Gilbert De La Fuente
Soc 176 3-9-14
Research Paper 6 “March Forth” Participant Observation
On March 4, participated in my first ever protest. It was a collective day of action that represented the social awareness and protest of several current local, national and world issues. The event started at the campus free speech area at 2:00 p.m. I arrived early, shortly after 1:00 and had a chance to visit these booths that each had different information on a social issue ranging from women’s rights, expansion of pre-trial facilities, to the lowering of our very own tuition. . There were 8 booths and each booth had 3 or 4 students with pamphlets and petitions for me to sign. I went booth to booth and listened to what these students had to say. One booth and one student in particular took the time to reach out to me and inform me of our local and national problem involving food insecurity and hunger. He introduced himself as Carlos Bazante. He informed me that for part of a project for his Social Movements course he and his group wanted to bring forth the awareness this issue of hunger. He was very knowledgeable about this topic and had much to talk about including local statistics and influence of politics on the issue. Carlos was passionate about this problem and made me aware how often possible solutions are a double edge sword that can ruin a politician’s career. He gave me the example of how raising the poverty line would hope more people qualify for government aid but politicians, especially the President, are afraid to be the labeled as the President with a high poverty rate. Right at 2:00 a group of elderly women began to set up in the free speech area. They were called the “Raging Grannies” and sang songs of awareness and protest. There was the funny “Uterus Song” which mocked an early Supreme Court complaint of a women who used the word uterus in a speech. They also performed a much more serious song called The Rape Song. During their performance many students began to gather up and we had a crowd of at least 100. I noticed several students from my qualitative class and other sociology students in general from past classes. Dr. Kubal was getting our group excited and ready with his chants and cheers. We also had a chance to make our very own protest sign and I went ahead and made drew my own that said, “Fresno is the 5th Hungriest Metro in the Nation,” which was a stat that I got from the booth. Soon after Dr. Kubal gathered everybody up and passed out directions that served both as a map and a kind of release of consent with reminders of how to behave and rules of the protest. About 100 students then gathered their picket signs, lined up and preceded to march. We marched through campus and turned many heads. As our group marched along Shaw we even got a few honks from passing cars. I felt empowered as part of this large group. Even though we had different signs and yelled different issued, we had the same goal. I had this feeling of Camaraderie, which is a feeling I probably hadn’t felt since High school football days. We had a mission and we weren’t afraid to express our feelings. During the march, I started up front right behind Dr. Kubal, I gradually fell back to experience the entire dynamic of the protest. Everybody took this day serious. There was one gentleman who decided he needed to be the clown of the group and he occasionally yelled out some annoying or obscene gesture with no relation to our cause. I ignored him and moved on. I walked with Carlos, the student who informed me about the hunger issue, I walked with Arthur who is my classmate and I even bumped in to Dr. Jendian who involved himself. As we made our way around the approximate two mile march, every passing student acknowledged us and or took pictures, some even joined right in. And the end of our march we met right back at the free speech area and I was surprised to see that our group was slightly larger than when we started.
In the GSS database I found an issue in the 2002 Adult Transitions Tab. The Title was PROTEST, and the question was, “ 937. Over the past 5 years have you done any of the following to express your opinion about an issue or your support for a cause? c. Join a protest rally or march. I ran the table with the dependent variable as SEX. The most interesting findings were, more women than expected did not participate in a rally or march in the past 5 years. Both men and women were far more likely to say No to participate in a protest. I thought this was interesting because of the class mates in my 176 course only about 20 percent showed up to participate and of those half were men and half were women. This is accurate from the findings in our table. Protesting was either not popular for the ones who didn’t show up or they couldn’t because of conflicting schedules. Of all invited to participate many did not attend our protest. Still the 100 or so that did show was plenty. We were a large group and I can definitely say we got noticed. A few students said they saw me from their class window during the march.
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