Building on the work of a group project of students at Kennesaw State University, the Marietta Museum of History has created the Cobb County Latinx Research Archives.

The student researchers pulled together documents related to the history of Cobb County’s growing Hispanic community.

In an announcement posted to the City of Marietta website, the project was described as follows:

This project is an ongoing process and a culmination of the work completed by two English 1102: Honors Composition II classes in 2020 and 2021 with students in the Honors Journey College at Kennesaw State University. Students in Dr. Rochelle Harris Cox’s classes have learned valuable research methods while also helping to establish the first set of research at the museum focused primarily on Latinx history and their establishment in our community. The students have contributed more than 200 files of new information to our research archives.

Dr Cox wrote, in a series of talking points for the project provided to the Courier:

In this community partnership, the students receive a unique experience as they learn to develop a sustained inquiry, research in multiple sites (archives, online, databases), and compose written pieces for both academic and public audiences while the museum is able to add materials to their archives to more holistically represent Cobb County’s history.

Amy Reed, the director of the Marietta Museum of History, wrote to the Courier in an email, “The project is an amazing start to documenting the history and culture of the Hispanic and Latinx communities here in Cobb County.”

“Topics that the students presented work on include significant Latinx Cobb events, immigration issues, the 287g Immigration Policy, Jessica Colotl, Latina Women, Latinx Theater & the Arts, Latinx Organizations in Cobb, Marietta High School ESL, Latinx Demographics, Churches, students essays, newspaper articles, and dozens more,” she wrote.

One significant find was from a yearbook from Southern Polytechnic State University, which became part of Kennesaw State University.

Dr. Cox wrote, in a list of materials found by the student researchers, “A key research moment in Spring 2020 was discovering the Latin Club that formed in the 1950s at SPSU by international students from South and Central America; a student found this in the school’s yearbooks.  We realized the history was much earlier than the 1990s where most of our sources seemed to start.”

Another significant topic taken up by students were what are often called “Juan Crow laws,” or restrictive laws that disproportionately affect the Latinx community.