CURRENT POSITION Children’s Supervising Librarian, Gilroy Library/Santa Clara County Library District, CA DEGREE MLIS, San José State University, 2007 FAST FACT Last year, Muñoz-Rosas received one of the Top Ten Employees of the Year Awards for Santa Clara County. FOLLOW gilroydispatch.com/the-smithsonian-comes-to-gilroy; gilroydispatch.com/guest-view-profound-discussion; bit.ly/Huerta-at-Gilroy Photo by Khang Nguyen

“Revolución” at the Library

When Elizabeth Muñoz-Rosas was presented with the opportunity to bring a traveling Smithsonian Institution exhibit on Dolores Huerta, a leading activist in the 1960s and ’70s farm workers movement, to her community of Gilroy, CA—the “garlic capital of the world,” with a nearly 60 percent Latinx population—she jumped at the chance.

The exhibition “Dolores Huerta: Revolution in the Fields/Revolución en los Campos” shares the story of Huerta, cofounder of United Farm Workers. The Gilroy Library was one of its 13 stops and one of the only libraries in California invited to participate. Muñoz-Rosas worked with the Santa Clara County Library District (SCCLD) marketing team and colleagues from other county departments to create all promotional content for her library, including a bilingual website and lesson plans detailing Huerta’s accomplishments for prospective student attendees. She also distributed promotional material throughout Gilroy and neighboring cities. Almost 900 people attended.

“The majority of the students and community members who visited the exhibit had never experienced going to a ‘museum’ or any kind of exhibit before,” Muñoz-Rosas notes. “Additionally, the exhibit was inclusive (bilingual, app with audio). Some of the visitors could not read and were still able to listen to the exhibit.”

To expand the exhibit’s reach, Muñoz-Rosas organized a panel featuring Huerta, Luis Valdez (often called the father of Chicano theater), and author Francisco Jiménez, led by local news anchor Damian Trujillo. The free event sold out, with over 600 attending, including English- and Spanish-speakers and multiple generations of farm workers.

In addition to the special exhibit, Muñoz-Rosas spearheads programming for the library during Hispanic Heritage Month and partners with the SCCLD on Rise Up, a program that supports at-risk youth. She intends to continue leading with passion, heart, and the communities’ best interests in mind, she says: “Having personally benefited from the opportunities of local libraries, I am driven to pay it forward to the community that I have the honor to serve.”