Unlike Sunday night, Monday was akin to a national day of mourning in Mexico as the Mexican national team fell 2-0 to Brazil, ending the nation’s hopes of a World Cup title.

Dominican Studies in Mexico

Although most SALALM conference attendees live in the United States or work in U.S. libraries, archives, and repositories, many others come from different parts of the world including but not limited to Latin America and Europe.

Similar to its sister fields of Cuban and Puerto Rican studies, once more the field of Dominican Studies was represented at the 63rd installment of the SALALM Conference with presentations by Sarah Aponte, chief librarian at the Dominican Studies Institute (CUNY) and me, collection development librarian at Bronx Community College. Aponte participated in a roundtable discussion alongside scholar librarians Pamela Espinoza (Ohio State University), Phillip Jones (Grinnell College) Bronwen K. Maxson (University of Colorado Boulder), and David Wiseman (American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese). Participants discussed intersections in teaching Latin American resources.

I presented the paper, “Competing Identities in a University Library: Decolonizing the Library by Building a Latin American Collection.” In the paper I discussed the importance of growing an academic institution’s collection to reflect the university’s student body. I also discussed my role in building Bronx Community College’s library collection as collection development librarian and also tackled the question of how librarians, partners, and users can use contested space to explore how we influence significance, perspective, and critical reflection in librarianship.

Recognizing Latin Americanist Librarianship

SALALM comprises of multiple committees and subcommittees that honor the works of library and information professionals and graduate students within the field of Latin America. SALALM member Marisol Ramos and her colleagues from the University of Connecticut including Jennifer Snow, Doug Neary, and Rick Sarvas, were awarded the José Medina Toribio Award for their digital humanities project, “Puerto Rico Citizenship Archives Project.” Established in 1981, the José Medina Toribio Award encourages and acknowledges superior accomplishments in research and scholarship.