Críticas Magazine

Bruce Jensen

María Elena Ovalle, a shining Tejas Star
April 4, 2008

María Elena Ovalle, visionary educator and longtime librarian, is someone whose bright ideas ignite entire communities.

As if coordinating the biggest Día de los niños/Día de los libros extravaganza in this vast, heavily Spanish-speaking swath of Texas wasn’t enough, this year she's overseeing the launch of the state’s first major prize for bilingual and Spanish-language books: the Tejas Star Children’s Book Award.

You might already know something about María Elena if you read American Libraries. The Jan/Feb issue printed some wonderful letters prompted by a ghastly diatribe urging linguistic cleansing of U.S. libraries. María Elena’s response said in part,

                                                                                   Maria Elena Anzaldua-Ovalle

 
Certainly those cognitive benefits were plentiful at last year’s inaugural Rio Grande Valley Book & Cultural Festival, an unforgettable pachanga-and-a-half that featured young mariachis, folkloric dancers, storytelling, panel discussions, workshops and games, with more authors and books than the many hundreds of us in attendance could possibly keep track of.

In a conversation a few days ago, I asked her if she had any tips for other organizers of Día events. "Begin early," María Elena said emphatically, "and invite as many [authors, artists, and performers] as possible, because a lot of them will turn you down."  But on the other hand: "As soon as we sent out the press release, people started contacting us."

(Now that Día is coming up at the end of this month, if you missed our reminder several weeks ago the begin-early thing is sort of moot. But there is still time for you to put together something nice.)

The dynamic doctoral student of UT-Austin’s School of Information and district officer of the Texas Library Association, whose day job is Coordinator for Instructional Resources & Technology of a large education service center that serves nearly 400,000 students from Brownsville to Laredo, is excited as the Tejas Star balloting draws to a close.

The books under consideration, all of them dual-language or Spanish-language books published between 2003-2007 and written for kids in grades K-6, were nominated by publishers and by school librarians in the region.  Then the decision was turned over to students who qualified to vote by reading at least three of the nominated books.

As she looks through the nominated books piled on a table in her office, María Elena enthusiastically points out to us what makes them so marvelous.  She has worked hard to put those books and others like them into libraries that might not otherwise have found them, knowing what the magic on their pages will do for many children.

"We just hope that everybody reads," she says earnestly.  "We want to get the point across that everybody should become literate.  In both languages."

Posted by Bruce Jensen on April 4, 2008 | Comments (0)