Reaching Out to the Latino Community via Public and School Libraries

Bradley, Rebecca
INFO 266
Fall 2016

Naidoo, J. C. (2010). Developing and enriching comunidad: reaching out to Latino communities via public and school libraries. In J. C. Naidoo (Ed), Celebrating cuentos: promoting Latino children’s literature and literacy in classrooms and libraries (pp. 239-257). Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.

Jaime Naidoo’s essay presents much to think about when considering library materials and services for the Latino community. In the first part, he talks about how public and school librarians must work with leaders and others in the Latino community to provide services that are relevant to their needs. Activities such as bilingual storytime, visits from Latino authors, Latino holiday celebrations, basic literacy classes, and English classes are all mentioned as possible ways to increase patronage by both Latino adults and their children. Naidoo goes on to caution that the librarian must look very carefully at the Latinos he or she is serving, because Naidoo believes that it is a common flaw to think that all of them are poor, illegal, immigrants from Mexico when in fact they could be third generation Cubans who speak only English.

In the middle section of the essay, Naidoo focuses on how to properly select high-quality books written in Spanish. He provides an evaluation sheet with questions such as “Is the author Latino, Non-Latino, Don’t Know?” and “Do the Latino characters need the help of Anglos to solve their problems in the story?” Although I appreciate the evaluation sheet very much, I am left wondering about where to actually find high-quality books that meet the best criteria recommended by Naidoo. In our school library, there are many Spanish books that are written by Latino authors, but often times they are not checked out by the children due to their unappealing illustrations. In any case, Naidoo’s evaluation sheet does have merit and can be a very helpful tool for librarians purchasing Spanish language books for their collections.


The remainder of the essay is devoted to providing librarians with articles, reports, websites and other resources to better enhance their outreach to the Latino community. Many of the resources Naidoo mentions are well-known such as the Colorín Colorado website, el día de los libros annual campaign, and the work being done by REFORMA, which is a branch of the American Library Association dedicated to serving the Latino community. To conclude, although this essay is a very broad overview of the topic, it does give librarian professionals many ideas about how to improve their Spanish book collections and increase their outreach to the Latino population in their areas.