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By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics

DREAMers

About

Since 2001, undocumented immigrant youth have mobilized across the country to bring attention to the immigrant rights struggle both at the federal and state levels. Intent on passing the DREAM Act, a piece of legislation that would grant immigrant youth brought as children to the United States an opportunity to become permanent residents and pursue higher education, the "DREAM" activists have mobilized thousands of young people by sharing their personal stories of struggle and triumph through multiple media platforms- self-made YouTube videos, documentaries, films, poetry, and Arte popular. The case study captures the experiences of undocumented youth who are members of various youth-led organizations such as the Orange County and Los Angeles Dream Teams, the California Dream Network, AB540 youth groups on college campuses, IMARTE, Dreamers Adrift, and Dream Activist.

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DREAMing Citizenship As evidenced in the previous chapters, participatory culture has become increasingly important to understanding patterns of civic, social, cultural and political engagement among youth. Yet, with some notable exceptions, there has been little attention focused on bridging insights from the theory of participatory culture with literature on social movements. Seeking to better understand how digital media platforms and practices may be impacting social movements, this chapter draws on insights from a case study with undocumented youth commonly referred to as Dreamers, who are engaged in immigrant rights organizing and activism. We draw primarily on interview data and media artifacts related to DreamActivist.org. Much like the American Muslim youth in the previous chapter, the Dreamers have engaged in acts of personal and collective storytelling, but they have done so in the context of a larger social movement, where tactics also seek to dramatize and publicize struggles over power. Dreamers, who originally coalesced around the federal DREAM Act legislation in 2010,, have leveraged their familiarity with digital media practices and networked culture to create ad hoc Dreamer organizations, circumventing top-down organizational structures to become critical actors within the broader movement for immigrant rights. This chapter does not aim to account for all characteristics of the DREAM movement systematically. Rather, our aim here is more modest--to identify ways that undocumented youth have used digital media tools to represent their voices, stories, and interests. In doing so, we will also explore what lessons can be drawn from Dreamers in understanding how other marginalized communities can use digital media to create pathways toward greater social and political empowerment. During our research, we met many individuals who defied popular presumptions about civically and politically disengaged youth. These were not “the usual suspects”, not “digital natives.” Rather, they were youth who were finding ways to connect against great political, legal, economic and technological barriers. This chapter draws on the case of DREAM activism to explore how undocumented youth have used transmedia strategies to mobilize for immigrant rights. While DREAMers engage in a wide range of activistism, from traditional protest marches to staged "graduations,” we focus on how DREAMers have used new media challenge the "illegal" identity by sharing "coming out" stories. Specifically, we show how undocumented youth activists have used digital media to meet individual affective/therapeutic ends, create an archive of DREAMer stories and experiences, and engage in movement tactics that bridge to on-the-ground action. We argue that DREAMer coming out stories, which are largely produced and circulated via new media, serve four key functions with regard to participatory politics, which fall in various locations on the trajectory from voice to influence. Coming out stories: · Serve as a psychic survival mechanism, providing an outlet for affective sharing and release on individual and communal levels · Create a visible archive of collective sentiment around the shared struggles and experiences of undocumented youth · Harness the power of collective identity to create vital communities of support for undocumented youth · Help spur involvement in other forms of activism and collective action, even in the face of personal and political risk We also describe the emergence of the DREAMer movement, its recent adoption of more radical tactics, and it’s relationship to other movements that have embraced the rhetorical strategy of “coming out” to illustrate how DREAMers offer a unique perspective on immigrant rights and social change. Our research shows that transmedia strategies have served the Dreamers well in their quest, not only to move immigrant rights legislation forward, but also in their efforts to shed light on the struggles of undocumented youth more broadly. Thus, we argue that the rise in digital media, and by extension participatory cultures, has opened up other avenues beyond what Harris-Lacewell (2004) calls "information networks" to create pathways toward participation. Following from this, we demonstrate that undocumented youth have used digital media to create spaces of citizenship, collective identity, belonging, and political participation.

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Agenda Shifting How might identity groups use media to react to, reshape, or even control the narrative being constructed about them in mainstream media? We are seeing many of the groups we study -- but especially the DREAM activists and the American Muslim networks respond quickly to news stories or popular culture programming that they feel places them in a negative light. They are using their collective capacities to pull together information, critique representation, construct alternative narratives, and get them into circulation, often in ways that commands the attention of major news organizations. In part, these strategies work because of the ways they are able to quickly mobilize dispersed and decentralized networks that are invested in helping them spread content. Real World Example: The Goatface video about the Sikh temple shooting addresses a serious issue related to a marginalized population while also complicating national definitions of “Islamic” identity. Hasan Minhaj opens the piece with “this is the truth”. He uses logical reasoning and explicit examples to construct an argument for how the shooting is doubly tragic: not just in the deaths but also in the complete lack of national attention. He says the only people responding are “brown, social Asian community” and then identifies specific names to make it more relatable and then generalizes it by claiming “black community has been talking about this for years”. He addresses both minorities and the white population. For the former he calls on them to Mobilize, stop the hate, address the fact that white, racist domestic terrorist are more of an issue that islamic terrorism. For the later population, he calls on them to be open and talked with Sikh members of the community to learn the nuances of culture and not assume they’re muslim. Stylistically he uses classical music, costume, and settings to create an aire of a cultured individual and lend credibility (doubled through a layer of parody) to his perspective.

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Part 1 DC DREAM Act National Graduation