While working on a research project in 2014, Dartmouth College junior Melissa Padilla first noticed the words “illegal aliens” on a catalog reference during a routine consultation with Jill Baron, the college’s librarian for romance languages and Latin American studies.
Padilla’s distress, as a native of Mexico who’d acquired a green card after years of seeking legal status, prompted Baron and other library leaders to help Padilla and a coalition of foreign-born Dartmouth students on a quest to replace the offending phrase on catalog subject headings at Dartmouth’s Berry-Baker Library and, ultimately, at the Library of Congress and libraries around the English-speaking world.
The effort, which succeeded in 2016, also inspired Baron to co-direct the documentary Change the Subject, which will screen in Dartmouth’s Loew Auditorum on Saturday afternoon.
“I just felt that there was a really important story here, a story that was multi-dimensional and timely, much more than a library story,” Baron, a resident of Bradford, said this week. “This was about the way a term is used to create division. It’s not an acceptable use, especially in this time.”
Padilla lodged her complaint more than a year before Donald Trump opened his presidential campaign with his pledge to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, the better to keep out what he described as people “bringing drugs … bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
By the time the Library of Congress replaced “illegal aliens” with the terms “noncitizens” and “unauthorized immigration,” Trump had emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee. And after a general-election campaign full of often angry rhetoric about immigration, Baron decided a film would best illuminate the work and the journey of the Coalition for Immigration Reform, Equality at Dartmouth (CoFIRED), which counsels and advocates for fellow students with immigration issues.
“Just writing it down for print wouldn’t capture the dimensionality of it, the richness,” Baron said. “I wanted to highlight the people and their voices.”
The two main voices belong to Padilla and to CoFIRED leader Oscar Cornejo Casares, a 2017 Dartmouth graduate whose parents brought him to Illinois from his native Mexico when he was 5, and who was able to stay under the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, aka DACA, program). They petitioned the Library of Congress — at first without success. But with continued encouragement from Dartmouth’s Office of Pluralism and Leadership (OPAL), and from Baron, Baker-Berry Library cataloguer John DeSantis and then-associate librarian for information resources Liz Kirk, the students caught the ear, and the voice, of the American Library Association (ALA). Barely two months after the ALA leadership adopted a resolution calling for the abolition of “illegal alien” as a subject heading, the Library of Congress began re-labeling.
The story didn’t end there: Through parliamentary tactics involving an appropriations bill, conservative members of Congress sought to force the Library of Congress to enshrine “illegal aliens” in its headings. The continued controversy prompted Baron and co-director Sawyer Broadley, a 2008 Dartmouth graduate, to expand the film from a 20-minute video into a one-hour feature that includes debate in Congress, which ended in stalemate.
“It was like, ‘Oh! This is bigger than a little documentary,’ ” Baron recalled. ” ‘ This is really an important story for this time.’”
Broadley, who with Baron, Padilla and Cornejo Casares will answer questions after the advance screening at Loew Auditorium on Saturday afternoon, has begun applying to show the film at festivals around the country. Meanwhile, Baron has been talking with librarian groups about screenings nationwide.
“It has a lot of resonance in a number of fields,” Baron said. “We’re hoping to cast the net wide and get it seen.”
The Hopkins Center hosts a free screening of the documentary
ArtisTree Community Arts Center shows the documentary Waste Land at its Grange Theatre in South Pomfret on Saturday afternoon at 4. Over a stretch of three years in a massive landfill in Brazil, director Lucy Walker filmed contemporary artist Vik Muniz’s interaction with a band of catadores, who pick recyclables out of the garbage.
General-admission tickets cost $7.
The Hopkins Center and Dartmouth College’s Office of Pluralism and Leadership (OPAL) co-host a free screening of the Academy Award-winning drama Moonlight on Thursday night at 9, at the Top of the Hop.
■The Mascoma Film Society winds down its spring series, with free screenings of Martin Provost’s sublime Seraphine on May 8 and of Rob Marshall’s visually striking if thematically overstuffed Mary Poppins Returns on May 22.
Seraphine, from 2008, features Yolande Moreau as Seraphine de Senlis, an acclaimed artist of the Naive movement who slipped into obscurity as a cleaning woman in the French countryside, after her prime years at the easel.
While the kids should enjoy the animation in Disney’s 2018 sequel to Mary Poppins, and the grown-ups will appreciate the live-action Emily Blunt as the title nanny, be forewarned that it suffers from a shortage of editing. Particularly clunky are a scene with Mary and the second generation of Banks children visiting Poppins’ crazy Cousin Topsy (there is such a thing as too much Meryl Streep) and another in which the animated avatars of two of the live-action villains kidnap the younger Bankses.
Both movies start at 6:30 p.m. While admission is free, donations are welcome.
Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock kicks off its spring and summer series of films on May 11, with screenings at 5 and 7 p.m. of the documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. Steve James, director of the acclaimed Hoop Dreams, follows the travails of the Chinese-immigrant family that ran Abacus Federal Savings in New York City, the only bank that faced criminal prosecution in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Subsequent screenings, two each on Saturday afternoons, include Stan & Ollie on June 15 and Wes Anderson’s Academy Award-nominated animated feature Isle of Dogs on July 13. Most of the films, including the first one in May, start at 5 and 7 p.m.
The museum strongly advises calling 802-457-2355, no later than the morning of the movie’s scheduled date, to reserve tickets ($6 to $11).
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com or 603-727-3304. Send film and television news to highlights@vnews.com.