Faculty Profile: Ángela Pérez-Mejía
Directing the premier library in her native Colombia
On her last day on the Brandeis campus before beginning a temporary leave of absence to serve as the director of Colombia’s largest public library, Ángela Pérez-Mejía spoke about what she’d miss the most in the United States.
Libraries.
After more than fifteen years in the United States, the associate professor of Latin American literature and film is still enthralled by libraries that provide access to information in neighborhoods large and small all across the country. Community libraries are far less common in her native Colombia, where during her two-year leave she’ll lead the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in Bogotá. It’s Colombia’s closest equivalent to the New York Public Library, with more than two thousand people visiting each day and an attached cultural center that Pérez-Mejía will also oversee.
“The mission of the institution is to serve the public and to use culture and art to create civic society,” she says in her empty offi ce in the Shiffman Humanities Center. “That means a lot for a country like Colombia where the government has had a long tradition of failure. The creation of civic society is very crucial for the development of the country.”
Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, which opened in 1949 and fi rst loaned books in the 1980s, offers educational and cultural space free of charge, drawing people from all walks of society. In addition to university professors and researchers, 5 percent of the people who use the facility every day encounter a computer for the first time, notes Pérez-Mejía. The cultural component includes seven exhibition halls with permanent art collections and exhibits, and a large performance center that hosts jazz, chamber, and contemporary music. She had spent two sabbaticals conducting research there and maintained contact with the institution before library representatives asked her to take over for the retiring director. They recruited her—a teacher and not a librarian—to bring a political vision and emphasize the educational mission of the institution, according to Pérez-Mejía.
“The idea is that culture and the humanities and the arts are not to be kept in an ivory tower. Exactly the opposite,” she says. “We need to contaminate the world and let the world contaminate us. Through teaching, through what we do with our students, through the public that we serve, we can enact change.
“A lot of problems in society come to dead ends, especially in societies like Colombia. I believe that the arts allow you to see another way.”
Indeed, Pérez-Mejía is a living example of the transformative power of the arts. Growing up in a working-class family, she cultivated a love of books, eventually discovering all she could in a modest library at her high school. After earning a journalism degree at the Universidad Pontifi cia Bolivariana in Medellín, she worked as the assistant editor of a cultural magazine in Bogotá, operated by the library she now directs. In the late 1980s, violence in her country fueled by the drug trade along with a weak economy motivated her to leave for the United States, where she earned her master’s degree in Latin American literature and PhD in Spanish literature.
She began teaching at Brandeis eight years ago. The former chair of the Latin American Studies Program, she says Brandeis has worked to attract more students from Latin America and of Latino heritage.