Things to know up front:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.

Every chapter in My Life Story includes information about me, my work, my family and my friends. It also includes information about events that took place locally and nationally, etc. that I thought important enough to include. You’ll also find that I’ve included films, musicians and recordings/videos, in addition to books that were released in a given year.

While I have included many personal photos, most of the graphic content included below is borrowed from the Internet. I do not claim to own this material. I am just adding it for educational purposes. If the owners of any of the content in the “My Life Story” series want their stuff removed, I am happy to oblige. My email address is jrdiaz@arizona.edu. Thanks!

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.

“Instruction in a Multicultural/Multiracial Environment”, co-authored with Karen Downing, in the book, Learning to Teach: Workshops on Instruction. American Library Association, 1993.

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

Things to know up front:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.

Every chapter in My Life Story includes information about me, my work, my family and my friends. It also includes information about events that took place locally and nationally, etc. that I thought important enough to include. You’ll also find that I’ve included films, musicians and recordings/videos, in addition to books that were released in a given year.

While I have included many personal photos, most of the graphic content included below is borrowed from the Internet. I do not claim to own this material. I am just adding it for educational purposes. If the owners of any of the content in the “My Life Story” series want their stuff removed, I am happy to oblige. My email address is jrdiaz@arizona.edu. Thanks!

I was still in Tucson enjoying my holiday vacation, visiting with family and friends when the new year began. Before I left to go back to Michigan, I contacted Carla Stoffle to say hello. She was the former Assistant Dean at the University of Michigan Libraries and she played an instrumental role in hiring me there in 1987. She was very committed to promoting diversity and did all she could to hire librarians of color and to combat racism in the workplace. In 1991, she became the Dean of Libraries at the University of Arizona.  When I contacted her to say hello, she invited me to one of her holiday gatherings at her home, where I met some of the Library’s department heads and library administrators. I brought my friend Richard Elias with me and we both had a blast drinking beer and other assorted alcoholic beverages, eating a bunch of food and meeting new people.

Carla encouraged me to apply for a position as a reference librarian that had just opened up. The area of specialization was psychology, and this just happened to be a subject I knew well because of my background (I have a bachelor of arts degree in psychology) and experience at Michigan conducting countless instruction sessions for students taking courses on this topic.  I was very excited about the prospect of being able to finally come back home after being away for over five years, and was filled with hope and anticipation.

I returned to Ann Arbor the first week of January, and jumped right back in to doing my job, providing reference service, teaching basic library skills to students in Psychology, English and other areas, and supervising and training reference assistants. I also continued serving on the Library Diversity Council. MLK Day was right around the corner, and this particular year we were bringing the author Alex Haley to campus. It was an exciting time.

It was also around this time that I hit a high note with my teaching, and received a resounding round of applause after an instruction session I conducted for students in an upper division political science class. I was ecstatic, as something like that had never happened before. All those hours I spent in the classroom teaching while at Michigan had finally paid off, and this was proof that I was getting pretty good at it.

Toward the end of January, I attended the ALA Midwinter conference in San Antonio. I had never been there before, and there was a lot to see and explore. I had fun shopping, and even bought a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. I had immersed myself in country music around this time, and enjoyed dressing up in Western wear. I also found some great record stores and antiques stores, as well as some interesting historic landmarks, such as the Old Spanish Governor’s mansion and a neighborhood called La Villita, which was home to many historic houses. I also got a taste of the gay scene and visited a few bars in the downtown area. The food in San Antonio was pretty good too. At one restaurant, called Mi Tierra, I purchased a t-shirt with Emiliano Zapata’s portrait on it, and underneath it, painted in bright red, were the words “Mi Tierra”. I thought it was the coolest thing, and I kept that t-shirt until it finally fell apart.

At some point, the Arizona job was advertised, and I put my resume and a cover letter together and sent them in. Once this was done and out of the way, it was just a matter of time. I waited and waited and waited.

I was not involved romantically with anyone at this time, and spent a lot of nights watching movies that I had rented from local video stores. These included a number of old Bette Davis and Joan Crawford movies, such as Jezebel, Mr. Skeffington, The Women,  and Mildred Pierce. It was a lot of fun, inexpensive, and it kept me home at night! My car wasn’t very reliable at the time, so staying at home was really the best thing for me to do. Besides, I needed to start saving money for the move back home.

By March, I had been notified that I was a leading candidate for the reference position at Arizona. I was interviewed over the phone, and later invited out to Tucson for an interview. I didn’t know it at the time, but Carla had another position open, that of Staff Development librarian, and while I was in the middle of the interview for the reference position, she asked me to consider applying for that job also.  I didn’t really feel ready to take on a job like this, as I felt I didn’t have the appropriate experience, but Carla was persistent and asked me to interview, so I did. She argued that I had done library programming and instruction, and that I had what she called “transferable skills”, and could easily pick up along the way whatever else I needed to learn. There would be more pay, and I would be part of the Library administration. I thought about it for a few days, and finally decided that I would give it a try and apply for the job, and lo and behold, the job of Staff development librarian was soon offered to me. I would report directly to the Dean of the Library, Carla Stoffle.

When I got back to Ann Arbor, I needed to wrap things up at work and also needed to figure out how to get back home. My record collection and book collection presented the biggest challenges. There was no way I was going to get rid of anything this time around, so I decided to ask my oldest brother Charles if he would be willing to fly to Michigan and help me drive a U-Haul back to Tucson. He agreed, thank goodness.

I stayed in my job in Ann Arbor until early May. The head of the Undergraduate Library, Barbara MacAdam, threw me a going away party the day before I left, and my good friend Barbara Hoppe, (now Kolekamp) took photos of the occasion. I felt bad about leaving my good friends LeAnne, Mike, Karen, Barb, Linda, Judy and Rhett behind, but nothing would get in the way of going back home.

In hindsight, I’m glad I took the risk of moving away from Tucson back in 1987, but my mom’s death the following year has always made me feel guilty about it at the same time. I realize that she still would have passed on if I were in Tucson, however. I have to remind myself all the time that her death wasn’t my fault. It was her time to go, and that was that. She was ill and had reached the end of her road.

If I set aside the guilt trip that won’t go away, I must admit that living in Nogales and then in Ann Arbor were indeed worthwhile experiences. Living right on the U.S. Mexican border was eye opening in many ways, and I enjoyed crossing the line whenever possible. There’s nothing like the birria they sell on Elias St in Nogales, Sonora!  I also got to see a lot of the state of Michigan while I lived there, and I really enjoyed it. I also liked living in Ann Arbor. There was always something going on, and I took advantage of that and saw concerts, attended lectures and plays and art fairs, and bought scores of record albums and books. I also had fun going out dancing, listening to live music, and partying with my friends. My relationship with Brent fizzled out at the end of 1990, unfortunately, but we did a lot of fun stuff together while we were a couple.

By the end of the first week of May, Charles and I were on the road heading back to Tucson. Unfortunately, he had to drive the whole way, because my eyesight is bad, and I just couldn’t handle driving such a big truck. It would have been a dangerous proposition!  We had a good trip, nevertheless,  and made it back home within a few days. I was so happy to finally be back home!

Finding a place to live was at the top of my to-do list when I arrived. At first I thought I would find an apartment on the south side of town, close to my brother Carlos and sister Irene. However, I quickly began to have second thoughts about it. I wanted to feel safe, and as a gay man, I knew I would not be so safe on the south side of town. That’s just the way I felt about it, and while some folks may not understand, I just knew there would be problems. I searched elsewhere, and quickly found an apartment near Ft. Lowell and Country Club. It was a two-bedroom townhouse and the rent was just a little more than what I was paying in Ann Arbor.  My family helped me move in, and I was pretty well settled by the time I started my new job on June 1.

I was hired as an assistant librarian, even though I had been promoted to associate librarian while at Michigan. This meant that I would have about five years to “prove myself” in three areas: my primary job, scholarship and service, and either be awarded continuing status (similar to tenure) or released from my job for not “cutting it”. I was told that even though I had been promoted at Michigan, I hadn’t published enough, although I had submitted a book chapter manuscript that was slated for publication in 1993 and had co-written another book chapter with my colleague Karen Downing that was also published in 1993.

During the first few weeks of my new job, I learned that in addition to having responsibilities in the area of staff development, I would also be responsible for professional recruitment and the promotion of diversity within the organization, and that my job title would be “Assistant to the Dean for Staff Development, Recruitment and Diversity”. I would also be a member of the Library administration and would attend meetings of the Administrative Group, Library Cabinet, Planning Council and Library Council, all leadership groups within the organization. I would also work with the Library Diversity Council and the Diversity Training Committee and would allocate staff development funds in consultation with the Staff Development Committee.

I also learned that Carla was very, very busy, and had little time to devote to helping me learn the ins and outs of the job. I spent more time learning from Shelley Phipps, one of the assistant deans. She and Carla were spearheading an “organizational review” of the Library, something I had no knowledge of until I got there. This was a huge deal, and it meant that I would have to hit the ground running in my new job.

I spent the next six months on the fast track, attending countless meetings and learning about how the UA Library operated from the top down. I also started organizing workshops and events for the staff.  There was a whirlwind of activity around the library restructuring project, as it was soon called. Plans were in the works to completely change how everything in the Library was organized and managed. The restructuring had to take place, we were told, because the University had been cutting the Library budget for several years in a row, and something had to give. Increased costs for magazines and journals and the implementation of a new integrated library system also contributed to the idea that the Library needed to make some deep structural changes. The goal of the restructuring was to save money while continuing to provide critical user services and access to information. It called for the number of departments to be reduced from 15 to 9, in addition to calling  for a change in how work was done and decisions were made. The library would become a “team-based” organization, with shared decision-making as one of its central tenets and improved work processes. This was a multi-year endeavor. My role was to help people get on the bandwagon to learn to work in teams and to make shared decisions, among many other things.

Unfortunately, nothing I did seemed adequate or good enough. From the beginning, in all honesty, I didn’t feel much support from Carla or others in the administration, and was soon blamed for many things that went wrong that were simply beyond my control. I was very surprised that there was so much “politics” at play, particularly around the issues of diversity and recruitment. The Library had two diversity committees, and the leaders of these both competed with one another for resources and attention. I got stuck in the middle of all of this and had to figure out where I fit in. It was difficult. Carla also had me doing things that should have been taken on by others. For example, she asked me to coordinate the development of a proposal for the creation of Mexican American Borderlands archive in Special Collections. I spent countless hours meeting with various Latino leaders in the community, gathering information and gauging their interest in such an idea. Meanwhile, the staff in Special Collections were livid that they were not asked to do this work. Eventually, they did get involved, but they were not happy that I got the ball rolling. As far as recruitment of minorities went, some of the department heads pretended they supported minority recruitment and affirmative action, but in reality, they did not. I worked hard to recruit minority candidates to apply for our jobs, but they wouldn’t in many cases even be granted an interview.

In hindsight I realize that the Library needed a seasoned professional to coordinate the training and development necessary for the move from a top down organization to a team-based organization. It needed someone who had experience in administration and leadership, with expertise in human resources issues, organizational design and change.  Actually, nobody on the staff had this kind of experience. We were all winging it. I could be wrong, but as far as I know, our ARL consultant had never led this type of process anywhere else. She, the Dean and the Assistant Dean were all learning as they went along, as were the members of the Operational Adjustment Team (OAT), who came up with the idea that we should have teams run the organization. The problem was that nobody on the staff had experience with team-based organizations. The members of OAT read some books and figured they could take a cookbook approach to the whole thing and tweak things as they went along. They ignored some basic tenets about teams that the professional literature espoused, and decided that instead of having small project teams, as the literature promoted, we were going to have large functional teams, with everyone having a “voice” in decisions and workflow processes. Boy, what a mistake that was, on so many levels. Unfortunately, we dove right in and went for it, and within a year upended the whole structure of the organization. It would take just a short while to realize that we had made some major mistakes. Within a year, at least four of the members of operational adjustment team had left the Library. I have to wonder why. Perhaps they didn’t want to be around to take the heat for what was to come. Who knows?

I traveled three more times between June and December, attending conferences and training events. I went to ALA Annual in San Francisco, to the first conference of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association in Columbus, and to a training skills workshop in Raleigh, North Carolina.

 I’ve always enjoyed traveling, and I took the time to explore each city as much as I could. I got to see my Michigan friends in San Francisco, and even ran as a member of their team in the ALA Fun Run, rather than with the UA team. I was already missing Michigan. In Columbus, Ohio, where the BCALA conference was held, I spent time with my friend Karen Downing. We had a bit of a falling out before I left Ann Arbor in May, but by August, things were better between us and we spent a lot of time together at this conference. It was an historic event, and I’m very glad I was able to be there. The training event I went to in Raleigh was a good session, but I quickly learned that the format of the workshop relied heavily on the participants teaching each other, by sharing their own knowledge and experiences with one another. The workshop facilitators merely provided the structural framework for the workshop and filled in a few gaps. We were also given lots of reading material. This was an approach to training that I saw used again and again by certain consultants and trainers.

The first six months back home had other surprises in store for me as well. Things weren’t the same with the family. My dad had met a much younger woman from Mexico and they lived together at my dad’s house. I never felt comfortable going over to visit. It was different. My sister Becky lived there with my dad and Lupe too. Things sure had changed. I missed my mom.

Christmas was non-eventful. I don’t remember much about it. I looked forward to the new year and hoped that things would improve. So far, I wasn’t all that happy with the way things were turning out.  I wasn’t an HR person. Prior to moving back to Arizona, I had been a public services librarian and had done reference and teaching, as well as some collection development work. I was not accomplished as a public speaker,  nor had I the confidence to stand up to others and stand my ground. I felt beat up by the end of the year. And I was not taking care of myself. I was doing stupid things like partying a lot and going out at night. I was lonely. It wasn’t a good time for me. Another big change in my life had just occurred—moving back home to Tucson after having been away for over five years– and I had difficulty adjusting to it all. I felt really stuck.   My dreams of serving my community, of turning people on to reading and learning and of social change seemed further and further from my grasp. It would take another year or more before I felt more grounded in my personal life and found things to do on the job that were more worthwhile. But at least I was back home.

A NOTE ABOUT THE GRAPHICS: IF YOU CLICK ON THE IMAGE, IT WILL ENLARGE IN A NEW WINDOW. THERE’S A LOT OF TEXT, AND DOING THIS WILL MAKE IT EASIER TO READ THE WRITING. CLICKING THE BACK ARROW KEY WILL TAKE YOU BACK TO THE POST.

Here’s one of my favorite songs from the album:

I wrote the following article about unity among Latinos on campus. It was my farewell message to Michigan.

I got a phone call from the UA Library on March 9 and was invited for an interview for the reference job at the University of Arizona Libraries as well as the staff development position.

In addition to talking about my experiences with collection development and bibliographic instruction, I gave a presentation on the diversity work I participated in doing while at the University of Michigan Library. This was for the staff development position, which was later offered to me and that I accepted. My start date would be June 1. Here is a link to the presentation that I gave.

“Staff Development and Diversity at the University of Michigan”, / presentation, March 19, 1992. A talk I gave while interviewing for the position of Assistant to the Dean for Staff Development at the University of Arizona Library.

Couldn’t resist adding this:

Barbara MacAdam, the head of the Undergraduate Library, threw me a going away party at her home on Thursday, May 7, one day before my very last at Michigan. Most of my UGL friends were there, except LeAnne Martin and Mike Robbins, unfortunately. We had a great time. Everyone loved my brother Charles, especially the women. They thought he was quite handsome.

My very last day at work…

By the end of my first week of work in early June, I attended a meeting of the Arizona University Libraries Consortium, and was introduced there as Carla’s new assistant. The consortium membership included administrators and staff from all three Arizona universities. The purpose of these gatherings was to share information and explore areas where the three libraries could collaborate, such as working together to reduce costs by engaging in consortial arrangements with publishers and vendors.

In the Spring I threw my hat into the ring and ran for national secretary of REFORMA. I won the election and by ALA Annual was busy taking notes at all of the formal REFORMA meetings. Fun, fun, fun!

To see a full, detailed summary of the conference, see: “Surviving the Tremors: ALA in San Francisco”, Wilson Library Bulletin, September 1992, Vol. 67, p34-47. (pdf)

Here’s one of the songs from the album “El Quelite”.

I was looking forward to attending La Fiesta de San Agustin on August 30. Here’s a preview of the day’s events.

Earlier the same day, I had a big family gathering at my townhouse. We had a blast. Almost everyone in my immediate family showed up, with the exception of a few nieces and nephews. My dad, his wife Lupe, my cousin Yolanda and my niece’s boyfriend, Martin Green, have all since passed on. Time sure flies. I remember this like it was yesterday.

A few days later, I was traveling again, this time to Columbus, Ohio, for the first ever national conference of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. The conference lasted from September 3 through September 6. It was a historic occasion. I spent a lot of time with Karen Downing, my friend from Michigan. The purpose of my attendance was to recruit African American librarians to Arizona. I had just successfully helped recruit one such librarian, and the Dean of the Library wanted me to let people know that Arizona welcomed librarians of color.

The conference got several write-ups in the national library press. Here are links to a couple such articles.

African Americans “stretch the envelope” at the first Black Caucus Conference, by Beverly Goldberg, American Libraries, November 1992.

African American Librarians Meet as “Culture Keepers”, School Library Journal, October 1992.

Papers from this conference are available in the following publication. Culture keepers:enlightening and empowering our communities : proceedings of the First National Conference of African American Librarians, September 4-6, 1992, Columbus, Ohio (catalog record from the University of Arizona Library).

Here’s my favorite version of the song, “I Have Nothing”, which first appeared on the soundtrack to the movie “The Bodyguard”.

Here’s one of the many great tunes that can be found on the above album.

I ended up the year still single, but in the next few months, things in my personal life would change dramatically, and for the better.