Rose Treviñ;o, Leader in Services to Latino Children, Dies at 58
RSSThis article originally appeared in SLJ's Extra Helping. <a href="https://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/subscribe.asp?screen=pi8">Sign up now!</a>
By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 05/03/2010
Rose Zertuche-Treviño, a librarian who devoted her career to helping improve the lives of children, died on April 30 in Houston, TX. She was 58.
Treviño spent her last seven years as the youth services coordinator for the Houston Public Library, a system that serves one of the biggest Spanish-speaking populations in the country. She retired in October 2009 and moved back to San Antonio, where she was born and raised.
 |
|
Rose Zertuche-Treviño |
The granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, Treviño grew up poor. Her father worked in a cotton field as a child and went on to hold two jobs to support his family, while his wife worked four jobs. Treviño’s first language was Spanish and only learned to speak English when she entered kindergarten. It was also that year that her mother first took her to a public library—and the five-year-old decided on her career path. “Not everyone figures out what they want to be at such a young age,” says her son Steven Treviño, 33. “And she got to do more than she thought she would ever do.”
The oldest of five children, Treviño helped raise her three sisters and brother, and was the first person in her family to attend college and graduate school, earning an MLS in 1975 from Our Lady of the Lake University, a private catholic university in San Antonio.
Treviño spent her 35-year career being the first of many things. After earning her library degree, she worked in a bookmobile with the San Antonio Public Library's Las Palmas branch. Later she became the first Hispanic manager of a library in the city of San Antonio when she joined the Memorial Library branch. After that, she became the children’s services coordinator at the Central Library.
One of the highlights of her career was as chair of the 2009 Newbery Award Committee, the first time that a Latino held the position.
“She presented the Newbery Award to Neil Gaiman in Chicago for The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins, 2008),” says her son, who proudly remembers watching his mother on stage that day. “It was such a great way to cap her career.”
Treviño was the “perfect mother” who started reading to her son and daughter from early on. “When she was pregnant with my sister, I would curl up next to her, and she would read stories to us,” says Steven. “She literally read thousands of books to us. My biggest regret is that we don’t have kids yet because she would have been such a great grandmother.”
Steven and his sister Jaclyn, 27, remember spending many childhood days in the library with their mother attending story time and puppet shows, and Treviño would even bring her young daughter to Texas Library Association (TLA) and American Library Association (ALA) conferences.
“For the first five years of her involvement in ALA, we roomed together during the mid-winter and annual meetings, many times bringing along our daughters or nieces so they could enjoy their vacation and help us scout the exhibit halls for goodies while we attended to our meetings and obligations,” says Garza de Cortes, who Treviño recruited to work at the San Antonio Public Library, where they worked closely together.
Treviño was a passionate advocate for Latino children's literature and library services to Latinos. She wrote Read Me a Rhyme in Spanish and English (2009), a collection of Latino rhymes, songs, finger plays, riddles, and other programming ideas for librarians who work with babies, toddlers, preschoolers, and school-age children. And she edited The Pura Belpré Awards: Celebrating Latino Authors and Illustrators (2006, both ALA Editions).
While at the Houston Public Library, she offered a variety of Latino children’s programs such as Para los niños/For the children, which provided Spanish-speaking parents with resources to help them serve as their children’s “first teachers;” Bilingual Storytime; and Jardín Infantil, a program that was conducted entirely in Spanish and was aimed at newborn children to the age of four.
Treviño also served as chair of the Pura Belpré Award Committee, which seeks to increase of quality Latino literature available to U.S. readers. And she was on the El día de los niños/El día de los librosNational Advisory Committee, a program founded by author and poet, Pat Mora, to help libraries reach out to Latino children and their families.
“Gracious Rose Treviño was a shining example, a librarian committed to the underserved,” says Mora. “She was a friend and a great Día supporter. A warm, quiet person, a woman of faith.”
She was an active member of the ALA, the TLA, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), the Public Library Association (PLA), and REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking.
In 1997, she was the first the first Mexican American to receive the Siddie Jo Johnson Award for significant contributions for children's librarianship. And most recently, Steven and Jaclyn attended the TLA annual conference in San Antonio to accept an award on their mother's behalf for her contributions to the 2X2 committee, which selects a list of 20 recommended books for children from age two to grade two.
“Mom was not the type to brag about her accomplishments,” says Steven Treviño. “She did what she did because she loved books and children and hoped that all children would have the opportunity she had to learn through reading.”
She is survived by her husband of 35 years, Pete, and their children.
