Pura Belpré Diversified New York Public Library Collection and Community
The Librarian who brought Spanish language materials and programming to the New York City Public Library for the first time.
Written by shift7, published here with permission.
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In 1920, Pura Belpré was 21 years old and new to New York. Having recently moved from Puerto Rico, she landed a job in the garment industry, but she was soon recruited by the New York City Public Library under a new initiative to hire diverse young women from different communities across the city.¹ Pura became the first Puerto Rican librarian in the entire New York City Public Library system. She quickly noticed that Spanish speaking parents weren’t taking their children to the library because they thought it was only for English speakers, so she dedicated her work to expanding access.² From that first moment of hire, to a career spanning nearly fifty years, Pura brought Spanish language books, music, and programming to the New York City Public Library for the very first time.
Pura “saw the library as a way to bring the community together,” said children’s book author Lucía González. She knew that the library couldn’t exist just within four walls and so she journeyed beyond it. Before the age of outreach services and multicultural collections, Pura traveled around the city’s libraries, telling stories, with puppets, in Spanish and English — unheard of at the time.³ And when the resources she wanted didn’t exist, Pura created them. She noticed a lack of books for children in Spanish, so she wrote one herself. Her first book, Perez y Martina, authored in 1932, was the first Spanish language book for children published by a mainstream U.S. press. She also brought Puerto Rican stories to non-Spanish speakers, publishing a number of folktales translated into English.⁴ Still today, while nearly a quarter of American public school students are Latinx, less than 3 percent of books published for kids in the U.S. are by Latinx authors and illustrators.⁵ Sadly, Perez y Martina is no longer in print, but her legacy lives on through the American Library Association’s Pura Belpré Award honoring excellence in children’s literature and celebrating the Latinx cultural experience.
The day before her death in 1982, New York City Mayor Ed Koch presented 83-year-old Pura the Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture for her decades-long work enriching the lives of the city’s Spanish-speaking children and making the libraries more accessible to all.
Learn more about Pura Belpré and how she brought Spanish to NYC’s libraries. You can visit Pura’s story in person too:
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture — Harlem, NY (Original site of the 135th Street Branch New York Public Library — the site of her first library job.)
Harry Belafonte 115th Street Library — Harlem, NY (Site of her second library job, which turned site into important cultural center for the Latinx residents of NYC.)
Centro, Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY — East Harlem, NY (Where Pura’s papers are archived, open to the public.)
