Ending Book Deserts
By Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante
We know what book deserts look like. We drive through them all the time, on the way to the mall.
Pick any major city with a large Mexican American population, and you will see that book deserts engulf our communities.
Some folks pretend to care or feign a desire to learn how to eliminate book deserts. No, those folks have already blamed our own community for creating the book desert forged by the neglect and avarice of corporate publishing, corporate bookstores, corporate media, and corporate english.
What is corporate english? This is the current evolution of the king’s english that forms the rules created by the rulers to maintain their rule.
Librotraficantes are expert at hacking it. Our first job as kids is translating the outside world into Spanish for our parents. We eliminated the king’s lisp from the king’s spanish. We created Spanglish. Whereas corporate english captures the imagination by day. By night, Librotraficantes liberate words.
corporate english forces our minds to be distracted in an essay by the main topic. Let’s call that the king’s topic, which in this case would be: why have the Latinx allowed the barrio to become engulfed in a book desert?
No. we won’t be sentenced to that racket.
The real question is how our community can profoundly understand our power, cultivate that power, and then unite to accelerate our community cultural capital.
corporate english does not mandate a book dessert. But, let’s get something clear. the erasure of our art, history, and culture, is written in policy, legislation, and coded into practice.
I only have to remind you that just a few years ago, Arizona right-wing officials banned Mexican American Studies. The Librotraficantes organized the 2012 Librotraficante Caravan to smuggle back into Tucson the books from the outlawed MAS Curriculum. Our community united to overturn that racist law. However, to any just-minded, reasonable person, I do not have to explain how blatantly discriminatory laws play a role in erasing our Culture which leads to book deserts.
This is obvious.
A more subtle approach is based on the dots of corporate graphs forecasting their profits, dodging our neighborhoods until it is time to gentrify our abuelo’s house. Those dots on corporate margins code book deserts, forge the self-fulfilling prophecy that our gente do not buy books, do not want books. Those dots add up to the language that describes smart, sound, safe investment in any other community but ours.
We cannot employ the corporate language or practices that lead to the user agreements that create book deserts in our community.
And on October 1, 2021, the Librotraficantes, Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say celebrate with The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, under the leadership of its Director, Cristina Balli, launching their Latino Bookstore and Gift Shop, becoming the only-THE ONLY-book store on the West Side of San Antonio.
This bookstore will not follow corporate tactics of intellectual gentrification.
The Guadalupe’s Latino Bookstore is built on and creates more Community Cultural Capital. The books on our shelves are not just products. They are not just blocks of wood. Each curated book represents the deep history of the center, art created in the center, San Antonio, Tejas, and our gente’s contributions.
Here are just a few ways that we defy the king’s corporate english that sentences us to book deserts.
We are investing, literally, figuratively, and artistically in our community.
We will focus on Texas Latino writers, Mexican American Studies, Chicanx Scholars, and icons. You won’t find these terms on corporate pamphlets or even in the search history of the computers of corporate executives.
Our bookstore has a Padrino and a Madrina: Chicano Studies scholar Dr. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto is our Literary Pardino; we will have signed copies of the book he co-edited: "Recovering The U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Volume VII" published by Arte Público Press based in Houston; and Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla is our Madrina. We will feature her new children's book “The Last Butterfly,” published by FlowerSong Press based in the Rio Grande Valley. Corporations don’t have padrinos or familia.
Here is a dose of Community Cultural Capital in action: Our launch will feature our padrinos and also the national launch of Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodriguez’s new book: “Writing 50 Years más o menos Amongst the Gringos,” published by Aztlan Libre Press.
Dr. Cintli is from Tucson. His books were among the over 80+ titles that were part of the Mexican American Studies Curriculum outlawed by Arizona officials. His new book is published by Juan Tejeda and Anisa Onofre at Aztlan Libre Press, based in San Antonio since 2009. And I will serve as Literary Curator of the Guadalupe’s Latino Bookstore. Tucson, San Antonio, and Houston are uniting to erase a book desert and to ensure that our gente are never kept from our art, history, and cultura.
I am proud to serve as the Literary Curator for the Guadalupe’s Latino Bookstore. I am touched that they are trying to make an honest man out of this Librotraficante. Perhaps, we will no longer have to smuggle our history, art, and culture into the hands of our community. I hope not. But you can bet, the moment we have to, we are ready, and we are damn good at it.
Links/Resources:
Ending a Book Desert Announcing a New Latino Bookstore (VIDEO)
Opening Oct. 1, the bookstore will offer book selections that are curated by writer, activist, and professor Tony Diaz and focus on Texas Latino writers, Mexican American studies, and Chicano scholars and community.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Writer, activist, and professor Tony Diaz, El Librotraficante, was the first Chicano to earn a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He earned his bachelor's degree in Communications from De Paul University in Chicago. Diaz is currently a professor of Mexican American Literature and Rhetorical Analysis in Houston, Texas.