Overview

DREAMers and the Choreography of Protest chronicles the history of the DREAMers--the term used to describe undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Based on interviews with lead activists, extensive archival research, and years of ethnographic study, Michael P. Young details the making of the DREAMer, the early organizing of undocumented youth on college campuses cooperating with nonprofit organizations, and the independent organizing of an online network of radical undocumented youth. Tracing a sequence of escalating protests--from sit-ins to detention center infiltrations and border crossing actions--Young argues that this later network of DREAMer activists pushed the immigrant rights movement away from the elite-driven, insider politics of immigration reform toward radical direct action organized by and for undocumented immigrants. In one of the first accounts of the radical factions of DREAMer activism, Young provides a detailed and engrossing counternarrative of DREAMer history that offers some pragmatic lessons for activists and the allied supporters of social movements.

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9780197608180

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Reviews

This story of the undocumented young people who radicalized the movement for immigrant rights is fast-paced, exciting, and often poignant. It also offers a profound rethinking of how movements radicalize. Rather than either emotional or strategic, activists here radicalized when their anger at mainstream groups pushed them to innovate strategically. Fed up with the idealized image of the 'DREAMer', some activists both rejected that image and self-consciously exploited it, using the political protection it offered them to engage in daring acts of civil disobedience. With sensitivity and insight, Michael Young captures the originality of the strategy-and its costs for activists. A fascinating read. * Francesca Polletta, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine * Beautifully written and warmly human in its relationship to the DREAMers, Michael Young's book is also an important intellectual contribution. It clarifies the DREAM Act and the activism that followed and gives the best account available of this moving human drama and the challenges of organizing. Crucially, it shows that what counts as a movement cannot be settled merely by academic definition but is shaped by protagonists who both create collective action and struggle over how it is represented. * Craig Calhoun, co-author of Degenerations of Democracy *

Author Information

Michael P. Young is Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Bearing Witness against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement. His research has been published in leading journals, including American Sociological Review, Social Problems, and Theory and Society.

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