The day after the presidential election, the Wednesday morning adult ESL class at Wright College Humboldt Park took a field trip, heading south on California Avenue to the Read/Write Library. The class, consisting largely of women from Mexico and Central America, was working on writing personal stories based on neighborhood photos. Nell Taylor, the Read/Write’s executive director—and also its founder, head librarian, programming director, and chief ambassador—brought out a pile of books of pictures and poetry and personal essays in both English and Spanish for the students to look through.
“It was interesting to read books from our community,” says Laurina Cervantes, one of the students. She had immigrated to Chicago from Guerrero, Mexico. “We looked at a book from a guy who lived in Pilsen. He was telling about his family. It wasn’t a big book. It was not expensive. It was folded paper. He was telling part of his life, like eating beans every day, how big was his family, the routine of life in the USA. It was like my life. When you’re an immigrant, you don’t think too much about education. You think about working.”
As Taylor watched Cervantes and her classmates pore over books and chapbooks, she began to feel better. This was exactly how the library was meant to function. The women were seeing that you didn’t have to be a grand and important person to have your words matter enough to be preserved in a library. You could be a Chicago woman practicing your English by writing stories about your life and your neighborhood.
As materials continued to accumulate under the stereo in Taylor’s apartment, she began thinking about ways to organize them. The librarians introduced her to arguments about naming, hierarchy, and identity that were taking place in library circles, in particular the philosophy of radical cataloging.
“There’s an element of recognition that starts to disarm people,” Taylor says. “People would respond to things they remembered and places they used to go to, friends who had died. They were gathered around the table telling stories. It’s a neat way to make a publication live again.”
Heidaripour notes that many urban designers start their projects from scratch, assuming that nobody bothered to preserve old community plans or histories for them to build on. But she found that the Read/Write Library has a large collection of community plans, some going as far back as the 1950s, when neighborhood activists were discussing, in language that seems appallingly racist today, what to do about the “Negros” moving into Lawndale. (Some of these plans came from a single donor, who stored his entire collection in a rotting paper bag, which he handed over to Taylor at a meeting at a McDonald’s in the Loop.) “Preserving these things is superhelpful,” she says, “especially if you want to build the future of the community. No other library preserves these things.”
