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For self-proclaimed latchkey kids like Consuelo Cruz, the West Branch of the Kansas City Public Library was a sacred home away from home.
“I always felt lucky that within walking distance, I had a library,” says Cruz, who grew up on Kansas City’s Westside in the 1970s.
In addition to offering a comfortable, air-conditioned place to do homework, the library had a cornucopia of entertainment in the form of VCR tapes and books.
Cruz’s favorite part about the library, though, was a person: Irene Ruiz, the branch librarian.
“She just had a love for the community that was contagious,” says Cruz. “And, at least for me, it instilled a lot of pride.”
A stylish, petite woman with a beaming smile, Ruiz was known for fostering a love of reading in even the most reluctant readers. She also spoke Spanish, which made her library a particularly inviting place for Mexican immigrants and Latinos, who have been settling on Kansas City’s Westside in large numbers since the Mexican Revolution.
Ruiz died in September 2023, but her impact on the Westside is impossible to miss today. She’s the namesake of the Irene H. Ruiz Biblioteca de las Americas branch of the Kansas City Public Library, which opened on the Westside in 2001.
What was unique about Ruiz, even for a librarian, was her passion for documenting life in Kansas City. In the 1970s and ‘80s, she conducted nearly 60 interviews on a tape recorder. Her project, now known as the Hispanic Oral History Collection, is one of the only existing oral histories of Mexican immigrants coming to Kansas City.
When Cruz discovered the cassette tapes in a cardboard box at the library as an adult, she was blown away by the stories of her Westside neighbors.
“I was surrounded by such a spectrum of people who had so many different experiences and who contributed to the makeup of my community, but also to the city,” she says. “You know, the architects and political figures who maybe had humble beginnings, but [Irene] always felt like their stories were important to share. And I'm so grateful that she did.”
A lover of language
Irene Hernández Ruiz was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1920. She grew up comfortably middle class, the second of eight daughters born to two fiercely independent thinkers.
Ruiz’s Tejano mother, María de la Luz Vela Benavides, managed rental properties and a beauty salon. Her Mexican dad, Antonio Dorado Hernández, owned and operated a restaurant downtown.
“Her parents knew people in the symphony and they would come over and play music at their house,” says Julie Robinson, a friend of Ruiz’ at the Kansas City Public Library. “I mean, this was not a deprived childhood. And it really molded her into the person that she was.”
As a teen, Ruiz enjoyed playing piano and running the cash register at her dad’s restaurant, the Liverpool Café.
“She was very studious, but she also was a tomboy,” says her son, Bret Ruiz. “She did like to bake cookies, but mom was not domestic.”
Bret says his mom was also a “real fashion icon” and the kind of person whose personality and love of conversation dominated every room she walked into. Ruiz spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese, and later, German too.
Her linguistic prowess, in fact, is why she got recruited for a full-time job as a phone monitor for the U.S. Government’s Office of Censorship, a controversial wartime agency formed after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
Ruiz was tasked with listening in on phone calls between the United States and Latin America.
Bret Ruiz says his mom kept everything she heard on the phone calls a secret, but admitted to listening in on conversations with María Félix, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, a famous countess and the mistress of a notorious Jewish mobster, just to name a few.
When World War II ended, Ruiz earned her teaching certificate in 1948 from Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. It wasn’t long before she met fellow teacher Francisco Ruiz, who would become the love of her life.
Bonding over their mutual infatuation with languages and education, the pair got married in 1956. They initially moved to Lawrence, Kansas, before making their permanent home in the swanky neighborhood around the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri. Together, they raised three sons: A. Duane, F. Brent and R. Bret.
Irene Ruiz taught Spanish and social studies for Kansas City Public Schools, while Francisco oversaw the district’s language classes.
Over those decades, the pair became integral members of the community, advocating for Mexican immigrants and Latinos. They helped bring civil rights activist César Chávez to Kansas City, as well as poet Octavio Paz.
“They were very adamant about equal rights and standing up for the underdog,” Bret says. “They felt that they had to speak up for other Latinos because nobody else was going to do it.”
For both Francisco and Irene Ruiz, their activism came to life through storytelling.
In his documentary, “The Others” (Los Demás), Francisco predicted gentrification would continue to get worse and worse, and push out families that had lived on the Westside for generations — and he was right. In the last 25 years alone, the percentage of residents on the Westside who identify as Latino has decreased by more than 20%.
An excerpt from “The Others” (Los Demás), 1973
Francisco went on to become a popular professor at Penn Valley Community College, where he started a Chicano literary magazine called Entrelíneas (Between the Lines) and taught history classes for residents at Ft. Leavenworth Prison. (Francisco died in 1993.)
Ruiz took a different path, enrolling at Emporia State College to pursue library studies in the summer of 1969. She gave up teaching in 1976 when she was hired as a full-time librarian by the Kansas City Public Library.
Serving and documenting the Westside
When Irene Ruiz started at the West Branch of the KCPL, there were very few Spanish language books in the collection — a sobering fact in a neighborhood where so many people were native Spanish speakers.
Not many places in the U.S. printed in Spanish, according to Julie Robinson, so Ruiz had to write letters overseas to book publishers in Spain and Latin America. Soon, she was stocking Spanish-language newspapers and movies, in addition to Spanish comic books and fotonovelas, for children and adults.
She also recruited more Mexican Americans to the library by physically going to local churches, and meetings at the Guadalupe Centers.
On top of that, Ruiz became a one-stop shop for anything anyone needed. She helped people fill out paperwork and job applications, study for citizenship tests, and learn English. She’d also act as an interpreter for undocumented people at the courthouse — and make phone calls on their behalf.
“She always wanted people, no matter who you were, to be welcome. And to do that, the people in the library had to be welcoming,” says Robinson.
The late 1970s is also when Ruiz began her oral history project, interviewing dozens of Latino residents in both English and Spanish.
The list of subjects included incredibly well-known Kansas Citians like Paul Rojas, Missouri’s first Hispanic state legislator — in addition to other working folks in the neighborhood: a restaurant worker, a post office employee, a police officer, a chemistry professor.
All of these years later, the now digitized collection serves as a representation of intimate stories and personal achievements. Ruiz often asked her subjects questions about pivotal moments in their lives, the people who influenced them during childhood — and the factors that pushed them in times of struggle.
Ruiz’ goal, according to Bret, was to change whose stories were preserved. She didn’t like how history has mostly been written about the powerful.
“Napoleon, Queen Elizabeth. History is all about winners,” Bret says of his mother’s work. “But who's going to tell the story of people that aren't losers, they're just regular Joes?”
‘The Westside wants their library’
“We have materials here that are not available anywhere else,” Ruiz told the Kansas City Star in 1996. And that’s important, she said, because “books open up a new world to you.”
By the mid-’90s, Ruiz had made the West Branch library into a real community gathering place.
At the same time, however, the Kansas City Public Library board was rethinking its entire system, says Robinson. And it was an open question about whether it made sense to maintain branches in both Westport and the Westside.
Would it be better, the board asked, to build one, bigger library branch in between?
Many in the Westside community immediately came out against the idea. As Ruiz pointed out, the Westside was a walking community. The Westport branch was two miles away from the Westside — and moving their library would make it far less accessible to residents.
To save the library, Ruiz and other community members went door to door to campaign.
“Then the community leaders got together, and that really changed a lot,” says Robinson. “It was very definite. You will leave the library on the Westside. The Westside wants their library.”
In the end, the library board decided they would build a new, bigger library, but rather than sitting in between the neighborhoods, it would instead sit in the heart of the Westside. Ruiz had won.
In 1996, Kansas City voters approved a 28% tax levy increase and plans started being made for West Branch library's permanent home.
Comforted that the library was saved, Irene retired that same year — after two decades of service. At 76, Ruiz told everyone she didn’t want “any fuss, any party.” Her presence was far too prominent, however, for her to disappear without patrons on the Westside noticing.
Around the turn of the century, a movement began to name the new, in-progress Westside branch after its dearest retired librarian.
The KCPL board initially rejected the idea, though. Some people thought it was odd to name a library after a former employee. But the community didn’t take “no” for an answer.
“It had to really go through the library board. And people were very vocal about it at board meetings,” Robinson says.
Pete Cedillo was one of those “vocal” people. He remembers attending a pivotal board meeting and throwing a petition with hundreds of signatures in the members’ faces.
“I raised my hand and said, ‘My community has already spoken. We have provided you with 300 plus signatures,’” Cedillo recalls.
Eventually, the board once again conceded to the pressure, and the Westside won its second library battle.
The Irene H. Ruiz Biblioteca de las Americas opened in September 2001, the same week of the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
There was talk of canceling the opening party that weekend to mourn the national tragedy, but staff members felt like it was important to do something uplifting. In the end, the celebration softly went ahead as scheduled.
A local hero and lasting presence
Today, Irene Ruiz’s legacy is preserved at the Irene H. Ruiz Biblioteca de las Americas branch of the Kansas City Public Library at 2017 W. Pennway St.
This library is four times as large as the former West Branch locations, and it’s packed with plants and brightly colored murals. Sunshine streams in through huge floor-to-ceiling windows.
In addition to bilingual staff members and a huge selection of books in Spanish, the library also offers a conversational Spanish club, yoga classes, chess sets, a seed library, and birding backpacks — complete with binoculars and guidebooks.
When Julie Robinson was the branch librarian here from 2003-2014, Irene Ruiz was a fixture. She’d regularly come in for story time and other special events.
Ruiz was well in her 80s by then, something she somewhat covered up by dying her hair a bright red.
“That used to be a secret, by the way,” says Robinson. “She didn't want anyone to know how old she was. Because if you knew how old she was, then she would be treated as an old woman.”
An old woman, Ruiz was not.
In 2006, she was selected as a “local hero” at Primitivo Garcia World Language School, a few blocks north of the library — and Mrs. Arras’ English as a Second Language class wrote an original song for her.
"Thank You, Irene Ruiz" (2006)
The song cemented Irene’s place as a celebrity around town (a student even asked for her autograph once).
Realizing her star power, teachers used it to their advantage. When kids would misbehave, the teachers would threaten to call Mrs. Ruiz — and it worked. Not because the kids were afraid of getting a stern talking-to, but because they didn’t want to disappoint her.
“In their mind, she was such a great person, such a great model, that to disappoint her would be like disappointing the No. 1 person in your life,” says Robinson.
Consuelo Cruz understands the feeling. Ruiz was her first librarian on the Westside, and they never lost touch. Cruz used to send her a Christmas card every year and see her around town as an adult.
“You know when you have that relationship with someone when you're a kid and you want to run up to them and hug them?” says Cruz. “I think that's how a lot of us felt about Irene, because she made such an impact on our lives from a very early age.”
Irene died in September 2023, two months shy of her 103rd birthday. According to her son, Bret, these are her tips for living so long:
- Ruiz loved to dance.
- She liked her martini, but never drank to excess.
- She watched what she ate.
- She never smoked.
- She didn’t like the sun.
- And perhaps most importantly, she did crosswords and read books well into her 90s.
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported, produced and mixed by Mackenzie Martin with editing by Gabe Rosenberg and Suzanne Hogan, and help from Celia Morton.
