Author: Cynthia Orozco

Scrambled Thoughts Amidst Another US Mass Shooting

Content warning: mass shooting, death

Bear with me; this might be all over the place.

Despite its name, East Los Angeles College (ELAC) is a community college located in Monterey Park, a city in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley. But yes, ELAC was once part of unincorporated East Los Angeles before being annexed in the early 1970s. East LA is well known as a largely Hispanic community, over 95% according to the 2020 Census, while Monterey Park has a majority Asian American population at 65%. As a Japanese Mexican American, I feel right at home here. I was hired as a librarian at ELAC in 2016 and have grown to love these communities. The ‘community’ part in community college is crucial. Our students are majority locals and understanding the community and my students’ local context largely informs my work as a librarian. For example, I’ve been advocating for using OER to appeal to local college contexts and diverse ways of knowing the world rather than assume one textbook can work across all geographic locations. I love to incorporate the community in my library instruction, whether it’s teaching information literacy with an example information need like, “Where can I find the best xiao long bao near ELAC?” to searching databases on environmental racism in Southeast Los Angeles, as we also have a campus in the city of South Gate.

On January 21, 2023, Monterey Park experienced a mass shooting that took the lives of eleven people and injured nine others at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio late at night on the eve of the Lunar New Year. It is also the worst mass shooting to occur in Los Angeles County. The Monterey Park and AAPI communities are devastated, in what should be a joyous time in ringing in the new year. My heart goes out to the victims of this tragedy, their friends and family, and those impacted in the community. Never forget: My Nhan. Lilian Li. Xiujuan Yu. Muoi Ung. Hong Jian. Yu Kao. Chia Yau. Valentino Alvero. Wen Yu. Ming Ma. Diana Tom. The Half Moon Bay shootings occurred less than 48 hours later, claiming the lives of seven: Yetao Bing, Qizhong Cheng, Zhishen Liu, Jingzhi Lu, Marciano Martinez Jimenez, Jose Romero Perez, and Aixiang Zhang. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 40 mass shootings in the US in 2023 alone, and we’re only in January.

This isn’t the post I intended to write this week, but I felt the need to say something. The prevalence of mass shootings in the United States is absolutely unacceptable. And as a library worker, I hate that one of my biggest fears and, in my opinion, a bona fide workplace hazard is the possibility of a mass shooting. Statistically speaking, the possibility of an active shooter remains quite low, but tell that to my anxiety. In a recent meeting regarding the design of a new library space, the library team was presented with an open concept library floor plan, which most of us immediately flagged as a safety issue (and is also terrible for acoustics). The design team responded by enthusiastically declaring this to be something that most libraries want these days. Major facepalm. How is that an acceptable response? I’m a big fan of aesthetics in libraries, and admittedly a lot of libraries are cold, unwelcoming, and sometimes just outright ugly; however, I’m tired of decisions related to safety being made by those who won’t physically be in these spaces, whether it’s the builders or the administrators. I’ve done my fair share of researching protective design concepts for active shooter scenarios, and I’m just saying–I’m not asking for Kevlar wall panels or intrusive surveillance of students. However, I do want to be able to lock any door from the inside. To have a phone in each instructional classroom. To receive timely crime alerts and annual security reports. And to just overall have a better strategy than to watch the “Run, hide, fight” video…that maybe isn’t even great advice, as some experts recommend dropping the “hide” part to simply, “Run, fight.”

I went to a candlelight vigil on my campus on Wednesday. I appreciated all of the speakers who shared something with our community. There was an immense feeling of love and a desire to keep each other safe. And I really do hope we can keep each other safe and that we have more conversations on how to accomplish this in our respective communities.

Moving Forward, Not Backward

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Cynthia Mari Orozco to the ACRLog team. Cynthia is the Equity + OER Librarian at East Los Angeles College and PhD Candidate in Information Studies at UCLA. She is a former resident librarian at Loyola Marymount University and tenure-track librarian at California State University Long Beach before moving into community college librarianship. Her interests include OER and open pedagogy, information literacy, and scholarly communications in community colleges.

I graduated from library school in 2011, and I recall library workers bemoaning the overuse of the term “21st century library” in publication and presentation titles. At the time, I mostly agreed with this criticism. However, having now been in the profession for over 10 years, it sometimes feels like some spaces are not operating in the present century.

But I get it. When I started my online MLIS at San José State University, I remember thinking, “Let’s try this out for a semester. If it doesn’t work out, we can apply to an in-person program.” I had previously attempted to take an online course at my local community college and failed miserably. The course wasn’t hard, I don’t think; I just forgot to sign into the learning management system (LMS) and do the work. Entering the SJSU program, I was now confronted with another LMS and many new technologies that I had long resisted or never even heard of: teleconferencing, blogging, wikis, and Second Life, among others. In this first semester, I also started my first and current Twitter account! I lurked for at least two years before actively tweeting, or at least attempting to tweet. These technologies were all new and scary to me, and it took years to develop the comfort and ease that I now am privileged to have. Through SJSU, I learned how to thrive in an online environment by communicating synchronously and asynchronously, working across time zones and geographies, working on projects with various groups of people, and developing a curiosity for utilizing and assessing new technologies to improve my library work.

In early 2020, I was pulled into a Zoom meeting in my library not because I was involved with this group in any way but rather to connect to and facilitate Zoom in one of our classrooms. I logged into my Zoom account as no one else in the room had one at the time, I brought my microphone as the computer had none, and I pushed buttons as requested by the group. While slightly annoyed at the time, again, I’ve had the privilege of having years of experience using teleconferencing for my work. And throughout the last several years, I’ve witnessed all of my colleagues rise to the occasion to work effectively online with even the Zoom resisters now able to fully use Zoom on their own. I’m incredibly proud of my colleagues, and I have been looking forward to seeing how our experience in working remotely and providing remote services will affect our work from this point forward.

At East Los Angeles College, we have a smaller campus 10 miles away in the city of South Gate, where I often work. The South Gate campus library is one large room with one librarian and one library technician who both work at a public-facing desk during all operating hours. Our campus conversations often include advocating for equitable student services at this campus, which is often overshadowed by our Monterey Park campus (known by most as the “Main Campus,” which further perpetuates the relative importance of this campus). Do you know where a lot of this advocacy work happens? In meetings! In conversations with the ELAC community! And through teleconferencing, employees at South Gate have been able to attend meetings that one would otherwise have to miss when tied to a physical location at a specific time. While the pandemic has admittedly been very isolating, remote meetings have raised attendance and participation, an amazing opportunity for advocacy and diversity of thought.

I see our campus starting to revert to our default in-person modalities and assumptions that everything in-person is “better.” Advocacy for our smaller South Gate campus is just one example of how online technology has allowed us to improve our work, thus improving campus conditions for our students. It would be an utter shame to dismiss the progress we’ve made over the last several years. It’s also worth remembering that 12-hour days on Zoom is not normal and probably way too much! But it also doesn’t mean that we ought to completely discard remote or hybrid options for meetings and conversations.