Latino Festival Links Reading and Culture

Jose Celguera was bouncing with a friend down the aisle of a row of bookstalls at the Latino Book and Family Festival Saturday feeling very much at home.

“This is all talking about our culture, man, and I really like it,” said Celguera, 15, who had traveled to the Los Angeles Convention Center with a group of 20 students from the Chicano Club at San Fernando High School.

“It’s usually really hard to find things we can relate to, but here everything is all under one roof.”

If books are about making a connection--with a culture, with an experience, with yourself--then kids like Celguera and his friend Jesse Gonzalez, 14, are what the Latino book festival is all about.

Hundreds of exhibitors, authors, musicians, actors and other performers are on hand this weekend for what is billed as the largest Latino book fair in the United States. The festival, which is free, includes author panels, poetry readings and booths dedicated to health, travel, education and computers.

The festival was born in 1997, co-founded by actor Edward James Olmos and Kirk Whisler. The timing of this year’s festival could not be more perfect, said festival director Katherine Diaz.

“Right now, Latino culture is hot,” she said. “Still, if you go into a mainstream bookstore you have to work hard to find books by and about Latinos. They’re usually segregated in the Spanish-language section.”

Which is why it was so important for people like Jose and Celguera to be a part of the event.

“I mostly read during school, mostly because there’s not a lot of books out there to interest me,” said Celguera, who found plenty of the mystery and action series he enjoys at the book fair.

Cynthia Nava and her friend Will O’Donnell, two other first-time festival-goers, were searching for inspiration of another sort. They found it in a children’s book called “Chato and the Party Animal,” by Gary Soto and illustrator Susan Guevara, one of a series on the adventures of a cat named Chato and his hip kitty friends.

“He’s a cholo cat, but he’s really sweet,” said Nava, 46, who teaches special education for bilingual children at Loreto Elementary School. “The cats have a way of talking that many of my kids can identify with. A book like this lets the children know it’s OK what they hear at home.”