Making friends, making coalition: the endurance of place-based grassroots community organizing*

What is it about?

In this essay, we study the rhetorical processes involved in creating and sustaining the place-based grassroots community coalition Friends of Friendship Park that advocates for Friendship Park, a historically significant site on the westernmost edge of the U.S.-Mexico border. Based on our rhetorical fieldwork, we propose the rhetorical concepts of coalitional endurance and nested exigencies. We adopt a rhetorical ecological approach to examine how place-based grassroots community coalition is built and supported through its responses to coalitional moments, specifically the threat of walls. We theorize coalitional moments as having nested exigencies to which coalitional enclaves respond by inventing resources and enacting them in various spaces of contact that expand and retract coalition participation in both qualitative and quantitative ways.

Featured Image

Photo by Shelby Murphy Figueroa on Unsplash

Photo by Shelby Murphy Figueroa on Unsplash