The protest modalities of the Jasmine Revolution--a democratic transition often mis-characterized as an uprising or upheaval--are rooted in both Tunisian and Algerian social, economic and political contestation and context of the 1980s, 90s, and 00s. Over four hundred self-immolations, protest tactics, slogans, graffiti, rap lyrics, and other manifestations of oppositional ideas are deeply intertwined across the Tuniso-Algerian border, and much more prevalent in Algeria, and the Tunisia-specific framing of the events, such as in Masri's recent "Tunisian Anomaly," or Arab-wide accounts, dozens of books and hundreds of articles about which have been published, entirely miss the deep cross-pollination of protest modalities in the Tunisian and Algerian cross-border interior and where millions of border crossings occur each year. Based on interviews with over 2700 primarily young Algerians and Tunisians from both countries over several years, nearly entirely in French and Arabic, and an extensive analysis of the protests themselves including protest paraphernalia and production, this paper examines the cross-border continuities and discontinuities of protest and contestation. The paper challenges prevailing theories of protest, including social movement theory, rational choice theory, resource mobilization theory, and political opportunity theory--along with the overemphasis on leaders and frames rooted in various social constructivist theories--and re-roots collective social protest in re-theorized culture, emotionality, organic and symbiotic protest, and a better conception of layered local agency. In addition, I look at why most Tunisians and Algerians outside of the intelligentsia view their collective experiences as part of an "Arab spring," an Arab spring of which the goals the populations still espouse in the latest extensive polling data in both countries. Part of the methodology drawn from social history is to ground protest narratives in specific historical contestations which re-articulated become part of collective local and regional memory and by extension ongoing protest vocabulary, beyond the (sometimes imagined) strategic re-framings of purported local movement leaders. These protest narratives often challenge and combine existing ideologies of protest, both ideological and identity-based, creating much of the inclusive Arab spring ethos we are familiar with but have not sufficiently examined its local origins, including adoption of feminist, Islamist, and socialist themes, just to name three of the inputs, into the new theory of action. This hybridity, increasingly dismissed in the academy as misleading or fetishized, is useful as an articulation about what is wrong with the boxes and borders placed around social protest to fit particular analytical approaches.