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This chapter explores the ways in which the feminine-coded qualities of librarianship and the "feminization" of library work may be aligned with (re)asserting an agenda for libraries that builds from a foundation of serving the public good and of social responsibility.

Collections that explore the wealth of a culture are vital to the essence of every library, as they provide opportunities to build connections between students, faculty, librarians, and the community. As witness to the possibilities stands the amazing Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library provides a service to the world with this rich collection and beautifully arranged, accessible Web site.Yet as with the Jazz collections the Schomburg Center includes, the interwoven strands of cultural studies are long, tangled, and complexly interrelated. Shana Higgins' s gathering of resources will help librarians build a collection that provides students, researchers, and lifelong learners a way to contextualize and study the unique cross-cultural aspects of African American and Latino culture.Higgins is uniquely suited to author this guide. As an instructional services librarian at the University of Redlands Armacost Library, she is responsible for collection development in Latin American studies and race and ethnic studies. In addition to holding an MLS from Indiana University, Bloomington, she also holds a masters degree from their Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.-Editor A rthur, or Arturo, Schomburg is best known as the bibliophile whose collection of books, prints, and manuscripts on African American art and culture served as the foundation for what is now the New York Public Library Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Less known is that Arturo Schomburg was Puerto Rican. The fact that we rarely encounter Schomburg represented as both African American and Latino (Afro-Latino) is emblematic of the experience of most Afro-Latinos in the United States and underscores this bibliography' s purpose. These resources are intended to illuminate some recent voices seeking to make visible the lived experience of Afro-Latinos across the Americas.Piri Thomas' s enduring classic memoir of growing up in Spanish Harlem, Down These Mean Streets (New York: Knopf, 1967), provided one of the first descriptions of the experience of being identified as both African American and Latino in United States popular culture. One might consider Bodega Dreams (New York: Vintage Contemporary, 2000) by Ernesto Quiñonez to be an update on Thomas' s classic, insofar as it tells a more current tale of growing up Puerto Rican in East Harlem. Each novel subtly deals with the experience of being both African American and Puerto Rican. It is a part of the mise-en-scene, noticeable if one is attuned. Likewise, the Dominican-born Julia Alvarez characterizes Afro-Latina experience in her book In the

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