San José Budget Cuts Could Doom Library History and Culture Space

They say big things come in small packages, and the adage holds true at the California Room in San José’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library.

In contrast to some of the library’s vast, sweeping communal areas, the California Room is a cozy space tucked innocuously into the special collections area of the fifth floor.

But the room is bursting with historical maps, aerial photographs and lesser-known books and volumes focused on the diverse people and cultures that have contributed to Santa Clara Valley.

The collections include microfiche records of thousands of old San Jose Mercury News newspapers, massive fire insurance mapbooks dotted with discolorations and water stains that offer detailed looks at the region’s roads and buildings through time, as well as sculpted art, phonebooks and city directories.

“The California Room really is the space for the public to engage with and understand and learn from the past broadly, but also…the ability to have historic documents that you can actually look at, touch, smell, understand,” said Jill Bourne, the city’s library director.

Some of the pieces lie laminated in hulking gray file cabinets, while others are one-of-a-kind and so delicate they can’t be photocopied. All are physical links to the origins of the city and the broader South Bay.

But those touchpoints of history, referenced by students, researchers, developers, city planners, journalists and wandering visitors alike, are under threat.

As San José grapples with a $50 million shortfall in its $1.7 billion general fund budget, the city’s library department is being asked to trim a little more than $5 million.

The city could save about $400,000 annually if the few staff members who run the California Room were reassigned, officials said. The cut would end public access to the room, which is currently open nearly 40 hours a week for anyone and everyone’s benefit.

Instead, library leaders say some of the room’s materials would likely need to be made available for retrieval and viewing by appointment only. It’s unclear how much access would remain.

“Of all rooms to cut, why would it be the city of San José cutting information about San José? That’s what I don’t understand,” said Darlene Tenes, a business owner and board member of History San José, an organization that aims to preserve and promote the region’s history.

Tenes said the staff who guided nearly 5,500 visitors last year alone are “the most important things about the California Room.” She said they have personally helped her, including by tracking down the name of a woman she was trying to identify.

“It is so helpful to have staff there with institutional knowledge because you’re doing so much research, but you don’t necessarily know how to get to where you’re trying to go,” Tenes said.

The space has, over the past several years, also hosted a series of well-received exhibits diving deep into the roots of Asian Americans, African Americans and Latinos in the region.

There have been two different exhibitions on the intertwined relationships of lowrider culture, Chicano history and East San José, as well as a recent Black History Month exhibit highlighting sculptor Edmonia Lewis.

In 2023, the room hosted the exhibit Pinoytown Rising: Filipino Americans in Santa Clara Valley, which retired aerospace engineer and San José native Robert Ragsac curated.

“It’s another one of those cases where a page is closed that allowed us to tell the story about not only, in my case, Filipino Americans and their descendants, my generation, but all the other immigrants’ stories,” Ragsac said.

“One of the things that seems imbalanced to me is we are Silicon Valley, super high tech, but…a lot of people don’t understand the history of Santa Clara Valley, the Valley of Heart’s Delight,” he said, pointing to the waves of immigration of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Mexican laborers whose stories have intertwined here.

Before attending college and learning engineering, Ragsac, now 94, worked in some of the many orchards in the South Bay as a young person.

He said he distinctly remembers watching a tractor mow down acres of cherry trees in Cupertino, only to see surveyors and development follow soon after.

“Closing the California Room is pretty close to my heart. It’s not just the money part of it, I do understand that. But I would hate to see something like the California Room shut down because it shuts down a whole lot of venues for telling the stories of our people here in Santa Clara Valley during those early years, and to come,” he said.

At a City Council budget study session earlier this week, councilmembers asked Bourne, the library director, how access to the materials would look without staffing.

“There’s a lot of deep research that happens, the materials are older, they require some oversight sometimes. So it isn’t just like looking up a fiction title and going to the shelves by yourself and getting it,” Bourne told the council. “I think it’s important to note that if we could have done it without the staff, we would have already.”

Councilmember Anthony Tordillos asked about having San José State University, which is a partner with the city in the King Library, collaborate with the city to preserve the room, but Bourne said it’s unclear whether the school could muster that.

Tordillos also raised the potential of reducing service levels, instead of closing the room off altogether.

“Beyond just retrieval or access to the collection, there’s a lot of peripheral services and benefit from actually having open access to the California Room, being able to interact with staff there,” he said. “So I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to find some sort of intermediary.”

The city, which is also eyeing cuts to public safety projects, youth programming and more, is set to vote on a final budget in June.