Bookstores
Reading levels are extremely poor for Pilsen students. Our students enter junior high school with 4th grade reading abilities. –Pilsen Neighbors Community Council 1979, 2
In this photo below, a Latina in front of a store banner with a United Farm Workers (UFW) flag displays books from the Liberator Bookstore booth - in English and Spanish, for adults and children, on a broad range of topics including the Chicano Movement, South Africa, non-traditional women’s work, and Emiliano Zapata. Festival organizers Avila and Solís also welcomed small, independent bookstores with varied social justice emphases. As book lovers who saw limited access to books in Pilsen, it was important to the Festival organizers to celebrate the power of reading and books at the Festival.
Now internationally reknowned author Sandra Cisneros, who read her poetry at the Festival when she was a young teacher at Latino Youth Alternative High School in Pilsen, also had limited access to books during her Chicago childhood. "Cisneros came from a working-class family that owned two books. One was a Bible her mother bought with S&H Green Stamps, the other, a dog-earred copy of "Alice in Wonderland" bought in the bargain basement of a Sears....'I read books to keep me company.... When I was growing up I didn't know you could buy a book. Every book I had was stamped `Property of St. Aloysius.' " (Cisneros in Garza, "Writer Says," 1).
Also participating was the New World Resource Center, a not-for-profit, bookstore collective and meeting space at 2546 N. Halsted Street on the North Side. With an anti-imperialist orientation and focus on international struggles for justice, they developed a Spanish book collection to better serve Latinos in 1977. Diana Solís was introduced to this bookstore by her University of Illinois Chicago Circle (UICC) Latin American Studies teacher Mary Kay Vaughan, where she first went for programming about Chile's Salvador Allende. For an idea of the Center's issues and events, the leaflet below promotes a poetry reading held around 1977 at the Center to raise funds for two South African writers persecuted during apartheid, including Ilva McKay, a South African Student Organization (SASO) activist.
Revolution Books was listed on the Festival program. Also invited was one of the first women’s bookstores in Chicago, Jane Addams Women’s Bookstore (Enke, 2007).
Here's more about Chicago’s New World Resource Center (1972-1982+):
SOURCES
Collins, Carolyn. Summary History of the New World Resources Center, 1984?. Manuscript. From African Activist Archive Project, New World Resource Center, January 1972- at least 1982. http://africanactivist.msu.edu/organization.php?name=New%20World%20Resource%20Center (accessed June 7, 2022).
Enke, Anne. Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Garza, Melita Marie. "Writer Says She Succeeded Despite Chicago." Chicago Tribune, December 20, 1992.
Matthews, James. Black Voices Shout! An Anthology of Poetry. South Africa: Troubador Press, 1976.
New World Resource Center Collection. African Activist Archive Project, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI.
Pilsen Neighbors Community Council, 1979, The Pilsen Student Organizing Project, Pilsen Neighbors Community Council Records, MSSO131. DePaul Special Collections and Archives, Chicago, IL.