Abstract
This article discusses the Mega Marchas in Greater Los Angeles, a series of massive protests and actions that emerged in the spring of 2006 to oppose a draconian immigration bill passed in December 2005, by a Republican majority in the US House of Representatives. Using a neo-Gramscian framework, I describe the origins of the Mega Marchas, their dynamics and the decline of the movement that made them possible. Grounded in my analysis of 12 interviews with leading activists from diverse sectors, and hundreds of hours of participation and observation of political activities around the 2006 Mega Marchas, including meetings, conferences, press conferences, lobbying and strategy sessions, I argue that the 2006 Mega Marchas constitute a counter-hegemonic moment in the history of Latino social movements. Moreover, the article challenges the view that the Mega Marchas were organized spontaneously or by radio personalities. I end with a brief discussion on the current economic crisis and the Obama administration and their implications for the future of the Migrante Struggle.
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Notes
- 1.
The Migrante Struggle in the twenty-first century is comprised of immediate and strategic goals. Immediately, it seeks to achieve the legalization of 12 million undocumented workers and put an end to militarized migration enforcement at the border and interior of the United States. The long-term strategic goal of the Migrante Struggle is to challenge and transform the ideological and structural conditions (racism and global capitalism) that force people to migrate and that justify state and civil society violence against them.
- 2.
Resource mobilization theory, most often identified with the work of Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, focuses on the ability of individuals and organizations to mobilize resources on behalf of their cause or constituents (Tarrow and Tilly, 2001). Political opportunities theory, developed by Doug McAdam (1999), provides a corollary to the former in that it adds the idea that organizations can effectively mobilize when there are openings created in the political and social system. The latter framework is often associated with what scholars call New Social Movements (NSM) in reference to movements of ethnic minorities, women, and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community of the 1960s and 1970s (Mayer and Roth, 1995). Scholars from this tradition contend that these new movements developed in the aftermath of the post-modern break, which in their view occurred in the late 1970s. In this perspective, identity as opposed to class becomes a central axis for developing oppositional consciousness. Each one of these approaches could potentially offer insight into the understanding of the development of the 2006 Mega Marchas. For instance, traditional social movement literature could be used to explain the role of media organization, the political opportunities created by H.R. 4437, and how a pan-Latino identity was used by the organizers as a tool for mobilization. While all of these factors certainly played a role in the formation of the Mega Marchas, the theories from which they stem were developed to explain preexisting social movement phenomena in the United States before the development of the 2006 Mega Marchas, which I contend goes beyond the limits of traditional social movement and coalition literature in both their dynamics and scope.
- 3.
Terms like neo-liberalism and globalization are highly contested. Nonetheless, I use the former to refer to the free market ideology behind capitalist globalization, and the latter to refer to the latest phase in the evolution of the world capitalist system characterized by the transnationalization of production and finance and the emergence of a truly global economy.
- 4.
The historic bloc that Gramsci wrote about was often a reactionary one comprised of the dominant economic groups, intellectuals and groups in civil society. Nonetheless, I am taking the liberty to use the term historic bloc as a heuristic device. I use it to refer to a bloc organized by organic intellectuals who come from the mass movement and who eradicated the contradictions between intellectuals and non-intellectuals, leaders and non-leaders that Gramsci wrote about in his notes on the philosophy of praxis.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the organizers who shared their analysis of the Mega Marchas for this article. I also want to thank the close friends and colleagues who provided invaluable feedback on this article: Ray Rocco, Mark Sawyer, Esther Portillo, Mark Jimenez, Chris Zepeda and René Francisco Poitevin. Finally, I thank my editor, Sally Ades, and the anonymous reviewers and editorial staff of Latino Studies.
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Gonzales, A. The 2006 Mega Marchas in Greater Los Angeles: Counter-Hegemonic Moment and the Future of El Migrante Struggle. Lat Stud 7, 30–59 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2009.2
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Keywords
- globalization
- immigrant mobilization
- latino social movements
- hegemony
- latino politics