This paper is based on an analysis of chat transcripts from an English-language telecollaboration project between students at universities in Chile and California. This research found that the richest intercultural interactions involved events that could not have been foreseen: the immigrant rights demonstrations in the USA and the massive student protests in Chile in May of 2006. Through a discursive analysis of the chat transcripts in which participants compared these two protest movements, this paper elucidates the linguistic resources through which intercultural attitudes, knowledge, skills, and critical cultural awareness were constructed. (Contains 2 notes.)