Críticas Magazine

One of the neighbor kids, a seven-year-old, is right now scrambling along the narrow top of the wall that separates our apartments from the gated community of roomy manors to the north. He stops alongside a place with a lovely pool and an ornamental fountain; people on the other side are having words with him. The kid lowers himself off down to our side and runs off.

Kind of impressive, given that the wall is more than twice his height. I imagine myself 15 feet up off the ground trying to keep my balance while asking the homeowners to toss me a beer. 

Walls are tragicomic monuments to our deepest, tallest insecurities. We've seen again and again throughout history that fences don't age well--sure, they start out all daunting and imposing but they often end up as just plain meaningless.  Laug...Read More

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The Graduate School of Information Sciences and Technology (GSIST) of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) has launched a Cross-cultural Collaborative Leadership Project for LIS Education with the School of Information Sciences of the University of Tennessee (SIS-UTK). It is an innovative program that includes research, service projects and student/faculty exc...Read More

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"Professor wants libraries to reflect cultural diversity" was the headline last week over in Silicon Valley.

That's because Dr. Clara Chu spoke Thursday at the Sunnyvale Public Library.  The UCLA professor of Information Studies and Asian American Studies is, as the article points out, "a Peruvian-born Chinese-Canadian residing in the United States":

...she looks at Sunnyvale and Cupertino's increasingly diverse demographics, particularly the 43 percent of both populations who are foreign-born, and sees opportunities for libraries to help residents better underst...Read More

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For the 4^th year in a row the Northeast Chapter of REFORMA is teaming up with AILA, APALA, BCALA and CALA to present its widely successful mini-conference. Every year since 2005, the event welcomes librarians, support staff, professors, publishers, distributors and students.  They come from the Northeast, the Midwest, the South, everywhere! Everyone wants to make the Mini-Conference weekend, a New York weekend. There is no registration fee. Lunch is free. There is a maximum capacity of 75 people.

 If you’d like to attend, send an email to ...Read More

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Last week an old friend came down here for a conference at University of Texas Pan-American.  Border Walls and Border Mirrors: Language, Literature and Culture on the Border attracted scholars and artists from far and wide to discuss the literature, performing arts, and visual arts of the borderlands.

One of the keynoters was the noted novelist, essayist and poet Cristina Rivera Garza who was born in Matamoros (twin city of Brownsville, on the Mexican side) in 1964 and has been attracting enthusiastic critical and popular attention with books like her best-known Nadie me verá llorar (Tusquets, and also in translation by Curbstone Press as No One Will See Me Cry)...Read More

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Let’s celebrate 5 de Mayo, Latinos, and Camila Alire!

Alire, champion of diversity, award-winning leader, published author, strong supporter of intellectual freedom, and a former REFORMA President will be the first ALA Latin@ President.

Last Friday, May 2, I had visions of proud Reformistas dancing in the streets, some of them shed tears of joy… it was the first time since ALA was founded in 1876 in Philadelphia that the association would have a Latin@ President. History was made by a dynamo librarian and thousands of believers.

 ...Read More

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On Friday the American Library Association announced the results of this year's election. One-quarter of the ALA's 65,000 members voted, and most of us who did picked Dr. Camila Alire for president. Her year at the helm will begin in 2009.

This is welcome news for fans of inclusive library services. Dr. Alire coauthored both editions of Serving Latino Communities, an eminently worthwhile book. Not only that, the Colorado Library Association chose her for its CLA Exemplary Library Services to Ethnic Populations Award not once but twice. She was REFORMA’s Librarian of the Year in 1997. That same year she became t...Read More

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This post is short and sweet. Click on the following list to see pictures of my visit to Colombia. 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/45964032@N00/sets/72157604822871796/

There you will see pictures from 

 -2nd meeting of President of Latin American library associations, 

   ...Read More

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Seeing's how I don't get to travel much these days, it's always fun to follow where in the world my globetrotting blog-buddy Loida will turn up next. Colombia is the place she's reporting from this week, with a great story yesterday about a diligent librarian who hikes for hours carrying a bag of books to isolated readers and schools, and who is patiently working to build a library in a town that lost one to a flood.

That story reminds me of another inspiring example. See, there was this cat in Mexico named José who loaded lots of books on mules and sent them...but hey, the venerable Earl Shorris ...Read More

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Meet Wilton Hurtado Cuero, librarian and superhero bringing a Maleta Viajera (traveling suitcase) to the residents of Municipio Olaya Herrera in Colombia. 

Last Thursday, April 24, the Colombian library association, ASCOLBI, awarded its Librarian of the Year Awards and Wilton was one of the four librarians honored in the country.

Wilton story inspired me more than anything I saw or listened to during my stay in Bogotá. Shortly after receiving his degree as a librarian in 2004, he started to...Read More

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The party is not over yet. The real Children's Day, in Mexico anyway, is April 30. Many Día de los Niños/Día de los Libros celebrations in the US will wait till Wednesday, but a whole lot of them happened over the weekend.

We were lucky to be at the Rio Grande Valley Book & Cultural Festival on Saturday, surely the biggest Día event in deep South Texas. You would've had to go way upriver to Pat Mora's hometown of El Paso for a bigger one. (How do I know this? The Día database of the Association for Library Service to Children, of course.) 

The festival here had something for everybody: storytelling, readings by authors who write for kids ...Read More

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