The Protests of 2006

What Were They, How Do We Understand Them, Where Do We Go?

Irene Bloemraad, Kim Voss, and Taeku Lee

In a short span of twelve weeks between mid-February and early May 2006, an estimated 3.7 to 5 million people took to the streets in over 160 cities across the United States to rally for immigrant rights. Marches and demonstrations were organized from Anchorage, Alaska, to Miami, Florida, and forty-two states in between. The marches brought together groups large and small, from the 24 people counted at a protest in Anchorage to as many as 700,000 people in the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles. Often wearing white T-shirts, waving American flags and, at times, flags from their homelands, the marchers included people of all ages, from babies in strollers and teenagers walking with their parents to gray-haired seniors in wheelchairs. The marchers spanned economic conditions and came from all walks of life, from day laborers and janitors to professionals and politicians, including the future U.S. president, Barack Obama. Together, they chanted slogans such as "Today we march, tomorrow we vote," and "!Si, se puede!" (Yes, we can!). The majority of those who took to the streets were Latino, but people of European, African, and Asian heritage marched too. The group of "Latinos" who participated was diverse, including immigrants from over a dozen Spanish-speaking countries, their U.S.-born children, and Chicano or Hispanic Americans whose families' U.S. roots stretch back a hundred years or more.

The sheer scope of the protests and the numbers involved are of historic proportions. During the heyday of the civil rights movements, in 1963, 250,000 people flocked to the Mall in Washington DC to hear Martin Luther King Jr. (JBHE Foundation 2003). In 1969, those who marched on Washington to protest American involvement in Vietnam numbered between 250,000 and 320,000 (Cicchetti et al. 1971). Looking back to the nineteenth century, some 300,000 to 500,000 people took to the streets to militate for labor rights, culminating in the famous Chicago Haymarket protest of 1886 (Avrich 1984; Foner 1986). Strikingly, none of these prior protests—historic moments in the annals of contentious politics in the United States—matched the largest May 1 rallies for immigrant rights in 2006.

Beyond the United States, the marches of 2006 were likely the largest protests over immigrant rights seen in the world, and they probably figure among the largest demonstrations held in Western nations in recent de cades. Especially noteworthy, the 2006 U.S. mobilizations were peaceful and without a major violent incident: there were no demonstrator/police melees, not a single person died, and not a single car was burned, unlike other twenty-first-century protests and riots over immigrant rights and race relations in cities such as Birmingham, Paris, and Sydney.

The scope, scale, and peaceful nature of the protests demand explanation; this is one of the goals of our volume. Activism outside "normal" electoral or institutional politics suggests that standard political science accounts of behavioral politics or Latino/minority politics must be expanded beyond voting or contacting elected officials to include contentious action. At the same time, the protests do not quite fit within existing social movements scholarship: the strategies used were tried and true tactics employed by past social movements, but the nature of the 2006 mobilizations was unusual. The protests rapidly ballooned to unimagined proportions, were sustained for about three months, but then collapsed as quickly as they started. Why, like a July 4 fireworks display, did the marches end as abruptly as they began? It is unclear whether the 2006 protests better represent "spontaneous" collective action, as articulated by an older generation of social scientists and recently retheorized (Killian 1984; Biggs 2003, 2005), or a "sustained" movement in line with most contemporary political process and new social movement models of contentious action.

Much of the research reported here suggests that the rapid, large-scale mobilization arose, in part, due to the loose network of local groups who received support from actors like the media or Catholic Church, organizations that could send widespread messages about the protests. We also suggest that the protests were animated by an almost paradoxical mix of threat—from legislative action against undocumented immigrants and anti-Latino or anti-immigrant sentiment more generally—and faith in the political system. Perhaps for this reason, there is evidence that some of the energies animating the 2006 street protests became channeled into 2008 electoral participation. These dynamics, if accurate, reinforce social movement scholars' argument about the importance of organizations for contentious politics. However, they challenge the idea that, for mobilization, social movements need openings in the political opportunities structure—2006 was more about threat than opportunity—and they challenge hard and fast distinctions between contentious and electoral political engagement.

The 2006 protests were remarkable in another way: they focused on, and were in substantial part animated by, people without citizenship in the political system they challenged. Most...