Sowing Literacy Brings Windfall

When a Kansas schoolteacher named Krista Meisel e-mailed Rueben Martinez to make an appointment with him at his Santa Ana bookstore for last Tuesday, the bookseller didn’t think much about it. An erstwhile barber turned nationally recognized missionary for Latino literacy, Martinez met with students and teachers almost every day.

At the appointed hour, however, there was no Krista Meisel. Instead, the telephone at Libreria Martinez Books & Art Gallery rang, and the man on the other end of the line, Daniel J. Socolow, congratulated Martinez for winning a $500,000, no-strings-attached MacArthur Foundation grant.

“I almost hung up on him, because I thought it was a crank call,” Martinez recalled. “About a fourth of the way through the conversation, he said, ‘Mr. Martinez, don’t hang up, because this is the real stuff.’ ”

To prove it, Socolow asked Martinez if he had an appointment with a certain Krista Meisel for this hour.

“They just wanted to make sure I was here,” the bookseller said.

Martinez is one of 23 recipients whose names the foundation formally revealed today. Eight live in California. Martinez is the only one in Southern California and no doubt the only one who cut hair for a living for more than 30 years before opening his bookstore in 1993.

The thought of half a million dollars, to come in quarterly payments of $25,000 for the next five years, has left Martinez a little dazed, he said. Having accustomed himself to the life of a bookseller -- a small, rented apartment in Santa Ana, a 19-year-old Volvo with 342,000 miles -- he’s not sure whether he will invest the money in expanding his business, which includes the main store in Santa Ana, a children’s bookstore next door and a satellite store in Lynwood, or save some of it for his old age.

“But I’ll tell you what, man, the money comes only if I stay alive, so I’m not going to take chances on the road anymore when I ride my bike,” he said.

At 64, Martinez is a small, trim, muscular man with perfectly cut gray, swept-back hair and apparently inexhaustible energy. When discussing books and Latino literacy, his dark eyes glow with zeal and his steady stream of words accelerates without warning into a whitewater of exhortation. This he typically delivers bent forward from the waist toward his listeners, his hands churning, a style he has demonstrated from podiums at local grade schools, national booksellers’ conventions, as well as Harvard and Oxford universities and the Sorbonne.

“We Latinos are a large population and we’re growing fast, but it doesn’t do us any good if we don’t get educated so we can help the next generation,” he said, growing restive on the couch in the bookstore’s office. “So, love education,” he commands, leaping to his feet. “Work hard. Don’t give up. It’s all about learning, all about pride, all about life.”

The importance of Martinez’s mission was underscored by two recent studies showing that about 50% of Latinos graduate from high school nationally, roughly 20 percentage points lower than the overall rate. Moreover, of Latinos entering college, only 23% get bachelor’s degrees by age 26, compared with 47% of whites, according to another recent study.

Martinez was born in the tough little desert town of Miami, Ariz., where his parents were copper miners. His mother misspelled his first name on his birth certificate, transposing the “e” and “u” and writing “Rueben,” his legal name. (Even the MacArthur people got the name wrong, spelling it “Reuben” on their website.)

A peripatetic boy, he nonetheless was an enthusiastic reader who moved from Edgar Allan Poe to Dumas to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Hemingway as he grew older. His reading fed a fascination with distant locales, and at 18 Martinez set out for Long Beach, a place he had read about. Once he laid eyes on the Pacific Ocean, he knew he would never return to Arizona to live.

Eventually, he built a prosperous life as a hairstylist. He put his three children through college (his son runs a home-remodeling business in Fresno, and his two daughters own an office machine-leasing business in Orange County). With business flourishing, Martinez had money to spare. “I was a Cadillac guy,” he said. “I had a Corvette, rings galore -- phony stuff, man.”

His metamorphosis into a bookman has been decidedly less pecuniary. “Nowadays,” he said, “I don’t even own a watch.” The life change had its origins in two volumes he kept in his barbershop among the usual sporting magazines. As customers paid increasing attention to the books, Martinez slowly added to the collection.

When the number of books reached 100, Martinez had no choice but to build a bookcase for them. But buying books and lending them out in such numbers began to become financially untenable, and in 1993, when his collection had grown to about 200 volumes, he began selling.

Even as a barber, Martinez had been a community and political activist who often spoke to schoolchildren about the value of reading and education in general. “But I started getting more attention to what I was saying because now I was a bookseller.”

For the first three years, his barbering paid the bookshop’s expenses, but gradually rising book sales began to contribute more to the pot, and Martinez found himself with a new career, one that “just gave me a deeper pleasure in my heart.”

By 1998, when he opened for business at his current location, his barbering had declined from as many as 30 appointments a day to a handful a week. He became a full-time and very noisy apostle of literacy and book-loving among the burgeoning Latino population of Santa Ana.

Eventually, he carried the gospel nationwide, helping alert publishers to the growing market for Spanish-language books in this country. He co-founded the Latino Book Festival, which now tours nationally, serves on the board of directors of Critica, a Publishers Weekly guide to Spanish-language titles, and speaks regularly at national conventions of publishers, librarians and teachers.

Each Thursday morning, he rises at 4 to drive to Univision studios in Los Angeles, where he has a live, five-minute program called “El Club de Libritos” (“The Little Books Club”). On the program, which is broadcast nationwide at 6:30 a.m., he reads to young children and urges parents, and fathers in particular, to read to their children.

At present, Martinez says, he sells about 125,000 books a year, the great majority in Spanish. The 7,000-square-foot Santa Ana store is a colorful, sunlight-filled place where books by eminent Spanish-language authors mingle with English-language classics translated into Spanish and with books in English.

On entering the store, a customer comes upon a table bearing bestsellers. Bill Clinton’s “My Life” and its Spanish-language version, “Mi Vida,” are stacked side by side. Clinton, Martinez said, was to have done a signing at the store but was hospitalized for heart bypass surgery.

Other famous authors, including Mexican literary giant Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Sandra Cisneros and Univision newscaster and author Jorge Ramos, have drawn throngs to the store for signings.

Martinez said he will have to expand his business to survive and, accordingly, is considering establishing stores in other densely populated, working-class Latino communities. His original store’s reputation as bookshop, community center and artistic and literary hotspot has drawn the interest of numerous mayors who have asked him to open a business in their cities.

Expansion should be easier since Libreria Martinez incorporated in January. Martinez believes the publicity surrounding the MacArthur Foundation announcement will increase investors’ interest in the business. His ultimate goal, he said, is to become “the Barnes & Noble of Spanish-language books.”

Even before today’s announcement, word of Martinez’s selection leaked out in Santa Ana. At the weekly story hour at his children’s bookstore, an event that typically draws a score or so of youngsters, nearly 300 turned out last Saturday to congratulate him.

On Sunday, however, it was business as usual. Martinez spent the day washing the front windows of his shop and sweeping the long stretch of sidewalk. “Clean windows and a clean sidewalk -- what they say is, ‘We’re open for business,’ ” he said.

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Other MacArthur Grant Recipients

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced 23 fellows who will each receive $500,000 over five years:

* Angela Belcher, 37, Cambridge, Mass. An associate professor of

materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Belcher’s research opens new paths for controlling inorganic chemical reactions.

* Joseph DeRisi, 35, San Francisco. DeRisi is an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UC San Francisco who develops new technologies for exploring the pathways regulating gene expression.

* John Kamm, 53, San Francisco. The executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation has won the release of or improved the conditions for hundreds of political prisoners in China.

* Daphne Koller, 36, Stanford. Koller, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, has developed new computational methods for representing reason and knowledge.

* Naomi Ehrich Leonard, 40, Princeton, N.J. A professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, Leonard has developed autonomous underwater vehicles.

* Vamsi Mootha, 33, Boston. Mootha is an assistant professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School and an assistant professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He specializes in the subcellular structures responsible for energy metabolism.

* Maria Mavroudi, 37, Berkeley. Mavroudi is an assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley who studies the history of shared knowledge between medieval Byzantium and its neighbors in the Islamic Middle East.

* Judy Pfaff, 58, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Pfaff is an artist who works to make paintings more three-dimensional and sculptures more painterly. She is an art professor at Bard College.

* Aminah Robinson, 64, Columbus, Ohio. Robinson is a folk artist, visual historian and storyteller who focuses on her childhood neighborhood in Columbus.

* Amy Smith, 41, Cambridge, Mass. Smith is an inventor and mechanical engineer who specializes in labor-saving technologies and life-improving solutions in developing countries. She teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

* Julie Theriot, 36, Stanford. Theriot is an assistant professor of biochemistry and microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. She is working to solve the mysteries of bacterial infection.

* C.D. Wright, 55, Providence, R.I. Wright is the author of 10 volumes of poetry, an editor and an English professor at Brown University.

* David Green, 48, Berkeley. Executive director of Project Impact, Green applies traditional business strategies in developing countries to make healthcare products available inexpensively.

* Reginald R. Robinson, 31, Chicago. Robinson is a pianist and composer who has devoted himself to preserving ragtime music.

* Gretchen Berland, 40, New Haven, Conn. An assistant professor of internal medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, Berland has combined her current career as a physician with her past experience making documentaries to compose video projects on healthcare topics.

* Heather Hurst, 29, New Haven, Conn. Hurst is an archeological illustrator and artist who focuses on the pre-Columbian Americas.

* Tommie Lindsey, 53, Union City, Calif. Lindsey is a debate coach at James Logan High School, and his students -- many from poor or broken homes -- regularly excel at national championships.

* Edward P. Jones, 53, Arlington, Va. Jones is a fiction writer whose multilayered novel about a black slave owner, “The Known World,” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

* Aleksandar Hemon, 40, Chicago. Born in Sarajevo and writing in his adopted language of English, Hemon is a short-story writer whose work addresses war, exile and ethnic conflict.

* James Carpenter, 55, New York. Carpenter is a glass sculptor, engineer and designer who uses glass as a way to reshape space and light. He has been involved in the rebuilding of a structure at the World Trade Center site.

* Cheryl Rogowski, 43, Pine Island, N.Y. Rogowski overhauled her family farm, which specialized in a single crop, to provide a variety of products for regional and specialty markets. She has also mentored immigrant farmers and worked on literacy programs for migrant farm workers.

* Katherine Gottlieb, 52, Anchorage. Gottlieb, president and CEO of Southcentral Foundation, has improved healthcare in her Native Alaskan community by changing the focus to patient-centered care.

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Source: Associated Press

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Los Angeles Times