An Introduction to Serving Latino Migrant Workers

This week I spent some time looking into library services to a specific Spanish-speaking sub-population: migrant farm workers.  I started my research off with a power point of the three winning presentations of the REFORMA "Research At Your Service! ¡Investigaciones para servirles! Latinos & their Information Needs on Center Stage" research competition.  

One of the presentations, given by Kaitlin Peterson, was entitled "Including the Culturally Excluded and Socially Forgotten: Information Services for Spanish Migrant Workers in the United States."  The presentation was a great overview of the challenges and successes of serving this population.  Peterson starts off by discussing the idea of the "theory of information worlds" as developed by Gary Bune and Paul Jaeger: information behavior is shaped by the influence of our family and friends, as well as "larger social influences;" only a limited number of people, what would be considered truly isolated populations, live in a small information world.  Peterson goes on to make the argument that Latino migrant workers constitute one of these isolated populations.

Peterson highlights some statistical information (from the Institute of Food and Development Policy) on the population:

• There are an estimated two million migrants workers in the US, including 100,000 children.
• Of those two million, 2/3 are immigrants, and 80% are Mexican.
• The average grade completed is 8th.
• 35% do not speak English at all.
• 3/5 of the population lives beneath the poverty line.

From her research, Peterson defined the following information needs of Latino migrant workers: education, employment, health/family planning, housing, legal/political, geographic, consumer information, home, and welfare.  These needs are complicated by the following barriers to information seeking: language/literacy, isolation, misunderstanding of legal system, time, transportation, perception of libraries, and most importantly, access, plain and simple.  After highlighting a few programs for migrant workers across the US (to be detailed in a later section of the post), Peterson goes on to make a few recommendations for serving this "isolated population" including bringing the resources where they are, partnering with organizations already serving the population, creating relevant library policies for the workers (but being flexible), and most importantly, always, always being an advocate for the information needs of migrant workers.

I also watched a webinar entitled "Reaching Spanish-speaking Agriculture Communities," which I found on the "Spanish-speakers" section of Webjunction. The webinar highlighted public computer access within the migrant population of Eastern Washington.  Some of the most important takeaway points were:

• Once again, the "word of mouth" social network was emphasized as the most important locus of information sharing within the population.  Spanish-language radio stations function as an extension of that trend.
• Mastery of email was an important learning milestone, increasing personal digital confidence levels and social capital.
• Latino migrant workers are looking for family-centered, safe, and respectable social spaces.  Marketing public technology centers (and libraries in general) as such can be very effective.
• Some specific recommendations for increasing the efficacy of technology services were detailed:
• Increasing the availability of quality of media and web-based tutorials that encourage self-directed learning, which would help overcome time barriers common for the population, while also building off of the increase in "mobile uptake" throughout the population.
• Building peer- and intergenerational-learning into instruction.

In my research, I came across some specific examples of outreach services to migrant populations including:

• Fresno Co. Public Library in California has a bookmobile that stops at migrant farm camps and communities.
• The University of Washington and the Department of Education partnered to create "Community Technology Centers" for area workers.
• Miami Dade Public Library's Hispanic Branch located in the bottom floor of an affordable housing complex where many workers live.

On a different note, earlier this summer I heard a great Storycorp segment on NPR about just how powerful library outreach can be in migrant camps.  As the child of a migrant family, Storm Reyes grew up in a world where books were a luxury, too heavy to carry around from camp to camp.  When she was 12 and a bookmobile came to camp, and she couldn't believe that the librarian would give her books of her own.  Those books changed her life; she ended up working as a librarian for more than 30 years!  On a more personal note, I worked for a Migrant Education program for two summers in the Flathead Valley of Montana, going out into the orchards each afternoon, putting down blankets in the rows between the trees and tutoring the children of the cherry pickers using a math game curriculum.  Overall, it was an amazing experience, but I saw first hand the huge amount of logistics that go into just locating, let alone serving the migrant population.  It is really clear to me how important partnerships with other organizations would be; my program had a great partnership with a mobile clinic and health care providers.  I can also see how well a bookmobile service would work along with other educational programs like the one I was a part of those summers.  Instead of having a "build it and they will come" attitude, bringing your services to those isolated populations is clearly much more effective.