Banned books library

San Antonio is one of four cities (the others being Houston, Albuquerque, and Tuscon) that will host, what Diaz has dubbed, “underground libraries,” community-minded reference/lending facilities forged with the primary purpose of keeping at least four copies of each book that was taken out of Arizona classrooms when the HB2281 law (sounds like a virus vaccine, no?) effectively killed off Tucson's ethnic studies and sent boxes of Latino literature to a book depository for the interim.

Greg Harman - The shelves at SWU's Underground Library are organized by first edition, signed, fiction, poetry, and banned. Underground Librarian Diana Lopez said that recognized local writers like Sandra Cisneros and Dagoberto Gilb have contributed works to the effort. SA Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla even donated multiple copies of her book of poetry, Curandera, republished with "Banned in Arizona" on the cover.

 San Antonio's Underground Library erupts into operation this Thursday, May 10, with a reading from Gustavo Arellano, the much-syndicated Ask a Mexican columnist, who has just written a subversively salivating book called Taco USA (see review "Time of Mex-Tex"). On Arizona's recent legislative policies, the author, who is a great fan of Librotraficante, says: "Those idiot politicians thought that Mexicans and their allies would just allow them to strip the libraries and classrooms of such books; instead, it created the opposite effect. Sure, Arizona law has now pushed Latino literature to the back of the burro, but now you have a vibrant movement of people pushing and reading these books, and authors more than willing to engage in such actions to promote literature. To use that terrible but so apropos cliche, the sleeping Mexican has woken up." •

Lone Bookstore's Last Chapter

Fourth-graders at C. M. Macdonell Elementary School in Laredo who wrote letters trying to persuade their bookstore, the only one in town, not to close.









Mary Benavides steps from behind the cash register several times a day to embrace the mourners. For more than 30 years, she has managed the mall's B. Dalton outlet -- the only bookstore in Laredo. It will close next month.

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All B. Daltons nationwide are closing, as corporate parent Barnes & Noble shutters the chain. In this era of mega-bookstores with cafes and cozy couches and 150,000 titles -- and with more than a million books available online -- B. Dalton's cramped outlets no longer make economic sense.

Xavier Garcia and Joe Garcia IV read at the B. Dalton bookstore in Laredo, Texas.


The city council is expected to pass a resolution Monday proclaiming that Laredo needs a bookstore. State lawmakers have promised to write letters. A "Save Laredo's Bookstore" page on Facebook has 530 members and a city committee is circulating petitions. The theme of their campaign: Laredo Reads.

Now (Monday, 1.15pm) up to 6





Jose Angel, 10, stands in front of two boards with English and Spanish words in his bilingual class.




Author Sonia Nazario saw that first-hand when the bookstore manager and several high-school teachers invited her this fall to discuss her book "Enrique's Journey." Over two days, Ms. Nazario spoke to 4,000 people, and some waited hours for her autograph. "It was like the hottest rock star had shown up in town," she said. "I've never had such a reception in my life."

Nearly 2,000 copies of her book sold in Laredo, and there was a waiting list for all 75 copies at the public library.

"Books created a communal bond in what was, to me, an unlikely place," Ms. Nazario said. "The beating heart of that was the bookstore."

Author Without Borders

The writer William T. Vollmann at the Terrace Park Cemetery in Holtville, Calif., a burial place for illegal immigrants who have died crossing the border.






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William T. Vollmann, legendarily prolific, writes in a studio that used to be a restaurant in Sacramento. The place is surrounded by a big parking lot where he encourages homeless people to camp out. Inside he runs a one-man assembly line. His bibliography so far includes nine novels, including “Europe Central,” which won the National Book Award in 2005; three collections of stories; a seven-volume, 3,000-page history of violence; a book-length essay on poverty; and a travel book about hopping freight trains, a hobby of his even though his balance is so bad that he has to use a plastic bucket as a stepstool.

Mr. Vollmann’s newest book, “Imperial,” which comes out from the Viking Press on Thursday, costs $55 and is 1,300 pages long — so heavy, he observed recently, that if you dropped it, you’d break a toe. A companion volume, to be published next month by powerHouse Books, contains some 200 photographs he took while working on “Imperial,” for which he also wore a spy camera while trying to infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable raft down the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the most polluted stream in America. The water, he writes, tasted like the Salk polio vaccine.

Mr. Vollmann, who just turned 50, is a loner, a bit of a recluse, despite being married and the father of a daughter, and a throwback: a wandering, try-anything writer-journalist in the tradition of Steinbeck or Jack London. Some people think he’s a little nuts.

A little?

To research “The Rifles,” a novel partly about the 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic, Mr. Vollmann spent two weeks alone at the magnetic North Pole, where he suffered frostbite and permanently burned off his eyebrows when he accidentally set his sleeping bag on fire. But being eyebrowless has its advantages, he discovered more recently, while experimenting with cross-dressing to research a novel he’s now writing about the transgendered. He didn’t have to pluck his brows when getting made up.

Well, that's an advantage.

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A Drive Through ‘Imperial’

“Imperial,” which is about Imperial County in California, the vast, flat and arid region in the southeastern part of the state, bordering Mexico, is an extreme Vollmann production: brilliant in places, practically unreadable in others. There are lyrical passages, and others edging over into magenta (“And change came; just as the urine of dehydrated people is turbid and dark, failing in transparency, so the evening sunlight, as if heated to exhaustion by and with itself, now lost the glaring whiteness which had characterized it since early morning, and it oozed down upon the pavement to stain it with gold”), along with scientific chapters, complete with graphs, on salinization and agricultural productivity, and 175 pages of notes. A page early on has a title warning of “Impending Aridity.”

Phew! Exhausting just reading this paragraph.

The book is a little like the Imperial Valley itself: pathless, fascinating, exhausting. Its two great themes are illegal immigration — the struggle of countless thousands of Mexicans to sneak into the United States through the Imperial Valley — and water, which has transformed the valley, or parts of it, from desert to seeming paradise but at great environmental cost.

Mr. Vollmann’s editors urged him to cut, he said, and he resisted: “We always go round and round. They want me to cut, and I argue, so they cut my royalties, and I agree never to write a long book again.” He acknowledged that the length of “Imperial” might cost him readers but said: “I don’t care. It seems like the important thing in life is pleasing ourselves. The world doesn’t owe me a living, and if the world doesn’t want to buy my books, that’s my problem.”

Good point.

On a cloudless, sun-baked day last week Mr. Vollmann, with a characteristically bad haircut, toured some of the landscapes that had inspired him, traveling from San Diego across the border to the Mexican town of Tecate, down the mountainous, hairpin road to Mexicali and then back across the border into California, through the Imperial Valley to the Salton Sea, an enormous inland lake that is the region’s agricultural sink, so hyper-saline from irrigation runoff that it is almost toxic.

Along the way, some of the secrets of Mr. Vollmann’s method began to reveal themselves. Mr. Vollmann doesn’t drive, and his Spanish is only so-so, so he was driven, as he was for most of the 12 years it took him to write the book, by Terrie Petree, who also served as an interpreter. She learned her Spanish as a Mormon missionary in northern Spain, which also prepared her, she said, for having doors shut in her face. Mr. Vollmann sat in the passenger seat, taking in everything and peppering Ms. Petree with questions. Far from manic, he was preternaturally calm and patient, dosing himself with nothing stronger than bottled water.

Being a passenger certainly allows him to observe everything. I remember that feeling when we rode the bus from Guadalajara to Melaque: I could see everything at my leisure.

Mr. Vollmann is almost excessively polite, and in conversation has a salesman’s habit of using your first name in every other sentence. He seems more innocent than worldly, driven by insatiable curiosity. In Mexicali he turned an annoying and time-consuming visit to a police station, occasioned by what appeared to be a traffic-fine shakedown, into an interview with the station’s chief of information. He also charmed a blushing secretary there and learned the name of the best taco joint in town.

And he speak Spanish poorly.