Lately, I have been doing research on my various visits to Philadelphia over the years. I’ve been there several times–in 1995, 1999, 2003, 2008 and 2014. (To see my blog post about my 2014 trip, click here.) I’ve always had an enjoyable experience. It’s a great city, with a lot of historic landmarks and interesting things to do. I have in my travel files the following booklet that I purchased somewhere along the way. It was published in 1908, and is in the public domain. I don’t know if many of the buildings still exist. Downtown is now filled with tall skyscrapers, none of which are shown here.
My Life Story: 1994
This particular entry is divided into two parts. The first is the narrative for my life story in 1994. The second part includes a lot of graphics, including photos, postcards, maps, documents, news articles etc.
I began the year by continuing to work at the University of Arizona Libraries and living with my partner Ruben in a spacious, two bedroom apartment on the west side of town on Shannon Road, near Pima Community College. I turned 35 in mid-January, and was presented with a beautiful birthday cake that our friend Roberto made for me. It was delicious too. At the end of February, Ruben and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary as a couple. We had our share of ups and downs during our first year together, but we managed to work things out as we got to know eachother. We’re still together 31 years later. In March, he started school at the Allure College of Beauty, and within a year he would become a licensed cosmetologist and hair stylist. In April, we bought a new car, a 1993 Nissan Sentra, and we soon began taking road trips to places like Albuquerque and the Grand Canyon. It was so nice having a car that didn’t break down every other week, and we kept it for a very long time, 11 years to be exact.
Work-wise, 1994 was a very busy year. I passed my second year review as I continued to juggle a variety of responsibilities in my role as Assistant to the Dean for staff development, recruitment and diversity. Each area of responsibility was quite demanding. I was also a member of the Administrative Group and Library Cabinet, the library’s leadership teams, and attended every meeting and every training session held for these groups. The restructuring process was still unfolding, and there was a great demand for staff development and training. I continued to set up, as I had the previous year (for example, see: Library Wide-Training Plan Summary, June, 1993-December, 1993), scores of training sessions for the staff and the administration this particular year, and allocated several thousand dollars of funding for staff attendance at workshops and other events. However, I enjoyed the work I did in the area of diversity the most. I worked with the Library Diversity Council to set up a variety of informative programs, including a lecture on women in Islam, a Passover seder, a lecture on Black aviators, as well as a Cinco De Mayo lecture and celebration, among others. In July, the Diversity Council wrote an annual report for 1993/1994, that outlined all of the activities it sponsored and issues that it confronted. The Dean of the Library was quite impressed and pleased, and commended the group for its work. In July, E.J. Josey, a distinguished leader in African American librarianship and former president of the American Library Association, visited and gave a lecture on diversity in librarianship for the campus. In the Fall, I received funding from the University administration to host the writer Leslie Feinberg, whose novel, Stone Butch Blues, had just won the ALA Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Book award for fiction. Feinberg was at the forefront of the budding transgender rights movement, and I organized both campus and community events that gave people the opportunity to get to know this amazing individual. As a result of my organizing these events, I was invited to become a member of the board of directors of Wingspan, Tucson’s lgbt community center. I accepted the invitation, but within a month or so realized that this was too big a responsibility to take on, so I resigned. Wingspan needed a lot of attention, and I just didn’t have the time. In November, the Diversity Council hosted the Equity Institute, a diversity training organization that provided training to the Library faculty and staff on the issue of racism. This was the first of several all staff diversity-focused training events that I would be involved in coordinating while assistant to the Dean. Looking back, it’s a miracle I didn’t collapse from exhaustion. It was a very busy time for me. It was not without its ups and downs, either. I experienced some conflict with one of my senior colleagues in particular, whose good friend, one of our library consultants, told me flat out at one point that I was not qualified for the work I was doing. This was after I refused to go to the student union to buy her and my senior colleague sandwiches one night while we were working on planning training for the staff. I told them I wasn’t their errand boy. They also told me that they weren’t there to teach me, after I asked questions about the work we were doing. I later mentioned this to the Dean of the Library, and she gave me the authority to decide whether or not to bring this particular consultant back for more training. We never did bring her back as a consultant, but she managed to continue working with us in other ways.
I was also involved in a lot of service-related activities, including the ALA GLBTF Book Award Committee, which I’ve noted awarded Leslie Feinberg that year’s award for fiction; REFORMA, at both the national and local levels, and the Arizona State Library Association, where I chaired the Services to the Spanish Speaking Roundtable. I also managed the student chapter of REFORMA, and we took a number of field trips to various libraries, including a college library in Nogales, Sonora as well as local libraries like the El Rio Center Library, located in the heart of Barrio Hollywood. Because I was on the “tenure-track” at this point in my career, I also had to engage in scholarship. This took the form of either writing for publication or giving formal presentations at professional conferences. This particular year, something I had written while at Michigan, a chapter titled “Collection Development in Multicultural Studies” was published in the book, Cultural Diversity In Libraries, edited by my colleague Pat Tarin and Don Riggs, Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan. I also participated in writing a couple of chapters for the publication, Magazines for Libraries. I recruited colleagues from the UA Library and the local public library to help me write descriptions of recommended core magazines and journals from Latin America for libraries. We also included magazines and journals focusing on the Latino experience in the US. The work would not get published for another year, but we completed it in summer, 1994, and the editor of the publication, Bill Katz, a well-respected library leader and publisher, was quite happy with our work. I also participated in a number of professional development workshops, including a seminar on time management, a workshop on working with the media, strategic planning training, facilitation skills training, and other programs. I also attended two national conferences, ALA Midwinter in Los Angeles and ALA Annual in Miami Beach, and one state library (ASLA) conference in Phoenix.
There were several major family events that occurred this year. My dad married his companion, Guadalupe Lopez, in March. They already had a child, my little brother Jose’, the previous September. The marriage took place in Bullhead City, Arizona, and was attended by most of my dad’s brothers and sisters. My great niece Estrella Ochoa had her first child, a boy named David. In December, both my aunt Dora Sainz, one of my mom’s younger sisters, and my cousin Martin Olguin died. I went to my aunt’s funeral in San Francisco, and attended my cousin Martin’s services in Tucson. I grew up with Martin, and we were very close at one point. His death made me very sad. He was only in his mid-30s.
My childhood friend, Richard (Ricky) Fass was killed in late June. He was an undercover DEA agent, and was shot by drug dealers in a botched up undercover operation. It was quite a tragedy. Ricky and his brother Bubba grew up two houses up the street from me, and we spent lots of time together as kids. Another friend, Kidd Rivenbark, also died this year. We weren’t that close, but he was a very nice man. I met him when I was with my first partner, John. They had been in the Air Force together. Kidd was from North Carolina. He was quite fond of me, but I was young and flighty and didn’t keep in touch with him.
Several major events occurred in 1994, including the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement by the US, Mexico and Canada. Both events occurred on the same day, January 1. Later in the month, a major earthquake hit southern California and was centered in the town of Northridge, just north of Los Angeles. 1994 also saw the emergence of both the internet, the World Wide Web, and the companies Yahoo and Amazon. OJ Simpson was accused of murdering his wife, and Nelson Mandela won the presidency in South Africa, in its first ever fair and free elections. California’s Proposition 187, which would have denied many social and public services to the undocumented, was passed and then quickly repealed as illegal.
The following musicians, actors and other celebrities died in 1994: Amparo Ochoa, Cab Calloway, Papa John Creach, Dinah Shore, Jackie Kennedy, Cesar Romero, Harry Nilsson, Henry Mancini, Carmen MacRae Marion Williams, and Major Lance.
My personal interests at this time revolved around collecting Mexican music and classic movies. I loved the music of Lucha Villa, and sought out her recordings whenever and wherever I could. Pepe Aguilar and Alejandro Fernandez were two other Mexican ranchera singers who were both relatively new to the music scene, and I purchased every recording of theirs that came out. I even got to see Pepe Aguilar perform with his father Antonio Aguilar and his mother Flor Silvestre at the Pima County Fairgrounds.
Ruben and I became big movie buffs and we bought the following films, all on vhs:: The Story of Ruth, Of Human Bondage, El Cid, Paris is Burning, Shindig Soul, Two Mules for Sister Sarah, All In A Night’s Work, The Man in the Iron Mask, Stage Door, James Brown and Friends, Pretty Baby, Sweet Bird of Youth, Dark Shadows, 2,000 Year Old Man, A Stolen Life, The Children’s Hour, Barbarella, Making Love, Aretha Live at Park West, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Night of the Iguana, Reefer Madness, Norman Is That You?, The Country Girl, Nijinsky, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Quartet, The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz, Guitarras, Lloren Guitarras, Where the Boys Are, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Midnight Cowboy, Yours, Mine and Ours, The Last Emperor, Fantastic Voyage, La Cage Aux Folles, The Count of Monte Cristo, In This Our Life, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Gone With the Wind.
Little did we know that the vhs format would soon be replaced by dvds. We still have some of these tapes, and they do work, but we gave many of them away and replaced them with dvds. Maybe one day they’ll, like lps, make a big comeback! You never know.
Happy New Year!
1-1-94 –The beginning of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico.
On the same day-January 1, 1994-The North American Free Trade Agreement, signed into law in December by President Clinton, takes effect.
ALA Midwinter in Los Angeles was interesting and fun. The conference was held in the downtown area. I had never really spent any time there before, so it was a new experience. I stayed at a hotel called the New Otani Hotel, in Little Tokyo, which was close to City Hall, Olvera Street, the train station and skid row. One evening I took the bus to West Hollywood with my friend Mario, and we spent the night partying at a bar called the Ramrod II. It was great. I also found some very hard to find Lucha Villa recordings at a store called Ritmo Latino and I visited Olvera Street, where I had some very tasty champurrado and bought some Jesus Hilguera prints. It’s LA’s original site, and is home to several historic buildings.
Amparo Ochoa dies. February 8, 1994. She was a great promoter of “la nueva cancion” in Mexico, and recorded some beautiful, traditional Mexican folk music including an entire album of corridos and songs from the Mexican Revolution.
Valentine’s Day cards.
Ruben and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary as a couple in late February. He celebrated his 31st birthday in June.
Nelson Mandela wins the presidential election in South Africa on April 27 in South Africa’s first fully multi-racial elections. He becomes the first democratically elected president the following month.
In celebration of El Cinco de Mayo, Lupe Castillo, a well-known local Chicana activist and history instructor at Pima Community College, was invited to the Library by the Diversity Council to speak about the cultural and social significance of El Cinco de Mayo to Tucson’s Mexican American community. She talked about immigration along the way, which ruffled a few feathers, but I thought it was great. The event included a musical performance by Mariachi Arizona and a potluck. I coordinated this program on behalf of the Library Diversity Council. When Mariachi Arizona was playing, the leader asked me if I would sing the song “Volver, Volver”, and I did! It was a lot of fun, and I wasn’t even drinking any booze! Ha ha ha!
ALA Annual in Miami was a lot of fun, but getting around to the various meetings was a real challenge. Some of the meetings were held in Miami Beach, and others in the city of Miami. It was a logistical mess. I had fun any way and went dancing several times, hung out at the beach, and I also enjoyed spending time with my friends Richard DiRusso and Mario Gonzalez, who drove us around in a red convertible one bright, sunny day. It was great.
The world wide web was born in 1994. According to some estimates, there were just 10,000 websites and two million computers connected to the Internet. Amazon, Yahoo! and Mosaic Communications (later Netscape) were in the beginning stages.
I contributed a chapter to this book back in 1991-1992, while I was working at the University of Michigan Undergraduate Library. It finally saw the light of day in early August, 1994. It’s available here: Collection Development in Multicultural Studies, book chapter in Cultural Diversity in Libraries, edited by Don Riggs and Patricia Tarin, Neal-Schuman Publishers, 1994.
Grand Canyon with Ruben. First week of August.
California’s Proposition 187 was designed to deny social services, non-emergency health services, and public education to undocumented immigrants. California voters passed the proposed law by a margin of 59 percent to 41 percent at a referendum on November 8, 1994. The law was challenged in a legal suit the day after its passage, and found unconstitutional by a federal district court on November 11, 1994.
Cousin Martin dies.
I was a member of the ALA Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Book Award Committee in 1994. I received complimentary copies of a number of books, many of which are listed below. My job as a committee member was to review them and to be prepared to discuss and debate which ones were the best in their respective categories. It was quite an assignment, as there were many, many wonderful books published in 1994.
That’s all, folks!
“Stonewall 25”: Tucson Gay & Lesbian Pride 1994 Commemorative Program October 8, 1994
My life story: 1993
As I look back at 1993, I have come to realize that my job was just a part of my life, not my entire life. I’ve delayed writing about this period because I’ve been avoiding writing about the years when I served as Carla Stoffle’s assistant at the University of Arizona Library. In many ways, I felt inadequate, humiliated and burned as the Assistant to the Dean for Staff Development, Recruitment and Diversity. By the time I stepped down from the job eight years later, I was totally fried. I don’t want to just focus on the bad stuff, however, and I don’t have to, so I’m going to mostly write about all the other stuff that happened in my life. I have many fond memories.
1993 was a year that changed my life for the better overall. However, I had just been hired at the University of Arizona Library in June the previous year and was beginning to realize how intense my job was. It was very demanding, and at times I struggled to keep up with the pace. We were in the midst of a major organizational overhaul, and there was a constant demand for staff development and on-the-job training. I worked with a variety of people–national consultants, local consultants and other staff– to coordinate and deliver these efforts. We were in unknown territory, working to completely change the structure and culture of the library while consolidating units, changing work priorities and trying to convince people that diversity and working in teams were good ideas. There was a lot of resistance among the staff to these changes, but we charged forward.
I lived alone at the beginning of the year and turned 34 on January 15, but didn’t do anything but watch movies at home. My car was giving me problems, so I was stuck. The photo below is what my car, a 1980 Toyota Corolla, likely looked like back in 1980, when it was brand new. After having survived 12 Michigan winters, it was not nearly as pretty as it once was, but it was what I had at the time. I spent a lot of money on repairs, but by the following year, I’d have a new vehicle.
Here are some of my birthday cards from that 1993.
Nevertheless, here’s one of the songs of Charlie’s that I really like:
I have had lots of trouble with the issue of political correctness over time. I think my leftist friends can get quite dogmatic and they easily put people down who aren’t “enlightened” like they are. I disagree with a lot of what they espouse, especially when it comes to one’s chosen use of language/ terminology and attitudes about various issues like what foods one should or should not eat. There are certain words like queer and latinx, for example, that I’ll likely never use in my own day-to-day speech because I don’t like those terms, but they’re politically correct, so to speak. I also refuse to add pronouns to my signature. If you can’t tell I’m a dude, something is wrong! Seriously, if you want to know, just ask. But don’t make me feel obliged to include it as part of my signature. Oh well. I know who I am–a gay Chicano socialist, or as Archie Bunker might say a “commie, pinko, fairy” through and through. That won’t ever change.
Even though I had an uneventful birthday, a week or so later I got to go to Denver to attend the 1993 ALA Midwinter conference. I’d never been there before.
I was in Denver for just a few days, so I made the most of it and had a very nice time, but I was also there to work. In 1992, I had been elected national secretary of REFORMA, The National Association for the Promotion of Library Services to the Spanish Speaking, so I was obligated to attend and take minutes at all of the REFORMA meetings held at Midwinter ’93. Here are the minutes from two of the meetings I attended:
Reforma Executive Board Meeting minutes 1-24-93 Denver ALA MW
Reforma II Minutes ALA Denver 1-24-93
We were in Denver at a time when there was a lot of conflict in Colorado over Amendment 2, a ballot initiative passed by Colorado voters in 1992 that prohibited the state from enacting antidiscrimination protections for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, but that had been blocked by the courts. I and other colleagues from the UA Library, including our Assistant Dean Shelley Phipps, attended a protest rally at the Capitol in support of the gay population of Colorado. I did my best to keep up with what was happening.
The following article provides more detail about the controversial conference location and many of the activities that took place at the conference.
Under Protest ALA Midwinter in Denver
Here are two more articles that summarize the activities that took place at the conference:
A_Rocky_Time_in_Denver ALA Midwinter
American Libraries Midwinter by the Numbers
The highlight of the trip for me was seeing the exhibit titled “Aztec” at the Denver Museum of Natural History. I was blown away by the incredible sculptures and artifacts that were on display. The exhibit was gorgeous. I remember I hitched a ride with one of my colleagues, Janet Fore, but the car was crowded and Janet wasn’t very happy, so I had to find my own way back to my hotel.
I also got to eat at a few really good restaurants and explore the various record stores and bookstores in the downtown area, as well as the 16th Street Mall.
I also went out a few times to the gay bars and nightclubs. I remember one in particular. It was called “Charlie’s” and it was a very crowded country western bar. There were other gay bars around too, just to the east of the Capitol building on Colfax.
I really enjoyed the conference, but I had a lot of work to do at the Library when I got back. We were training our staff how to become teams, and we worked with a consultant named Maureen Sullivan. It was my job to communicate our plan to the staff. This work kept me quite busy. Having fun was a luxury, but I did manage to go to a few concerts like the one noted below.
I recently found the following announcement in a 1993 Library newsletter.
On the last day of February, I met someone. His name was Ruben. We hit it off and we fell in love. His mom grew up in the thirties in Superior, Arizona, next door to my dad’s family. She used to play with my aunts Carmen and Helen, and my dad knew her brother, Maclovio Barraza, a union organizer who had recruited my dad to join the union at the mine. Ruben and I had also gone to the same high school and worked at the same grocery store, but at different points in time so our paths never crossed before. It was uncanny. We became inseparable and by May, we decided to live together. It’s now been over 30 years!
In early April, at Easter time, I rented a car and Ruben and I drove with his friend Enrique Gomez and another guy named Roberto, who Enrique was dating, to Rocky Point. We had to take the long way, through the back roads in Sonora to get there, because Roberto was from the other side and could not cross into the US. It was a rough road, and the rental car I drove took a beating. This was not a great trip. We had some misunderstandings with Enrique, and things got tense. I realized on this particular trip that I didn’t like Enrique at all, and was never able to get over it. Ruben and I ended up finding our own hotel room in Rocky Point. The only thing that I liked about the trip was the food. We ate grilled fish and later found a little taco stand outside the hotel that sold the most delicious tacos. There’s nothing like tacos and beer to satisfy one’s hunger!
At the same time as the March on Washington, Tucson was hosting its 11th annual Tucson International Mariachi Conference. This year’s featured performers were Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan, Mariachi Cobre, Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano, Angeles Ochoa and Linda Ronstadt. I made sure not to miss this event!
Sometime in late Spring, Ruben’s niece Marissa, Jerry’s daughter, had her first holy communion at St. Ambrose Church. She was only five or six at the time, and was the cutest little girl. She lived with Ruben and her grandparents. Ruben bought her a beautiful dress for the occasion. We all gathered at his parent’s house afterwards. This was the first time I had been around his extended family. Here are some photos of the occasion.
By early May, Ruben and I were living together in a two-bedroom apartment on N. Shannon Rd, on the far west side of town, just down the road from Pima Community College West. The apartment complex was called Desert Hills Apartments and had been built sometime in the Sixties. He had convinced me to move there because the rent was a lot cheaper and it was close to his parent’s house. The complex consisted of several long buildings like the one shown below. We spent a lot of time at Ruben’s parents house, and they were very nice to me. Before I knew it, I was part of the family. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about my own family. They weren’t very nice at all.
The photos that follow were taken around his birthday on June 7. Our friends Roberto and Enrique Navarro joined us during the day, and later we drove to Albuquerque and stayed for a day or two. It was a fun trip. Some of the photos were taken on our drive back through central Arizona.
As soon as I got back to work, I had out of town guests to take care of and host. They were visiting the library from the University of Michigan. Barbara MacAdam was head of the Undergraduate Library there and Karen Downing was a librarian and member of her library staff. Lester Refigee was a student assistant who worked at the reference desk and was part of the Peer Information Counseling program. Carla Stoffle asked me to arrange for them to visit the UA Library to talk about undergraduate services and peer information counseling. They stayed at the Arizona Inn. Over the weekend, I took them on a tour of southern Arizona. We visited San Xavier, Patagonia, Tumacacori, Nogales and the Saguaro National Monument. It was a fun, but exhausting day, and they really enjoyed themselves. I did too. Barbara is now retired, and Karen still works at Michigan. Lester went on to get a medical degree and is now a physician in the Chicago area.
At the end of June I was traveling again, this time to New Orleans to attend the American Library Association’s annual conference. Man, it sure was hot there, and very, very humid. I cannot stand this kind of weather, but I wasn’t about to stay indoors. New Orleans is a hopping place, and I made sure to visit the sites and eat a lot of good food in the French Quarter. While at the conference, I attended REFORMA meetings and took minutes, but also found time to have dinner with friends, party at the gay bars and visit various bookstores and record stores, of which there was an abundance.
In early July, the Diaz clan held its first family reunion in Tucson. My dad and all of his living brothers and sisters showed up with their children and grandchildren. His brothers Raul and Val had already passed, but their children and families and the rest of the brothers and sisters and their families came from all over to partake in the festivities, which were held at St. Demetrius’s social hall and at Reid Park. We held another family reunion in 2007, and there’s currently talk of another being planned.
Status of Hispanic Library and Information Services : A National Institute for Educational Change, July 29-31, 1993. I was a member of the planning committee for this institute and was responsible for coordinating the opening reception. Members of the Library staff and students from the Library School assisted with the logistics and with hosting the event. A fun time was had by all.
I had spent the first half of the year at work coordinating workshops, participating in training and learning how to juggle many responsibilities at the same time. In August, after new team leaders were hired or appointed, we were finally ready to get the staff together to begin designing the work of their individual teams. We held all staff workshops, led by our ARL consultant Maureen Sullivan, at the Student Union in mid-August. The photos that follow give a snapshot of the work we did.
In October, I attended a workshop on management skills in Chicago. It was another program sponsored by the Association of Research Library Office of Management Services. I had attended one the year before in Raleigh, NC called “The Training Skills Institute”. Once I was done with the workshop, Ruben flew in from Tucson and we stayed and enjoyed a nice vacation in the city. It was lots of fun. I had been to Chicago before, but this was Ruben’s first visit. We went to the Art Institute, the Natural History Museum, the Al Capone Museum, and the Chicago Historical Society, and saw some great exhibits. We also went to the top of the Hancock building, and ate tons of great food.
I spent a lot of time in my job establishing ties with various Latino groups, including the services to the Spanish-speaking staff of the public library and Latino faculty on campus who were members of the Arizona Association of Chicanos in Higher Education, of which I became secretary for a year. I also met with Latino students enrolled in the library science graduate program. They helped me coordinate the reception for the Trejo Institute in July, and I later hosted them for dinner one evening at my home. On November 12, several of us took a field trip to Nogales, Mexico, where we visited with staff from El Colegio De Sonora and had lunch. It was a great group of students. One of them is now a library science professor at San Jose State. Others have already retired or are continuing their work as librarians in communities across the country.
Right before Christmas, Ruben and I were invited to Nogales by his friend Enrique Gomez, the same Enrique that we went to Rocky Point with back in April. We stayed in a hotel about seven blocks from the border, and hung out with Enrique and his friends at his house. We were supposed to go out to the bars with them, but decided to stay at our hotel. Enrique and I did not like each other, and I think we sensed that things weren’t going to go too well if we went along. Ruben, who doesn’t speak Spanish, was also badly treated by one of Enrique’s friends. We ended up eating campechanas at a small seafood stand across the street from our hotel, and shopping in the tourist area. I always enjoyed doing that.
A summary of the bulk of my 1993 staff development, training and diversity-related work activities (mostly June, 1993 to the end of December 1993) is included in the report linked below. I wrote this in January 1994. It gives one an idea of how busy I was in 1993. And the fun was just beginning….
1993 (June-December) Summary of Activities