http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindeal ... xml&coll=2

Georgia library says it won't buy fiction in Spanish anymore

Thursday, June 22, 2006
Giovanna Dell'Orto
Associated Press

Lawrenceville, Ga. - The library system in this suburban Atlanta county says it won't buy any more thrillers, romance novels or other works of adult fiction in Spanish.

The decision has angered Hispanic leaders and thrust Gwinnett County, where one in six residents is Hispanic, into the nation's immigration debate.

Last week, the library board in this fast-growing county of 700,000 people eliminated the $3,000 that had been set aside to buy Spanish-language fiction in the coming fiscal year. It offered no explanation, but the chairman said such book purchases would lead readers of other foreign languages to demand the same treatment.

However, one board member, Brett Taylor, said the move came after some residents objected to using taxpayer dollars to entertain readers who might be illegal immigrants.

"The argument was we didn't need to cater to illegal aliens," Taylor said. "I'm personally offended by that."

The budget cut passed without discussion at a June 12 meeting, minutes after reporters and residents rushed out the room because the library director was fired for reasons the board has not disclosed.

The 13-branch library system spent $2,200 for adult fiction in Spanish since it started buying such books in January. It will continue to buy children's books and adult nonfiction in Spanish, but not, say, the latest John Grisham thriller in Spanish, or a Marcela Serrano novel in its original language.

Hispanic advocates were outraged, and said such cutbacks are rare across the country.

"A library is more than a place for kids to read books; it's often the center of the community," Raul Gonzalez of the National Council of La Raza said. "A vast majority of the people who don't speak English as their first language - guess what - they're citizens of the U.S."

Amid the national debate over illegal immigrants and whether English should be the official U.S. language, some critics elsewhere around the country also have been objecting to public libraries' efforts to buy more bilingual materials.

Last fall, Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican, wrote a public letter asking if the library in Denver was increasing its Spanish-language collection at the expense of English material.

But a Cleveland librarian called the backlash bigotry.

"We provide books to our patrons no matter what language they may read," said Milos Markovic, who oversees the roughly 400,000 volumes in the foreign language department at the Main Library of Cleveland Public Library.

Markovic's patrons range from immigrants to American-born students learning second languages to scholars studying great works in the original.

The Lorain Public Library System buys Spanish books today for the same reasons that it bought Slovenian and Hungarian ones 100 years ago, said Valerie Smith, public services coordinator.