Organizing MySpace: Youth Walkouts, Pleasure, Politics, and New Media.

Abstract

While the major urban centers around the country were flooded by millions of protesters demanding immigrant rights in March 2006, the San Francisco Bay Area remained relatively quiet. A coalition of organizers, including Centro Legal de la Raza, Deporten A La Migra, and the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition mobilized a one-week hunger strike, creating media visibility and political pressure despite their smaller numbers. Approximately 30 strike organizers and 15 huegalistas de hambre camped on the concrete in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco, and operated as a condensing point for a series of small actions, including several marches and rallies, none of which exceeded a few hundred people. On the morning of March 27th, the organizers broke camp and prepared to march to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein's office to demand changes to the bill (1) being constructed by her senate committee. Unlike the millions of marchers in Los Angeles, and hundreds of thousands in San Jose the previous weekends, the San Franciscans who had rallied hundreds of thousands to protest the war in Iraq initiated little activity around immigration policy. Perhaps the mainstream media had successfully convinced the Bay Area's liberal White population that immigrant rights were a Latino issue. In fact, the massive marches around the country were unprecedented both in their size, but also in their composition as largely working-class, nonpartisan, Brown people. Neither law enforcement nor organizers expected a mass mobilization. It was a quiet Monday morning on March 27th, with Homeland Security officers nearly outnumbering organizers. Local police expected a turnout so small that they were already informing organizers that they would restrict the march to the city sidewalks. Around 11 am, a collective cry went up on the east side of the camp, as a band of youth waving flags and carrying pickets arrived at the camp. Within minutes, another cheer went up at the west side of the camp, as another group arrived. The students are here! an organizer told me. Soon, teenagers had flooded the Federal Plaza, and the tall downtown buildings became an echo chamber of cheering and chanting as groups of high school students converged on the camp. Eventually, 3,000 to 5,000 people closed down Market Street, the main thoroughfare through downtown San Francisco, to rally in front of Senator Feinstein's office. A few hours later, Feinstein announced in committee that she opposed the most repressive aspects of the proposed legislation that would criminalize service providers and family members of undocumented immigrants. Youth played a large role in organizing for immigrant rights in cities throughout the country, but in San Francisco they became the critical mass necessary for a significant mobilization. This article explores the nature of fast organizing among youth made possible through the advent of new media, particularly instantaneous text messaging and virtual communities formed in cyberspace. However, this study affords an analysis of not just new media, but of the contemporary terrain of youth organizing and popular culture. Problem Statement Analyzing effective youth actions is critical for developing a postmodern theory of social change, as such actions reveal both the potential of new media and of youth agency. Specifically, effective youth actions should inform our thinking around the democratizing power of youth popular culture, and the theorization of power itself. Youth popular culture is frequently equated with popular media, and disparaged by critics as dominated and debilitating (e.g., Hirsch, 1987). Without direct observation of the effective use of power and the development of critical resistance through youth popular culture, any study runs the risk of reifying predisposed essentializations of power and culture. Power is similarly philosophized to be a corrupting and abusive force, by both canonized philosophers and critical theorists alike (e. …

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