Language, Identity, and Activism in Education

Thank you for watching! Alright, back to those terms, definitions rather, that upset the liberals. Some college students felt that they were dehumanizing illegal aliens. Well can you believe that the Library of Congress would make a decision with a bunch of liberal students from Dartmouth University who sent a petition to them to say that this was a dehumanizing or an inflammatory term. One of the reasons why I like Dartmouth, the mountains, the trees, the river, it was beautiful, it was gorgeous, it was a place where I felt at peace and I felt like I could thrive because the first memory that I have of this country are mountains. So I came in into Ventura, California where my great-uncle was living. There's just this green, green mountains everywhere. And I remember the distinct smell of tomatoes. I always thought that these mountains and the smell was a dream. It was fake imaginary. But it was actually real when I got to visit my great uncle two years ago. The mountains actually existed. I didn't make it up. I'm wearing my blue skloos. This one is from the 4th of July. How very patriotic. And so literally that's my first picture of me in this country. In higher learning, this Ivy League is the best you can do. If you make it, if you buy into this club, you become a part of it, right? Like you're no longer just an undocumented immigrant. You are this exceptional human being. I really was looking for something that could tie me to the U.S. as somebody that like belonged, as someone who deserved to be here. To me, Dartmouth was kind of this fit, right, with all the traditions. Melissa, she did an independent studies with me looking at undocumented youth organizing. And as she begins to do that, and she's putting together a syllabus, basically, of readings, she goes to talk to Jill. I met Melissa in her first year writing class. And she followed up with me afterwards because she was actually starting work on an independent study and she needed to develop a syllabus and a bibliography for this independent study. So she came to my office and I wanted to start by showing her our library catalog, which is basically a database for books and other types of materials that we own in the library. And one sort of data point on that page is the area where the subject headings are. And the subject headings are controlled vocabulary that we draw from that's established by the Library of Congress. So, you know, I'm working with Melissa. I'm cognizant of her research interests, and yet I'm sort of like rattling along my script. Okay, here's the book, here's this, here's that, and here's the subject heading. And if we click on the subject heading, this will lead us to more sources. And so we went into the list of subject headings, the alphabetized list, and saw that there were pages and pages of variations on the term illegal aliens. This was the term that had been used. to categorize this particular book. My gut reaction to seeing the subject heading here at Dartmouth was disgust and also like perplexed. I was like, why? Like, I thought this place would know better or do better. Wow, like I can't believe you think these things, right? Like I know there's undocumented students here on campus and you recruit them and you still subject them to this sort of thing and it's not okay. I realized that I wasn't getting any feedback from Melissa and when I turned to look at her I knew that something had gone wrong and and that's when she asked you know why why are you using those words that's not that's not the term that I would use that's not the term anybody should be using. This is what I do remember we have a co-fired meeting. and she brings it up and everybody is with her. Stephanie is there and Halimo and Oscar, and they're like, yeah, this is really messed up, right? And so what can we do? Coal Fire stands for the Dartmouth Coalition for Migration for Equality and Dreamers. The crux of The founding of Coal Fire for me was that I personally was done being quiet. I was done not saying anything and expressing my voice. It was very much the mentality that I had before coming to Dartmouth because my parents were afraid. Around the time when I arrived and when Eduardo was a student, that was now at the cusp of... A shift towards much more agitative strategies that included students not only saying I'm undocumented and unafraid but really syncing up with civil disobedience strategies to really make it known that by hiding their identity it was actually doing a disservice. So what started changing was students organizations when coal fire happened we started just doing things. Whether people are attended or not, we shifted from wanting to increase awareness for everyone to saying we have to do concrete things. My initial initiatives were to get Dartmouth at least up to par with all these other peer institutions by providing resources, providing the support and the advising, providing the network for these students. Eduardo at that time, he was my mentor. He was telling me about you. He was like, she would be a great advisor for the organization, Co-Fired, because she was undocumented. I was just like, I never heard of a professor that was undocumented teaching. And so to see an actual person that looks like you represented and teaching you about something that is very personal and explains your life and your experience and validates them was amazing. I remember I was just looking, it looked like my mom, my grandma, my great-grandmother. It was just a lineage of maternal kind of support in a way that wasn't ever really taught to me. I think it seemed worthy of action personally to me because I really believe that, you know, language is one of the ways that we give meaning to the world, to our interactions. We can all cop up to having done something that's considered illegal, and yet we don't walk around saying, you are the illegal student who had a sip of beer right before 21 or you're the... illegal person for jaywalking. All of the literature that it had under the subject heading was not anti-immigrant. If anything, I think a lot of them were uplifting and humanizing undocumented people. So to see a word that very, you know, starkly represents one way to dehumanize undocumented people, like emotionally, hurt me but also kind of did make me not really trust the library as a system. I didn't look at the system, the cataloging system, as actually an expression of values. I just sort of saw it as this like dissociated, neutral, you know, organizing principle. And I have to say, you know, even I as an educator hadn't really thought about that, right? It's just, to me, it's just a catalog word that they use. But it's not just a catalog word. It means that you are giving value and you are giving credence to that subject heading. And that that is the way in which you're cataloging knowledge on a global scale, according to that word. And what it allows you to do by dehumanizing, by othering those people, is to treat them as less than human, as less than we would treat ourselves. The fact that it's been used and codified in the subject heading has tremendous power because that shapes the way we think and write. It does affect the way the minds work and the way that you see this. Right? It's not like they're picturing me, a classmate, a peer sitting next to them when they say illegal alien. It's wielded most specifically towards migrants of color and there's a racist coding to it. By virtue of its power, it becomes part of the ways in which anti-immigrant sentiment festers. It kind of shaped who I could be friends with and who I could talk to and what I could say. You know the playground where people would be like, oh, like, you're from Mexico, you must be an illegal, and me like having to laugh it off and be like, haha, like, yeah, that's so funny, like I am, and like, I had this nickname in middle school called, they called me floaty because they assumed that I swam across the border or across the Rio Grande and it literally took me reflecting on that like last week to be like that that was not okay I actually think I gave myself that nickname because they were going to give me a more terrible nickname and I was like that would be funny floaty You know, today I meet US citizen, which is kind of bizarre on its own. And I catch myself, like, pinching myself whenever I get on an airplane. There's always this moment when I get to where they ask for your passport or your ID. I just feel like they're going to catch me. As students, and at Dartmouth, the library is central to like education and like the representation of what Dartmouth is. Like now we're going to, from our own institution Dartmouth, to the nation's library institution. Oscar grew up in Park City. It's a small northern suburb of Chicago, in my home state of Illinois. He was quite a student. I dedicated myself, Oscar said, solely to my education to honor the sacrifices my parents made. Well, it was because of those outstanding academic achievements in high school that Oscar was admitted to Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school in Hanover, New Hampshire. He's the first member of his family even to attend college. He co-founded and co-directed the college's first immigrant rights organization. And now he's in his senior year at Dartmouth. Even though this looks kind of meaningless, it's actually from my grandfather, my mom's dad. And he was also undocumented and he worked in the carpet industry. And her mom was in Mexico. And then my dad's parents are both in Mexico, so we're separated by borders, by countries, and I'm separated by states. In some ways the Dream Act created the Dreamer narrative and the Dreamer movement by focusing and putting the spotlight on certain narratives. We are deserving of addressing this issue, but so are my parents, the original Dreamers, and so are the other 11 million of us. In a globalized world, one of the things that states can still control is who comes in, right, and who belongs. So you can manage then who belongs in this nation and what it continues to mean to be American. And one of the ways that you do that is through... exclusion, right? And so there are people we want and there are people we don't want. And what I always say is like sometimes it's easier to scapegoat than it is to deal with a structural problem, right? It's much easier to put a wall up than to say we need to think about, right, restructuring the way the U.S. economy works. Learning all these cues as to like how to navigate Dartmouth was especially hard the first term. I called my dad and we had a conversation and I think it's when it kind of began to like piece together that even though my dad didn't attend college he very much was in constant interaction with white male privilege. For example, a party that a Greek organization hosted. It's like blood and cribs, right? And so I told my dad this story, not very much expecting him to say anything or even understand. But he understood it very well. He was like, you know, translating what he said in Spanish, but it was like, yeah, like, you know, those rich kids, what do they understand about, like, living in a ghetto? About, like, the really real implications of going to school and being told don't wear red, don't wear blue, don't wear basically any color because it could be associated with a gang and that could put your life at risk, right? When I came to Dartmouth, I came in with the mentality of, I'm going to take a break from activism. And so I said, I'm just going to be a student, and I'm just going to study, and I'm going to be this stereotypical college student. I got to Co-Fired and sort of realized that activism really can't take the backseat, right? Discrimination, oppression, it doesn't take a backseat, right? You can't just like time it out and be like, okay, I'm tired, can you like not be sexist for a second or for like 10 years, right? Can I just like have everything be perfect? So during that winter of 2014, Professor Gutierrez-Nagyera brought to our attention this Freedom Budget. So the Freedom Budget, you know, didn't just include issues related to the undocumented population on campus, but it also included that of Black, Latino, Asian, underrepresented groups basically at Dartmouth. And so we thought it was a great avenue to push for change. I felt a complex mix of things when the Freedom Budget came out and I saw the the provision about the library catalog. Oh my god, I was like, I know what that's about. And I was I was embarrassed to kind of tell them. I was like that actually I know exactly what that's about and I think it originated at my desk. We had check boxes with every single point of the freedom budget. Tan Leng to tell us if he either strongly disagrees to... You know, activism takes many forms. You need people at all. Levels targeting the same issue. I think it's important to tackle language as it is to tackle policy, as it is to tackle other dimensions of issues. But at the end of the day, you have to choose what avenue you want to. take because you're only one person and you won't be able to bring about change yourself. I think change comes in a very communal way in which multiple individuals are tackling the same issue from different ends. We set up an initial meeting and we thought that our explanations were pretty good. I was talking with the students with my colleague Amy Witzel who was a former cataloger at one point and she was pulling out her cataloging textbook from library school and was you know you know really getting into it but the students weren't satisfied with our explanations. They were like, but what are we going to do about it? And I think Amy and I were like, what are we going to do about it? What can we do? And at that point, Amy contacted John DeSantis and our cataloging department. And meanwhile, I contacted our library administration to relay to them the fact that we've met with the students and discussed their concerns. but they really want to see something happen here and I think we need to respond. Fortunately, one of our administrators at the time, Liz Kirk, was really in solidarity. with this and suggested that, okay, we could make a subject heading change proposal. The Dartmouth Library could take this on. We'll do it if the students join us in this effort. We just assumed that Dartmouth was responsible for the subject heading, so we kind of went in with the idea that we just wanted them to change it and we would be okay. We didn't realize that it was like a national database that applied to like every institution. It was in some ways our naive understanding of systems. So we had a meeting with the students and the librarians all together I think it was in March the end of March of 2014. I felt that during that meeting with the students that they they began to understand what was really involved here. They knew what the implications were of petitioning the Library of Congress and in the event of a successful petition what the result would be, that the consequences would reach far beyond just Dartmouth. We met with librarians to learn about the application process, to gather other sources that use terms like undocumented, unauthorized, as opposed to illegal to show, you know, the change in discourse that has already happened and that now the Library of Congress needed to catch up to. Before coming to Dartmouth, my perspective of librarians were just these older women, cranky a little bit for not returning your book on time or being loud in the library. I didn't think that they were gonna be too willing or understanding of the situation, but to my surprise it was the complete opposite, so making me realize that You know librarians are actually people too. Ultimately the students challenged us to be better professionals. I began to care not just as a catalog librarian but as a person, as a human being and it made me happy that I was able to help in any way that I could. Here is an illustration. of what proper cataloging can accomplish. I'm looking for a book on television. Do you know the author? No, I don't, and I don't know the title either. But it's a blue book. I think we can... This boy's problem was not an unusual one. Because the cataloger did a good job, the book was easily located and the boy was further encouraged to use the library facility. A subject heading is is a designated term that represents a concept. The Library of Congress subject headings are used by almost every library in the country. Officially it is the Library of Congress. It serves Congress. To the rest of the library community, the Library of Congress subject headings are ours too. Over the years, many individuals have tried to reform Library of Congress subject headings to make some of the outdated terms more current. Most notorious, of course, is the evolving descriptors for people of color within the United States. So at one time, the official subject heading Negroes existed for a number of years before it was changed to Afro-Americans. And after that, it was updated to African-Americans, and then finally updated again to distinguish between African-Americans and blacks of the United States. So the leading proponent of this type of change is a librarian in Minnesota, now retired, named Sanford Berman, who routinely submitted proposals to the Library of Congress, many of which were accepted and many of which were not, but he is primarily known as a subject-heading activist. So yeah, this is what I got back from the Library of Congress. It was right after the New Year. This proposal was made to change the wording of the existing heading illegal aliens to undocumented immigrants. And then those five words that you just hate to see and read, the proposals were not approved. Provided the evidence and I think that was submitted in that summer of 2014 and we didn't get a response until the end of that year, I think, where they had rejected us initially. The way that I first encountered the subject heading proposal from Dartmouth was I was doing some kind of research reading online and I and I don't remember exactly what I was up to. I mean you know I'm a librarian I do that sort of thing a lot. I came across a news story and saw that there had been this protest movement that that had noted that illegal aliens was being used as a term in their college library and that students had initiated this campaign to get it changed. It was very inspiring and then so I continued to research the story. I went from like this elation to like disappointment just a few minutes later because this had all taken place in the past that when I was finding out about it. They had made the proposal and it had already been declined. It was so fantastic that this had happened. It would be really unfortunate and unsatisfactory if it just ended there and that, you know, that was that. When Tina Gross contacted me, I guess it was a year later. And I was kind of like, wow, this is interesting that this person, you know, this is like halfway across the country, is working on this. And she's working on it because she heard about what we had done and she's kept it alive. And then I came up with the idea of submitting a resolution to the American Library Association Council, the ALA Council. Every librarian network that I'm part of. that I thought people would be sympathetic, I contacted. People were very receptive, and a lot of people went out and contacted their networks. And so, I mean, a lot of people became involved. I actually found out that it passed nearly unanimously by watching Twitter. Still though, Still when that happened, as excited as I was that the issue had become a national issue, I really thought this is more of a symbolic gesture than something that will actually bring about change in the library. Two months later the library announced out of the blue, I mean nobody expected this, the library announced that it was intended to change the headings. I didn't realize the impact that we had until Juno Diaz and Jorge Ramos shared on their Facebook page the change that we had made. They, you know, said like these kids are our heroes. We were blown away because they, at least for me, is one of my heroes. We realized that this was a big thing that we had done. Typical changes to subject headings, even if they were in some way controversial to someone, there's just a monthly list that they put out that announces what all the changes are, and there's a certain subset of people who pay attention for that list every month and watch what's on it, but it's not normally newsworthy. So it was in March of 2016 that the Library of Congress announced that it would It intended to implement the change. It intended to delete the term illegal aliens from its controlled vocabulary, like completely remove it. That was in March, and then there was backlash from members of Congress who disagreed very strongly with this change. Joining me now, Republican Congressman from Tennessee, Diane Black. Congressman, thanks for being with me tonight. Thank you. It's great to be with you as well. So we scrubbed these terms in the first place because some college students felt that they were dehumanizing illegal aliens. And to make that decision... On political correctness, to change something that has been in the lexicon there at our Library of Congress since back in the early 1900s is just unbelievable to me. Diane, let's move from presidential politics to policy and combat. adding the political correctness on Capitol Hill. You've introduced legislation to overturn a decision by the Library of Congress to remove the term illegal alien from their materials. What on earth is going on over at the Library of Congress? This is where we have political correctness gone amok. We see a group of very liberal students from Dartmouth University who sent the petition to the Library of Congress and they reacted to that. SILLINESS, BECAUSE THE WORDS ALIEN ARE DEFINED IN WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY AND BLACK'S LAW. THEY'RE USED ACTUALLY THROUGHOUT OUR CODE. Ted Cruz is continuing to push the issue back on Capitol Hill. Cruz, one of four Republican lawmakers, to sign a letter urging the Library of Congress not to eliminate the term illegal aliens from search terms and cataloging. The House Appropriations Committee has also approved a plan that would require the library to call undocumented people in this country illegal immigrants. Okay. The library concedes that while it regularly reviews requests to alter existing terms, revisions are rare, not true, and even rarer for terms of legal and historical significance, i.e. exactly the terms at issue here, yet it continues on this Orwellian trajectory. There is no other way to put this. The library has bowed to the political pressure of the moment. Such an action is beneath the dignity of the Library of Congress. Rather than engage in revisionist history, the library should base its decisions on sound judgment, taking actual history, present facts, and future efforts into account. Well, it should do all those things, but like doing that would not result in the outcome that these people are advocating. I don't know even, I mean, it's just such a, such a knotted nest of both Ignorance and bad faith. The house is not in order. The house will be in order. Members, please remove your conversation from the house floor. The committee instructs the library to maintain certain subject headings that reflect terminology used in Title VIII of the U.S. Code. That's what's so offensive to the minority party. For seven and a half years, we've had a president that... wants to ignore the intent of our laws of our land. We will not allow this body, this House, to ignore the definitions nor the words of the laws that have been voted on in this body, passed by the Senate, and signed into law by the President. So I'm asking this body, vote no on this motion to recommit. Vote yes to uphold the laws of this land, and vote yes for your constituents on final passage, and have a good weekend. With that, I yield back. If we remove Negro and Oriental in the subject headings of the Library of Congress before we change the U.S. Code, we should do the same for the now pejorative term illegal alien. The Library of Congress is our nation's first established cultural institution, and it's hard to fathom why my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would try to tie its hands to the slow-moving wheels of the U.S. Code. Entering into an immigration debate on the legislative branch appropriations bill is a terrible precedent. The Library changes thousands of subject headings each year without interference from Congress. Why this one? Why now? My side of the aisle could certainly have pushed to have the library reconsider its decision after the Dartmouth petition was turned down back in 2014. Because many Democrats and Republicans believe that the term illegal aliens labels a group of people based on a misconception that an immigrant's presence in our nation is a criminal violation, which it is not. But we allowed the process to work, because the library is in the business of language and nomenclature. and should be free to make these decisions without political interference. The politicization of the Library of Congress in order to perpetuate a misconception about immigrants in our country is simply an issue on which my principles will not allow me to bend an inch. Thank you. In the years of the Congress and the Library, language has evolved. That's why we've done away with terms like Negro and Oriental and lunatic and retarded. Because we understand that even words that start off as neutral descriptors can over time become used as verbal weapons and knives to inflict pain and disrespect and sow division. The words illegal alien will be retired. This will change, whether it's now or six months from now or ten years from now. The question for all of us is whether we today will do the right thing, or whether a few years from now we'll apologize for doing the wrong thing. Please support this motion to recommit and do the right thing. I yield back. Gentlemen, time has expired. For what purpose does the gentleman from Georgia seek recognition? Dear Speaker, I write in opposition to the motion to recommit. The gentleman from Georgia is recognized for five minutes. Famous speaker on the line. Oh, sorry, 315, 320. Mm-hm. What floor are you all on? We have a three o'clock, so if the 245 to three window works for you guys, again, I'm sort of assuming that they're out of blood. Yeah, so maybe we should wait here. Excuse me. Feels like we're meeting celebrities. But it's just the power that is so, and that's like a corporal reaction. I'm supposed to be interviewing Columbers woman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She's unavailable because she's voting alongside also Joaquin Castro, but this is I guess the day-to-day apparatus of working in Congress. Thank you. Hi. How are you? I'm so great. Nice to meet you. Good afternoon. Oscar, nice to meet you. The Librarian of Congress made us aware of the petition from Dartmouth as well as from the National... Library Association suggesting that they change their subject heading. I enthusiastically supported that change and we ran into a buzzsaw with the chairman of the committee at the time. So we had a battle through the fiscal year, through the appropriations process over that. Is that normal for the Library of Congress? Did they feel that it was a politically charged move and wanted to let you know before? You know, I'm not sure. That's the first time in the ten years that I had either been the chair or the ranking member of the subcommittee, that the library had made us aware of a subject heading change. To me, this was nothing more than the normal systematic process of updating a subject heading. And then it had the added outrage of the opposition coming from the Republicans over something as simple as, you know, ceasing to use the Use a term that was pejorative and offensive and inaccurate. And so there are some times when you just have to take a stand. What impact do you think this had in terms of the library, Congress, all this opposition and contestation? I think this was emblematic for Republicans of their belief that, you know, we shouldn't be the refuge in the world. It was sad. I found it pathetic. Our bill is usually non-controversial. We don't really have too many battles. But this was specifically about what we call people, how we refer to people. And everybody has to be able to maintain their dignity. And I was going to stand up for dignity. Is that okay? Okay. We're going to keep following this for sure. I know that... We did at least stop them from putting the language in that would have halted the library's ability to make the change in the terms, but that was great. And if there's anything we can do to help you with finding research, and or... Thank you, I'm still on the committee, but it's not the ranking. We're partners and allies in this. Yes, alright. Thank you so much. Amazing to hear such blunt honesty, like the, like she used the word pathetic. Yeah, for a hot second I was like... Do I want to? I could do this. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you. Not an honor. Hi. Great to see you. Nice to meet you. Come on in. Thank you. Nice to meet you. So thank you. Come on in. Now, I don't know where you all want me to sit. How did you become aware of the Library of Congress subject heading change? Well, I had read about... the effort at Dartmouth to change the subject heading of illegal alien. So I thought this is an opportunity to really have the language reflect the humanity of the people we're talking about and describing, rather than allowing what has become a very offensive and politicized term to remain to be used. The effort last year made by some members of the Congress was to Make sure that the Library of Congress continued to use the term illegal alien, which was historic because the Congress has never really inserted itself in the titles that the Library of Congress uses. And so that was very troubling that there would be an effort, essentially a political effort, to force them to continue to use what many considered outdated language. What has been the impact of all this contestation in terms of the way we think about undocumented immigrants? Do you think this was just political theater to divide this issue? Well, I think most of all it's raised the consciousness of people. They understand that the term can dehumanize. What we've also seen is something that years ago we would think remarkable, which is journalism and the private sector are often ahead of government now in using... a term other than illegal alien and ultimately i think government will come along uh and things will change thank you well thank you so much congressman casta for how much longer do you all have at dharma uh literally thursday thursday four days on sunday congratulations well you guys you all helped inspire other people to take action including myself and i want to say thank you for that thank you you know we'll get there yes thank you good to see you thank you Having no legal status but occupying this area that we were in, like as in many ways it's subversive to like hold no legal status to live outside the law and then go into the offices of the people that literally create the law and so it made it seem so imaginary, the law that is. That all it takes is you get down whatever it is, the paper, you write out the text of it, and you vote on it and debate and make changes and stuff, but literally it's words on a paper. I think that when I was undocumented, the only thing that I could think that could save me was papers and that I would someday lead a normal life and getting a green card and like now being a US citizen has really made me question whether Are papers are really even the answer? The realization that this subject heading was problematic and not just like in an intellectual way that it was problematic but that it was actually hurting people I think made me confront like my own whiteness. You know, by just sort of accepting that term being there and not questioning it, I was, in a sense, using that term. Carrying out our principles, I mean, such as providing courteous, reliable services to all people regardless of immigration status, that in this country today, unfortunately, that is not a neutral value. That's something that actually often has to be asserted and fought for and taken very seriously as an issue. We don't get this a lot, right? We are always in confrontations, we're always in like tense mode and there isn't always time for us to feel appreciated or feel like we're doing something good, but we are. For everyone who put in man hours, I know that you had classrooms, finals and other things, like we're still students and so I just want to make sure that whoever sees this, if you're an activist, if you're involved in this, if you're being affected by this, that's not a small task. It's a very respectable thing. For those that continue to seek improper and illegal entry into this country, be forewarned. This is a new era. This is the Trump era. And there are vast numbers of additional criminal illegal immigrants who have fled. But their days have run out. Our prisons are bursting with illegals right now. What about the law-abiding majority? We're in a moment where immigrants are seen in a pejorative way. Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall! What inspires me about really troubling moments like this is the indomitable spirit of people who want to resist and who take up the mantle of activism. If we move away from hard topics which we're apt to do, we have... hard time talking about race and we have a very hard time talking about these issues. Understanding the communicative aspect of this becomes a really nice entry into this larger conversation which is why is there so much anti-immigrant sentiment? Dartmouth didn't do it. You didn't, right? And so, like, that's where the credit needs to be. Yes, Dartmouth has given you tremendous resources to be able to do some of the work you've done, but it's you. It's a group, right? And it just wouldn't have happened without you guys. As people of color, as undocumented, we still face certain things, and I don't think we could have. Done as much as we could have without you and Professor Anguiano helping us in getting forth and creating that path and demonstrating like what other kinds of things educators at Dartmouth could do. Well you guys have a big piece of my heart. I'm graduating on June 11th. I've been here for four years and not once will my parents step foot on this place that I've lived, studied for the past four years. Their initial goal as to why they came here for me to be able to cross that stage, get my education and they're literally not going to be able to come here because they're too scared to make the trip all the way from Illinois. Crossing Indiana, Ohio, New York, Vermont, all the way to Hanover, New Hampshire. They're too scared. ...of being deported and they're too scared of family separation. And when they told me that, that was very, very scary and very... Of course, it made me cry. By virtue of the authority vested in me by the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College... Life in Georgia just seemed so restricted, like that there were just so little possibilities that I just had to get by and like fight in the little ways that I could. To think about the fact that I've now been a part of this battle, right? Like not just a fight, but like an actual battle. And continue to be, right? Because it's very much in limbo right now, what's going to happen at the Library of Congress. I feel like myself and other people in Co-Fired and activists and people who just care about the community are definitely leaving some part of their their soul or their heart here for other people who just don't see themselves here.

One of the reasons why I like Dartmouth, the mountains, the trees, the river, it was beautiful, it was gorgeous, it was a place where I felt at peace and I felt like I could thrive because the first memory that I have of this country are mountains. So I came in into Ventura, California where my great-uncle was living. There's just this green, green mountains everywhere.

And I remember the distinct smell of tomatoes. I always thought that these mountains and the smell was a dream. It was fake imaginary. But it was actually real when I got to visit my great uncle two years ago. The mountains actually existed.

I didn't make it up. I'm wearing my blue skloos. This one is from the 4th of July.

How very patriotic. And so literally that's my first picture of me in this country. In higher learning, this Ivy League is the best you can do. If you make it, if you buy into this club, you become a part of it, right? Like you're no longer just an undocumented immigrant.

You are this exceptional human being. I really was looking for something that could tie me to the U.S. as somebody that like belonged, as someone who deserved to be here. To me, Dartmouth was kind of this fit, right, with all the traditions. Melissa, she did an independent studies with me looking at undocumented youth organizing.

And as she begins to do that, and she's putting together a syllabus, basically, of readings, she goes to talk to Jill. I met Melissa in her first year writing class. And she followed up with me afterwards because she was actually starting work on an independent study and she needed to develop a syllabus and a bibliography for this independent study. So she came to my office and I wanted to start by showing her our library catalog, which is basically a database for books and other types of materials that we own in the library.

And one sort of data point on that page is the area where the subject headings are. And the subject headings are controlled vocabulary that we draw from that's established by the Library of Congress. So, you know, I'm working with Melissa. I'm cognizant of her research interests, and yet I'm sort of like rattling along my script.

Okay, here's the book, here's this, here's that, and here's the subject heading. And if we click on the subject heading, this will lead us to more sources. And so we went into the list of subject headings, the alphabetized list, and saw that there were pages and pages of variations on the term illegal aliens.

This was the term that had been used. to categorize this particular book. My gut reaction to seeing the subject heading here at Dartmouth was disgust and also like perplexed. I was like, why?

Like, I thought this place would know better or do better. Wow, like I can't believe you think these things, right? Like I know there's undocumented students here on campus and you recruit them and you still subject them to this sort of thing and it's not okay. I realized that I wasn't getting any feedback from Melissa and when I turned to look at her I knew that something had gone wrong and and that's when she asked you know why why are you using those words that's not that's not the term that I would use that's not the term anybody should be using.

This is what I do remember we have a co-fired meeting. and she brings it up and everybody is with her. Stephanie is there and Halimo and Oscar, and they're like, yeah, this is really messed up, right? And so what can we do?

Coal Fire stands for the Dartmouth Coalition for Migration for Equality and Dreamers. The crux of The founding of Coal Fire for me was that I personally was done being quiet. I was done not saying anything and expressing my voice. It was very much the mentality that I had before coming to Dartmouth because my parents were afraid.

Around the time when I arrived and when Eduardo was a student, that was now at the cusp of... A shift towards much more agitative strategies that included students not only saying I'm undocumented and unafraid but really syncing up with civil disobedience strategies to really make it known that by hiding their identity it was actually doing a disservice. So what started changing was students organizations when coal fire happened we started just doing things. Whether people are attended or not, we shifted from wanting to increase awareness for everyone to saying we have to do concrete things.

My initial initiatives were to get Dartmouth at least up to par with all these other peer institutions by providing resources, providing the support and the advising, providing the network for these students. Eduardo at that time, he was my mentor. He was telling me about you. He was like, she would be a great advisor for the organization, Co-Fired, because she was undocumented.

I was just like, I never heard of a professor that was undocumented teaching. And so to see an actual person that looks like you represented and teaching you about something that is very personal and explains your life and your experience and validates them was amazing. I remember I was just looking, it looked like my mom, my grandma, my great-grandmother. It was just a lineage of maternal kind of support in a way that wasn't ever really taught to me.

I think it seemed worthy of action personally to me because I really believe that, you know, language is one of the ways that we give meaning to the world, to our interactions. We can all cop up to having done something that's considered illegal, and yet we don't walk around saying, you are the illegal student who had a sip of beer right before 21 or you're the... illegal person for jaywalking. All of the literature that it had under the subject heading was not anti-immigrant.

If anything, I think a lot of them were uplifting and humanizing undocumented people. So to see a word that very, you know, starkly represents one way to dehumanize undocumented people, like emotionally, hurt me but also kind of did make me not really trust the library as a system. I didn't look at the system, the cataloging system, as actually an expression of values.

I just sort of saw it as this like dissociated, neutral, you know, organizing principle. And I have to say, you know, even I as an educator hadn't really thought about that, right? It's just, to me, it's just a catalog word that they use. But it's not just a catalog word. It means that you are giving value and you are giving credence to that subject heading.

And that that is the way in which you're cataloging knowledge on a global scale, according to that word. And what it allows you to do by dehumanizing, by othering those people, is to treat them as less than human, as less than we would treat ourselves. The fact that it's been used and codified in the subject heading has tremendous power because that shapes the way we think and write. It does affect the way the minds work and the way that you see this. Right?

It's not like they're picturing me, a classmate, a peer sitting next to them when they say illegal alien. It's wielded most specifically towards migrants of color and there's a racist coding to it. By virtue of its power, it becomes part of the ways in which anti-immigrant sentiment festers.

It kind of shaped who I could be friends with and who I could talk to and what I could say. You know the playground where people would be like, oh, like, you're from Mexico, you must be an illegal, and me like having to laugh it off and be like, haha, like, yeah, that's so funny, like I am, and like, I had this nickname in middle school called, they called me floaty because they assumed that I swam across the border or across the Rio Grande and it literally took me reflecting on that like last week to be like that that was not okay I actually think I gave myself that nickname because they were going to give me a more terrible nickname and I was like that would be funny floaty You know, today I meet US citizen, which is kind of bizarre on its own. And I catch myself, like, pinching myself whenever I get on an airplane.

There's always this moment when I get to where they ask for your passport or your ID. I just feel like they're going to catch me. As students, and at Dartmouth, the library is central to like education and like the representation of what Dartmouth is. Like now we're going to, from our own institution Dartmouth, to the nation's library institution. Oscar grew up in Park City.

It's a small northern suburb of Chicago, in my home state of Illinois. He was quite a student. I dedicated myself, Oscar said, solely to my education to honor the sacrifices my parents made. Well, it was because of those outstanding academic achievements in high school that Oscar was admitted to Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school in Hanover, New Hampshire. He's the first member of his family even to attend college.

He co-founded and co-directed the college's first immigrant rights organization. And now he's in his senior year at Dartmouth. Even though this looks kind of meaningless, it's actually from my grandfather, my mom's dad.

And he was also undocumented and he worked in the carpet industry. And her mom was in Mexico. And then my dad's parents are both in Mexico, so we're separated by borders, by countries, and I'm separated by states. In some ways the Dream Act created the Dreamer narrative and the Dreamer movement by focusing and putting the spotlight on certain narratives.

We are deserving of addressing this issue, but so are my parents, the original Dreamers, and so are the other 11 million of us. In a globalized world, one of the things that states can still control is who comes in, right, and who belongs. So you can manage then who belongs in this nation and what it continues to mean to be American.

And one of the ways that you do that is through... exclusion, right? And so there are people we want and there are people we don't want. And what I always say is like sometimes it's easier to scapegoat than it is to deal with a structural problem, right?

It's much easier to put a wall up than to say we need to think about, right, restructuring the way the U.S. economy works. Learning all these cues as to like how to navigate Dartmouth was especially hard the first term. I called my dad and we had a conversation and I think it's when it kind of began to like piece together that even though my dad didn't attend college he very much was in constant interaction with white male privilege.

For example, a party that a Greek organization hosted. It's like blood and cribs, right? And so I told my dad this story, not very much expecting him to say anything or even understand.

But he understood it very well. He was like, you know, translating what he said in Spanish, but it was like, yeah, like, you know, those rich kids, what do they understand about, like, living in a ghetto? About, like, the really real implications of going to school and being told don't wear red, don't wear blue, don't wear basically any color because it could be associated with a gang and that could put your life at risk, right? When I came to Dartmouth, I came in with the mentality of, I'm going to take a break from activism.

And so I said, I'm just going to be a student, and I'm just going to study, and I'm going to be this stereotypical college student. I got to Co-Fired and sort of realized that activism really can't take the backseat, right? Discrimination, oppression, it doesn't take a backseat, right? You can't just like time it out and be like, okay, I'm tired, can you like not be sexist for a second or for like 10 years, right?

Can I just like have everything be perfect? So during that winter of 2014, Professor Gutierrez-Nagyera brought to our attention this Freedom Budget. So the Freedom Budget, you know, didn't just include issues related to the undocumented population on campus, but it also included that of Black, Latino, Asian, underrepresented groups basically at Dartmouth.

And so we thought it was a great avenue to push for change. I felt a complex mix of things when the Freedom Budget came out and I saw the the provision about the library catalog. Oh my god, I was like, I know what that's about.

And I was I was embarrassed to kind of tell them. I was like that actually I know exactly what that's about and I think it originated at my desk. We had check boxes with every single point of the freedom budget.

Tan Leng to tell us if he either strongly disagrees to... You know, activism takes many forms. You need people at all.

Levels targeting the same issue. I think it's important to tackle language as it is to tackle policy, as it is to tackle other dimensions of issues. But at the end of the day, you have to choose what avenue you want to.

take because you're only one person and you won't be able to bring about change yourself. I think change comes in a very communal way in which multiple individuals are tackling the same issue from different ends. We set up an initial meeting and we thought that our explanations were pretty good.

I was talking with the students with my colleague Amy Witzel who was a former cataloger at one point and she was pulling out her cataloging textbook from library school and was you know you know really getting into it but the students weren't satisfied with our explanations. They were like, but what are we going to do about it? And I think Amy and I were like, what are we going to do about it? What can we do? And at that point, Amy contacted John DeSantis and our cataloging department.

And meanwhile, I contacted our library administration to relay to them the fact that we've met with the students and discussed their concerns. but they really want to see something happen here and I think we need to respond. Fortunately, one of our administrators at the time, Liz Kirk, was really in solidarity. with this and suggested that, okay, we could make a subject heading change proposal. The Dartmouth Library could take this on.

We'll do it if the students join us in this effort. We just assumed that Dartmouth was responsible for the subject heading, so we kind of went in with the idea that we just wanted them to change it and we would be okay. We didn't realize that it was like a national database that applied to like every institution. It was in some ways our naive understanding of systems. So we had a meeting with the students and the librarians all together I think it was in March the end of March of 2014. I felt that during that meeting with the students that they they began to understand what was really involved here.

They knew what the implications were of petitioning the Library of Congress and in the event of a successful petition what the result would be, that the consequences would reach far beyond just Dartmouth. We met with librarians to learn about the application process, to gather other sources that use terms like undocumented, unauthorized, as opposed to illegal to show, you know, the change in discourse that has already happened and that now the Library of Congress needed to catch up to. Before coming to Dartmouth, my perspective of librarians were just these older women, cranky a little bit for not returning your book on time or being loud in the library. I didn't think that they were gonna be too willing or understanding of the situation, but to my surprise it was the complete opposite, so making me realize that You know librarians are actually people too. Ultimately the students challenged us to be better professionals.

I began to care not just as a catalog librarian but as a person, as a human being and it made me happy that I was able to help in any way that I could. Here is an illustration. of what proper cataloging can accomplish. I'm looking for a book on television. Do you know the author?

No, I don't, and I don't know the title either. But it's a blue book. I think we can... This boy's problem was not an unusual one.

Because the cataloger did a good job, the book was easily located and the boy was further encouraged to use the library facility. A subject heading is is a designated term that represents a concept. The Library of Congress subject headings are used by almost every library in the country. Officially it is the Library of Congress. It serves Congress.

To the rest of the library community, the Library of Congress subject headings are ours too. Over the years, many individuals have tried to reform Library of Congress subject headings to make some of the outdated terms more current. Most notorious, of course, is the evolving descriptors for people of color within the United States. So at one time, the official subject heading Negroes existed for a number of years before it was changed to Afro-Americans.

And after that, it was updated to African-Americans, and then finally updated again to distinguish between African-Americans and blacks of the United States. So the leading proponent of this type of change is a librarian in Minnesota, now retired, named Sanford Berman, who routinely submitted proposals to the Library of Congress, many of which were accepted and many of which were not, but he is primarily known as a subject-heading activist. So yeah, this is what I got back from the Library of Congress.

It was right after the New Year. This proposal was made to change the wording of the existing heading illegal aliens to undocumented immigrants. And then those five words that you just hate to see and read, the proposals were not approved.

Provided the evidence and I think that was submitted in that summer of 2014 and we didn't get a response until the end of that year, I think, where they had rejected us initially. The way that I first encountered the subject heading proposal from Dartmouth was I was doing some kind of research reading online and I and I don't remember exactly what I was up to. I mean you know I'm a librarian I do that sort of thing a lot.

I came across a news story and saw that there had been this protest movement that that had noted that illegal aliens was being used as a term in their college library and that students had initiated this campaign to get it changed. It was very inspiring and then so I continued to research the story. I went from like this elation to like disappointment just a few minutes later because this had all taken place in the past that when I was finding out about it.

They had made the proposal and it had already been declined. It was so fantastic that this had happened. It would be really unfortunate and unsatisfactory if it just ended there and that, you know, that was that.

When Tina Gross contacted me, I guess it was a year later. And I was kind of like, wow, this is interesting that this person, you know, this is like halfway across the country, is working on this. And she's working on it because she heard about what we had done and she's kept it alive.

And then I came up with the idea of submitting a resolution to the American Library Association Council, the ALA Council. Every librarian network that I'm part of. that I thought people would be sympathetic, I contacted. People were very receptive, and a lot of people went out and contacted their networks. And so, I mean, a lot of people became involved.

I actually found out that it passed nearly unanimously by watching Twitter. Still though, Still when that happened, as excited as I was that the issue had become a national issue, I really thought this is more of a symbolic gesture than something that will actually bring about change in the library. Two months later the library announced out of the blue, I mean nobody expected this, the library announced that it was intended to change the headings.

I didn't realize the impact that we had until Juno Diaz and Jorge Ramos shared on their Facebook page the change that we had made. They, you know, said like these kids are our heroes. We were blown away because they, at least for me, is one of my heroes. We realized that this was a big thing that we had done. Typical changes to subject headings, even if they were in some way controversial to someone, there's just a monthly list that they put out that announces what all the changes are, and there's a certain subset of people who pay attention for that list every month and watch what's on it, but it's not normally newsworthy.

So it was in March of 2016 that the Library of Congress announced that it would It intended to implement the change. It intended to delete the term illegal aliens from its controlled vocabulary, like completely remove it. That was in March, and then there was backlash from members of Congress who disagreed very strongly with this change. Joining me now, Republican Congressman from Tennessee, Diane Black.

Congressman, thanks for being with me tonight. Thank you. It's great to be with you as well. So we scrubbed these terms in the first place because some college students felt that they were dehumanizing illegal aliens. And to make that decision...

On political correctness, to change something that has been in the lexicon there at our Library of Congress since back in the early 1900s is just unbelievable to me. Diane, let's move from presidential politics to policy and combat. adding the political correctness on Capitol Hill. You've introduced legislation to overturn a decision by the Library of Congress to remove the term illegal alien from their materials.

What on earth is going on over at the Library of Congress? This is where we have political correctness gone amok. We see a group of very liberal students from Dartmouth University who sent the petition to the Library of Congress and they reacted to that. SILLINESS, BECAUSE THE WORDS ALIEN ARE DEFINED IN WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY AND BLACK'S LAW.

THEY'RE USED ACTUALLY THROUGHOUT OUR CODE. Ted Cruz is continuing to push the issue back on Capitol Hill. Cruz, one of four Republican lawmakers, to sign a letter urging the Library of Congress not to eliminate the term illegal aliens from search terms and cataloging. The House Appropriations Committee has also approved a plan that would require the library to call undocumented people in this country illegal immigrants. Okay.

The library concedes that while it regularly reviews requests to alter existing terms, revisions are rare, not true, and even rarer for terms of legal and historical significance, i.e. exactly the terms at issue here, yet it continues on this Orwellian trajectory. There is no other way to put this. The library has bowed to the political pressure of the moment. Such an action is beneath the dignity of the Library of Congress.

Rather than engage in revisionist history, the library should base its decisions on sound judgment, taking actual history, present facts, and future efforts into account. Well, it should do all those things, but like doing that would not result in the outcome that these people are advocating. I don't know even, I mean, it's just such a, such a knotted nest of both Ignorance and bad faith.

The house is not in order. The house will be in order. Members, please remove your conversation from the house floor. The committee instructs the library to maintain certain subject headings that reflect terminology used in Title VIII of the U.S.

Code. That's what's so offensive to the minority party. For seven and a half years, we've had a president that... wants to ignore the intent of our laws of our land.

We will not allow this body, this House, to ignore the definitions nor the words of the laws that have been voted on in this body, passed by the Senate, and signed into law by the President. So I'm asking this body, vote no on this motion to recommit. Vote yes to uphold the laws of this land, and vote yes for your constituents on final passage, and have a good weekend.

With that, I yield back. If we remove Negro and Oriental in the subject headings of the Library of Congress before we change the U.S. Code, we should do the same for the now pejorative term illegal alien.

The Library of Congress is our nation's first established cultural institution, and it's hard to fathom why my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would try to tie its hands to the slow-moving wheels of the U.S. Code. Entering into an immigration debate on the legislative branch appropriations bill is a terrible precedent. The Library changes thousands of subject headings each year without interference from Congress. Why this one?

Why now? My side of the aisle could certainly have pushed to have the library reconsider its decision after the Dartmouth petition was turned down back in 2014. Because many Democrats and Republicans believe that the term illegal aliens labels a group of people based on a misconception that an immigrant's presence in our nation is a criminal violation, which it is not. But we allowed the process to work, because the library is in the business of language and nomenclature.

and should be free to make these decisions without political interference. The politicization of the Library of Congress in order to perpetuate a misconception about immigrants in our country is simply an issue on which my principles will not allow me to bend an inch. Thank you. In the years of the Congress and the Library, language has evolved. That's why we've done away with terms like Negro and Oriental and lunatic and retarded.

Because we understand that even words that start off as neutral descriptors can over time become used as verbal weapons and knives to inflict pain and disrespect and sow division. The words illegal alien will be retired. This will change, whether it's now or six months from now or ten years from now.

The question for all of us is whether we today will do the right thing, or whether a few years from now we'll apologize for doing the wrong thing. Please support this motion to recommit and do the right thing. I yield back. Gentlemen, time has expired.

For what purpose does the gentleman from Georgia seek recognition? Dear Speaker, I write in opposition to the motion to recommit. The gentleman from Georgia is recognized for five minutes.

Famous speaker on the line. Oh, sorry, 315, 320. Mm-hm. What floor are you all on?

We have a three o'clock, so if the 245 to three window works for you guys, again, I'm sort of assuming that they're out of blood. Yeah, so maybe we should wait here. Excuse me. Feels like we're meeting celebrities.

But it's just the power that is so, and that's like a corporal reaction. I'm supposed to be interviewing Columbers woman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She's unavailable because she's voting alongside also Joaquin Castro, but this is I guess the day-to-day apparatus of working in Congress. Thank you.

Hi. How are you? I'm so great.

Nice to meet you. Good afternoon. Oscar, nice to meet you. The Librarian of Congress made us aware of the petition from Dartmouth as well as from the National... Library Association suggesting that they change their subject heading.

I enthusiastically supported that change and we ran into a buzzsaw with the chairman of the committee at the time. So we had a battle through the fiscal year, through the appropriations process over that. Is that normal for the Library of Congress? Did they feel that it was a politically charged move and wanted to let you know before?

You know, I'm not sure. That's the first time in the ten years that I had either been the chair or the ranking member of the subcommittee, that the library had made us aware of a subject heading change. To me, this was nothing more than the normal systematic process of updating a subject heading. And then it had the added outrage of the opposition coming from the Republicans over something as simple as, you know, ceasing to use the Use a term that was pejorative and offensive and inaccurate. And so there are some times when you just have to take a stand.

What impact do you think this had in terms of the library, Congress, all this opposition and contestation? I think this was emblematic for Republicans of their belief that, you know, we shouldn't be the refuge in the world. It was sad.

I found it pathetic. Our bill is usually non-controversial. We don't really have too many battles. But this was specifically about what we call people, how we refer to people.

And everybody has to be able to maintain their dignity. And I was going to stand up for dignity. Is that okay? Okay.

We're going to keep following this for sure. I know that... We did at least stop them from putting the language in that would have halted the library's ability to make the change in the terms, but that was great.

And if there's anything we can do to help you with finding research, and or... Thank you, I'm still on the committee, but it's not the ranking. We're partners and allies in this. Yes, alright.

Thank you so much. Amazing to hear such blunt honesty, like the, like she used the word pathetic. Yeah, for a hot second I was like...

Do I want to? I could do this. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you. Not an honor.

Hi. Great to see you. Nice to meet you.

Come on in. Thank you. Nice to meet you. So thank you.

Come on in. Now, I don't know where you all want me to sit. How did you become aware of the Library of Congress subject heading change?

Well, I had read about... the effort at Dartmouth to change the subject heading of illegal alien. So I thought this is an opportunity to really have the language reflect the humanity of the people we're talking about and describing, rather than allowing what has become a very offensive and politicized term to remain to be used. The effort last year made by some members of the Congress was to Make sure that the Library of Congress continued to use the term illegal alien, which was historic because the Congress has never really inserted itself in the titles that the Library of Congress uses.

And so that was very troubling that there would be an effort, essentially a political effort, to force them to continue to use what many considered outdated language. What has been the impact of all this contestation in terms of the way we think about undocumented immigrants? Do you think this was just political theater to divide this issue? Well, I think most of all it's raised the consciousness of people. They understand that the term can dehumanize.

What we've also seen is something that years ago we would think remarkable, which is journalism and the private sector are often ahead of government now in using... a term other than illegal alien and ultimately i think government will come along uh and things will change thank you well thank you so much congressman casta for how much longer do you all have at dharma uh literally thursday thursday four days on sunday congratulations well you guys you all helped inspire other people to take action including myself and i want to say thank you for that thank you you know we'll get there yes thank you good to see you thank you Having no legal status but occupying this area that we were in, like as in many ways it's subversive to like hold no legal status to live outside the law and then go into the offices of the people that literally create the law and so it made it seem so imaginary, the law that is. That all it takes is you get down whatever it is, the paper, you write out the text of it, and you vote on it and debate and make changes and stuff, but literally it's words on a paper.

I think that when I was undocumented, the only thing that I could think that could save me was papers and that I would someday lead a normal life and getting a green card and like now being a US citizen has really made me question whether Are papers are really even the answer? The realization that this subject heading was problematic and not just like in an intellectual way that it was problematic but that it was actually hurting people I think made me confront like my own whiteness. You know, by just sort of accepting that term being there and not questioning it, I was, in a sense, using that term.

Carrying out our principles, I mean, such as providing courteous, reliable services to all people regardless of immigration status, that in this country today, unfortunately, that is not a neutral value. That's something that actually often has to be asserted and fought for and taken very seriously as an issue. We don't get this a lot, right? We are always in confrontations, we're always in like tense mode and there isn't always time for us to feel appreciated or feel like we're doing something good, but we are.

For everyone who put in man hours, I know that you had classrooms, finals and other things, like we're still students and so I just want to make sure that whoever sees this, if you're an activist, if you're involved in this, if you're being affected by this, that's not a small task. It's a very respectable thing. For those that continue to seek improper and illegal entry into this country, be forewarned.

This is a new era. This is the Trump era. And there are vast numbers of additional criminal illegal immigrants who have fled. But their days have run out. Our prisons are bursting with illegals right now.

What about the law-abiding majority? We're in a moment where immigrants are seen in a pejorative way. Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall!

What inspires me about really troubling moments like this is the indomitable spirit of people who want to resist and who take up the mantle of activism. If we move away from hard topics which we're apt to do, we have... hard time talking about race and we have a very hard time talking about these issues.

Understanding the communicative aspect of this becomes a really nice entry into this larger conversation which is why is there so much anti-immigrant sentiment? Dartmouth didn't do it. You didn't, right?

And so, like, that's where the credit needs to be. Yes, Dartmouth has given you tremendous resources to be able to do some of the work you've done, but it's you. It's a group, right? And it just wouldn't have happened without you guys.

As people of color, as undocumented, we still face certain things, and I don't think we could have. Done as much as we could have without you and Professor Anguiano helping us in getting forth and creating that path and demonstrating like what other kinds of things educators at Dartmouth could do. Well you guys have a big piece of my heart. I'm graduating on June 11th. I've been here for four years and not once will my parents step foot on this place that I've lived, studied for the past four years.

Their initial goal as to why they came here for me to be able to cross that stage, get my education and they're literally not going to be able to come here because they're too scared to make the trip all the way from Illinois. Crossing Indiana, Ohio, New York, Vermont, all the way to Hanover, New Hampshire. They're too scared. ...of being deported and they're too scared of family separation. And when they told me that, that was very, very scary and very...

Of course, it made me cry. By virtue of the authority vested in me by the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College... Life in Georgia just seemed so restricted, like that there were just so little possibilities that I just had to get by and like fight in the little ways that I could.

To think about the fact that I've now been a part of this battle, right? Like not just a fight, but like an actual battle. And continue to be, right? Because it's very much in limbo right now, what's going to happen at the Library of Congress. I feel like myself and other people in Co-Fired and activists and people who just care about the community are definitely leaving some part of their their soul or their heart here for other people who just don't see themselves here.

Transcript for:Language, Identity, and Activism in Education

Transcript for:
Language, Identity, and Activism in Education