New @ the Library: More Streaming via Films on Demand!

Good news – the Library now subscribes to Films on Demand, the streaming video collection from Films for the Humanities & Sciences, one of the best known distributors of educational documentaries.  Subjects are very wide-ranging and provide great coverage in science & technology areas, in the social sciences, and humanities.  The streaming documentaries come from a variety of familiar and popular sources, including television news programs; PBS programs (such as the American Experience, Bill Moyers, NOVA, and the Ken Burns collection); TED talks, Scientific American Frontiers; California Newsreel titles focusing on African and African American topics, and more.

Films on Demand

Films on Demand – front page view

The streaming videos in Films on Demand can be searched by title or by video segments; an Advanced Search supports searching for titles with closed-captions, interactive transcripts, and other features.   Frequent users will want to create an account that allows creation of personalized playlists and organizing favorite content in customized folders, which can be a handy means for instructors to collect different materials for specific courses.  Instructors can easily place entire videos or specific video segments on Course Reserve, play them in media-equipped classrooms, or stream online, making Films on Demand a flexible and engaging content tool for your face-to-face, online, and distance learning courses.  (There is also an Embed feature that in theory allows you to embed the video directly in your Blackboard course pages, but…. I haven’t yet gotten this feature to work properly.  Perhaps this can be straightened out soon.)  Off-campus users will of course need to login with their Library Borrower ID and password to view.

Pass the popcorn, and enjoy!

Hathi Trust Update – It’s here!

Received the good news this morning that we now do have access to Hathi Trust!  You’ll find it linked in the e-Library in the Article Indexes & Databases page.  Once you click on the link, you do need to login (using your ISU Net-ID and password) in order to get fullest access to materials.  I say”fullest” access by way of reminder that not everything within Hathi Trust’s collections is available full-text to all users, due to copyright restrictions.  However, you will find tons of materials are now accessible to you so do login and start exploring.

Here’s some info to help get you started:  Items marked “Full view” are available for you to read, print, and download full-text.  Items marked “Limited (search-only)” allow you to search within that item and give you a frequency number of how many times your search terms were found in the book.  It will not show you the book itself to you, but does provide a helpful link to WorldCat for you to find the library nearest you that owns that item.  (Why?  Copyright.)  Note that you can easily restrict your search results to show only “Full view” items.

The Home tab allows you 3 different methods of searching HT’s vast collections of currently over 10 million total volumes.  Catalog Search lets you check for specific titles, authors, subjects, etc.  Full-text Search lets you search contents of those millions of digitized materials – wow!  Collections search is a really cool feature.  You can create your own collections of materials that interest you, whether for your own use or potentially student- or group use.  You can use the Collections search to see what other users have done and made public.  (For example, I see that a helpful user at University of Michigan has created a 19th century cookbooks collection – simply tagging relevant cookbooks and saving them as a unique collection for others to use.)

As you might imagine, you will find a wealth of primary historical materials are now at our fingertips.  There are also lots of US state and federal government documents included, making this a good source for locating full-text of these non-copyrighted materials.  One interesting item I found was the 1900 Census of Puerto Rico, taken by the US War Department just two years after the Spanish American War.

Enumerators of Ponce

Enumerators of Ponce

 

Included in the Census and its report were a number of photographs, including interesting photos of the actual folks who worked as the Census enumerators in specific cities.  Here are the enumerators from Ponce, one of the only groups that seems to have included and employed women.

 

 

Tagalog supervisors

Tagalog supervisors

 

Coincidentally, I also found the 1903 Census of the Philippine Islands, this one undertaken by the “Philippine Commission” and the US Bureau of the Census.  This one also had photos of the enumerators, including this arty montage of the Tagalog supervisors of the Census:

Virtually all subject areas and time periods are included in Hathi Trust’s materials, as are many different languages.  An Advanced Full-text Search is available, allowing you to specify where your keywords should be found (title, author, subject, publisher, series title, etc), specify year(s), language (ranging from Abkhazian to Zuni), and by original format – archive; audio (music; spoken word; cd; lp); biography; book; computer file; conference; dictionaries; electronic resource; journal; maps-atlas, mixed material; newspaper; video (dvd or vhs), visual material, and much more.  Amazing!  Search facets along the left side of your search results screen help you drill down by subject, author, language, place or date of publication, and more, giving you lots of control over your search results, as well as lots of opportunities for happy discoveries.  Enjoy exploring!

ACLS Humanities e-Book collection

New-ish to the Library is the fascinating ACLS Humanities e-Book collection, from the American Council of Learned Societies.  This impressive collection has almost 4000 full-text scholarly books across the wide gamut of the traditional humanities (history; art & architecture; film & media studies; literature & literary criticism; linguistics; music, dance, performance; philosophy; political science, religion, and even sociology, to name a few).  There is a strong focus on “historical studies” focused on “African, American, Asian, Comparative/World, Eastern European/Russian, Economic, European, Latin American, Legal, Medicine, Methods/Theory, Middle East, and Science/Technology.”   You can download an Excel spreadsheet of the specific book titles included if you want to take a look.

Okay, we know it’s huge.  Even the title is a mouthful – so much so that you’ll see even the authors refer to it as ACLS HEB, or even just HEB.  So what can you do with HEB?  Happily, the collection boasts both an easy to use browse feature (that allows you to browse by title, author, or subject) and a very robust search engine that lets you quickly find titles / subjects / authors of interest.  Within a few clicks, you have the full-text of the book right in front of you.

acls ebook1   Once you find a book of interest, you can enter the book from its ACLS title record page.  You can go to the first page of the book and page your way through, or enter specific chapters / page ranges by using the linked Table of contents.  There are book reviews for my title linked on the page, plus the full citation and full cataloging record.  You can even get a larger version of the book jacket by clicking on your book’s image.

I found the book, Buñuel and Mexico: The crisis of national cinema, by Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz and published by the Univ of California Press in 2003.  So you can see what I mean, here’s a graphic of the ACLS title page for the Buñuel cinema book I found.

Once you enter the full-text of your book, you can even choose the best display – page image, text,  or pdf – for your own reading comfort or downloading / printing needs.  You can also easily adjust the size of the page if you need a larger font or need to see an illustration in greater detail.

Speaking of illustrations, the few illustrations from book contents that I have seen have not been of the greatest quality.  This is probably the only drawback I can see during my own quick review of this collection.  Let me show you what I mean.

acls heb2

Hmmmm……  in a fantastic collection like HEB, it’s disappointing to see such blurry and grainy images.  This one comes from a book called Gay L.A. by Lillian Faderman.  There are lots of illustrations in this interesting book and none of them seems to be scanned clearly, which is really too bad.  It’s just not the same high quality images you will find in the original hardback book.  I haven’t found illustrations in other HEB books yet to compare but my guess is that this may be a current weakness throughout this collection.  You’ll need to see what you think.

So, do use this collection to find a surprising breadth of full-text eBooks in the humanities.  Don’t expect to find high quality book illustration images you can use (copyright permitting) in other projects.  You will though find nice quality reproductions of book covers.  And yes, you can find these books through Quick Search too.  Overall, a big positive addition to the Library’s collections.  Give ACLS HEB a test drive and let me know what you think!

Coming soon: Hathi Trust

Update (1/24/13):  We do now have access to Hathi Trust!  You will need to login with your ISU Net-ID and password to get fullest access to materials.  Remember not everything within Hathi Trust is available to all users full-text due to copyright restrictions, but you will find plenty of materials that are fully available.  Have fun exploring!

~~~ (Original post follows below)~~~

Looks like the Lib may soon be partnering with Hathi Trust Digital Library.  If you’re not familiar with them, be sure to take a look at their site.  They currently have over 5 million digitized books contributed by partners.

Hathi Trust Digital Library

Hathi Trust Digital Library

Just a few minutes ago, I was searching for a copy of Gems of Chinese Literature.  Our local copy seems to be in the Storage building, but I also found a link to Hathi Trust, where there are a few editions online.  I found an edition that is open to the public to view / read online.  I’m going to guess you could find content in Hathi Trust relevant to all race & ethnic studies areas and much more.

While some items in Hathi Trust are available to the general public to view full-text, many items are locked up.  Partners are able to login and view much more.  As I understand it, partnership means we would also need to contribute digital content to the site.

We’ll see how things develop.  This is potential great news, and hopefully everything will be ironed out for us to have access to this fantastic collection of digital books!  Stay tuned….

Sorry for the blurry image on this one! :s

Coming Soon: American Indian Film Talk

ISU Lectures Program is co-sponsoring “American Indian Film Talk,” a discussion panel featuring filmmakers Jon Proudstar, Mary Goose, Rean Goose and Lucas Goose.  When / where:  April 25, 7:00 pm, Gallery, in the Memorial Union.

Proudstar has appeared as an actor in numerous movies (including Sterlin Harjo’s indie film Barking Water), shorts, and various TV series.

More recently, he has written and directed the award-winning short film Dude Vision (2005) and the feature-length drama So Close to Perfect (2009).

Visit IMDB for a full list of his many projects and credentials.

The Goose family are Meskwaki and Chippewa, and based in Iowa.  Mary Goose is also a published poet and writer.  Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including the following anthologies that you can find in the Library:

   The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of contemporary Native American literature, ed. by Geary Hobson.
Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1981.
Parks Library GEN COLLECTION:  PS508 .I5 R4 1981

   Songs from this Earth on Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry, ed. by Joseph Bruchac.
Greenfield Review Press, 1983.
Parks Library GEN COLLECTION:  PS591.I55 S64x 1983 

This event is co-sponsored by the American Indian Studies Program, and the Center for Distance and Online Learning.  Plan to attend and show these filmmakers your interest and support!

Upcoming lectures

April at ISU features a number of upcoming Lectures of interest.

On Tues, April 10, writer Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux) will deliver a lecture entitled “Thinking Indian: The Urgency of Native Stories in the New Century.”  7:00 pm @ Great Hall, Memorial Union.  (See Lectures Program for more information.)

Selected Works by Susan Power available in the Library include:

  • “Miss Indian Chicago” (short story), Southern Review, June 1, 2010, pp. 345-356.  (Full-text available through Academic Search Premier and other subscription databases.)
  • “The Table Loves Pain,” American Indian Quarterly 28(1/2): 115-117.  Personal essay on creative writing, Native American literature, and inspiring college students.  (Full-text available through Academic Search Premier and other subscription databases.)
  • Roofwalker, published by Milkweed Editions, 2002.  A collection of 12 short stories organized in two parts – Stories and Histories.
    (Available:  PS3566  .O83578  R66  2002)
  • The Grass Dancerpublished by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994.  A collection of interwoven short stories.  This collection won the prestigious PEN Literary / Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction in 1995.
    (Available:  PS3566  .O83578 .G73  1994)

~~~

Also on Tues, April 10, professor and author Olúfémi Táíwò will deliver a lecture entitled “Africa’s Second Struggle for Independence: What’s Modernity Got to Do with It?”  8:00 pm @ the Gallery, Memorial Union.  (See Lectures Program for more information.)

Selected Works by Olúfémi Táíwò available in the Library include:

  •   How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa, published by Indiana University Press, 2010.  This scholarly work examines colonialism in Africa, legal and constitutional aspects, and globalization.
    (Available:  DT14   .T35   2010)
  •   “The Love of Freedom Brought Us Here: An Introduction to Modern African Political Philosophy,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109(2): 391-410.   (Full-text available through Academic Search Premiere and other subscription databases.)

On Thurs. April 26, Dr. Gretchen Bataille will lecture on the topic of “Women and Leadership: Career Success and Satisfaction.”  Dr. Bataille has published on Native American literature as well as ” diversity, civil rights and ethnic studies.”   7:00 pm Sun Room, Memorial Union.  (See Lectures Program for more information.)

Selected Works by Gretchen Bataille available in the Library include:

  • Faculty career paths: Multiple routes to academic success and satisfaction (with co-author Betsy E. Brown).  Published by Praeger Publishers, 2006.
    (LB2331.72  B38  2006)
  • Native American women: A biographical dictionary (with co-editor Laurie Lisa). Published by Routledge, 2001.
    (REF E98  W8  B38  2001)
  • Ethnic studies in the United States: A guide to research (with co-authors Miguel A. Carranza & Laurie Lisa).  Published by Garland Pub., 1996.
    (E184  .A1  B275  1996)

Help welcome these visitors and support campus programming by attending these Lectures!

Update: Streaming videos from Filmakers Library Online

Filmakers Library Online provides award-winning documentaries with relevance across the curriculum—race and gender studies, human rights, globalization and global studies, multiculturalism, international relations, criminal justice, the environment, bioethics, health, political science and current events, psychology, arts, literature, and more. It presents points of view and historical and current experiences from diverse cultures and traditions world-wide. This release now provides 1,001 titles, equaling approximately 791 hours.”  See:  http://flon.alexanderstreet.com/

Stay tuned…

Update (March 1, 2013):  We’ve been enjoying Filmakers Library Online for a while now.  This package provides written transcripts for its documentaries, which increases accessibility and searchability.  Videos include search features, plus you can easily create your own clips.  Lots of other flexible features are available – please take a look and start exploring this great resource!

Adrienne Rich: Teaching the walk

Prolific poet and feminist activist Adrienne Rich passed away last week on March 27.  Years ago as a freshman undergraduate, I attended by chance a poetry reading she was giving at my campus.  The reading was held in a large auditorium – large enough to hold maybe 500 attendees.  As I recall, the room was quite full.  In the midst of her reading, a young baby began crying – loudly.  Adrienne Rich read on, accompanied by the wails of the baby.  A number of attendees began craning their necks in growing annoyance.  Where was that baby?  Why didn’t the mother have the decency to get up and leave?  The nerve – we’re here to listen to poetry!

The baby continued crying, and more attendees were visibly looking this way and that, searching for that baby.  At last, a young woman, red-faced, stood up with the fussing baby – of course they were in the middle of the auditorium and in the middle of a very long row.  The mother began slowly inching her way down the long row, headed for the exit aisle, swaying from the weight of the wriggling and fussing baby in her arms.

While reciting, Adrienne Rich noticed the standing woman and her baby, and immediately stopped reading her poem.  Urgently, she said into her microphone:

“Stop!  Don’t leave!”

The atmosphere throughout the auditorium was electrified.  The anonymous young woman indeed stopped in her tracks, extremely shocked to be addressed directly by the famous poet.  We all stared dumbly at Adrienne Rich, who also seemed a bit embarrassed by her own outburst.

She explained earnestly, urgently, in words I will never forget:

“I mean, if you are leaving because of your baby, DON’T.  Because your baby isn’t bothering anyone.”

The audience was momentarily stunned.  Of course, the baby had been bothering quite a few attendees.  But in a second, Adrienne Rich had taught us all a vital lesson.  A split second later, the whole auditorium went wild with cheers and a standing ovation.

I remember this lesson frequently.  I certainly remembered it when I was a single parent struggling with my own crying baby at public events and lectures I desperately wanted to attend.  I thought of it again when I learned of Adrienne Rich’s death.  She really was a poet and feminist who talked the talk, walked the walk, and in surprising ways taught the walk to all of us who could listen, reflect, and understand.  Rest in peace, Adrienne Rich.

~~~~~~

From Poetry Everywhere (Public Television)

~~~~~~

Selected Books by Adrienne Rich in the Library:

  • Tonight no poetry will serve: Poems, 2007-2010
  • Telephone ringing in the labyrinth: Poems, 2004-2006
  • The School among the ruins: Poems, 2000-2004
  • The Fact of a doorframe: Selected Poems, 1950-2001
  • Arts of the possible: Essays and conversations
  • Midnight salvage:  Poems, 1995-1998
  • Dark fields of the republic: Poems, 1991-1995
  • An atlas of the difficult world: Poems, 1988-1991
  • Time’s power: Poems 1985-1988
  • Diving into the wreck: Poems, 1971-1972
  • What is found there: Notebooks on poetry and politics
  • Collected early poems: 1950-1970

Adrienne Rich – Selected Multimedia in the Library:

  • Spoken Word: American Poets (Audio CD:  Media Collection – Disc 008 016)
  • Readings & Conversations: Reading by Adrienne Rich (Video: Media Collection – VIDE 003 699)
  • Adrienne Rich (Audio CD:  Media Collection SOUN 000 367)
  • The Language of life: A festival of poets, with Bill Moyers (Video: Media Collection – VIDE 002 143)

Periodicals Archive Online – Digital Humanities & Social Sciences

I’ve just begun exploring in one of the Library’s newer tools, Periodicals Archive Online, from ProQuest/Chadwyck Healy.  It’s an index that leads to full-text articles in the arts, humanities, & social sciences.

One of the first things I noticed is that you can change the search interface to one of 6 different languages, including French (below), Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese – and of course the default is English.  This can make for a nice immersive experience for language students, and is also useful of course for researchers who prefer to search in one of these languages.  So, big bonus points from the beginning from me!

The next obvious question is what’s in here?  Here’s a useful list of titles that I found online at the ProQuest website – wow!  (Currently, the Library subscribes only to only some of the collections – see the title list for Collections 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 to know exactly what’s available.)

What breadth in terms of subject areas, in terms of international perspectives, languages, and in terms of years!

Broad subjects include art; drama; history; economics; folklore; literature, poetry, and literary studies; geography; religion; psychology; linguistics & psycholinguistics; education; African American studies; law; Cuban studies; music; anthropology; philosophy; sociology, women’s studies, and more.

International perspectives?  Cultural studies?  Race & ethnic studies?  I see Islamic studies in English and in German; African and African American titles; South Asian & Middle Eastern studies; many titles in French, German, and Spanish, with some in Dutch; Japanese religious studies; Latin American and peninsular Spanish studies; Korean and Chinese studies…

What about years?  This depends on the titles themselves, of course.  I do see some titles dating back to the 19th century, such as Geographische Zeitschrift (coverage in PAO from 1895 through 2000), Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis (1885-2000), Orientalistische Literaturzeitung (1898-2000), and Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1813-2000), to grab a few titles just at random.  Most journals seem solidly rooted in the 20th century, with the most recent coverage year apparently 2000.  The search interface does indicate you can search by date, with 1665 (!) being the first year listed through 2000.   Amazing!

I also definitely appreciate the built-in flexibility for researchers.  PAO lets you refine or filter your search results by language, by journal, date, and by subject.  Marked references can be exported into EndNote or other bibliographic management software packages.

TO test drive the index, I did some sample searching totally off the top of my head.  For starters, I did a search on medieval author Christine de Pisan (alternatively spelled Christine de Pizan), and found great articles in English and in French listed under both spellings.

Christine de Pisan

(No, Periodicals Archive Online does not seem to include images.  This illustration of Christine de Pisan “lecturing men” is courtesy of Wikipedia – love it!) But the index did very quickly find a number of focused and interesting full-text research articles that I wouldn’t have been able to easily find in any other single index, save for Quick Search.

Aside: Pisan was one of the earliest women writers to be able to support herself and her children through her prolific writings.  She was also a feminist, writing her ground-breaking Le Livre de la Cité des Dames in 1405 as a protest against the misogynistic leanings in the renowned Roman de la Rose.

Well, you can see I quickly got into source material of great interest to me – which is of course the job of any good index – to get you where you want to go.  Periodicals Archive Online is so flexible and so broad, it’s likely to include materials you’re interested in too.  Give it a try and see where it leads you!

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A Day without a Mexican

Standing on line at the café waiting for my morning coffee, CNN was doing a spot on A Day without a Mexican, Sergio Arau’s “mockumentary” satire from 2004.  Scripted like a sci-fi thriller, the film depicts the shocking story of Mexican & Mexican American people disappearing throughout California, leaving hordes of panicky white folks to deal with their own cooking, laundering, babysitting, gardening, and other responsibilities.

Trailer: A Day without a Mexican

The documentary makes its point with humor and some tragedy, and can serve as a useful tool for class discussions on the often difficult topics of immigration, race, economic refugees, and class privilege.  The Library owns A Day without A Mexican in both DVD and video formats.  Here are the details, along with other recent and classic DVDs and videos on the topic of Latin American immigration.

* – * – ** – * – ** – * – ** – * – ** – * – ** – * – ** – * – ** – * – ** – * – *

A Day without a Mexican; dir. by Sergio Arau
“Presented in documentary fashion, this program shows what might happen, what adverse effects there would be, etc. if all Mexican Americans and Mexicans in the United States were to vanish.”
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (Vide 003 462)

AbUSed:  THe Postville Raid; dir. by Luis Argueta
“The arrest of nearly 400 undocumented workers in Postville, Iowa, pushed the town to the brink of collapse and severed an economic lifeline to one of the poorest areas in the Western Hemisphere. These are stories in Guatemala and Iowa of the immigrants affected.”
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (DVD 005 162)

 Trailer: AbUSed: The Postville Raid

Postville: When cultures collide; Iowa Public Television
“Tells the story of how a small Iowa town is dealing with multiculturalism. Postville, Iowa is where more than 300 Hasidic Jews, plus hundreds of Mexicans, Guatelmalans, Ukrainians and Russians have taken up residence in the last decade. Explores the struggles and rewards of the social and economic changes.”
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (Vide 003 808)
Which Way Home (HBO Documentary Films); dir. Rebecca Cammisa
“A feature documentary that follows unaccompanied child migrants on their journey through Mexico as they try to reach the United States. We follow children like Olga and Freddy, 9-year old Hondurans, who are trying to reach their parents in the U.S. Children like Jose, a 10-year old El Salvadoran, who has been abandoned by smugglers and ends up alone in a Mexican detention center, and Kevin, a streetwise 14-year-old Honduran, whose mother hopes that he will reach the U.S.”  Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (Vide 003 792)

Trailer: Which Way Home


La Caminata / The journey; dir. by Jamie Meltzer
“Fed up with the mass migration of their community, the small Mexican town of Alberto creates a one-of-a-kind tourist attraction they call La Caminata, a simulated nighttime border crossing, complete with fake border patrol chasing balaclava-clad coyotes. The experience is a cross between adventure tourism and a way for participants, largely middle class Mexican tourists, to experience firsthand the hardships of the border crossing. La Caminata details the story of this unlikely attempt to save a small community, offering a powerful look at the effect of migration in home communities, and opening a view to the immigration debate on the other side.”
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (Vide 006 793)

Children in No Man’s Land / Niños en tierra de nadie; dir. Anayansi Prado
“Relates “the story of Maria de Jesus (13) and her cousin Rene (12) as they attempt to cross the [Mexican-American Border Region] alone to reunite with their mothers in the Midwest. Focusing on minors crossing through the Sonora Desert area in Nogales, Arizona, this film explores every detail of these children’s journey as well as the journeys of other children we meet on the way.”
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (Vide 003 787)

A Little Salsa on the Prairie: The Changing Character of Perry, Iowa
“Summary of the history of a rural Midwest community, particularly its industry, immigration and ethnicity. Includes the rise and fall of the railroad and emergence of meatpacking as its major employer in the 1960s; investigates and portrays changes in the economy, society, and physical environment that arose due to Latino immigration in the 1980s and 1990s.”  Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (Vide 003 389)

Trailer: A Little Salsa on the Prairie

Letters from the other side; dir. by Heather Courtney
“Heather Courtney’s film interweaves video letters carried across the U.S.-Mexico border by the film’s director with the personal stories of women left behind in post-NAFTA Mexico. The video letters provides a way for these women to communicate with both loved ones and strangers on the other side of the border, and illustrates an unjust truth – as an American Courtney can carry these video letters back and forth across a border that these women are not legally allowed to cross. Focusing on a side of the immigration story rarely told by the media or touched upon in the national debate, the film offers a fresh perspective, painting a complex portrait of families torn apart by economics, communities dying at the hands of globalization, and governments incapable or unwilling to do anything about it.”
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (DVD 000 932)

De l’autre côté / From the other side; dir. by Chantal Akerman
“In images and interviews, this film examines the plight of poor Mexicans who try to emigrate to the United States illegally with the hope of a better life. U.S. attempts to stem the influx has forced immigrants to take dangerous routes to avoid detection, and many have died.”  In French, English, & Spanish, with English subtitles.  From renowned and prolific  Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman.
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (Vide 006 494)

Del otro lado del cristal / On the other side of the glass (ICAIC)
“Documentary on “Operación Peter Pan,” during which thousands of Cuban children left Havana for Miami without their parents between 1960-1962.”  In Spanish, with English subtitles.  From the renowned Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfica (ICAIC).
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (Vide 003 389)

María Full of Grace; HBO Films, dir. Joshua Marston
“Maria, a poor Colombian teenager, is desperate to leave a soul-crushing job. She accepts an offer to transport packets of heroin – which she swallows – to the United States. The ruthless world of drug trafficking proves to be more than she bargained for.”  
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (DVD 000 900)

[Trailer: María Full of Grace – now replaced by a playlist Motorcycle Diaries!]

Diarios de motocicleta / Motorcycle Diaries; dir. by Walter Salles
(Okay, this one does not fit our theme at all but I just noticed the Maria Full of Grace trailer has  been replaced by a video playlist that starts with a Motorcycle Diaries trailer.  Playlists – go figure!  You can skip ahead about 6 or 7 videos to view the Maria Full of Grace trailer, or enjoy viewing them all.  It’s quite an eclectic collection!  Just the same, we do own Motorcycle Diaries, which tells the tale of the young Ernesto “Che” Guevara who drives his motorcycle across Latin America, learning many life lessons and becoming politicized along the way.  Enjoy the beautiful music by Gustavo Santaolalla in this trailer! Hey, we own the cd of his soundtrack for the film as well:  Disc 004 205 in the Media Center!  Check it out!)
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (DVD 001 134)

Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary; dir. Laura Angélica Simón
“A documentary by Los Angeles teacher Laura Angelica Simón, exploring the impact of California’s Proposition 187 on the immigrant community. The subject is Hoover Street Elementary School, where Simón candidly explores the attitudes and emotions of teachers, students and parents, focusing on a ten year old Salvadorian girl.”
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (Vide 002 738)

Trailer: El Norte

El Norte; dir. by Gregory Nava
The 1983 classic and still powerful film:  “Mayan Indian peasants are tired of being thought of as nothing more than manual laborers. They organize an effort to improve their lot in life, but are discovered by the Guatemalan army. After the army destroys their village and family, Enrique and Rosa, a teenage brother and sister, who barely escaped the massacre, decide they must flee to United States. After receiving clandestine help from friends and humorous advice from a veteran immigrant on strategies for traveling, they make their way by truck, bus and other means to Los Angeles, where they try to make a new life as young, uneducated, and illegal immigrants.”
Parks Library–Media Center PARKS Media Center: Media Collection (DVD 003 728)