On April 10, 2006, between 80,000 and 100,000 mostly Mexican immigrants participated in an unprecedented mass mobilization in the small southwest Florida city of Fort Myers.1 Florida had never seen anything like it. The demonstrators waved flags from across the Americas—but especially the U.S. flag—and carried handmade signs that read, “No to Terrorism, Yes to Citizenship” and “We Are Your Friends.” None of the protest organizers were “professional activists.” The organizing effort was largely led by local merchants and soccer league members who harnessed the community’s overlapping personal, social, and workplace networks. Consequently, the movement remained relatively fluid and unstructured.
“There wasn’t even anyone directing it,” recalled Moisés, an agricultural worker and founder of a local soccer league. “The monster was moving on its own. The stage was set and people would just jump on and say, ‘Ya basta with the abuse! Ya basta with them ignoring us! Ya basta with them not passing immigration reform!’ And then they’d get off and someone else would jump on. . . . .By then there was no agenda, there was no program, everything just happened on its own.” (Because the people interviewed for this article were undocumented, their names and professions have been changed to protect them. All interviews were conducted in the winter of 2009 throughout southwest Florida.)
The protest, which included a one-day work stoppage, was part of the historic spring 2006 immigrant mega-marchas that took place across the country, numbering close to 400 in all, with up to 5 million people participating in almost every state in the union. The marches were organized in response to the proposed HR 4437, also known as the Sensenbrenner bill, which among other draconian provisions would have made undocumented immigration a felony and criminalized anyone—from clergy to social service providers—who assisted undocumented immigrants. Immigrants not only in Florida but all across the U.S. South joined some 100 rallies in the region.
Since Mexicans are relative newcomers to the South—having only begun to arrive in large numbers after the late 1980s, when the region became a new migrant destination—the mobilizations seemed to signal a new era in Southern politics (with the major exception of Cuban immigrants, who arrived much earlier.)2 Many of the Southern locales where the protests took place lacked both histories of immigrant activism and the traditional social movement organizations that scholars of contentious politics often claim are vital for movement building and large-scale collective action. Why and how did immigrants in these often rural and isolated locations mobilize?
The example of Fort Myers offers some important clues. It shows that immigrant communities have the power and resources to mobilize on a mass scale, even in unexpected locations. In the case of southwest Florida, several factors contributed to this process. Motivated by the broad and severe threat of the Sensenbrenner bill, the non-professional activists, including many undocumented people, who formed the coalition that organized the march took personal risks and found strength in numbers, as millions of other immigrants like them took the same chances when demonstrating across the country. Immigrant coalition leaders, who where often key nodes in the social fabric of their communities, used their important skills and organizing experiences, which they had either migrated with or acquired while living in the United States. The efforts of these grassroots organizers, together with the activation of local social and economic resources, were crucial elements in making the Fort Myers protest the biggest in Florida and one of the largest in the 2006 protest wave.
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The perceived callousness of the HR 4437 was a fundamental factor in motivating immigrants to unite and protest. Pointing out the potential far-reaching nature of the legislation, Rosalinda, an apartment manager, recalled that the law would have criminalized “anyone that had anything to do with undocumented people, which could have been a church, a hospital,” and that it was the “inhumane wording of the policy” that motivated her to join the march. “You couldn’t give your brother a plate of food because that made you a criminal,” she said, adding that “there was no way that one could sit back as a human being and let someone else [get] treated like the scum of the bottom of your shoe.”
Moisés, an agricultural worker, contended that the “community was offended” because “you weren’t just an undocumented person anymore. Now you were an actual criminal. So the whole world reacted to that and said, ‘No! We’re not criminals. We’re workers.’ ” Ramona, a domestic worker who was previously undocumented, explained how her feelings of solidarity prompted her to take action. “Thank God that I already had [my citizenship], but everyone [without papers] around me was scared to go to work,” she said. “To be so close to them, their pain was like mine. I would put myself in their situation. That made me feel as if I were the one living what they go through. That’s what motivated me to act.”
Revealing the importance of maintaining a sense of dignity when living in a foreign land, Ramona further explained that, “More than anything, I think that the law awakened in our people a feeling of not letting ourselves be humiliated, that we were worth something, and it was as if they saw us as less, a great feeling of racism. But thank God that it helped wake up the sleeping giant that the people had inside of them. So in reality it was a good thing. They did us a favor because it united us.” Moisés added, “When people saw they could lose all their dignity, their credibility, their rights, their personhood, they had to come out to the streets to say, ‘No!’ That’s why people reacted. It didn’t matter anymore because there was nothing left to lose.”
Since people of Latin American descent have become the face of illegal immigration, many Latinos in southwest Florida felt that the racialized tone of the debate was a direct attack on them—that they were being targeted because of their ethnicity and that their contributions to this country were being negated.3 Moisés again recalled, “I think what happened was that all Latinos, not only the undocumented, we felt the necessity to express ourselves in one way or another to say, ‘We need to make a change.’ That was my sentiment as a [naturalized] citizen, and that’s how a lot of other people that wanted to send that message felt too.” David, a restaurant owner, went even further, stating, “I don’t like to sound like a nationalist, but if you watch the media, when a Mexican does something bad, it’s all over the TV and radio. They always only talk about Mexico, to criticize it, to screw it over. And [Mexican immigrants] are the ones that contribute most to the economic development of this country.”
Such expressions of a collective identity were not limited to people in their local communities. Many immigrant coalition leaders also said that the marches in other places inspired them to act and made them feel as though they were part of a larger collective. Identifying with this bigger “imagined community” is crucial given that immigrants in new destinations often live in isolated locations, are habitually excluded from the upper socioeconomic and political classes in these areas, and often feel powerless.4 The sense of being part of a larger group that exists across the country helped to minimize their feelings of remoteness and reaffirmed their desire to act on behalf of, and in solidarity with, other migrants. This demonstrates the mental and participatory power of imagining oneself as part of a larger collective, one that is physically and geographically dispersed but united by similar experiences of state and cultural repression, a shared ethnic identity, and the inspiration that this mental geographic remapping created during the protest wave.
Elucidating this idea, Tacho, a soccer league president and farmworker, remembered how the protests in other places were “a big motivation.” “When we saw there were protests in big cities, then we started to think of doing it like that too,” he said. “When we saw them, we identified with them. We even chose to do our march the same day as them. We wanted to be part of what was going on.” The media’s diffusion of the images of large rallies in other cities showed Southwest Florida immigrants not only “the strength,” but also the “safety in numbers.” According to several coalition leaders, by seeing millions of immigrants across the country marching without being harassed by authorities, immigrants in southwest Florida learned that they could do the same. Witnessing these acts of defiance and political expression from people “just like them” seems to have helped give immigrants in relatively isolated places the confidence to also take action.
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In his classic text Weapons of the Weak, the political anthropologist James C. Scott contends that in order to coordinate and communicate their “practices and discourse of resistances,” subordinate groups “must carve out” for themselves local “social spaces insulated from control and surveillance from above.”5 Soccer leagues represent an important example of these social spaces in new immigrant-receiving destinations. The leagues, as some scholars have pointed out, “create a cultural space that is familiar, entertaining, practical, inexpensive, transnational, and ephemeral, where immigrants gather to reaffirm their sense of identity and belonging.”6 Throughout southwest Florida, soccer leagues have become the central gathering and socializing spaces for immigrants. As Tacho a league president described, “Here we live differently. We don’t have complete neighborhoods like in other places. Here we hardly see each other. On weekends the only time we gather, besides church, is the soccer field.”
Each league in the region can have several hundred to more than 1,000 players. Games are genuinely community affairs, and it is not uncommon for several hundred people to attend them. Families and neighbors often show up to socialize and talk about topics ranging from jobs to news from their countries of origin. So when the presidents of a coalition of southwest Florida soccer leagues, representing more than 10,000 members, united to get all their local teams to support the march, they were able to mobilize thousands of people. In doing so, both the players and the league presidents were taking substantial risks. Many of them struggled just to establish their local leagues in their predominately white and often nativist communities. And considering that several of the players were undocumented, they were also vulnerable to being deported. Despite these dangers, soccer league representatives contended that the vast majority of teams and players still chose to participate. Tacho recounted:
When I met with the soccer coaches, I warned them that this could potentially change things in the league. This could maybe cause a raid on the soccer field because [immigration officials] knew I was there and was helping direct things [for the march]. . . . I asked them if they agreed, that I’d represent them and that if they didn’t agree that it was OK and that we didn’t have to participate. So we spoke about it and everyone was in favor and said they wanted to participate.
Daniel, another league president, said his team captains pledged to get their players and families to take part in the protest. “All of the community and all the players supported” the march, he said. In this way, various soccer leagues across the region united to help mobilize for the rally. As one coalition member put it, “from central to southern Florida” the “soccer leagues were the seedbeds of the movement.”
Other important factors in the mobilization were the skills and agency of individual activists. Ana María, an immigrant receptionist, described how this dynamic played out in southwest Florida. Her testimonio is worth quoting at length:
We had different meetings in different places. We started to educate people about what was going to happen to them if they didn’t’ come out and speak up. I would just drive and stop wherever I saw [Latino immigrants] and with a megaphone would just start saying out loud, “Your attention please! Your attention please!” And then I would tell them what was going on. People would come up to me and say, “Hey, where I live there’s a lot more people. Why don’t you come there?” I would tell them that I’d go if they got me 50 people together. Then I’d try to show them how to talk to other people [about the issue] so that they could then go [and do the same]. We ended up doing meetings like Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. We would even go to people’s work and talk to them though the megaphones. We’d just show up at construction sites and start speaking to the workers.
Isaías, a construction worker, recalled, “A lot of people know me in construction. I talked to them about the law and how it was going to affect us and [about] the better bills that we could fight for.” He added, “I’d go talk to them during their lunch break, and we’d agree to a meeting place for later. That’s how I spoke to tons of people. We used to have frequent meetings at the park on Sundays. A lot of times, we’d meet at soccer fields too. There would be like 300 to 400 people at the meetings.” Ramona, the domestic worker mentioned above, remembered that during the day she would go to work, “but at night I’d go to all the places I knew” Latinos went. She said, “We’d give flyers out everywhere, at Laundromats, in the evening at nightclubs, on cars, at restaurants,” and other places immigrants would be able to see them.
The people making an effort to launch the march were not limited to those in the coalition of organizers. Before and during the protest, community members also contributed to making the demonstration a success. For example, Moisés said people would just show up to meetings or call coalition members and say, “ ‘I have a lunch truck, so I’m going to take it with water, ice, and sodas at this certain spot and I’ll donate it.’ Someone who sold corn just showed up [to the protest] and started making and giving them out to people.” The day of the rally, several neighborhood residents gathered at the local Catholic Church to make more than 2,000 plates of food to distribute to marchers, remembered Father Ruiz.
Thus, we can think of the agency of individual immigrants—with skills and experiences that they either brought with them from their countries of origins or acquired while living in the United States—as preexisting community resources that were vital to the migrant mass mobilization process. There is no doubt that the demonstration would not have been possible without their efforts—driving hours to different neighborhoods to educate others about the issue, going to multiple radio stations several times a week to talk about the importance of the march, developing strategies of how best to persuade people to leave work for a day.
Immigrants also activated another kind of local resource: their collective economic assets. For instance, local immigrant merchants helped pay for and organize the demonstration. As Marcos, a coalition member and lawyer whose parents were immigrants, explained, “In our community their customers follow them. Their customers go to them for every problem. They are the little mini-leaders in our community.” If an immigrant business owner “in his store says something, it trickles down” to the rest of the community. “It’s powerful, they’re powerful in their neighborhoods.”
A coalition of more than 300 mostly Mexican local businesses across the region invested thousands of dollars in organizing the march. “There were lots and lots of small businesses that helped,” recalled Zebedeo, one of these merchants. “From Arcadia, Wauchula, Tampa, Clearwater, Fort Myers, Immokalee. They participated by giving food, trash bags, transporting people. Lots of labor contractors didn’t go to work and gave their workers the day off.” Omar, a small clothing store owner, remembered, “We all chipped in. I spent more than $1,000 on the event. Other stores, smaller stores, would give $100, $200, $150. All my friends around here gave money.” Advertising the march on local Spanish radio stations was fundamental to promoting the rally. Local Mexican merchants played a vital role in making this happen as well. As Zebedeo again explained, “We bought ads on all the radio stations. But how did we pay for the publicity? All the local merchants of each community donated!”
No external funds from, for example, private foundations or national organizations were used to coordinate the Fort Myers protest. Hence, despite stereotypically being depicted as financially deprived, immigrant communities can in fact muster sufficient economic resources to facilitate large-scale collective action.
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Contrary to common belief, the supposedly under-resourced and under-skilled locales where immigrants live are actually filled with all kinds of assets that may not seem overtly political in their routine functions, but that can in fact be activated by communities for political purposes. In this regard, the Fort Myers demonstration was not a case in which a “social movement industry,” made up of NGOs, professional organizers, foundations, and so on, “parachuted in” with external resources in order to “help” a vulnerable segment of society. This was an instance in which a community in movement used its various indigenous assets to defend itself and to demonstrate its dignity and discontent.
Chris Zepeda-Millán is a scholar-activist and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research focuses on social movements, immigration, and race and ethnic politics. He has been active in various social movements, ranging from the Zapatista to the immigrant rights movement.
1. The author would like to thank Perla De Anda, Phillip Ayoub, Igor Logvinenko, and the NACLA editors for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
2. Victor Zúñiga and Rubén Hernández-León, eds., New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States (Russell Sage Foundation, 2005).
3. Nicholas De Genova, “The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant ‘Illegality,’ ” Latino Studies 2, no. 2 (July 2004): 160–85.
4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1991).
5. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press, 1990), 118.
6. Marie Prince and Courtney Whitworth, “Soccer and Latino Cultural Space: Metropolitan Washington Fútbol Leagues,” in Daniel Arreola, ed., Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places (University of Texas Press, 2004), 168.
