Access to Knowledge: Schools, Libraries, and Books
We created a little library at Mujeres. Books were prominent for me. Every payday, I would go to a bookstore. I didn’t have a lot of books at home growing up, so it was important to me to have a library at Mujeres, to have a lot of bookstores at the Festival. -Festival Coordinator Diane Avila, May 3, 2022
Festival organizers Diane Avila and Diana Solís promoted education, reading, and books, especially to empower women with access to knowledge and illuminate Latino and other marginalized cultures and activism around the world. Through the 1970s, Latinos in Chicago, including Pilsen’s youth, encountered great challenges in education and access to books. According to Pilsen Neighbors Community Council (PNCC), a community empowerment organization whose 1979 board of directors was mostly mothers of Mexican ancestry, Pilsen students faced “an educational system that often seems to be deaf to their differences of language and culture” (The Pilsen Student Organizing Project 1979, 1). A grassroots council influenced by Saul Alinsky’s community organizing strategies by the 1970s, PNCC was deeply engaged in neighborhood efforts to improve education and library access for Mexican immigrant families in Pilsen.
In this first page of the Chicago Hispanic newspaper El Heraldo (below), we see a photo of a 1981 protest for a significant, centrally located Chicago Public Library branch in Pilsen with strong coverage of Latino, Latin American, and Spanish-language materials. (If you wanted to buy the paper, it cost 15 cents.)
To learn about Pilsen community organizer Mary Gonzales and her efforts, with Gregory Galluzzo, to move PNCC from a social service to an organizing model during the 1970s: Cruz, UNO: organizing at the grass roots
SOURCES
Cruz, Wilfredo. “UNO: Organizing at the Grassroots.” Illinois Issues, April 1988: 18-22. https://www.lib.niu.edu/1988/ii880418.html
“Lucha de La Comunidad de Pilsen por su Biblioteca.” El Heraldo, June 11, 1981, 1, 11.
Pilsen Neighbors Community Council, 1979, The Pilsen Student Organizing Project, Pilsen Neighbors Community Council Records, MSSO131. DePaul Special Collections and Archives, Chicago, IL.