Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism

Winner of the 2018 Ralph J. Bunche Award - American Political Science Association

Winner of the 2018 Best Book on Race and Immigration Award - Race, Ethnicity and Politics (REP) Section of the American Political Science Association

Winner of the 2018 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award - Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association

Honorable Mention for the 2018 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award - Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section of the American Sociological Association

The immigrant rights movement is one of the most dynamic socialmovements in the United States. In the spring of 2006, across thecountry millions of mostly Latino immigrants participated in some of the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. In this timely and highly anticipated book, Chris Zepeda-Millán analyzes thebackground, course, and impacts of this unprecedented wave of protests,highlighting their unique local, national, and demographic dynamics. Hefinds that because of the particular ways the issue of immigrantillegality was racialized, federally proposed anti-immigrant legislation (H.R. 4437) helped transform Latinos' sense of latent group membershipinto a racial group consciousness that incited their engagement inlarge-scale collective action. Zepeda-Millán shows how nativist policythreats against disenfranchised undocumented immigrants can provoke apolitical backlash--on the streets and in the ballot box--from not only"people without papers," but also naturalized and U.S.-born citizens. Latino Mass Mobilization is an important intervention into contemporary debates about race, immigration policy, Latino politics, and immigrant activism in the U.S.