The Rhetoric of Social Movements

Networks, Power, and New Media

Nathan Crick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138346000
• eBook ISBN: 9780429790522
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection provides an accessible yet rigorous survey of the rhetorical study of historical and contemporary social movements and promotes the study of relations between strategy, symbolic action, and social assemblage.

Offering a comprehensive collection of the latest research in the field, The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media suggests a framework for the study of social movements grounded in a methodology of "slow inquiry" and the interconnectedness of these imminent phenomena. Chapters address the rhetorical tactics that social movements use to gain attention and challenge power; the centrality of traditional and new media in social movements; the operations of power in movement organization, leadership, and local and global networking; and emerging contents and environments for social movements in the twenty-first century. Each chapter is framed by case studies (drawn from movements across the world, ranging from Black Lives Matter and Occupy to Greek anarchism and indigenous land protests) that ground conceptual characteristics of social movements in their continuously unfolding reality, furnishing readers with both practical and theoretical insights.

The Rhetoric of Social Movements will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of rhetoric, communication, media studies, cultural studies, social protest and activism, and political science.

SECTION 1

Tactics of Rhetorical Advocacy

The different methods that social movements use to gain attention, challenge power, and put forward solutions within a multi-mediated environment.

2

THE ASSEMBLING OF A MARCH

Rhetorics of the Farm Workers’ 1966 Pilgrimage

José G. Izaguirre III and Josue David Cisneros

When the cadre of roughly 200 men, women, and children began the nearly 300-mile march to Sacramento on March 17, 1966, in the name of the farm workers’ cause, the “pilgrims” were tapping into and adapting a long-standing tradition of marching in social movement rhetoric. César Chávez, President of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), spoke to this tradition when he wrote in a letter to sympathizers that the farm workers’ march from Delano represented a

meeting of cultures and traditions; the centuries-old religious tradition of Spanish culture conjoins with the very contemporary cultural syndrome of ‘demonstration’ springing from the spontaneity of the poor, the down-trodden, the rejected, the discriminated-against baring visibly their need and demand for equality and freedom.

(Chávez 1966)

Chávez’s letter articulated a complex and intersectional perspective on the march that he hoped would increase its persuasive appeal. The march from Delano, the movement’s headquarters, to Sacramento, the state capital, was envisioned as something between a civil rights march (“demonstration”) and a religious pilgrimage (in the “centuries-old tradition of Spanish culture”).

True to this framing by Chávez, farm workers carried a variety of different objects with them as they made their “pilgrimage” across California. Marchers carried a banner of La Virgen de Guadalupe at the head of the procession as well as other meaningful items, both sacred and secular, both symbolic and instrumental. “One man carried a large wooden cross,” wrote Frank Bardacke (2012: 283), meanwhile,

another [carried] a Star of David, and one hosted an oversized photograph of Emiliano Zapata. Once on the road, the pilgrims either walked together in small groups or spread out single file, their flags and banners making a dramatic silhouette against the blue and cloudless Central Valley sky. A small fleet of cars and trucks followed: a lunch wagon, a flatbed truck for evening rallies, various vehicles to carry supplies or give rides to the sick, injured or exhausted, a press truck and finally, a portable toilet nicknamed “The Mayflower.”

Support and publicity increased with each step; on their journey, farm workers stopped in dozens of towns to hold rallies and celebrate Catholic mass, and they received aid and support from those sympathetic to their cause. Marchers might have suffered injury, blistered feet, and sore muscles (Levy 1975: 207), but the multiplicity of races and religious denominations coming together to reinforce the movement (in a figurative and literal sense) demonstrated the emerging appeal of the farm workers’ journey (Davies 1966). By the time they reached Sacramento on Easter Sunday, with about 8000 waiting to attend the final celebratory rally (“Protest March Stirs Up New Boycott, Wine Grower to Talk Union” 1966), the farm workers were ready to tackle their next boycott target: Di Giorgio Corporations.

The pilgrimage typified the movement’s robust, multimodal, and “intersectional” (Wanzer-Serrano 2006) rhetoric in both focus and form, emerging from the energy and tumult of NFWA’s recently launched grape boycott and strike, yet assembled and composed as a rhetorical impetus for changing the social and political conditions of farm labor in California. The march was rhetorical movement that crossed space(s) and time(s). Indeed, the march’s status as a rhetorical performance (a march) and as an act of composition (to march) illuminates the link between this particular, rhetorical act of mobility and the rhetoric of social movements more broadly. Although it certainly appeared to have certain hard and fast boundaries (i.e., a beginning and ending destination) as well as symbolic dimensions (i.e., naming it a “peregrinación” instead of a “protest” march), each of which came together in conscious (as in Chávez’s letter) and unconscious ways, analyzing the rhetoric of the farm workers’ march across California escapes the boundaries of any one of these discrete lenses.

Following Nathan Crick’s definition (see his “Introduction”), we view a social movement as a networked assemblage arising in response to shifts and changes in a social ecology that is always and already in flux. A movement, consequently, is always and already immanent, emerging out of social networks to form new “social assemblages” over time. Social actors, already connected to other actors in some way, form new relationships with others as they congregate and form a “movement.” Social motion supplies the potential energy for movement. At the same time, the precise moment at which movement might become discernible within the social fabric is indeterminable, contingent, and circumstantial. A movement, therefore, is always and already imminent as well. A “movement” is always on the cusp of emerging, as a constitutive feature of a lively, active, and energetic social life. As social actors experience life together or even in loose associations with one another, a multiplicity of factors might encourage the formation of a movement (e.g., a pothole in need of filling on a busy neighborhood street or an incident of police brutality).

Nevertheless, it is the inventive work of agents that infuses visibility, purpose, and pragmatic force into social motion to make movement manifest. Viewed in this sense, a movement becomes eminent as rhetorical actions intervene in the social ecology, fashioning social motions into discernible, meaningful forms. Movement is composed and tactically construed, a product of agents and situations that, whether separately or corporately, assemble and thus invent coordinated movement from (within) the social motion always and already occurring (Edbauer 2005). There might be a latent concern about safety in a neighborhood, for example, but it is a turn toward rhetorical actions that makes that concern visible to and for others, and it is through rhetorical interventions that the ramifications of a lack of safety on individual actions can be made known. A social movement then is influenced by and construed as an influential force by rhetorical acts, working within and against social conditions.

Bodies amassed in public space, chanting, holding signs, and collective movement from one location to another, the march is perhaps the most iconic rhetorical act performed in social movements. And yet, even taking into account the added complexity of social movement we have outlined previously, the rhetorical nature of a tactic as quotidian as a march can often be overlooked because of its semblance to the social motion that induces its emergence. Recognizing the complexity inhering in the march, we suggest, requires viewing it from a more expansive point of view, one in which “discourse” or “symbols” are simply a part of a broader rhetorical moment fueled by social energy. The term we use to capture this complexity is to say that the march is eventful, a conceptual approach we use to “highlight the fact that rhetoric always thrives in a certain eventful environment whose totality is always beyond our powers of representation, an environment in which events are surprising, unanticipatable, and always entail a reversal of a relationship of forces” (Crick 2014: 254). As we describe in the following, approaching the rhetoric of the march—and that of social movements more broadly—as an event allows scholars to assess the contributions of a variety of different subjects and objects to a tactic’s composition, appeal, and configuration. Doing so encourages methodological reexaminations about how and what features of a “march” might be necessary for capturing the “rhetorical” in “social movement rhetoric,” particularly in perennial tactics used in social movement contexts such as a march. Our approach encourages scholars of movement rhetoric to recognize the complex interplay between what is “social” about “movement rhetoric” and what is “rhetorical” about “social movement.”

In this chapter, we analyze the rhetorical tactic of the march through a closer study of the 1966 farm workers’ march from Delano to Sacramento, an inaugural and one of the most iconic marches of the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Although borne out of unique circumstances and social forces throughout their respective histories, Chicanx and Latinx movements have consistently deployed the march to mitigate political weaknesses and affirm their political identities—from the farmworkers’ “pilgrimage” march from Delano to Sacramento in 1966, led by César Chávez, to the 2006 “Great March” of over a million people (many Latinxs and Latinx immigrants), marching in downtown Los Angeles in opposition to proposed restrictive immigration legislation. Through a consideration of one of these marches, this chapter invites further reflection on the tactic of “the march” and its bearing on the concept of a “social movement.” We argue that understanding the material nature of the march as both event (a march) and tactic (to march) reframes our understanding of the rhetoric of social movements more broadly. A march is an assemblage of bodies, behaviors, affects, objects, texts, and forms of movement that makes demands, performs publicity/presence, composes a collective body politic, and enacts transformation. Furthermore, the material rhetoric of the march as tactic underscores the duality of social movement as eventful, because marches assemble and redirect ongoing social motion into a transformative rhetorical event. In short, the march illuminates the rhetorical assembling of social, political, and rhetorical forces inducing the manifestation of movement but is inseparable from the immanent social motion that it harnesses and channels. In examining the farm workers’ march as a process and product of rhetorical intervention, we hope also to demonstrate how the eventfulness of the march calls for an adjustment of the concept of social movement itself. Thus, our chapter has two interlocking yet distinct purposes. We put into focus the complexity of a common tactic to social movements, whose rhetoric on the surface appears to be self-evidential. However, we also deploy that renewed and more complex perspective on a quintessential social movement tactic to exhibit a fresh way of approaching social movement rhetoric itself.

In what follows, we first explain the rhetoricity of the march, as an assembly of individuals (and other elements) engaged in collective motion, and we draw out its relationship to social movement more broadly. The concept of a march historically has been linked to social movements since the eighteenth century, and the march’s use as a tactic in political action(s) underlines its link to its movement making capacity within a social fabric always and already in motion. Taking into account the rhetorical character of a march, we then discuss the farm workers’ march (or peregrinación) to Sacramento in 1966. We show how our understanding of this iconic march is expanded through a more robust understanding of the rhetoric of the march. Finally, we conclude by discussing how our chapter problematizes and intervenes in rhetorical analyses of social movement rhetoric.

The march is a familiar topic of study to scholars of social movement rhetorics. Most commonly, the march is approached as a rhetorical discourse, or what we might call text or artifact, which is analyzed for its symbolic, performative, and consummatory dimensions (e.g., Cisneros 2011; Pezzullo 2003). In other cases, rhetorical scholars consider marches as fragments within a broader effort to trace social movement(s) over time (e.g., “the movement of meaning,” see Condit and Lucaites 1993; DeLuca 1999; McGee 1980). Rather than view the march solely as instrumental to or symptomatic of social movement(s) as such, our goal in this section is to analyze the rhetorical, materialist nature of the march qua movement. Contra Christina Foust’s (2017) claim that “rhetoric (with or without a phenomenal movement) moves the social” (60), we understand the march as a vivid exhibition of the materialist aspects of rhetoric both in form (e.g., corporeality, affect, sensation, physical motion) and in its manifestations (e.g., posters, megaphones...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section 1 Tactics of Rhetorical Advocacy
• Section 2 Mobilizing New Media
• Section 3 Power in Networks
• Section 4 Emerging Contexts
• Index