Read Hunting Season for Free Online Page B

for a big corporation. Taking a pay cut, Kaleda, at thirty-one, returned to Long Island to work as a librarian in Riverhead, near where she had grown up.
    From 1990 to 1997 she was relatively content with her job as a reference librarian, but barely used her Spanish. Then, in 1997, the offer came to work at the Patchogue-Medford Library, where, she was assured, her Spanish would be put to good use. So it was with eagerness and a great sense of mission that she accepted the position, seeing herself as a link between the library and the growing Hispanic population on the south shore of Long Island. She envisioned all she could do with her language skills and her curiosity for a people who she knew were underserved and often misunderstood, as many newcomers are.
    Kaleda was surprised and disappointed to find that the library’s patrons were not as diverse as the population she could see right outside the library’s front windows. Where is everybody? she wondered. And who are they? Where are they from?
    She would strain her ears walking up and down Main Street trying to identify the soft Spanish accent she had come to know and love in Spain, or the more musical but truncated Spanish of the Caribbean that she was used to hearing from the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in New York City. What she heard in the streets of Patchogue resembled neither of those accents. This was a more formal, clipped way of speaking that seemed to skip over the vowels and end each word with an expectant tilt, as if the other person was supposed to finish the thought.
    Kaleda couldn’t place it, and didn’t know who could. She didn’t know anybody in Patchogue outside the library or at least not anybody who shared her interest in Hispanics and her love of Spanish in particular. But she was determined to attract Hispanic patrons to the library.
    There was plenty of history to draw from. Chartered by the state of New York in 1900, the Patchogue-Medford Library is the main library for Suffolk County, serving a population of more than fifty thousand people. 1 During the 1970s and 1980s, Puerto Ricans made up the vast majority of Spanish speakers in the community. A librarian named Barbara Hoffman decided to reach out to that community by focusing on the youth. With her support, a local band of teenage musicians, mostly Hispanic and African Americans, was hired for a library dance. Local teens who thought of themselves as graffiti artists were enlisted to redirect their talents to paint a mural for the library, and the library provided video equipment and a videographer to film events in the Hispanic community. To develop a young adult collection in Spanish, English-speaking librarians asked local teenagers to accompany them to the Borders Bookstore to select books they thought other teenagers would like. 2
    The program was a victim of its own success: as the community became more bilingual and more integrated into the fabric of Patchogue, there was no longer such a need for a Spanish program. Eventually the library’s outreach to Spanish speakers came to a near-standstill. While the library blinked, the Spanish-speaking community was reinventing itself, but this time with the Ecuadorians. 3
    In early 2002 the library revised its long-range plan, and Spanish-language outreach was designated a priority. Soon after, the library established a Spanish Outreach Committee, which was chaired by Kaleda. A Literacy and Languages Center with materials to learn English and other languages was established, printed materials were translated into Spanish, and the bilingualand Spanish collections were greatly expanded. Bilingual suggestion boxes were placed everywhere in the library. 4
    The only problem for Kaleda was that there seemed to be no clear path to reach out to the community. The library was like a perfectly laid-out buffet with all the trimmings and no takers. Unlike other groups that tend to unite to lobby for recognition, jobs, or political power, the