In early 2006, millions of people participated in nearly 400 immigrant rights demonstrations across the United States. Why and how did this extraordinary and unprecedented wave of collective action occur? Why did the size of the protests vary so much across different U.S. cities? What led to the precipitous decline of the protest wave a few months later? These are among the central questions of Zepeda-Millán's Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism.
The protests “all had a common target: The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005” (2). The proposed law (H.R. 4437), would have “severely increase[d] border control and interior immigration enforcement measures [and] sought to change the penalty for being undocumented from a mere civil violation to a federal felony. The bill also intended to punish individuals who assisted—even in the most basic ways—any of the nation's estimated 11 million ‘people without papers’” (2). In December 2005, H.R. 4437 passed in the House on a sharply partisan vote. In early 2006, desperate to stop the bill from becoming law, millions of immigrants and their allies hit the streets in protest. This part of the story is well-known. What has been missing until now is a “systematic analysis of the 2006 immigrant rights protest wave” (3) from the ground up, and Chris Zepeda-Millán delivers exactly this, in Latino Mass Mobilization.
Why do some threats, he asks, spur collective action while others tend to suppress it? Zepeda-Millán's analysis of the role threats can play in mobilization and demobilization is among the major theoretical contributions of the book. He distinguishes between single source/multiple source and narrow/broad threats. He also points to threat timing and visibility. The bottom line: the kind of threat that H.R. 4437 posed—single source, generalized in scope, looming, and highly visible—helped spur mobilization. This insight is a significant advance on prior immigration research.
A related contribution is the book's explanation of “why and how nativism motivates Latinos to participate in collective action” (17). Employing a process tracing approach in three case cities (Fort Myers, FL; Los Angeles; and New York City) the author reports surprising findings. For example, prior research suggests that undocumented immigrants are unlikely activists due to risks that inhere in their legal status. Yet this was not the case in Fort Myers, where the undocumented and their allies were active and visible. Another established theory asserts that “activists usually attempt to stage large demonstrations to draw the attention of news,” yet it worked the other way around in Los Angeles, where activists “used Spanish-language media to amplify their calls for action” (203). Moreover, it stands to reason that all immigrant communities might have felt threatened in the face of H.R. 4437, but Zepeda-Millán's New York City case study tells a different story. Why? Because that city's “more racially and ethnically diverse immigrant population resulted in not all of the city's immigrant groups feeling—though many arguably were—equally threatened by H.R. 4437” (102).
This brings me to Latino panethnicity. Not so long ago, an open question in Latino studies was whether or not Latinos would coalesce as such. Zepeda-Millán answers this question inconclusively. On the one hand, the author makes a convincing case that threats posed by H.R. 4437 “triggered feelings of linked fate and racial group consciousness amongst millions of Latinos in general” (196). Merely “‘looking Latino’ in America” he asserts, “can make one vulnerable to acts of random violence” (141). On the other hand, he says that “anti-immigrant sentiments have created and sustained a sense of collective identity among people of Mexican descent in particular” (196, my emphasis). Along these lines, he found that “cities with the biggest demonstrations had more homogeneous foreign-born populations with larger numbers of undocumented Mexican immigrants and people of Mexican descent” (127). What are we to make of the fact that Latino mass mobilization in the United States in 2006 was mostly Mexican-American and Mexican mass mobilization? Put differently, while the author proves there was no “sleeping giant” in 2006 (1), did he demonstrate that Mexican-Americans and undocumented Mexican immigrants were the most “woke”?
Ultimately, we learn that the demonstrations of 2006 were strong enough to kill a bill (H.R. 4437) but not to pass one (with a path to citizenship). Indeed, once the immediate threat of H.R. 4437 had passed, organizers were unable to “continue to get people to take to the streets” (133). The author's explanation for movement decline is clear, innovative, and credible. Threats that are broad in scope and deriving from multiple sources—think raids, deportations, hate crimes, state and local laws, etc.— “can lead to the suppression of immigrant contention” (136).
Latino Mass Mobilization ends with the 2016 election. Observing Donald Trump's victory, Zepeda-Millán anticipates, and is somewhat optimistic, that the president's overt nativism and racism might motivate more immigrant Latinos to naturalize and vote in future election cycles. However, one might also argue that the very nature of threats posed by the Trump Administration—think raids, deportations, hate crimes, minority voter suppression, rising white nativism and “zero tolerance” immigration policy that rivals and arguably even tops H.R. 4437 in its draconian implications—could push the most vulnerable Latinos back into the shadows. Moreover, while Trump's nativist rhetoric helped drive an “unprecedented proportion of Latino voters (79%) to cast ballots for the Democratic ticket” in 2016 (212), Trump won anyway, in part because that very same nativist rhetoric appealed to millions of white voters.
This exceptional book should be close at hand for anyone who seeks to understand contemporary American immigration politics. The many contributions of this work—theoretical, substantive, and methodological—together generate a powerful analysis of the protest wave of 2006 and will help to inform whatever happens next in the ongoing and unfolding drama of American immigration politics and policy.
