Racialization in times of contention: how social movements influence Latino racial identity

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of the 2006 immigrant rights protests on the strength of Latino racial identity. Utilizing the 2006 Latino National Survey and an original protest event data set, we test whether Latino perceptions of racialization changed during the series of demonstrations. We treat the marches temporally as a quasi-natural experiment to explore changes in Latino attitudes regarding their racial identities before, during, and after the protests. We find that both during and after the marches, Latinos possessed a greater sense of racialization than before the marches. Moreover, the effect of the demonstrations was not short-lived and did not dissipate immediately after the end of the protest cycle. Rather, the effect grew stronger as the number of days after the last protest occurred increased. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the impacts social movements can have on the strength of collective identities.