Ray Pun: Interview with Sandra Rios Balderrama
Sandra Rios Balderrama is the co-founder, Immediate Past-President and current Treasurer of REFORMA del Valle Central. She served as the first Director of the Office for Diversity of the American Library Association and as former President of National REFORMA (1997-1998). She is a co-founder of the Pura Belpré Award for Latinx Authors & Illustrators of Children’s Books, whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latinx cultural experience. She currently serves on the Fresno (CA) Women’s International League of Peace & Freedom’s Library Committee and works closely with the REFORMA Children in Crisis Project. She was a recipient of the 2003 Arnulfo D. Trejo Librarian of the Year Award and the first recipient of REFORMA’s Elizabeth Martinez Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.
Ray: Thank you so much agreeing to do this interview, Sandra! Can you tell us about your work?
Sandra: My current work is with retired mental health advocates, and social workers, anti-war activists, teachers, poets and artists and so many people with the strong SI, SE PUEDE strength, to connect books with the communities of the Central Valley of California. I met these book activists through REFORMA del Valle Central (RDVC) and the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom’s (WILPF) Library Committee. The books aren’t just any books though!
We emphasize local writers, Pura Belpré Award books, Jane Addams Peace Association Award books, books by and about BIPOC (black/indigenous/people of color), Spanish and Hmong language books. All that said, I’ve also met some wonderful Latinx/Chicanx, Hmong, African American and Persian librarians here that do awesome work: Tamara Evans, Yer Vang, Veronica Casanova, Clarisa Bernabe, Mina Abdollahian and more! They are great librarians, period! In my retired life, I have my dream job.
Ray: What do you enjoy most about your work?
Sandra: The moments. The huge smile on the face of a little boy at the SIREN (Services, Immigrant Rights And Education Network) Festival for Immigrants and Refugees who selected a book from our booth by Yuyi Morales, and I explained to him that she was “Mexican” too. Trying to explain in my own broken Spanish, at the Rafael López Community Mural Celebration booth - about the Japanese American concentration camps as part of our history to a recent woman that immigrated from Oaxaca and had picked a picture book on Ruth Asawa. When a child of Cuban and Mexican heritage met Cuban American author/poet Margarita at the Arriaga Recreation Center in the nearby town of Malaga. These moments add up to inspiration and affirmation of global life. One love. For me, these serve as my own spiritual and active counterforce to the current state of our government and country.
R: What do you like to do for fun? How do you center yourself and maintain work/life balance?
S: Walking has always been my relief and release. I like to reduce my view to the tiny blossoms, the horse-tail clouds, the cat that stares from a porch, and then sometimes memories flow from these sights - like of my Grandmother Concha listening to the radio and wanting to discuss politics or of my working single mother when she’d talk to me while making “string beans and egg” for dinner. This is a way to steer my mind toward beauty and relax it.
Sandra with Isaac Maynard, May 2019
R: You have been such an amazing mentor to many librarians and library workers and students of color over the years, what motivates you to be such an advocate for us?
S: Thank you. It’s an honor I don’t take lightly. I never intended to be a “mentor” in any formal sense of the word but what drives me to listen and uplift is “I’ve been there.” The most difficult challenge is the work “inside” any library organization and institution. There we find new names for former strategies/methods/trends of flattening hierarchical and patriarchal systems amidst old and static ways of thinking and doing. Today, librarian scholars are looking at white supremacy as the parasite in many of our oppressive library structures. The language and research have deepened. I applaud it.
Library service is about freeing, accessing, honoring and informing so why would library organizations tie the hands of the innovator or dim the light of the vision? Why are we so threatened? Yes, there are budgets, policies, fundraising needs, politics, and at the same time where do we find the library leader willing to connect a librarian or library worker’s enthusiasm for the profession they’ve chosen with great inclusive service described in the mission statements of our organizations? We have some of these leaders, past and present. You will find those retired, now giving back and those in current positions, taking brave stands.
They include Dr. Camila Alire, Dr. Carla Hayden, Patrick Fitzgerald, Luis Herrera, Lucía González, Skye Patrick, John Szabo, Natalie Rencher, Dr. Loriene Roy and others of so many more libraries that we may not hear or read about because they are involved with action and change, within their communities and don’t have the time to write articles or attend American Library Association conferences. All are needed and important. All of the leaders we know and don’t know. They include leaders that have stepped out of formal library organizations such as Ruth Metz, Loida García-Febo, and Oralia Garza-Cortés who continue to do great work and those that are writing great content such as Lettycia Terrones and Dr. Nicole Cooke. But yes, we need more. We must continue to grow our circle and cultivate more service-driven, staff-valuing and vision-implementing administrators, directors, and deans.
From Left to Right: Willy Gamez and Erika Ramos-Cano, Adjunct Counselors and Valerie Elizalde, Student Assistant of the Fresno City College Dream Center, Summer 2019
All this said, I do what I can to affirm, uplift BIPOC librarians and to encourage them to move toward what’s generative because they deserve this as they grow, contribute, and “become.” I listen with tea or coffee or pad thai between us and suggest an array of options that affirm self-confidence and self-trust while at the same time, support their livelihood. Always look for the window. The light. The opening. Sometimes it’s within. Sometimes it’s outside of the job. Sometimes it means stepping out and free-falling. Sometimes it means cultivating alliances and creating foundations for yourself and for the service you believe in. Sometimes it requires a break. I am so awed by We Here and the new and growing groups of BIPOC librarians.
And, I must add, without hesitation, I, myself, receive so many gifts, insights, new language, energy and mentoring from young BIPOC, as I “become” and move through my own stages in life. I’m in love with the librarians of color of today - their courage and their ganas. I have a small role, now as a junior elder (LOL) to share the values, the struggles, and compassion of the people whose shoulders I stood on. It’s a sacred trust I take seriously.
And truly, when one of these students or librarians or library workers thrives in a moment, a day, or in a career, my heart sings! I will always be excited about the profession that collects, archives, and disseminates the global drum - the heartbeat of stories that is our shared mother.
Ray Pun (he/him/his) is an academic librarian in the Bay Area, California. Ray has presented and published on the values of diversity, equity and inclusion in the profession.