Libraries as Contested Community and Cultural Space: The Bruggemeyer Memorial Library of Monterey Park, California

Abstract

In the City of Monterey Park, a sleepy city east of downtown Los Angeles, the late 1970s and the 1980s marked a dramatic demographic shift from predominantly White to Asian American. Who had economic and political power was publicly played out through struggles between the City Council and the business sectors. An unlikely locus for political struggle was the Bruggemeyer Memorial Library. In the late 1980s, what many might consider to be a neutral agency that collects, organizes, and disseminates information, the public library became the battleground to (re)claim community, access, and representation of Asian Americans in Monterey Park. By contextualizing the library as civic space, this paper explores dominant U.S. hegemonic ideologies and political agendas reproduced in cultural institutions, such as libraries