Immigrant rights advocacy as records literacy in Latinx communities

This work discusses the need for and value of immigrant rights advocacy in libraries and archives amid the xenophobic climate in 2017. Using action research, we set out to understand how members of the Latinx community in Boston responded to President Trump’s Executive Order 13768, Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States. Our focus on the Latinx community stems from our personal connections to it; however, our findings apply broadly to migrant communities and the intersectionality with multiple identities such as ethnicity, gender, legal status, and socioeconomic class. We argue that immigrant rights, and more generally civil and human rights, are indeed information issues, and archivists and librarians have a unique role to play in advocacy for oppressed communities. We identify records literacy instruction as critical for information organizations to prevent misinformation and to safeguard civil liberties and human rights during times of political turmoil.