Authored by Alana Coulum
This is the front of the VHS Tape. The front cover features two people from the Institute interviewing a woman wearing a mask to protect her identity
For my academic service-learning project, I chose to volunteer at the Center for Migration Studies, which is an institute devoted to the advocacy of migrants around the world. It is an organization backed by an international group of Catholic ordained and lay people, and the institution holds an impressive amount of immigration information in their archives. I was tasked with cataloguing their audio/visual collection, which was small but disorganized. In the collection, there were many documentaries telling the stories of immigrant groups who came to the United States. The Center for Migration Studies in general has an enormous amount of resources about Italian-Americans and their experience. One VHS tape in particular caught my eye because of its title: “Mickey Mouse in Haiti”. This is a video exploiting the terrible working conditions of laborers in Haiti making apparel for The Walt Disney Company. This was part of a campaign sponsored by the Institute for Global Labour and Rights, to convince Disney to raise the minimum wage for factory workers in Haiti. The entire documentary is available here on the Institute’s official YouTube page.