The Mission of "Little Star": Juana Manrique de Lara's Contributions to Mexican Librarianship

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution and after a year studying library science in the United States, Juana Manrique de Lara returned to Mexico City to begin work as library inspector for the Federal District. The story of her life and career in public and children's library service and library education is an historical narrative of both her emerging profession and her nation. This study focuses on Manrique de Lara's formative years (1899–1925) as she acquired an education and began her life's work in the midst of Mexico's prolonged civil war and subsequent reconstruction. Foremost, this study is a tribute, intended to share what too few librarians, even in Mexico, know: Juana Manrique de Lara helped establish librarianship in Mexico and passed her enthusiasm for the profession to a generation of librarians.

Every society of the West today needs a certain number of doctors, magistrates, soldiers, and librarians—to cure their citizens when sick, to administer justice to them, to defend them, and to make them read.

—José Ortega y Gasset, "Misión del bibliotecario"

You have no idea of the enthusiasm I had, the love I felt for my profession. Indeed, it was my life, and they paid me.

—Estela Morales Campos, "Entrevista: Juana Manrique de Lara"

In the summer of 1924 and in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, twenty-seven-year-old Juana Manrique de Lara returned to Mexico City fresh from a year of study at the Library School of the New York Public Library to begin work as inspectora de bibliotecas (library inspector) for the Federal District. Manrique de Lara's mission, so well articulated over the course of her nearly forty-year career, was to recognize and respond to the needs of Mexicans of all ages for reading and for public libraries. In the midst of civil war she acquired an education, forged a career, and

Figure 1.

Juana Manrique de Lara, first professional librarian of the Departamento de Bibliotecas. In Estela Morales Campos, Educación bibliotecológica en México, 1915–1954 (Mexico City: UNAM, 1988), 97.

made lasting contributions to librarianship in her homeland. The depth and reach of Manrique de Lara's work are reflected in her professional passions, which first encompassed children's library service, expanded to public library management, and then found tandem expression in teaching library education and as a government-appointed library consultant. Remarkably, as a young professional she succeeded by both conforming to and defying bureaucratic practice to bring children's library service, public libraries, and library education to the federal government's attention in the midst of and following the Mexican Revolution.

There is very little scholarship that mentions Manrique de Lara and even less that examines her life and work in any depth. Accordingly, piecing together Manrique de Lara's early life and career is a challenging task. To do so, one must draw from a limited number of articles or sections of monographs, a single interview, contemporaneous government sources, and Manrique de Lara's own writings, almost all of which are Spanish-language materials published in Mexico and found in few public, university, or research libraries across North America. The foremost scholarship on Manrique de Lara is the work of Mexican library historian Martha Alicia Añorve Guillén, whose master's thesis led to two published articles on Manrique de Lara's contributions to the federal government's library programs and to children's library services during the 1920s. Her conclusion, based on close comparisons of Manrique de Lara's early articles and Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) documents, is that although no official attribution was ever made, we can infer that the SEP heard and incorporated Manrique de Lara's suggestions into its now-landmark library planning between 1920 and 1924.¹ Ample, yet not abundant in number, Manrique de Lara's own writings comprise the most compelling testament to her life, work, and ideas. With the exception of children's stories...