![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
Increasingly, social movement organisations (SMOs) within the immigrant rights movement mobilise online. Although this seems an unlikely tactic for a movement whose constituents are often on the wrong side of the digital divide, the increasingly frequent use of various communications technologies works to enable communication with other activists and raise awareness among the general public. Utilising a cultural sociological perspective, this article examines the ways in which the immigrant rights movement uses various symbols to perform national identity online. The goal is to put meaning and the process of meaning making squarely at the centre of analytical attention. Building on the multiple traditions perspective on American national identity, the article explores how several national-level SMOs engage symbols to perform immigrants’ belonging to the USA.
Funding
This research has been supported by a generous grant for the Employment of Newly Graduated Doctors of Science for Scientific Excellence (CZ.1.07/2.3.00/30.0009), co-financed from the European Social Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.
Notes
[1] At the same time, but much less publicised, there are a growing number of municipalities that have undertaken actions to assist rather than attack immigrants. ‘Sanctuary cities’ such as San Francisco, Atlanta and New York have adopted various policies, including direction to law enforcement not to question the immigration status of residents and issuance of identification cards regardless of their status.
[2] At the time, Central American refugees were caught in the net of Cold War politics; thus, Salvadorans fleeing a right-wing regime had a difficult time achieving refugee status, while those fleeing the Marxist-inspired Sandinista government in Nicaragua did not.
[3] I employ the terms America/American as they are used in the vernacular, to mean only the USA, while at the same time aware of their problematic nature. Henceforth, I dispense with quotation marks for ease of reading.
[4] Cultural extension of a script occurs when its meaning is convincingly communicated from an actor to an audience.
[5] DREAMers are those unauthorised youth brought to the USA as young children who would benefit from the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, which in some version has been before Congress several times since it was first introduced in 2001.
[6] I wanted to capture the activity around May 1, a holiday on which the movement has traditionally organised widespread and coordinated action.
[7] Even though it is not the focus of this analysis, no discussion of American national identity would be complete without at least a brief mention of its most explicit symbol – the national flag. Within the immigrant rights movement, the US flag serves as a powerful symbol in two ways – through flying and flagging. First, there is the proudly flying flag featured in photos of participants at protests and marches. Second, there is the unwaved flag that Billig (Citation1995) describes as so crucial an item of ‘banal nationalism’: ‘Daily, the nation is indicated, or “flagged”, in the lives of its citizenry’ (6). This flag is the background for many of the visuals the SMOs produce online, such as Facebook cover photos and graphics. It was the third most popular single representation (after children and politics), appearing in 8.2 per cent of the photos and graphics in my sample.
[9] See for example, ‘Open Letter to the Immigrant Rights Movement: Our Families Can't Wait’, signed by Dream Action Coalition (DAC), at http://ymlp.com/xgjuhqsygmgu.
[12] There has been a dramatic shift in the discourse on immigrants among labour unions. Throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, a sense of nativism prevailed, with attitudes toward legal immigrants improving modestly in the 1960s. It was not until the 2000s, after an AFL-CIO Executive Council resolution that officially reversed previous support for employer sanctions and called for an amnesty programme, that widespread, nationwide support for the unauthorised blossomed.
[38] http://immigrationforum.org/legislation/comprehensive-immigration-reform-in-the-113th-congress.
[43] As of the publication of this article, the November 2014 action has not yet been implemented, due to a lawsuit brought about on behalf of 26 states.