HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LIBRARY IN CUERNAVACA

In the early 1950’s there was a group known as the Women of St. Michael’s Guild that had a book exchange and surely they had no idea that the exchange would turn into the Library which is celebrating nearly seventy years in Cuernavaca.

They kept their three or four dozen books at what was the parish rectory at Vergel 111, Colonia Chipitlán. When the parish bought the house next door as the new rectory, The Guild took over the first one as the base for their charitable fund-raising events as well as a consignment-thrift shop. Over the next few years, three or four dozen books had multiplied into six or seven hundred, and they opened a small lending library for the English Speaking community in the late 50’s.

The Guild House flourished as the center for Anglo community holiday parties, art shows, library, plays and monthly rummage sales for almost 50 years, until it was sold in 1999 and the Guild disbanded. Seven hundred books had grown by then to 7,000 in the lending library and almost that many for sale.

The volunteers found a new home for the books in the Diocesan Center next door to St. Michael’s church in Col. Delicias, where they renovated an old storage shed in the garden for the shop. The parish offered the Library the use of its unoccupied rectory house in back of the church hall in 2003, where it stayed for the following six years, and the name was changed from The Guild Library to St. Michael’s Library. Unfortunately, the consignment shop had to be closed because there wasn’t enough space for it there nor were there volunteers available to run it.

Even more unfortunate was the fact that the house had been sinking slowly for years, to the point that it was in danger of collapsing by the Spring of 2009.

The parish began planning for a Community Center, with a conference room and art gallery, as well as the Library, to be built on the site. So the volunteers packed the books for the third time in nine years and put them and the furniture in storage until the new building was finished in mid-January of 2010. Five weeks later, the bookcases were in place, the books were on the shelves and pictures were on the wall. The Library reopened with a gala inauguration on February 28th, 2010.

As of January 2024, there are 8 Volunteers who keep the Library open two mornings and one afternoon every week, and help members and customers find what they are looking for in the sections that range from books for children and young adults, fiction, suspense, classics and biographies, to history, cookbooks, non-fiction, religion and Latin America, health and fitness, audio books, music CDs and movie DVDs. The three latter sections are being fazed out as technology as made them all but obsolete.

Individual and family memberships cost $400 (half price for students and teachers) for the lending library, but you don’t have to be a member to browse and buy from the sales section, at extremely reasonable prices.

The income from memberships and sales is used for a monthly donation to the parish to help maintain the property and to occasionally buy some new books to add to the collection.

Since Newcomers and CCCC no longer exist, the Library occasionally sponsors events such as presentations, a Garage sale and the Holiday Bazaar. These really are not as much fundraisers as they are opportunities to bring the English speaking community together occasionally.