Greenwood’s Latino Chronology Named Best Reference
Posted April 17th, 2008by D.H. Figueredo
Greenwood’s Latino Chronology, written by Latino American Experience Advisory Board member D.H. Figueredo, has been named a New York Library Association Best Reference for 2007. The 170-page Chronology serves as the basis for LAE’s Timeline feature. Below librarian and scholar D.H. Figueredo shares his thoughts on receiving this prestigious award for the second time. (He previously was honored with the award for his contributions to the 2-volume Encyclopedia of Cuba, which is also part of LAE, a component of Greenwood’s American Mosaic database collection.)
When I was informed by my good editor, Mariah Gumpert, at
The honor is given by the New York Public Library branches and in the mid-1980s I was part of that system. I was not in the branches but at the Research Libraries and, though now and then there are territorial conflicts between the branches and the Research Libraries, I always felt that I was part of one incredible world of knowledge: the research component, documenting the world for the future, and the circulation experience, giving out that knowledge to the world of today. While working at the Research Libraries as the Latin American bibliographer, I used the branches regularly. I visited the Mid-Manhattan Library and also worked at the Donnell Library, where my editor, since at the time I was contributing to the journal Booklist, was the legendary Earle Gladden. This was a man who believed in spreading out to Manhattan the best of the world’s literature in its original language: a multicultural affirmation, if ever there was one. It was Gladden who first accepted for publication my many bibliographies; in turn, these bibliographies brought certain recognition that in time led me to write for other journals and eventually into the writing and editing of books.
It was at the Research Libraries that I learned, more than in graduate school, how to truly conduct research: visiting people’s homes, interviewing famous and ordinary participants in historical events, tracking obscure editions of monographs, understanding the differences between monographs, series, reprints, and new editions. As part of my job at the Research Libraries, I attended the conferences of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Libraries. At these conferences I made friends who years later would guide me further in my research process and would introduce me to incredible collections in places like Princeton University and University of Miami. Furthermore, many of these new friends were Chicanos and experts on the history of Mexican-Americans in the United States, introducing me to such major political and social developments as the founding of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), a successful organization advocating for the rights of all Latinos, and the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 when American soldiers and sailors attacked anyone in Los Angeles who looked stereotypically Mexican. These colleagues reaffirmed for me that the evolution of this great nation was not seeded just in the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 but also in the establishment of the first permanent European settlement in San Agustín, Florida, in 1565, and that the settlement of the emerging nation took place, not just on the Northeast under British rule, but on the West Coast where Spanish and Mexican explorers founded such cities as El Paso del Norte, Texas, in 1581 and El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles in 1781.
Those formative years gave substance to my research and writing as well as to how I saw myself, and my children, within the panoramic canvas that is the United States. Yes, I was a recent arrival, reaching
Thus, it makes sense, cyclical, circular sense that my chronology, which is a contribution to the American Mosaic suite of digital products created by Greenwood Press, is honored in the one city in the world that is a true mosaic.Yes,
