 Okay, so we're here at the grand opening of the Latino Collection and Resource Center at the Central Library, and I'm here with Marisa Bono, who is the Chief of Policy for Mayor Ron Nuremberg right now. And before that, she was with the Southwest Regional Council for MALDEF, which is Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, where she did some terrific work. Before that, she was in school in San Antonio, and there was a reference made tonight to the push by Rosie Castro, the woman who is the mother of our former mayor and of our congressman, and Bryce Milligan, and the push by those people to say, hey, we need more resources in this building. And Rosie brought a bunch of school kids here. That's right, high schoolers. High schoolers, you were in high school. Tell me what happened. Well, we were a group of high schoolers that had just come back from a program that was sponsored by the National Hispanic Institute, NHI. And the organization really pressed us to think about where we were represented in the city. So for example, Latinos were underrepresented in government and underrepresented in a lot of other parts of public life. And so when Rosie approached us with this issue, it really fit in line with issues that we wanted to work on and improve in the community. Separate from that, many of us had experienced our own hardships trying to find places to research for our courses in high school, and also to research more about ourselves, our families, and to find works from authors who we felt represented our community. So it fit very much in line with the work that we wanted to do in the community. So you guys came and Rosie brought you all to a board meeting at the San Antonio Public Library Board. That's right. And what happened? It was a small board meeting here at the library. And we basically made speeches to the board and explained to them why we felt this collection was important not only for young people, but for the community as a whole to make sure that Latino literature was properly highlighted in a city like San Antonio that was already a majority Latino. So now today we see young people trying all the time to come out and raise their voices and say something needs to change. What happened after you did that? Well, we got our collection, but it was very small and it was out of the way and it really wasn't what we had envisioned in terms of a good representation for our community. But as we can see by the opening today, advocates, other local advocates really picked up the ball and pushed hard for the funding. And also for the support under the vision of Ramiro Salazar to make the collection more reflective of the vibrancy of our community. And front and center at the library? Absolutely. Absolutely. There's no missing it now. It's not often the corner now. It's really featured with the span of 10,000 books and works. It really is sort of what we envision when we first came to fight for this at the library. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the message at least from me to young people is get out there and fight for it and you can make a difference. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's nothing too small and I like to say that everyone has a gift that they can contribute. Thank you. Thank you for giving us yours. Thank you. Okay, so we are here again, now cast SSA with the grand opening of the Latino Collection and Resource Center at Central Library in San Antonio, which is a really, really festive event and a really great achievement for a lot of people who have waited for this for a long, long time. We just spoke with Marisa Bono, who was one of the students who argued for a Latino Collection a long time ago. And Ellen Riojas-Clark, a professor emeritus at UTSA, was one of the people on the board of the library at the time listening to what those young people had to say. Tell us what that was like. Well, it was not only listening to what he said, but manipulating what happened. So I really appreciate the fact that you're doing institutional history because it's very, very important. At that time when I was in the board, I knew that the votes were against us. So what I did is called Rosicastro and other people in the community and I said, I need ammunition. I need people to come in and speak to the need for iLibrary to represent our city. So I said, I don't want just Edgewood, we got students from all different schools, but I wanted also kids who were from an upper middle class school to come in and we got Marisa Bono. And so she brought in her young group, so of course knowing what we were doing had them speak and they were the turning point. Because I don't think that our board of trustees listened to people of color, nor did they listen to people from different socioeconomic groups, but they listened to somebody who they thought looked like them and represented them. So for that I'm always grateful that Marisa, that was her first political activism thing. So instrumental in what we did to make sure that the library had a representation. And the impact of that was? The impact of that is that we finally had a Latino Resource Center, and I will take credit for putting together the Latino leadership for the library out of the third to make sure that we could do this. Wow, that's terrific. And the message to young people and to people who are on boards and commissions as you were? I think the message is you've got to participate. You have to be an activist. You can be a change agent. And a change agents are necessary for our community in order to achieve what we need to achieve. Ellen Rios-Clarke, thank you so very much. Thank you.