Kai Godsey / The Mossy Log
On Tuesday, Oct. 22, the annual Johannah Sherrer Memorial Lecture in Library Service brought Enrique Rivera in to discuss his life experiences and the important role libraries can play in the lives of adults in custody, or those who are leaving custody and adjusting to a new life. As a public safety coordinator for Multnomah County, he has launched the Multnomah County Justice Fellowship, which seeks to provide voice and representation to individuals who have experience with incarceration.
Rivera spoke to an audience of library professionals, students, professors and other interested members of the public. This year marks a departure from the event’s previous focus on professional audiences in an attempt to bring the campus community together on an interesting subject.
“We wanted to pivot this year in the planning of the event, and, instead of thinking of it as a professional event for the greater community of librarians and library workers, to have it as something that could help bring the campus community together,” Associate Director of Watzek Library Elaine Hirsch said. “With the interest on campus in social justice, in what we knew of (Associate Professor of History) Reiko Hillyer’s work with the Inside Out program, we thought that this could be a combination that would be intriguing to the community.”
The first half of Rivera’s lecture told the story of his tumultuous upbringing moving around — and briefly outside of — the country, leading into his adolescence, which was punctuated by incarceration, violence and persecution. He described his inspiration for this lecture as coming from his time on a panel at the American Library Association in 2022. Rivera’s father was an Indigenous Mexican American and his mother was a white Portlander. After his parents split, he faced severe physical abuse at the hands of his stepfather until both his stepfather and mother were eventually caught kidnapping him and his siblings and moving them across the country.
He described his experience growing up Chicano in Salem and how faculty at Waldo Middle School profiled his friend group, leading to his first encounters with law enforcement.
“Me and my friends, we were all Mexican American, English dominant. While the other group, they were kids of immigrants and immigrants themselves. And so they mainly communicate in Spanish. But the teachers at the time thought that we were actually two different gangs, so they started creating policies like, you can’t walk in groups of four or you’ll be suspended. Our clothing was labeled gang-related,” Rivera said. “In my community at the time, there was actually legitimate concerns. There was gang activity, and it was starting to become very violent.”
Rivera told the story of his adolescent life as it eventually became tangled in these violent conflicts. One violent confrontation landed him in Marion County Jail.
“So, I did eventually take a plea bargain just to plead guilty. It would run my sentences concurrently. And I did five years and ten months at the MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility,” Rivera said. “That’s basically where I fell in love with reading. I read all of the J.D. Salinger books. I read all of the S.E. Hinton books. You know, we didn’t have a really good selection, but that’s what you get.”
Rivera finished high school and continued his education while incarcerated through a distance education program with Chemeketa Community College. Distance education programs deliver educational instruction to students who may not be able to be physically present in the classroom. It is particularly useful for students experiencing incarceration, students working full-time and students living in remote areas. Thanks to his uncle’s advice, one of the first resources he sought after his release from incarceration was the Belmont branch of the Multnomah County Library.
“They helped me sign up for classes at PCC (Portland Community College). They helped me print out these resumes. They helped me write it up too, because I only had this one copy with a bunch of typos. They helped me get set up. And then I walked up and down Hawthorne and turned in my resume, because you could still do that in 2004,” Rivera said.
His original aspiration was to become a teacher, but the Portland Public Schools rejected him due to his criminal record. Instead of teaching, Rivera found a job at the Multnomah County Library. There, he began to notice gaps in the library services, like the lack of a program for Native American library users.
“I noticed that, you know, they weren’t being served, at least, in any official capacity at Multnomah County. And this is the ninth largest urban Native population in the country, so I started advocating for that,” Rivera said. “It resulted in Multnomah County hiring an entire team to serve the Indigenous population.”
When Rivera learned the county also had outreach programs for incarcerated individuals, he became involved with this work as well. He worked to help adults in custody procure library cards and write the library to have specific books sent into prisons.
“We received like a hundred letters a month by the time I left,” Rivera said.
His current work with the Multnomah County Justice Fellowship draws from his decade of service work and his own experience of incarceration to bring underrepresented voices into county decision making.
Andres Mendoza, one of the audience members, who is an author and a student at Portland State University, found Rivera’s story encouraging.
“I had a similar experience as Enrique. I spent six years in the system” Mendoza said. “It was really inspiring to know that there is light at the end of that.”
In an interview following the lecture, Rivera described how students can support these efforts.
“You don’t have to … have lived through this kind of journey or anything like that to be interested in this kind of work. I think what it really takes is just some empathy, right? Being empathetic to the fact that these things are happening in our society, and being conscious of it. Then, seek out opportunities,” said Rivera. “Something actionable, something that you can do. It might be a little thing, but it doesn’t have to abolish the whole system at once. We can chip away at things.”
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