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It’s been one year since our launch of Huertos Familiares and over the course of that time we have seeded and supported several gardens in San Antonio, Austin, Cedar Park, Houston, Tucson, Chicago, and Dallas. We have shared lessons, photos, and fruits from our gardens. We’ve deepened our commitments to each other, to the land, to gathering in community. In the Spring of 2025, we hosted our first Harvest Sobremesa with everyone that participated in the pilot launch of the pro

This week, Terra Advocati’s Director of Artistic and Transformative Practice, Marissa Ramirez, hosted a beautiful Día de los Niños celebration at St. Philip’s College , welcoming children from local elementary schools. The event centered around a reading of  “Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox”, a nature-inspired children’s book that introduces young readers to the personalities of animals across different ecosystems.  Through these stories, children are encouraged to see their own

For the second consecutive year, Books in the Barrio partnered with the St. Philip’s College Mexican American Studies Program and the Communications and Learning Department to celebrate Dia de los Niños. This year we hosted children from the St. Philip’s College Child Development Center and Bowden Academy and gave away over 100 copies of the children’s book We Are Water Protectors . Rosie Torres, Virginia Grise, and Excy Guardado led the children through a beautiful reading f

On Nov. 2nd, Books in the Barrio joined the Mexican American Studies Program at St. Philip’s College for the Día de los Muertos Symposium. It’s now been two weeks since that event and it’s difficult to put into words the significance of the experience. We began the day with a panel discussion on the importance of culturally grounding the work that we do. Professor Kelli Rolland-Adkins and UTSA graduate student Cynthia Aguilar both spoke about the need to understand a person’s

Books in the Barrio remains committed to creating spaces that blur the boundaries between literacy, education, and art. As part of this work, we joined the Mexican American Studies Program at St. Philip’s College (SPC) on September 15th for Noche de Orgullo , an evening of music, tacos, familia, community, and education. The intent was to mark National Hispanic Serving Institution Week and to draw attention to the underrepresentation of Chican@s in STEM fields. The event was

Books in the Barrio, in collaboration with the St.Philip’s College Mexican American Studies Program, hosted over 60 preschool students from the St. Philip’s College Child Development Center and Bowden Elementary on April 29th to commemorate Día del Niño (Children’s Day). Our celebration included a reading by Dr. Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, author of the children’s book Love and Monsters in Sofía’s Life , and a visual art activity led by internationally renowned indigenous ar

A year ago we commemorated the Spring Equinox in the patio of our dear friend, Veronica Castillo, with the simple goal of sharing a meal. We cooked our food in an earthen pit in the ground and carefully watched over it for over 12 hours as we talked, and dreamed, and imagined another way of being in the world. In the throes of the pandemic, we wanted to be intentional with our lives, so we held vigil as Winter became Spring. This year, we commemorated the Spring Equinox by jo

The following is part of the Talleres for Dreaming Series, which is a collaboration with a todo dar productions and Galeria E.V.A. The letter was sent to folks inviting them to mark the 2021 Fall Equinox. I sent you something in the mail. I hope you receive it before Wednesday.. I hope it did not break in transit. When I was a kid, an undergrad at UT, I spent many hours at a dingy cafe called Les Amis. I loved that place because it had a wood burning stove but I mostly loved

In March 2020, San Antonio hosted the most famous writers in the country at the Artists, Writers, and Writing Programs (AWP) week-long conference. From March 3rd-7th, stellar national and local writers alike came together to share books and readings, alongside literary agents, publishers, and editors. But what does it mean to host a conference about writers in a city with a 1 in 4 illiteracy rate? As Barbara Renaud Gonzalez, an author from San Antonio says, “If we really wan

“She’s a friend of my mind. She gathers me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them right back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” – Toni Morrison, from Beloved In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American writer to win a Nobel Prize. Through her writing, she gave voice to the complexity of the Black experience in this country and changed the lives of countless writers, artists, reader