Libraries for Latinos? Not in Santa Ana by Bruce Jensen

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.

______________

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.