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Objectives: To evaluate the impact of protests on Latinos' perceptions of commonality and competition with African Americans. We hypothesize that the reinforcement and politicization of in-group identities leads to greater identification and sense of commonality with other marginalized racial/ethnic groups. Methods: This study utilizes geocoded Latino National Survey data combined with an expanded protest event data set to estimate the effect of temporal and spatial proximity to immigrant rights protests on Latinos' perceptions of commonality and competition with African Americans using ordered logistic regression models. Results: The findings suggest that respondents' proximity to marches had a positive impact on Latino perceptions of commonality with African Americans. The results also show that proximity to protests did not lead to an increase in feelings of competition with African Americans except in the case of electoral representation. Conclusions: Examining temporal and spatial effects of protests improves our understanding of how protests can influence public opinion and how protests can influence identities and group relations.

This article utilizes data from the Latino National Survey (2006) to analyze temporal and spatial variation in the effects of the immigrant rights marches in 2006 on Latino attitudes towards trust in government and self-efficacy. Using a unique protest dataset, we examine the effects of proximity and scale by mapping respondents' specific geographic location against the location of the marches as well as size of the protests using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). We find that local proximity to small marches had a positive impact on feelings of efficacy, whereas large-scale protests led to lower feelings of efficacy. The results shed light on the role localized political events can play in shaping feelings towards government, the importance of conceptions of space and time to the study of social movements, and the positive outcomes that can result from contentious politics. ©2013, Midwest Political Science Association.