It was only fitting that over 30 SALALM librarians (and vendors) would be among the many "profesionales del libro" participating in what has become the most important book event in the Spanish-speaking world: the 30th Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL).
While welcoming speeches at FIL’s opening ceremony were taking place, I visited Mexico’s Ministry of Education stand where one of the staff reiterated that textbooks currently in use in the country’s primary schools were available to libraries from Mexican consular offices in the United States. Some are quite popular at our Education Library. The most recent editions now include the iconic image I remember from my first grade class in a rural school in Northern Mexico.
A few days later, at a lunch with several local colleagues, I shared my hope that libraries and books would become a more constant presence in the everyday life of the country’s school-age children, more than they were for me 50 years earlier. Mexico continues to lag behind other Latin American countries on the number of books an average citizen reads per year. A recent news article notes a similar deficiency: 92% of Mexico’s municipalities have a library, but many are in poor condition.
