Grisham en Espanol? Suburban Atlanta area library says no thanks

GIOVANNA DELLÂ’ORTO

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP) - In a suburban county, where one out of six residents is Hispanic, the library board has axed money budgeted to buy more adult Spanish fiction - books like the latest John Grisham thriller in Spanish or a Marcela Serrano novel in its original language.

Spending the $3,000 US that had been earmarked for those Spanish reading materials next fiscal year, which starts July 1, would have only led to readers of other foreign languages to request the same treatment, the board's chairman argued.

However, one board member says the move came after some residents objected to using taxpayers' dollars for patrons who might be illegal immigrants.

The budget cut passed without discussion at a June 12 board meeting minutes after the media and vocal residents rushed out the meeting room because the library director had been fired without cause.

"We can't supply pleasure reading material for all language groups, so we're not going to go down that road," said Lloyd Breck, chairman of the Gwinnett County Public Library Board. The library system spent $2,200 for adult fiction in Spanish since it started buying it in January. It doesn't offer adult fiction books in any other foreign languages.

But one board member said the board acted after some residents complained.

"The argument was we didn't need to cater to illegal aliens," said board member Brett Taylor, who left the June 12 meeting in protest after the director was fired. "I'm personally offended by that. We've to look out for everybody."

In the context of heated debate over illegal immigrants and the recent discussion in Congress about English as the official U.S. language, some critics have been objecting to many public libraries' efforts to buy more bilingual materials as well as popular books in commonly used languages like Spanish.

Last fall, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo wrote a public letter asking if the library in Denver was increasing its Spanish-language collection at the expense of English material. A protest was held in front of the city's central library asking for the removal of Spanish-language adult comic books, which were found to have sexually graphic content and were taken off the shelves.

One Gwinnett board member said her only objection was similar - she didn't want Harlequin romance novels in Spanish, which are not considered educational.

"It'd make me unhappy if we had no Spanish collection," said board member Dale Todd, adding the library should offer life-skills books to help immigrants "getting through a day in English."

The library board in the metro Atlanta county is also considering making English the default language on the self check-out screens, eliminating a prompt that now asks patrons to choose between English and Spanish. Like the budget cut, the initiative for such a move seems to have come from some patrons.

Earlier this year, a couple of months after the library started buying novels in Spanish with a $2,200 budget, the board received an e-mail from a woman identifying herself as a Gwinnett County resident who said she didn't want any more purchases "of pleasure reading materials in any language other than English."

"While it is true that Gwinnett County is a melting pot, it is the American way to learn English and to assimilate to our culture, not to make it easy for those who may not be proficient in English," the e-mail said. The sender didn't respond to an e-mail from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Another resident associated with the Gwinnett County Public Library Watch, a group that pushed for the director's firing in its effort "to harmonize the library with the conservative values of Gwinnett County families," according to its website, also declined to comment.

"I can already see some people are thinking we are anti-Hispanic or something and that is not true," Warren Furlow wrote in an e-mail, adding his group did support buying "materials to help them adjust to living in the United States."

Georgia this year passed one of the nation's strictest laws on immigration, requiring agencies to verify that adults seeking many state-administered benefits are in the country legally.

Nationwide, libraries are increasingly buying best-sellers in many languages because they attract patrons and make them more likely to get English instruction, said Leslie Burger, president-elect of the American Library Association.

Gwinnett library staff declined to talk about the change, saying they had to do what the board ordered. The library system has 798 adult Spanish titles, about 40 per cent of which are checked out on an average day, slightly more than the percentage of all checked-out books, said Mabel Anne Kincheloe, the library system's director of materials management. The library will spend about $12,000 - out of a $22.2 million annual budget - for Spanish-language adult nonfiction in the next fiscal year, she said.

In neighbouring DeKalb County, which also has a large percentage of Hispanics, the libraries started collecting books in various languages - including Spanish and Chinese - in 1999, said collection management coordinator David Tucker. He said the library had a $30,000 budget for multilingual materials this year and will continue to add Spanish titles in both fiction and nonfiction because "they're in demand."

Latino advocates were outraged when told of the Gwinnett budget cut, which some said was rare across the country.

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

Jerry Gonzalez of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials recently organized a drive to get Gwinnett library cards to more Hispanics there.

"They're doing a disservice to the community, not providing a large segment of the taxpaying base with basic services," he said of the budget cut. "They'll see a very significant backlash."

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