October 23, 2024 • 46 mins
Margaret finishes telling Samantha McVey some of the history of public libraries and how the first Puerto Rican librarian in the US changed everything.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're
a weekly reminder that despite all the bad things that
are happening, there's people who try to do things about
the bad things that are happening. And I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and with me this week to talk about
libraries is Samantha McVay. Hi, Hi, how are you.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
I'm great? Thanks for having me on again. I love
being a part of the show.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yay, yeah, yeah, Okay, I have a question. You're the
host of stuff mom never told you? Correct, I don't
know that your relationship with your own mother. Does your
mom ever get mad about the implication that she never
told you these things?
Speaker 1 (00:39):
So that's a loaded question. I don't have time. This
is a real loaded question, Okay, for need this. When
I told my mother I was quitting my social work
job to become a podcaster, which, as you would expect,
first thing was radio what does that mean? Yeah? That
was that, and then it went into you know, feminist show.
(01:01):
Oh no, you've become one of those people who was
ruining the world, And that proceeded to a cry session
and I was ignoring each other for a while. Better yet,
speaking of libraries, I actually myself. My co host recently
wrote a book based on our show, Intersectional Feminism, and
I have completely hidden that from my mother in fear
(01:22):
of her being angry with me.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Oh shit, I'm sorry that I brought it up. Thank
you for your honesty about.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
It anyway, bluded questions. But I will say, because my
mother is absolutely against those things, there's a lot that
my mother did not tell me.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, so you have a lot of material for the show.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah, so there you go.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Mine would be the like, there's them. I think it's
reductrous or something has a meme or headline or whatever
of a you know, parent just accidentally forgot to mention
that health issue they've been struggling with for forty years
that runs in the family. Yeah, I'm just like, whoops,
never brought that one up.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
I can't add that to the trauma that I've endured
because I'm adopted.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
So oh yeah, no, fair enough.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
There's so many loaded things that we're talking about. I
apologize for the trauma dumping.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Yeah nope. Now I'm just gonna let me see if
I can come up with another thing to accidentally bring
up that I.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Uh, as you can see, I'm handling it well, you
did great.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Oh yeah, Sophie is our producer. Hi, Sophie, Okay. I
was when you asked that question, I was like, oh,
I knows.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
She knows a little bit of trauma. We kind of
bonded over it. I was like, listen loaded questions. You
can't come in with those types of questions as an intro.
I love making an awkward presence.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm gonna I'm gonna come up with
some even worse ones later. That's my plan. Our audio
engineer is Rory Hi.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Rory Hi Roy Hello, Sorry about the trauma dumping on
YouTube arth.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
The music was written for us by Unwoman and the
main subject this week is New York and probably the
US's first Puerto Rican librarian. She was an Afro Puerto
Rican author in puppeteer and trilingual hero named Puta Bepre
and she is a fascinating subject. I couldn't find a
(03:20):
biography on her, like a book length biography on her,
but there's a lot of academic papers librarians. There's a
lot of academic papers about her and a lot of
like pop articles about her. So I put together the
best that I can. Her name was the first one
on the list that was given to me by a
librarian at the conference this year, And yeah, I was
(03:41):
gonna do them all, but it looks like I'm doing
Purim and the rest will do it some other time.
Poor A Belprey was born on February second. Normally you'd
say what year someone was born after you say the date.
Who fucking knows what year she was born. Sources will
claim at ninety nine, nineteen oh one, nineteen oh two,
(04:03):
and nineteen oh three. She claimed nineteen oh three, so
I'm going to go with that one. I will let
her self identify birth year. It's almost like weird, Well,
they're supporting documents claiming other years, so it's not just
a like we don't trust her or whatever. Right, she
was generally reasonably cagey about her time in Puerto Rico
as a kid, and which, you know, whatever, Like no
(04:26):
one needs to talk about their childhood unless the host
of a podcast brings it up rudely at the top
of an episode. So like, she's not a public figure,
she's a librarian. You know, a lot of what is
known about her are educated guesses. But she was one
of five kids who grew up in a loving and
religious family, most likely Catholic, but she didn't seem to
write or talk much about religion as best as I
(04:48):
can tell. She also seems to have written or talked
very little about being black. We've talked about this before
on the show, Like on the episodes we did about
the Young Lords, which is this Puerto Rican I guess
Hall sort of the Puerto Rican Black Panthers, and that's fair,
but also they're peers, so it's like, well, then the
black Panthers are the Black Young Lords whatever, you know, right, Anyway,
(05:11):
we talked about how Puerto Rican racial identity, at least
historically looks really different than race looks in the Continental US.
So it's like, makes a lot of sense that she
identified strongly as Puerto Rican and that is mostly what
she talked about. She later married a black man and
regularly lived in black neighborhoods, but it seems that her
identity was primarily Puerto Rican. What she did write and
(05:35):
talk about was her connection to the legacy of Puerto
Rican folklore. She wrote quote, I grew up in a
home of storytellers, listening to stories which had been handed
down by word of mouth for generations. As a child,
I enjoyed telling many of these tales that I had heard.
The characters became quite real to me. I remember during
(05:56):
school recess that some of us would gather under the
shade of the tam entree. There we would take turns
telling stories. The best guess that people make it almost
feels like ghoulish, the way that people write biographies, where
you're like trying to dredge up this stuff that people
clearly just didn't really want to talk about, and there's
no reason that anyone should really care about the real,
specific nitty gritty of the class upbringing of this you
(06:19):
know person, But yeah, you know, here we are. The
best guess is that she was in a family that
was sort of culturally middle class, but without money, right,
without much money. Her father was a building contractor who
moved the family around a lot for work, and she
grew up speaking Spanish, English, and French, and both of
her parents were literate. Her older sister at least taught
(06:42):
in Puerto Rico for ten years before moving to New
York City. This is one of the earlier waves of
Puerto Rican movement into the US. And again, if you
want to hear way more about that. Listen to our
episodes about the young Lords. Porta graduated high school in
nineteen nineteen, then started college at the University of Puerto Rico.
But when Alise got married in nineteen twenty, the whole
(07:03):
family traveled to New York City for the wedding and
Poro was like, yeah, fuck it, I'm staying in New York.
And so she stayed in New York and at first
she got work as a seamstress, which was one of
the main jobs available to Puerto Rican immigrants at the time.
But then in nineteen twenty one, she was hired by
the Public Library of New York, which means I can
(07:27):
introduce another hero of the episode. Ernestine Rose never met
anyone named Ernestine. One day. I'm going to meet a
trans woman named Ernestine, because trans women loved to name
ourselves like weird old timing names, said Margaret. And I
definitely know some like Agatha's and you know, whatever.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Good name.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
I haven't met a Gertrude yet, but it'll happen, oh hope.
So Ernestine Rose was named after Ernestine Rose, which made
her hard to look up because it was a much
more famous Ernestine Rose. The first, Ernestine Rose was an
abolition and suffer just who I don't know a ton about.
But Wikipedia called her the first Jewish feminist, or rather
Wikipedia's as that other people called her that, and who
(08:08):
am I to argue with? I didn't read much about her.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
We're going to mark that, okay, I.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Know, because it was like, you can only follow each
rabbit hole like a couple steps right, Rose, the younger
one is like the already the side character. And then
I was like, now I'm going to read about this.
I'm like, wait a second, what am I doing? I
have I have to record at some point?
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Did you chase after so many? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:34):
How do you handle the like level?
Speaker 1 (08:36):
I have so many mini series episodes because it ends
up being like I have a thought and then that
thought turns into see, we did a whole religious trauma
and I thought it might be two parter. It's thirteen
parts all an hour.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Long, amazing. I really want to listen to that one.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
So it goes bad. I don't do well. I don't
do well.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
How long ago? How how far back?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Last year?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
This year? Year?
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Being in this year, because we were talking about just
overall the new anti feminist movement and then talking about
anti abortion movements and how it's very much rooted into
religious trauma and white supremacy. So it became a whole thing,
and then we went down so many rabbit holes. But
it's specific honestly to American Baptists and like that. We
(09:22):
don't even talk much about Catholicism. And that's how deep
we went in without going there.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, it was a thing.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, okay, So the answer is that you would also
now be doing a whole side episode about Ernestine Rose
one and Ernestine Rose two. I appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
You're doing better at controlling this and actually being really
really like following through things as opposed to myself, who
I'm like, I can definitely do this in thirteen parts.
Let's go. So you're doing.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Great, Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, so much discipline. So our Ernestine
that we're going to talk about the librarian Ernestine. We're
going to call her Ernestine even though she isn't related
to Ernestine Senior, just because it was funny to me.
Both of them seem cool as hell. Ernestine Junior is
this white lady who may or may not have been Jewish.
She apparently claimed she was Jewish and then one historian
(10:13):
I read disputes this who graduated from library school in
nineteen oh five, making her one of the first bona
fide librarians in the United States of America, and she
hit the ground running to try and make libraries cooler.
By nineteen oh eight, she was working hard to make
sure that whatever library she was in was actually integrated
(10:34):
into the ethnic community that it was part of. So
that's like the big thing we're going to talk about
is integrating libraries into the communities that they're part of,
instead of being sort of, you know, a place that
shows up and is like everyone should think like these
white people think. And at the beginning, this meant serving
the Yiddish and Russian speaking Jewish community that she worked in,
(10:57):
which is probably the community we've talked about a thousand
times on this show, because that's where all the weird
the anarchists and communists from Russia were hanging out because
they were all Yiddish speaking Jews in like the nineteen
tens in New York City, and later she moved to
Harlem to a black and Jewish community and immediately started
(11:19):
hiring non white people for the library, like Katherine Allen,
a Black Woman. She also organized the nineteen twenty one
exhibition of Quote Negro art at the library, which, according
to author George Hutchinson, Quote marked the beginning of the
Harlem Renaissance in the visual arts. She made Shit Happen then,
(11:40):
also in nineteen twenty one, she hired puro Belprey because
there was a sizeable and growing Puerto Rican community in
the neighborhood as well. She actually first tried to hire Elease,
the sister who got married, but then Elisa's husband told
her she wasn't allowed to go get this job. It's
like a throwaway line, like most of the things you
(12:00):
read are like was offered to a Lease who was
busy and couldn't do it, And then you read the
slightly more in depth piece and is like her husband
told her she couldn't, so she didn't.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
She wasn't allowed.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, unlike Pora, who did not get married until she
was forty, which is probably the better way to go
about it in certain circumstances like an incredibly patriarchal culture
of the United States at the time, and so Pooro
was hired as the Hispanic assistant, working in both the
adult and children's rooms of the library. Her passion was
(12:32):
clearly the children's room. This was the one hundred and
thirty fifth Street branch of the library in Harlem during
the Harlem Renaissance, and soon the library was the center
of that cultural renaissance, or was a center of that
cultural renaissance. And I still haven't deep dived the Harlem Renaissance,
and I'm not going to do it today, But we've
touched on a few times, like on our episodes about
Ben Fletcher, the black labor organizer from Philly. Also, my
(12:56):
great grandmother was like a white artist who knew a
lot of the people in scene, especially where it overlapped
with like leftism more broadly. And so I really want
to learn more about it at some point, but I
didn't this time. Suffice it to say, Harlem was the
coolest shit place in the nineteen twenties where black people
did a ton of amazing cultural stuff, and the library
(13:17):
was part of it. It was intentionally part of it.
Because librarians didn't start off as magically known as a
place where people could meet and do things. It seems
like they were seen as white places for white stuff.
Until all these people at the one hundred and thirty
Fifth Street branch changed that they held talks by like Langston,
(13:38):
Hughes and a bunch of other folks, and one librarian
later wrote about this time quote, if you are familiar
with Harlem, you are aware of the fact that the
streets are frequently made impassable by the many soapbox speakers
and their enthusiastic audiences. It occurred to us that if
people will listen to politics and patent medicines, then they
will listen to education, provided it as well presented to them.
(14:02):
So we employed one of the most eloquent and most
popular of these speakers and paid him to address large
crowds at strategic corners on the streets of Harlem once
a week. These people were urged to come to a
meeting at the library. Some two thousand people were reached
each week. If out of these fifty appeared at the library,
we were confident that something worthwhile had been accomplished. And
(14:26):
so they just yeah, got people to come to the library.
The other thing that I think is really important to
take away from that is from the very beginning, soapboxing,
which everyone understands, is the podcasting of the oldie times,
frequently mixed up politics and patent medicines, which brings us
to the next segment of this show, the advertisers, and
(14:56):
we're back, and so yeah, this library, well the Division
of Negro Literature History in Prince in nineteen twenty five.
Ernestine Rose also helped the first black woman get through
library school, a woman named Nella Larson, who worked for
a while at the one hundred and thirty fifth Street branch,
but is much more famous for her place in literature
as a writer of American modernism. And it's like the
(15:17):
most important novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. And there are
biographies about her. And so I'm like, nope, too much
of a side character. Can't because one day probably topic
of her own.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
We love bonus episodes on our show, so you should
do bonus episodes with this.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
I'm just saying I do two a week. I mean,
I guess you do do five? Yeah? All right, all right,
fair enough.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
You're doing great, Keep going.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
I am so impressed that you also still have time
to come on other people's shows. I am genuinely I'm honored.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
For you and for Sophie anytime, all the time. Oh thanks, Yes,
I love this show. I learned so much.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah. The other the thing that happened in nineteen twenty
five is that Poora Bell Prey enrolled in library school
and soon she's going to become the first Puerto Rican
library in New York City and probably the country. I
really liked the source I read that was like, yeah,
we know, she's the first Puerto Rican library in New
York City, and it's like in parentheses it's like which
(16:19):
realistically probably means the country, but they know they can't
say it because it's not. Because I really appreciate that
verified because like I everyone knows that listens to this.
I'm an enemy of any time anyone says the first
person who did something something because right, like you can't
prove it just anyway whatever my brain works in a
very specific way.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Oh no, I'm with you. Like when we talk about
first on anything, it's understanding that it has to do
with who's writing the history, where the history, historical contexts
come from, and who's also claiming what. So it's always
asterisk because it also you might they just may not
be discovered, and that's okay because that's some amazing things
when you get to discover new.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Information totally being the first isn't the only thing that matters,
you know exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
I'm sure she was just excited to be able to
share her knowledge and her love and her passion.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, and she does it. She does it so much.
She gets involved in writing folklore. She once said, quote,
one of my duties in the children's room was to
read the fairytale shelves. Thus the folklore of the world
opened for me. As I shelved the books, I searched
for some of the folk tales I had heard at home.
(17:29):
There wasn't even one. A sudden feeling of loss rose
within me. And so she's at library school and she
has this teacher, another Librarrian folklorist, a white woman named
Mary gold Davis. So during that class she writes a
children's book called Peezzi Martine. This goes on to be
published in nineteen thirty two as the first Spanish language
(17:52):
children's book published by a mainstream press in the United States.
And it is a romance between a cockroach and a mouse.
And she is very clear this is not her story.
She heard this from her grandmother, and it is a
Puerto Rican story, like a lot of I've only been
able to track down some of her stuff, and it'll
specifically say like a Puerto Rican story rather than like
(18:14):
it'll have her name as the author, but instead of saying,
like buy what about prey, it would say like a
Puerto Rican story. It's it's it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Yeah, it's so interesting when you see people with the
love for their heritage, because we've seen it more and
more than goodness with like the indigenous people bringing their
own folklore or like any kind of storytelling to life,
and they share it with people and they make sure
to write it because they we know with the colonization,
(18:42):
we know and all this stuff white people trying to
erase history. Part of raising that history is those lores
and making trying to make them disappear or trying to
make them evil. We know all about that. So having
people who take the opportunity and time to write it
down so that they can share and be preserved, it's
such a phenomenal thing to see and being able to
(19:05):
see their love for their heritage, even like it just
feels like I'm being honored, like I'm being privileged to
see and hear about their culture, and I love that aspect.
Folklore is so beautiful to me, just because of that.
When I started learning more about like Korean folklore, I
was like, what, And you just feel this sense of
connectedness to something that you may not have like in
(19:26):
so long or ever. So that's something to two with,
like we should definitely be honoring people like her, Yeah,
who are preserving such tales and traditions. I love that.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
No, that makes a lot of sense to me. And
it's interesting because I one of the things that I
end up I read a lot of like nineteenth century
folk tales, or rather nineteenth century writing down of folk tales,
and so a lot of the older ones, the first
ones in English are often written by these sort of
white interlopers or like white observers who are trying to
be good.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
It's like kind of all over the board. They're either like,
check out this wacky thing that they believe in Japan,
and other times they're like, I'm white and I've lived
in Japan for forty years and I've tried really hard
to do this right, you know. Yeah, And it's like
really interesting. But people actually writing from that culture, which
is what we see more now, is you're more guaranteed
(20:17):
to get the like actual love of that culture instead
of like yeah, and it's funny too because you'll still
even see, like check out this weird thing the Ukrainians
believe over there in weird Land, you know, because the
Ukrainians weren't white in the Victorian mind, like I mean whatever,
they weren't, right. It's complicated, but it's complicating, Yeah, but
(20:38):
it's interesting they bring up this thing about writing these
stories down because it's when we talk about next. Libraries
had a problem. They were colonized as fuck, right, as
like an institution, So the only real stories by the
library's mind are the ones that are written down. So
storytelling for Storytelling Hour had to come from a book.
Western libraries didn't understand the idea of oral literacy yet, right,
(21:01):
the idea that you can be aware of your culture
through oral traditions. Poor about Pray broke that she was
the first person probably to appeal and win the right
to tell stories that had never been written down. During storytime,
Mary gold Davis, her teacher, told her, tell your stories,
(21:23):
but only tell the children that none of these stories
have been written down, but maybe someday they will. It's
like this like almost paternalistic, but it's still this like
love where like yeah, it isn't amazing, but one day
they'll be real stories. But it's still like, it's still
the pretty genuine like poor actually has very She thought
very highly of the white women librarians who sought her
out and nurtured her career and helped her break into
(21:44):
this white dominated field. Right, So she told the stories
that eventually would find their way into another one of
her books, The Tiger and the Rabbit, which was the
first English language collection of Puerto Rican folklore in the US.
And she starts writing, and her branch is doing amazing
stuff in the black community. And then in nineteen twenty
nine she transfers to one hundred and fifteenth Street branch
(22:07):
in a Puerto Rican community, and it's here that she
really hits her stride and starts kicking ass as a librarian.
As far as I can tell, she pioneered Spanish language
content in public libraries. I expect she did it as
part of a team of people who are also amazing, right,
But she worked her ass off to get the community
involved in the library. At some point she watched a
(22:30):
puppet show at her branch and was like, oh, this
is the shit puppet's rule. I'm sure, that's how she
said it. And so for the rest of her life
she worked with kids to put on puppet shows because
that was part of it, was that by doing puppets
you could bring the kids into it, right. And she
went around to churches, to community centers, to neighborhood organizations
and schools to put on shows and like just do
(22:53):
outreach into community. She did bilingual shows regularly too, not
just Spanish language shows. And this just like hadn't been done.
She put on events for three Kings Day, a Puerto
Rican holiday, and she said this quote indirectly presented the
library to this group in a way that no other
activity could have done. Their confidence was gained. The library
(23:17):
put on complete programs in Spanish for children and for adults,
and basically they did at the one hundred and fifteenth
branch what one hundred and thirty fifth branch did for
the black community. And there's a downside to this, although
I've read conflicting tales of it, there's a problem if
I actually looking into too many sources, as they all
started arguing with each other, you know, right, Okay, so
(23:38):
this isn't the librarian's fault. But instead of racist city
government's fault. Basically, these two libraries served as quote ghettos
where all black and Spanish language content could be put,
where all black and latinae workers could be hired. So
it was like you try and get hired as a
black worker, and they'll be like, oh, we'll go up
to one hundred and thirty fifth and they're like that's
not where I live, you know, and they'd be like, oh,
(24:00):
we already have a black library, like we don't need
another one. And so that's a problem, and this limits
their career advancement, right because you can only work in
this one place.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Right instead of opening spots or making opening doors that
are like compete with each other. Here you go, good luck.
And this is because you need to fight this space.
The small amount of space is all we have for you.
But anyway, keep going.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yes, So in nineteen thirty nine, the Puerto Rican community
had moved a bit in the city, so she moved
once again to East one hundred and tenth Street and
kept up all the same stuff, bilingual story hour, reading clubs,
puppet theater, you name it. But you know what they
didn't have at these libraries ads because they were tax
(24:44):
funded instead of funded by private companies. But we, on
the other hand, are funded by private companies. And that
is just the compromises that everyone makes all the time,
like the following compromises. Here they are and we're back.
(25:08):
In nineteen forty. She goes to the ala, the American
Library Association convention in Cincinnati, and while she's there, she
meets a musician and composer named Clarence Cameron White, who
is we're going to get to the first like potential
drama that I'm entirely inferring. The way that the story
is presented is that she meets him and then they
(25:28):
get married a couple years later, and everything's happy and great.
And I started writing it by reading about him and
being like, oh, he was recently widowed or widowered or whatever.
He recently lost his wife. The complication she meets him
in nineteen forty, his wife doesn't tie until nineteen forty two,
and they don't get married till nineteen forty three. What happened?
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Drama?
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Probably they were just friends and then yeah, are they?
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Can they be friends? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (25:56):
I mean can they? Yeah? Man and a woman don't
seem posp but like a figure like this, every version
of her history is going to be a little bit sanitized.
I mean, I found no scandal. Like I'm not like
particularly worried that there's some like crazy skeleton in her closet.
But it's like when you're talking about like a children's
puppeteer person like, no one's like trying to write about
(26:18):
anything salacious, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Being the other woman, you know, her personality and the
everything about her reminds me of someone like my old
drama teacher, who are so passionate and so performed, Like
they perform and they love and they tell stories and
they understand the importance of puppetry like and bringing in,
like acting out these different characters. I could only imagine
(26:43):
what kind of performances she gave in her storytelling, and
with that, what type of passion she has, and just
like in her imagination being able to relay these stories
in a way that she was so successful enough to
be known to do this as well as writing these stories,
I just imagine she's just one of those people no
totally that you can't help but notice anyway. Yeah, and
(27:05):
then the effort she puts in telling these stories is
not telling a story, it is living that story for
the children or with the children, and I could only
imagine that's kind of how she also lived life.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
I believe it.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
So who knows, maybe some drama does happen, because when
you have that much passion, you know, yeah, that makes
it so interesting.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
No, I believe it. And it's it's interesting, right because
you're talking about someone who never had children and gets
married at.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Forty, right, and so you're my type of a woman.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
You're talking about someone who like either lived the like
cat lady life or lived a like pretty wildlife.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
You know, and there's like there we exist to not
have either of those things. Margaret, how dad, it's true,
you're with us, what are you talking about?
Speaker 2 (27:46):
It's true, right, as an unmarried person in her forties,
no children, Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And also and the
reason that I mentioned, my great grandmother, who's like basically
living in New York around the same time as an artist,
also didn't get married until four and then had like
one child, and that's like wasn't normal at all for
someone living, you know, a woman living in the early
(28:09):
part of the twentieth century. Right, So she falls in
love with Clarence White. You know, he's got his own
Wikipedia page as a composer and was one of the
most prominent violinists in the country. And after they get married,
Pura takes a leave of absence from the library to
follow him around on tour for a bit, and then
(28:30):
she goes back to the library and then she's like,
you know what, I actually want to focus on my writing,
and so she just kind of wants to be doing
the art stuff and hell yeah, and so she does
that for a while. She writes. As far as I
can tell, she keeps up the storytelling and the puppets
during this time, but I'm not one hundred percent certain,
but it's like implied, and she writes like eight books.
(28:51):
Seventeen years into married life, her husband dies of larynx
cancer in nineteen sixty. She goes back to the library
to a new post, one that I think they might
have made just for her, the Spanish children specialist. And
so at this point that whole thing about like the
Spanish language stuff only being at one or two branches
is not the case. That was actually some of the
(29:14):
stuff that there seemed to be drama about.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Is.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
I read some people arguing that sort of ghettoization was
not as prominent as other people were claiming and that
it was other issues keeping people from advancing, and I
read a lot of drama about employment discrimination in the
nineteen thirties. Basically, anyway, at this point, Spanish language stuff
all over wherever it's needed, and so she just goes
(29:37):
to every branch where it's needed and helps plan events
and helps bilingualize the New York City Public library system,
which is, if that's all she had done, it would
have been amazing.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Huge.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
If all she had done was write those children's stories,
it would have been amazing. If all she'd done was
be a puppeteer, would have been amazing. Then when she
was sixty five, she was forced to retire, because all
city employees at the time, we're forced to retire at
sixty five. I don't know if that's still the case
or not. I actually wonder because at the top, I
was saying that there's like, all these documents suggest she
(30:08):
was not born in nineteen oh three, but she told
people she was born in nineteen oh three. You know,
I wonder if it was so that she could keep
working a couple extra years.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Uh smart, But.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
I'm not sure, you know, that's entirely my conjecture She
died in nineteen eighty two, but her legacy continues to
this day. Starting in nineteen ninety six, the American Library
Organization gives out an award in Belprey's name every year
for children's books by Latino authors. A librarian originally from
the Dominican Republic named Viennella Rivas told NPR in twenty sixteen, quote,
(30:44):
because of her, we have a story time in Spanish,
we have computer classes in Spanish, and I feel like,
as a Latina librarian, we have a responsibility to continue
doing the work that she started. Shockingly, her books are
out of print right now, despite her being the earliest
known Afro Caribbean American writer, despite there being an award
(31:05):
in her name, And yeah, there are still three more
librarians on that list of cool librarians that I was handed.
So expect to be returning to this subject. But I
wanted to read some of her stories on book club,
but I haven't found a PDF of it yet. The
Internet Archive had one, but they're hacked right now. I
(31:26):
found one really short story and so fuck it, I'm
going to read it to you all.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Now, do you have a puppet.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
I'll pretend to have a puppy.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah, the full experience.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
You all should act as though I have a really
amazing puppet.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Okay, Okay.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
It's actually interesting that you talked about when you were
talking about folklore earlier, and we were talking about how
like indigenous folklore is perceived by others. Right, this story
is going to use the word Indian to describe the
people that's talking about, right, and it's gonna be describing
indigenous people, But the American North American conception of race
(32:00):
isn't necessarily going to apply one to one to in
a Puerto Rican context. And like so it's like interesting
because I can't say as cleanly how it relates to
indigenous culture. Right. Basically, that's my way of saying, if
the story had been written by a white person, I
would be suspect of.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
It, but it was not, gotcha.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
The legend of the Hummingbird from Puerto Rico by POORA Belprey.
Between the towns of Khi and Cidra, far up in
the hills, there was once a small pool fed by
a waterfall that tumbled down the side of the mountain.
The pool was surrounded by pomarosa trees, and the Indians
used to call it Pamarosa Pool. It was the favorite
place of Alita, the daughter of an Indian chief, a
(32:44):
man of power and wealth among the people of the hills.
One day, when Alita had come to the pool to
rest after a long walk, a young Indian came there
to pick some fruit from the trees. Alita was surprised,
for he was not of her tribe. Yet he said
he was no stranger to the pool. This was where
he had first seen Alida, and he had often returned
since then to pick the fruit. Hoping to see her again,
(33:08):
he told her about himself to make her feel at home.
He confessed with honesty and frankness that he was a
member of the dreaded Carab tribe that had so often
attacked the island of Barenkan. As a young boy, he
had been left behind after one of those raids, and
he had stayed on the island ever since. Alida listened
closely to his story, and the two became friends. They
(33:30):
met again in the days that followed, and their friendship
grew stronger. Alida admired the young man's courage in living
among his enemies. She learned to call him by his
Carab name, Taru, and he called her Alida, just as
her own people did. Before long, their friendship had turned
into love. Their meetings by the pool were always brief.
Alida was afraid their secret might be discovered, and careful
(33:53):
though she was. There came a day when someone saw
them and told her father. Alida was forbidden to visit
the Pamrosa Pool, and to put an end to her
romance with the stranger, her father decided to marry her
to a man of his own. Choosing preparations for the
wedding started at once. Alita was torn with grief, and
one evening she cried out to her god, Oh Yuki,
(34:17):
U help me kill me, or do what you will
with me, but do not let me marry this man
whom I do not love. And the great God yukiyou
took pity on her and changed her into a delicate
red flower. Meanwhile, Taru, knowing nothing of Alita's sorrow, still
waited for her by the Pamerosa pool. Day after day
he waited. Sometimes he stayed there until a mantle of
(34:39):
stars was spread across the sky. One night, the moon
took pity on him, Taro. She called from her place
high above the stars, Oh, Taru, wait no longer for Alda,
your secret was made known, and Alita was to be
married to a man of her father's choosing. In her grief,
she called to her god Yukiyu. He heard her plea
for help and changed her into a red flower. Ahi
(35:02):
Ahe cried, Taru, Oh Moon, what is the name of
the red flower? Only Yukayu knows that. The moon replied.
Then Taro called out, O, Yukayu, God of my Alida,
help me too, help me to find her. And just
as the Great God had heard Alida's plea, he listened
now to Tarou and decided to help him. There by
(35:23):
the Pomerosa pool, before the moon and the silent stars,
the Great God changed Taru into a small, many colored bird.
Fly Kalibri, and find your love among the flowers, he said.
Off went the Kalibri, flying swiftly, and as he flew,
his wings made a sweet humming sound. In the morning,
(35:44):
the Indians saw a new bird darting around among the flowers,
swift as an arrow and brilliant as a jewel. They
heard the humming of its wings, and in amazement they
saw it hover in the air over every blossom, kissing
the petals of the flowers with its long, slender bill.
They liked the new bird with the music in its wings,
and they called it humming bird. Ever since then, the
(36:07):
little many colored bird has hovered over every flower he finds,
but returns most often to the flowers that are red.
He is still looking, always looking for the one red
flower that will be his loss, Tolita. He has not
found her yet. That's the story.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
All these do remind me of the indigenous tales. And
the god you were talking about is a Tano god,
which is of the gods of the Puerto Rican indigenous peoples.
I have a failing if we were able to dig
more into her ancestral understand she is probably a part
of that indigenous group, because that's they're from her area
(36:47):
as well, like they are from that area. So I
absolutely believe these are tales from her community. Yeah, which
is gorgeous, And I love that she was able to
preserve that and share that, because that's what we know
when it comes to like indigenous and like especially older
religious groups, is the is the stories of creation, of
(37:08):
love in creation. It is so beautiful, and I love
that she preserved that so we could hear these stories
I know.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
And I like, I want to find so many more
of them, and I guess I have to wait for
the Internet archive to be unhacked or I need to.
Like I found like some used versions of the books,
but they were like you know how Amazon.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Automotba level like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Like they're like price jacked up to two hundred and
fifty dollars or whatever, you know, right, and yeah, no,
I I find it fascinating, and I find it fascinating
that they're out of print, and you know, I I
hope someone does something about that, but right, especially because like, yeah,
I love reading the earliest versions of folk tales I
can find, but usually that means reading white interpretations of
(37:55):
folk tales and so reading not that. But the oldest
that I can find is like from the sweet Spot,
you know.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Right, and on top of that, someone who heard it
from an area that she knew, who was familiar with
that that was her home.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Like one of the best parts to this is learning
about indigenous people that I didn't know anything about. I
know nothing about yuko U and Akabat god in itself
and which we love on our show. We love doing
like mythical goddesses and creatures and all of those, because
you know there's so much power behind that, yeah, and
the reason people believe in them. But not knowing that
obviously Puerto Rico, it makes sense to know there's an
(38:32):
indigenous group there, yeah, and community there that needs to
be preserved and their history should be preserved and deserved
to be preserved. Uh yeah, probably should be in power
whatever whatnot. But all of that to say is now,
like you brought this understanding through the talks of a library.
I love. I love the connectedness of it, I.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Know, and I love that it's like the work that
she did about keeping this stuff alive. And then like,
obviously language is an important part of I mean, obviously
Spanish is in the indigenous language, but compared to English,
for an immigrant community, it's like really important to have
Stuffy specifically, Yeah, just like making the library a space
(39:12):
that's actually for the communities as part of I just
I was really impressed by her story, and I like,
and it's a lot of stuff that I take for granted,
like even the story about the origin of libraries. I
had just been like, right, oh, yeah, of course a
country has to a country has to have roads. A
country has to have public lending libraries, otherwise it's not
really a country, is it. And it's like, well, actually, uh,
(39:34):
you know, we're pretty new to having them.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Like, it's also a story about understanding how important that
history is and librarians are and what they bring to
a community as we're in one of the worst states
of for librarians and libraries and banned books, and a
reminder of like, like how important these stories are, Yeah,
that so many cannot understand because culturally we should be
(39:59):
able to learn about these things, and we people should
know about these groups of people who have always existed,
existed before them, you know, for us. So all of
that is beautiful, as well as the fact that you know,
I love things like the little libraries. You know that
you see the look a birdhouse looking, Yeah, libraries. But
(40:20):
in order to kind of take back control from those
who are trying to ban books and trying to like
make libraries the enemies somehow, when stories like these are
so important and then people like her brought traditions and
tell folklore to life to children who didn't understand or
(40:40):
maybe for a long time, especially you know, you know,
as a person who immigrated to the US was taught
to learn what learn US culture and white culture, essentially
to truly understand the country if you want to be
a citizen, instead of understanding that their culture was just
as important to the makeup of this area, specifically New
(41:02):
Yorkers who are from Puerto Rico and children who may
have been born in New York but their families are
from Puerto Rico and then being able to learn about
their culture and to appreciate their own culture. Like, wow,
she did so much in such an early time. Like
obviously I'm very excited. Yeah, you opened up these big
box and I'm like, oh my god, I love everything
(41:22):
about this, including the libraries.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Yeah, no, totally. And it's just like I want to
fly on the wall. That stuff so bad, you know,
Like and even it ties into what you're saying just
now ties into how one of the problems with the
early libraries, including you know, some of the women's ones
and the free black ones and stuff, is they fell
into this idea that like this is for the improvement
of people by reading philosophy and stuff. And I'll read
(41:45):
some philosophy here and there. Right, I'm not I get it.
I'm I think that that stuff matters. But this idea
that fiction is distinct as this like lesser thing is
something that we're finally starting to break away from. And
I think part of the way that we break away
from it is exactly what you're talking about about, how
these stories and this idea of culture, like stories are
(42:07):
how you preserve culture in a lot of ways, and
so like stories matter, fiction matters just as much, you know. Yeah,
And I love I just think libraries are cool. I've
already spoken it too so far on this tour, and
like I can't wait to speak at more of them.
And yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
One of my favorite things. Again, like I will continue
to go to the different cities or different places and
find libraries. Went to New York and we went to
the library immediately, we explored everything. But thank you. I
was gonna say one of the two things. One, I
love that story. I love being able to hear her
writing because it is It's exactly right, you know, when
you thirst for a cultural like folklore, that is exactly
(42:47):
what I would like to hear. Like that was perfectly done,
and you telling it was so perfectly like, Yeah, obviously
Margaret is a writer. She's definitely a storyteller here. It
is like being able to hear it through you. Both
of those were shows, kiss, so thank you for sharing
with me.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Oh, thank you, well, thanks for coming on to my
episode about libraries. There's going to be more of them.
And yeah, if people want to hear more stories about
stuff that their mom never told them and then accidentally
ask really personal questions that you don't intend to ask,
where can they do that?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Well, we do talk a lot about our trauma as
in fact, I started Stuff Mom Never Told You by
talking about the METO movement and the trauma. So there
you go. But that Stuff Mom Never Told You you
can listen to us wherever you listen to your podcast.
We have twelve years worth of episodes. So so if you
want to go listen to all the different hosts that's
(43:42):
been there, historical context, you want to hear our reactions
to like different elections, which is really still stinged, you
can do that as well. We also have a book
and it's called Stuff Mom Never Told You. Actually at libraries,
we were able to find them that the Seattle library
and a New York library cool Boston who he hadn't
writen the book yet, so if you want to go
check it out at the library.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Is there, Yeah, And if it's not, you should request it.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah. Please. Also you can find me on McVeigh sam
Instagram for my doggie pictures.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
That is what Instagram is for as far as I'm
concerned exactly. Well, if you want to find me on tour,
you can look at my Instagram or my substack and
I'll be posting tour dates. And if you don't live
in the US, you can tell me that. You could
be like, why aren't you coming to where I live?
And then the answer is the aforementioned dog. And on
some level I'm aware that I could probably find someone
(44:34):
to watch my dog for long enough to go to
a different country, But why would I want to. I
like my dog more than I like you, dear listener,
And that's not even a slight against you. It's just
how much I like my dog. But that's unrelated. And
also I have a book out called The Sapling Cage,
just what I'm a tour about, and you should go
read it is fiction. I have a bunch of other
books too, including the most entertainingly titled is Escape from
(44:56):
Insul Island, So you can go read that if you want,
and you could also listen to Cooler Zone Media because
nothing would be funnier than watching me complain about ads
and then there's no ads and wouldn't that be funny?
And also you can listen to all the cool zone
media podcasts that way, including awful lot of shows including Wait,
(45:18):
there's one I really liked recently. Oh, there's a really
good it could happen here about the future of coffee
done by Prop who does hood politics with Prop and
it is like one of the best encapsulations of climate
crisis and also how capitalism and extractive practices work, and
also how cooperativism. It was just like, I don't even
(45:40):
drink coffee.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
It's also super funny.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Yeah, I've been long holding that Prop is my favorite
explain current events person in my life. He starts off
the episode by just singing a song and yeah, totally,
so you get past that part.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
Yeah, that always throws me off when host starts singing
or rapping. I'm like, what the what's happening? I'm never prepared. Yeah,
but he's like a professional rapper. Yeah, Like, oh, I'm
just good. It's still stocking though to see it live,
Like if I'm on MIC or somebody.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, but I love it. But stay for the stay
for the vibes, Stay for the vibes, and that's it.
We're here at the end of the show.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Hi. Hi. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website folzonemedia dot com, or check
us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Cool Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're
a weekly reminder that despite all the bad things that
are happening, there's people who try to do things about
the bad things that are happening. And I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and with me this week to talk about
libraries is Samantha McVay. Hi, Hi, how are you.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
I'm great? Thanks for having me on again. I love
being a part of the show.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yay, yeah, yeah, Okay, I have a question. You're the
host of stuff mom never told you? Correct, I don't
know that your relationship with your own mother. Does your
mom ever get mad about the implication that she never
told you these things?
Speaker 1 (00:39):
So that's a loaded question. I don't have time. This
is a real loaded question, Okay, for need this. When
I told my mother I was quitting my social work
job to become a podcaster, which, as you would expect,
first thing was radio what does that mean? Yeah? That
was that, and then it went into you know, feminist show.
(01:01):
Oh no, you've become one of those people who was
ruining the world, And that proceeded to a cry session
and I was ignoring each other for a while. Better yet,
speaking of libraries, I actually myself. My co host recently
wrote a book based on our show, Intersectional Feminism, and
I have completely hidden that from my mother in fear
(01:22):
of her being angry with me.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Oh shit, I'm sorry that I brought it up. Thank
you for your honesty about.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
It anyway, bluded questions. But I will say, because my
mother is absolutely against those things, there's a lot that
my mother did not tell me.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, so you have a lot of material for the show.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah, so there you go.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Mine would be the like, there's them. I think it's
reductrous or something has a meme or headline or whatever
of a you know, parent just accidentally forgot to mention
that health issue they've been struggling with for forty years
that runs in the family. Yeah, I'm just like, whoops,
never brought that one up.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
I can't add that to the trauma that I've endured
because I'm adopted.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
So oh yeah, no, fair enough.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
There's so many loaded things that we're talking about. I
apologize for the trauma dumping.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Yeah nope. Now I'm just gonna let me see if
I can come up with another thing to accidentally bring
up that I.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Uh, as you can see, I'm handling it well, you
did great.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Oh yeah, Sophie is our producer. Hi, Sophie, Okay. I
was when you asked that question, I was like, oh,
I knows.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
She knows a little bit of trauma. We kind of
bonded over it. I was like, listen loaded questions. You
can't come in with those types of questions as an intro.
I love making an awkward presence.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm gonna I'm gonna come up with
some even worse ones later. That's my plan. Our audio
engineer is Rory Hi.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Rory Hi Roy Hello, Sorry about the trauma dumping on
YouTube arth.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
The music was written for us by Unwoman and the
main subject this week is New York and probably the
US's first Puerto Rican librarian. She was an Afro Puerto
Rican author in puppeteer and trilingual hero named Puta Bepre
and she is a fascinating subject. I couldn't find a
(03:20):
biography on her, like a book length biography on her,
but there's a lot of academic papers librarians. There's a
lot of academic papers about her and a lot of
like pop articles about her. So I put together the
best that I can. Her name was the first one
on the list that was given to me by a
librarian at the conference this year, And yeah, I was
(03:41):
gonna do them all, but it looks like I'm doing
Purim and the rest will do it some other time.
Poor A Belprey was born on February second. Normally you'd
say what year someone was born after you say the date.
Who fucking knows what year she was born. Sources will
claim at ninety nine, nineteen oh one, nineteen oh two,
(04:03):
and nineteen oh three. She claimed nineteen oh three, so
I'm going to go with that one. I will let
her self identify birth year. It's almost like weird, Well,
they're supporting documents claiming other years, so it's not just
a like we don't trust her or whatever. Right, she
was generally reasonably cagey about her time in Puerto Rico
as a kid, and which, you know, whatever, Like no
(04:26):
one needs to talk about their childhood unless the host
of a podcast brings it up rudely at the top
of an episode. So like, she's not a public figure,
she's a librarian. You know, a lot of what is
known about her are educated guesses. But she was one
of five kids who grew up in a loving and
religious family, most likely Catholic, but she didn't seem to
write or talk much about religion as best as I
(04:48):
can tell. She also seems to have written or talked
very little about being black. We've talked about this before
on the show, Like on the episodes we did about
the Young Lords, which is this Puerto Rican I guess
Hall sort of the Puerto Rican Black Panthers, and that's fair,
but also they're peers, so it's like, well, then the
black Panthers are the Black Young Lords whatever, you know, right, Anyway,
(05:11):
we talked about how Puerto Rican racial identity, at least
historically looks really different than race looks in the Continental US.
So it's like, makes a lot of sense that she
identified strongly as Puerto Rican and that is mostly what
she talked about. She later married a black man and
regularly lived in black neighborhoods, but it seems that her
identity was primarily Puerto Rican. What she did write and
(05:35):
talk about was her connection to the legacy of Puerto
Rican folklore. She wrote quote, I grew up in a
home of storytellers, listening to stories which had been handed
down by word of mouth for generations. As a child,
I enjoyed telling many of these tales that I had heard.
The characters became quite real to me. I remember during
(05:56):
school recess that some of us would gather under the
shade of the tam entree. There we would take turns
telling stories. The best guess that people make it almost
feels like ghoulish, the way that people write biographies, where
you're like trying to dredge up this stuff that people
clearly just didn't really want to talk about, and there's
no reason that anyone should really care about the real,
specific nitty gritty of the class upbringing of this you
(06:19):
know person, But yeah, you know, here we are. The
best guess is that she was in a family that
was sort of culturally middle class, but without money, right,
without much money. Her father was a building contractor who
moved the family around a lot for work, and she
grew up speaking Spanish, English, and French, and both of
her parents were literate. Her older sister at least taught
(06:42):
in Puerto Rico for ten years before moving to New
York City. This is one of the earlier waves of
Puerto Rican movement into the US. And again, if you
want to hear way more about that. Listen to our
episodes about the young Lords. Porta graduated high school in
nineteen nineteen, then started college at the University of Puerto Rico.
But when Alise got married in nineteen twenty, the whole
(07:03):
family traveled to New York City for the wedding and
Poro was like, yeah, fuck it, I'm staying in New York.
And so she stayed in New York and at first
she got work as a seamstress, which was one of
the main jobs available to Puerto Rican immigrants at the time.
But then in nineteen twenty one, she was hired by
the Public Library of New York, which means I can
(07:27):
introduce another hero of the episode. Ernestine Rose never met
anyone named Ernestine. One day. I'm going to meet a
trans woman named Ernestine, because trans women loved to name
ourselves like weird old timing names, said Margaret. And I
definitely know some like Agatha's and you know, whatever.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Good name.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
I haven't met a Gertrude yet, but it'll happen, oh hope.
So Ernestine Rose was named after Ernestine Rose, which made
her hard to look up because it was a much
more famous Ernestine Rose. The first, Ernestine Rose was an
abolition and suffer just who I don't know a ton about.
But Wikipedia called her the first Jewish feminist, or rather
Wikipedia's as that other people called her that, and who
(08:08):
am I to argue with? I didn't read much about her.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
We're going to mark that, okay, I.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Know, because it was like, you can only follow each
rabbit hole like a couple steps right, Rose, the younger
one is like the already the side character. And then
I was like, now I'm going to read about this.
I'm like, wait a second, what am I doing? I
have I have to record at some point?
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Did you chase after so many? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:34):
How do you handle the like level?
Speaker 1 (08:36):
I have so many mini series episodes because it ends
up being like I have a thought and then that
thought turns into see, we did a whole religious trauma
and I thought it might be two parter. It's thirteen
parts all an hour.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Long, amazing. I really want to listen to that one.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
So it goes bad. I don't do well. I don't
do well.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
How long ago? How how far back?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Last year?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
This year? Year?
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Being in this year, because we were talking about just
overall the new anti feminist movement and then talking about
anti abortion movements and how it's very much rooted into
religious trauma and white supremacy. So it became a whole thing,
and then we went down so many rabbit holes. But
it's specific honestly to American Baptists and like that. We
(09:22):
don't even talk much about Catholicism. And that's how deep
we went in without going there.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, it was a thing.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, okay, So the answer is that you would also
now be doing a whole side episode about Ernestine Rose
one and Ernestine Rose two. I appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
You're doing better at controlling this and actually being really
really like following through things as opposed to myself, who
I'm like, I can definitely do this in thirteen parts.
Let's go. So you're doing.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Great, Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, so much discipline. So our Ernestine
that we're going to talk about the librarian Ernestine. We're
going to call her Ernestine even though she isn't related
to Ernestine Senior, just because it was funny to me.
Both of them seem cool as hell. Ernestine Junior is
this white lady who may or may not have been Jewish.
She apparently claimed she was Jewish and then one historian
(10:13):
I read disputes this who graduated from library school in
nineteen oh five, making her one of the first bona
fide librarians in the United States of America, and she
hit the ground running to try and make libraries cooler.
By nineteen oh eight, she was working hard to make
sure that whatever library she was in was actually integrated
(10:34):
into the ethnic community that it was part of. So
that's like the big thing we're going to talk about
is integrating libraries into the communities that they're part of,
instead of being sort of, you know, a place that
shows up and is like everyone should think like these
white people think. And at the beginning, this meant serving
the Yiddish and Russian speaking Jewish community that she worked in,
(10:57):
which is probably the community we've talked about a thousand
times on this show, because that's where all the weird
the anarchists and communists from Russia were hanging out because
they were all Yiddish speaking Jews in like the nineteen
tens in New York City, and later she moved to
Harlem to a black and Jewish community and immediately started
(11:19):
hiring non white people for the library, like Katherine Allen,
a Black Woman. She also organized the nineteen twenty one
exhibition of Quote Negro art at the library, which, according
to author George Hutchinson, Quote marked the beginning of the
Harlem Renaissance in the visual arts. She made Shit Happen then,
(11:40):
also in nineteen twenty one, she hired puro Belprey because
there was a sizeable and growing Puerto Rican community in
the neighborhood as well. She actually first tried to hire Elease,
the sister who got married, but then Elisa's husband told
her she wasn't allowed to go get this job. It's
like a throwaway line, like most of the things you
(12:00):
read are like was offered to a Lease who was
busy and couldn't do it, And then you read the
slightly more in depth piece and is like her husband
told her she couldn't, so she didn't.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
She wasn't allowed.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, unlike Pora, who did not get married until she
was forty, which is probably the better way to go
about it in certain circumstances like an incredibly patriarchal culture
of the United States at the time, and so Pooro
was hired as the Hispanic assistant, working in both the
adult and children's rooms of the library. Her passion was
(12:32):
clearly the children's room. This was the one hundred and
thirty fifth Street branch of the library in Harlem during
the Harlem Renaissance, and soon the library was the center
of that cultural renaissance, or was a center of that
cultural renaissance. And I still haven't deep dived the Harlem Renaissance,
and I'm not going to do it today, But we've
touched on a few times, like on our episodes about
Ben Fletcher, the black labor organizer from Philly. Also, my
(12:56):
great grandmother was like a white artist who knew a
lot of the people in scene, especially where it overlapped
with like leftism more broadly. And so I really want
to learn more about it at some point, but I
didn't this time. Suffice it to say, Harlem was the
coolest shit place in the nineteen twenties where black people
did a ton of amazing cultural stuff, and the library
(13:17):
was part of it. It was intentionally part of it.
Because librarians didn't start off as magically known as a
place where people could meet and do things. It seems
like they were seen as white places for white stuff.
Until all these people at the one hundred and thirty
Fifth Street branch changed that they held talks by like Langston,
(13:38):
Hughes and a bunch of other folks, and one librarian
later wrote about this time quote, if you are familiar
with Harlem, you are aware of the fact that the
streets are frequently made impassable by the many soapbox speakers
and their enthusiastic audiences. It occurred to us that if
people will listen to politics and patent medicines, then they
will listen to education, provided it as well presented to them.
(14:02):
So we employed one of the most eloquent and most
popular of these speakers and paid him to address large
crowds at strategic corners on the streets of Harlem once
a week. These people were urged to come to a
meeting at the library. Some two thousand people were reached
each week. If out of these fifty appeared at the library,
we were confident that something worthwhile had been accomplished. And
(14:26):
so they just yeah, got people to come to the library.
The other thing that I think is really important to
take away from that is from the very beginning, soapboxing,
which everyone understands, is the podcasting of the oldie times,
frequently mixed up politics and patent medicines, which brings us
to the next segment of this show, the advertisers, and
(14:56):
we're back, and so yeah, this library, well the Division
of Negro Literature History in Prince in nineteen twenty five.
Ernestine Rose also helped the first black woman get through
library school, a woman named Nella Larson, who worked for
a while at the one hundred and thirty fifth Street branch,
but is much more famous for her place in literature
as a writer of American modernism. And it's like the
(15:17):
most important novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. And there are
biographies about her. And so I'm like, nope, too much
of a side character. Can't because one day probably topic
of her own.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
We love bonus episodes on our show, so you should
do bonus episodes with this.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
I'm just saying I do two a week. I mean,
I guess you do do five? Yeah? All right, all right,
fair enough.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
You're doing great, Keep going.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
I am so impressed that you also still have time
to come on other people's shows. I am genuinely I'm honored.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
For you and for Sophie anytime, all the time. Oh thanks, Yes,
I love this show. I learned so much.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah. The other the thing that happened in nineteen twenty
five is that Poora Bell Prey enrolled in library school
and soon she's going to become the first Puerto Rican
library in New York City and probably the country. I
really liked the source I read that was like, yeah,
we know, she's the first Puerto Rican library in New
York City, and it's like in parentheses it's like which
(16:19):
realistically probably means the country, but they know they can't
say it because it's not. Because I really appreciate that
verified because like I everyone knows that listens to this.
I'm an enemy of any time anyone says the first
person who did something something because right, like you can't
prove it just anyway whatever my brain works in a
very specific way.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Oh no, I'm with you. Like when we talk about
first on anything, it's understanding that it has to do
with who's writing the history, where the history, historical contexts
come from, and who's also claiming what. So it's always
asterisk because it also you might they just may not
be discovered, and that's okay because that's some amazing things
when you get to discover new.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Information totally being the first isn't the only thing that matters,
you know exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
I'm sure she was just excited to be able to
share her knowledge and her love and her passion.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, and she does it. She does it so much.
She gets involved in writing folklore. She once said, quote,
one of my duties in the children's room was to
read the fairytale shelves. Thus the folklore of the world
opened for me. As I shelved the books, I searched
for some of the folk tales I had heard at home.
(17:29):
There wasn't even one. A sudden feeling of loss rose
within me. And so she's at library school and she
has this teacher, another Librarrian folklorist, a white woman named
Mary gold Davis. So during that class she writes a
children's book called Peezzi Martine. This goes on to be
published in nineteen thirty two as the first Spanish language
(17:52):
children's book published by a mainstream press in the United States.
And it is a romance between a cockroach and a mouse.
And she is very clear this is not her story.
She heard this from her grandmother, and it is a
Puerto Rican story, like a lot of I've only been
able to track down some of her stuff, and it'll
specifically say like a Puerto Rican story rather than like
(18:14):
it'll have her name as the author, but instead of saying,
like buy what about prey, it would say like a
Puerto Rican story. It's it's it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Yeah, it's so interesting when you see people with the
love for their heritage, because we've seen it more and
more than goodness with like the indigenous people bringing their
own folklore or like any kind of storytelling to life,
and they share it with people and they make sure
to write it because they we know with the colonization,
(18:42):
we know and all this stuff white people trying to
erase history. Part of raising that history is those lores
and making trying to make them disappear or trying to
make them evil. We know all about that. So having
people who take the opportunity and time to write it
down so that they can share and be preserved, it's
such a phenomenal thing to see and being able to
(19:05):
see their love for their heritage, even like it just
feels like I'm being honored, like I'm being privileged to
see and hear about their culture, and I love that aspect.
Folklore is so beautiful to me, just because of that.
When I started learning more about like Korean folklore, I
was like, what, And you just feel this sense of
connectedness to something that you may not have like in
(19:26):
so long or ever. So that's something to two with,
like we should definitely be honoring people like her, Yeah,
who are preserving such tales and traditions. I love that.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
No, that makes a lot of sense to me. And
it's interesting because I one of the things that I
end up I read a lot of like nineteenth century
folk tales, or rather nineteenth century writing down of folk tales,
and so a lot of the older ones, the first
ones in English are often written by these sort of
white interlopers or like white observers who are trying to
be good.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
It's like kind of all over the board. They're either like,
check out this wacky thing that they believe in Japan,
and other times they're like, I'm white and I've lived
in Japan for forty years and I've tried really hard
to do this right, you know. Yeah, And it's like
really interesting. But people actually writing from that culture, which
is what we see more now, is you're more guaranteed
(20:17):
to get the like actual love of that culture instead
of like yeah, and it's funny too because you'll still
even see, like check out this weird thing the Ukrainians
believe over there in weird Land, you know, because the
Ukrainians weren't white in the Victorian mind, like I mean whatever,
they weren't, right. It's complicated, but it's complicating, Yeah, but
(20:38):
it's interesting they bring up this thing about writing these
stories down because it's when we talk about next. Libraries
had a problem. They were colonized as fuck, right, as
like an institution, So the only real stories by the
library's mind are the ones that are written down. So
storytelling for Storytelling Hour had to come from a book.
Western libraries didn't understand the idea of oral literacy yet, right,
(21:01):
the idea that you can be aware of your culture
through oral traditions. Poor about Pray broke that she was
the first person probably to appeal and win the right
to tell stories that had never been written down. During storytime,
Mary gold Davis, her teacher, told her, tell your stories,
(21:23):
but only tell the children that none of these stories
have been written down, but maybe someday they will. It's
like this like almost paternalistic, but it's still this like
love where like yeah, it isn't amazing, but one day
they'll be real stories. But it's still like, it's still
the pretty genuine like poor actually has very She thought
very highly of the white women librarians who sought her
out and nurtured her career and helped her break into
(21:44):
this white dominated field. Right, So she told the stories
that eventually would find their way into another one of
her books, The Tiger and the Rabbit, which was the
first English language collection of Puerto Rican folklore in the US.
And she starts writing, and her branch is doing amazing
stuff in the black community. And then in nineteen twenty
nine she transfers to one hundred and fifteenth Street branch
(22:07):
in a Puerto Rican community, and it's here that she
really hits her stride and starts kicking ass as a librarian.
As far as I can tell, she pioneered Spanish language
content in public libraries. I expect she did it as
part of a team of people who are also amazing, right,
But she worked her ass off to get the community
involved in the library. At some point she watched a
(22:30):
puppet show at her branch and was like, oh, this
is the shit puppet's rule. I'm sure, that's how she
said it. And so for the rest of her life
she worked with kids to put on puppet shows because
that was part of it, was that by doing puppets
you could bring the kids into it, right. And she
went around to churches, to community centers, to neighborhood organizations
and schools to put on shows and like just do
(22:53):
outreach into community. She did bilingual shows regularly too, not
just Spanish language shows. And this just like hadn't been done.
She put on events for three Kings Day, a Puerto
Rican holiday, and she said this quote indirectly presented the
library to this group in a way that no other
activity could have done. Their confidence was gained. The library
(23:17):
put on complete programs in Spanish for children and for adults,
and basically they did at the one hundred and fifteenth
branch what one hundred and thirty fifth branch did for
the black community. And there's a downside to this, although
I've read conflicting tales of it, there's a problem if
I actually looking into too many sources, as they all
started arguing with each other, you know, right, Okay, so
(23:38):
this isn't the librarian's fault. But instead of racist city
government's fault. Basically, these two libraries served as quote ghettos
where all black and Spanish language content could be put,
where all black and latinae workers could be hired. So
it was like you try and get hired as a
black worker, and they'll be like, oh, we'll go up
to one hundred and thirty fifth and they're like that's
not where I live, you know, and they'd be like, oh,
(24:00):
we already have a black library, like we don't need
another one. And so that's a problem, and this limits
their career advancement, right because you can only work in
this one place.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Right instead of opening spots or making opening doors that
are like compete with each other. Here you go, good luck.
And this is because you need to fight this space.
The small amount of space is all we have for you.
But anyway, keep going.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yes, So in nineteen thirty nine, the Puerto Rican community
had moved a bit in the city, so she moved
once again to East one hundred and tenth Street and
kept up all the same stuff, bilingual story hour, reading clubs,
puppet theater, you name it. But you know what they
didn't have at these libraries ads because they were tax
(24:44):
funded instead of funded by private companies. But we, on
the other hand, are funded by private companies. And that
is just the compromises that everyone makes all the time,
like the following compromises. Here they are and we're back.
(25:08):
In nineteen forty. She goes to the ala, the American
Library Association convention in Cincinnati, and while she's there, she
meets a musician and composer named Clarence Cameron White, who
is we're going to get to the first like potential
drama that I'm entirely inferring. The way that the story
is presented is that she meets him and then they
(25:28):
get married a couple years later, and everything's happy and great.
And I started writing it by reading about him and
being like, oh, he was recently widowed or widowered or whatever.
He recently lost his wife. The complication she meets him
in nineteen forty, his wife doesn't tie until nineteen forty two,
and they don't get married till nineteen forty three. What happened?
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Drama?
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Probably they were just friends and then yeah, are they?
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Can they be friends? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (25:56):
I mean can they? Yeah? Man and a woman don't
seem posp but like a figure like this, every version
of her history is going to be a little bit sanitized.
I mean, I found no scandal. Like I'm not like
particularly worried that there's some like crazy skeleton in her closet.
But it's like when you're talking about like a children's
puppeteer person like, no one's like trying to write about
(26:18):
anything salacious, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Being the other woman, you know, her personality and the
everything about her reminds me of someone like my old
drama teacher, who are so passionate and so performed, Like
they perform and they love and they tell stories and
they understand the importance of puppetry like and bringing in,
like acting out these different characters. I could only imagine
(26:43):
what kind of performances she gave in her storytelling, and
with that, what type of passion she has, and just
like in her imagination being able to relay these stories
in a way that she was so successful enough to
be known to do this as well as writing these stories,
I just imagine she's just one of those people no
totally that you can't help but notice anyway. Yeah, and
(27:05):
then the effort she puts in telling these stories is
not telling a story, it is living that story for
the children or with the children, and I could only
imagine that's kind of how she also lived life.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
I believe it.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
So who knows, maybe some drama does happen, because when
you have that much passion, you know, yeah, that makes
it so interesting.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
No, I believe it. And it's it's interesting, right because
you're talking about someone who never had children and gets
married at.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Forty, right, and so you're my type of a woman.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
You're talking about someone who like either lived the like
cat lady life or lived a like pretty wildlife.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
You know, and there's like there we exist to not
have either of those things. Margaret, how dad, it's true,
you're with us, what are you talking about?
Speaker 2 (27:46):
It's true, right, as an unmarried person in her forties,
no children, Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And also and the
reason that I mentioned, my great grandmother, who's like basically
living in New York around the same time as an artist,
also didn't get married until four and then had like
one child, and that's like wasn't normal at all for
someone living, you know, a woman living in the early
(28:09):
part of the twentieth century. Right, So she falls in
love with Clarence White. You know, he's got his own
Wikipedia page as a composer and was one of the
most prominent violinists in the country. And after they get married,
Pura takes a leave of absence from the library to
follow him around on tour for a bit, and then
(28:30):
she goes back to the library and then she's like,
you know what, I actually want to focus on my writing,
and so she just kind of wants to be doing
the art stuff and hell yeah, and so she does
that for a while. She writes. As far as I
can tell, she keeps up the storytelling and the puppets
during this time, but I'm not one hundred percent certain,
but it's like implied, and she writes like eight books.
(28:51):
Seventeen years into married life, her husband dies of larynx
cancer in nineteen sixty. She goes back to the library
to a new post, one that I think they might
have made just for her, the Spanish children specialist. And
so at this point that whole thing about like the
Spanish language stuff only being at one or two branches
is not the case. That was actually some of the
(29:14):
stuff that there seemed to be drama about.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Is.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
I read some people arguing that sort of ghettoization was
not as prominent as other people were claiming and that
it was other issues keeping people from advancing, and I
read a lot of drama about employment discrimination in the
nineteen thirties. Basically, anyway, at this point, Spanish language stuff
all over wherever it's needed, and so she just goes
(29:37):
to every branch where it's needed and helps plan events
and helps bilingualize the New York City Public library system,
which is, if that's all she had done, it would
have been amazing.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Huge.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
If all she had done was write those children's stories,
it would have been amazing. If all she'd done was
be a puppeteer, would have been amazing. Then when she
was sixty five, she was forced to retire, because all
city employees at the time, we're forced to retire at
sixty five. I don't know if that's still the case
or not. I actually wonder because at the top, I
was saying that there's like, all these documents suggest she
(30:08):
was not born in nineteen oh three, but she told
people she was born in nineteen oh three. You know,
I wonder if it was so that she could keep
working a couple extra years.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Uh smart, But.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
I'm not sure, you know, that's entirely my conjecture She
died in nineteen eighty two, but her legacy continues to
this day. Starting in nineteen ninety six, the American Library
Organization gives out an award in Belprey's name every year
for children's books by Latino authors. A librarian originally from
the Dominican Republic named Viennella Rivas told NPR in twenty sixteen, quote,
(30:44):
because of her, we have a story time in Spanish,
we have computer classes in Spanish, and I feel like,
as a Latina librarian, we have a responsibility to continue
doing the work that she started. Shockingly, her books are
out of print right now, despite her being the earliest
known Afro Caribbean American writer, despite there being an award
(31:05):
in her name, And yeah, there are still three more
librarians on that list of cool librarians that I was handed.
So expect to be returning to this subject. But I
wanted to read some of her stories on book club,
but I haven't found a PDF of it yet. The
Internet Archive had one, but they're hacked right now. I
(31:26):
found one really short story and so fuck it, I'm
going to read it to you all.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Now, do you have a puppet.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
I'll pretend to have a puppy.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah, the full experience.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
You all should act as though I have a really
amazing puppet.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Okay, Okay.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
It's actually interesting that you talked about when you were
talking about folklore earlier, and we were talking about how
like indigenous folklore is perceived by others. Right, this story
is going to use the word Indian to describe the
people that's talking about, right, and it's gonna be describing
indigenous people, But the American North American conception of race
(32:00):
isn't necessarily going to apply one to one to in
a Puerto Rican context. And like so it's like interesting
because I can't say as cleanly how it relates to
indigenous culture. Right. Basically, that's my way of saying, if
the story had been written by a white person, I
would be suspect of.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
It, but it was not, gotcha.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
The legend of the Hummingbird from Puerto Rico by POORA Belprey.
Between the towns of Khi and Cidra, far up in
the hills, there was once a small pool fed by
a waterfall that tumbled down the side of the mountain.
The pool was surrounded by pomarosa trees, and the Indians
used to call it Pamarosa Pool. It was the favorite
place of Alita, the daughter of an Indian chief, a
(32:44):
man of power and wealth among the people of the hills.
One day, when Alita had come to the pool to
rest after a long walk, a young Indian came there
to pick some fruit from the trees. Alita was surprised,
for he was not of her tribe. Yet he said
he was no stranger to the pool. This was where
he had first seen Alida, and he had often returned
since then to pick the fruit. Hoping to see her again,
(33:08):
he told her about himself to make her feel at home.
He confessed with honesty and frankness that he was a
member of the dreaded Carab tribe that had so often
attacked the island of Barenkan. As a young boy, he
had been left behind after one of those raids, and
he had stayed on the island ever since. Alida listened
closely to his story, and the two became friends. They
(33:30):
met again in the days that followed, and their friendship
grew stronger. Alida admired the young man's courage in living
among his enemies. She learned to call him by his
Carab name, Taru, and he called her Alida, just as
her own people did. Before long, their friendship had turned
into love. Their meetings by the pool were always brief.
Alida was afraid their secret might be discovered, and careful
(33:53):
though she was. There came a day when someone saw
them and told her father. Alida was forbidden to visit
the Pamrosa Pool, and to put an end to her
romance with the stranger, her father decided to marry her
to a man of his own. Choosing preparations for the
wedding started at once. Alita was torn with grief, and
one evening she cried out to her god, Oh Yuki,
(34:17):
U help me kill me, or do what you will
with me, but do not let me marry this man
whom I do not love. And the great God yukiyou
took pity on her and changed her into a delicate
red flower. Meanwhile, Taru, knowing nothing of Alita's sorrow, still
waited for her by the Pamerosa pool. Day after day
he waited. Sometimes he stayed there until a mantle of
(34:39):
stars was spread across the sky. One night, the moon
took pity on him, Taro. She called from her place
high above the stars, Oh, Taru, wait no longer for Alda,
your secret was made known, and Alita was to be
married to a man of her father's choosing. In her grief,
she called to her god Yukiyu. He heard her plea
for help and changed her into a red flower. Ahi
(35:02):
Ahe cried, Taru, Oh Moon, what is the name of
the red flower? Only Yukayu knows that. The moon replied.
Then Taro called out, O, Yukayu, God of my Alida,
help me too, help me to find her. And just
as the Great God had heard Alida's plea, he listened
now to Tarou and decided to help him. There by
(35:23):
the Pomerosa pool, before the moon and the silent stars,
the Great God changed Taru into a small, many colored bird.
Fly Kalibri, and find your love among the flowers, he said.
Off went the Kalibri, flying swiftly, and as he flew,
his wings made a sweet humming sound. In the morning,
(35:44):
the Indians saw a new bird darting around among the flowers,
swift as an arrow and brilliant as a jewel. They
heard the humming of its wings, and in amazement they
saw it hover in the air over every blossom, kissing
the petals of the flowers with its long, slender bill.
They liked the new bird with the music in its wings,
and they called it humming bird. Ever since then, the
(36:07):
little many colored bird has hovered over every flower he finds,
but returns most often to the flowers that are red.
He is still looking, always looking for the one red
flower that will be his loss, Tolita. He has not
found her yet. That's the story.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
All these do remind me of the indigenous tales. And
the god you were talking about is a Tano god,
which is of the gods of the Puerto Rican indigenous peoples.
I have a failing if we were able to dig
more into her ancestral understand she is probably a part
of that indigenous group, because that's they're from her area
(36:47):
as well, like they are from that area. So I
absolutely believe these are tales from her community. Yeah, which
is gorgeous, And I love that she was able to
preserve that and share that, because that's what we know
when it comes to like indigenous and like especially older
religious groups, is the is the stories of creation, of
(37:08):
love in creation. It is so beautiful, and I love
that she preserved that so we could hear these stories
I know.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
And I like, I want to find so many more
of them, and I guess I have to wait for
the Internet archive to be unhacked or I need to.
Like I found like some used versions of the books,
but they were like you know how Amazon.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Automotba level like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Like they're like price jacked up to two hundred and
fifty dollars or whatever, you know, right, and yeah, no,
I I find it fascinating, and I find it fascinating
that they're out of print, and you know, I I
hope someone does something about that, but right, especially because like, yeah,
I love reading the earliest versions of folk tales I
can find, but usually that means reading white interpretations of
(37:55):
folk tales and so reading not that. But the oldest
that I can find is like from the sweet Spot,
you know.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Right, and on top of that, someone who heard it
from an area that she knew, who was familiar with
that that was her home.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Like one of the best parts to this is learning
about indigenous people that I didn't know anything about. I
know nothing about yuko U and Akabat god in itself
and which we love on our show. We love doing
like mythical goddesses and creatures and all of those, because
you know there's so much power behind that, yeah, and
the reason people believe in them. But not knowing that
obviously Puerto Rico, it makes sense to know there's an
(38:32):
indigenous group there, yeah, and community there that needs to
be preserved and their history should be preserved and deserved
to be preserved. Uh yeah, probably should be in power
whatever whatnot. But all of that to say is now,
like you brought this understanding through the talks of a library.
I love. I love the connectedness of it, I.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Know, and I love that it's like the work that
she did about keeping this stuff alive. And then like,
obviously language is an important part of I mean, obviously
Spanish is in the indigenous language, but compared to English,
for an immigrant community, it's like really important to have
Stuffy specifically, Yeah, just like making the library a space
(39:12):
that's actually for the communities as part of I just
I was really impressed by her story, and I like,
and it's a lot of stuff that I take for granted,
like even the story about the origin of libraries. I
had just been like, right, oh, yeah, of course a
country has to a country has to have roads. A
country has to have public lending libraries, otherwise it's not
really a country, is it. And it's like, well, actually, uh,
(39:34):
you know, we're pretty new to having them.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Like, it's also a story about understanding how important that
history is and librarians are and what they bring to
a community as we're in one of the worst states
of for librarians and libraries and banned books, and a
reminder of like, like how important these stories are, Yeah,
that so many cannot understand because culturally we should be
(39:59):
able to learn about these things, and we people should
know about these groups of people who have always existed,
existed before them, you know, for us. So all of
that is beautiful, as well as the fact that you know,
I love things like the little libraries. You know that
you see the look a birdhouse looking, Yeah, libraries. But
(40:20):
in order to kind of take back control from those
who are trying to ban books and trying to like
make libraries the enemies somehow, when stories like these are
so important and then people like her brought traditions and
tell folklore to life to children who didn't understand or
(40:40):
maybe for a long time, especially you know, you know,
as a person who immigrated to the US was taught
to learn what learn US culture and white culture, essentially
to truly understand the country if you want to be
a citizen, instead of understanding that their culture was just
as important to the makeup of this area, specifically New
(41:02):
Yorkers who are from Puerto Rico and children who may
have been born in New York but their families are
from Puerto Rico and then being able to learn about
their culture and to appreciate their own culture. Like, wow,
she did so much in such an early time. Like
obviously I'm very excited. Yeah, you opened up these big
box and I'm like, oh my god, I love everything
(41:22):
about this, including the libraries.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Yeah, no, totally. And it's just like I want to
fly on the wall. That stuff so bad, you know,
Like and even it ties into what you're saying just
now ties into how one of the problems with the
early libraries, including you know, some of the women's ones
and the free black ones and stuff, is they fell
into this idea that like this is for the improvement
of people by reading philosophy and stuff. And I'll read
(41:45):
some philosophy here and there. Right, I'm not I get it.
I'm I think that that stuff matters. But this idea
that fiction is distinct as this like lesser thing is
something that we're finally starting to break away from. And
I think part of the way that we break away
from it is exactly what you're talking about about, how
these stories and this idea of culture, like stories are
(42:07):
how you preserve culture in a lot of ways, and
so like stories matter, fiction matters just as much, you know. Yeah,
And I love I just think libraries are cool. I've
already spoken it too so far on this tour, and
like I can't wait to speak at more of them.
And yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
One of my favorite things. Again, like I will continue
to go to the different cities or different places and
find libraries. Went to New York and we went to
the library immediately, we explored everything. But thank you. I
was gonna say one of the two things. One, I
love that story. I love being able to hear her
writing because it is It's exactly right, you know, when
you thirst for a cultural like folklore, that is exactly
(42:47):
what I would like to hear. Like that was perfectly done,
and you telling it was so perfectly like, Yeah, obviously
Margaret is a writer. She's definitely a storyteller here. It
is like being able to hear it through you. Both
of those were shows, kiss, so thank you for sharing
with me.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Oh, thank you, well, thanks for coming on to my
episode about libraries. There's going to be more of them.
And yeah, if people want to hear more stories about
stuff that their mom never told them and then accidentally
ask really personal questions that you don't intend to ask,
where can they do that?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Well, we do talk a lot about our trauma as
in fact, I started Stuff Mom Never Told You by
talking about the METO movement and the trauma. So there
you go. But that Stuff Mom Never Told You you
can listen to us wherever you listen to your podcast.
We have twelve years worth of episodes. So so if you
want to go listen to all the different hosts that's
(43:42):
been there, historical context, you want to hear our reactions
to like different elections, which is really still stinged, you
can do that as well. We also have a book
and it's called Stuff Mom Never Told You. Actually at libraries,
we were able to find them that the Seattle library
and a New York library cool Boston who he hadn't
writen the book yet, so if you want to go
check it out at the library.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Is there, Yeah, And if it's not, you should request it.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah. Please. Also you can find me on McVeigh sam
Instagram for my doggie pictures.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
That is what Instagram is for as far as I'm
concerned exactly. Well, if you want to find me on tour,
you can look at my Instagram or my substack and
I'll be posting tour dates. And if you don't live
in the US, you can tell me that. You could
be like, why aren't you coming to where I live?
And then the answer is the aforementioned dog. And on
some level I'm aware that I could probably find someone
(44:34):
to watch my dog for long enough to go to
a different country, But why would I want to. I
like my dog more than I like you, dear listener,
And that's not even a slight against you. It's just
how much I like my dog. But that's unrelated. And
also I have a book out called The Sapling Cage,
just what I'm a tour about, and you should go
read it is fiction. I have a bunch of other
books too, including the most entertainingly titled is Escape from
(44:56):
Insul Island, So you can go read that if you want,
and you could also listen to Cooler Zone Media because
nothing would be funnier than watching me complain about ads
and then there's no ads and wouldn't that be funny?
And also you can listen to all the cool zone
media podcasts that way, including awful lot of shows including Wait,
(45:18):
there's one I really liked recently. Oh, there's a really
good it could happen here about the future of coffee
done by Prop who does hood politics with Prop and
it is like one of the best encapsulations of climate
crisis and also how capitalism and extractive practices work, and
also how cooperativism. It was just like, I don't even
(45:40):
drink coffee.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
It's also super funny.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Yeah, I've been long holding that Prop is my favorite
explain current events person in my life. He starts off
the episode by just singing a song and yeah, totally,
so you get past that part.
Speaker 1 (45:55):
Yeah, that always throws me off when host starts singing
or rapping. I'm like, what the what's happening? I'm never prepared. Yeah,
but he's like a professional rapper. Yeah, Like, oh, I'm
just good. It's still stocking though to see it live,
Like if I'm on MIC or somebody.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, but I love it. But stay for the stay
for the vibes, Stay for the vibes, and that's it.
We're here at the end of the show.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Hi. Hi. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website folzonemedia dot com, or check
us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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