“Old Forgotten Children’s Books” at CUNY: Centro Library’s (Unofficial) Children’s Literature Collection

“Childhood is the bit of the past that every adult knows,” Karen Sánchez-Eppler has said, suggesting that this familiarity might cause us to overlook its part in the “work of history.”¹ Kenneth B. Kidd writes that the “texts of childhood” preserved in rare children’s literature collections around the United States represent a kind of recovery project for understanding “childhood itself.”² Such collections have helped invigorate the childhood studies and children’s literature field, “elevating children’s materials” and increasing institutional support and visibility.³ As a Latino/a studies and childhood scholar, my research aims to unite Latino/a literary history with the larger conversation on American childhood. So I was eager to investigate the City University of New York’s (CUNY) holdings at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro), Hunter College Library and Archives. Born out of community agitation and demand, the Centro has had a fabled reputation as a pioneering ethnic studies research institute (at CUNY since 1973 and at Hunter College since 1980).⁴ Here, I analyze Centro Library’s collection of rare and popular, though forgotten, children’s books as a single “object” testifying to the history of Puerto Rican childhood and the formation of ethnic studies in the academy. The collection’s position as an anomaly in the library, however, demonstrates how children’s materials require further critical contextualization in ethnic studies institutions and scholarship.

As the first researcher in childhood studies and children’s literary history at the Centro, I was placed somewhat unofficially in the role of analyzing the Centro’s unofficial children’s collection.⁵ I use the term unofficial since, although the library has acquired children’s materials since its establishment in 1975, many of the treasures I highlight in this essay were uncatalogued and left in a storage area in the archives’ basement. The current librarian told me the materials were clearly important to the greater collection, but they had still not found a “home,” perhaps due to the kinds of research agendas emphasized at Centro in the previous years. She gathered an assortment of these materials on a cart for my perusal. The scene reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Old Forgotten Children’s Books” (1928). Benjamin muses on the historical value of old children’s books as works of art and relics of childhood’s pleasures, which may otherwise register as “so much waste paper.”⁶ Kenneth Kidd has argued that the personal affect and value assigned to children’s books as artifacts makes an archive of children’s literature “the most special sort of special collection.”⁷ Indeed, as I began reviewing the uncatalogued rare books, filled with children’s and author’s annotations, I felt an impression that I was handling the most precious objects representing the Puerto Rican Diaspora.

That the Library and Archives has been located since 2012 at 119th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan’s El Barrio/Spanish Harlem, a locus of Nuyorican history and culture, further amplifies the special quality of these relics. For example, in the shelves of uncatalogued materials, I found a set of children’s books belonging to Pura Belpré, a former resident and pioneering librarian in Spanish Harlem, who traveled around El Barrio and other historically Latino/a neighborhoods in New York telling stories. Some of the books contain Belpré’s signature or were dedicated to her by family members and friends (fig. 1). Among Belpré’s personal book collection is a copy of Nilda (1973) signed by acclaimed Nuyorican novelist Nicholasa Mohr. Because she was the first Latina librarian at the New York Public Library, a folklorist, and arguably the first Latina children’s literature theoretician, Belpré’s books allow us to examine her literary influences, reading practices, and relationships with other children’s authors. Researchers might request Belpré’s personal copies of children’s books, history books, and folklore, some of which she annotated, as a complement to her archival essays and stories (The Pura Belpré Papers, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Library and...