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our gardener, I'm gonna be interviewing Jose Vasquez today. I have been with Harris County for one year now and I'm recording this interview on February 3, 2021 at the Alden Branch Library. Hello, this is Jose Vasquez. I worked for Harris County Public Library for about seven

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years. Um that was about 11 years ago or so was the last time I worked, I'm recording this interview from my home in Houston texas, thank you so much for joining us today. Um So our first question is, did you grow up in Houston? And if

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not, what brought you here? So I actually grew up in Houston, I never left, I was born in Houston, went to school in Houston went to the University of Houston, and then my first real job was working at Aldine Branch library, so. Mhm. Okay. What did

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you think you were going to be when you grew up? Um I I always wanted to be a musician, as you can see, that's that's kind of what I do, I'm the mariachi band director at the University of Houston downtown. Um And I also work in

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student affairs, but um I would have never taken that route, had I not gotten my start working for Alden branch library um at the time I was just a circulation assistant, but the library is so community based there with uh you know to two or three,

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I think three schools within a couple blocks, so kids used to always come in whether they were high school junior high. Um And so I remember proposing to the branch manager at the time if we could do something to work with, like an after school program

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of some sort and he loved the idea and so basically every Tuesday and thursday we um we had what we call a team time and at the time the cool uh we had a uh I think it was a Nintendo 64 I don't remember the console,

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but basically they'd come in and do homework or they could play video games and um you know, we would help them out with their basic math tutoring and things like that, but um I really liked it and so what I decided to do was to go

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back into student affairs, go back to school and basically start advising student organizations in a college setting. Um When I left, I left Alden branch library after about a year um to become a young adult assistance, so that kind of, that pathway was kind of set.

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I really enjoyed it and and I tell people all the time that I totally see myself once I retire from my job, you know, being one of those guys that goes back to the library either as a friends of the library or a part time job,

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even as a shell ver or something just to be in that setting, I really, really enjoyed it. And so um when I heard that the library system was turning 100 I had to kind of chime in. Yeah. Uh I love that story. Um Well, I'll skip

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ahead a little too. Would you say that that was your favorite thing about the library or is there something else that you would say is your favorite thing? Um wow, I can't even um I had so many wonderful memories specifically at balding. Um Teen time was

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one of my favorite things, but I also enjoyed just, I remember the community coming in and uh we were kind of and I'm sure it's still this way, but we were like the hub for everything that was happening in that area. Um whether it was voter

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registration, um whether it was, you know, some of the mothers bringing their, their toddlers in for toddler time story time. Um Back then we did pajama time, like at seven o'clock at night on like Wednesdays and the kids would come in all excited. And, and just

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seeing it reminded me a lot of my own family. Everyone in the community looked like me um had some of the same struggles that my family had. Um you know, any time we had summer reading programming, uh you know, everyone would come out, especially if there

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was food. Um and so I can't point to any specific program that was my favorite, but I, I truly felt that we were making an impact on the community as a staff and that was wonderful and and that was the other thing? Um the staff that

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I was with? uh I was at Aldine wow, like 2000 and 4 to 2000 and five and I tell people to this day that that was one of the most all star kind of everybody had a unique talent. Um you know, it was, it was really,

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really neat because uh I think that the way that the staff was constructed at the time we jelled really well together, we played off of our strengths and our differences and um like I said, just just being a member of that community, I actually have dreams

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sometimes that I'm at the library just hanging out at that specific library. So it's it's you know, it's really cool. Um do you remember the visiting the library when you were a child? Yes. Uh so I grew up in the port uh and laporte had a

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really small library at the time, but my dad liked taking us to the library because he would check out english how to speak english like method, uh audio books or whatever. Um And this was back when libraries had little study carols with like a VCR um

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and actually they had a record player and they had like a tape player and so he would sit there and listen to the uh to a lot of the english language materials and my mom would take us two story time, we would, you know, we would

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just go to hang out and it was also the support branch library was close to the Port Elementary. So you know it was something to do. I remember I don't remember his last name, I don't even know if he's still a librarian, he might have retired.

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His name is Mark. Um He went on to do a lot of really cool puppet shows. Um and uh we would we would go to those um but just I mean it was it was I loved going to the library growing up and so when whenever

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I started working at the library um for me it was it was kind of coming full circle now I was on the opposite side of the desk so I too have a big fan of puppets but I know sometimes people are creeped out that you know

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it was really cool. I remember I remember we used to go rent movies, you know VHS tapes and then when they when they started renting out dvds uh you know we would we would look at those two. So um it was just it was something it

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was like a A well kept secret, you know because the library was tiny and um I think it wasn't until I got I think I was already in college, it was after 2000 um that they got a brand new library. I remember thinking you know why

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couldn't that have been pushed up when I was still in school but you know they have a brand new like well About a 30 year old life right now but still a lot of fun. Yeah um You see I've skipped around a little bit but do

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you have a library patron that you'll always remember? Oh yeah for sure there is this guy, I don't know how to pronounce his last name. Gary Sapone Garissa pony. He was a really cool dude. He he always had I don't know what the limit for holds

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is now, but back then it was like I think 14 and he always played he meant he had like he would come in and pick up a whole and immediately placed a hold for something else. But that's that that was part of the reason why I

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remember him but the real reason I remember him is he came in one day and showed me photos, he found out I was a musician, I was a music major at U. Of age and so he started talking to me and he had pictures with all

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these like awesome uh musicians and he played he played harmonica, he basically was on stage with a bunch of blues musicians and he was like this is me when I was earlier when I was when I was younger earlier in my life I still do it,

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I don't do it as much and it was really really neat because uh he he brought it to the library one time and uh he was a very interesting character, but like I said at first, I remember thinking, oh man, he comes his duty. He wants

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to pick up his holds, he has inter library loans, he's going to give me a hard time. And then once we had that connection that, you know, he, I guess he told a different staff member that he was a musician and when they saw us interact

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like, oh, he's a musician as well. Um, so, so he's probably one person. I remember that. I can definitely, like, I remember his name and if I see him walking down the street, I would say hello. I remember, but then another patron that I remember was

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in teen time, there was this, there was this little boy, probably like maybe five or six years old, but his mom, he loved video games. So his mom would let him pop into the room and she'd hang out with him for a little bit. But back

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then, back then I had a big afro and uh, there was this wrestler named Carlito Cool and the first time that he saw me, he froze, oh my God, that's Carlito, that's Carlito. And so I had to kind of go along with it and pretend like

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I was a wrestler. So that year we for Halloween, we dressed up and uh, one of the staff members dressed up like a member of the Beatles and he brought a guitar, Somebody else dressed up. I think like, uh Miss nelson from the book, you know,

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Miss Nelson is missing. Um And then I dressed up literally like carlito, which basically was like dress pants, a dress shirt, and then I had like a actual chain with a lock on, you know, like a bicycle lock on on the bottom of it, because that's

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what he would wear on tv and and the kid came in and it was awesome. So, you know, and there were so many more patrons, but those are the two that I remember off the top of my head to this day when I talked to my

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friends who were staff members back then say, oh man, do you remember when that kid came in and he thought you were carlito? And I'm like, yeah, so there was a lot of fun. Yeah, it's a personal connection. Yeah. Um I think you've gone over this

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a little bit already, but what was the library like when you first started working there? Um it was very uh mhm. Like For me it was very overwhelming. I remember my first day um I started I actually started the day after my 21st birthday And I

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remember not celebrating my 21st birthday because I really wanted to do a good job and the first thing they put me, on they put me on like book drop duty. So they were showing me okay, you're going to pick up all the books are going to

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put them on a cart, you're gonna wheel everything in, we're going to check them in, we'll show you how to do that. And I was about halfway done and I didn't realize that the book truck had fixed wheels on the back and so I pushed it

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and instead of it going sideways, it tipped over and had to start all over. And so the branch manager at the time came in, he just saw me, he shook his head and he went back in his office. I didn't realize that at the time he

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was awesome. His name is Jim Pearson, but you know, that's just kinda how he treated all of us when we were new, you know? But he wasn't being uh he was doing it to be funny, but of course he saw how nervous I was. And so

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um you know, he had fun with it for a little bit. And I also remember that we actually wore the same outfit, which I thought was a nightmare. Like I wore blue slacks and a yellow kind of plaid shirt and at the end of my shift

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that day, he calls me into his office and I'm like apologizing like, oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'm so much of a better worker than this, I'll never do it again, you know? And he laughed and he goes, I just called you in here to

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say, don't ever dress like me again. And I just, I just laughed and you know, that was the end of that. But um, but again, the library, I remember being overwhelmed, I kind of grew into my role of customer service. Um I spoke spanish. So, um

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so people always looked for me, but we did really good work. We were like I said, we were the community hub for, for that particular uh segment of the population. And then it's funny because when I left for Tomball, um I worked at Tomball during Hurricane

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Ike. So our branch location was flooded and I ended up getting sent to High Meadows, which is also in Alden. And so I was able to kind of compare and contrast both of the branches. Um still, I, I prefer Alden branch, you know, just because I

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worked there for for ever what seemed like forever, but I just, I had, I had a special connection, uh you know, everything that I do um now uh with community engagement. Um a lot of the template for the work that I do now um is modeled

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after the work that we did at Aldine. I think you might have mentioned it to, how long did you work for Harris County in total, like seven or eight years? I wasn't, I was at Tomball for uh yeah, for like six years, I think after I

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left Aldeen and it was one of those situations where I had a feeling that what I wanted to do is going to uh, you know, student affairs or being a kind of college setting. And so when the opportunity opened up to go to Tomball, um you

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know, I took it, you know, well I took the interview, but the interesting thing was uh a guy by the name of Albert used to be on staff here at Aldine and he left to go to Tom Ball and then he decided he was the young

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adult assistant there and he decided to leave to go to Ut uh, to get his masters in library science. And so I remember I got a phone call from him, he's like, hey man, I'm leaving. Um I already told him about you and I was like,

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wait, what? He goes, yeah, I recommended you, I remember that you used to do. So I was a summer camp counselor and so he was like, dude, I think he would be awesome. And I remember sitting down with my boss at all day and I'm going

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like, dude, like this is a wonderful opportunity, but I don't want to, like I actually like it here. And he basically said, look, man, I don't feel like you're selling out your community because you can either sell out your community, you're gonna end up selling out

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yourself. So like, don't think of it in those terms, it's a wonderful opportunity, we're going to take care of everything, you can always come back and so I said, okay, all right. Um and so I ended up I ended up leaving for tom ball and it

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was really neat because I ended up helping out the community there by doing a uh english, a computer basics class for people with english as a second language and most of them spoke spanish. So I ended up teaching a computer basics class to the library, helping

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out the training loud assistant um you know, in spanish. And so that was a wonderful opportunity. And so it kind of brought it back home for me and I think that's what was important with the work that I do is that I am tied to uh

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you know, community service and just giving back. And I think that's that's kind of the mission of the libraries and why I enjoyed my time working at the library so much. Okay, Okay. Yeah. Um So what do you think libraries will be like in 10-20 years?

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Oh wow. Um They better still be around, I'll say that much because you know, like look like I still have books, you know on my desk like like you know like um and I'll admit um I do use uh like my ipad, I have a Kindle

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app and I read books they're just because sometimes it's easier for me to highlight or to take to work and to come back. But um but I think that it's a definite resource um that communities need. so I don't know quite what that would look like.

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Um it's weird because I remember like I was saying earlier when we went from VHS to DVDS and now so much of that is online. So um perhaps focusing just on books and then having, you know, a bigger online presence with with your with audio books

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maybe. Um I hate to say this, but I'm thinking that libraries might be smaller, like like square footage wise. Um but perhaps maybe that that will allow people to build more libraries like the optimist, you know, in me I'm a I'm a dreamer, you know, and

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I think that libraries maybe might get smaller, but maybe we can build more um you know, kind of like a lot of the grocery stores that you see that they're building these huge grocery stores, but then you're also starting to see the smaller kind of all

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the type grocery store that's a lot smaller. Um but definitely I think that um having more books um you know, focusing on books on hard physical books and and you see that with like with music, you know, vinyl coming back, I mean um you know, I

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think at some point that same mindset might take place with with uh with having actual tactile books in your hand. Yeah. Uh you know like you were saying yourself that library so much more to than just books, it's like a community space um where people come

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to like learn together and things like that too, so and and like in my family, you know, we would run off to, you know, I'm the oldest of four Children, so I would run off to the young adult section or whatever. Um My little brothers, my

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sisters would run to the Children's section and like I said, my dad would go over to the nonfiction and look for for winter and we would we would all be in the library together even though we weren't necessarily sitting together. Um So I I definitely think

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that whatever a library looks like in the future, it definitely will be um community based and like I said, I think that they'll focus on um you know, hard tactile books that to get in people's hands. Yeah. Um did you have a favorite book as a

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child or as a teenager that you can remember? Um Let me think because by the time I was a teen, I was so buried in in in my music books uh practicing a lot. But um probably I remember I remember the first book that we got

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into in high school, I was uh I was a freshman and uh we started with Fahrenheit 4 51 and I remember thinking, oh my god, like I just thought this was a book about a guy running around burning books and trying to save it and and

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I think that that I have a shirt that says Fahrenheit 4 51 that I bought at a half price books, but that was a book I think growing up that really made me think on a deeper level of what could happen if people just start censoring

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books or um you know, just basically not not giving people respecting people's rights, you know? Um I also remember growing up, I mean pretty much all of the like eric Carle books, you know what else? Uh uh Shel Silverstein, I mean where the sidewalk ends? Uh

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Yeah, I remember, the other thing I tell people all the time is for me, I discovered things at school a lot, so a lot of books um that the teachers would tell us about um you know, then then we would we would go, we would go

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back and try to check them out from the local library, but in sixth grade I remember I got into a series, I want to say it was called Redwall, I don't remember, it was it was the protagonist was like a mouse and it was weird because

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it was like uh it was a mouse and he was they were fighting, they were they were like nights and they were going through these crusades. There's, I want to say, I read like four or five books, I don't remember how many they were in the

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series, but I really got into them back then. Um interestingly enough, I worked at a library but I could never ever ever really get into harry potter. It was one of those things, at least for me. And I would tell people like, hey, they were like,

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oh you know, I have friends that to this day, still call me the librarian, and I was like, I wasn't a librarian, but whatever, I worked at a library. All right, cool. And so they would always ask and I was like, dude, I actually I was

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never really into harry potter. Um remember books like the outsiders or you know, um you know, a lot of the work by Gary Soto, you know, is why as a hispanic y a uh author I said, but when it came to harry potter, I think maybe

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for me it was that once the movie started coming out, I just lost interest in trying to read the book. And so I I never I never caught up, I never really saw the movies and I saw bits and pieces and so um I was just

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on the wrong side of trying to catch up, you know, once I got much older, but I also I read nonfiction, like I love to read, but I find myself reading nonfiction just a ton. Um So and for a lot of that, by the time it

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gets in print things change. So I I read so much of just periodicals or um newspapers um I guess I'm kind of sort of like a news junkie you know now and it's sad that uh in the state of the world now you almost have to

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be my my my dad laughs at me because you know he doesn't he understand what's going on in the world but he to him he's just like whatever everything is rigged, I don't care. Um And so we have interesting conversations but he tells me all the

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time, he's like you know, out of all my Children you're the only one that like well actually take the time to read things and try to gain different perspectives. So I've told him I was like dude I I honestly I don't like to talk politics but

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with him I just have to do it because he has so many questions and and he came from Mexico and in Mexico a lot of times um You know you had one ruling party for 90 years the corrupt people talk about corruption. So and so he

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he had you know he he truly has a lot of questions but at the end of the day it's really neat because like two or three years ago he finally decided to become a U. S. Citizen. And so you know so then he had questions for

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different reasons. He now he had questions as an american citizen and how he could participate and so that was really really cool. Um But you know um as far as books go man I just I remember all of you know, I remember all of the, I

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remember when the book America came out Jon Stewart um I was in college and uh I got that for christmas one year and I just kind of laughed and I read through it and it's crazy because a lot of the things in that book still uh

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sadly are still true you know? But but books have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember um and you know and like I said for me that they will continue to do so you know I still I still have bookshelves

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with like books on them, you know here at my house. Yeah. Um it's funny how it tastes change over time. All right. Um if you could give any advice to future library staff or friends group, what would it be just to be nice to people? Um

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You know, you never know, you know somebody might be having a bad day and they go to the library because it's their only place of like I'm gonna get some quiet time or um you know maybe they they it's their get away from the world and

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so um you know some people might come in quiet um some people might come in loud and and and granted libraries are technically supposed to be quiet spaces for the most part. That's another thing that might change in the future. We might not be as quiet

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as, as before, but um, but just to respect people's kind of space, as long as, you know, they're being courteous because I do think that libraries are a safe space, so to speak for, um, uh, for people and, and if you, if you keep that in

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mind, you know, um allow people some grace to, you know, um, you know, it goes a long way and like I said for us, we had people that would come in, um, and literally in order to do their homework. Um, the library was the only place

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they had access to Internet. Uh, So to see a lot of the junior high students come in and complete their homework, I think it's phenomenal. I mean when I was there, I think we had like 6-8 computers and now you have like, I want to say

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to three times. I remember I went before, I wanted to say like a month ago, but it's been like a year. Um, and yeah, you just have a long bank of computers and that, that made me, I, that made me really happy because I was like,

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that's, that's what that particular library needed. Um, and so, you know, just, just remembering that we're not like we're not there to save people necessarily, but we're just there to be a presence of a positive President presence and, and, and, and the community will kind of

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take care of the rest. So I like that. Is there anything else that you would like to mention before we close? I just uh, I just want to express my gratitude to you all for doing this. Um, and and just my gratitude for my own personal

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and professional development. Um, when I worked for the county, there were so many soft skills, you know, that I learned just how to interact with people from all creeds, races, belief systems that I probably, you know, um, I would have gotten in college, but the library

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kind of personified it uh across generations, you know, and so it really made me realize that the world is such a big place and that, you know, um, we're here to just kind of make things work as best we can, you know, And so I would

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have never gained a lot of the perspectives that I had had I not worked at the library. So um, just express my gratitude and I, you know, I I try to support uh the initiatives of the libraries and you know, summer reading programs and things like

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that and I hope that others continue to do that as well. That's also and thank you so much for joining us today. Um yeah, thanks so much. Thank you shouldn't need anything. Just hit me up. Yeah, and say hello to who I was there, janney, I'm

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trying to think well, I know johnny for sure we work together, but but yeah, just say just say hi to everyone, you know, and and to keep doing a great job and once this is all over, I'll try to, you know, I'll try to swing by

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author. So all right, thank you.