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" It Just Happened " : Telescoping Anxiety, Deﬁance, and Emergent Collective
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“It Just Happened”: Telescoping Anxiety, Defiance, and Emergent Collective Behavior in the
Student Walkouts of 2006
Author(s): Laura Barberena, Hortencia Jiménez and Michael P. Young
Source: Social Problems, Vol. 61, No. 1 (February 2014), pp. 42-60
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social
Problems
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“It Just Happened”: Telescoping Anxiety,
Defiance, and Emergent Collective Behavior
in the Student Walkouts of 2006
Laura Barberena, University of Texas at Austin
Hortencia Jiménez, Hartnell College
Michael P. Young, University of Texas at Austin
In one week in the spring of 2006 more than 100,000 students walked out of schools all across America to
protest the threat of H.R. 4437 to immigrants. Drawing on 50 interviews with students, educators, and community
activists involved in 11 walkouts across five Texas metropolitan areas, we reconstruct the lived experience of these spon-
taneous protests. We identify three tightly interrelated aspects of a social and psychological process shaping these pro-
tests: the relationship between political threat and telescoping anxiety; the role of defiance and its emotion-switching
effect; and the emergent and situational nature of the walkouts. We argue that the collective psychological process of
telescoping anxiety punctuated by the situational thrill of defiance is indispensable in explaining these massive, far-
flung, and spontaneous protests. Keywords: social movements; emotions; collective behavior; anxiety; political threat.
In one week in the spring of 2006, more than 100,000 secondary school students walked
off their campuses across the United States to defend immigrants against a political threat. These
massive protests surprised everyone. Drawing on interviews with students, high school princi-
pals, and community activists involved in the walkouts in Texas, we establish the “spontaneity”
of these walkouts and provide an explanation of the protests grounded in the significance of
dynamic collective feelings of anxiety, the emotion-switching power of mass defiance, and
situational contingency.1
Three tightly linked aspects of a social and psychological process shaped the 2006 walkouts.
First, just prior to the walkouts the anxiety of students over immigrant deportation telescoped
from a general mood of uncertainty about a real but somewhat remote threat to a concrete fear
of an immediate threat. Second, collective rule breaking and the thrill of defiance attacked this
1. We use scare quotes for the descriptor “spontaneous” here in its first usage. For the rest of the article we drop the
quotes. As we explain below, the walkouts did not occur entirely without organization or planning; and an institutional
political threat, H.R. 4437, obviously played a role as a prompt to protest, but spontaneity is an apt descriptor of the protests
because of their simultaneous appearance across disconnected schools and communities, their rapid mobilization and exten-
sive geographic reach, and the relative lack of organized planning.
The authors would like to thank Jim Jasper, Ari Adut, Frances Fox Piven, Jeff Goodwin, John Krinsky, Javier Auyero,
Sylvia Manzano, Christine Williams, Jesse Diaz, and the anonymous reviewers for their help and advice in improving this
article. They are grateful to Holly Hacker of The Dallas Morning News for the initial student contacts. Most of all they thank the
participants, in particular, the students who were willing to talk openly about their experiences of the walkouts. Previous
versions of this article were presented at the Politics and Protest Workshop, CUNY Graduate Center, 2011; the Annual Meet-
ing of the American Sociological Association, Boston, 2008; and the National Association for Chicana & Chicano Studies–Tejas
Regional Conference, University of North Texas, 2007. Direct correspondences to: Michael Young, Sociology Department,
University of Texas at Austin, CLA 3.306, Mail Code 11700, Austin, TX 78712; e-mail: myoung@austin.utexas.edu.
Social Problems, Vol. 61, Issue 1, pp. 42–60, ISSN 0037-7791, electronic ISSN 1533-8533. © 2014 by Society for the Study of
Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp.
DOI: 10.1525/sp.2013.11153.

Anxiety, Defiance, and Emergent Collective Behavior 43
dynamic anxious situation unleashing an anxiolytic effect. Third, the protests were essentially
emergent and situational in nature. Pulling these aspects together, we argue that explaining
why the walkouts exploded across America in the spring of 2006 requires appreciating the emo-
tional dynamics experienced by immigrant students and the immediate practical effects of their
defiance.
The collective psychological pattern to the walkouts identified in this article recalls insights
from the Chicago School approach to collective behavior (Blumer 1939). We take a pragmatist
approach to these old insights to construct a new theory of microlevel processes shaping massive
spontaneous protest in situations of political threat (Emirbayer and Goldberg 2005; Flam 1990;
Gross 2009; Joas 1996; Whitford 2002). We argue that political processes, mobilizing structures,
framing processes, and rationalist microprocesses are insufficient in explaining these far-flung and
spontaneous acts of defiance. Telescoping emotions and the mood-switching power of defiance
attacking the situational nature of threats are key to explaining protests like the 2006 walkouts.
The Student Walkouts of March 2006: Across America and Texas
The 2006 walkouts started in California. On Friday, March 24, hundreds of students walked
out of at least five high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (Keller and Gorman
2006; Malloy 2006). Walkouts were also reported in Ceres, just south of Modesto in northern
California (Anderson 2006; Eiselein 2006). The following week, student walkouts exploded across
the nation. Los Angeles, Seattle, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Detroit, the suburbs
of Washington, DC, and dozens of smaller cities reported walkouts during the last week of March
(Jablon 2006; Kleinbaum 2006). In one week, at least 100,000 students walked out of high schools
and middle schools in communities across the country and in every region of the United States
(Bahrampour and Stockwell 2006; Bradley 2006; Bulkeley 2006; Chuang 2006; Cole 2006; Eiselein
2006; Fernandez 2006; Krone and Lenore 2006; Obernauer 2006; Planas 2006; Riske 2006; Sena
2006; Summers 2006; Thompson 2006).
In Texas, on March 27 and 28, an estimated 10 to 15,000 students walked out of Dallas area
schools (Calderón 2006). On the same two days, hundreds walked out of schools in Houston. By
the middle of the week, on Wednesday, the walkouts appeared in El Paso with an estimated 700
students walking out (Younge 2006). The next day over 2,000 students walked out of El Paso
schools, hundreds walked out of at least four high schools and two middle schools in Austin, and
just north of Austin, in the suburb of Round Rock, scores of students at one of the two high
schools walked out. On Friday, 200 to 300 students walked out of the second Round Rock high
school. Students in San Antonio walked out that same day and again the following week (Martinez
and Ludwing 2006).
Dallas, a city historically known for its quiescence not its protests, witnessed massive walk-
outs on the first day in multiple schools. Walkouts in the north and south of the city ended up in
different places: Town Hall and Kriest Park, respectively. The students from a number of the
schools in Dallas were unaware that students from other schools were walking out at the same
time. Walkouts in Houston occurred on the same day without students knowing about what was
going on in Dallas or elsewhere in the country. In other places with richer histories of contention,
like Austin, and more established networks of Chicano/a activism, like San Antonio, the walkouts
came later in the week and were smaller in scale. South of San Antonio, in communities that were
part of the cradle of the 1960s Chicano/a movement, walkouts did not materialize.
The walkouts caught school administrators, police, politicians, and activists by surprise, but
there was a political fuse to this explosion of student protests, albeit a slow one: The Border Pro-
tection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 or House Bill H.R. 4437, and
the impending threat of action in the Senate on a similar bill to H.R. 4437 introduced by Majority
Leader Sen. Bill Frist (S. 4545, Securing America’s Borders Act). H.R. 4437, passed by the House of
Representatives in December of 2005, defined undocumented immigrants and those who aid

44 BARBERENA/JIMÉNEZ/YOUNG
them as felons. It required state and local law enforcement agents to turn over to federal authori-
ties any undocumented immigrants they detained and increased criminal penalties for document
fraud (Siskind, Susser, and Bland 2005; Suro and Escoar 2006).
Immigrant, social justice, humanitarian, religious, and Latino organizations immediately
opposed H.R. 4437 (National Council of La Raza 2005). Community-based organizations,
churches, and the Spanish language media provided organizational support and education for
anti-H.R. 4437 rallies. The earliest mass rallies occurred in Washington on March 6 and in Chicago
on March 10. On the 25th of March a half a million marchers descended on downtown Los
Angeles and 50,000 rallied in Denver. The marches culminated on April 9 and 10 with rallies
reported in well over a hundred cities across the country (Newbart et al. 2006; Truax 2006a,
2006b; Voss and Bloemraad 2011).
The school walkouts were only loosely connected to these mass rallies. Almost everywhere,
student protests preceded the marches and caught march organizers by surprise. In Los Angeles,
students started walking out the Friday before the rally on March 25. In Texas, the student lead
was even more pronounced. Across America, the walkouts occurred well before the mass rallies
that took place on April 9 and 10.
According to newspaper accounts and the students we interviewed, MySpace (www.myspace.
com) played a central role in the student walkouts. A viral spread of MySpace postings—furthered
by e-mails, instant messaging (IM), mobile phone text messaging, and word of mouth—called for
student walkouts to protest H.R. 4437. These bulletins and messages jumped across relatively dis-
connected communities and constituted the most important planning and notification of the early
and massive walkouts on March 27 and 28 (Barreto et al. 2009; Martinez and Ludwing 2006;
Shore 2006; Stengle 2006; Yan, Hobbs, and Meyer 2006; Younge 2006). The interviews we con-
ducted confirm that the walkouts unfolded with little other planning. According to students we
interviewed, the call to walkout “was just like crazy on MySpace”; it was “bulletin mania.”
Students alone executed this act of mass defiance independent of social movement organiza-
tions. The walkouts developed with breathtaking speed and appeared in communities with little
or no history of immigrant rights activism. A remarkable feature of the walkouts, in Texas and the
nation as a whole, is that they appear to have just exploded simultaneously across relatively dis-
connected communities with little planning and thin to no organizational support. How best to
explain this dynamic of contention?
Threat, Telescoping Anxiety, and the Pragmatics of Defiance
One explanatory point is plain: The 2006 walkouts present an example of “threat induced
contention” with a specific political threat—H.R. 4437—“focusing resistance” (Almeida 2003:345;
Goldstone and Tilly 2001:180; Voss and Bloemraad 2011). The social movement literature on
political threats and popular contention extends insights from macro- and meso-level theories of
political processes (Goldstone and Tilly 2001; Jenkins, Jacobs, and Agnone 2003; Okamoto and
Ebert 2010; Van Dyke and Soule 2002). This literature is mainly concerned with the mediation of
organized popular contention by institutional politics, leaving a large explanatory gap in cases like
the 2006 walkouts where the meso-level factors assumed by political process theories—the role of
mobilizing structures or the cultural framings of activist organizations or networks—are missing
(McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996).
To the extent that the political threat literature plumbs the microsociology of protest, it
relies mainly on a rationalist approach (Goldstone and Tilly 2001). Specifying the motivating
power of political threats at the individual level in rational choice terms demands a clear speci-
fication of the goals or purpose of protest in interest-based terms and shifting subjective expect-
ations of the efficacy of collective action. Rationalist microtheoretic approaches based on these
assumptions offer rigorous explanations of the endogenous processes shaping the rapid spread
of protest mobilizations and even massive spontaneous protest with no organizing. As we

demonstrate, the 2006 walkouts—and we believe a wider variety of threat-induced spontane-

ous protest—defy these rationalist assumptions. Our theoretical approach better fits their
pattern of collective behavior.
If we accept that spontaneous protests like the 2006 walkouts do happen, as we should, emo-
tional microprocesses, not just utility maximization, deserve attention. In these protests, we see a
clear fit between emotional processes and pragmatic behavioral dynamics. Our theoretical argu-
ment is new, but it draws on old insights from collective behaviorism’s microtheoretic link
between anxiety and the spontaneity and emergent aspects of protest. Using pragmatist theory,
we build on these insights. The fit we claim between emotional process and spontaneous dynam-
ics of contention also owes much to Randall Collins’s (2004, 2008) recent work on emotional
energy, microinteractions, and the forward panic; to Deborah Gould’s (2009) study of ACT UP
and the role of emotional shifts, like the transformation of shame into anger in periods of rapid
mobilization; and above all to James Jasper’s (1998) theorizing of the role of affective and reactive
emotions in movements. In this theory section, we first outline our argument. We conclude by
discussing why a rationalist approach, the only alternative microlevel approach to explaining
massive and spontaneous protest, cannot explain the 2006 walkouts.
Affective and Reactive Anxiety: A Situational Analysis

Unlike much of the work in the collective behaviorist tradition, we are not looking to anxiety
as the master emotion of protest. We are looking for general links between specific emotional
experiences and particular forms of collective behavior that can advance social movement theory.
Emotions are indispensable and decisive in grasping situations that are too complex or unfold too
quickly “to be handled” by a detached and deliberate “analysis of options and their consequences”
(Elster 2000:159; see also Damasio 1994). In situations of a rapidly developing threat, actors must
feel their way in order to orient themselves. When there is “no time out,” we commonly feel
situations as we act (Katz 1999:316). These feelings are not essentially private but are often shared
dispositions. We do not misspeak when we refer to the mood of a party, the feel of a room. Moods
often occur as emotional “entrainment” or affective “attunements” in shared situations (Collins
2004:65; Dreyfus 1991:169). Emotional contagion is not a myth of the madding crowd, but a
“socio-psychological fact” of interaction in shared situations (Collins 2004:78).
People without face-to-face interaction, confronting the same or very similar situation, may
also share emotional dispositions, despite great distance, if they quite reasonably feel themselves
to be in the same boat. The shared disposition of immigrant students in the spring of 2006 is ab-
solutely key to explaining the massive and spontaneous walkouts—their feel for the situation was
one of collective anxiety, a longstanding anxiety made suddenly acute by the threat of H.R. 4437.
Anxiety is both “affect” and “reactive emotion” (Jasper 1998). Unlike anger, grief, elation, or
other more typically reactive emotions, anxiety can be vague and diffuse, and, at some level, a per-
manent experience. As an affect, it is an almost atmospheric mood, more “scalar” than “vectorial”
(Geertz 1973:97). In this affective form, anxiety would seem a poor choice as a psychological factor
to help explain episodic and intentional events like protests. As a shared and longstanding mood,
however, anxiety can shift, and sometimes suddenly, to something more reactive, the fear of
something immediate and concrete (Smelser 1963).
If emotions typically come with “action tendencies,” anxiety is attended by split tendencies:
freezing or furtive action versus attacking or panic fleeing (Elster 2000:38–40). A pragmatic
approach to emotions helps explain why. Following John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, we
ground emotions in situations of “conflict within the coordination” of activity or the “disintegration
and reconstruction of conduct” (Dewey 1896:368; Mead 1903:109). Anxiety first and foremost
discloses a problem at hand, an action problem. From this pragmatist view, threats create anxious
situations by interrupting habitual activity, by disrupting the “quotidian” (Gross 2009; Snow et al.
1998). If the disrupting problem is “too remote or uncertain,” its source being unreachable or
unclear, it may not be possible to do anything overt about it (Dewey 1894:566).

Herbert Blumer (1939, 1978) argues that actors in these situations characteristically feel
balked. These situations feel paralyzing, as is the case with generalized anxiety. Uncertainty about
the nature of the threat and the difficulty of assessing risk often leads to hiding, keeping a low pro-
file, or carefully sticking to safe practices that avoid unnecessary exposure to the problem. This
was the general line of action of many of the students we interviewed before the spring of
2006. Some undocumented students described their experience as living a “closeted life”—always
trying “to be good” so as not to call attention to themselves, so as to hide.
If the threat grows clearer or becomes immediate, it can be acted upon. To the extent that a
changing situation provides “definiteness or limitation” to the problem and the feeling of threat, it
may help guide action directly against the problem, as in the case of flight or defensive attack in
the face of cue-specific fear (Dewey 1894:561). Generalized or sustained anxiety and cue-specific
or phasic fear are linked experientially and physiologically, but there are important distinctions
between the two (Lang, Davis, and Ohman 2000). They mark different threat situations and
occasions for action. As work on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust shows, the immediacy of
a threat increases the likelihood of resistance (Einwohner and Maher 2011; Maher 2010). As an
ambiguous and remote threat becomes clear and immediate, a scalar anxious mood starts to shape
into something more like a vectorial fear (Geertz 1973), an affective emotion becomes reactive
(Jasper 1998). The experience is of movement from the opposite ends of anxiety’s action tendencies:
from paralysis to action. We describe this emotional process as telescoping.2
This experience of telescoping anxiety is contingent on the situation of threat. In the case of
the walkouts, public schools provided an added definiteness to students’ feel for the threat they
faced and a way forward. A similar way forward was not as readily apparent to many other immi-
grants whose resistance to the threat came after the lead of students in the 2006 wave of protests.
In an analogical process familiar to phenomenologists, the immediate and specific context of the
school provided a particular feel for the national political threat of H.R. 4437 and an occasion to
attack it. The schools enabled a “keying” process that guided action (Goffman 1974). The transpo-
sition of frameworks, national politics and school rules, provided what Dewey describes as an
“end-in-view” for projecting action through the threatening situation (Joas 1996; Whitford 2002).
This kind of keying between “situation-transcending” political threat and “situation-specific”
action appears in students’ descriptions of their telescoping emotions before and after the acts of
defiance (Katz 1999:315). Through their accounts we can trace the students’ feelings as they
telescoped in, sliding from the wider significance of the political threat of H.R. 4437 to the more
concrete and immediate occasion for defiant action against school authorities, and then after the
walkout as they telescoped back out as they sensually reflected on the broader significance of what
they had just done.
The Anxiolytic Power of Emergent Defiance in Situations of Threat

The emotion-switching power of defiance is axial to the psychological and behavioral arc of
this dynamic of contention. It is the pivot in the process of telescoping in and out. By making a
situation in which a counter-posing emotion is produced, defiance attacks the unbidden anxiety
and fear (Elster 2000; Shibutani 1966). Collective rule breaking unleashes a powerful anxiolytic
effect; it thrills and electrifies actors as it moves through and ahead of a threatening situation
(Scott 1990). Defiant social protests breakthrough the balked feelings of generalized anxiety and
literally explode as they move toward a suddenly new end in view. The goals of collective defiance
2. We treat “generalized anxiety” and “cue-specific fear” as two ends in a continuum of the emotion anxiety (Lang et al.
2000). Telescoping anxiety refers to the slide from the generalized to the specific. In our discussion we at times use anxiety to
refer to the continuous emotion and at times to refer to the generalized end of the continuum. The context in each case should
make clear the particular sense being used. Fear and anxiety might alternatively be treated as analytically distinct, as different
emotions, and then this slide would be seen more as a jump from one emotion to another closely related emotion. We don’t
think this reconceptualization would change our analysis too much. That said, our understanding of the phenomenology and
psychoneurology of anxiety and fear justifies treating them as variations of a coherent feeling.

emerge in the emotional and practical flow of actors moving through and against the threatening
situation. The emotional and practical ends or effects of defiance appear in the process of acting
often catching actors by surprise.
We are not suggesting that anxiety focused as fear prods (irrational) action in a kind of stimulus-
response behavioral model. This was the (wrong) view of collective behaviorism criticized by re-
source mobilization and political process theorists (McAdam 1982; Tilly 1978). Quite the opposite,
following our pragmatist reading of Blumer, we see protestors who “forge lines of action” in threat-
ening “situations of uncertain and shifting character” as “projecting” through anxiety—as attacking
it (Blumer 1978:3; Young 2007:33). Although not guided by a clear preconceived goal, their actions
are practical as they tackle problems immediately at hand.
Our pragmatic approach does not rob the actor of her agency. Protestors are not simply
responding to emotions but are acting into them. The anxious situation does not “trigger” action
but it was also not just “the terrain” for acting on preconceived intentions (Joas 1996:161). The
“trick” is to recognize that telescoping anxiety and situational contingencies leading to the trans-
position of the registers of threat are not “constitutive of action” but create the “occasion” and the
“feel” for action—the occasion for a bold and proud defiance that projects actors through and out
of anxiety and its attending shame, at least for a time (Whitford 2002:355).
Defiant collective acts like these project actors into unforeseen possibilities. They open new
horizons and new paths (Fantasia 1988; Hirsch 1990). When the students in our interviews say
“it just happened” they mean they surprised themselves with acts that broke abruptly with their
usual practices and that were not planned to achieve a preconceived, specified goal. These acts
were directed at a threatening situation, one that emerged quickly and presented an occasion,
which they seized, to attack a longer standing anxious situation. Under the pressures of a rapidly
evolving political threat, the lightening-fast coordination of calls to walkout through the Internet
and mobile phones, and the situational contingencies of the school context, there was no time to
weigh the costs and benefits of protest or inaction. Once the students acted they were shocked by
the outcome, not just the fact that they were joined by so many, but also by the emotional power
of their defiance as anxiety gave way to thrill and pride. Once they achieved the end of bolting
from schools and discovered how strong they were in numbers, new ends in view emerged
to challenge other public authorities, e.g., defying the police in the streets, demonstrating at the
capitol, invading city hall.
Alternative Rationalist Approaches
An alternative microsociological approach to spontaneous protests comes from a rational

choice tradition. While rejecting key assumptions of this tradition, we find two prominent lines
within it valuable in specifying the puzzle posed by the walkouts. As in all rationalist approaches,
both lines assume that an individual’s decision to protest hinges on her perceived balance of the
costs and benefits of acting in terms of a “pre-specified” end or the “future state” protest is “intended
to bring about” (Friedman and Hechter 1988:202; Herdstrom and Swedberg 1996:132). One line
offers threshold models to explain how the intentional actions of a few individuals can cascade
quickly into massive collective behavior, and the second line offers a spontaneous collective action
model to explain how disconnected individuals in similar situations can simultaneously act in
concert (Granovetter 1978; Opp, Voss, and Gern 1995).
Threshold models assume that an individual’s perceived balance of the costs and benefits of
joining a protest varies depending on how many others have already joined. Actors reasonably
believe that the likelihood of success goes up the larger the number of participants in the protest.
Individuals, however, have different participation thresholds: They vary with regard to how many
people they believe must participate before they think the protest will achieve the goal, and they
will join the protest only when they think this threshold is (near to being) met. Mark Granovetter
(1978) first demonstrated how small “perturbations” in the participation threshold of individuals

could lead to massive, essentially unpredictable, collective behavior. Recent work following this
line seeks to specify individual-level mechanisms that might predict the tipping points when small
changes suddenly unleash massive effects (Biggs 2005; Oliver 1993). Forest fire, snowball effect,
avalanche, and critical mass are some of the natural metaphors and heuristic devices employed by
social scientists in this rationalist line to help explain these kinds of protest dynamics (Biggs 2005;
Oliver, Marwell, and Teixeira 1985). Common to most of these explanations are the mechanisms
of “inspiration” and “interdependence” (Biggs 2003:224; Biggs 2005:1685). They pay close atten-
tion to the temporal sequence and spatial spread of collective action to identify the information
cascades and network interconnections that should pace and channel rapid mobilizations.
We do not doubt the importance of these information cascades, but why so many walkouts
appeared simultaneously without students knowing if others elsewhere were also walking out
defies easy explanation by threshold models that rely on mechanisms of inspiration and interde-
pendence (Opp et. al. 1995). A second line of analysis in the rational choice tradition addresses how
disconnected actors manage to act together. Karl-Dieter Opp, Peter Voss, and Christiane Gern
(1995) develop a spontaneous collective action model to explain this kind of collective phenome-
non. They employ this rationalist approach to explain the spontaneous revolution in East Germany
in 1989. Our puzzle and theirs are similar. Like the walkouts of 2006, spontaneous protests in
Leipzig in 1989 involved disconnected mass simultaneity. Without clear knowledge that others
would protest and without any organization, citizens of Leipzig in the fall of 1989 came in large
numbers to Karl Marx Platz hoping to be a part of a demonstration. Opp and his colleagues explain
this spontaneous collective action as the result of a combination of factors: again, a clearly shared
goal; a dramatic rise in the incentives to protest; a shared belief that no organization or activist
network would lead the protests; and, in Leipzig, a weekly ritual of a peace gathering in a central
plaza providing an obvious time and place for people to demonstrate without the need for prior
coordination. As incentives mounted, disconnected individuals arrived simultaneously at the same
decision: if they went to the plaza on Mondays, they would find a critical mass of likeminded critics
of the regime and be joining a demonstration that could effect regime change. This is how the spon-
taneous Monday demonstrations first emerged in September and October of 1989.
To their great credit, rationalist threshold and spontaneous collective action models take
seriously the possibility that the intentional actions of individuals with little prior organization can
suddenly come together in massive collective action. The 2006 walkouts, however, violate ratio-
nalist assumptions. To begin with there was no clear preconceived goal. In a very general sense
the students acted against H.R. 4437, but they had no clear sense before the walkouts how they
could counter such a political threat. This does not mean that students’ actions were purposeless,
much less irrational. The teleological approach to intentional action of the rationalist tradition
assumes a priori, stable ends to act toward; pragmatist approaches do not (Joas 1996; Whitford
2002). From the pragmatist view, the ends of intentional action emerge into view within the pro-
cess of acting to change a problem.
There are similarities between our approach and rationalist ones. The explanation we provide
based on telescoping anxiety might usefully be thought of as an emotional process in effect low-
ering the participation threshold of many (Granovetter 1978; Oliver 1993). Also, our analysis of
the dynamic anxious situation of immigrant students in public schools might usefully be thought
of as explaining how disconnected individuals could simultaneously meet with the same occasion
for defiant action. Instead of attending to changes in the balance of costs and benefits of actions
toward a preconceived goal, we highlight changes in the anxious feelings of a threat and the situ-
ational contingencies of these perturbations as shaping the occasion for individuals to protest and
attack the threat.
We think our account better fits the factual pattern of the walkouts. We take the arc of the
protest—its rapid explosion in schools across America, and within these schools tension suddenly
and dramatically giving way to defiance against local authorities, fear and even shame giving way
to thrill and pride, and students improvising as they bolt from their schools—as part of the phe-
nomenon that must be explained. It is not clear to us how rational decision-making processes

based on the assumptions of stable goals and utility maximization could fit this same pattern of
collective behavior. The students did not have preconceived goals in mind, instead the ends of
action emerged and changed fluidly in the concrete situations within which they acted. The
moments leading up to defiant action and the moments of defiance did not look like calculative
cognitive processes as specified by rational choice theories but instead as emotional processes with
practical breakthroughs as situationally contingent defiance overthrew fear and anxiety.
Methods And Data
This research is based primarily on 50 in-depth interviews with students, principals, and com-
munity activists with direct experience in the 2006 student walkouts in Texas. We interviewed
42 students from five metropolitan areas and two smaller cities in South Texas. The students we in-
terviewed gave accounts of 11 discrete walkout events. Interviews were conducted from January
2007 through 2008. We started with interviewing students referred to us by a reporter who covered
the walkouts for the Dallas Morning News. She provided us ten names of students each from different
high schools in the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. To find students outside of the Dallas–Fort Worth
area, we started with a sample of undergraduate students from two courses offered by the Center
for Mexican and American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and from a civics fair
organized at the same university. From these different points of initial contact, we used a snowball
sampling technique. The resulting sample includes one fairly large cluster of students from the
southern Dallas walkouts that ended up in Kriest Park and another smaller but still significant clus-
ter from an Austin walkout. We also have multiple accounts from walkouts in Round Rock, San
Antonio, northern Dallas, and Fort Worth, and single accounts of six different walkouts from places
as far apart as Houston and El Paso. We interviewed five high school principals and three commu-
nity activists who became involved in the protests and related events thereafter.
Interviews were conducted in person and over the phone: 42 in person and 8 over the phone.
All of the students allowed the interviews to be recorded. The names used in this text are pseudo-
nyms. All of the student participants we interviewed were of Latino heritage, and all but one of
Mexican ancestry. The question format we used for the interviews was semistructured and open-
ended, allowing participants the freedom to speak. In general, we tried to get students to talk about
what happened before, during, and just after the walkouts, with an emphasis on their own experi-
ences. The interviews average one hour in duration and were conducted in Spanish and English, in
accordance with the preference of the respondents.
We took pains to gather particular accounts of multiple walkouts across different social con-
texts and multiple accounts of specific events, but we must be cautious about generalizing from
this data. Ideally our data would not just be randomized but—given our particular concern with
emotional dynamics, interactive situations, and collective behavior—ethnographic. But catching
spontaneous and rare events like the 2006 walkouts for ethnographic study is obviously difficult.
We depend primarily on the retrospective account of witnesses and participants.
We supplement these interviews with data from two other closely related research projects:
ethnographic and interview data collected from 2006 to 2010 on the workings of an immigrant
rights coalition in central Texas and interview data collected from an ongoing research on Dream
Act activists in San Antonio and Austin, Texas.
This retrospective study asks adolescents and young adults to report on memories of events.
These memories are not copies of the experiences recalled but subjective reconstructions subject
to recall bias (Sudman, Bradburn, and Schwarz 1996). Many describe without personal reference
crowded hallways as students spilled out of classes, the rhythm of the action as it first emerged, the
behavior of students as they exited buildings, the actions of school administrators, police chases,
the clothing students wore, the signs they displayed, etc. They also provided reconstructions of
emotional experiences like the tension they felt as the hour of walking out approached and their
excitement as they bolted from class. Depersonalized memories pose the least problems in terms

of recall bias because they are easier to corroborate, they can be compared with other accounts of
the same events. Personal memories of how one felt are essentially private and cannot be verified
by third parties, but they can be compared to the behavior described in depersonalized memories
or by third party accounts to look for correspondence: Did students act as if they felt the way they
say they felt? We make these kinds of cross checks when we can.
According to studies of autobiographical memory, events that are unique, consequential, un-
expected, and emotion provoking lead to well-recalled memories (Brewer 1986; see also Opp et. al.
1995 on this point). These are all defining characteristics of the events the students in this study are
asked to recall. Is recalling emotion more problematic than recalling action or even thought? As far
as we know, political scientists working on theories of affective intelligence and voting are the only
social scientists who have tested this issue. Andrew Civettini and David P. Redlawsk (2005), in an
experiment designed to see if respondents could accurately recall their emotional responses to
candidates, conclude “that post-hoc measures of affective reactions are good, but not perfect,
approximations of affect as it would be reported if measured immediately.” In short, we think our
phenomenological data is reliable.
The Lived Experience of the Walkouts
Peter Orner (2008), in his introduction to a study of 60 oral histories of undocumented

immigrants, argues that immigration laws in America force “undocumented people to live in a
state of permanent anxiety” (p. 9). Our interviews and ethnographic research support this claim.
Enforcement of immigration law is generally spotty because of both a lack of resources and public
will to deport the many millions of undocumented people in the United States. Douglas S. Massey,
Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone (2002) argue that U.S. immigration policy has been for some
time purposefully ambivalent in enforcement because it serves contradictory interests creating
settings where immigrants are safe and spaces where they are punished. Under these contradictory
circumstances, most undocumented immigrants, and even some “legal resident” immigrants, can
never completely shake the threat of deportation, but they do not always nor even regularly ex-
perience the threat of detention and deportation as immediate. This structural ambivalence in
American immigration policy is periodically punctuated by forceful moves on one side of the
valence. This is what happened in 2006 with the nativist and anti-immigrant bill H.R. 4437.
Telescoping Anxiety
The students we interviewed felt that they and loved ones, as immigrants and Latinos, were
in the spring of 2006 in a particularly dangerous situation. The threat was not entirely new but it
suddenly appeared much closer. They experienced an emotional process that suddenly traveled
from an always-present anxious mood to a fear of an immediate threat. For many of the students
we talked to, the news of H.R. 4437 and speculation of how it might change immigration enforce-
ment disrupted their lives. It played on longstanding apprehensions, triggering in many acute
fears of deportation, imprisonment, and loss of loved ones. As news of H.R. 4437 reached immi-
grant students, their anxiety started to telescope into fear, sliding from an affective to reactive
emotion.
Anna Villanueva, a student from Townview High School in Dallas, tried to walkout on
Monday March 27. She bolted from her classroom with others but was blocked when she got
to the school exit by administrators who had managed to put parts of the school in “lockdown.”
Anna’s defiant act on that day overturned years of cautious behavior ingrained in her by her
parents since the day she crossed the Rio Grande. They taught her to always be on guard
and “be good” as a way of protection from being identified as undocumented. She learned
to disperse the anxiety of being undocumented by being vigilant to “stay out of trouble” and
“not call attention to myself and my status.” As a child, Anna remembers always “hiding” her

immigration status. It was like being “closeted.” She made sure not to talk Spanish in school.
She and her siblings dressed in ways that they hoped would not make them look Mexican.
Anna obviously had grounds for worrying about deportation and family separation, but no
one close to her had ever been deported or even entered deportation procedures. Through-
out her public school years in south Dallas with its large Latino community and years of
belonging to a Pentecostal church with a largely immigrant Mexican congregation, the threat had
never hit home. The threat, the anxiety, was permanent but remote for Anna until the spring
of 2006.
Paula Rodriguez, like Anna, is undocumented, but she spent her school years in a more afflu-
ent suburb of Dallas. Her family started to teach her “the do’s and don’ts” of being an undocu-
mented immigrant even before she left Mexico. For example, they would not let her learn to
drive since she could not get a U.S. drivers license. No one in her family, including her mom
and dad, ever got behind the wheel of a car. For long trips, Paula learned to take Amtrak and not
Greyhound because the buses were often targeted by “la migra.” Like Anna, she was always
careful to be “good” around authorities, especially the police. For Paula, Anna, and their family
members, avoiding encounters with authorities managed the anxiety of being undocumented.
Changes to immigration law or enforcement threaten to disrupt the safe practices and spaces
of immigrants. News of H.R. 4437 disrupted the lives of many of the students we interviewed. The
bill made the threat of deportation suddenly immediate to many. The threat was confusing to
many who we interviewed, but H.R. 4437 was generally discussed as a real and immediate threat
to them and their families and loved ones.
Mayra Lopez, born in Hidalgo, Mexico and at the time a senior in a Dallas high school,
remembered hearing about H.R. 4437 from her mom, but she did not at first register the signifi-
cance of the bill: “I was busy with scholarships and stuff. I wasn’t really concentrating on the news
and stuff. My mom had mentioned something: ‘Quieren sacarnos’ [they want to kick us out] and
blah blah blah. I didn’t really pay [attention].”
Throwing herself into work and school, Mayra at first avoided the growing fear felt by her
mom. This came to an end when a small anti-H.R. 4437 rally at Dallas City Hall caught her atten-
tion. “That’s when I realized the severity of the whole issue.” News of H.R. 4437 and witnessing
Latinos protesting the bill arrested her everyday life of school and work. What her mom had said
now suddenly seemed real and immediate: “¡Quieren sacarnos!”
As news of the potential impact of H.R. 4437 reached students, it disrupted the very founda-
tion of their lives: their security in family and friends. Julieta Ramirez, a freshman at LASA high
school in Austin, felt targeted by H.R. 4437.
It was going to affect my family because my brother didn’t have his papers at that time, I didn’t have my
papers at that time you know, cousins, and aunts and uncles, friends, and their family, you know? I was
just, see, basically the majority of our friends, with the exception of maybe 3 or 4, it all [would] be gone,
you know.
For Julieta the new threat was immediate and totalizing: “because we have our family, our
friends, all around our community, it would have affected everybody.” She felt her world was
about to fall apart.
The principal of a Dallas high school who spoke with student leaders just before hundreds
walked off his campus explained that his students “feared that their parents were going to be de-
ported all of a sudden.” Isabel Navarro, a ninth grader in a Dallas magnet school at the time, ex-
plained why she walked out this way: “Well my parents came as quote-unquote wetbacks . . .
I wanted to stand up for my parents.” José Rosa, born in Odessa and a junior at the time at Round
Rock High School, said that chain e-mails calling for walkouts to protest H.R. 4437 got him think-
ing about doing something. José was bewildered and scared by the news of the bill.
I was just like in disbelief. It was kind of weird. It was like why you going to do that? You might as well
put everyone in prison . . . My grandpa, my grandma even, even my cousins, my aunt, they helped

people who came in. And some of our family actually had bad papers. And so, I was kind of worried,
I was kind of worried about that. Like, well, we helped them out.
Anxiety telescoping into fear mixed with a strong sense of injustice in many students’ accounts.
Xiomara Bermudez, a junior at the same Round Rock school, expressed fear mixed with sadness
and anger as she described how news of the bill jarred her. “Yeah, I took it to the heart . . .
I actually felt hated at that point.”
Students reported salient links between their growing fear over H.R. 4437 and the risk of
walking out. In the act of walking out, the situation-specific fear of breaking school rules and the
threat of H.R. 4437 to themselves, family, and friends came together. In the schools we studied,
the control and screening of students by campus authorities was in ways similar to the work of the
Border Patrol and ICE. The risks of walking off campus and the risks of being “bordered” had a
similar feel (Browne 2005). Schools provided a situation where students found and felt a way
to attack a confusing political threat that was coming from afar but seemed to be closing in. The
school setting helped “key” protest against the anti-immigrant threat and provided an occasion to
attack the fear.
As the time grew close to walking out, students described mounting and sharpening tension
and excitement. Before the walkout started in Mayra Lopez’s school, she described the collective
sentiment this way: “It was uncertainty on everybody. It was tension on everybody ‘cause they
didn’t know what to do, what was going to happen . . . if they were going to get in trouble.” On
the morning of the first walkout in Duncanville, a southern suburb of Dallas, Fernando Rodríguez,
widely credited as a central leader of the Dallas walkouts for the work he did the day before on
MySpace, “felt kind of nervous and kind of excited.” José Rosa felt very much the same way the
morning of the first Round Rock walkout. “I was anxious . . . I was excited. I was pretty jumpy.”
Julieta Ramirez, described the time just before the walkout this way:
You know, I had trouble [sleeping]. I think I might’ve spent 3 or 4 hours [sleeping]. I was really excited
about it, you know going through with it. I knew what was going to happen the next day, you know no
matter what happened, it was going to be okay. It was just a lot of excitement, and I was just like oh
my God it’s almost time, it’s almost time. I was counting down to 9 a.m., like; we are all counting down
waiting for 9 to arrive.
Nydia Velazquez described the way she felt just before walking out as the “most crazy feeling ever,
like, there was like this vive that you can feel in the back of your neck, it was brewing, it was, it
was indescribable.”
Pilar Montejano, born and raised in San Luis Potosi, Mexico was afraid of walking out:
“I didn’t know what the school would do to us, if they were going to give us tickets, if they were
going to suspend us. I didn’t know what was going to happen. That’s why I was scared.” For Beatriz
Sanchez of Nimitz High School in Irving just west of Dallas the idea of skipping school made her
feel uneasy. Like Anna and Paula, she had always been careful to do the right thing, to keep a low
profile, and now she was risking calling attention to herself, upending the protective conduct of
being “good”: “I was actually scared. I’m just one of those people that goes to school every day.
I don’t skip school. Am I doing the right thing? I guess I just got the courage to walkout. I’m just
one of those people who doesn’t get in trouble.” Similarly, Teresa Uribe, born and raised in
Tamaulipas, Mexico was scared of getting in trouble. She asked Ramiro Hernandez, a central leader
in the Lanier High School walkout in Austin, as the protest was unfolding, “would there be problems
with the police and all that?” Ramiro, born and raised in Michoacán and described by his principal
as a “really good kid,” said many were afraid: “A lot of them had doubts.” [Muchos tenían la duda.]
Explosive Defiance, Thrill, and Pride

At the moment of action, the emotions of students like Pilar, Beatriz, Teresa, and the students
Ramiro encouraged to walkout were telescoping. As Maya Medrano, a sophomore from Fox Tech

High School in San Antonio, described the moment of defiance, the anxiety of being undocu-
mented, the threat of H.R. 4437, and fears of reprisals for walking out all became transposed, and
these feelings were about to be overthrown by a bold act:
I told my teacher, “Sir, I’m going to walk out. This is going to happen.” I had talked to some of the kids
there and everybody knows I don’t have my papers. Everybody knows how hard this is hitting my home.
‘Cause it isn’t just me, but my mom, and my brothers . . . if we were deported my two younger sisters that
are born from here, they would stay here cause there’s no chance that my mom wanted them to go back
to Mexico with us. So that would separate our family that we worked so hard to keep here and to work
where we are at the moment. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to walk out.” At 9 o’clock, I just kept staring at
the clock. I just kept thinking, oh no, . . . I was just getting ready . . . Okay, I’ve got to do this.
Maya was not alone in this in-the-moment transposition of challenging the threat of changing im-
migration policy and confronting school authority. Norma Perez, a senior at Skyline High School
in Dallas, born in Michoacán, described a similar transposition of frameworks in the electrifying
experience of defying her high school principal. At her school, the walkout occurred at 10:30 a.m.
during “the passing period.” School authorities responded by putting the school in lockdown.
“They tried to lock us in, but the school has seven buildings so it’s almost impossible for them to
stop us.” Norma was confronted by her principal as she was leaving one of the school’s buildings:
“You can’t do this!” Norma replied, “Oh, yes I can. You can’t stop me.” In describing the event,
Norma’s voice crackled with excitement as she retold why she could and how she told him off:
“See it from my perspective. This is going to affect my family, the people who I care for, that’s why
I’m doing this. I’ll take the consequences.” At the moment of walking out, Norma felt she could
or must defy his authority no matter the consequences because the situation threatened to rip
apart her family. An emotional transposition of school and national politics was guiding action. As
she brushed by him, she looked back at the students streaming out, “I couldn’t see the end of the
line!” For Norma and many others we interviewed, the anxious behavioral pattern of being
undocumented—of always being good and avoiding risk—was suddenly overthrown with an act
of mass defiance.
Many of the students we talked to described apprehensive anticipation giving way to the kind
of exhilaration Norma experienced as she walked out. The act of defiance worked as a mood
switch. Early in the morning of the walkout at LASA High school in Austin, Julieta Ramirez met
with a group of students in her math teacher’s classroom.
We were in his classroom making posters, and making phone calls, there were about 20 of us. And, from
there we were just, we kept running to the window to see if there was anybody out there yet and it was
close to 9 a.m. I looked out the window and there was like people kind-a peeking through, everybody
was watching to see who was going to be the first people to walk through, to walkout, and so, I was like,
you know, let’s just go. So we grabbed all our posters, everything we have and let’s just go.
As they made their move, Julieta described the mood this way: “We were just all kind-a standing
tall, you know, just walking out the building feeling proud for what we were doing.” Mayra Lopez
described the early moments of the walkout at Townview in Dallas this way: “Everybody was com-
ing out of the classes and you got more pumped up once you saw all the people coming out . . . It was
exhilarating to get out of class without permission . . . It was a lot of noise, a lot of people, a lot of
chanting.” As in Townview, authorities at Nydia Velazquez’s school tried to stop the walkout as
it started. They told the students:
“Everybody go to homeroom!” And they were like yelling at everybody and nobody would move and so
nobody wanted to get in trouble, but I guess we were strong in numbers, you know, and then, so then we
just stayed there. There was 100 or more of us. And then, I don’t know who this guy was, I don’t even
remember him, he stood up and he’s like “no, we got to do this right, we got to do this right, nobody
walkout!” And then, I was like look at all these people here, you know, and then so finally this [other]
guy said “e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y LET’S GO! So then we were like OKAY! And we just charged through the
back doors and there was this old lady that I remember that nobody liked her, she was like, she was the

secretary, she was like “NO, STOP, STOP, NO.” She tried to grab people and people were like pulling off
from her and we just walked right past her.
Nydia’s description of the dynamic in the hall captures a threshold or tipping point when the de-
fiant initiative of one unleashes a torrent. In her account the thrill of defying authority appears as
the pivot of the collective protest—it unleashes tremendous emotional energy. Describing the
power of the experience of walking out, Nydia remarks “it wasn’t just protesting you know, it was
breaking the school rules, especially for me. I’ve never gotten in trouble.”
Maya Medrano described her feelings at the moment of walking out of her San Antonio high
school this way:
I was mad, nervous, anxious, more anxious than anything else. I wanted to see how many people would
do it. At first I was like what if I’m the only person that does it and if I get expelled, I can’t get expelled. At
that point, when it was actually happening like all that kind of went away. And I was like, you know, [so]
what if I get expelled . . . I got to accept something good. My mom would be proud of me . . . It’s like my
whole Mexican pride came and uplift me.
Maya’s description captures the move to attack the fear and the powerful anxiolytic effect of rule-
breaking collective action: “when it was actually happening like all that [mad, nervous, anxious
feeling] kind of went away.” The feeling switched abruptly with the act of defiance. In her attack on
fear, “so what if I get expelled,” her act of defiant “Mexican pride” changed the emotional situation.
The act of defiance exercised control over the unbidden feelings of anxiety and fear by creating a
situation with a counterposing feel.
The Emergent Nature of the Walkouts

Students repeatedly described their acts of defiance with the temporal qualifier “just,” flagging
the spontaneous and surprising character of what they felt and did. The student interviews reveal a
common course of experience. Collective moments of apprehension—watching the clock, halting
in the halls in front of authorities in indecision, being caught in “la duda”—are suddenly broken
through with acts that “just happen”: “I just got the courage to walkout”; “And we just walked”;
“I was like, you know, let’s just go.”
There was of course some measure of planning and coordination, and many were following
the lead of others. Fernando Rodríguez, one of the publicly recognized leaders and “organizers” of
the Monday, March 27, Dallas walkout, started planning less than 24 hours before. In our inter-
view, he described how the morning of the day before he was watching “Meet the Press” or “some
other” Sunday news show and heard about H.R. 4437 and protests in Los Angeles. After going to
church with his family, he decided to try to mobilize some friends.
I called them on the phone and I was like hey you know I’m thinking of doing a walkout you know
tomorrow. And they are like “for real?” And I kind of got ‘em into everything that was going on . . . and
they were like “alright whatever, that’s cool, we’ll do it, we’ll do it.” So I told them to call more people and
when I got back to the house, as soon as I got there, I got on MySpace.
According to Fernando, the plans were pretty sketchy and he had no idea what to expect. “With
so little time that we had to plan we couldn’t cover every detail about what we were going to do.”
Some students we interviewed remained undecided about walking out right up until the mo-
ment they did. Mayra Lopez was one of them. She knew about the plans to walkout because of
MySpace:
It all started with MySpace. I saw a bulletin through one of my friends and it said “yea let’s walkout for” . . .
I don’t remember what it said. I don’t know . . . at first I didn’t agree with it. I was like if we are [to] fight
for people to have a right to an education . . . it just doesn’t seem right if you walkout of education. That
was my first thought but then, um . . . as I thought more about it, and my friends kept calling me, . . . they
said, “Yea let’s do it.”

Alexandra Fernández, a junior at Townview, born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico heard about the
Monday Dallas walkout through instant messenger. As she recalls: “I didn’t have MySpace at
that time, so I’d gotten a note that Sunday on messenger that said ‘there’s this new law that they
are trying to pass and we want everybody to support us and on Monday we will be walking
out of Townview.’” Norma Perez’s description of how the walkout in her school started made
it sound mysterious, almost magical. “It was funny how it happened . . . It just happened. It
was the whole moment. It wasn’t really like oh, you know. It just happened. Everything just
happened.”
Some students were caught unprepared for the walkouts: their bags were too heavy and their
shoes were unsuited for long walks. Leticia De La Garza, a senior at Townview who thought the
administration would stop the walkouts before they got underway, joined the protest spontane-
ously. She quickly realized she would not be able to keep up with all that she was carrying. “I had
to stop because my backpack was too big. We dropped it off at a taquerilla.” “It wasn’t planned at
all” according to Sandra Bermudez of Round Rock. Choosing the same words as Norma Perez,
Sandra said, “It just happened.”
In the cases we researched, the planning of the walkouts took place over 24 to 48 hours at
most. Word of the walkouts reached most students the day before or the morning of the protest.
Students initiated these plans. They spread the news through informal networks of friends con-
nected by a social networking website, text messaging, instant messaging, and word of mouth.
When asked who organized the walkout, Julia Contreras, a junior at Townview, said, “I have no
idea who organized [it]. You just got messages. There were tons of messages, text messages, Yahoo
messenger messages. It was just going around.”
Some schools had campus chapters of League of United Latin American Citizens, but, in gen-
eral, LULAC leaders seemed as surprised as the rest of the students when the walkouts swept their
campuses. According to Mayra Lopez also of Townview, “it wasn’t organized by LULAC in any
way. They didn’t know that we were going to walkout. It was after the fact. Everything was
spontaneous.” After the first walkouts on Monday, Jesse Diaz, president of LULAC Dallas Council
4496 told the Dallas Morning News: “We’re telling them to stay in school . . . [T]heir emotions are
taking over. The kids are doing this on their own. There is no adult leadership” (Fischer, Ramshaw,
and Unmuth 2006).
In many of the walkouts, students were confused about what to do once they had bolted
from campus. Norma Perez said that once the walkout started the students at her school impro-
vised. “We were just going to walk around the school, but so many came out, we thought let’s go
to City Hall.” In Round Rock, students decided after they walked off their campus to head to a rival
school. On their way, they played a defiant game of cat and mouse with the police running
through the suburban streets. When the marches arrived at their (often improvised) destinations,
students again did not know what to do next. Julia Contreras reported that their was “a lot of
confusion at [Kriest] park. ‘What we going to do now? How we gonna get back?’”
As the protests came to an end, students started to reflect on the significance of what they had
just done. Julia recalled what she was feeling when she was at the park after a long march:
We were trying to make a difference. Trying to get them to listen to us. Hey we’re here. Listen to us.
They’re not taking us serious. But maybe now? They’re a lot of us here. I was proud . . . Getting to the
park was a great moment. I tried to do something. I tried to make a difference.
Students from some of the schools who ended up in Kriest Park were bused back to their cam-
puses. The ride back gave them a buffered moment to reflect on what they had just done.
Isabel Navarro, a freshman born in Dallas but self-described as Mexican, remembers it as the most
emotional time of the whole day: “On the bus we were so happy. We were screaming . . . We were
chanting, ‘yeah we did it,’ piled three to a seat, one lying on top of each other.” It was not, how-
ever, all elation for Isabel. “I was crying because I was remembering my grandpa and I was doing it
for his honor. They were holding my arms. Some of my home-girls started crying too. It was a
bittersweet day.”

For a number of the students we interviewed, the experience of walking out was marked at
the end by these kinds of emotional pivots: from the elation and thrill of defiance to an ambivalent
and scalar, more somber mood, and, once again, more anxious.
Conclusion
The 2006 student walkouts were spontaneous. With little to no organizational planning they
appeared simultaneously across disconnected communities and then spread with great speed
from these many different points to involve more than 100,000 students in schools all across
America. Like the broader wave of immigrant protests that spring, no one predicted them (Voss
and Bloemraad 2011). If we are right in our analysis of the 2006 walkouts, this failure to anticipate
this explosion of mass defiance is not surprising, and sociologists cannot hope to anticipate similar
explosive protests without first appreciating their emotional, defiant, and emergent nature.
Something causally significant happened at the moment of the 2006 walkouts. Our inter-
views catch this something. They show the dynamic role of telescoping anxiety, the contingencies
of the school situation, the centrality of defiance as a mood switch, and the emergent nature of
these protests. Focusing on this emotional process does not pathologize protesters. Quite the
opposite it reveals the pragmatics of mass defiance.
The 2006 walkouts provide a clear example of a political threat focusing resistance. This arti-
cle builds a partial theory to fill a gap in the social movement literature on political threats. This
threat literature extends insights from political process theories about societal-level factors shap-
ing contentious politics, but it leaves unexplained or assumes that rationalist microprocesses
explain how and why actors meet political threat with protest. We show that in the case of the
2006 walkouts key rationalist assumptions are violated. Instead of relying on these assumptions,
our explanation provides an alternative microsociological approach to the relationship between
spontaneous protests and political threats inspired by collective behaviorism and pragmatism. Our
explanation is grounded in the social-psychological process of telescoping anxiety punctuated by
the situational thrill of defiance.
Today, anxiety is largely neglected as a psychological ground for collective protest. Even with
a growing interest in the role of emotions and political threats, anxiety appears relatively unim-
portant in contemporary social movement studies. This is an oversight. We argue that a pragmatic
view of the dynamics of anxiety in threatening situations can provide a microsociological explana-
tion of spontaneous protests like the 2006 walkouts that fits both their lived experience and objec-
tive factual pattern of collective behavior.
Immigrants share profound worries about deportation, their families being ripped apart, and
the hostility of “native” citizens. The actions of students in the spring of 2006 must be understood
within this collective psychological situation of anxiety. The threat of H.R. 4437 made this anxious
situation particularly dynamic. Feelings of anxiety were focused by this political threat. This led to
a telescoping of students’ anxiety into fear. Once the dynamic of anxiety is given its place as the
experiential ground to situations of threat, the emotional power of defiance takes on new light.
Defiance operates as a powerful anxiolytic as it creates direction and purpose out of anxious situa-
tions. In the walkouts, the school context provided an occasion to attack this telescoping fear.
It provided immigrant students with an “end-in-view” for a line of action that could attack their
fear and the political threat.
Breaking out of their schools and taking to the streets in places all across America, these stu-
dents spearheaded a massive wave of protest. In these acts of defiance, students used their feelings
to project themselves into the national political uncertainty, attacking fear and unleashing the
thrill of defiance. The arc of the protests, the dynamic pattern of the walkouts, supports this ac-
count. Students, who had grown up with established practices of hiding their status as immigrants
and operating with care not to call the attention of authorities, suddenly attacked the political

threat of H.R. 4437 with acts of bold defiance that not only surprised authorities but the students
themselves. The lived experience of protest reveals an emotional arc of telescoping anxiety over-
thrown by thrilling defiance.
The particular political threat the students reacted to, H.R. 4437, dissipated quickly and so did
the protests of the spring of 2006, but widespread and shared anxiety remains among immigrants.
As we write in the late summer of 2013, the prospects of comprehensive immigration reform
regularizing the status of undocumented immigrant remain uncertain. The technological means to
coordinate rapid, massive, organizationally unmediated collective action continue to develop. The
threat of nativist or anti-immigrant legislation at the national level remains possible in the future.
Attending to the dynamics of immigrant anxiety and situations that could turn the scalar collective
mood into reactive fear may help anticipate any future bursts of mass protest for immigrant rights.
More generally, we think sociological attempts to explain spontaneous protest in the face of
political threats must pay attention to the dynamics of emotions and how specific situations may
telescope an affective state into a reactive emotion and create the occasion for attacking these feel-
ings with defiance. This is a quite different microlevel approach to spontaneous protest than focus-
ing on the goals of actors and their shifting calculations of the efficacy of contentious collective
action. From our view, the emotions of political threats as they disrupt conduct and how actors
manage to feel their way out of these disruptions in their particular situations provide a better
guide to understanding and anticipating acts of mass defiance like the 2006 walkouts.
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Article in Social Problems · March 2014

Hortencia Jiménez Michael P. Young

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Confessional Protest Project View project

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Hortencia Jiménez, Hartnell College

Michael P. Young, University of Texas at Austin

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The Student Walkouts of March 2006: Across America and Texas

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Threat, Telescoping Anxiety, and the Pragmatics of Defiance

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demonstrate, the 2006 walkouts—and we believe a wider variety of threat-induced spontane-

Affective and Reactive Anxiety: A Situational Analysis

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The Anxiolytic Power of Emergent Defiance in Situations of Threat

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Alternative Rationalist Approaches

An alternative microsociological approach to spontaneous protests comes from a rational

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Methods And Data

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The Lived Experience of the Walkouts

Peter Orner (2008), in his introduction to a study of 60 oral histories of undocumented

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Explosive Defiance, Thrill, and Pride

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The Emergent Nature of the Walkouts

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