Opportunity and Threat: Political Opportunity Structures and the Place of Immigrant Politics.

Drawing on 61 interviews with Mexican immigrants and ethnographic participant observation conducted over three years, I compare social movement organizing among Mexican immigrant communities in two cities in one California county: one more progressive and the other more repressive. As political process theory was extended to authoritarian settings, scholars have challenged the classical political opportunity literature by arguing that both growing opportunity and threat inspire mobilization. This study's contribution lies in its specification of the relationship among political opportunities, threat, and mobilization tactics. I argue that more open political environments give rise to more collaborative protest tactics, while more threatening environments yield more confrontational tactics. In a literature focused on extreme cases of threat and other social outliers, the case of immigrant mobilization in the U.S. provides a broader empirical basis for theorizing political opportunity by examining 1) threat in its more mundane and systemic forms and 2) how variation in threat levels across local contexts leads not only to increases or decreases of mobilization, but also conditions the social form of protest. Because threat is not objectively assessed, nor does it automatically inspire protest, organizers utilize the collective action frame of shared destiny to 1) stress the urgency of mobilization and 2) to undermine the efficacy of the individual strategies of avoidance and insulation to illustrate the utility of collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]