Guerrilla Librarian

In one of history’s most incandescent bursts of library-building, the post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1920s created some two thousand new libraries in less than four years. This project’s driving force was Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos, an intensely energetic idealist who combined political savoir-faire with a rare enthusiasm for books, libraries, and literacy. This text examines the important successes and shortcomings of Vasconcelos’s work, and traces its continuing influence on contemporary librarianship. Vasconcelos was not a trained librarian; much of his methodology was as technically faulty as it was sincere. Like his philosophical and autobiographical writing, his library work was seemingly disordered and divinely inspired. Vasconcelos’s iconoclastic, contentious outlook was powerful, maddening, and occasionally amusing, but at its core was an innocent faith in the redemptive force of the written word.