I’ve been a little tied up with “real world” stuff this past couple of weeks and missed out on some great diaries here. I checked out Man Without A Counties piece on Peak Blogging and there was an interesting discussion in the comments about the immigrant’s rights marches and the fact that the organizing of those marches had no real blog or internet component. How they managed to put millions in the streets through radio and how “none of the demonstrators in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere ever even heard of Daily Kos or any of the other blogs, let alone read them or participated.”
I figured y’all might be interested in how the organizing was really done. A little secret, that through dumb luck on my part, I’m somewhat privy to.
The notion that the immigration marches were fueled through Latino radio is somewhat of a misnomer that I believe came about because the MSM missed the whole story until it happened and figured the “media” component must have been something traditional … hence they stressed the importance of Latino radio. Although they played a large role, the radio stations came quite late to the party and played a much larger role in motivating than organizing.
In fact a large percentage of the organizing was done online.
Here’s how it was done … at least the online component.:
Weeks before the marches the national organizers would set up websites… giving out minimal info, a date and a time for one or two rallies. But the important part was that they would ask for volunteers to be local organizers. Over the following weeks one by one local grassroots efforts would join in. They would post up all the information about local rallies and include the contact info for each of the local cities organizers. E-mail addresses, websites, even home phone numbers were included in the info. One by one all the various marches and rallies joined the list.
From there the effort branched out. Graphics were posted up for posters and signs in English, Spanish, some in Korean or Chinese for many of the individual marches and rallies. These are the signs many of us saw in shop windows and on lampposts.
The next step was spreading the word. Much of it was done by e-mail, text messaging, blogs and through Myspace. Myspace was huge. Many of the children of immigrants, communicating through Myspace got the info to interpret for their parents. In fact the school walkouts were organized exclusively with a combination of Myspace and text messaging.
That’s how everyone knew to wear white, where to meet, what time, the march route … it was e-mailed, blogged or Mypsaced across the internet.
By the time the radio stations got in the show, the show was already on. They played a big role in reaching many, but they were not the driving force behind this stuff.
I know this all because I watched it unfold.
Before the first march in Chicago in early March, about a week before to be exact, I noticed tons of traffic coming to my site from Chicago. All of it going to a page that explained HR4437 (it was just dumb luck, because since no one was really covering the issue at that time, I ended up being on the top of the 1st page of a Google search for “HR4437”). I went from 50 hits a week to 300 a day. In fact the Wednesday before the march I told met wife that something bizarre was going on in Chicago,but I didn’t know what. Until the march happened.
After that I started watching this stuff. Watching to see who was hitting the site and from where. A few days before the LA march on 3/25, I stumbled on the organizing site and started posting up their info. I put up a front page with their graphic and listed all the march info. During that period my blog traffic went crazy looking for info on HR4437 or the march. This is how I found out about the Myspace link. Kids all over were sending links from my site to their friends. Sometimes up to a hundred an hour.
The same thing repeated itself during the big National protest days, first on April 10, and then culminating in the May 1 Boycott. In fact for that one the organizers contacted me through e-mail weeks in advance to see if I would post up their info and list the various protests and contact info. Since I was already showing up on google searches due to all the linkage from the LA marches and was getting close to 2000 hits a day leading up to that march, they figured I could help spread the word. So my blog became part of their “network”
They managed to set up this network within a few weeks that allowed people to google up “immigration march yourcityname” or “el gran paro” and get back numerous sites with the info they needed to participate in the rallies and marches. They were very tech savvy that way, they followed the linkages, they watched the search engines and site meters, and they knew how to work the internet to their advantage. They knew how to target their message.
So it was all pretty much a matter of dumb luck on my part, but it allowed me to see first hand how this whole movement worked and was organized. It was amazing and totally grassroots based … I mean can you imagine people posting up their home phones and saying “call me if you want info” … well they did, and it worked.
There is also a huge network of Latino blogs, many in Spanish, some in English, some in both. A lot of them are not political, but rather plain old personal blogs, but covered this stuff from day one and did much to spread the word. Again, I found these by tracing back links to see where I was getting hits from.
I guess my point for writing all this is that for progressives the rallies can teach us very important lessons. This movement provided a blueprint for organizing real world events through a combination of both old and NEW technology. We can learn much from how this movement operates.
For me it was pretty amazing to watch … even if much of the watching was done through a computer screen.
