I am convinced that movements go through particular stages and phases of development, whether we are aware of those stages or not.

Take, for example, the current movement for immigrant rights. Last March it burst into the consciousness of English speakers with enormous rallies, marches, and (in May) a one-day general strike. It seemed to errupt out of nowhere, and to have a spontaneous message and coherence. Wow! How’d that happen?!

Well, obviously, it didn’t come out of nowhere — ask all the folks who’d been staffing worker rights centers through the 1990s, and getting increasingly frustrated with and alarmed by US immigration policy. In order for this movement to take off as it did, a lot of groundwork had to be laid. “Normal channels” for redressing grievances had to be exhausted. Hopes had to be raised in Mexico by the election of Vicente Fox, and then dashed again by his neo-liberal economic policies. People who came here expecting a speedy return home had to resign themselves to staying for a while, and realize that, if they stayed, the political processes in this country meant something to them, too. They built up radio stations, newspapers, churches, and face-to-face communities for discussing issues and spreading the word. Conditions ripened for the take-off of the immigrants’ rights movement, almost unnoticed by the mainstream.

Our button, “No Human is Illegal”, first appeared around 1994. We followed it with a smattering of other slogans:

They didn’t sell. We thought maybe we hadn’t hit the issues just right, because we knew people out there were organizing. Whatever the case, by last March we’d discontinued most of these products. Then, WHOOSH! the movement took off and we spent a week scrambling to get our existing product back into production, and to make some new images that reflected the new militancy:

What I rather expect is that immigrant rights activists and organizers can turn out huge crowds a couple more times, if they try, and then the movement will go into another stage. Some people will likely become discouraged and dispirited because the unprecedented rallies and marches did not, in fact, bring Congress or President Bush to their senses. Others — hopefully a lot of others! — will turn their attention to building coalitions, broadening the movement beyond Spanish speakers, educating the public, improving the infrastructure of resistance, and devising demands and programs which will truly benefit immigrant workers. It will seem as if the steam went out of the movement as suddenly as it appeared, when in fact the movement has simply gone into a less visible (but even more potent) phase.

I’m making these predictions not so much out of my own clairvoyance (!) as from the Movement Action Plan, which William H. Moyer noticed and popularized. (This is not the TV Bill Moyers, but an activist Bill Moyer.) For the whole story, see www.socialinclusion.sa.gov.au/webdata/resources/files/movement_action_plan.pdf

Whatever happens, we here at Northland will be following developments closely, and providing the best art for organizing that we can!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 @ 9:50 am on the category Labor, Organizing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.