EVLD Launches Spanish Book Club for Hispanic Community

The gravel crunches under tires as the library bus rolls down Interstate 70, past the familiar sprawl of Vail and Eagle, heading toward the quieter stretches of Minturn and Red Cliff. It’s a mobile outpost of knowledge, a place where a farmer in McCoy might check out a Spanish-language novel or a construction worker in Dotsero might grab a DVD. But inside that bus, and now in the main branches, a new chapter is being written.

The Eagle Valley Library District (EVLD) has launched a book club specifically for the Hispanic community. It’s not a grand, flashy launch with ribbon cuttings and politicians posing for photos. It started modestly, with five people. But the initiative is the brainchild of Rocío García-Roa, the district’s outreach coordinator for the Hispanic community, and it represents a significant shift in how this district serves its bilingual, bicultural population.

García-Roa, a native of Zacapu, Michoacán, has lived in the valley for 28 years. She knows the landscape, the people, and the specific gaps in service that others might overlook. Her path to this role wasn’t linear. She arrived in the U.S. at 17, finished school in Riverside County, California, and ended up in Colorado with her husband and family. When she first applied to the library district, she faced a common bureaucratic hurdle: she didn’t have a library science degree.

“When I came with my kids to one of the summer reading programs, I noticed they were hiring, but I said, ‘no, no,’ they aren’t going to hire me because they will hire someone with a library science degree,” García-Roa recalls.

She applied anyway. And she got the job. Not because she had the degree, but because she had something else the district desperately needed: she spoke Spanish.

“They were looking for someone who spoke Spanish,” she says. “That’s what gave me the entry with them.”

That entry point led to two decades of service. She started as an Associate on June 6, 2006. For four years, she handled technical services — processing and cataloging books. It was a heavy lift before the district joined Prospector, the interlibrary loan system, in 2011. Before that, getting a book meant waiting for it to come from Mexico, Cuba, or Spain. The origin didn’t matter; the mission was simple: connect the reader with their favorite title or author.

Today, García-Roa is the Coordinator of Events for Hispanics. Her team runs the Bibliobús, the mobile library that has been on the road for a year, hitting places like Minturn, Red Cliff, McCoy, and Dotsero. These innovations didn’t just keep the lights on; they won the district the “Public Sector Innovation” award from the Vail Valley Partnership.

“Ganamos el premio de ‘Innovación en el Sector Público’ por haber traído recursos para la Comunidad, de parte de Vail Valley Partnership,” García-Roa says, proud of the recognition.

The new book club is the latest extension of that mission. It’s about integration. It’s about ensuring that the Spanish-speaking population isn’t just a demographic statistic, but an active participant in the cultural life of the valley. For locals who might assume the library is just a quiet place for books, this is a reminder that the institution is evolving to meet the community where it lives.

As García-Roa puts it, the goal has always been to bring resources to the community. Whether that’s a bus rolling into a small town or a book club meeting in a quiet corner of the library, the intent is the same.

“México nos prestaba libros porque no teníamos tantos libros en español,” she notes, reflecting on the early days. “También nos llegaban libros de Cuba, de España.”

Now, the resources are here, and they are being read.