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Central Library’s Latino Collection is finally getting its due

By , Staff WriterUpdated
The Central Library’s Latino Collection and Resource Center will have an area for programs, such as lectures and panels.
The Central Library’s Latino Collection and Resource Center will have an area for programs, such as lectures and panels.Courtesy photo

For more than two decades, San Antonio’s Latino literary community has advocated, sometimes with little support, for a public space that celebrates the city’s deep Latino literary traditions.

Scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto rightly calls such a space a necessity in “the social, cultural capital of Mexican America.”

By this fall, that space will become reality when the Central Library opens the Latino Collection and Resource Center in a newly renovated space on its first floor.

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The 6,000-square-foot area will house the library’s existing 10,000-volume collection and provide room to grow its holdings. The space will have research capacity, study rooms, a small gallery and spaces for programming. If the colorful plans are any indication, it will be a place of inspiration.

Established in 1995, the Latino Collection was sequestered on the sixth floor of the downtown library in what can only be described generously as an afterthought.

“It was just to appease us,” said Ellen Riojas Clark, a UTSA professor emerita, recalling a library board that “was not supportive at all.” It even attempted to evade Latino activists by switching the site of public meetings.

She recalled a remarkable meeting when a teen Marisa Bono, now Southwest regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, spoke before the board and advocated for the creation of a Latino Collection.

Its volumes were placed in a 2,000-square-foot area in a seldom-trafficked spot on the sixth floor. It has remained in solitude there while providing little to no space for readers to study, write or celebrate the word.

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Yet when it hosted celebrations honoring authors Sandra Cisneros and Ybarra-Frausto, it was standing room only.

So the space, the new legitimate space, the new prominent space, the new more accessible space, has been long in coming.

It will showcase the collection and provide a venue for programs that will celebrate the Latino experience.

Renovations will begin this month and be completed by July. Sometime later, programming and festivities will begin.

The Latino Collection and Resource Center is supported by a public-private partnership. The city will contribute $190,000, and the library foundation has pledged $300,000.

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Library director Ramiro Salazar hopes to have $25,000 annually for programming.

While there are many people behind the project, including champions such as Cisneros, Ybarra-Frausto and Riojas Clark, it’s safe to say that Salazar had a great deal to do with fashioning the space.

In part, it was born of frustration.

Salazar watched as members of the L3 Committee — the library foundation’s ambitious Latino Leadership for the Library Committee, L to the third power — dreamed of creating a wing.

They were so hopeful that renowned Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta was called on to design it. Tens of millions of dollars would have been needed. No funding materialized.

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As Salazar pondered solutions, the teen area’s move to the third floor cleared prime real estate on the first.

The goal is to make the collection a stronghold of U.S. Latino literature and history. The library will acquire anthologies, emerging Latino writers and early Latino writers with an emphasis on Texas and the Southwest and will grow from there.

Few library systems have such public collections and/or centers.

Salazar could name only a few: San Jose Public Library’s Biblioteca Latinoamericana Branch, Tulsa City County Library’s Hispanic Resource Center, Miami-Dade Public Library’s Hispanic Branch and El Paso Public Library’s Raza Collection.

Salazar wasn’t as locked into the idea of a wing as he was on a solution and on what the library could do now.

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“It’s an important collection,” Salazar says. “San Antonio has a strong literary tradition that few know about. We bought this literary tradition from Mexico.”

Ybarra-Frausto agrees, recalling that as a boy, his father read Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House” to the family from a Spanish-language serialization in La Prensa. For some time, he was sure Dickens was Mexican.

“The point is that a lot of people don’t understand that in San Antonio, we were getting a cosmopolitan education through La Prensa,” which printed works by U.S., European and Latin American writers.

Ybarra-Frausto is certain that the space will help attract more personal collections like his, because donors will see that their gifts will be kept together, be made available to the public, and be maintained and reserved, all important criteria.

He gifted almost 900 volumes about Mexican and Mexican-American art, culture and social issues to the Latino Collection in 2014.

When he was a boy, he waited as bookmobiles traveled the dusty, unpaved streets of his West Side neighborhood and checked out as many books as allowed.

He remembers checking the card catalog in hopes that an Ybarra would appear. One day his prayers were answered. He found “T. Ybarra, ‘Young Man of Caracas,’” about a boy in Venezuela.

The scholar who taught at Stanford University and oversaw humanities and arts projects in Mexico and Latin America for the Rockefeller Foundation dreamed his library might have another Ybarra on its shelves someday.

Today, his nieces and nephews can look up a digital catalog and find one of their uncle’s own books — and in the Latino Collection and Resource Center someday soon, they will find much, much more.

eayala@express-news.net

|Updated

A newspaper journalist for almost 40 years, Elaine Ayala has held a variety of journalism jobs, including news reporter, features editor, blogger and editorial page editor. She covers San Antonio and Bexar County with special focus on communities of color, demographic change, Latino politics, migration, education and arts and culture. Email Elaine at eayala@express-news.net.