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Obituaries: 11B
Wednesday, March 20, 2019

LINA COLLADO GARCIA / COURTESY PHOTO

Decked out in props and accessories from a photo booth, Cristina Briones and Roney de la Cruz show off their moves with some Mexican line dances during
the Tlaxcala Children’s Library Gala at the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

Books bridge Jackson,

Tlaxcala communities
Jackson immigrants building children’s libraries in Mexico for
nine years. This Jackson project marks
plan children’s library the first time she has seen a library
spring up in partnership with an immi-
as a link to Mexico. grant community in the United States.
By Allie Gross “It’s an opportunity to have a first-
world library in their hometown, some-

O
n an August trip to visit her
mother in Tlaxcala, Mexico,
Miriam Morillon marched into
the mayor’s office with a proposal. She
walked out with an ordinance.
The legal document declared that a
modest building next to the town’s se-
nior center would be reserved for a chil-
dren’s library, the first of its kind in the
small town of San Simeon. The promise,
signed and stamped, now sits securely
tucked away in Morillon’s office at the
Children’s Learning Center in Jackson.
For a group of Jackson immigrants
who left family in Mexico when they
came to Wyoming to work, creating
this library is a way to build a brighter
future for those back home.
“In Mexico we don’t have this cul-
ture of reading,” Roney de la Cruz
Gonzalez, Morillon’s husband, said
in Spanish. “The value of reading is,
you’re learning every time you read.”
Angela Rosales, director of Abra Pal-
abra libraries, or “Open Word,” has been
thing that they never had before or they
never grew up with,” Rosales said. “A lot
of families that have been deported or
kids that are being taken back to San
Simeon will have a place that is nice,
that is beautiful, that is pretty, that is
worth it to go, and they will find some of
what they have in Jackson.”
s gala. Leaders who threw the party aimed to fill each table with a balance of
When Morillon and her peers from a
local Latino leadership program heard
about Abra Palabra “it was like a light
in our brains,” Morillon said.
Morillon is one of 16 graduates from
Jackson Hole’s first leadership academy
for Latino adults, funded originally by
the Jackson Hole Institute. The leader-
ship program aims to give participants
the tools and confidence to engage in
projects that better the community. Mo-
rillon graduated from the program in
October 2017.
Now she is a driving force behind this
grassroots effort to raise $60,000 to build
a library in Tlaxcala along with other
graduates of the leadership program.
Pablo Arellana shakes hands with Silvia Davila across their table at the
immigrant and American guests.
Tlaxcala is the country’s smallest
state, but it has an outsized presence in
Jackson. An estimated 75 or 80 percent
of Teton County’s Spanish-speaking
community has roots in Tlaxcala, or,
more specifically, a small town called
San Simeon.
Many Tlaxcalans who have immi-
grated to the Tetons over several decades
have family there: parents, siblings,
nieces, nephews. Some parents even
leave their children with grandmothers
when they travel north for work.
“Most of them are successful in the
U.S. and feel like this is a way to give
REBECCA NOBLE / NEWS&GUIDE
back to their community,” Rosales said.
“Because when these people come to the
States they see how many opportunities
kids have in the world. There’s a lot of
resources, there’s a lot of opportunities
to learn, to improve your skills. Edu-
cation, it’s offered in so many ways —
that’s not the case in Mexico.”
s
Of the immigrant leaders work-
ing on the library project, some
grew up in Tlaxcala, others did not.
But pretty much all of them say
they didn’t grow up reading.
See LibrAry on 8B