Speaking to the Latino masses

Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2006 | 7:12 a.m.

When Mary Lou Rodriguez was born in a Los Angeles' county hospital, her mother didn't speak English very well and wasn't up to insisting that her daughter's birth certificate have the Latin spelling, "Marilu."

Thirty-three years later, having built a life rooted in two cultures, including a Chicano studies degree from California State University, Northridge, Rodriguez and her husband, Tony, have opened Aztlan Books y Mas, the Las Vegas Valley's first bookstore specializing in Latin American themes and books in Spanish.

And although there have been plenty of slow afternoons since the store's Aug. 1 opening, the effort is a sign of the increasingly cosmopolitan nature in the Las Vegas Valley, where hardly a month goes by without some new cultural offering.

Many of those offerings appear when ethnic or national groups reach a critical mass of sorts - like area Brazilians, who have seen three Brazilian jujitsu studios open as their numbers climb toward 6,000 in recent years, or Serbs, who now have three restaurants they can call their own.

Although Hispanics in Clark County number more than 400,000, no one has seen fit to open a bookstore like Aztlan until now.

Aztlan sits in a gritty mall on a strip of Charleston Boulevard near downtown Las Vegas that includes immigration attorneys and notaries public, Philippine buffets and Mexican money order stores.

Recently Rodriguez readily admitted to one thing - the very name of the store may be a turn off to some. That's because Aztlan, which she describes as "the mythical land of the Aztecs," also is used by some members of the Chicano civil rights movement to describe the desire to reclaim ancestral lands in the United States.

"Two gentlemen did call," she said. "They felt attacked."

She noted that one of the two has become a faithful customer, making at least four return visits to buy books about Chicanos and their history.

"At the beginning, I was very apprehensive about having him in the store," she said. "Now I see him as someone I can have a good conversation with and he keeps me on my toes."

At the same time, the books lining her shelves - which include "Dora the Explorer's Book of Words," "Lucha Libre: The Man in the Silver Mask, A Bilingual Cuento" and a collection of interviews with Fidel Castro - are not selected to promote any particular political viewpoint, Rodriguez said.

Rather, she wants to be a source of information for those who would like to take the same sort of journey as she has in search of Latin American fables, stories and history.

She recalled that her mother, who did not study beyond the second grade, would tell her how places like Plaza Olvera in downtown Los Angeles were steeped in Latino history.

At the same time, however, the books that her mother would buy for her were of the Judy Blume variety. "It wasn't until I got to college that I was able to get into a more deep analysis of who I was, and read authors of Latino background," she said.

After moving to Las Vegas three years ago, she found she wanted to start that process at her part-time job teaching second grade Spanish at Henderson's Estes McDoniel Elementary School. "I wanted to have books for my students, but couldn't find any," she said.

So she and her husband opened Aztlan.

Now she finds that her customers range from schoolteachers - four area elementary schools have contacted her to order books - to university students interested in politics and history.

One obstacle she recognizes is that most of the Las Vegas Valley's Hispanics - now about 25 percent of the total population - are Mexican working-class immigrants with little formal education. That is different from other cities where she has lived, which have had more native-born Hispanics and larger populations of educated professionals from other Latin American countries.

"But (Las Vegas Hispanics) have children, like my parents had me," she said. "And they'll do anything to get education for their children."

Including, Rodriguez hopes, buy them books.