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82 chapter five Individual Worldviews Humanity, Nationality, and Ultimacy During an informal conversation in the course of my fieldwork, a Humane Borders member named Charli alluded to the time before she joined the group and said of herself, “I was one of the blind people in this city.” Charli’s remark compresses a personal narrative into a metaphor based on two kinds of “seeing.” Most obviously, she once was “blind” because she did not perceive a situation that demanded her attention. But she also implies that when she “saw” the crisis, she “saw” the need to do something about it. In my interview with Fenton, another Humane Borders member, he related a similar account: “When I moved to Tucson about ten years ago I started reading about [migrant deaths] and I thought, ‘this is really crazy.’ You know, people dying just because they can’t feed their families. It just seemed like the logical thing to do was to get involved.” Though the words are different, the schemas of the stories are the same: the speaker moves from ignorance to awareness, and this change in consciousness requires a change in behavior. Charli and Fenton’s comments underscore a problem with describing social movement organizations, which is that although the organizations would not exist without the personal beliefs of their supporters, movement activity by its nature levels differences among members. Mission statements and the like are useful in suggesting points of general agreement among constituents, but they cannot intimate each person’s perspective on how the world operates. Behind the apparent uniformity of group practices are myriad individual viewpoints or emotional investments, and these “convictions of the soul”1 are important factors in trying to understand Individual Worldviews • 83 how movements are formed and perpetuated. Since individuals can provide more nuance and personality than collective representatives can, taking stock of their perspectives enables a richer account of the modes of consciousness that propel movement activity. Charli and Fenton, for instance, describe how a new understanding of the objective conditions of the world led to joining Humane Borders. Their stories hint at dozens of similar experiences among other immigrant advocates in which the acquisition of knowledge led to taking actions consistent with that knowledge. One way of thinking about these transformations is to consider them as expressions of a person’s self-concept. In the words of philosopher Charles Taylor, “To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose” (27). That is, much of who we are (or want to be) involves what we like or dislike and what we approve or disapprove of. We project those evaluations through our behavior, through performances that may be called “acts of identification” (McRobbie 723). Hence, in the case of Charli and Fenton, once the “blindness” had been overcome, once the insight had registered, some new act of identification was necessary in order for them to be, as is sometimes said, “true to themselves.” Moreover, as Taylor argues, “one cannot be a self on one’s own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors” (36), which is to say, socially. Therefore, a “full definition of someone’s identity . . . usually involves not only his stand on moral and spiritual matters, but also some reference to a defining community” (36). Acts of identification, then, are also acts of relation, because they postulate similarities and differences between the actor and a larger group of human beings. An actor’s approval or disapproval of any set of circumstances depends on how the actor perceives those who are affected, and how the actor stands in relation to them. To take sides in a social conflict, participants have to answer—to some extent unconsciously—the questions, “Who am I, who are the people affected by this situation, and what is our connection to each other?” The answers, in turn, imply certain ethical imperatives. Fenton models this thought process quite explicitly, explaining that once he decided migrants were “dying just because they can’t feed their families,” joining Humane Borders was “the logical thing to do.” To enter into thought and action about a political controversy is thus to simultaneously diagnose what one perceives as the problem, claim one or more identities...

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