In 2014, Melissa Padilla, a student at Dartmouth College (shown above), was researching immigration in the United States and noticed that the term “illegal aliens” was the subject heading used in Dartmouth’s library to describe undocumented people. Disturbed by this, Padilla and her peers at the Coalition For Immigration Reform and Equality (CoFIRED) fought to change the subject heading locally, but were surprised to find it stemmed from the Library of Congress instead. Realizing that this change had to be made at a national level, Dartmouth students petitioned the Library of Congress to change this term to “undocumented immigrants”. Following backlash from conservative politicians and media, this petition became a national movement fighting for the humanity of undocumented immigrants. Although the subject heading remains unchanged, this movement further exposed America’s racist and strategic rhetoric around immigration.
This website is the entryway into a culminating project undertaken during the Fall term of 2019 by 25 Dartmouth College undergraduate students in the class: Latino Studies 3, Latinx Lives in the United States. This project consisted of analyzing the film, Change the Subject, and further exploring the themes and ideas that were unable to be fully fleshed out in the film or that left us with questions we wanted answers to. We hope that this digital curation serves to inform people about this historic movement and further the discourse on humanizing and protecting undocumented people in the United States.
This project is divided into five student-made digital exhibits that analyze the Change the Subject film and movement:
- Timeline – A chronological list of notable events in this movement.
- Stories – Details the personal struggles and involvement of some key members of this movement.
- Activism – Describes the campaigns students undertook to bring this issue to national attention.
- Reactions – Highlights the widespread media, social, and political response to students’ efforts to change the subject heading.
- Language – Critically analyzes the nature of immigration rhetoric in the United States.