Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez: Latine Heritage Month in the Library

In retrospect, after reading all the contributions to this series, I wish I’d arranged a conversation with David, Cindy, Lucia, and Sonia. I can imagine hearing memories filled with both joy about how libraries helped each of them, in very different ways, overcome barriers to their success, perhaps even survival. I would leave energized to work that much harder for the people who visit my library. Just reading these, though gives me real reason to be proud of my profession and to understand just a tiny bit more of Latine culture. Libraries aren’t just about books. Rather, they’re places where information is freely accessed, transformed, and shared.

At the Library

Yuyi Morales’ Dreamers (2018) is a beautiful visual representation of the impact the library can have on (im)migrants. In Dreamers, a mother and child discover magic in books at a time when the outside world is new, scary, and unwelcoming–to say the least. I admire Morales’ book as an educator and as a scholar of Latine children’s literature. Personally, I love this picture book because the mother and child represented in the pages could have easily been my mother and me. As a young Mexican immigrant, Mami used the library for its resources. The availability of “Ingles Sin Barreras,” citizenship information, printers, fax machines, and later, computers, was invaluable. In the 90s and 2000s, the Cicero Public Library in Illinois had a bulletin board with makeshift flyers of information from apartments for rent to furniture for sale to wellness support groups. It wasn’t uncommon to spot a flyer for how to contact “Maria, the Avon lady” next to a poster advertising a temp services office. While Mami desperately utilized the library to try to improve our lives, my sister and I would explore the children’s book section of the library. 

Today’s Cicero Public Library is not the same library of my childhood. The library now is a beautifully renovated space that feels twice as large as what it was when I was a child in the late 90s and early 2000s. The new library has a lot of natural sunlight. I remember a lot of brown in the library I grew up in: brown lacquered furniture, brown chairs, brown couches, and maybe brown carpets. Nevertheless, I loved that place. It was in the children’s book section where I began to imagine myself as more than what my family and society thought I was or could be. While Mami worried about finding an answer to one of our many problems, my sister and I would rush to the children’s section for the free coloring and activities pages. The pages were available in a large plastic display organizer bolted to the wall. We’d take one at a time, examine, and discuss: 

“I like this one. And we don’t have this one yet.”

“We got this one last week. But we should still take it.”

We’d grab a bunch of copies anyway–for later. My favorite, though, were the read-along books on tape. The audiobooks were packaged in what to me looked like a clear briefcase with a plastic handle. The briefcase included a physical copy of the children’s book and a white cassette tape meant to be played while following along with the book. I felt important when I walked out of the library with my little briefcase holding my books and paper copies. On TV at the time, important people plopped their brown briefcases on their kitchen tables and stuffed their manila folders and their brown paper bag lunches into their briefcases. Important people on TV with brown briefcases kissed their wives and children goodbye and everyone was happy and safe. As a child, I wanted nothing more than for that to be true for my family, because it was anything but. I grew up undocumented and witnessed domestic violence. Leaving the library, I held on tightly to the red plastic handles because if I felt important, maybe I could look important, and then maybe I could be treated as if I mattered. 

I talked with my sister about how often we were at the library as children. Gabo said, “I feel like we were at the library a lot because it was free.” I’ve frozen the Cicero Public Library in my mind as a place that saved me and helped my family. And, yes, we were there a lot because it was free. My family was poor. My parents didn’t have money for childhood extracurriculars. They had money to feed us, clothe us, and put a roof over our head–and sometimes not all at the same time. Public libraries are vital to the success of low-income and working class families. At the library, I got to play with toys my parents couldn’t afford. We didn’t have money to go to the movies but we could borrow VHS tapes from the library. I knew I could write some book reports and I’d get a coupon for a personal pizza from Pizza Hut—and I got a lot of pizzas! As a teenager, my parents couldn’t help me with homework but I could go to the library to do research and ask the librarians. I became the student and academic I am today because of the Cicero Public Library.

I live in Queens, NY and I have a happy life where I feel safe. The library plays a different role in my life now. I have a teaching career that affords me the privilege to buy books and have a personal collection at home and in my office. The Queens Public Library, however, is still where I try to get most of my physical and audio books. But most importantly, a trip to my local library branch has become part of how I take care of myself physically and mentally. I was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis a few years ago and my doctors have encouraged regular movement like going on daily walks. When my body hurts and I don’t want to move but know I should, I convince myself to go outside because I have a library book available for pick up. My local branch of the Queens Library is maroon, lots of maroon. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the library was where I went for facemasks and extra covid tests. I find flyers for local events and activities at my library. 

Nowadays, I’ve traded my childhood clear briefcase for a lime green tote bag inscribed with large bold letters that read “Pinche Mexico Te Amo.” The feeling of importance remains. While I’m not vulnerable in the same ways I was as a child, the world remains a scary and oftentimes unwelcoming place. Books and the public library still feel like a softer place to land. While my love for libraries runs deep, libraries do not exist in a vacuum. Libraries are political spaces. Librarians and patrons have political views. As an undocumented Mexican immigrant child, I was still eligible for a library card. My first library card included a photo of me and sometimes served as my only form of identification. While everyone should have a library card, there are many different reasons why one may not be able to get one in the United States today. 

As an educator, academic, and creative writer, libraries are an important place that helps me do what I do. I research and write in library spaces across New York City because libraries remain a free and quiet place to concentrate. I encourage my students to feel like they have a stake in these public spaces that serve as keepers of knowledge. As a creative writer, the libraries in my stories are places where my protagonists can feel safe, fall in love, and find themselves. 

There’s a spread in Dreamers where Morales illustrates the mother with the child on her lap and an open book on the child’s lap. The family is surrounded by what their imaginations have seen in the books: a shark, a monarch butterfly, a rocket ship, the moon, a baseball. More opened books float around them as well. What I find beautiful and empowering about the scene is that the agency lies with the mother and the child. The library and the books help and are the catalyst for the possibilities but the power is within the reader. The library didn’t give my mother, my sister, and me our strength. But the library was a place where we could learn to unlock our power ourselves.  

Bio: Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez (they/she) is a writer and educator living in Queens, New York. They are an English Professor at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), the co-editor Ethnic Studies and Youth Literature (forthcoming Spring 2025 from SUNY Press), and co-editor of the open-access academic journal Research on Diversity in Youth Literature. Sonia Alejandra participated in writing workshops at Tin House, VONA, and Kweli. Their stories have been published in Latino Book Review Magazine, Kweli Journal, Variant Lit, Strange Horizons, The Acentos Review, Longreads, Okay Donkey, Reckon Review, and elsewhere. Follow them on Instagram at @soniaalejandrawrites and at @latinxkidlit. 

References

Morales, Yuyi. Dreamers. Neal Porter books, 2018. 

Filed under: Libraries & Schools