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Building upon intensive ethnographic research on the undocumented youth movement in Los Angeles, this paper investigates the backstage work done by the leaders and activists within a movement to create cohesive and disciplined frontstage performances. These backstage techniques and strategies are important to examine because frontstage unity is not natural or automatic. As most campaigns are made up of heterogeneous individuals, organizations and groups, frontstage coherence is something that needs to be worked upon. We show that this essential backstage work consists of 1) training activists to become disciplined frontstage performers; 2) converging the feelings of activists through emotionally intensive disciplinary techniques; and 3) managing differences and conflicts in the free spaces of the movement. This paper thus aims to encourage scholars to look under the hood of public protests and give greater weight to studying the backstage work needed to produce strong and powerful voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the communist-led inquiry into the 1939 death of thirteen year old Mexican American Benjamin Moreno while in the custody of the state-run Whittier State School for Boys in California, a juvenile detention facility. It was led by El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Español (the Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples) and a branch of the International Labor Defense (ILD), two California-based communist groups. Moreno was initially reported to have committed suicide, but his family argued against such a conclusion. Other subjects explored include how the communist groups failed in their efforts to garner the support of Mexican Americans; Mexican American civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s, and the national political agendas of American communist societies in the 1930s.

Pacifica Views was a four-page publication initially written and edited by conscientious objectors at the Glendora, California, Civilian Public Service ( CPS) camp. During its four years of existence (1943-1947), Pacifica Views provided a lively forum for discussion among radical pacifists. This article provides a brief history of Pacifica Views, sketches of the principal contributors, and a discussion of the major issues discussed in its pages. Finally, it offers an assessment of the long-term impact of Pacifica Views on peace and social justice movements in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a multidimensional examination of Filipina domestic workers' efforts to promote workers' rights nationally and globally. Through their own experiences as transnational workers, Filipina activists were able to translate their knowledge of labor dynamics into practical and effective tactics such as the demand for labor contracts as an industry standard. Combining ethnographic research and interviews conducted with New York-based Filipina domestic worker activists with primary and secondary sources from Los Angeles, recent advocacy work in New York is compared with efforts in Los Angeles and California more broadly. Key points of comparison--demographics and organizing histories, geography and usage of public space, and political contexts and legislation--illuminate significant divergences and continuities between the two regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Occupy encampments erupting around the world in Fall and Winter of 2011 developed into local platforms where activists from different milieus came together and forged relations and shared understandings. While Occupy protests broke out around the world in a synchronized fashion and used similar symbols and narratives, the protests were sustained by quite different local networks in different cities. We argue that the abilities of local Occupy movements to cope with challenges and magnify their resonance in the public sphere largely depended on how they were connected to local activist networks. We provide a political geography of Occupy and show how local networks in Amsterdam and Los Angeles shaped the global movement. Occupy activists were able to connect to some of the more prominent elements of Los Angeles' local activist networks and effectively formulated claims, but Occupy activists in Amsterdam were isolated and lost public support. The aims of the essay are twofold: first, to explain these divergent outcomes and second, to assess the effects of these outcomes in shaping the sustainability of Occupy struggles in these cities over the medium term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay documents the history of the Senshin Buddhist Temple in South Central Los Angeles, a Japanese American temple belonging to the Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land) School. In the United States, ethnic Buddhists are generally perceived as socially conservative and politically passive, while convert Buddhists are known to be active in peace movements and social activism. The essay analyzes the reforms Senshin members introduced to the temple’s religious rituals and elucidates the development of new cultural activities and art forms, which not only contributed to the emergence of vernacular ethnic art and music, but also to the construction of a community of socially engaged Japanese American Buddhists. By opening their temple to members of local minority communities, Senshin Buddhists formed artistic and political coalitions with other peoples of color, harboring subaltern cultural activism, which transgressed national, racial, and religious borders, and defied hegemonic racial, gender, and class hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on the affective dimensions of social change has pointed toward hope as an ethically promising form of belonging. In this article, the articulation of hope in the context of a reform-oriented social movement provides the basis for interrogating the political promise of hope. The author examines the ascent of a movement for small, equitable schools in Oakland, California, to explore the hopes and aspirations of its most ardent advocates. To do this, the author contrasts the movement's assertion of its equity-centered strategy with the complex race and class hierarchies that grounded power relations within the movement. The question that emerges from this discontinuity is how reformers come to experience the movement as equitable and unequivocally progressive. The author finds that the gap between reformers' ideals and their material circumstances is bridged by the movement's ample production of hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how antiprison activists borrowed from and networked with environmental justice activists during a fight to stop construction of another new prison in California. It also suggests ways that work done during that campaign has laid the foundation for further work, both among organizers and researchers, which would strengthen both the environmental justice and antiprison movements.