Abstract
The predominant debate following the Arab Spring centered largely on a single question: what was the role of social media (and other new technologies) in these movements? In Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement, Costanza-Chock cuts through the noise of this somewhat important debate by presenting a comprehensive narrative of the various mobilization strategies of the (Latino) Immigrant Rights Movement in the United States. The author carefully maps the complete array of media and other mobilizing strategies while noting the challenges and tensions associated with each. While acknowledging the relevance of social media in movements, the author makes his stance clear by declaring from the onset, “I don’t believe it’s productive to try to prove or disprove a causal relationship between technology use and social movement outcomes” (p. 18). Significantly, he argues that “transmedia organizing is the key emergent social movement media practice in a converged media ecology shaped by broader political economy of communication” (p. 14). Out of the Shadows therefore departs from the seemingly over-indulged debates on the role of social media, reflected in the work of by Clay Shirky, on the one hand, and Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov, on the other.
Through what he terms transmedia organizing, which “includes the creation of a narrative of social transformation across multiple media platforms, involving the movement’s base in participatory media making, and linking attention directly to concrete opportunities for action” (p. 50), Costanza-Chock marks the various tensions, affordances, and issues in the media ecology that shaped the evolution of the Immigrants’ Rights Movement in the United States. The term, coined from synthesizing Marsha Kinder (1993) and Henry Jenkins’ iteration of Transmedia storytelling and Lina Srivastava’s Transmedia Activism, is the basis for his explication of the different dynamics defining the political economy of the production, reception, distribution, and influence of media in the Immigrant Rights Movement—a corpus of various organizations fighting against unfavorable immigration policies, domestic surveillance, raids, detentions, and deportations.
To present his case, Costanza-Chock traces the movement’s interactions with media from the early 1990s to the early 2010s, through which he builds the reader’s historical appreciation of the nuances of transmedia organizing in the movement’s formal nonprofits, grassroots organizations, and media organizations, all of which claimed to have the same interests. For instance, just as the book explicates the nuances surrounding the use of the fairly new technology of email communications in the 1994 students’ walkout against Proposition 187, it offers reflections on the relevance of flyers, pre-existing student networks, face-to-face meetings, and MySpace in the 2006 student walkouts against the Sensenbrenner Bill H.R. 4437. The encounters engendered by the seizure of radio and television stations by the Asociación Popular de Los Pueblos de Oaxaca de Los Angeles (APPO-LA) in 2006 are not left out. The author also marks the various tensions and changing roles of professional movement media content producers arising from the collation and (re)production of video content from observers of the MacArthur Park police raid in 2007; the role of lower power FM live transmissions in the 2008 Fast for Our Future hunger strikes; and the interplay of activism through mobile phones, email blasts, phone calls, SMS text messages, radio, and television in ending the contract of Lou Dobbs, an anti-immigrant commentator on CNN, in 2009. The live streaming of sit-ins by DREAMers at congressional offices, Obama campaign offices, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) buildings in 2012 is also marked.
Out of the Shadows also contains nuanced reflections on the challenges of deploying these various media. Notably, the challenges presented by participatory digital media literacy efforts among various sections of the movement; for instance, mobilizing immigrants through these platforms at the Garment Worker Centers (GWCs) had to consider monetary, time, energy, training capacity, and restricted home access challenges. Furthermore, the author notes that a major source of mass media support—Spanish-language commercial media—was not without its own issues; the language, strategy, and tactics of the movement were shaped and constrained by this medium. The tendency of some hosts and guests to be sexist, sensational, materialistic, and homophobic, while emphasizing assimilation and de-emphasizing national identity, was as problematic for sections of the movement (e.g. the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community), as was the difficulty of balancing control over the movement’s message framing while courting mainstream news media reporters to favorably report on the movement’s interests. The additional challenges posed by such corporate interests as Facebook, Twitter, and other Silicon Valley big names through professionalized campaigns such as the Dream is Now and media platforms such as FWD.us, in later years, are also carefully documented.
While very detail-oriented, Costanza-Chock writes in very simple prose, painstakingly summarizing key arguments and accounts at the end of each chapter, thereby making Out of the Shadows a very easy read. In an era dominated by social media debates, this book is an important iteration of a bigger picture of the role and challenges of deploying various media, presented through the critical lenses of an embedded movement scholar activist. Costanza-Chock noted very early in the book that “social movements have always engaged in transmedia organizing; organizers bring the battle to the arena of ideas by any media necessary” (p. 19). His account of the Immigrant Rights Movements’ media praxis is a significant confirmation of his assertion, supported by the many examples presented in the book.
Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement is an important resource for readers interested in the changes that have taken place in the media ecology of social movement mobilization from the 1970s to the early 2010s. It does not simply trace the trajectories of media praxis in the Immigrants’ Rights Movement, but also the many other tensions, challenges, and victories (beyond media) of the movement. Contemporary social movements seeking advice on what (not) to do with social media might find the experiences of the movement chronicled in Out of the Shadows useful.