaining vertical control over
messaging and framing.
385
This strategy is in part driven by the apparent success of top-
down management of networked communication by other professionalized nonprofits and,
most recently, by the Obama campaign.
386
In addition, an industry of ‘new media’
consultants has sprung up around the nonprofit sector. In interviews with some of these

385
Interviews, LN, XD
386
Interviews LN, XD, OE, BH
225
‘social media professionals’ and consultants, I found that many are actually interested in
pushing top-down immigrant rights organizations towards more horizontal media practices
and strategies. However, they expressed that this usually ends in failure and frustration.
387

Social media as underpaid labor in the NPIC
As we have seen, although some professional nonprofits hire full time online
organizers or outside social media consultants, the majority tend to assign social media
work to volunteers or to the lowest-paid staff:

Here’s a crazy idea: the fact that the work force in non-profit organizations is
not an organized work force, and therefore, there’s an area which is rife with
worker exploitation. Where workers are asked to do so much, and this is just
something that’s added to that plate. So there’s a lot of guilt, and there’s a lot of
exploitation that makes these tools not viable, cause who’s gonna get stuck
with it? Low person on the totem pole. It’s like ‘alright, oh and by the way
don’t fuck up cause you’re our organization’s voice, but you’re not gonna be
part of the decision making process, cause that’s not in the scope of work’
[laughs].
388

Unfortunately, within vertically structured organizations this study found that social media
often ends up relegated to the realm of underpaid labor.
389
This precludes its effective
integration into transmedia mobilization strategies able to incorporate the voices of the
social base directly into movement communication practices.
Capacity building
More professionalized, vertically organized nonprofits participate in foundation-
backed social media trainings, and in general these take on a very different form from the
skillshares and hackmeets of the horizontalists. Consultants or specialists in new media

387
Interviews XD, LN
388
Interview, LN
389
Interviews LN, XD, OE
226
provide ‘capacity building’ workshops for leadership and communications staff from
professional nonprofits, with support from private foundations. For example, Liberty Hill
Foundation conducted a Technical Assistance Survey in October of 2003 in order to
evaluate the work of the Liberty Hill Fund for a New Los Angeles, a grants program
created in 1992 to fund CBOs doing antipoverty, racial justice, and gang prevention work
in L.A. The Fund distributed over three million dollars between 1998 and 2003, the time of
the survey. The aim of the survey was to evaluate Liberty Hill’s Technical Assistance
Program, which included workshops in the history of social movements, general skills
building workshops, and peer roundtables for CBO executive directors and development
directors. Over 20 CBOs from around the City participated in the survey, and of these most
listed technology and media capacity building as their highest priority needs:

Technology: Eleven of the 21 respondents listed technology-related technical
assistance priorities. These included general requests such as maximizing
technology use, to more specific requests such as maintaining and upgrading
websites and creating better database systems […] Media: Ten respondents
listed media-related subjects among their organization's top three technical
assistance priorities. The specific areas mentioned included developing a media
strategy, interfacing with the media, developing/strengthening general
communications skills, and facilitation/public speaking.
390

In part based on this survey, Liberty Hill expanded their media trainings, bringing nonprofit
staff from around the City together for trainings with Foundation staff and additional media
professionals. In 2008 Liberty Hill initiated a new round of ‘brown bag lunch’ media
trainings in which media and communications staff from more than 15 community based
and nonprofit organizations gathered to share experiences on using ‘Web 2.0’ tools for
organizing and fundraising aims.

390
Liberty Hill, 2003
227
I attended several such trainings and interviewed participants. In marked contrast to
skill shares and workshops organized by horizontalists, where hands-on media making
workshops, ‘hard’ tech skills (how to build a computer or solder a radio transmitter
together), IT knowledge (how to set up a server and install a content management system),
and movement strategy discussions frequently take place together, in this capacity building
workshop series there was a firm division between ‘technology’ and ‘media.’ This was
shaped by Liberty Hill’s own analysis of their survey results:

Technology appears also to be of interest to many. This is one subject quite
possibly best left to other technical assistance providers. The Center for
Nonprofit Management, for example, recently introduced a fairly extensive
technology training program for nonprofits, which includes such workshops as
Introduction to Word; Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced PowerPoint; and
Database Design Principles, among others. This series was developed after an
extensive needs assessment process, which included interviews with Liberty
Hill as well as with some Liberty Hill grantees. One particularly attractive
feature of this program is that the Center's partner in this venture, the Verizon
Foundation, offers full scholarships for the program.
391

ICTs are still thought of as primarily for internal organizational use, while ‘media skills’ are
focused around press releases and the development of relationships with professional
journalists. In addition to the separation between IT and media skills, despite the focus on
social media, the primary framework for funders still seems governed by the longstanding
paradigm of the press release and the mass media interview: how to stay on message and
ensure that your frame and talking points will be heard. Several of the organizers I
interviewed speculated that perhaps this is because professional nonprofit media strategies
have centered for so long on reaching mass media organizations, rather than developing
popular communication approaches.
392
In theory, as we have seen, transmedia mobilization

391
Liberty Hill, 2003
392
Interviews LN, BH, XD, TX
228
integrates the praxis of digital media literacy with more traditional strategies for outreach to
mass media, since member-created media texts can serve as key ‘hooks’ to generate interest
from professional journalists.
393
In practice, even without engaging the deeper critiques of
the NPIC, foundations that aim to help community based organizations develop
professional capacity, while well meaning, have fallen behind the times. Funders have
mostly failed to grasp the new media opportunity structure, and lack an integrated vision of
ICTs as key tools not only for internal document and data management tasks, but also as
infrastructure for transmedia mobilization.
394

Controlling Funders
While community based funders like Liberty Hill struggle to come to grips with the
importance of read-write digital media literacy to overall communication strategy, none of
my interviewees questioned their underlying intentions. As a relatively small social justice
funder, CBOs feel that Liberty Hill’s aims are definitely to strengthen the movement as
much as possible. Indeed, most of my interviewees were critical of the ways in which
foundation funding tends to shift the priorities of movement organizations over time, but
they also emphasized that this takes place through subtle, long term pressures, rather than
through direct demands from funders about specific actions. However, several interviewees
also described instances of funders, especially the largest national and international
foundations, intervening in social movements in much more direct ways. One interviewee
described an instance of the latter form of pressure:

I think there is a pushing out of organizers, there is a pushing out, because it
goes to D.C., and [this topic] goes to the funders as well. The funders do not
want to be polarized, so as soon as you polarize your politics, and you’re

393
Interviews XD, LN
394
Davis and Applied Research Center, 2010
229
saying some pretty extreme things, and I’m not saying being a racist or a
separatist, or anything like that, the funders start shaking a bit, and they tweak
your message […] It’s not the big conspiracy theory that the funding officer is
coming and saying “ You can’t do this.” Which they have though, they did it
during the presidential election when Obama was inaugurated. In D.C. there
was the immigrant rights movement that was like “we’re gonna march on the
day of his inauguration, and we’re gonna demand immigration reform.” Ford
Foundation was very clear with the head organization, they’re like “if you
fuckin do that shit, we will pull your funding. You will not get funded by us
anymore.” […] They had to shift their whole strategy to not offend […] I mean
you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars that they receive, that
most of the organizations receive in a year. So you know, we become
dependent of that, we like having ten people in our staff because we’re able to
do more work, but its this total catch-22: we’re doing more work, but in the
times of really striking, we, our leaders or our directors, really, really think
about the ramifications. Not in the community, but the ramifications that they’ll
receive from the funders and from their access in D.C.
395

The same dynamic plays out in Los Angeles. The politics of lobbying in D.C. have local
impacts, when immigrant rights organizations shy away from more radical activity because
they worry about losing access in D.C., or when they place more resources into D.C.
lobbying because of a perceived shift in the national political opportunity structure. When
nonprofits play an insider’s political game, they expose themselves to the possibility that
funders may avoid them or even pull funding if they seem ‘too radical’ or even just
‘unprofessional.’ In this way, controlling funders can be another vertical structure that
militates against the adoption of bottom-up transmedia mobilization strategies.
Social practices of sharing
One of the main barriers comes from what several interviewees described as ‘old
school’ cultures of organizing that fail to engage in social practices of sharing that
characterize newer, networked movement formations. One interviewee described the lack of
a social practice of sharing contact information, and the lack of trust between nonprofit

395
Interview, NB
230
organizations, as the main block to successful online organizing during a national campaign
against Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio:

When the NDLON started working on the Arizona campaign against Arpaio,
one of the strategies of the Day Laborer Network was to activate their network
and use it with new media. You know, be able to build lists and really for the
purpose of bringing people out from different parts of the country, and having
people caravan, and things like that, and so we used a system, you know? A
system to be able to get people to sign up, to go online, say that they were
gonna be a part of it, and maybe even potentially donate for water or whatever.
[Q: What system did you use?] We used the Democracy In Action system, the
Salsa Commons, you know what I mean? It has its, it’s been very successful
for a lot of groups. But it was interesting because the network is comprised of
forty organizations, and so the theory was that if each organization could
donate 70 to 80 of their contacts for this list so that those 70 and 80 could be
put into a database, and they could be invited out and the list would just
continue growing. That was the initial theory but what we got in response from
those organizations was a non response. They didn’t wanna give their 70
contacts, even though they’re organizations with thousands of contacts. So they
didn’t see the importance of building a list like that for their national network,
because at the end, NDLON is just, NDLON wasn’t or isn’t theoretically its
own organization within the network, it actually is one that helps the network
work, throughout the country. So what we saw was kind of this ownership of
their bases instead of this distribution of bases, and use of through Internet, so
I think it failed, you know?
396

In this case, organizers within a networked movement formation were unable to move a
social media strategy forward because the leadership of vertically structured member
organizations were wary of sharing contacts with each other and failed to understand the
utility of networked collaboration. When movement formations are horizontal, it matters
less when some in the movement formation fail to grasp the significance of a particular tool
or tactic. Participants in the movement have the opportunity to advance new tools and
tactics, to convince others of their utility, and to deploy them towards movement ends, as
we have seen in case studies in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. However, the more vertical the

396
Interview, NB
231
decision-making process in the movement formation, the more important it becomes to
ensure that leadership understand social media and transmedia mobilization.

Top-down Tweets: social media as a broadcast tool
Besides problems of resource sharing, many organizers are deeply frustrated by
what they find to be pervasive attempts by immigrant rights organizations to use social
media as a new kind of broadcast channel. Interviewees described various organizations
that have this problem, and said that it was a constant struggle to get organizations to realize
the possibilities of creating a conversation with their online audience. This is especially a
problem for national organizations:

Some of these national groups are using social media, but they kind of use it as
a broadcast medium. It’s just a different channel that they broadcast on, and
I’ve, as a consultant, have had trouble communicating to people the difference
between broadcast and social media […] It’s really hard for organizations to
understand about opening it up and allowing people to add content to what they
have to say, you know? And it’s kind of scary to them, and they, they’re very
wary of it.
397

This social media consultant mentioned the National Immigration Forum and America’s
Voice as examples, and said that many movement organizations in L.A. suffer from the
same problem. When I asked for a specific example of top-down social media use in L.A.,
he began by describing how one well known immigrant rights organization tried to use
Twitter:

[The organization] has a twitter feed, and I got really frustrated with them cause
they had a conference last fall, I was just asking about it, and they basically

397
Interview, XD
232
[laughs] they used Twitter as a way, what they did was is they took the
program, and they cut and paste different things from the program, like ‘we’re
gonna have a workshop on social media,’ and they put that in the Twitter feed
and just sent it. And there was no kind of, they didn’t follow anybody, they
didn’t ask any questions, it was ‘this is what we’re doing, and maybe
somebody out there will be intrigued enough by the title of this workshop that
they’ll want to come to our conference.’ But there was no relationship building,
there was no looking for other organizations to say ‘hey, could you share this?’
It was very kind of, ‘we’re pushing this out.’ […] From my experiences in
social media, you gotta do a lot of legwork, you have to do a lot. You have to
call in a lot of, I don’t wanna say favors, but you know what I mean? You
Tube doesn’t even work like that. It’ll just get drowned out. You have to go
and tell people to go look at it, and you have to invite people to participate with
it, otherwise it just gets lost.
398

In another instance, the same organization hired a consulting firm to manage their Facebook
page, but then got upset when the firm changed their profile photo:

They got really upset when they changed the photo on the profile. The thing
I’ve learned about Facebook, you have to change it all the time. You can’t keep
the same. My sister makes fun of the number of photos I have on mine, cause I
just do it all the time as a routine thing. But they, as an organization, got upset
because they had their logo, and they didn’t understand the need, necessity of
changing that, you know? In my mind, the thing with social media, it has to
always be new and fresh and show that there’s a human, that it’s not
automated, that there’s somebody behind it.
399

The logic of social media, which requires constant attention to human connections,
conversation, and regular foregrounding of ‘new and fresh’ content, conflicts deeply with
the discourse and practices of branded identity that nonprofits have incorporated from the
private sector. Another interviewee described how she quickly set up a Facebook page for
a program within her organization, but a more senior staff member “immediately pulled
me in and was like, ‘why isn’t this connected to [our] main page, blah blah blah, you
shouldn’t have just created [the program page] cause then people think it’s just [the

398
Ibid.
399
Interview, XD
233
program], and [the organization] is not just [the program],’ and so those kind of things I
still have to deal with.”
400
In the social media space, nonprofits struggle to implement the
advice they have received from communications consultants who counsel them to
maintain strong brand identity. This manifests in the micropolitics of daily
communication practices, with nonprofit staff pushing back especially against the more
fluid social media practices of youth.
401

Taking Credit: “Who gets the credit for this?”
Others felt that larger organizations find most of the principles of network culture
alien to their experience. Sharing of resources, contacts, content, and platforms, so crucial
to the cultural logic of networked activism, is not something that tends to take place in the
immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, at least not between the largest and better
resourced nonprofits.

I think that’s really one of the big challenges we have because of the nature of a
lot of the kinda newer movement within the, using the Internet as a tool. A lot
of the people involved in it believe in sharing content, the creation of programs
and content that can be distributed and used by anybody that maybe has similar
thoughts, or wants to use it for the same reason. Part of the challenge with a lot
of the larger organizations, the immigrant rights organizations that receive a lot
of funding and they’re kind of these institutions, they’re very wary of that,
they’re very wary of sharing. They’re very wary of, well, then who gets the
credit for this, you know? And unfortunately it leaks back to kind of the
funding issue, cause whoever gets the credit is the one that’s gonna get the
funding [chuckles]. The funders aren’t just gonna fund this undefined
movement, you know? This un-centralized movement, they’ll just move on to
the next topic on their list, on their funding list.
402

400
Interview, OE
401
Interviews OE, XD, TH, KZ
402
Interview, NB
234
In other words, funders currently play an important role in pushing movement
organizations away from horizontalist organizational logics and the norms of network
culture. In part this may be because funders themselves do not understand the new cultural
logic of networking; in part it may be because they have a different model of social change;
in part it may be because individual program officers do not want to (or in some cases, are
legally not allowed to) fund a diffuse ‘network.’ Funders want to build organizations and
institutions, and to be able to quantify deliverables such as service provision metrics or key
policy changes.
403
In this context, interviewees described how professional nonprofit
organizations within the immigrant rights movement often compete for funding and project
ownership rather than work towards network coordination and resource sharing.
404
Even
when they create nominal or formal ‘networks,’ participating organizations with internal
vertical structures often block network activity and resource sharing.
Structure: “I cannot believe he just said that.”
In general, many professional nonprofits fear social media because it is a space in
which they are less able to control the message. Of course, controlling the message is a
difficult task in the broadcast media space as well. When asked about vertical organizations’
fears of letting people from the base speak for themselves, one interviewee described the
following scene. At a DREAM Act rally, the executive director of a well known immigrant
rights nonprofit took the stage and spoke about immigration reform:

She stayed on message about immigration reform, when right now the question
is should we push at least one thing forward, and use it as a victory to build
momentum, or really just go for the whole thing and end up getting nothing,
and continue to crush the movement? But then right after her a worker spoke,
and the worker’s message was ‘if Obama doesn’t pass immigration reform, he

403
Poletta, 2004; Bartley, 2007
404
Interviews OE, LN, NB, TH, XD
235
will not count with our vote.’ He was immediately sort of pushed to the side,
and [the executive director], you could see her face right away was just like,
“Oh I cannot believe he just said that.” And I had other people next to me that
immediately also responded the same way, we were like, “oh no, I can’t believe
he just said that, that’s not the message that we want people to hear from us,
and definitely not from this action, right?” But I understood what he was
saying and I don’t disagree completely. That our communities are feeling like
yeah, he’s not doing shit for us right now […] And so it wasn’t for me that it
seemed crazy, but for them, it was all about ‘that totally is against the message.’
Because they’re still very pro Obama, they spent a lot of money in doing all
that work, so they don’t wanna dis-encourage the Latino vote to vote him in
again. I see it all the time.
405

This interviewee went on to describe how the P.R. staff of the lead organization then
approached broadcast media reporters and encouraged them to edit the worker’s ‘off
message’ statement out of their reports. However, they were deeply worried that citizen
journalists, bloggers, or everyday movement participants present at the event would
distribute the statement. For organizations that have spent years or even decades learning
how to stay on message, shape frames through personal relationships with reporters, insert
choice quotes into mass media, and push forward campaigns with a unified voice, social
media offers a threatening, messy arena where keeping ‘message discipline’ becomes all
but impossible.
Fear of Haters
When asked about why many organizations had trouble opening up to the
conversational possibilities of social media, some interviewees talked about the fear of
being overwhelmed by anti-immigrant hate speech. One described an instance in which
their site was hacked and had to be temporarily taken down.
406
However, no one gave a
concrete example of a site being flooded by anti-immigrant speech. Instead, immigrant

405
Interview, OE
406
Interview, NB
236
rights organizations tend to ‘preemptively’ lock down their web platforms out of fear that
this might happen.
407
Fear of ‘haters,’ whether based on direct experience, word of mouth,
or otherwise, has produced a chilling effect that reduces the ability of the immigrant rights
movement to fully engage with participatory and horizontalist communication logics.
Blurring the personal and professional
As we have seen, the danger that social media will expose a movement’s base as
more radical than the leadership is one reason why nonprofit leaders remain wary of
opening up their communication to more people. The fear of too much transparency also
comes into play not only in terms of political positioning, but also in the potential of social
media to expose the behavior of organizational staff as ‘unprofessional.’ Another
interviewee talked about a situation where the leadership of a nonprofit angrily called in the
younger staff to berate them for posting pictures of people drinking and dancing at an
organizational fundraiser on Facebook.
408
In this case, social media again generated tension:
on the one hand, the ED worried that revealing staff and members drinking, dancing, and
having fun would appear unprofessional and reduce the chances of securing foundation
funds in the future; on the other hand, staff members felt that showing this side of the
organization via social media would make it easier to attract interest from potential new
members and volunteers.
Digital culture
Finally, younger organizers talked about how organizational leaders simply do not
understand social media as a space for the production and circulation of digital culture. For

407
Interview, XD
408
Interview, OE
237
example, one articulated a concern that more vertical, hierarchical movement organizations
are unable to effectively bring arts and music into their culture of organizing, in contrast to
the dynamic appropriation of social networking sites by youth and student activists:

I feel like there are very few ways that we communicate our work in the media,
alternative media. I don't feel that there is a unifying way that we've been doing
it or have done it. I think about youth organizing, and there are always really
cool flyers that grab your attention. Posting it on MySpace or Facebook I think
really makes a difference […] The artistic, creative, and even musical part of it,
not that it's been left behind, but I feel like, how do we incorporate these things
into our work? I think we get focused on the goal, or the message, and I feel
like incorporating art and media and music is really important.
409

When asked how art, creativity, and music within social movement formations relate to
communication technology, she responded:

I feel like these are different organizing strategies. I think that organizing
sometimes is very businessy. I think about unions, or nonprofits that are very
hierarchical […] Alternative media strategies or tools are in line with art and
culture and music. So I feel it's about us thinking and using these as ways to
organize and to develop.
410

She worries about the professionalization of social movement activity (“I think that
organizing sometimes is very businessy. I think about unions, or nonprofits that are very
hierarchical.”) Her concern is at least in part that she feels hierarchical organizations in the
immigrant rights movement fail to mobilize arts and culture to effectively communicate with
the base they are trying to mobilize. They approach communication technology from a
‘hard’ utility perspective, with the assumption that ICTs are worth investing in only if they
are tools that can be applied directly to nuts-and-bolts organizing, with outcomes that can be
measured in clear quantitative terms like increased membership, greater donations, or more
efficient use of staff time. In her analysis this perspective fails to grasp the key value of

409
Interview, DH
410
Interview, DH
238
networked communication, so evident from the experience of high school and college
student activists: direct participation in the production and circulation of movement culture.
To take another example, the computer lab of one CBO had signs up above every
computer warning people to use the lab for ‘work related tasks’ only, and specifically
banning the use of social networking site MySpace. The sign threatened to fine lab users $5
if they were caught using MySpace, and to revoke computer access for repeat infringers. In
many ways this is simply a recent reiteration of the now longstanding tension between ‘old
left’ values that place class analysis and struggle as the central (and in the most extreme
version, only) category and more sophisticated analyses that recognize the intersectionality
of oppressions and the importance of cultural resistance. Staff and leadership of some
movement organizations seem also to have internalized values that discount the importance
of play and informal learning to digital literacy. In other words, one of the ways that
hierarchical organizations often fail to effectively appropriate network communication
technologies is that they attempt to use these technologies solely as extensions to vertical
models of communication. They approach the web as another means to distribute
‘important’ or ‘hard’ information vetted by leadership, and fail to grasp the key place of
talk, play, graphic arts and music in networked cultures.
411

Movement structure: The Fast for Our Future
How can the concepts of media opportunity structure, transmedia mobilization, the
praxis of digital media literacy, and social movement structure strengthen our analysis of
social movement formations and help us understand their media practices? The last section
of this chapter uses these concepts to analyze a movement formation that appeared in the

411
Juris, 2008; Ito et al, 2009
239
last months of 2008. At that time, a group identified as the RISE movement circulated an
announcement that they would be organizing a 21 day hunger strike in the lead up to the
presidential election:

The “Fast For Our Future” campaign will begin in Los Angeles on October
15th, 2008, three weeks before the November 4th presidential election. Over
100 people will fast in order to mobilize our community to vote for immigrant
rights. Fasters will give up all food and juice liquids. When engaging in a
hunger strike, we will commit to only drink water. The Fast will be based at an
encampment at La Placita Olvera, the historic heart of Los Angeles. The
encampment will be a visual representation of the size and growth of the
hunger strike. Fasters will sleep in tents and live at the encampment for the
duration of the Fast.
412

The RISE movement is an organization whose key activists are rooted in the Catholic
worker tradition and inspired by liberation theology. Religious immigrant rights activism
has a deep and powerful history as well as high visibility in Los Angeles today. Religious
activists of various faiths, especially Catholics, have long organized for immigrant rights in
terms of civil rights, border rights, and economic justice.
413
Cardinal Roger Mahoney of the
Los Angeles Archdiocese, the nation's largest, has been a vocal and visible supporter of
Amnesty and full legalization, along with many other clergy members of various
denominations. The Fast for Our Future was not explicitly tied to any religion, and many
secular activists participated. However, the campaign drew extensively on religious
symbolism in its imagery and actions, had visits and support from religious figures, and
attempted to engage the public with a moral force rooted in religious faith.
The communications committee of the Fast for Our Future planned a popular
communication strategy. My notes from the weeks before the hunger strike include action
items assigned to RISE movement activists including: create a blog for hunger strikers (at

412
See http://immigration.change.org/blog/view/fast_for_our_future.
413
Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2008
240
fastforourfuture.wordpress.com); coordinate WiFi access for the camp (piggybacking on
the wireless connection of nearby nonprofit organization COFEM); arrange a live Internet
radio stream as well as links to the stream from various Indymedia sites; set up a VOIP
account at gizmo.com to allow people to call a number to leave messages of support;
coordinate a sound system for musicians, speakers, and films; get access to a printer to use
for printing out images of support; set up campaign accounts on Flickr, MySpace,
Facebook, change.org, and Twitter (with various individual activists taking on
responsibility to manage each account); create a Facebook cause; and prepare other tools for
use during the hunger strike. The group hoped to build visibility for the campaign, spread
its message via social networks, encourage additional supporters to take the pledge to
support political candidates only if they were willing to support immigrant rights, raise
funds to be used for organizing for immigrant rights, and otherwise contribute to the goals
of strengthening a shared identity for immigrant rights activists and supporters.
Digital Solidarity
One of the goals was also to provide ways for supporters to demonstrate solidarity
in ways that would be visible and would bolster the resolve of the hunger strikers. For
example, a free VOIP service provider called Gizmo was used to set up a phone number
that supporters could call to leave voice messages. The messages were converted to mp3
files and sent via email to a dedicated mailbox, and were then automatically posted to an
online audio gallery. As people began to call in and leave messages from around the City
and across the state of California, organizers highlighted some of them with links in blog
posts. They also downloaded the calls and played them over the air on a local microradio
FM station (Radio Ayuno) that was set up with the help of the Garment Worker Center
radio project. The radio station broadcast music, live interviews, call-ins, and messages of
241
support across the area of La Placita, where the hunger strike encampment was located. An
Indymedia activist from the San Francisco bay area, living temporarily in Los Angeles, also
helped set up an Internet radio stream to rebroadcast the signal of Radio Ayuno across the
web. Supporters were also able to send pictures from their cell phones to a Flickr
photostream by posting them via MMS to ‘ayuno@vozmob.net.’ 77 images supporting the
hunger strikers were sent in this way:
Figure 37: RISE movement Flickr photostream

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/risemovement

About two weeks into the hunger strike, volunteers from the Mobile Voices project printed
all of these images out and hung them up along one wall inside the encampment. This
provided a physical representation of the solidarity messages for the hunger strikers and
served as a visual reminder of community support for those living at the encampment. As
242
the hunger strike progressed, participants began to post regular updates to blogs and SNS.
Some participants, and some supporters, also began to record, edit, and post videos to
YouTube on an almost daily basis.
414

Figure 38: RISE movement YouTube Channel

Source: http://youtube.com/user/therisemovement

A wide range of digital media tools and skills were thus deployed around the strike.
Through peer-to-peer circulation of calls for solidarity, mostly face to face and via SNS, the
Fast for Our Future engaged hundreds of supporters in media production and circulation.
These media practices were participatory, multimodal, and bridged ‘new’ and ‘old’ media.
At the same time, within a specific movement formation and the media practices that
surround it there are always competing modes of use and communication goals. For
example, some of the RISE movement’s leadership, in this case white male activists
affiliated with religion-based support for immigration reform, also hoped to use the

414
See http://www.youtube.com/user/therisemovement.
243
visibility from the Fast for Our Future to build a large email list that they would later be
able to use for MoveOn-style, one-to-many email action alerts. To meet this goal, they
purchased an account with Social Movement Application Service Provider (SMASP)
Democracy In Action, and the main action they asked of visitors to the fastforourfuture.org
website was to sign a petition pledging ‘to vote for immigrant rights’ in the Presidential
election. They faced internal criticism for the vagueness of their demand from other
immigrant rights groups in L.A.
415
Signing the petition was a mechanism for encouraging
supporters (via a check box) to add their email address and zip code information to the
RISE movement’s supporter database (hosted by DIA). Once the hunger strike began, the
email list began to grow, but these organizers were cautious about using the list to ask for
expressions of solidarity via social media. Thinking of the list more like a traditional
movement newsletter, they wanted to reserve its use for ‘important’ announcements (whose
content they would control) and for calls for funds. This approach clashed with the
participatory strategy of inviting supporters to produce media about the hunger strike, and
the difference meant that in the end the list was almost never used to drive traffic to
supporter-produced media or to ask for support in the form of producing or circulating
media texts. The vertical organizational logic of key actors within the movement formation
undermined the ability of the Fast for Our Future to parlay moderately successfully social
media practices into a true transmedia mobilization strategy.
Given the media opportunity structure for the L.A. immigrant rights movement,
Fast for Our Future press conferences at Placita Olvera were fairly well attended by
reporters from Spanish language TV, radio, and print outlets. English language broadcast
media were scarce, although PBS did produce and air a video on the Fast as part of Tavis

415
Interviews, NB, LN, BH
244
Smiley’s special election 2008 coverage.
416
Yet the RISE movement, like many immigrant
rights organizations in L.A., struggled to link their new media strategy and tools to
broadcast news coverage. For example, before the Fast began, the communication team
discussed the importance of driving traffic to the website by constantly repeating the site
address during interviews with journalists from print, radio, or TV. They also discussed the
possibility of specific days when press conferences would be used to invite readers,
listeners, and viewers of broadcast media to participate in the Fast or show support by
taking specific actions such as calling or texting in messages of support. However, the
former tactic was used only sporadically, and the latter was never taken up at all. One
organizer of the Fast for Our Future, asked to comment on what would make digital media
more useful in the future, put it this way:

Having capacity. Having a group of people that is going to be there for the
whole time. That we had actually thought about what kind of frame we wanted
to do, had some set goals. That’s what lacked. We didn’t have set goals of what
we wanted to show and when. Or how quick it would be shown. Having that
before we go: OK, we will have this event, this is what we need to do:
A.B.C.D., instead of ‘here’s the tools you can use,’ but what to do with those
tools?
417

By the end of the Fast for Our Future, organizers reported that “Almost 300 people
have fasted and joined the encampment in Los Angeles and a dozen courageous people
haven't eaten anything since October 15th. Solidarity fasts are popping up from Santa Cruz,
CA, Las Vegas, NV, and Lansing, MI to Cincinnati, OH, Washington, DC, and Miami,
FL. The Fast has been covered extensively in local, national, and even international
Spanish- and English-language media from Telemundo to CNN.”
418
Significant broadcast

416
See http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/voices/497.html.
417
Interview, BH
418
See http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5586/t/3639/blog/index.jsp?blog_KEY=30.
245
media coverage was thus generated. However, in the absence of a clear focus on linking
social media to broadcast coverage - a transmedia mobilization strategy - social media
solidarity with the hunger strikers mostly came through networks of people who were
connected to the strikers in real life.

A lot of things happened. If we looked at the pics that were taken by [popular
communication] team – they took an active role in taking pictures, so it wasn’t a
failure. I thought it was going to be able to get more people that weren’t part of
our community to do it, but even the tools of the phone calls, a lot of the
workers center workers made phone calls to support the hunger strikers. My
expectations were higher, but were going beyond the scope of work that we
were doing.
419

As this interviewee indicates, at the end of the day, it is very difficult to make a new media
campaign ‘go viral’ beyond the immediate circle of real world friends. Organizers
sometimes assume that new media campaigns will autoproliferate based on the natural
communication patterns of young people online. This erroneous assumption is strengthened
and skewed by the extremely high visibility of successful activist media that does manage
to go viral; put simply, everyone hears and talks about those cases where new media is
effectively used by the movement (the walkouts were ‘organized on MySpace’) but few
spend time discussing and understanding the thousands of cases where movement
networks fail to effectively use the same tools.
At the same time, the FFOF did successfully generate a large amount of
documentation of their actions. One interviewee who covered the story for L.A. Indymedia
described it this way:

I guess the biggest thing we had lately was the fast for immigrant rights that
was the 21 day fast leading up to and ending on the day of the election. Right
here, right where we're sitting. They were camped out right there. So the first

419
Interview, BH
246
day there was a big kickoff, and so we were emailing each other to see if
anybody could make it, or if anyone was gonna be there. So we try to, we can't
really be sure if somebody's gonna, somebody that's there is just gonna take it
on their own initiative to write something up or take pictures or upload pictures
so sometimes we try to make sure that one of us or somebody we trust is
gonna be there to at least put pictures up or do a blurb. So there was some back
and forth in the email seeing who is gonna be there. And then the organizers
themselves, or people affiliated with them, did a lot of media. They had videos,
and they had pictures, they had audio, radio, they had a lot of stuff. So it was
really easy for us as far as the work collective to just sit back and let them do all
the work and then we just put everything into place. And that's really the way
it's supposed to work, ideally.
420

Just as we saw in Chapters three and four, in the ideal case this interviewee sees social
movement media activists as aggregators: taking media elements (videos, pictures, audio)
produced by movement participants and highlighting them, summarizing and linking them
together, reposting them, and pushing them into broader circulation. In this way, transmedia
organizers also build horizontal accountability to movements directly into their daily
practice, by stepping back from exercising a monopoly on production to promote the
bottom-up circulation of struggles.
FFOF: the role of leadership
In an interview several months after the end of the Hunger Strike, one organizer had
this to say about the solidarity audio messages and photos:

I thought it was going to be a lot easier. I had a lot of expectations, a lot of
ideas had come out about people taking the pictures and supporting through use
of the phone, but I guess... you know, student groups already use the phone as
a means [of organizing]… naively I thought it would come organically. Also
we thought we would be able to teach people how to do it, but it didn’t
happen.
421

420
Interview, CS
421
Interview with VozMob project coordinator, conducted by Cara Wallis
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There is often a disconnect between the desire of some members, volunteers, or staff of
movement organizations to creatively and effectively deploy new media tools and strategies
in participatory ways, and the already existing repertoire of ‘communication as P.R.’ used
by movement professionals or long time activists. Sometimes, but not always, the differing
views of how to engage the new media space can be explained by age, with younger
activists often more familiar with new media cultures, tools, and practices. However, this
can backfire, as expressed by the organizer above who pointed out that it was a mistake to
assume that young people and students are already so digitally literate that using new tools
to support mobilizations will ‘come organically.’ Or to put it another way, effective
movement use of social media comes from a delicate balance between organic appropriation
by a digitally literate base and the catalyzing activities of movement activists engaged in the
praxis of digital media literacy. In addition, in the case of the FFOF the failure to use mass
media to build and amplify the campaign’s social media strategy seemed to be based more
on a combination of lack of coordination and the vertical leadership style of some of the
RISE movement organizers. For organizers on the ground, it can often be difficult to
determine whether leadership are not supportive of opportunities to extend horizontal
communication practices within the movement through conscious decision-making
(because they fear losing control of the message) or through lack of imagination (because
they are not used to thinking about what it would look like to effectively involve a large
number of people in social movement communication).

Movement structure: conclusions
This chapter used the theory and practice of horizontalidad (horizontalism) to
investigate the relationship between the structure of social movement formations and their
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ability to effectively appropriate networked communication. Overall, social movement
formations that are governed by horizontal structures have the most affinity for the
participatory logic of transmedia mobilization, and thus are best able to effectively
incorporate social media into their daily practices of movement communication. However,
the most horizontal formations tend to have the least resources, and face the greatest
barriers in terms of access, staff, time, and connectivity. When the social movement base is
already read-write media literate, lack of organizational support for transmedia mobilization
matters less, since the movement formation can create ad hoc networks to route around
vertical organizations. On the other hand, if the movement formation has a low-income base
with little digital literacy, the lack of organizational support can make it difficult for the
movement to effectively appropriate digital media tools and skills at all. Yet
professionalized movement organizations that receive funding from private foundations,
while they have greater access to resources including connectivity, computers, and video
cameras, are almost always organized with vertical structures, making it difficult for them to
adapt to the new cultural logic of networks. These organizations may come from and
maintain strong ties to their base and to ad-hoc movement formations, but they also often
compete against each other for a relatively small pool of resources. Overall, professional
organizational culture does not usually mix well with social media and transmedia
mobilization. These factors militate against the ability of movement formations to embrace
resource sharing, including media content, contacts, and software platforms.
The professionalization of social movements, their segmentation into issue-based
nonprofits, and dependence on foundation funding thus all push against horizontal
governance structures, horizontalist communication, and transmedia mobilization. Actors in
the immigrant workers’ movement are often caught in a catch-22: deploy social media in ad
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hoc movement formations by working with those who already have read-write digital
literacy, or struggle against vertical organizational cultures to bring in rich media texts
created by the social base of low wage immigrant workers who currently lack digital
access, tools, and skills. One possible path forward for organizers and activists is to
educate funders about the value of conversational, rather than top-down, media strategies,
and about the importance of supporting social movement networks. Another strategy is to
shift away from nonprofits altogether, and to place more energy into networked, ad-hoc,
and horizontal movement formations.
To that end, there may be an emergent transformation within immigrant movement
formations, as expectations about the digital literacies and roles of the movement base,
volunteers, anarchogeeks, and professionals all begin to shift. Whereas in the past,
movement actors might have been satisfied to hire contractors with a specialized skill set to
produce media that promoted their issue, framing, or message, there is now an increasing
expectation that the role of a media activist or organizer embedded within broader social
movements is to actively share skills and help build the capacity of those most directly
involved to tell their own stories. Some of my interviewees see this as an encouraging shift
towards greater horizontalism and accountability in social movement media practices.
However, funders have not caught up with this shift, and indeed it remains unclear whether
most funders will be willing to transition to supporting a more horizontalist approach to
social movement media. That goal may be incompatible with many foundation’s social
change models, where change is driven by professionalized nonprofits engaged in issue-
based policy debates, rather than by broad based, directly democratic, digitally literate social
movements of the base. Professional nonprofits themselves, for the most part, are failing to
effectively deploy transmedia mobilization because their leadership fail to understand the
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social media space. What is more, younger staff within professional nonprofits are often
frustrated when their efforts to use social media for movement ends are blocked by
organizational leadership who either fail to understand social media, are afraid of losing
control of the message, or both.
As we saw in the Fast for Our Future, few movement formations think
systematically about how to use online media to drive broadcast media coverage, or vice
versa. In part, this may be a function of the fact that in smaller, understaffed movement
organizations, there is a division of labor between ‘new’ and ‘old’ media: younger staff or
volunteers spend time building the movement’s online presence, while older and more
experienced organizers focus on generating mass media coverage through press
conferences and relationships with print and broadcast journalists. By dividing labor in this
way, movement organizations and networks may miss opportunities to effectively leverage
interesting movement-generated online media into mass media coverage, as well as to use
stories in the mass media to drive large numbers of viewers and participants to online
spaces.
While some immigrant rights movement formations may successfully deploy top-
down network communication strategies to build email lists, raise funds from middle class
sympathizers, and win grants from private foundations, this strategy has little connection to
the need to broaden participation by the immigrant worker base. Horizontalist immigrant
worker collectives, organizations, and formations are, by contrast, adopting networked
communication tools in a manner that is more organic and based on expanding the capacity
and reach of popular media practices. This approach is less visible in the short run, and is
unlikely to attract funders, but effective mass socialization of digital and networked
communication practices will have real impacts on the strength of the immigrant rights
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movement and may pay off down the road with increased mobilization capacity, stronger
movement identity, and concrete political and economic victories.
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CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSIONS

In the context of a global political economy that results in vast numbers of economic
immigrants, immigration policies are shaped by social movements - nativists on one side
and immigrant workers and their allies on the other - that battle over attention, framing, and
credibility within a communication system that is simultaneously globalized, converged,
diversified, hypersegmented, broadcasts to more eyeballs than ever before, and includes the
rapidly expanding, unruly, and participatory space of social media. This dissertation is an
attempt to make sense of how social movements negotiate, and sometimes influence, such a
rapidly changing media landscape.
To understand these dynamics and contribute to research on social movement
media, this study focused on the primary question: under what conditions do social
movements effectively use networked communication technologies to strengthen movement
identity, win political and economic victories, and transform consciousness? Together with
a wide network of organizers, students, media activists, community based organizations, ad
hoc collectives, and immigrant workers, I used a Communication for Social Change
framework to develop shared research, theory, and practice focused on building the digital
media literacies of low-wage immigrant workers. Insight drawn from nearly 100
participatory digital media workshops, movement events, and day to day practice was
augmented by analysis of multimedia texts produced by the movement during this time, and
by 30 semi-structured interviews with movement participants. What emerged from this
work is a model that finds social movement formations to be successful when they learn to
take advantage of transformations in the media opportunity structure through transmedia
mobilization, shift their communicative role from sole content creator towards aggregation,
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curation, remix, and circulation of movement media, and engage in a praxis of digital media
literacy with their social base. I also found that the ability of social movements to participate
in transmedia mobilization is shaped by contradictory vertical and horizontal organizational
logics that operate within, between, and across movement organizations, formations, and
networks.

Summary of findings
Analysis of key moments of mobilization in the immigrant rights movement,
including the 2006 marches against the Sensenbrenner bill, the 2006 high school walkouts,
and the FIOB, reveal that social movement formations are operating within a rapidly
changing media opportunity structure. On the one hand, most actors in the immigrant rights
movement still lack access to Anglo print or broadcast media, and these channels continue
to play the most important role in framing and agenda-setting for the dominant political
class, both locally and nationally. On the other hand, most movement actors agree that they
have a steadily growing ability to generate coverage in the ethnic press, including print,
radio, and television stations that have increasing reach and power. It is also clear that
commercial Spanish language radio is the single platform with the most power to galvanize
the social base of the immigrant rights movement into action. When Spanish language
locutores (radio hosts) decide to call for mass mobilization, they are able to bring literally
millions of immigrant workers into the streets. Ethnic media, especially Spanish language
commercial radio, television, and newspapers, provides new possibilities for social
movement formations.
Another important factor that modifies the media opportunity structure is the growth
in translocal circulation of media texts. Although access to ICTs and digital media literacies
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remain deeply unequal, immigrants appropriate ICTs to strengthen practices of translocal
community citizenship. Indeed, in some cases immigrant workers are early adopters of new
digital media tools that allow them to remain closely linked with family, friends, and
community via rich media sharing practices. During mobilizations, they use these tools and
skills to share movement media with networks of supporters and media outlets in their
communities of origin and around the world; they also generate transnational support for
movements in their places of origin by circulating media among supporters and the ethnic
press in the United States.
At the same time, the media opportunity structure is being transformed from the
bottom up by the rise of social media and mobile phones. The rapid adoption of social
network sites by the children of new immigrants, and mobile penetration rates soaring
above 80 percent even among the most marginalized groups of low wage immigrant
workers, enable new participatory practices of movement media making. These new tools
and skills help everyday participants in the immigrant rights movement coordinate,
document, and circulate their own actions in near-real time, and generate space for bottom-
up agenda setting, framing, tactical media, and self-representation. Crucially, the impact of
social media is not limited to peer to peer circulation, as important as that may be. Media
produced by movement formations and initially circulated via social networks also passes
into broadcast distribution, and print and broadcast journalists now regularly seek news tips
and content that has ‘bubbled up’ from social media, blogs, and the ethnic press. Those
movement formations that recognize these new openings in the media opportunity structure
and take steps to occupy them are more successful than those that continue to address all of
their communications efforts directly towards Anglo broadcast outlets.
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The most successful movement media practices during the walkouts and in the
aftermath of the 2007 police attack in Macarthur Park can be best theorized in terms of what
I call transmedia mobilization. Transmedia mobilization engages both skilled media makers
and the social base of the movement in the production and circulation of compelling
movement narratives and media texts across all platforms and channels. Transmedia
production practices provide opportunities for participation to people with varying digital
media skill levels, allowing those involved with the movement to contribute simple
elements like photos, texts, or short video clips that are later aggregated, remixed,
combined, and circulated more broadly. Some movement formations consciously employ
social media solidarity tactics that encourage allies and supporters to identify more closely
with the movement by adding their own short rich media elements to larger shared texts.
Transmedia mobilization is not limited by genre, and may also incorporate elements of
commercial films, television programs, songs, and so on, which are then referenced,
sampled, remixed, and recirculated in the movement context, thus providing multiple entry
points to movement consciousness.
Transmedia mobilization strengthens movement identity formation among those
who take part, by providing discrete opportunities for participants and supporters to
produce and circulate movement frames and narratives. At the same time, it results in
broader visibility of the movement to non-participants through distribution across multiple
platforms. Transmedia mobilization thus values the act of mediamaking as in and of itself a
movement building process. Movement formations that become hubs of transmedia
mobilization practice are able to take advantage of the changed media opportunity structure,
build stronger movement identity among participants, and gain greater visibility for the
movement, its goals, its actions, and its frame.
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Immigrant rights organizers in Los Angeles, as movement actors elsewhere, are to
some degree caught between the desire to retain control over framing and act as
spokespeople for the movement, and the need to become transmedia organizers by shifting
from the production of messages and frames to aggregation, remix, curation, and
amplification of messages and frames generated by the movement’s social base. Some
characterize this shift as a conscious decentralization of the movement voice. Top-down
communicators inside social movement formations find it increasingly difficult to retain
control over messaging, as ‘approved’ frames are challenged by media texts produced and
circulated by a social base with ever growing digital media skills. In some cases, bottom-up
transmedia mobilization forces movement leaders or spokespeople to modify their
messages in order to regain trust and credibility with the broader movement formation.
However, the tools and skills of transmedia mobilization have not yet become an
established part of daily communicative practices within the movement. Press conferences
and actions staged specifically to draw mass media coverage remain an essential component
of social movement repertoires. Over time, the many small tasks required to effectively
organize a press conference have become tacit organizational knowledge. By contrast,
effective use of social media tools is a recent development and requires a new and different
skill set. These skills often mystify the older generation of organizers. Older organizers,
especially, are used to dealing with broadcast media events but do not yet truly understand
the new media opportunity structure - the shifted terrain of communication power. Even
those who are paying close attention to the transformed media environment, and who have
intellectually committed to adapt digital media to movement needs, continue to struggle to
transform their daily practice. This is slowly changing. Many movement activists hope that
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over time, the new tools and skills themselves will fade into the background, and the ability
to effectively deploy and integrate them within overall movement media strategy will grow.
Transmedia mobilization has great potential both as a tool to strengthen participatory
democracy within social movement formations, and as a strategy to leverage changes in the
media opportunity structure to generate greater movement outcomes. However, wide
disparities in ICT access and digital media literacies pose significant challenges. In the
worst cases, social movement formations may transfer the majority of their time and energy
to ‘organizing in the cloud,’ become removed from their social base, and draw resources
and attention to online activity that appears significant but lacks accountability to any real
world community beyond a handful of web savvy activists. While some see this as a
problem, few organizers in the immigrant rights movement argue that the solution is to
move away from online organizing. Instead, they are building on the history of popular
education to develop a praxis of digital media literacy that links training in ICT tools and
skills directly to movement building. Analysis of media practices by the MIWON network
as well as by DREAM Act organizers reveals the key role of social movements in the long
growth of read-write digital media literacy.
This praxis of digital media literacy takes place in a context of scarce resources and
a lack of advanced ICT capacity within the immigrant rights movement. Many community-
based organizations have low capacity computer labs, and struggle to sustain digital literacy
trainings alongside their many other responsibilities as overworked nonprofits with few
staff and constant crises. Older CBO staff, especially, often struggle themselves with what
they describe as strange new tools. At the same time, there is a great deal of informal and
peer to peer learning, including between younger movement participants and students but
also between generations. In fact, the bulk of the democratization of media skills within the
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immigrant rights movement takes place through informal learning processes. In the case of
the DREAM act students, it also became clear that digital media literacies both enable and
are shaped by new processes of ad hoc movement formation. Backchannel conversations
via digital media tools may rapidly coalesce into new movement formations that are more
open and participatory than pre-existing organizations or institutions. Ad hoc movement
formations also provide opportunities and incentives for participants to gain new digital
media skills. While students do generally have greater digital media literacy than low-wage
workers, this is unequal between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. In
some cases, students also learn new tools and skills from immigrant workers who have
appropriated these tools for translocal community practices. Digital media literacies thus
flow back and forth across generations and between social movement formations in largely
informal processes of peer-to-peer learning.
Perhaps more than any other factor, social movement structure shapes the ability of
the immigrant rights movement to engage in effective transmedia mobilization. Social
movement formations are structured by competing horizontal and vertical logics. Horizontal
influences include (among other things) open skillshares, indigenous norms of the tequio,
anarchogeeks, and frequently, younger organization staff and volunteers whose political
formation has been shaped explicitly by horizontalist movement philosophy or implicitly by
the cultural logic of networks and experience with social media tools. Vertical pressures
often come from funders, who push organic movement formations towards issue based
policy advocacy, professionalization, and clear brand identity, all of which require top
down communication strategies and tight control over messages and framing. The long-
term professionalization of social movements, the incorporation of movement formations as
501(c)3 organizations, and the subsequent necessity to compete with other organizations
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for scarce resources also drives many CBOs away from daily practices of information and
resource sharing. For these and other reasons, nonprofit organizations often tend towards
tighter message control. Nonprofit staff are under pressure to take credit for mobilization
successes and increase their organization’s visibility, to reframe broader social struggles in
terms of issue-based campaigns, and to advance winnable policy proposals. Funders,
program officers, and media specialists are also often experienced with communication
strategies that have not caught up with recent transformations in the media opportunity
structure, the possibilities of transmedia mobilization, or the growth of read-write digital
media literacy. In capacity building workshops and professional trainings, they therefore
often replicate a discourse about the importance of top down message control, based on
communication strategies that focus entirely on the production of ‘news hits’ defined as
coverage by Anglo broadcast media.
Any given group, organization, network, or social movement formation faces
contradictory organizational logics in response to the new media opportunity structure.
Besides implicit and explicit pressure from funders, many organizers in the immigrant
rights movement talked about a divide between ‘old school’ organizers who are unfamiliar
with social media and the younger generation. Some older organizers, who occupy
leadership positions inside vertically structured nonprofit organizations, either ignore,
dismiss, or deprioritize the possibilities of transmedia mobilization. In some cases, leaders
actively push back against social media use because they fear loss of control in networked,
participatory spaces. A few do so based on concerns that anti-immigrant groups will invade
their social media spaces and overwhelm them with hate speech, although in practice this
rarely occurs. Others worry about the dilution of their brand identity, or that by hosting
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conversations open to participation by their base, they will appear unprofessional or too
radical to secure funding.
Some are willing to take risks, open movement communication practices to their
base, and incorporate the praxis of digital media literacy into their work. They make the
shift from speaking for the movement to speaking with the movement; from content
production to aggregation, curation, remix, amplification, and circulation. In the long run,
these organizers, and the movement formations they are part of, are most likely to
effectively use transmedia mobilization to take advantage of the new media opportunity
structure, strengthen movement identity, win political and economic victories, and
transform consciousness.

Revised analytical model
In the analytical model presented in Chapter 1, social movements were theorized as
completely separate entities from the media. Press coverage was taken as a dependent
variable, or outcome, of successful movement activity. While a few theorists have focused
on media produced by movements themselves, media making has rarely been considered a
core aspect of social movement activity. The growth of read-write digital literacy on a mass
scale and the rise of social media require that we retheorize this relationship. The following
figure presents an analytical model revised to include the findings from this dissertation:
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Figure 39: Revised analytical model of social movements and media

As the political economy of the communication system itself is reconfigured around the
social production and circulation of digital media, social movements are becoming
transmedia hubs where new visions of society are encoded into digital texts by movement
participants and then shared, aggregated, remixed, and circulated ever more widely across
platforms. Despite digital inequality, the praxis of digital media literacy can result in
subjects able to fully participate in transmedia mobilization, connect to networked social
movements, and take advantage of the changed media opportunity structure to strengthen
movement identity, win political and economic victories, and transform consciousness.
Within the immigrant rights movement in L.A., as in other social movements, this process
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is becoming increasingly visible. However, social movement formations are continually
pushed in contradictory directions by both external and internal organizational logics.
Private foundations steer movements towards professionalization and vertical structures,
while old-school organizers often misunderstand, distrust, or fear the loss of message
control. To build stronger social movements, transmedia organizers must educate funders,
move towards more autonomous resource models, gain the trust of older organizers, take
risks with new ad hoc network formations, and share digital media literacies with the
movement base.

Knowledge gaps
This project has engaged deeply with media practices in the immigrant rights
movement in L.A., and based on analysis of these practices, proposed significant changes
to our understanding of the relationship between social movements and media. Yet, this
research in some ways only scratches the surface of the analytical model that can usefully
describe this retheorized relationship. The proposed new model must be further developed
and refined by examining its utility for understanding a range of social movement
formations in different contexts. For example, comparing the outcomes of immigrant rights
movement formations from several, widely disparate contexts might test the importance of
the composition of the media opportunity structure. In addition, comparative work is
needed to examine whether and to what degree the proposed model holds across different
kinds of social movements and movement formations. Other key areas for research include
more systematic attention to different geographic levels of the media opportunity structure
(neighborhood, city, state, national, and transnational, as well as translocal, media
opportunity structures). There is also a need to examine transmedia mobilization by political
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parties and by State agencies, as well as to explore transmedia mobilization by reactionary
social movement formations.
The analytical model proposed here could be greatly extended, and its impacts
enhanced, by additional attention to social movement outcomes. Social movement scholars
have developed an extensive literature focused on movement outcomes, including the
creation of diverse outcome typologies (for example, mobilization, political, and cultural
outcomes) and the development of various outcomes metrics (number of movement
participants, size of mobilizations, adoption of movement frames by the mass media,
incorporation of movement proposals into specific legislation, election of movement
candidates, and so on). Where appropriate, quantitative indicators should be applied, and
additional indicators developed for other components of the model. For example, social
movement scholars may wish to develop quantitative indicators of the media opportunity
structure. These might take the form of measures of social movement access to various
components of the media system, or indices of information access, as proposed by the
Knight Commission.
422
Measures of the media opportunity structure might also combine
quantitative and qualitative approaches, as in Sandra Ball-Rokeach’s work on media
ecology.
423
Future research on transmedia mobilization could focus more attention on
impacts, as shown by different outcome indicators.
Another key research gap lies in the need to further elaborate the serious dangers of
transmedia mobilization. Dangers that were touched on only briefly in this project but
deserve sustained attention include surveillance, data mining, and social network analysis
by enemies, censorship in social media spaces, and the incorporation of movement
communication practices as free labor for the profitability of corporate media platforms.

422
Knight Commission, 2009
423
Kim and Ball-Rokeach, 2006a, 2006b
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Transmedia mobilization makes social movements more visible to friends and enemies
alike, and movement participants often create and circulate content online without regard to
the potential implications for privacy and for future repression. The long-term persistence
of online data generates unforeseen effects, as movement participants who leave traces of
their daily practices in social media spaces may be retroactively held accountable for their
activity far in the future. This is especially problematic in environments of extreme State
repression, but potentially harmful to movement participants’ life chances even in the most
open environments. Overall, transmedia mobilization potentially enables heightened
surveillance by State, corporate, and countermovement actors.
While we have seen that social media platforms are great enablers of peer to peer
movement communication, at the same time over-reliance on commercial platforms leaves
social movement formations vulnerable to censorship. Censorship of movement media
takes place for a variety of reasons: content that contains music or video clips from
commercial sources is deleted by algorithms designed to eliminate copyright violations;
images of police, military, or vigilante brutality are removed based on violations of Terms
of Service that disallow graphic display of violence; group accounts and pages are deleted
for advocating positions seen by site moderators as too extreme. Site Terms of Service
rarely leave space for movement actors to take any legal action against providers for hiding
or deleting their content or social network accounts. In some countries, the State requires
service providers to implement extensive content filtering, and in most countries, almost all
commercial sites cooperate extensively with law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Most of the self-documentation of struggles that takes place in the immigrant rights
movement in L.A. is being circulated through appropriated space on commercial sites like
MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. While movement media finds broad audiences via
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these spaces, at the same time movement mediamakers are contributing to the profitability
of transnational communication firms, some of which (especially Rupert Murdoch’s Fox
News) are active mouthpieces for anti-immigrant sentiment. Many movement activists I
talked to were quite aware and self-critical of their own use of corporate tools to do
movement work. They use these spaces strategically because of their ease of use and in
order to reach wide audiences. However, if autonomous alternatives were available many
would use them. On the margins, some media activists are working to construct a stronger
autonomous communication infrastructure, built in decentralized fashion using Free and
Open Source Software, but these tools would be more widely used if they were more
visible and more user friendly. Since corporate SNS already have massive audiences,
autonomous tools have much less chance of uptake even if they are functionally equivalent
or superior. However, this can change rapidly during moments of great crisis, ruptures in
the glossy facade of friendly corporate culture, or at other moments based on the fickle
feelings of the multitude. Additional research into these dynamics would be welcome.
Despite these and other knowledge gaps, the research findings of this dissertation
have real implications for communicative practice in social movements. The last section is a
discussion of these implications.

Implications for social movements
One of the main aims of communication for social change specifically, and action
research more broadly, is to develop new knowledge together with the community of study
in order to advance theory and practice within that community. In accordance with that aim,
this dissertation ends with a summary of the implications of the research findings for social
movements. The points highlighted here are based on my own interpretation of the project’s
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research findings, drawn from the large body of primary materials gathered from
participatory workshops, movement media, and semi structured interviews. In addition, all
interviewees were asked to reflect on what they felt the most important goals of the
immigrant rights movement should be with respect to communication practices, and to
imagine and describe the media landscape they would like to see in five years’ time. I have
tried to incorporate all of the key points made by interviewees in response to this invitation
to imagine the future of social movement media practices.
Analysis of the media opportunity structure
Very few actors in the immigrant rights movement in L.A. have taken the time to
analyze the media opportunity structure. This project demonstrates that social movement
formations would benefit greatly if they took the time to do so, since changes in the media
opportunity structure have implications for the strategies and tactics they choose to employ.
In plain language, this means that effective social movements think about who they are
trying to reach with their actions, research which media platforms and spaces will be most
effective at reaching that group of people, and shape their communication strategies
accordingly. This form of analysis needs to be iterative and built into overall movement
strategy, since the media opportunity structure involves rapidly changing platforms, tools,
and services. The process involves learning about the audiences and reach of various print,
TV, radio, and online news media, as well as blogs, social media, and mobile media
services and platforms. Movements can also take advantage of the new media opportunity
structure by developing relationships with and allies among journalists, bloggers, and
media makers across all platforms.
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Transmedia mobilization strategy
This project also argues that social movements that want to take advantage of the
new media opportunity structure must think about how they can involve their social base in
making media about the movement. Media texts created by the movement base can then be
aggregated, remixed, more widely circulated, and amplified across platforms by transmedia
organizers. Transmedia mobilization also means systematically linking movement media
texts in any one channel to the broader movement narrative across media platforms. For
example, interviews with broadcast media should always mention a website or an SMS
number where the viewer or listener can find out more. If a movement participant creates an
interesting video about an action, a link to the video can be included in the press release that
is sent to mass media reporters, a high quality version can be made available for download
by TV journalists, online news sites and local bloggers can be contacted to embed the video
in their sites, and so on. Transmedia mobilization also requires reconceiving the organizers’
role, from content creator to curator. Part of the responsibility of effective transmedia
organizers is to constantly pay attention to media created by the movement base. When they
find something powerful, transmedia organizers repost it on their sites, send it to their
social networks, and try to get it picked up by broadcast media. These practices privilege
participation by the social base of the movement in messaging, framing, and the
construction of larger movement narratives, and help build movement identity among those
who participate. Those social movement formations that are willing to relax top-down
control over messaging and framing will benefit from stronger movement identity, greater
participation, and ultimately, more power among the social base of the movement.
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The praxis of digital media literacy
Especially for movements with a social base that is largely excluded from the digital
public sphere, it is important to develop a praxis of digital media literacy that links training
in new media tools and skills directly to popular education and day to day movement
building. This project demonstrates that the praxis of digital media literacy is most effective
when it is ongoing and takes place as much as possible across the movement formation,
including core organizers, staff, volunteers, and the social base. Some organizations wait
for ‘experts’ to train them, but this is not likely to be an effective long term strategy.
Movement actors can strengthen the praxis of digital media literacy by sharing tools and
skills in both formal and informal settings across movement formations and networks.
Regular, hands-on, skill sharing labs, workshops, and practices, open to all movement
actors, can greatly strengthen the movement’s capacity for transmedia mobilization. The
more people in the movement base that learn to make, remix, and circulate media across
platforms, the more powerful the movement formation becomes.
This research also indicates that social movement actors should challenge the
tendency to assume that media production is too complex or too expensive. Effective digital
media production is increasingly fast, cheap, and DIY. Movements with few resources can
still use free online tools to make quick, inexpensive, multimedia that tells their story
effectively. Expert advice or internalized fears about ‘production values’ should never be
allowed to hamper the creative appropriation of digital media for movement ends. Videos
with high production values can be important tools if the resources are available, but
movement formations do not need big budgets to have big impacts. Those that make a
practice of regularly producing and circulating their own media improve their skills and
abilities over time.
269
Physical media laboratories can quickly become key spaces for the praxis of digital
media literacy and effective transmedia mobilization. Movement organizations and
formations that invest in creating or improving digital media labs expand critical
opportunities to build community around digital media tools and skills. It is possible to
transform existing computer labs that often sit empty or are used only for basic computer
literacy learning, or for personal use, into hubs of transmedia mobilization. Social
movement organizations have, for the most part, not thought creatively about how to find
staff or volunteers to help make this happen. Partnerships with community colleges,
universities, and other institutions that have students skilled in digital media production are
one possibility that has been underutilized in Los Angeles. Movement organizations might
also explore pooling resources with others to help make dynamic media labs a reality.
In the long run, many organizers interviewed for this project also feel that social
movements should consider the possibilities of community controlled communications
infrastructure. For example, although cable access TV stations are rapidly disappearing,
some still have resources to teach video production; the long struggle by microradio
activists has finally begun to bear fruit in the form of new Low Power FM licenses
(although, at the time of writing, these are not yet available in Los Angeles); organizers in
Little Tokyo created a community owned wireless network, and so on. Community
controlled media and communications infrastructure, combined with the praxis of digital
media literacy, is a movement outcome itself and also has the potential to be a decisive
factor in additional movement outcomes.
Horizontal movement structures
The structure of social movement formations shapes, but does not determine, the
ways in which they use the tools of networked communication. Social movement
270
formations in the U.S. context have become increasingly professionalized and vertically
structured, in part due to the influence of private foundations and the rise of the issue-based
nonprofit sector. Within the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, some
professionalized nonprofits and vertical organizations have been able to take advantage of
the new media opportunity structure and engage in transmedia mobilization, when their
leadership has been open to shifting their communication strategy away from a top-down
model towards a horizontalist or popular communication model. However, staff, especially
younger staff, within professional nonprofits are often frustrated by organizational
leadership’s refusal to abandon top down communication practices. By contrast,
horizontally structured movement formations have been more easily able to effectively
deploy transmedia mobilization.
Regardless of the decision-making structure of the movement formation, I argue in
this dissertation that horizontalist principles are essential for those that want to take
advantage of the possibilities of the new media opportunity structure. First, social media is
a conversation, not a broadcast. Movement actors that try to control the message in social
media space will fail, since no one wants to participate if they are not allowed to speak.
Second, it is crucial to let people innovate, play, and take risks. Those that try to over-plan
social media strategy will never get off the ground, while those that allow interested
movement participants (for example) to set up accounts and play with new online services
and networks, then incorporate them into overall communication strategy if they seem to be
working well, will have more success. Movement formations must also avoid technological
‘lock-in:’ tools that do not seem to be working should be dropped in favor of others that
seem more intuitive or effective. Third, and perhaps most important, effective transmedia
mobilization means opening the movement voice to the social base of the movement. If the
271
movement base wants to push messages other than those preferred by the movement
leadership, then the leadership needs to either do a better job of articulating the importance
of their frame, or a better job of actively listening to what their social base demands. The
solution, in a social movement formation that actually wants to build shared power, can
never be to silence or marginalize the voices of the social base. Effective movement
leadership respects and values community knowledge and information. An effective praxis
of digital media literacy and a strong transmedia mobilization strategy thus also serves to
constantly strengthen movement accountability.
Finally, participants in this study emphasized over and over again the importance of
sustainability, self-sufficiency, and freedom from foundations. A diversified stream of
resources is important not so much to avoid explicit control by funders (although that does
occasionally present a problem), but in order to escape the long term process of social
movement professionalization that tends to shift movements away from value-driven base
building and towards issue-based, top-down (expert-driven) models of social change. This
is not to say that social justice oriented foundations cannot play a positive role in
encouraging transmedia mobilization among social movement formations, but so far, most
have not. Exceptions during the period of this research included the Funding Exchange’s
Media Justice Fund, now closed, and certain program officers within the Ford Foundation,
the Open Society Institute, and a handful of others. While these programs supported a great
deal of important community-based media work, most of them were also explicitly focused
on getting CBOs involved in media and communications policy battles. The California
Emerging Technology Fund, Zero Divide, and the Instructional Television Foundation
were also all important sources of funding for actors within the immigrant rights
movement, but mostly (with the exception of Zero Divide) focused on a ‘capacity building’
272
model that was divorced from a theory of social change. Foundations were thus willing to
fund CBOs either to train community members in basic computing skills, develop
professionalized public relations strategies, or develop so-called ‘new media’ strategies that
were geared to using social media as a broadcast and branding tool or to building email lists
for fundraising. Some funders were willing to support community mediamaking as long as
it also contained a component of media policy advocacy at the federal level. Yet we have
seen that movements are most effectively able to incorporate networked communication
tools and skills when their base is digitally literate, when they use digital media tools and
practices in everyday resistance, and when they are willing to shift from top-down
communication strategies to horizontalist approaches that involve the base as much as
possible in production and circulation of transmedia movement texts. A long term vision
for community control of media thus requires a diversified funding model that does not
remain wholly dependent on foundations for the bulk of resources.
The immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles has already built innovative forms
of transmedia mobilization on top of existing media practices of their base. The steady
growth of read-write digital literacy makes possible new practices of richly mediated
translocal mobilization and ad hoc movement formation. By beginning from the actually
existing practices of social movement formations and tracing the way that media is created,
circulated, appropriated, and transformed across various platforms, we gain a more detailed
and deeper understanding of social movements in the 21st century. By listening to the
experiences of those involved in day to day organizing within the immigrant rights
movement, and by learning from those experiences, it is possible to build stronger, more
democratic social movements in the information age.
273
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APPENDICES
Appendix 1: Partial List of Movement Actors Connected to the Study

American Federation of Teachers (AFT)
Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca en Los Angeles (APPO-LA)
Asia Pacific American Legal Center (APALC)
California Emerging Technologies Fund
Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights LA (CHIRLA)
Community Partners
Copwatch LA - Guerilla Chapter
Data Center
Ford Foundation
Free Speech Radio News
Frente Contra las Redadas
Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB)
Garment Worker Center (GWC)
Institute of Popular Education of Southern California / Instituto de Educación
Popular del Sur de California (IDEPSCA)
Insurgencia Femenina
Killradio
Koreatown Immigrant Worker Alliance (KIWA)
KPFK
La Otra Campaña del Otro Lado
Liberty Hill Foundation
Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE)
Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN)
Los Angeles Indymedia
March 25 Coalition
Media Justice Fund
Multi-Ethnic Immigrant Worker Organizing Network (MIWON)
National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON)
People’s Network in Defense of Human Rights
Pilipino Worker Center
Producciones Cimarrones
Radio Tijeras
Revolutionary Autonomous Communities
RISE Movement
Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
Slaptech
Social Justice organizations
Soul Rebel Radio
South Asian Network
South Central Farmers
290
Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE)
Taxi Workers’ Alliance
Underground Undergrads
UNITE-HERE
Voces de Libertad
Voces Moviles (VozMob)
Zero Divide

291
Appendix 2: Interviewees
I conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with participants in the immigrant rights
movement. This appendix provides short descriptions of the interviewees in order to orient
the reader. To preserve the anonymity of the interviewees, the descriptions are of a very
general character. Please note that the initials of all interviewees have been changed, and no
longer reflect their real names.

BC, radio producer, interviewed July 2008.
BD, day laborer, interviewed October 2009.
BH, staff at a community based organization, interviewed February 2010.
CP, funder, interviewed March 2008.
CS, volunteer with a news website, interviewed January 2009.
DM, volunteer with various media projects, interviewed July 2008.
EN, high school student, interviewed August 2009.
EQ, director of a small nonprofit, interviewed May 2009.
GN, video producer, interviewed December 2007.
HH, taxi worker, interviewed November 2009.
IQ, funder, interviewed September 2008.
KB, volunteer for multiple collectives, interviewed July 2009.
KD, staff at a community based organization, interviewed July 2009.
KL, tech activist, interviewed September 2008.
LN, IT staff at a large nonprofit, interviewed February 2010.
NB, community organizer / media maker, interviewed April 2009.
ND, immigrant rights lawyer, interviewed April 2010.
NH, household worker, interviewed August 2009.
NI, student, interviewed May 2008.
NN, day laborer, interviewed October 2009.
NQ, community organizer, interviewed February 2010.
OE, staff at a medium size nonprofit, interviewed January 2010.
PS, organizer with an indigenous organization, interviewed May 2009.
QH, labor organizer, interviewed October 2008.
QX, director of a community based organization, interviewed April 2008.
RF, student and media maker, interviewed November 2009.
TD, staff member of a community based organization, interviewed July 2008.
TH, member of various horizontalist collectives, interviewed February 2010.
TX, employee of a small nonprofit organization, interviewed March 2010.
WO, public interest lawyer, interviewed April 2009.
XD, social media consultant, interviewed February 2010.
ZP, radio host, interviewed February 2009.
292
Appendix 3: Interview guide

Overview
Organization: Briefly describe the organization or network you work with, its main
areas of work, how you frame your work, and what social movements you consider
yourself part of. And, what’s the best source for more overview information?
Personal engagement: How and why did you get involved?
Daily communication practices: Describe day to day communication practices. Within
organization? Between staff/leadership of movement network? With base? With alternative
and popular media? Ethnic media? 'Public' media? Mass (Anglo) media?
Media use by those you are trying to organize: What media does the community you
are trying to organize use most? What are their three most popular communication channels
(specific radio stations, TV channels, newspapers, etc)?
Is it the same for men and women? Younger and older people?
How do you know?
Networks: Are you, your organization, or movement, part of a network or networks?
What are they?
Are any of them transnational? How has it helped or made things more difficult to be
part of a network?
Describe how communication flows through the network.

Mobilization
Victory: Describe something you consider to be a major victory of your organization
or of the movement.
Crisis: How about something that was a major setback or crisis?
Communication: Describe your own communication practice during these key
moments.

Access
Relationships to the media: Describe the movement’s relationship to: mass (Anglo)
media, ethnic media, 'public' media, independent and popular media, Print press, radio, TV,
Blogs, Social Network Sites, mobile phones, other forms of media.
293
Relationship to the net: Describe how your organization and the movement use the
net. In what ways has the net helped you, and in what ways does it present challenges or
dangers?
Barriers: What do you think are the key barriers for your organization in gaining
access to the media?
What about to new communication tools and skills?
Do you think these are the same barriers faced by other groups or networks in the
movement?
What do you think the key barriers are for your base or members?

Appropriation
Popular Communication strategy/practice: Is there or has there ever been any? If so,
describe it. What worked/failed, and how do you know?
Describe an example of how the immigrant rights movement has effectively used the
mass media, and an example of how the movement has effectively used new media.
Where do you get ideas for how to use new media as an organizing tool?
Are there specific people, organizations, trainings, examples you look to?

Specialists/Professionalization
Specialists: Describe your following relationships:
With tech-activists in the movement?
What about movement media makers?
Do you have a dedicated communications person on staff?
Do you work with outside communication consultants or strategists?
Do you have an IT person you work with, or software programmer?
How about an online organizer?
Do you use any corporate application service providers, (for example, Democracy In
Action?) Talk about that experience, what has been good and bad.

Structure
Who? Describe who your organization is accountable to, and the mechanisms for
accountability.
294
Structure: What is the decision-making structure in your organization or network?
Technology: Do you think communication technology has any impact on
accountability in the movement? If so, what?
Gender, Sexual Identity, Race/Ethnicity, Class, Age: of staff/leadership; of
membership; of communication activists. How do these impact communication practice in
the movement?
Funders: What role do funders play in movement communication tools, skills, and
practices?

The Long Term
History: Has your use of media and communication technology changed over time?
How so?
Desired capabilities: are there communication projects or goals that you have as an
organization or as a movement? What would you like to see in 5 year's time?
Barriers and blocks: What is in the way of realizing your best case scenario?

Thank you so much for your time!

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Asset Metadata

Creator Costanza-Chock, Sasha (author)

Core Title Se ve, se siente: transmedia mobilization in the Los Angeles immigrant rights movement

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 08/05/2010

Defense Date 06/01/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag communication,Communication for Social Change,community organizing,digital media,immigrant rights,immigration,Internet,literacy,Los Angeles,media opportunity structure,media studies,mobilization,OAI-PMH Harvest,organizing,political economy of communication,political theory,praxis,radio,social justice,social movements,Transmedia

Place Name California (states), Los Angeles (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Castells, Manuel (committee chair), Gross, Larry (committee chair), Anderson, Steven F. (committee member)

Creator Email costanza@usc.edu,schock@riseup.net

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3313

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