Organizing Myspace: Youth Walkouts, Pleasure, Politics, And New Media‪.‬

While the major urban centers around the country were flooded by millions of protesters demanding immigrant rights in March 2006, the San Francisco Bay Area remained relatively quiet. A coalition of organizers, including Centro Legal de la Raza, Deporten A La Migra, and the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition mobilized a one-week hunger strike, creating media visibility and political pressure despite their smaller numbers. Approximately 30 strike organizers and 15 huegalistas de hambre camped on the concrete in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco, and operated as a condensing point for a series of small actions, including several marches and rallies, none of which exceeded a few hundred people. On the morning of March 27th, the organizers broke camp and prepared to march to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein's office to demand changes to the bill (1) being constructed by her senate committee. Unlike the millions of marchers in Los Angeles, and hundreds of thousands in San Jose the previous weekends, the San Franciscans who had rallied hundreds of thousands to protest the war in Iraq initiated little activity around immigration policy. Perhaps the mainstream media had successfully convinced the Bay Area's liberal White population that immigrant rights were a Latino issue.