Ourprotest.com: Latino teens used cell phones and MySpace.com to mobilize.

NAYDALLI HARO GOT HER CELL PHONE three years ago as a high school freshman. Mostly, she would text message her mom asking to be picked up. This year, however, the 17-year-old student organizer got a different message from friends that basically said: We're walking out to protest HR 4337, the anti-immigrant bill before Congress.

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"I never thought cell phones would lead like this," says Haro, who walked out of Cabrillo High School in Long Beach, California in March with hundreds of her classmates.

This spring, as Congress considered immigration legislation, thousands of Latino teens took to the streets. They walked out of schools across the country as word spread by text messaging and on popular Internet sites like MySpace.com. In Los Angeles alone, school district officials estimated that about 3,000 students walked out on March 24. News media outlets estimated that on March 27, about 40,000 L.A. students left school in protest. In New Jersey, hundreds of students went to the statehouse and in Virginia, hundreds protested outside their high school.

The teenagers faced backlash quickly--from principals who called in law enforcement to public officials who chastised them for missing school. The walk-outs became deadly, at least in Ontario, Calif. where Anthony Soltero, an eighth grader, committed suicide after his vice principal supposedly told him he was going to jail for three years for having participated in the marches.

Haro's school was locked down with police for awhile after the protests at the end of March. In fact, she admits that she was out of the political loop because she doesn't have a Myspace.com account. She had to learn about the second day of student protesting from her 14-year-old niece who found out about it on MySpace.com.

For adult organizers, the text messaging made a tremendous difference in working with students during the protests, says Yvonne Paul, assistant director for Californians for Justice, a statewide student organization. Organizers were able to call students in schools to find out how many were leaving and at what time and also to advise them. "We really encouraged folks to stay with the crowd," Paul says, adding that kids alone or in twos were more likely to be picked up by cops for truancy.

Paul points out that even though the young people they work with are in poor communities, cell phones are commonplace now and more than 90 percent of the organization's youth members and leaders have MySpace.com accounts.

"This wasn't a random thing," Paul says. "You go to the different links and you link to all these people and you get a sense of how many people are participating."

Haro hopes that the text messaging will improve for the next round of marches. "We didn't have chants," she says. "We didn't know what to say to the media" when the students arrived at city hall. In the end, she reflected, cell phones aren't a replacement for actual organizing, but they sure made it possible.