Reclaiming the Story and Finding the Frame
This chapter offers both theoretical and pragmatic contextualization as activist narrators describe the diverse ways they conceive of and negotiate narrative frames and strategies toward the goal of immigration reform. The chapter chronicles the public work of undocumented immigrants who use their own stories as persuasive evidence that immigrants deserve a path to citizenship, and the narrators discuss the power and limitations of different immigrant rights strategies. I illuminate the strategies the narrators describe by way of textual analysis of some exemplars of each, demonstrate the ways members of the movement have lobbied for necessary shifts in the framing of their messages, and explore how these negotiations are promoted and implemented in grassroots activism. The resulting work reveals the power of storytelling in public media and the centrality of strategic communication to social movements.