Lowrider Librarian

I hope your Spring is springing. I wanted to ask you all to consider volunteering to be on your state's LSTA Grant advisory boards. I am currently the chair of the Oregon LSTA Advisory council. My place on the council give me a voice that I can use to represent others who are not at the table. There have been many times already where I was able to make an argument that would have not been made (concerning Latino issues) if I had not been there. If we take our places on these and other committees that have a say in where money goes, then more Latino programming may get funded. At the very least, we can represent where we are not represented already. We can create change, we can lead from anywhere we are and we can help one another be strong.

Ola 2015 Presentation from Max Macias This slideshow and talk was the first part of the first library conference session on cannabis resources for Librarians ever. The second part of the session was a panel. Max Macias: librarian, Jake Boone: dispensary owner and Bethany Sherman: cannabis testing facility owner. This presentation was meant to show general types of cannabis resources available in Oregon and other places.  This was not a primer on Cannabis. But you can find that here: http://lowriderlibrarian.blogspot.com/2014/07/cannabis-resources-for-librarians.html    Link to handouts:   http://tinyurl.com/o62rr2m   This was not a primer on Cannabis. But you can find that here:  http://lowriderlibrarian.blogspot.com/2014/07/cannabis-resources-for-librarians.html

This book is amazing on so many levels. Poetically, it stands almost alone as an example of relationships, alienation, microaggressions, and racism in the 21st century US. Quote from Citizen A friend recommended this book to me over the break--as we were all freshly cut wide open from the Ferguson coverage, revealing local discussions and ongoing murder of POC from any age and area in the US. I finally got a hold of it via the library and read it in earnest. The descriptions of racial microaggressions in 2nd person narrative poetry are so powerful I was shaking as I read them. Quote from Citizen Each page is condensed emotion, reaction and analysis of a lifetime of experiencing relationships that bite while smiling.  Her poetry describes how inescapable it is to be a POC in the US at this time and place.  The relentless assault upon our senses of 21st century lynchings and their impact the mental health, awareness and identity of POC is explicated in de...

On a web site I frequent someone recently posted a photo from an article on the san Francisco police giving some books to children.  Here is the link to the article: Article I commented on the site that “I hope they gave the kids some books on how to survive a confrontation with the pigs.”  I said this in all seriousness because the police routinely kill people of color in the US.  In fact, citizen survival tactics during interactions with police should be programming in libraries. Using the term pig is English in origin and has also been used to describe police since 1851. Apart from the police brutality based on race there was also some POC on POC bullying going on in this exchange on the board. Immediately, the person who posted the article (a professional in the same profession as me) told me that I should act professional--”Aren’t you a professional Max--we should behave as professionals!” I’m used to getting the “professional” ad hominem fro...

Information and knowledge are diffused via artistic expression in Hip-Hop culture among other methods. Here is a very brief sketch of some ideas on this topic. ANY and ALL comments will be answered and are valued.  Graffiti and Tags There is a lot of metadata here!   Tags and other graffiti carry metadata. for instance, when one sees a tagger's tag--and one is familiar with the the tagger, then one will know about them--how brave they are--by where they throw up their tags--the more dangerous, the braver. One would know much about their style oftentimes. If they are a local, they might have legendary status, people might know much about the tagger from the metadata derived from their tags, yet they might not even know the tagger's real identity. Murals Political Information Hip-Hop Mural Hip-Hop murals tell stories. Sometimes the story is that of the local neighborhood. The art will be done by someone who intimately knows the neighborhood's charac...

When you are a person of color and you speak about race, you are playing a game of Whack a Mole and you are the mole. Ready for the next one! Something I have seen recently jarred me into consciousness about how peer pressure bullying works in combination with Race in the US. Often, when a person of color brings up Race, they are most often told to shut up in one way or another.  If they don't or happen to bring up Race again, then they are most often attacked. Once the initial attack happens, other bullies join in and reinforce the idea that non-White viewpoints on Race don't count and don't matter. This has happened to me countless times and most often it happens with the bullies hiding behind the guise of paternal/maternal patronizing comments about the person of color being a racist. This type of bullying has happened to me in forums, on Facebook, in person and in various other scenarios when speaking about Race. Recently I was a witness to this on th...