Here’s a new rule of thumb for Californians: If Donald Trump and the Chinese government both want to boycott a Golden State place, you should get yourself there as fast as you can.

Which means that now is the time to visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, which in April, became a target of autocrats from Mar-a-Lago to the Middle Kingdom.

President Trump recently suggested on his Truth Social account that he would boycott presidential debates at the Reagan Library, in part because the chair of the institution’s board is Washington Post publisher Frederick Ryan Jr., a former Reagan aide.

Meanwhile, China’s leaders announced sanctions against the library after it hosted a meeting between U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Bakersfield Republican, and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, whose government China refuses to recognize. The sanctions mean that China will not cooperate with or recognize the library in any way.

Such blasts at the library made headlines—but even if Trump, Xi Jinping, and their acolytes stay away, the library would suffer no damage. It already is the most popular of the presidential libraries overseen by the National Archives, and rightfully so.

If anything, the attacks expose an irony, and highlight a remarkable success. In an era when politics has come to define and consume almost everything, the Reagan Library has managed a nearly impossible trick: maintaining its devotion to a major conservative political figure while simultaneously developing a reputation as a highly accessible and attractive center that serves people of all kinds of politics.

My own affection for the place is an example of this success. I grew up in Southern California during the Reagan era despising most of his policies; I couldn’t imagine voting for him today. And I’d put an end to the American presidency, with all its quasi-dictatorial power, if I could.

But I can’t get enough of Reagan’s library, because it offers so much to California.

The place is irresistible, first and foremost, because of its beauty. It seems to glimmer on a mountaintop in Ventura County—the embodiment of Reagan’s metaphor of America as “the shining city on the hill.” The views alone are worth a visit to Simi Valley: a panorama of mountains to the east, the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles to the south, the Central Coast to the north, the ocean to the west. There may be no better place to watch a sunset.

Like other presidential libraries, this one has permanent exhibits, artifacts, and films from its favored president’s life, though the Reagan Library is distinguished for its Hollywood flair (which includes the airplane he used as Air Force One). And the library has made itself an essential stop for Republican politicians, whether they are engaging in presidential debates (the library has hosted four), or giving speeches or book talks.

In heavily Democratic California, the library is the rare place where everyday people can meet and ask questions of GOP politicians who shape our policy—Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin just spoke, and upcoming events feature Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, and West Virginia U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a crucial behind-the-scenes dealmaker on bipartisan Congressional legislation.

But the Reagan Library has also smartly made itself a gathering place for people who aren’t Republican, or don’t care about politics.

Some of its attractions are serious. The library hosts what has become the country’s leading gathering of people who think about national security, the Reagan National Defense Forum, with speakers from across the political spectrum and from all sorts of industries. (The sitting Secretary of Defense delivers the keynote every year, regardless of their political party.)

The Reagan Library also hosts major special exhibits each year that aren’t about American politics at all. The current exhibit is immensely powerful. “Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away” offers a visceral sense of what it was like to be in a concentration camp and has been drawing large crowds. The library has accompanied the exhibit with extensive and creative programming, often connecting Holocaust survivors with young adults and school children.

Previous, less heavy exhibits, always rich in artifacts, have focused on the histories of the FBI, Egypt’s lost cities, the Vatican, Titanic, Abraham Lincoln, Pompeii, and baseball.

The Reagan Library also rents out its spaces for meetings for nonprofits and corporations—from local chambers of commerce to Amgen—and I’ve attended large meetings with Ventura County figures there over the years. The library, with its spectacular setting, also has become a favorite local site for high school proms.

While ideologues urge boycotts, the Reagan Library has become the sort of place where you can take your kids and your mom, with little resistance. The annual Christmas tree exhibit is beautiful and festive. There have been sunset dances with Beatles and Fleetwood Mac tribute bands, Eagle Scout recognition dinners, Mother’s Day brunches, and tastings devoted to Central Coast wines.

I’ve visited 14 of the 15 presidential libraries, mostly in my travels as a political reporter and history researcher (perhaps I’ll get to Abilene, Kansas, to see the Eisenhower Library, someday). None of them offers as much as the Reagan Library.

When I visit, it’s often to do archival research (the staff moves quickly and the rooms are comfortable) or meet someone in Ventura County (everyone knows where it is). I like to walk the 300-acre grounds, and visit the memorial where Ronald and Nancy Reagan are buried. There, an inscription from President Reagan reads: “I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph and there is purpose and worth to each and every life.”

Of course, you and I are too cynical about this nasty world to believe all of that. But we can appreciate the sentiment, and the welcoming library that expresses it.

The post Why Everyone (Except Donald Trump and Xi Jinping) Loves the Reagan Library appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That summer, I planted my mother’s salvias, coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, coreopsis, yarrows, sedums, verbenas, and asters where they were never meant to be—in the shade. Over that first year as I treaded, unskilled but earnestly, into gardening, those vibrant creatures (probably endowed with just enough of my mother’s spirit to forgive me) taught me their ancient knowledge. Two decades later, her plants are still with me, transplanted into sunny niches around my garden, which is nestled into the edges of an ancient forest along Maryland’s Sligo Creek, a tributary of the Anacostia River near Washington, D.C.

A plant knows its survival depends on the soil’s structure and nutrients, the right amount of sunlight, and the climate, topography, and ecosystem, as well as the availability of creatures evolved to the precise morphology needed to pollinate its reproductive organs. Plants are masterworks of precision and industry. Then there’s me, the witless gardener.

I remain fascinated by the individual plant and my arrogant desire to make it fit somehow. So my garden is a kind of created chaos. Luck is my winning charm. A clematis finally takes root where I’ve settled it after many have perished before. My peonies grow up too close together; some of my lilies never flower, my asters topple over midway through the summer, my plumbago replicates and scrambles over the tops of my annual herbs. But the creation is all mine.

Over the years I will admit to gaining some expertise. After my roses bloom in spring, a tiny mite renders their leaves into a lacework that I hide behind a well-placed dahlia bulb that grows up just in time to mask the destroyed rose bush. A fern planted amidst my hosta sometimes keeps the deer from gorging on those big leafy beauties. I’ve artfully learned to grow foods like eggplant and peppers as display plants in my front yard, and a well-placed hot pepper plant (like the nasty Carolina Reaper with a 2.2 million Scoville rating) will sometimes discourage my nemesis, the deer. I indulge the catbirds, who steal my blueberries but delight me with their polysyllabic songs, and I am secretly enchanted by the rabbits who nip at my bean plants and the squirrels whose circus antics amuse me even though they have just dug up and run off with my bulbs. And yes, when I’m down on my knees and my gloved hands are working the soil, sometimes, I can still conjure up my mother’s patient voice guiding me.

If my garden was born out of grief, the seeds of my garden library grew up around the long fascination my mother and I shared for books—especially vintage volumes with their elegant tooled bindings. About a dozen years after her death, I was visiting Thuya, a public garden in Sea Harbor, Maine. Thuya was endowed with exceptional vistas of vine-covered pergolas and burbling fountains and ponds surrounded by water lilies, all of it gathered behind heavy ropes to separate the visitor from any possible hope of imagined ownership. But after I roamed the grounds, pen and pad in hand to take notes, I went inside this dark cavity of a cottage-style house.

Upstairs was a large nook overlooking the garden and filled to capacity on built-in shelves was a collection of musty, but absolutely charming, garden books. I wanted to curl up in a corner and begin years of reading. I wanted a list of the titles. I wanted to own them. Each one.

The author of the first book I collected was, like me, a magazine editor. Unlike me, she was rich and famous and celebrated. Katharine S. White began her 34 years at the New Yorker in 1925. She was married to literary fame (E.B. White) and mother of journalistic excellence (Roger Angell). And she kept a garden, which she wrote about for 12 years in a column called “Onward and Upwards in the Garden.” Her narratives were chock-full of anecdotes from the correspondence she kept with other gardeners and seed sellers and nursery owners and the catalogues she perused every winter. Her book of the same title was published posthumously by her husband, with a loving tribute that recalled how she would come home from the city and, without changing her tweed suit and elegant Ferragamos, would go tripping into the garden and come back with her high-end heels muddied and scratched. (In emulation, I once found a pair of these designer beauties in a secondhand store and tried to be carelessly chic from office to garden, but only ended up irritating my bunions.) Like my mother, she was survived by her plants, as E.B. White noted:

As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her … small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

I used White’s compendium of publications and gardeners to begin my library. After acquiring some of the books she read and researching the people she consulted, I wrote about them, fine-tuning my own writing for several years when blogging was all the rage. The entries I logged under “Garden Putter” were the tailings of all the mindful muttering that fills a gardener’s head while puttering about in the soil.

The classic How to Know the Wild Flowers by Mrs. William Starr Dana is absolutely my favorite, and I own two copies. I dare not open the original because it is so fragile and stuffed with dried examples of the flowers that the book’s first owner collected. But to read and to use, I bought the 1989 reprint, gorgeously reproduced with Marion Satterlee’s original botanical illustrations and enhanced with new color plates by Manabu C. Saito. I carry it into the forest with me to study the wildflowers, just as Mrs. Starr Dana ventured out into the woodlands surrounding her home after she was widowed young and forced to wear black and limit her activities. Her nature hikes with Satterlee became her only pleasure. And her book is deeply researched with not only the tools for making an identification, but also quotes from the poets of her day and snippets from Plato and other ancient naturalists.

Courtesy of Beth Py-Lieberman.

Mrs. Starr Dana endows the Canada violet with the “sprightly self-assertion which is peculiarly charming, perhaps because so unexpected.” And I can just imagine her down on her knees in the soil, despite her confining garments, watching with horror the menacing trap of a carnivorous plant. “The round-leaved sundew is found blossoming in many of our marshes in midsummer. When the sun shines upon its leaves they look as though covered with sparkling dewdrops, hence its common name. These drops are a glutinous exudation, by means of which insects visiting the plant are captured; the reddish bristles then close tightly about them, and it is supposed that their juices are absorbed by the plant … the rash visitor rarely escapes.”

Over the years, my library has continued to grow, and no matter the season, I wake up before the sun, so I can pull open a friend. Here is the delightful and tireless Celia Thaxter, who wrote about the exhaustive efforts it took to build a garden on an outcropping of rock and sand off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. To read her 1894 account, An Island Garden, is to acknowledge the delight of sowing a seed that every gardener knows so well:

I think of all it holds for me of beauty and delight, and I am filled with joy at the thought that I may be the magician to whom power is given to summon so sweet a pageant from the silent and passive soil.

Or taking the moment to admire the industry of migrating birds:

“They come suddenly down from the sky in myriads, on their way to the continent, and I have known them to strip the little plot of every green shoot in a single day, utterly bare … but I do not lose patience with the birds, however sorely they try me. I love them too well. How should they know that the garden was not planted for them?”

Currently, I’m reading one of my favorite botanical heroes, Robin Wall Kimmerer. Gathering Moss, her venture under the microscope into the miniature forests that grow up on fallen logs and the trunks of trees, is a Lilliputian journey for any budding naturalist. I’ve just bought another of Mrs. Starr Dana’s field guides, How to Know the Ferns, and a photographic work by Vaughn Sills, Places for the Spirit: Traditional African American Gardens.

Since I started collecting garden books 20 years ago, I’ve kept my obsession mostly out of sight, stashing them in spaces where visitors wouldn’t notice them piling up. To this day, even my husband may not be aware of the number of books I’ve brought into our home. Occasionally, I will give one or two away to gardeners in the community garden I run, but when I do, I will buy other copies to replace them. That’s because curled up with my holdings, they make anything possible. They endow my intellectual quest for knowing, or trying to know, about plants, design, botany, and ecology, including the people, who, like my mom, loved to garden, and what it means, from the highest echelons of society to the practical kitchen cottage to the patch finders who scratch out a spot of soil.

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The complexity of the struggle to desegregate public libraries can be seen in the way it played out very differently in two Southern cities: Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama. In Jackson, nonviolent protest unleashed brutal white violence against blacks, and was resolved only by means of federal intervention and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s filing of a class action lawsuit. In Birmingham, despite initial pushback from whites, public libraries were desegregated surprisingly quietly and relatively peacefully, though the city would soon be reeling from a series of bloody confrontations elsewhere.

In Mississippi, the participants in the struggle included a band of courageous black college students called the “Tougaloo Nine.” Named after the historically black Tougaloo College, a private, liberal arts institution that had been founded by Northern Christian missionaries to educate free slaves and their descendants, the Nine were highly disciplined and organized, and used the tactics of nonviolent resistance to draw attention to the institutionalized racial discrimination and inequality around them.

Shortly after opening the Jackson, Mississippi Public Library on March 27, 1961, the white director was asked by two newspaper reporters if she was aware that a group of black students was coming to the library that day. She was not, she said, but after the reporters left she immediately phoned the police. “Contact us when the students arrive,” they responded. Unbeknownst to the director, while she was talking to police, the nine Tougaloo College students—four women and five men, and all members of the NAACP—were preparing for Mississippi’s first sit-in demonstration. NAACP mentors told all to dress well, sit quietly in the library, and avoid violence.

The four women wore dresses, the men dress shirts and ties; some added sport coats. First they visited Jackson’s George Washington Carver branch, which served blacks, and requested books that they knew were not there. At about 11:00 a.m., they walked to the main library.

“I went into the library and I stood up by the card catalog and was thumbing through it,” Ethel Sawyer later recalled. “After I didn’t see the…title of the book I wanted, I went over and sat at one of the tables…until the time I was interrupted.” Albert Lassiter stood in front of the card catalog with a clear view of the front door. “I had seen what a billy club could do to a guy’s head, so I positioned myself so I could see the blows coming. I didn’t want to get a blind shot.”

Ten minutes passed. During that time, the librarian called police, then approached the students, asking if she could help them. We’re doing research, they responded. She suggested that they visit one of the two black branches. Immediately thereafter, a group of policemen came in and told the students to get out of the library. But “nobody moved,” Sawyer said. About a minute later, the police chief told them they were under arrest. Six officers placed all the students into squad cars, and at the station charged them with breach of the peace.

In jail that evening, Tougaloo students worried. “Reflecting back on Emmett Till, the history of lynching connected with Mississippi,” Joseph Jackson told an OC Weekly reporter in 2015, “the later it got that night, I was in fear of my life.” He began rehearsing what he would say if the Ku Klux Klan came for them. “Please, Mr. Klansman, don’t hang me. I have a wife and two little children in Memphis, and if you release me this night, I promise you I will never, ever come back here to Jackson, and violate your Jim Crow laws.” “Well, that sounds very good,” one cellmate responded, “but you know what the Klansman would say? ‘N—–, you should have thought of that before you entered our segregated public library!’”

Several days later, the students were taken to the courthouse to be tried, and, again, reporters were ready. So were a hundred supporters who cheered the “Tougaloo Nine.” When the crowd began to applaud the students as they arrived for their trial, the police chief yelled, “That’s it! Get ‘em!” Police then set upon the crowd with nightsticks and dogs, as once again reporters captured the event with cameras snapping. In the melee, NAACP representative Medgar Evers and several women and children were beaten, two men were bitten by the dogs, and an 81-year-old man suffered a broken arm when police beat him with a club.

To describe the melee, white segregationists defaulted to their canned response. In his daily column, a Jackson newspaper staff writer complained, “A quiet community has been invaded by rabble-rousers stirring up hate between the races, and following are the…publicity media feeding an integrated North the choicest morsels from the Mississippi carcass.…The Negro who has so long held the guiding and helping hand of the white,” he warned, “may lose that hand as he climbs the back of his benefactor and teacher to shout into halls where he is not welcome.”

Amid the din, the Tougaloo Nine went to trial. They were quickly found guilty of breach of the peace. Each student was fined $100, and their 30-day sentences were suspended on condition that they “participate in no further demonstrations.” None of the students testified, but a police captain said they had been arrested because their presence at the library could have caused “trouble.” Medgar Evers later argued that the brutality exercised on those black supporters set into motion the broader desegregation activities in Mississippi. On January 12, 1962, the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit and five months later a federal judge ordered the Jackson Public Library to desegregate.

In Alabama, the desegregation of Birmingham’s Public Library progressed quite differently.

In early April 1963, Southern Christian Leadership Council Executive Director Wyatt Walker recruited fair-skinned Addine “Deenie” Drew to pass as white and case the downtown library to prepare for a public library sit-in. Attired like a middle-class white, in blue and white silk dress and hat, she entered the library unhindered, walked through reading rooms and stacks, and after noting all entrances and exits, left the building to call Walker from a pay phone across the street. The experience was so traumatic, she later recalled, she had to “look down at my feet and tell them to keep walking.” On April 9 she and other black students entered the library, and sat reading at desks, undisturbed. Whites stared, but said nothing. When librarians took no action, students left quietly.

Disappointed that they had provoked no incident, Walker planned a second sit-in the next day. He told 12 students to approach the library that afternoon, and asked Shelley Millender, a student at Miles College, another historically black school, to speak for the group once they got inside. As they approached the library two white men came up to Millender. “I was really afraid that day,” he later recalled. If violence occurred, he hoped the media would be there to photograph the incidents. He was unaware the two men were newspaper reporters whom Walker had tipped off. They followed him into the library, and as the other students gathered, Millender spoke to librarians at the circulation desk.

Birmingham had a library for Negroes, the librarian said; Millender should go there. Millender and the librarian then had “quite a little skirmish in terms of rhetoric,” he later recalled, and when finished, Millender sat at a desk with several other students. Police came, but after several phone calls and much muffled conversation refused to arrest them. Forty-five minutes later students left “voluntarily and without incident or disturbance,” the library director later told his board, although when they walked through a crowd of young whites, some uttered remarks like “it stinks in here,” and “why don’t you go home?” “We were there to get arrested,” Millender said; when that did not happen, they saw no purpose in staying.

At a quickly assembled board meeting the next day, the library director wanted approval of his actions the previous day and guidance for what he perceived would be inevitable future sit-ins. The board discussed alternatives, and although it rejected any use of the library for sit-in demonstrations, it approved the director’s actions and unanimously passed a resolution that “no persons be excluded from the use of the public library facilities” because of race. The very next day, Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, arrested Martin Luther King Jr. and 132 other protesters, and in subsequent weeks, millions of television viewers across the county watched Connor’s minions using fire hoses and police dogs on black demonstrators. Then, on September 15, the nation was shocked when four adolescent black girls attending Sunday School died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

By “quietly desegregating” in the midst of a violent summer, the Birmingham Public Library actually functioned as a lone mediating site for facilitating racial reconciliation. Perhaps board members approved the effort to counter the national image of violence Connor helped create for their city; perhaps they feared cameras capturing and news media reporting on similar violence in their library. At a July board meeting, the library director reported a distinct increase in the number of blacks using the main library facilities, and particularly the formerly white branch closest to a black neighborhood. When the director testified in court in December, he reported that the Birmingham Public Library was an integrated institution. But the media—national and local—had largely ignored the library in its coverage.

For many years the activists who desegregated these libraries remained “hidden figures” in the history of the civil rights era and the South.

It wasn’t until June 24, 2018, that the American Library Association (the world’s oldest and largest such organization) formally recognized the activists and their struggle, by passing a “Resolution to Honor African Americans Who Fought Library Segregation” at its annual conference in New Orleans. The resolution apologized for the role the Library Association played in supporting segregated libraries and discriminating against African American librarians. And it commended, “African Americans who risked their lives to integrate public libraries for their bravery and courage in challenging segregation in public libraries and in forcing public libraries to live up to the rhetoric of their ideals.”

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It may be difficult to appreciate the significance of a book drive held nearly 75 years ago. But this was no ordinary campaign. At the time, books—vehicles for new ideas—were being banned and burned in Europe by the German Army. As the Nazis swept through Europe—occupying Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark—restrictions were placed on the authors and titles that could be read in these conquered territories; books by American, British, and Jewish authors were outlawed. The most severe penalty for being caught with such contraband was death. This threatened punishment produced Germany’s desired effect: Strict compliance with the book bans was the norm.

With this threat across the Atlantic, Americans felt an urgent need to preserve books and all they symbolized. To spread this message, Hollywood celebrities, popular musicians, politicians, and military officials visited the New York Public Library in January 1942 to give speeches and performances that were broadcast nationwide over the radio. Katharine Hepburn, Chico Marx, Benny Goodman, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Wendell Willkie, and Danny Kaye were among the famous who visited the library. They stressed that the best defense against Germany’s war on books was to do the opposite: read and spread information. And so books became a sort of weapon in the war—fighting ignorance, censorship, and boredom.

In 1942, the New York Public Library stressed that the best defense against Germany’s war on books was to do the opposite: read and spread information.

 
The Victory Book Campaigns of 1942 and 1943 enlisted ordinary Americans and their favorite books. Librarians across the United States scattered giant bins in stores, movie theaters, train stations, schools, and other public spaces to collect “Victory Books” for those serving in the Army and Navy. In 1942, 10 million books were collected by the Victory Book Campaign, making it the largest book drive in the world. Another 8 million books were collected the following year.

Most of the donations were hardcover books, a reflection of the American book industry at the time. The majority of American publishers refused to enter the paperback trade, fearful that 25-cent softcovers would ruin the handsome profit margins they earned from hardcover sales. The donated hardcovers were fine for stationary Army camps in the United States and aboard Naval ships, where soldiers did not need to carry all of their belongings on long marches or into battle. When Americans shipped out to North Africa in 1942, they brought Victory Books to pass the long weeks spent sailing to their destination. Lacking any other entertainment, most tucked books into their packs and carried them into the invasion and beyond. But, long marches with aching backs and blistered feet caused many to whittle down the possessions they carried; heavy hardcovers were reluctantly tossed.

American publishers heard of the insatiable demand for books overseas and the plight of the ill-suited hardcovers. They banded together to create books specially designed for American sailors and troops. Scrapping the hardcover, using lightweight paper akin to newsprint, reducing page margins, eliminating blank pages, and shrinking the size of books to as small as 3.5 by 5.5 inches, publishers created volumes sized to fit the pockets of uniforms. These miniature paperbacks were called “Armed Services Editions,” and were sold to the military at cost; they were distributed, free of charge, to Americans serving overseas. Westerns, sports stories, histories, bestsellers, fiction, nonfiction, short stories, books of humor, and poetry—the range of subjects ran the gamut. Soldiers devoured them. Creased covers, loose pages, taped bindings, and dog-eared pages were evidence of their popularity. No matter how worn, the books were passed from one GI to the next. According to one soldier, “To heave one in the garbage is tantamount to striking your grandmother.”

Homesick and lonesome soldiers found solace in books. Surprisingly, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was the most popular of them all, despite being a coming-of-age tale from the perspective of Francie Nolan, a young girl. Troops related to Francie’s difficult upbringing, her discovery of comfort and escape in books, and her resolve to beat the odds and achieve her dream of going to college. Smith received over 10,000 letters of gratitude from Americans in uniform. In one letter, a marine described watching his friend’s final moments of life and said a part of him died with his friend. However, two years later, Smith’s book transformed him and his heart “turned over and became alive again.” Another man wrote Smith that her book inspired him during difficult battles, and that he and his wife vowed to name their first-born daughter “Betty Smith,” to honor the author who helped him survive war.

Surprisingly, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was the most popular novel among American soldiers.

 
Other books were appreciated for their ability to amuse. Leo Rosten, author of The Education of Hyman Kaplan, received a letter of praise from a unit stationed in the Persian Gulf, whose only other entertainment was “a ping-pong set—with one paddle only.” Rosten’s humorous tales became the hottest commodity on the post; the men assembled each night by campfire and “roared” with laughter as they read one Kaplan story per day—it was their “ration on pleasure.”

Publishers received letters suggesting future titles to be printed. One man explained that the books that were in the highest demand had “at least an essence of—to put it bluntly—sex and a lot of it.” He asked for Forever Amber, Strange Fruit, and Tiffany Thayer’s The Three Musketeers, as they were all endowed with that quality. One man wrote: “For days, I’ve been hunting through our service club, bothering the Red Cross, scanning our library shelves and hunting unrelentlessly through the barracks—for what????” He desperately wanted a copy of H. Allen Smith’s Low Man on a Totem Pole, a popular book of humor. Another soldier summed up the success of the publishers’ Armed Services Editions: “You have no idea how many hours of pleasure your books give to us.”

The German Army, by V-E Day, had burned an estimated 100 million books and destroyed hundreds of libraries, institutes, and rare book collections across Europe. By contrast, American librarians and publishers distributed over 140 million Victory Books and Armed Services Editions to those serving in the U.S. Army and Navy. These books made a lasting impact on the Americans who read them. Thanks to the Armed Services Editions, 12 million veterans returned home with an insatiable appetite for paperbacks. Demand was so high that publishers could not ignore this new market. A scant 200,000 paperbacks were printed in the United States in 1939; a staggering 95 million paperbacks were printed in 1947. Publishers realized they could earn a profit off paperbacks after all. In doing so, they printed books that attracted a larger audience of book readers than expensive hardcovers could.

A soldier enjoys a paperback in a flooded camp.

 
Besides revolutionizing the book industry, the provision of books to those in the armed forces also changed attitudes towards higher education. Before the war, most Americans did not dream of going to college; expensive tuition made it a financial impossibility. However, the passage of the GI Bill, which promised a free education on the government’s dime, coupled with a newfound interest in books and learning led many veterans to consider returning to school. After all, they had proven to themselves that they enjoyed the scholarly activity of reading even under the stresses of war. Over 2 million Americans pursued an education under the GI Bill.

The next time you see a tattered paperback, think of the millions of Americans in uniform who cherished them while at war. These Americans not only fought and won a military victory against the Axis powers; the reading habit they gained led to the democratization of higher education and access to books at home.

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Santa Ana has become a first stop for immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America. It is also home to many Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s. The city is now about 80 percent Latino and 10 percent Southeast Asian. Fifty percent of our community is foreign-born. The downtown area, where the library is located, is a yeasty mix of trendy restaurants and businesses serving immigrants—both turbulent and exciting.

Libraries strive to reflect and enhance their communities, and the Santa Ana Public Library has moved to support our changing community, so we’re serving both the people eating at the trendy new restaurants and those eating at traditional taquerías and carnicerías. We use demographic stats to identify overall needs based on a cultural and economic picture, and we talk to individuals in the library about what they’d like to see in programming and materials.

Efforts to adapt to the changing interests of Santa Ana residents became more difficult after the Great Recession arrived in 2008, bringing fiscal crisis to the city—and the library. The per capita expenditure for our public library was already among the lowest in the state at $11.07, and it decreased even further. We didn’t have funds to buy new books or materials. We had to reduce hours at one branch. We had to contemplate reducing the number of story times and other programs for children and youth.

We didn’t want the community to feel short-changed, so we, with support from our director Gerardo Mouet, began to apply for grants. We had so many ideas for new services and programs, but we needed more funding.

Teen historians from the Santa Ana Library with Gonzalo Mendez, Jr., who was one of the children involved in a landmark 1940s lawsuit challenging the segregation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans into separate schools in Orange County.

Not really believing our application had a chance, we applied for a grant in the 2010 Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. It came as a surprise to be awarded $636,000 over three years to develop bilingual librarians. Since 1996, we have required that all public desk staff be bilingual in either Spanish or Vietnamese, and translated all signs and communications. Now, with the grant, we can pay bilingual young people from the community to work in the library, support their undergraduate and graduate education, and teach them the skills they need to become librarians in a diverse community.

We like “raising our own” librarians. Three of our four managing librarians grew up in the community, and started as pages or volunteers in the library. “Locally grown” librarians understand the community and have the gift of making immigrant families feel comfortable and welcome. They also are guides and can help us to create collections and services that answer needs in the community. Our youth services librarian, who grew up in the city and has been with the library through high school, college, and graduate school, has developed a K-12 bilingual tutoring program, including a science institute and intensive math tutoring in the summer. She also has created an award-winning Dia de los Ninos, Dia de los Libros (Day of the Children, Day of the Books) program. The event—a celebration of families, literacy, and bilingualism—attracts between 1,500 and 2,000 attendees every year.

Encouraged, we’ve applied for a variety of federal grants that have allowed us to increase programming, particularly for young people. We now host programs to train at-risk youth in digital media skills, including digital music, graphic design, and web design. We have an active, after-school tutoring program that focuses on kids with learning problems, and a Teen Historian program that trains teens to collect oral histories from their immigrant parents or grandparents, while helping them to understand their families’ struggles to settle in a new country and adapt to a new culture.

Last year, we started Memories of Migration to build on the Teen Historian program. The idea is to develop cultural heritage collections based on the shared stories of human migration in America. Teens find members of the immigrant community with stories to tell, collect artifacts, and record their experiences. Techniques developed by the library will be tested in model programs operated by four libraries and agencies that serve immigrant communities in Connecticut, New York, and New Mexico.

Every day, Santa Ana Public Library staff serves a variety of people with equally varying needs. Teens and tweens hang out with friends in the TeenSpace, men and women come in to get help with resumes and job hunting, and people of all ages visit our Tech Desk to get one-on-one help with technology or to take bilingual computer classes. Hundreds of people use our computer labs to job hunt, complete job certifications, and communicate with relatives far away, supported by bilingual computer tutors. The library has become a supportive second home for Santa Ana teens (including an unusually high number of boys). It is a place where they can develop self esteem and a sense of value to their community by gaining skills, mentoring younger children, and becoming advocates for the needs of their parents and grandparents through the city’s Youth Civic Engagement program.

Recognition has followed: in 2014, were one of 12 recipients of the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. We’ve also received recognition from the city of Santa Ana, which, in addition to increasing our funding, has asked us to create an “e-library” (a kind of electronic petting zoo where people can try tablets, e-books, and 3-D printing) in a proposed community center. We are a major player in the city’s Five-Year Strategic Plan. Our task is to reach out to Santa Ana’s young people to involve them in civic life. We look forward to continuing to adapt to our community’s shifting needs.

I have enjoyed observing the changes that have come about in libraries, reveling both in the rise of technology and the persistence of the written word. Libraries remain places where everyone can find information, a calm place to hang out, a window into the past, and a path to the future.

The post How One City’s Library Adapts to Tweens, Teens, and New Families appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Shortly after, I learned how presumptive that statement was. James slept in a variety of places, like the police station lobby, a breezeway next door to a nightclub, and the entrance to a nearby credit union. But none of these could be described as “home.”

James started telling me more about his life outside the library. After a few years, he told me he was finally old enough to start receiving Social Security checks and had enough money to get a small apartment. During this stage of transition, James approached me at the reference desk and asked me how to get a checking account; he didn’t feel safe with his money on him.

It struck me how vulnerable he was, and I recommended that he immediately sign up at the very credit union where he had once slept. After he moved into his place, a fellow librarian delivered a bit of furniture. Another of my coworkers helped him locate a bed.

Since encampments were banned in Fresno, tents cannot be permanent. In the morning, police make sure those whose who spent the night on the streets pack everything up.

I wondered how many other people knew the personal stories of those, like James, who didn’t have a permanent home. So in the summer of 2014 I began working on a short documentary to shift public conversations from one about “the homeless problem” to one about diverse individuals who don’t have housing. I wanted to encourage contact and understanding between Fresno’s housed and unhoused. The resulting film, Our Lives: Surviving the Streets of Fresno, will have its premiere at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fresno on April 10, and be available at the library for home viewing.

To get started on the documentary, I had to identify potential interview subjects. By then, James was no longer a daily visitor and didn’t want to return to a painful chapter of his life. So I started with Dre, another library regular who lived on the streets. Dre didn’t want to be interviewed himself—he mentioned a lawyer’s advice, which I’d never expected—but he did have some great ideas. He pointed out that nobody was going to open up with some white lady who looked like a social worker; I needed to find someone who was trusted on the streets and could introduce me to interview subjects.

Dre introduced me to Yellowfeather Noriega. For many years, Yellowfeather lived in downtown Fresno’s encampments—makeshift housing structures made of scrap wood, located on streets or vacant lots. Local homeless advocates funded port-a-potties, and for a while the city even offered trash pick-up. Yellowfeather became homeless in the early 2000s on account of her addiction to meth, and while living in the encampments she dealt drugs to support her habit.

The encampments hosted many of Fresno’s homeless people until late 2013, when the city stopped providing basic services, posted eviction notices on each of the structures, and then tore them down. At this time, the city was at the midway point of its 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, with a strategy of putting resources into housing programs instead of maintaining the encampments. In practice, there are not enough resources to house everyone on the streets, so step one for the housing authority is assessing those deemed most vulnerable (literally, those who are most likely to die on the streets, if nothing changes). Those with the highest ratings are put in apartments, almost rent-free.

When I met Yellowfeather, she was about one year into sobriety. She was living at Dakota EcoGarden, a small, environmentally friendly alternative to traditional homeless shelters. It features a house with rooms for rent and common areas, plus spaces for tents in the backyard, but it is a homeless shelter all the same. Yellowfeather passed a sobriety test to live in one of the tents.

Yellowfeather Noriega

Yellowfeather joined me and several others (including library staff and additional representatives from the homeless community) at a film-making training at Fresno’s Community Media Access Collaborative. Soon afterwards, she recruited several people she knew from the streets for two days of interviews at the library. By this time, I had decided it would be better for Yellowfeather to ask the questions I’d prepared instead of doing this myself. As I stood behind the camera and listened to the warm exchanges she had with her friends, the stories hit surprisingly close to home.

Jesse was a man once in the same drug rehabilitation program as Yellowfeather, and was very open about his continuing methamphetamine abuse. When he talked about suffering from bipolar disorder, I thought of my own sister-in-law’s most recent manic episodes. She has disappeared more than once. What would her life look like if she didn’t have loved ones who got her help? How would Jesse’s life be different if he had had the same?

Nolan, another interviewee, knew Yellowfeather from the main homeless shelter in downtown Fresno. But drugs and alcohol weren’t Nolan’s problem—he just didn’t have a place to stay after his grandmother died. After finding out he had “problems with his memory” and being placed in special education in high school, he’d had several entry-level jobs while living with his mom. When his mom died, he took care of his grandmother. When his grandmother died, family members in other parts of the state connected him with local services and the local homeless shelter has been home ever since.

A few months have passed since we completed filming. Yellowfeather secured an apartment with government assistance, in part because the city has deemed women to be among the most vulnerable on the streets. She is now a personal friend. We play Words With Friends on our phones, share book recommendations, and discuss interior decorating options for our respective homes. She is active in her church, helps her mother get through chemotherapy, and carries pictures of her daughter, who is serving in the military.

Chronic homelessness was just a part of Yellowfeather’s story; she had a life before she became homeless and she is starting a new one now that she’s got a roof over her head. This is true for all who sleep on the streets.

I’m hoping that Yellowfeather will join other interviewees featured in the film in a panel discussion after our first screening. But life is complicated, even when you think you’ve put homelessness behind you. Because Yellowfeather had drug charges from her time living in the encampments, she still had warrants out for her arrest when she got sober. She was supposed to start community service in lieu of jail time last month, but she has to pay a fee of $10 a day for the community service. It may seem like a small amount, but she can’t keep up with the payments since she hasn’t found a job yet. She is turning herself in for the jail time at her next court date.

Yellowfeather gets to the heart of the misguided attempts to solve the “homeless problem” when she says, “It’s going to take an effort of the community to erase homelessness because you can’t erase people. We are not going to disappear.” The shantytowns are now gone, but Fresno is nowhere close to ending homelessness. In fact, according to the most recent grand jury report on Fresno’s 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, the overall number of people on the streets is projected to grow by as much as 25 percent as veterans from recent wars return. Fresno still lacks a short-term temporary shelter for men. Nationally, the Fresno area has the highest percentage rate of chronically homeless still sleeping on the streets rather than in shelter beds.

For too long, we’ve just averted our eyes when we see homeless people. My hope is that the film will, at least, get us to look at our fellow Fresno residents, and strike up a conversation.

The post Who Are the Homeless People in My Library? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I was a kid, I read so voraciously my mom found it hard to keep up with my demand for new books. Her solution: Drop me off at the Monmouth County Library branch in Shrewsbury, New Jersey. I roamed through the children’s section, grabbing every Baby-Sitters Club book I could find. I spent most of my free time at this library, learning about dogs and, later, Emily Dickinson. I often pretended that the big gray building was my home.

As an adult, I’m still excited when I walk into a library. When I first moved to Los Angeles in 2013, I explored the city’s public libraries and talked to librarians about what their branches had to offer beyond books: online SAT prep classes, children’s story time read by SAG actors (we are in L.A. after all), and DVD collections rivaling those of any film snob. As I photographed L.A.’s public libraries, I realized that the art and architecture in the City of Angels is stunning, ranging from 1920s art deco to modern eco-friendly buildings.

The West Hollywood Library is a great example of the new generation of libraries— 32,000 square feet of sunlit rooms, a children’s theater, and a rotating art gallery packed into a LEED-certified structure. On the wall, above the wooden steps to the second floor, hangs a sculptural white tree made from steel, copper, and porcelain that stretches 60 feet toward a huge skylight. You can’t help but feel in awe of this indoor sycamore, a nod by the artist to the trees that grow outside in the park.

I love writing at the West Hollywood Library. The floor-to-ceiling windows upstairs showcase an epic view of the Pacific Design Center and the Hollywood Hills. The panorama beats any coffee shop, and there’s a constant buzz of readers, writers, and researchers. You can even find inspiration and creativity on the outside of the parking garage, where there are murals by artists like Shepard Fairey.

The brand-new Santa Monica Pico Branch Library is nestled in the middle of greenery and basketball courts. You can smell the ocean as you approach the library. Gone is the feeling of a stodgy, dark library where silence is of the utmost concern; here, you feel invited to stay and watch the world go by on the beach outside the wall-to-wall windows.

The renovated Silver Lake Library also blends the indoor and outdoor through metal and glass walls intermingled with lush outdoor plants. Architect Barry Milofsky, who lives in the neighborhood, drew from Silver Lake’s local architecture, including the homes of masters of mid-century modern buildings like Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler. Senior Librarian Lisa Palombi said the glass walls in the front room “help us feel like we are a part of the neighborhood all day.” When I visited, the small but bustling library was filled with parents and children, waiting for story time to begin.

At Burbank’s Buena Vista Branch Library, a giant oak tree sits in the middle of the children’s reading room next to a space that mimics the look of a woodland area—complete with skunks and squirrels painted on the walls. At the Beverly Hills Public Library, Steve Johnson and Jim Favaro—who are also the architects behind the West Hollywood library—created ceilings that look like a book’s open pages. The bookshelves in the fairy tale room are at kid height, and the walls are covered with larger-than-life black-and-white illustrations from famous children’s books.

Some libraries in L.A. keep a close communion with their early-20th-century roots. I was struck by the classic adherence of downtown Los Angeles’ Central Library to its 1920s art deco origins. A massive fire in 1986 destroyed about 20 percent of the library’s holdings, but it reopened in 1993—and preserved its original look while integrating new art in the renovated sections. Antiquated library catalogue cards, rather than being tossed, line the elevator walls behind plexiglass, some with handwritten corrections from past librarians.

High above the escalators are massive fiberglass and foam chandeliers created in 1993 by artist Therman Statom, to represent nature, man-made objects, and heaven. I love that the Central Library is a history and art museum and a working library. I can spend hours meandering through the halls and geeking out. Did you know that restaurant menus in the 1940s could be beautiful, hand-painted pieces of art? You can find original samples in the Central Library’s menu collection.

The newly restored Brand Library and Art Center in Glendale resembles its original early 20th century appearance, when it was the mansion of Leslie C. Brand, a businessman who left his home to Glendale and was informally known as the father of the city. My favorite spot in the library is the room I’ve nicknamed the “Blue Room” because the ornate woodwork window is ideal for gazing out mid-brainstorm.

Like its sister library in Glendale, the Pasadena Central Library adheres to its 1920s style. Librarian Dan McLaughlin told me that Pasadena had a public library before it was even formally a city. This branch comfortably blends old and new: E-readers are available for circulation, and you can still use card catalogues in the ultra-quiet rare collections room.

In an era of downloadable books and the Internet, why are these bastions of printed matter and data bits still important? Libraries curate the collective matter that our culture deems worth saving and sharing. They enable us to better ourselves and find camaraderie with fellow book lovers. I regularly meet a friend at my local branch, the Buena Vista Burbank library, for hours-long writing sessions. I always smile when I see kids carrying stacks of books to check out. I’m also plotting how to make the West Hollywood branch my secret dream home. Some things from childhood just never change.

The post L.A.’s Libraries Are Lookers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I found my love for the performing arts during my junior year at Theodore Roosevelt High School. I joined the drama class, got the lead in a play, and was hooked. After high school, I earned my theater degree at Cal State Northridge and worked part-time at CASA 0101, a performing arts nonprofit in my home neighborhood of Boyle Heights. There, I produced (and performed in) a string of stand-up and improv shows. In the summer of 2006, CASA 0101 commissioned me to co-write the script of Little Red, a musical adaptation of the Red Riding Hood classic with a modern twist. This was the production that led me to create my own superhero show.

In the musical, a teenage Little Red Riding Hood is torn between going to a rock concert and delivering a basket to her grandma’s house, which is a time-honored tradition in her family. I approached the piece like I do every script: I tried to write a play that would really make me laugh. Looking back, Little Red was the first play I wrote that dealt with themes—the dueling pull of tradition and of the new—to which I related. Most of the Latino theater I had been exposed to previously told of the hardships that immigrants had to endure to make it to this country. But I was born here, and those were hardships I fortunately never experienced.

After Little Red, I wanted to create a hero with whom I could identify. Fortunately, that same year, I was asked by CASA 0101 to contribute to Documenting the Undocumented, a festival of original works about immigration and the protests against restrictive federal legislation. I decided to write a superhero piece as my contribution to the festival.

So I created El Verde. The piece takes the form of a classic episodic TV show like the 1966 Batman series or the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons of the 1940s. An announcer opens the show, introduces our hero, Arturo, and narrates the adventure that awaits him. Like Superman, my superhero is an immigrant—only he was born in a world that is not so far away, Mexico, and was raised in the United States. Arturo marries his American high school sweetheart and receives his green card—hence his superhero name, El Verde.

Unlike Batman or Iron Man, who are the billionaire playboys of the comic book world, El Verde is a blue-collar hero who spends his days working at an elote (corn) factory. He is a shucker, so it is his job to remove the husks from every piece of elote. When we meet Arturo, he has worked in the factory for several years and is yearning for something new. After an accident at the factory, Arturo tells his wife that he suddenly has superpowers, although he is not sure which powers he has exactly. So he ditches his factory uniform for his best and only suit and becomes El Verde.

The factory worker concept was inspired by my grandparents, who found work at a tortilla factory in Boyle Heights when they first came to this country in the 1960s. I also thought about the TV show The Honeymooners, which found humor in the lives of blue-collar characters. And like me, Arturo loves comic books. The heroes he has read about give him the ideal for greatness. He is tired of being known only as a factory worker and knows he can offer more to his city. So, he overlooks his limitations and strives to become a hero.

The humor of El Verde has been compared to that of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show—it appeals to a younger crowd but there are plenty of jokes and references that adults enjoy. Arturo is naturally awkward and a bit of a dork, but he tries to play that off as El Verde, doing his best to be cool and collected. He is still fairly new to the hero game, so the audience enjoys watching him stumble and make mistakes as he tries to save the day. When it came time to cast the show, I assigned myself the role of Arturo/El Verde. If you are going to develop a show this fun, you might as well make yourself the lead. Besides, how often do you get the chance to be a superhero?

The one-act play debuted at the festival in 2006. In 2007, I expanded El Verde into a full-length production at CASA 0101; that version was comprised of quick episodes where our hero faced an array of different villains like the Kukaracha King, La Llorona Lisa, and Frita Kahlo. The production continued for a few years at CASA 0101 with El Verde experiencing new adventures and confronting new villains.

In 2011, East LA Rep offered me and Alejandra Cisneros, the show’s director, a residency to develop a script about El Verde’s origins, and his first confrontation with the evil La Quinceañera and her henchmen, Los Chambelanes. Earlier this year, East LA Rep partnered with Center Theatre Group for readings of this latest El Verde script in four libraries in Boyle Heights. During the last week of January, we read El Verde at the Benjamin Franklin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Estrada Courts Satellite, and Malabar libraries in Boyle Heights.

The live El Verde shows usually have a cast of about 10 to 12 actors and include a few designers, numerous costumes, and lighting. When we do readings at libraries, we scale it down to six readers. We stand behind music stands dressed in our everyday clothing—and we still have so much fun reading the play. I always get a kick out of hearing the laughs from the kids in the audience, and I hope they get a thrill not only from hearing a live superhero show, but from seeing a hero with whom they can identify.

It is great when kids from Boyle Heights come to see the show. But I am more interested in having kids experience live theater. Being involved in the performing arts has done a lot for me, but I was not really exposed to the arts until late in high school. I would like for kids to see at a young age that it is possible to write, perform, or design for the stage.

So, what is next for El Verde? First we are planning to continue reading the play at other events. My old junior high, Stevenson Middle School, has invited me to read it for students in May. The graphic designer of El Verde, Luke Lizalde, and I are planning to turn these adventures into a comic book.

And we will perform a new episode of El Verde in July at the Rosenthal Theater, which is located inside Inner City Arts in Los Angeles, where I took acting classes as a high school student and where I have been working this year as a lighting designer.

So, like our announcer says at the top of every show, “Get ready boys and girls for another thrilling episode of El Verde!”

The post My Superhero’s Got a Green Card appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Until 1940, when the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch opened nearby, Pratt’s library was known as the Pratt Free Library. It was the first general lending library in the borough, and cards were available to all people over the age of 14. For those too young for borrowing privileges, the building also housed a children’s library with an elaborate Romanesque portico and colonnade leading to a separate entrance. Looking up into the windows from the street today you can see nothing but shelves of books. Inside, the open stacks are designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, the floors are made of leaded glass tiles, and florid cast bronze shelving rises through all four levels. The collections are bathed in natural light, given the place of honor that books relegated to the basement stacks of a typical library are denied.

I am not and have never been a student at Pratt Institute. I’m a high school teacher and an expired Friend of Pratt Library, which means that four years ago I paid $100 to have a slip of yellow paper bearing my address and thus proving that I am part of the zip-code community. I joined when I was in the throes of working through a master’s thesis on Chaucer’s dream poems. This meant that most days I went straight from school to the library and stayed there until it closed at 11:00 p.m. Some days, tired from running around the classroom or overwhelmed by the difficult balance of work and graduate school, I’d put off my own research and pull whatever books were shelved the closest to my seat. I would read about the origins of lacework, early New Jersey glass factories, and methods of log cabin construction. In the end, the decorative art focus of the library shaped my final product and my thesis explored the poems’ material world: interiors and architectural adornment.

On the night that I finished my thesis there, I remember not wanting to leave right away because the closing chimes had not rung yet. A little over a year later, as I finished the final chapter of my first novel, my legs had become so cramped that I cleared part of a shelf so I could perch my computer at chest height. In the midst of typing my final sentences, I stood intertwined with the structure of the building. The shelves on either side of me were filled with periodicals on house restoration. As Marianne Moore reminisced about the Pratt Free Library in a 1960 essay for Vogue, “In the stacks, related items in a subject often became more important than the original quest.”

It has been more than 70 years since the library was officially closed to the public and 30 years since the porch of the children’s library was moved across campus to where it now sits, half ruin, half relic, a few feet from the great modern facade of the gymnasium, a stairway to nowhere.

In idealistic moments I wish that this haven were open to everyone again. But I know that would disrupt the placid stacks and obscure the odd titles that nowhere else see the light of day.

K. Abigail Walthausen is a high school English teacher and poet who lives in Brooklyn.

*Photo by K. Abigail Walthausen.

The post Stacks by Tiffany appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I remember a huge mural loomed from behind the library’s reception desk, depicting scenes of Mexican American life in the San Diego area in the late 1970s and early 1980s: a quinceñera celebration, students lifting up their diplomas, a backyard carne asada, a news reporter interviewing a vintage car enthusiast before the painted pillars of Chicano Park. The colors were rich, the images drawn with an appealing cleanliness, the lines easy to follow. I knew nothing about who painted the mural or how long it had been there, but I probably gazed at it hundreds of times over the years. As a child I didn’t fully understand what the images in each panel meant or represented, but I remember regarding the mural’s presence as a sort of silent anchor.

When I finally arrived to check it out, the library was shut down, the 1970s-style brown-on-brown building locked and unused. It turned out National City had built a new library a few years back, down the way in Kimball Park. When I walked over to see if the mural was there, I couldn’t find it. I asked around, spurred both by reportorial instinct and by a more personal desire I couldn’t quite identify. No one knew what I was talking about. But I needed an answer.

Upstairs, in the municipal history archive, a librarian helped me find clippings on the mural’s inauguration, on June 6, 1981. I was less than a year old at the time. “A mural depicting four facets of Chicano life – family, education, friendship and pride, will be unveiled today in ceremonies at the National City Library,” reported the San Diego Union. “Fifteen to 20 students, mostly teenagers, chose the themes. They said they did so because those aspects of Chicano life are often overlooked by the mass media. They painted the mural as part of a campaign by the library to attract more Chicano youths.” It was thrilling to read. I learned the mural’s dimensions-four panels totaling a length of 42 feet. I found that it was created as a project with a civil rights organization called PUEDO, or Proudly United for Educational Development Organizing. And the artists were local kids like me and my siblings.

I asked the librarian if he knew where the old mural might be, but it was a mystery to him as well. The National City officials I asked admitted they lost track of the artwork in the course of moving the public library from one building to another. I dug around for contacts for two artists who coordinated the mural project, David Avalos and Juan Parrino. They explained that the mural emerged in the political current of the time, making it in my view a historical document, a monument to a moment. Parrino told me that the students who painted it chose to dedicate the mural to Luis “Tato” Rivera, a young man shot in the back and killed by a National City police officer in 1975. The San Diego Union didn’t report the detail of the politically charged dedication, but Lowrider magazine did.

I kept digging. I needed to know the mural was okay. Avalos and I met up one day outside the old library and walked over to City Hall together to knock on some doors. We finally met with an administrator in the Community Services Department who promised the city was diligently searching its records and storage facilities to locate the mural.

Sometime later, they found it, in a basement storage room in City Hall. Avalos examined it and noted only a few small tears of damage. Last I checked, National City was looking to put the mural on view again.

The news soothed me. As I realized talking to Avalos and Parrino, and looking at the clips in the municipal archive, the mural is an artifact in my personal history. Its images helped shape my sense of self – as a reader, as a member of my community growing up in South San Diego, as a writer, as a journalist. Now I knew the mural must have had the same effect on other kids, and at least on the young people who helped design it.

Investigating the mural got me thinking about what “home” means to the wandering adult. I’ve lived up and down California. I’ve traveled. I live in Mexico now. My family heritage is in Tijuana. San Diego is my hometown, but it is no longer my home.

Home seems to me less a city or a place than your footprints, your archeology. I needed to find what happened to the mural behind the reception desk at the National City Public Library because I needed to relocate an essential intellectual and creative point of reference. I needed to relocate a fragment of home.

Daniel Hernandez is a journalist and writer based in Mexico City, where he contributes to the Los Angeles Times’ Latin American news blog, La Plaza. He is author of a forthcoming book, Down and Delirious in Mexico City, to be published by Scribner.

*Photo of National City Public Library mural by David Avalos.

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