I think we really need to differentiate between the fact that we have all kinds of Latino families if we’re going focus just for a minute on Latino families. I’m equally interested in Vietnamese families and Hmong families and how we make all kinds of families feel welcome.
But to focus for a minute on Latino families, there’s a wide range of diversity within that group not only diversity in terms of home country so, it could be Cuba, it could be Puerto Rico, it could be Venezuela but not all Latino families are immigrant families. So, there are families that have been here for five generations.
And when we think about outreach programs, we need to sort of really study just the way we do in anything what is the population that I’m working with like? If we’re talking about immigrant populations, there may be the notion that, “Maybe I have to pay if I go to the library.” So, I don’t go. Maybe I don’t speak English, and I’m afraid that the librarian is going ask me a question. And I’m going to look incompetent in front of my children.
I asked a teacher who worked with a group of students in Nevada one day, when the librarian said, “Well, I’m just really discouraged. I have a bilingual story hour, and nobody’s coming.” And so I said to this young teacher, “Why aren’t they coming?”
And she said what I hoped she would say, “They’re afraid.” They’re afraid. You know, we don’t like to put ourselves in situations where we feel we might be humiliated. And so there’s very good will on the inside of that library, or that school. How do we extend that?
And it’s the same issue, frankly, that museums are working with now. How do we reach out to populations that, perhaps, previous generations were ambivalent about? And what excites me now is the number of teachers and librarians that are excited, that really want to serve the whole population.
So, how do we do that? Well, we set a tone. Sometimes it means we have to leave the library. So, I have a lot of librarian friends who do all kinds of outreach at community centers. They go to churches. They go to social service agencies. They go to medical clinics and start talking about books, and start saying, “Come over to the library. I’m going to be there when you get there.”
Programs that make parents feel welcome. I remember a program in Redwood City, California, where I was to talk to an existing group. It was an outreach group. I think that these were primarily families from Guatemala. And the library had done a lot of outreach, and they had picked an evening time that was convenient for families.
And so what we did was I talked to the whole group in Spanish, and then the parents had time to wander around the library. And the students did a craft, and we all came together again. And it was a book about the desert. It was a book called Listen to the Desert/Oye al desierto. And we all read the book together, and the students used the little puppets you know, lizards and frogs that they had made during the craft period. So, it was a positive experience for everybody.
And then they had a grant, which allowed them to give students a book. And I remember the mom who came up to me and said in Spanish, “I want to congratulate you for writing this, because I can read this book to my child, because it has the Spanish. And he can read it to me in English.”
