Los Lobos de Yorba Linda, California

Our friend Gustavo Arellano has a great article in the Orange County Weekly about the quintessetnial East Los Angeles bands migration to Richard Nixon’s hometown of Yorba Linda.

Arellano and Los Lobos paint a nice little sketch of Orange County:

Perez has enjoyed his 16 years in Orange County, and he has experienced all of its insanity, from immaculate Laguna Niguel (“They must have elves who come out at night with toothbrushes or something”) to Laguna Beach gentrification (“The billionaires are moving out the millionaires”) to SanTana (“I just about expected chickens to come crossing the street”). And since this is an Orange County-centric piece, we’ll end it with Louie’s restaurant picks: Thai Brothers in Laguna Beach, Irvine’s Wheel of Life and El Farolito in Placentia. But don’t bother with any restaurants in Yorba Linda, Perez says: “Food-wise, it’s a wasteland.”

The observation about Yorba Linda being a food wasteland is not entirely accurate. I recommend Wing’s Chinese on Yorba Linda Boulevard and Lakeview.

Wing’s Restaurant
18553 Yorba Linda Blvd , Yorba Linda 92886-4135
714-777-2453

Happy New Year

So here we are heading into 2008.

Within the next three months we may have both the Democratic and Republican nominations locked up – and perhaps a clearer vision of what type of immigration policy we can expect from the next Administration.

When we started Orange County Latino, way back in October, 2001 – we had only a vague notion of how 9/11 was going to impact the immigration reform that George W. Bush and Vicente Fox signaled they were working on in the summer of ‘01.

Since then we’ve seen a backlash in the United States against globalization, immigration – making it politically impossible to find a real answer to try to manage the flood of immigrants from Mexico and beyond.

And from what the candidates have said so far – it seems that will continue to be the case.

We’ll watch this issue – and share any insights gleaned on this website.

Happy New Year.

Latino Facts

These are out of date and I do not have the source. But think about the social, economic and political implications of the following facts about Latinos:

1. ½ total population growth in US from 2003 to 2004
2. 85% speak some Spanish at home and will continue to do so
3. From 1990 to 2000 the number of Latinos who speak Spanish at home grew 61% while the Hispanic population grew 58%
4. Spending is project to more than double over the next 10 years, 1.5 trillion in 2015
5. Consumer spending for 2005 was estimated to be 715 billion
6. Households spend more on groceries, clothing and footwear, gasoline and motor oil, cell phone usage and going to the movies
7. Since 1990 the Hispanic population has increased in every state
8. There are 41.3 million Hispanics in the US (2005)
9. 83% is under age 50, 63% are under age 30

Gustavo Arellano in the New York Times

Gustavo Arellano’s Ask A Mexican is reviewed in the Fashion & Style section in today’s New York Times.

My favorite part:

 “Part of the joke is the assumption that the reader doesn’t know any Mexicans,” said Ted Kissell, editor of The OC Weekly. Mr. Arellano, he noted, “is a surrogate Mexican for our English-speaking readership.”

Mr. Arellano, born in Anaheim to Mexican immigrants, one of them a father who crossed the border illegally several times starting in the 1960s, doesn’t deny that his satire is not for everyone. “I use the column to give the straight dope but also be as rude as possible to people who deserve it,” he explained. Accordingly, his responses often cite studies and statistics in a flurry of profanity. And he tackles some questions with the gusto of someone who not only wants to set the record straight but also wants to settle scores.

“Gracias for illustrating the great double standard in America’s immigration policy,” Mr. Arellano wrote in response to a reader who suggested that Mexicans stay in Mexico to improve their own country. “Centuries of immigrant waves chose not to improve their homelands and to try their luck in a new land, and we rightfully celebrate their pluck as pioneers. Yet when Mexicans follow in the footsteps of our gabacho forefathers, we accuse them of lacking self-motivation and want to shut down the border.”

Then, in typical fashion, he used an epithet to refer to the reader and challenged him to give up his cheap labor and “taco-and-enchilada combos.”

Here is is some video I took with my Treo at Gustavo’s book tour stop in Pico Rivera, California:

SolArt Gallery Cafe: Arte LatinoAmericano

Event: “Arte LatinoAmericano: From the Figurative to the Fragmented”

SolArt Gallery Café presents a collection of distinguished Latin American artists to kick off its Summer Series. The works included in “Arte LatinoAmericano: From the Figurative to the Fragmented” were first exhibited at Chapman University’s Leatherby Libraries in conjunction with the John Fowles Creative Writing Center’s Spring Lecture Series. The distinguished collection of works was brought together as a part of the center’s efforts to make international artists accessible and available to the Orange County community. The works will be on display from June 2^nd-July 31^st

Cost: $5.00 donation requested
Date: Opening Reception will be held on Saturday, June 2^nd, 2007 @ 7:00 p.m.
Place: The “new” SolArt Gallery Café, 511 E. Santa Ana Blvd. Santa Ana, CA
Website: www.solartgallerycafe.com
MySpace: www.myspace.com/solartgallerycafe

Gustavo Arellano’s Ask A Mexican Book Tour

Gustavo’s book “Ask A Mexican” is out and he is promoting it outside of Orange County on the following dates:

May 7: Borders Pico Rivera, 8852 Washington Blvd., Pico Rivera, (562) 942-9919

May 9: Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW, Albuquerque, (505) 344-8139, 7pm

May 10: Barnes & Noble Webster, 1441 W. Webster Ave., Chicago, (773) 871-3610, 7pm

May 13: Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way NE, Lake View (near Seattle), 206-366-3333, 5:30 pm

May 16: Barnes & Noble Westheimer, 7626 Westheimer, Houston, (713) 783-6016, 7pm

Or order it online at Amazon.com

Giving Orange County a Brown Face

by Yolanda Morelos Álvarez
contributor

Note: This is an article from 2002. Since the publishinig of this article Ms.  Álvarez has become the inspiring force behind the founding of the Orange County Mexican American Historical Society (OCMAHS) which has a growing digital collection of historic photographs of Mexicans in Orange County. The collection strength is in twentieth century images. Of which, undoubtedly contains her collection “Fire in the Morning”. Ms. Alvarez has been featured in National Public Radio. Her writing contributions to Orange County Latino in 2002 are republished here as we prepare for our June, 2007 relaunch.

I used to be good at minding my own business, but not anymore.

I have driven all over Orange County in search of historic Mexican neighborhoods with names like La Conga, Alta Vista, La Jolla, Colonia Juarez, Logan, Delhi, La Manzanilla, La Colonia Independencia, Hollywood.  Sometimes I find them and sometimes I am too late; they have disappeared.

What remains of the life of these Mexican-Americans communities plowed under the never-ending Orange County development project are the stories and photographs, intact in the hearts and minds of elderly citizens who have lived through times I can only imagine.

My own attempt at reconstructing this history is assembled in a traveling historical photographic exhibit called “Fire in the Morning.”  A portrayal of the lives of Mexican-Americans raised and—contrary to popular thought—often born in this county, it reveals a way of life that was simultaneously rich and poor, joyous and tragic.  Stories are included that explain briefly the agricultural strike of 1936, the mass deportation of American citizens of Mexican descent during the Depression, trips over the Grapevine to work in Fresno and Bakersfield, riverside dancing and picnics at Sycamore Flats (by Green River) and Jamaicas, some colonias famous for their grand festivities.  These stories add to the historical vision presented.

The photographs, in varying shades of browns and blacks are full of people of all ages, and tell stories waiting to be told.  Beaming faces adorn barefoot children standing tall and proud for a class photograph taken in the 1930s, classmates who attended a “Mexican” school, one of fifteen segregated schools operating in Orange County…Segregation here?  In the Deep South, something we know of course… but here?  In Orange County?

After doing some research on my own, I learned that the immigrants from the Midwest and South brought to Southern California their institutionalized ways of treating the cheap labor force, which included a segregated and unequal education.  If someone takes a Chicano Studies course at college, they might learn of this ignominious history.  Yet ask a typical grade schooler—high schooler, even—and most likely they would have never heard about this.

Why not?  All students learn of the injustices of slavery, the segregated water fountains for example.  But why haven’t students been taught that we “Mexicans” (what all of us of Mexican heritage are called, born here or not) were not allowed to use the pool except the last day of use before it was cleaned?  Or that “we” were permitted to see movies at the theater as long as “we” sat in the balcony?  Or that certain restaurants would not serve us because we were “Mexicans”?

The history of our region becomes so much more interesting when I learned that four school districts were taken to court to end segregation March 2, 1945. The parents of students from the cities of El Modena, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and Westminster joined forces to end what was an educational system that relegated “Mexican” students to what amounted to a vocational education instead of studies that would have prepared the children for high school.  Gonzalo Méndez, William Guzmán, Frank Palomino, Thomas Estrada and Lorenzo Ramírez filed suit against the exclusion of Mexican children solely because they were of Mexican or Latin descent.

These parents, who were represented by Los Angeles attorney, David C. Marcus were victorious in February 1946 when Judge Paul McCormick ruled that the segregation of Mexican pupils was a violation of California state law and of the Fourteenth Amendment.  McCormick pointed out that in El Modena, seventh graders scored higher than their contemporaries did in the “white” school in standardized achievement tests.  The argument that “Mexicans” would hold back the white students was simply not true.  But predictably the school districts appealed the decision.

Many organizations submitted amicus curiae briefs (Friend of the Court) in support of desegregation: Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP, the American Jewish Congress, the Japanese American Citizens League, National Lawyer’s Guild, and ACLU combined to write a third, and California Attorney General sponsored a fourth.

April 14, 1947 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld McCormick’s decision.  This was truly a victory for the Mexican Americans in the state of California.  (Although examples exist in California in which school districts did nothing to change the status quo.)  It was also an important precedent to the Brown v Board of Education case in 1954 and deserves national recognition.

And yet this story isn’t told in Orange County, much less the nation.  Intrigued by such gaping omissions in my own education, I am determined that my children will learn a fuller truth about the existence of Mexican-Americans in Orange County.  I do not accept the view of us as docile Mexicans, but it is a stubborn perception that continues to exist among some of the population.  It is important that examples in our history highlight a courageous people who fought the dominant majority for justice and won.

In a sense, the exhibit, “Fire in the Morning,” attempts to present a fuller picture of Mexican Americans and the challenges the communities had to face.  There is something special about having lived in the scattered Mexican neighborhoods or “colonias” of the county that makes people say with fondness and pride that they are from Santa Anita, or La Paloma, Travelers, or Campo Colorado.  In spite of the poverty from very low wages, the richness is in the heritage, the close-knit nature of the people who lived the joys and tragedies life had to offer.

The stories of our elderly can open up an understanding that helps us to appreciate their and our own strength, intelligence and determination.  From the story about the second grader (now in his 70s) who gets kicked in the shins by a teacher for speaking Spanish, to the big wedding at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Santa Ana, there are thousands more stories waiting to be shared.

No book or file exists in any Orange County library history room that named all or most of the Mexican colonias of Orange County.  Because of this, I continue to go about the county to interview Mexican-Americans who have the stories of Orange County to tell from their own viewpoint.

The exhibit has been touring the county for one and a half years and is currently at the Bryant Ranch Museum in Yorba Linda.  It then moves to the Orange Library and will continue on to Irvine City Hall which will host it in September.  A portable exhibit visits schools and special events.
Of the various comments in the guest book, many are revealing.  “I never realized there were Mexicans back in the early years”… “I cried to see the familiar faces …” “it’s about time”…”reminds me of East Los Angeles” and finally from a Vietnamese woman, “nice to see other immigrant stories told, it’s important for us all to stick together.”  And one person wrote, “this is only the ‘tip of the iceberg.’”

I Sing the Nation Brown: Richard Rodriguez and Latinos as the End of Race

by Gustavo Arellano
Editor-in-chief, emeritus

W.E.B Dubois famously predicted at the dawn of the 20th century that its most urgent concern would be “the problem of the color line.” There’s been little progress in solving it a century later, the dissolution of colonial empires and scientific theories on race notwithstanding. But Richard Rodriguez thinks he has the answer to Dubois’ prophecy: Latinos.

In his latest book Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Rodriguez doesn’t examine real-life Latino lives so much as take Latinos and their most associated skin tone as a metaphor to show how race can be overcome in this country. To Rodriguez, the sanguinary diversity of Latinos—“la raza cósmica” (the cosmic race) as the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos called them—makes them the ultimate solution to the ingrained racial vista of the United States. Heavy in ideas, outlandish in its arrogance, yet ultimately vindicated by its radical hypothesis, Brown has the potential to serve as a starting point for a much-needed racial dialogue for the coming century.

Throughout Brown, Rodriguez interchanges “Latino” and “brown” as metaphors with dazzling results. “Brown as impurity. I write of a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several,” he writes in the preface to the book. He then proceeds to tell in the next nine chapters’ different ways in which Latino/brown has influenced the United States, changing everything from America’s relation to the world to its imperialistic outlook of East/West to North/South to-most importantly to Rodriguez-the racial divide.

The book is strongest when Rodriguez-emulating Whitman and Baldwin with his lyrical, introspective prose-expands on his Latinos-as-the-eradicators-of race thesis. When he actually speaks about what the Latino community is as opposed to what it represents, though, the book falters. Brown’s one chapter exclusively devoted to Latinos drowns in self-righteousness and snootiness as Rodriguez abandons intellectual dissemination and comes off sounding like Barbara Coe with lines like “I marvel at the middle-class American willingness to take Spanish up.”

But Brown is saved when Rodriguez finds his thesis of the Latino/brown promise amongst-of all the people on Earth, how weird is this?-Richard Nixon. Walking around the lame Nixon Library (“The guards are spooky, their walkie-talkie vigilance suggests only crackpots visit this tomb,” Rodriguez wryly notes), Rodriguez finds in the young Nixon the tragic truth of the American racial life. He remembers that when Nixon fumbled and sweated his way through his 1960 debate with John Kennedy, “I saw what many other Americans saw that night: Harvard College will always beat Whittier College in America. The game is fixed and there is nothing to be done about it.”

Rather than attempt to help his kind (the working class, not “whites”), though, Nixon apparently betrayed his “people” by classifying people in five racial groups in 1973 (of which “Hispanic” was the most prominent) because it was politically expedient at the time to allow affirmative action to flourish under race rather than class. Within this bureaucratic decree (O.M.B. Statistical Directive 15, to be exact), Rodriguez argues, Nixon also unwittingly laid the seeds of race’s destruction because there was no way such narrow classifications could survive America’s ensuing multicultural madness. Especially that of “Hispanic”: “Mayan Indians from the Yucatán were directed to the Hispanic pavilion which they must share with Argentine tangoistas, Colombian drug dealers, and Russian Jews who remember Cuba from the viewpoint of Miami.” All of this thanks to whom Rodriguez only half-jokingly refers to as “the dark father of hispanicity” and who might ultimately turn out to be our greatest civil rights reformer.

Brown embraces Latinos not for who they are but what they symbolize: the impurity in America’s traditional black/white dichotomy that will probably do away with the country’s most pernicious problem. The book makes a convincing case that America can no longer afford to think of itself in racial terms-all thanks to a people/color that the United States set its eyes on subjugating but is now the other way around. “And I am left”, Rodriguez writes from his home in San Francisco, “sitting inside, deconstructing the American English word for myself-Hispanic [<sic>]-by which I celebrate my own deliverance from <cultura>; the deliverance of the United States of America from race.”

BROWN: THE LAST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA BY RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, VIKING PRESS, 231 PAGES, $24.95

______________

Gustavo Arellano is the Editor in Chief for OC Latino. He is also a contributing writer for the OC Weekly.

 

Maria and Me: An Homage to the Image

by Adriana Alba-Sánchez
Editor, emeritus

Maria Felix died last Monday. I found out upon getting home, after I kicked off my shoes, flopped down on the couch, and turned on the tube to see Vicente Fox standing somberly next to an oak coffin between vases of long Calla Lilies and surrounded by a hoard of politicians, celebrities and cameramen. It took a while before I realized that all the escandalo was because Maria Felix was dead.

As expected, for the next couple of days Spanish Network Channels have paraded one homage after another to the Mexican Icon. Article upon article has already been written about her film career, her numerous lovers, her arrogant political commentary, her art collections, her life in Europe, the elite circles she ran with; so I don’t want to go there. I want to write about Maria and me. No one has covered that angle yet.

My father was always a big fan of all films that came out of Mexico’s “Epoca de Oro.” When I was a child, it was a Sunday ritual to go to the local video store and come home with a stack of black and white films that featured Mexican men in full splendor-on top of a horse with two guns swinging from their hips and a mournful ranchera dancing out of their throats. I don’t remember the first time I saw the sickle shaped brows that arched above those infinitely dark eyes staring down Pedro Armendariz, Jorge Negrete, or Pedro Infante. It was before my mind developed the ability to organize memories and images, but the flaming rage and relentless pride that glowed from the depths of her gaze had a haunting and contagious flicker.

This admiration for the black and white image that graced the screen of our thirteen-inch T.V. was a reaction to a deep suspicion. At that young age I was looking around trying to figure out what it would mean for me to be a woman. Everything that I saw and heard in real life was teaching me that woman’s role was to find a man and be a mother. Women (especially Mexican women) were supposed to be delicate and nurturing, accepting and always loving. Our power was that we kept men’s worlds in meticulous order–washed, ironed and folded neatly in their drawers.

I must have been ten the day I turned to my mom and declared, “I want to be like Maria Felix when I grow up.” My mom responded to my articulated desires with, “Esa vieja es una vulgar.” To her she was vulgar because Maria was vicious and always ready to strike any “canalla” that tried to impose his rule on her. She smoked and dressed like a man in movies, she led wars, she ran her own ranchos and had a deep voice that demanded nothing less than full command. She was not the “Patron’s” dutiful wife. She was La Patrona, (or the boss) in the fullest sense of the word. She was not a Mexican Marilyn Monroe, simply oozing with sex and filled with bubbly giggles. She was not blonde and never played delicate or helpless women like the ones I saw in telenovelas every day. La Doña never lowered her eyes for anyone. If that type of independence signified vulgarity, I wouldn’t mind the notoriety.

In real life she really was arrogant and self-righteous as hell. Quick to criticize everything around her, she once even went so far as to call Subcomandante Marcos a clown and the Zapatistas “Indios apestosos.” Her elitist rhetoric offended me. I felt angry and betrayed, let down. I had to learn to take her for what she really was: a Mexican post-revolutionary creation, much like the PRI. She got rich by playing the heroine that symbolized nationhood in 20th Century Mexico. She was propaganda!

I know that now, but I still feel the same knot in my stomach when I see her in “La Generala” or “Enamorada.” From that image of female rebellion I learned that my biology was not my destiny. The fact that I was born with ovaries did not mean that my life would have to be marked with self-sacrifice and sufrimientos.

There are images that come about in our lives that are transformative. They are initially shocking and hauntingly linger inside of us. They are representations of deep inner desires; some truth we feel born with and remains buried until we are able to somehow connect it to something outside of our own skin. Such was La Doña to me.

 

Libraries for Latinos? Not in Santa Ana

A half-editorial, half-reporting, all reading report

Bruce Jensen
Contributing Writer

A four-block walk in downtown Santa Ana was all it took to get me hooked.  The city seized me around the shoulders and pulled me close, roaring ¡Órale, hermano!  Ya has llegado, güey, pos make yourself at home!  Can I get you something?  You want a cheve?

In the downtown core I felt a pulse, action, movimiento.  The sidewalks were crowded and music came pouring out of damn near every open door.  You could smell empanadas and find fresh tortillas and see Y tu Mamá También for a $3.50 double-feature ticket—without subtitles. Within five minutes I had a half-dozen local Spanish-language newspapers tucked under my arm.  There was even a pupuseria in this pluricultural paradise, and nearby was a truly happening bookstore-café-neighborhood nerve center.

Pásate, compa, a donde tu chambita.  Let’s check out the pinche library

That’s why I was in town: a job at the Santa Ana library.  What drew me into public librarianship, see, was my dissatisfaction with the service that so-called linguistic minorities usually get—or rather, don’t get—from their libraries.

Back in ’98 while in the hinterlands of Oregon, amidst Mixtecs and Zapotecs who were evidently too short or too dark to matter to librarians, I launched an informational website that’s been growing ever since.  Later I went back to grad school (little-known fact from this hierarchical field: without a master’s degree in Information Studies, you’re not called a librarian) at UCLA, because there I could study public libraries that sit in Korean and Russian and Central American neighborhoods.

When I heard of an opening in Santa Ana I jumped all over it, aware that the 2000 census had identified it as the Spanish-speakingest city in the country, a place where fully three-quarters of the residents use Spanish at home.  A “minority language”?  Not here.  I could just imagine the exciting, groundbreaking work being done by a library in such an exceptional town.

The phone interview went well—well enough that they rewrote the job description to fit my background and did a brief pro forma posting.  My wife and I decided to put up in Santa Ana a week ahead of the final interview so we could start to get a feel for the place.  I’d take the job, I told her, only if we both felt comfortable living a short walk from where I’d work.  A librarian should be part of the community, and no way was I going to drag my paychecks out to Fountain Valley or Anaheim like some highly paid guest worker.  (Oh, did I mention that a librarian gig in Santa Ana starts at around $50K a year, plus all the icing?)

 

Vente, carnal, y mira nomás qué chula…

As I approached the building, part of Santa Ana’s impressive civic center, I felt giddy anticipation.  Meeting a new library is always fun, and the city’s ambiente had me wondering what would be inside this library, so well positioned was it to be a cultural touchstone for its community.

Then I actually went in.  The pulse that throbbed outside had gone flatline.  In what should have been a busy time of day there were few readers.  They and the staff seemed to be moving underwater.

The signs were mostly in English, many of them carelessly taped up and forgotten with their corners curling away from the wall.  Rolled-up posters rested atop shelves; stuff was lying around at random.  Some decorations in a glass case still displayed their Big Lots price tags.

I lingered near a reference desk, just an anonymous patron, eavesdropping on my prospective colleagues who chatted away as if there were nobody around.  The librarians were in the middle of a sleepy conversation devoted to badmouthing an absent co-worker.

I made my way over to the Spanish-language collection—a small part of the library, mind you, in this city where most people use Spanish.  It’s a vintage collection that any library U.S. could be proud of, provided that library is in a backwoods town somewhere near the Canadian border.

Of the eight free newspapers I’d picked up downtown not one was available at the library.  Neither that day nor the other two times I visited.  But, hell—they weren’t giving away the OC Weekly, either.

In the days that followed I walked and rode buses to visit the two neighborhood branch libraries.  Even though their book collections left a lot to be desired, at least those branches didn’t have the same end-of-the-world dreariness that prevailed downtown. 

Still, if I wanted timely, relevant reading matter in Spanish, none of the libraries could rival the typical Santa Ana tortillería.  Library as community information hub?  Not in this town.

Dig this: Thirty years ago Roberto Haro worked as a librarian in Sacramento and East L.A.  He spent five years doing what few of his modern-day colleagues would ever bother to do—he went out, sometimes in disguise, and asked people in the neighborhood what they thought about the library.  Now he’s Dr. Haro, professor of Ethnic Studies at SFSU, but back then he was a bibliotecario dedicated to fingering the reasons why so few Latinos regarded the public library as their own.

This street-level ethnographic research is great stuff that’s never been equaled in Libraryland, where Haro’s work has long since been forgotten. Fueled by Movimiento optimism and his fierce passion, Haro imagined the day when raza would rise up to protest racist, classist library service.  He was dreaming; experience shows that nobody gets organized to complain seriously about libraries unless they have plenty of time on their hands.

Fast-forward to 1998, when the American Library Association ran a census of librarian ethnicity and gender. Guess what they found?  The figures are even more extreme than you might imagine: in public, college, and school libraries alike, the percentage of Latina/o librarians is on the order of two to three percent.  Even in places like Santa Ana.

C’mon, don’t laugh; this isn’t funny. 

If you’re looking for signage in Spanish, or public service staff who really knows the language, where would you go first—the public library or the K-Mart across the street?   Why the hell is that?

Some libraries do better than others, and mind you, the situation in OC as a whole is not as awful as it is in many other places.  The county is even home to one of the most committed and accomplished activists, Latina or otherwise, in U.S. library history: Elizabeth Martínez, former director of the American Library Association as well as the OC and Los Angeles public library systems.  But most of my friends and colleagues, when I asked them about Santa Ana Public Library, alluded vaguely to its “problems.”  That often means money, certainly.  In this case though things might go rather deeper. 

In 1990 the LA Times reported on a “mutiny” at the library.  Employees called the director, who’s still in charge, a “Hitler,” and one vowed that if he had a gun he’d blow the guy’s head off.  The staff printed up caustic buttons and wore them at work until the director issued a memo telling them to knock it off.

His side of it?  The staff was afraid of change.  It’s not implausible.  A classic librarian joke goes something like this:

Q: How many librarians does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Uhhh…change?

The way Santa Ana Public Library does a disservice to its community is nothing unusual.  The rationale, too, is familiar and has a lot to do with who librarians are, and aren’t.  “I don’t speak English,” Pablo Picasso is supposed to have said, “but that does not mean that English doesn’t exist.”  A wildly unbalanced collection that slights the languages people are speaking outside reflects a library’s desire to make those people stop existing—at least, they won’t be darkening the library’s door.

Library dinosaurs still haven’t picked up the clue: any business that ignores and insults its biggest customer base might as well soap the windows. Though libraries don’t have to satisfy stockholders, the unspoken truth is that without real community support they invariably languish in another kind of bankruptcy.

My interview?  It began well, with a language test.  The first question was about library philosophy, and without thinking about it I uncorked a rollo that would’ve had Fidel Castro gasping for breath.  On an on I went, about libraries’ important role in helping newcomers adjust to the surroundings, their responsibility to furnish comprehensible information about health and law and opportunities, about the library as the richest egalitarian source of entertainment and facts and diversion that we have going, the one place where we’re all welcome regardless of what’s in our pockets that day.  That means (I continued, starting to get warmed up) that the library has a duty to tailor its offerings to the folks moving in and milling around outside; it’s irresponsible to keep serving the same old faces the same old way…

The interlocutor wrote a high score on her sheet and looked me in the eye: don’t be nervous about the rest of the interview, she said: “They need librarians like you.”

Thus buoyed, I walked in to face the Human Resources guy and the mid-level librarian who were my real interview panel.  Way too confident, and still in a philosophical mood, I treated the interview like a collegial conversation.  I subtly criticized some of what I’d observed at the libraries and speculated about other ways of doing things.  Not the smartest approach; the order of the day was meek, non-boat-rocking subservience.  Gradually I woke up that I had genially talked myself straight out of a job.

The city’s HR professionals haven’t gotten back to me just yet, but it has been two months since my interview so I figured I’d better find something else to do. The next chapter in the SAPL saga, however it reads, won’t include me, but in any case it’s not going to be librarians who solve the system’s problems.  No, that comes down to the library’s owners: the people who pay—whether they know they pay or not—for those books and magazine subscriptions and those displays from Big Lots.  That is to say YOU.

Librarians seldom meet anyone but satisfied customers.  The people the library ignores, you see, don’t come in.  It doesn’t much matter if those people represent a majority of the citizenry.  None of this is gonna change until somebody calls the libraries on their shit because the librarians are not about to call their own shit on themselves.  The librarians will just keep doing what’s comfortable and what earns them pats on the butt until it’s time to collect on that sweet pension.

Try it.  Just you and a few friends.  Call your library on their shit, and in two languages.  The result might be a pleasant surprise.  A lot of librarians (and this is gonna shock you) aren’t all that tough.

A little organized griping from just a few library owners packs a bigger wallop than you’d expect.  If some santanenses were to get together and make enough noise, they might be surprised–after some initial kicking and screaming—what they can squeeze out of their library.  If not, well…there’s always Reuben Martinez’s bookstore…or the newspaper rack outside El Metate.

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Bruce Jensen is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Críticas magazine.  His carefully crafted boberías have recently appeared in books like The Changing Culture of Libraries, Alternative Library Literature 2000-2001, The Power of Language/El Poder de la Palabra, and the upcoming Revolting Librarians Redux.