Solidaridad: Organizing the Web

By Adriana Gallardo, July 30, 2008

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Youth organizers turn to the web to mobilize for immigrant rights.

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When Chicago resident Cynthia Mazariegos found herself single-handedly trying to organize a march for immigrants right after her college graduation, she didn’t have much support from her classmates. She didn’t let her peers' lack of interest slow her down. Setting up groups on Facebook, Mazariegos made event entries and sent out constant reminders in the days leading up to the march.

She also made it a priority to reach out to those without internet access. Dedicating one of her Sundays to a local church, she spoke at four Masses to mobilize her community to march.

When the day of the march came and more people responded to her Facebook invitations than to her face-to-face work, she was surprised. While her in-person organizing failed to produce desired results, she still insists that if today's net-savvy young activists want to be effective, they must also reach out to those without internet access.

"There’s a whole sector of people who do not have access to computers who still need to be mobilized. It's not honest solidarity if we only organize online and forget about those with the lived experience," she says.

Working the Web

Armed with web tools, America's immigration rights movement is being energized by young people. From video games to Facebook, members of today's generation are making it clear that they won't rest until they're utilizing all the resources available to them.

Today, online social networks are unanimous with youth. Sites like Facebook and MySpace often double as political organizing tools. Facebook now boasts more than 90 million active users, making it the sixth-most-trafficked website in the world. Its top competitor, MySpace, reports 230,000 new registrations each day. With such a broad swathe of youth participating, it's no wonder networking sites are a priority for organizers.

Tara Tidwell Cullen, communications manager for the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), firmly believes that networks like Facebook and MySpace can act as critical sources of information and activism for youth.

"People need to learn about the system by any means -- as long as they become educated about the injustices that are happening in the immigration system and especially inside the detention centers," says Tidwell Cullen. "The only way to ever change this is to have a strong base of people who will make the government accountable for how it treats immigrants."

It is estimated that the US government detains 27,500 immigrants every day and places them in more than 300 county jails and detention centers throughout America. NIJC uses YouTube to help get the word out, posting interviews with their clients that reflect the lack of due process many immigrants face after they have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

"The videos and audio on our website and YouTube provide a way for clients to talk about their experience in detention while remaining relatively anonymous. It is very important [for each of them] to have their own voice [when] describing what happened to them. We have received a lot of positive responses from these videos," says Tidwell Cullen.

The detention of unaccompanied children and youth is an injustice that young people can work to oppose in solidarity. Every year, thousands of children are arrested and put in the custody of the US Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The agency is responsible for the children until they are reunited with family or their legal status is changed.

"There are a lot of problems with child detention. Locking up kids who might not have had a say in the situation is a problem," says Tidwell Cullen. "It could be a good opportunity for youth to reach out to other kids facing this problem."

Loaded Game

There are now some very creative ways of learning how fellow youth are affected by current immigration laws. The interactive video game, "I Can End Deportation," (ICED) has provided an innovative way to educate and reframe the discourse on immigration. "ICED," also a play on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was released in February of this year.

Players navigate the day-to-day lives of five immigrant youth. Good moral choices and correct answers about immigration policy take players closer to obtaining legal status. In Level One, the challenge is to navigate the city while confronting common misconceptions about immigration law and stereotypes about immigrants. Level Two focuses on myths and facts about the detention system. The game comes with a curriculum designed for high schools and community groups to use in social studies and civics discussions.

Without any previous experience in game development, grad students Heidi Boisvert and Natalia Rodriguez partnered with Breakthrough TV to create the game as a class assignment.

Boisvert and Rodriguez continued to work on the assignment beyond the classroom, creating a three-dimensional game that could be downloaded for free. After numerous case studies, sampling over 100 youth from New York, the five characters were developed. Players can chose from Ayesa, an Indian green card holder; Suki, a Japanese student on a visa; Anna, a Polish orphan; Javier, an undocumented Mexican skateboarder; or Marc, a Haitian asylum seeker.

Balancing the legal jargon and the game concepts was not easy for the creators.

"Trying to include all of the legal concerns in the video concept without watering down the content was a very complex issue. You don't want to trivialize the issue by making it into a game and at the same time you have to keep it interesting for the players," says Boisvert, who now works as Breakthrough TV's multimedia manager. Boisvert's ultimate aim is to invoke action towards more comprehensive immigration laws.

"Our goal is to utilize social media to bring about public education around the issue," she says. "Once awareness is made, hopefully there will be some impetus to change these laws."

The Legacy of Online People Power

In 1994 when the internet and all its possibilities were beginning to take shape, a group of rebels from the southern jungles of Mexico taught the world what an allied electronic network could do. On January 1st, 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), took up arms against the Mexican government to demand autonomy after decades of government neglect and exploitation.

After the EZLN declared war against the Mexican state, the government quickly mobilized 15,000 troops to combat the rebels' efforts. When the fighting escalated, what could have turned into a massacre instead became a conflict of ideologies and interests thanks to the internet. The EZLN's most powerful weapon became the international attention its allies commanded through the web. The outrage generated online prompted a cease-fire within 12 days of the uprising. While the Mexican government controlled mass media, it had no grasp of what the internet could do.

Benjamin Anaya, Zapatista scholar and author, says the Zapatistas were the first to exploit creativity online and build a culture of followers from its website.

"Creativity is a must in any revolution. The Zapatistas knew this and generated a discourse online that ultimately became a method of survival in the 90s," says Anaya. "The internet gave them a common language with the rest of the world and creativity gave their revolution life, color, and memory."

Anaya sees similarities in the obstacles facing both the Zapatistas and the movement for immigrant rights in the United States.

"The immigration movement needs to reach out to build stronger ties with all nationalities. This is a labor that young people can do better than anyone else," he says. "Today's generations have to deal with immigration more directly than ever before. The advantage is that they are also living in a time when it's easier to connect with more people than ever."

Youth Organizing Youth

Dulce Mora, 25, has effectively navigated the technological divide between older immigration organizers and her peers. Mora has been active in the March 10th Movement for the last two years and has seen first-hand how tactics from youth can improve organizing. The March 10th Movement (named after the first massive march the group staged in downtown Chicago in 2006) now partners with the May 1st Youth Network. The network emerged to create a space for students and youth to share immigrants' rights efforts in Chicago. With 20 active members from local universities and high schools, the group meets on a monthly basis to keep each other up-to-date and to organize future efforts.

The youth network is comprised of members ages 18 to 25 representing various schools and affiliations. One of the goals of the group is to broaden the definition of "youth" within the movement.

"Most youth groups tend to focus on the DREAM Act and that aspect only acknowledges youth as students. While many are students, realistically we are both students and workers. Young people should also have a place in the workers' rights discourse," says Mora.

Communicating faster and reaching more people can be a common challenge for veterans in the organization. This is where youth jump in with online networking skills that can make all the difference.

"I introduced the group to text messaging through the internet as a way to reach multiple receivers in case we need a quick a response if there is a raid or other emergency," says Mora.

In addition to the new methods, Mora hopes today's generation can continue the work to breach the color divide and reframe immigrants' rights as people's rights.

"We are still lacking unity among youth of color. We still tend to stick to our own and it's hard to see the connections."

It is her hope that we can organize more broadly, using both online networking and face-to-face organizing to connect youth in the struggle for immigrants' rights.