Persona: Luis Loera

Luis Loera

Persona: Luis Loera Luis Loera is a 15-year-old high school sophomore. His parents immigrated from Mexico, but he and his siblings have only known the United States as home. He is fluent in both English and Spanish; he speaks Spanish with his family and English with his peers. His family is binational between Mexico and the U.S., and he has relatives in California and Texas. He uses social media to connect with his high school friends; he sometimes also uses WhatsApp to participate in his extended family’s discussions.

Snapshot

Age: 15
Nationality: U.S. citizen, child of first-generation immigrants from Mexico
Occupation: high school student with college aspirations, does agricultural work in the summer
Marital status: single; lives with parents, younger brother, and sister
Location: A large town in Nebraska
Technology profile: Luis is a power user of technology

“The first thing I do every morning is check my phone – it’s also the last thing I check every night before going to sleep. I can’t imagine life without it.”

Devices Luis has

Smartphone:Luis uses his phone for texting, calling his parents, studying for school and checking social media, newspaper sites, and sports sites.

Tablet:He uses his tablet for homework, streaming movies, and research.

Laptop:He uses his laptop to write his school papers and occasionally for gaming.

Luis also uses other devices from his school, such as videocameras and scanners, to complete his school projects.

Technology

Connectivity

Luis mainly uses wifi at school and at home, as well as at cafés. Luis has a limited data plan for his phone that is shared with his family, so he's always looking for a wifi connection.

Social media platforms and web resources consulted

Google and YouTube are Luis’s preferred search tools for gathering information.
He has installed a lot of applications on his phone like Facebook, Spotify, Instagram, and Snapchat, and each one has a different purpose. For example, he uses Snapchat exclusively for chatting with friends and Instagram for interacting with one of his cousins.
When he looks at a web page on the internet, he tries really hard not to make judgments about its reliability based on aesthetic considerations like whether its layout is outdated or the page is too busy. He’s noticed most of his friends don’t think like this. They’ll make snap judgments based on appearance.

Frustration with technology

Luis is concerned about finding the right answers – to his own research for school, for his parents’ questions, etc. There’s been so much talk about fake news, though, and Luis is concerned that he or his family will mistake fake news for real news. For his parents, as immigrants, everything is still a little new and somehow unexpected – he worries they will fall for fake news or scams, but he doesn’t know how to protect them. Luis himself tends to disregard any news he gets via Facebook or other social media unless he sees it confirmed in a newspaper or on a respected news site – but he’s heard about fake news even appearing on news sites.

Communication

Most of Luis' smartphone communication is texting and social media based - posting videos and funny pictures and communicating with friends. Sometimes he shares helpful science-related videos on his science club’s Facebook page, which their advisor created.
Luis also shares a lot of information from his online research, primarily with his family either at dinner or afterward.

Information needs and background

Luis was born in the United States, but both of his parents are from Mexico. Luis’s father came to the US and first went to California to work in harvesting there. After he settled, Luis’s mom and other relatives joined him in California. Some time later, Luis’s father was encouraged to move to Missouri to take a job in an agromaquila – an agricultural processing plant. A couple of years later, that employer moved to Nebraska, and Luis’s family followed the job there. As a result, Luis has relatives in Mexico and California, and a few of his relatives have moved to Texas for work or school– they are the only members of their family to live in Nebraska.
Luis uses his internet skills to help his family find information about school requirements, health concerns, and city ordinances. As the oldest child, Luis has been the language broker for his parents for a long time, often translating for his mom and dad at school visits or doctor’s offices. As the oldest child, Luis is used to being the responsible one, but he was relieved when his siblings were able to do more translating for his mom.

During the school year, Luis focuses on academics because he knows how important it is to get a good education in order to get into a good college. He hasn’t decided on a career yet, but he wants to work in a helping profession related to science – a doctor or maybe a science teacher. Luis is involved in his school’s science club, which includes tutoring other students. In the summer, he works de-tasseling corn because his dad doesn’t think he should spend the entire summer reading books.

Due to his emphasis on his studies and his need to research information for his family, Luis is mostly a content consumer, but his participation in the science club is pushing him toward becoming a content creator. His science club advisor wants them to make short videos illustrating a scientific reaction. Luis and his friends want to post these videos to YouTube. His school has elective classes on keyboarding, word processing software, and using MovieMaker.

Information Sources and Library Use

To get his information, Luis:

Uses internet sources to help his family get the information they need, such as videos showing how-to tricks for home maintenance;
Searches mostly in English (for his classes), and sometimes uses a dictionary app to look up Spanish words;
Often shares local information with his immediate family, such as severe weather alerts or city events, translating from English to Spanish;
Prefers video to print information, partly because he thinks it’s harder to fake a demonstration of something than it is to write something untrue.

For Luis, his parents are a trusted source of information, especially for topics like health and dating. They also like to listen to Spanish-language radio on Pandora, which Luis set up for them. Luis prefers to listen to pop music on Spotify if he’s not with his family. Luis and his family talk about the most important news events of the day at dinner every night.

Goals for using the library

Luis does not go to the public library or school library very often, but he does use their resources.

If he needs access to something in the school library, he uses an app to pull up the information on his phone
He does use his school library databases for homework assignments, but only if required (he prefers to use Google)

He’s had some information literacy training at school from the school librarian, which was helpful since he has a big responsibility of getting the right answers to his family’s questions.