Book Smugglers in the United States

Librotraficante Bryan Parras films the Librotraficantes as they arrive at the Alamo.

Houston and San Antonio, January, 2012: Calling all Librotraficantes

After the books were confiscated in Tucson, Tony Diaz and Bryan Parras filmed a video for Librotraficante in front of Diaz’s garage in Houston and declared their intentions to act.

“My name’s Tony,” he says in the video, wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses while standing in front of a black van in his garage.

“You may have heard that Arizona had the audacity to ban Latino studies.” The trunk of the van is filled with boxes, and titles like Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are visible.

“Well I’m here to introduce a few more words into the lexicon of Arizona,” he raises his right fist in defiance.

“First phrase: Librotraficante. Me and my fellow librotraficantes will be smuggling contraband books back into Arizona this spring, 2012.”

The Librotraficante movement started on January 16, when Bryan Parras read a story about the events in Tucson. He immediately sent out a tweet calling all Libro Traficantes: “The LT are headed to Tucson w/ more banned books than the ‘thought police’ can handle. Stay tuned…” He also sent the news to Diaz and Lopez, who sent it to their friends, and so on. Soon, the story was buzzing around the net.

Meanwhile in San Antonio, Chicana poet and writer Carmen Tafolla was following the news about Tucson and reading her friends’ reactions on Facebook. Then she received a phone call that shocked her.

“You’re on that list, you know,” a fellow writer told her, “for Curandera.”

Tafolla went to her bookshelf and pulled out the collection of poems she wrote almost thirty years ago. It was set to be reprinted by her publisher in September. “If I was a school administrator,” she thought, “how would I read this?” So with critical eyes, Tafolla slowly reread her own work, looking for any trace of offensive material.

She opened to her flash fiction piece “Quality Literature,” in which a student asks his professor if he can write an essay on a Chicano author. The professor replies, “Chicano literature simply isn’t quality…it hasn’t even been critiqued by the PMLA!”

“You know what,” she said to herself, “the Tucson administrators haven’t even read my book at all.”

She returned to Facebook. Seeing Diaz’s wall alert with stories from Arizona, she replied. “So what now? Does that mean I have to smuggle my books into Arizona in a brown paper bag?”

Diaz responded to her question in the Librotraficante video: “Second Phrase: Wet [Back] Books. These are books that we will smuggle illegally across the border to be used in underground classes where we will conduct Latino literary studies.”

Diaz pulls out Woodcuts of Women by Dagoberto Gilb.

“It’s a lethal dose of Dagoberto Gilb comin’ at you, Arizona.”

From Houston To Tucson, March 2012: Planning A Caravan

Along with two more of their colleagues, Lupe Mendez and Laura Acosta, the group began to plan a Librotraficante Caravan not unlike the US Social Forum Parras and Lopez had helped organize. The caravan extended the team’s 14 years of work with Nuestra Palabra and the 11 years they spent hosting the radio show. Through both projects the Librotraficantes already had an informal network of Latino writers across the country.

Starting on March 12 in Houston, Texas, the caravan would pass through four Southwestern cities – San Antonio, El Paso, Mesilla, and Albuquerque – before arriving in Tucson on March 16. In these cities, the group planned to distribute a complete set of all of the banned books and other multicultural literature to local nonprofit organizations in an effort to create “underground libraries.” At each city the group would host readings by banned authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Carmen Tafolla.

After putting out a press release, receiving attention from the Huffington Post, New York Times, CNN, and Democracy Now!, and contacting friends and family, the group gained thirty-five individuals who agreed to travel with them on a bus for a week.

Up until the start of the Caravan, the group would go from their full-time jobs to Lopez’s dining room, which had been turned into a makeshift meeting space with a whiteboard and projector. The group received 1,000 books worth $20,000. But just to run the Caravan they estimated they would need $80,000. They received $15,000 in donations.

During the meetings the group also discussed their reasons for forming the Caravan. “The students make it worth it,” related Lopez. “Tony and I were the first in our families to graduate from college…for a lot of Latinos just getting through high school is a challenge.”

“If this kind of thing could happen in Tucson, where they had a solid, well-established, and exemplary program for years, with the full support of the community, it could happen anywhere,” said Tafolla.

Despite the project’s significance the group also had some worries about starting the Caravan. They wondered if the Tucson students would accept their help, if putting their ideas into action would be as easy as talking about them, or if their anger would get the best of them. But in the end, their personal maxims rang true.

“The laws might fail us, but we can always turn to art and push it,” said Diaz.

“If anyone was to do anything, we had the power to do it,” said Lopez.

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