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The introduction provides an overview of the immigrant rights movement and the emergence of a prominent contingent of undocumented immigrant youth at its forefront. These youth have strategically and purposefully leveraged the use of an intersectional movement identity to in turn facilitate coalition building with members of similarly situated groups. The introduction lays out the book’s theoretical intervention in the scholarly literature on undocumented immigration and social movement activism and its methodological approach. It also includes a road map of the later ethnographic and interview-based chapters.

This chapter reveals how liberal Protestants in San Francisco became influential allies and advocates of the emerging homosexual identity movement by examining the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH). The CRH was a discussion group that facilitated dialogue between local clergy and members of homophile organizations. The organization became well-known in January 1965 when its members, who were also part of the clergy, blasted the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) for raiding a costume party organized by various homophile organizations. The retaliation provided a “cloak of the cloth” to the homophile cause. Ultimately, the CRH brought attention and redress to discriminatory police practices, helped jump-start broader grassroots support and cooperation, and inaugurated channels through which queer communities began exerting influence on the city government.

This chapter follows the diverse paths people take as they become politicized, connect to others, and make their way into social movement worlds. The chapter explores the case of DREAMers: undocumented youth who were brought to the U.S. as young children and who are increasingly stepping to the forefront of the immigrant rights movement. The term comes from the proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which offers a streamlined path to citizenship for youth brought to the United States by their parents. Among other pathways to participation, the chapter finds that making media often builds social movement identity; in many cases, media-making projects have a long-term impact on activists’ lives. DREAM activists, often young queer people of color, have developed innovative transmedia tactics as they battle anti-immigrant forces, the political establishment, and sometimes mainstream immigrant rights nonprofit organizations in their struggle to be heard, to be taken seriously, and to win concrete policy victories at both the state and federal levels.

Adolescence is a stage in one’s development where the self can be experienced as being in flux. Changes in one’s physical self is inevitably linked with changes in the way young people may see themselves and the way others see them. As a consequence, the identity of adolescents can be perceived as “moving” in a number of ways, matching both musical preferences as well as internal movements and changes. Similar to musical identities, movement identities will be defined in this chapter as external, physical manifestations of movement associated with self-definition. Using ideas from Erikson and post-Erikson thinkers as well as developmental theorists, such as Kestenberg, we will explore the role dance movement psychotherapy can play in supporting the formation of new movement identities. It will be suggested that when people are not sufficiently supported in their revisiting of the past and their reorganization of inner perceptions, moving forward and towards adulthood can become problematic. We will therefore, argue that changes in internal and externally-externally manifested movement can be enabled through dance movement psychotherapy, a movement-based intervention that allows for movement and musical explorations within a safe environment. A clinical vignette from work within a secondary school context will be used as a way of illustrating relevant points, whilst parallels with musical identities will be drawn throughout the text.

This chapter documents the diversity within Arab-led activism for Palestinians, through detailed case studies of two different activist groups, Adalah-NY and Al-Awda NY. While Al-Awda draws its membership and discourses from the recently-immigrated communities of New York and New Jersey, Adalah-NY is oriented towards international discourses of solidarity and social justice. The different ways that identities (such as Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, American, and Jewish) are used by these organizations represent different responses to the problems of political engagement that Arab Americans and their political allies face.

Chapter 10, “15-M and Podemos: Explaining the Puzzle of the ‘Electoral Turn,’ ” explores the relationship between 15-M and Podemos to answer a central puzzle that arises from the case of 15-M: How did so many members of a movement that was radically committed to critiquing representative democracy embrace the Podemos electoral initiative less than three years later while still claiming allegiance to the spirit and identity of the 15-M movement? It argues that party strategists engaged in extensive discursive work to overcome their cognitive dissonance and realign their activist identities to embrace an electoral option without reneging their 15-M identity. Podemos managed to convince 15-M activists by offering the promise of integrating core elements of 15-M political culture into the party, including autonomy, feminism, and a digitally enabled hacker ethic.