Contemporary latino mass immigration has come to the United States within the framework ofi mmigration policies resulting from the tensions between employers' demands, anti-immigration pressures from various groups, and the immigrants' own aspirations. Those partially contradictory demands have been harnessed in what we call the immigration regime, which policymakers strive tomaintain, sometimes through substantial modifications. The regime, between immigration demand and rejection, constitutes one of the historical conditions of immigrant mobilization and politicization.Other such conditions are a result of the history and the present state of the labor movement, longhostile towards immigration, despite drawing crucial contributions from it. Immigrants remain largely unorganized for the defense of their rights, despite the interventions of non-profits. Hardly anything in the organizational landscape allowed analysts to predict any social movement such as that which swept the country during the Spring of 2006. Our analysis, based on the existing literature as well asour own fieldwork data collected in Chicago, will present the creation of a political opportunity for such a movement, at a time when the stabilization of the immigration regime was becoming particularly problematic. The social actors behind this creation, activists who arguably founded themovement, sometimes belonged to established immigrant advocacy organizations, yet acted relatively autonomously in the Spring of 2006. Their success rested on their capacity to intervene in a way thatechoed the rising tide of protest among latino immigrants. We offer a reading of those events based on the concept of repertoires of protest, so as to better describe the specific traits of an atypical mobilization in the contemporary US context, and the importance of political culture trends among latino immigrants. The movement was also an opportunity to focus on strategic debates concerning immigrant rights (within the regime or otherwise) and the power and legitimacy of various forms of protest. Lastly, through a double case study, we offer a sketch of an analysis of the migratory and militant trajectories of leaders of the 2006 movement in Chicago.
