Seeing Latinx Students: Efforts to Journey Beyond Color-Blind Services

Kellie O'Donnell-Bobadilla, Reference Librarian and Head of Access Services, Eastern Connecticut State University

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The J. Eugene Smith Library at Eastern Connecticut State University strives to make our services, collections, spaces, and policies equitable, diverse, inclusive, and more recently, anti-racist. Our efforts in anti-racism have begun with countering the idea of color-blindness. To begin this work, we started with our Latinx students. The efforts we have taken so far include a diversity audit, outreach to the student club, Organization of Latin American Students (OLAS), we created a LibGuide to share resources and curated book lists, and a blog to foster communications. We are currently surveying students on their satisfaction with the Library. In the future, we will implement changes to our services, collections, spaces, and policies that are discovered based on the feedback from the survey. And we will continue to scan the literature to learn more about Latinx students in higher education, especially in libraries. Our goal is to “see” Latinx students through a racial-ethnic identity lens in order to break down racist barriers to their learning, feelings of belonging, persistence, and graduation rates. Engaging them where they are and who they are, in other words in a non-color-blind way, is an important anti-racist journey that the J. Eugene Smith Library has begun.

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