The Making of the DREAMers

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Collective Identity and Solidarity

Abstract

Who are the DREAMers? How do we explain their political influence? The social boundaries around their collective identity were first drawn by a piece of legislation that failed to win the force of law, the DREAM Act. Despite this legislative failure, DREAMers coalesced as a political force altering the trajectory of American immigration politics. They won protection benefits under President Obama’s DACA order, and under President Trump, they remain, for now, un-deportable. How did DREAMers become this political force? By way of an answer, we provide a short history of the DREAMers and the movement that shaped them. We offer theoretical reflections on the interaction of social movements and political institutions in the formation of collective identities. We highlight how social boundaries drawn by the categorical distinctions specified in proposed policy combined with social protests for public recognition to create and radicalize the DREAMer. Our research is based on over 60 interviews of DREAM activists and extensive archival research, including thousands of group messages posted from 2009 to 2012 by DREAM activists as they organized and executed their first protests.

The formation of the DREAMer identity reflects a broader theoretical insight: collective identities emerge at the intersection of reifying classification and lived experience: On one side, legal and political institutions impose categorical distinctions, defining who is recognized and who remains excluded. On the other, movements rework these classifications by embedding them in shared narratives, communities, and conceptions of self. Drawing on theories of the protean power of social movements to create collective identities (Touraine 1981; Melucci 1989), we argue that social movement was the conjurer of the DREAMer identity, but the movement’s magic alchemy depended on the mixing of these two disparate social elements: reification and lived experience.

Authors

• Dorothy Rau, The University of Texas at Austin

• Michael P. Young, University of Texas-Austin