Expanding literacy in the RGV

“I’m sadly not surprised,” said Elena Venegas, an assistant professor from the Bilingual and Literacy Studies department at UTRGV, when asked how she felt about the literacy rate in the Rio Grande Valley.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, an agency that promotes world peace and security with education, sciences and culture, a literacy rate is the percentage of a community that can read and write.

Venegas said the South Texas Coalition, an organization that wants to improve the quality of life in the Valley with literacy, stated that “south of San Antonio there is only 58% literacy rate, according to the 2010 Census.”

The assistant professor said the data is “incomplete” because it showed her literacy in English but not in Spanish. The United State Census Bureau’s American Community Survey reported in 2015 that 83.3% of Texans speak Spanish.

“General statistics may not be reflective of a particular area or region or town,” Venegas said. She mentioned that when she was living in Waco, the population was not as bilingual as the Rio Grande Valley; she has been living in the Valley for four years as of this publication.

In addition to being able to read and write, Venegas noted that speaking and listening are a part of a literacy rate.

“A lot of the text people encounter nowadays is multimodal,” she said. “It involves not only text but also there might be images or videos, like sound associated with it. That’s definitely a skill that’s needed for the future. I think that’s also maybe not as reflected in the literacy statistics.”

Regardless of the literacy statistics about South Texas, one person wants to challenge it.

Cecilia Martínez, an AP Spanish literature teacher at IDEA Public Schools and UTRGV alumna, started a social media business to encourage reading in the Valley. She named her digital business RGVLector; this is also its name on Instagram. It stems from two ideas: relating to the community and the Spanish word lector (reader). She saw several small businesses that used “RGV” in their names and wanted people to identify her business as “the business we have online for the Valley for books,” she said via a Zoom interview. The business owner wants to show that “the Valley likes to read.”

“We are that community, even though people think we’re not,” she said. “We can be that community who likes to read, who likes to open books for fun, just like we do with Netflix and Hulu.”

While Martínez spends most of her weekdays teaching, she works on RGVLector during the weekends. Her tasks include taking and editing photos for social media, organizing bins full of multilingual books into genres, designing flyers and cleaning her products to minimize the spread of COVID-19.

“I’m having fun,” she said. “It’s not even like, ‘Oh, I’m [going to] earn money and [I’ll] get rich.’ It’s like, I’m having fun. It’s really nice.”

Books have been in Martínez’s life for as long as she could remember. She recalled reading a Spanish magazine that published gossip articles, how-to guides on persuasion and small novels; that hooked her. Additionally, her grandfather was a poet and writer; he had a small library in his home that had books in Spanish. When Martínez’s grandfather sold his house to her father, they inherited the library. Martínez spent a lot of time in it. She saw her father flipping through books and her mother reading magazines.

“The fact we actually had a library at our home was a big factor [for] me [to be] interested in reading,” she said.

The influence books had on Martínez came outside of her home, too. She would go to bookstores; however, overtime the number of bookstores in the Valley dwindled. One closed bookstore that comes to mind is Waldenbooks in the Valley Vista Mall in Harlingen.

“It was everywhere around me,” she said.

There have been times where doubt was in Martínez’s head. It comes from worrying about having the time and energy for the online business. As a teacher, she spends 40 or more hours at work.

“It’s not just teaching, it’s reports, grades, and meetings with parents, and with other teachers and with your supervisors,” she said. Then, when she is home, she goes through her collection of books and designs on Canva.

“My goal is to work on the weekends,” she said. However, she said she thought that people could purchase a book during the weekdays.

“My worry is that I’m going to get orders, I don’t know, on a Monday and the postal office is not going to be open because I get out at six,” she said.

Additionally, she is concerned about shipping.

“[Do] people want me to go to their houses,” she asked. “I want to make it work … I won’t give up on this. Not that fast.” To motivate herself, she reflects on her resilience in handling stress, such as getting her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

“Amazing doctors [and] amazing professors, but very strict,” she said. “I went through this master’s that everyone thought was so easy. … You don’t want to know what I’m capable of.”

She added that working for IDEA developed her motivation to maintain her digital business.

Since she was 15 years old, Martínez’s dream is being a book publisher. She wants to publish herself and other RGV writers. She hopes that RGVLector will help her achieve that dream.

“We can start little,” the UTRGV alumna said. “Obviously, let’s not create a book right now or [be] a publisher right now. But let’s create something that allows people to read with books that people, like me, already have.”