Guerrilla Librarian: José Vasconcelos and Mexico's Revolutionary Library Rennaissance

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 and idealistic man who combined political savoir-faire with a rare enthusiasm for books, libraries, and literacy. Guerrilla Librarian 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, the man’s library work seems 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.