The Legacy of Americanization: Language Diversity in Public Libraries by katelynn Laws & Kenneth Daniel

This principle is a cornerstone in conceptualizing the public library as a social equalizer, a place where anyone, regardless of identity, can freely access what interests them. From its earliest days, the programs, resources, and outreach conducted by the public library have been deeply informed by its nature as a part of the government, whether it be a municipal, state, or federal institution. In its most extreme application, public libraries in the 19th and 20th centuries served as a lynchpin of the US government's "Americanization" movement, providing services to create "good citizens" out of immigrant patrons. The legacy of these Americanization practices and their ongoing impact on the operation of public libraries as they continue to serve immigrant communities is the impetus for our project.

Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States, with 57 million speakers. In North Carolina, roughly 7% of residents speak Spanish, and in Lincolnton, where the public library we reviewed for this project is located, 15% of their residents speak Spanish. As a result of their large Spanish-speaking population, the Lincoln County Public Library (LCPL) system has created a Spanish language collection to support literacy and information needs. Studies related to library use among immigrant populations have consistently found that the most common criticism from immigrant patrons who use these kinds of multilingual collections is that the materials are out of date, uninteresting, and irrelevant. To measure relevance, we looked specifically at metrics related to cultural responsivity - especially since a majority of the materials we reviewed were meant for children, and the important role diverse representations play in positive youth development. Since 17% of the town's population is Latinx and can safely be presumed as one of the primary users of the collection, we looked specifically at Latinx cultural responsivity.

Early on in our research, we chose to focus on the collection at LCPL not only because it serves a significant Latinx population, but the personal relationship one of our authors, Katelynn, has with the library as a Colombian-American whose Spanish-speaking family currently resides in the county. This also impacted the form our physicalization took as a poncho. Since we are looking at cultural relevance, it felt important to create a representation that was reflective of Latinx identity in some way. For this reason, we used Katelynn's childhood poncho as the basis for our design.

We would also like to note that our physicalization is the result of a case study. The data depicted in our physicalization was collected from the LCPL's online catalog, and is largely based upon returns from searching under the subject heading "Spanish language materials."

Process and Data

While the original poncho was weaved, the time necessary would have greatly exceeded the bounds of our project, so we felt it was best to work with fabric that could be sewn together. To begin the process, we took measurements of Katelynn's poncho, creating a digital pattern in Illustrator to get a sense of the fabric required for the project.

We had the idea to recreate the stripes present on the original poncho, but with the widths and designs correlating to the data we had gathered about the collection. To create each stripe, we designed digital collages from book covers for titles actually present in the data sets we were reviewing.

The three stripes on the bottom (accounting for the right side of the physical poncho) represent findings related to high author count, meaning the presence of several works from a single author. When searching for Spanish language materials, the LCPL catalog offered various ways to refine the search. One of these methods included the ability to quickly find 24 authors with the highest counts of works in the collection.

Looking at this list of authors, we found that 71% were American or British authors whose works had been translated into Spanish, and just 4% of the authors were Latinx (only one Latinx author was featured on the list). Another issue emerged while we reviewed the list: the library system included Spanish-language translators as authors, meaning the remaining 25% of the authors were actually translators. The overemphasis on translated works not only indicates a problem with the collection's ability to provide culturally responsive materials but has manifested in the form of search redundancy - pushing users toward more translated materials, and in many cases returning books by the same American authors already present on the list.

Continuing from the bottom, the next four stripes came from an analysis of the 113 most highly circulated titles. Using a spreadsheet, we organized each title based on their target age group, the country the work was published in, the author's nationality, and whether or not it was a translation or originally written in Spanish (or bilingual).

Of the 113 books, 82 were translations of English language works, and in total only 16 of the authors were Latinx. As we found, the publishing country had little correlation to whether a work was a translation or not, as only 7 works were published in Latin America and yet only two of those were not translations. Furthermore, the library's site itself only had two works that had descriptions in Spanish - most works instead had English-language descriptions if they had any at all. From this point, we further divided the data between the intended audience.

As we found, 38% were written for an adult audience. Within that group, 53% of the books were translations, and only 19% of the authors were Latinx.

The other 62% of the books were aimed at children. A full 86% were translations - and only 11% of the authors were Latinx.

Finally, we shifted away from our query term to look at the representation of Latinx authors in general among the LCPL's entire (English and Spanish) collection. After compiling a list of 75 popular Latinx authors from Latin America and the US, we found that the library had works from 37 of these authors - for a total of 135 works across the high, medium, and low circulation brackets. We found that 62 of those works were in Spanish, while the other 73 were in English (a 46% - 54% percent breakdown). Of the 18 authors who had at least one work held in Spanish, four authors were responsible for 41 of the 62 works (at a breakdown of 19, 11, 7, and 4 works). Consequently, the LCPL's collection of Latinx authors, while fairly evenly divided on the language front, had a significant dearth of diversity when it came to authors for the Spanish-language works. Some of the authors with high quantities of works only in English (Margarita Engle, Elizabeth Acevedo, Octavio Paz, and Juan Felipe Herrera) have works that are highly circulated yet remain unavailable to members of their primary audiences who may find the works valuable.

Since we wanted to include these collages on the fabric itself, we decided to use pretreated fabric that could be dyed with exposure to sunlight. By printing the collages onto transparent paper, we could lay the sheets over the fabric while we exposed the fabric to sunlight.

After exposing the fabric for 20 minutes, we gathered all the sheets to be washed and dried.

Once the sheets finished drying, they could be sewn together. The pieces were laid out to get an idea of the final pattern and then sewn together to remove the excess white areas. After being sewn together, the middle white circle was removed to create a space for the head to go through.

Closing Thoughts

So, what does it mean for the LCPL to not have many Spanish-language books written by Latinx authors? In answering this question, we return to the original subject of Americanization. In 2023, PEW Research released a study illustrating how teaching the next generation Spanish is considered vital to Latinx communities in the US. At the same time, the Latinx population has, since the 1990s, been the fastest growing in North Carolina, as well as one of its most diverse - requiring now more than ever a greater understanding of cultural diversity rather than homogenous views of "Hispanics."

Despite this, the priority -intentionally or not- in collection development has remained on European and US materials, even in the Spanish language collection the focus is on works originally in English. This is all within a system where the website only supports English, and which obfuscates the language selection by placing it near the bottom of the search criteria options. With this in mind, the presence of Americanization, whether deliberate or not, becomes clear - especially when the majority of the Spanish language materials are children's books. When Spanish-language books are not only difficult to find, but by and large Euro-American anyway, the result is an implicit, yet no less directly felt, othering of non-English speaking patrons. Similarly, with children's materials the majority of options are books that treat Euro-American culture as normative - regardless of the language it's written in. As a consequence, the current composition of the LCPL's Spanish-language collection reflects a priority being placed on providing "American," rather than culturally relevant materials to its Spanish-speaking patrons.

We hope that through this physicalization we have illustrated the wide gulf between a linguistically diverse and a culturally diverse collection. At the same time, the solution to this lack of representation is, at least diagnostically, simple: learn your community, learn their cultures, and not simply their languages. The LCPL, to their credit, has been responsive enough to work on developing a sizeable Spanish-language collection in the first place, and they certainly have Latin American authors represented in their English collection. What their next step must be is bridging the gap between those two, and working to collect culturally relevant materials in that culture's language. A companion, and even more immediately implementable, suggestion would be to revise their website to make language selection a primary, rather than peripheral, option when choosing sources. Exercising cultural competence rather than simple tolerance is an essential step for libraries like LCPL in making sure patrons are not only being allowed in, but are welcomed in.

Citations

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Lincoln County Public Library System. (2024). Online Catalog. https://lcpls.lincolncountync.gov/polaris/default.aspx