Chiara Arroyo and Celene Navarrete embarked on an adventure in 2012 that they never thought would take them this far: Opening a bookstore specializing in books in Spanish for children.
“They are crazy, they told us, especially at a time when reading levels have dropped and when the publishing industry seemed destined for death,” says Navarrete.
But they weren’t crazy. In reality they were absolutely sane.
The idea of starting a Spanish and bilingual bookstore did not come from nowhere. In reality, it was the product of an observation process that they began as mothers with children in a school in Santa Monica, and they realized that the demand for these types of books was growing as more schools adopted dual immersion methods.
It made sense in a region like Southern California, where there are more than four million Spanish speakers and where Spanish has been present for more than 250 years.
But from the moment they started LA Librería they have done an intense job, going to all the book fairs, reading clubs, and schools to promote their inventory.
Chiara Arroyo is an immigrant from Spain and Celene Navarrete is from Aguascalientes, Mexico. They both know that Los Angeles is the ideal place to develop a business like theirs, especially if you take into account that, according to Census figures, Spanish is spoken in almost 40 percent of the county’s households.
“There is a renewed interest in bilingualism and feeling represented,” says Navarrete. “We have noticed that our customers are looking for books from their countries of origin.”
Perhaps one of the factors that most drove the editorial work of these partners was witnessing the poor quality of many of the books published on digital platforms, full of errors of all kinds.
So they decided not only to sell books in Spanish, but also well-edited books without errors. This is how LA Librería was born.
The first stage was an online store, which offered a modest catalog of children’s books in bilingual and Spanish. And then they began their pilgrimage through the city, going to schools and organizing book fairs in schools throughout the country.
When they saw that the effort began to bear its first fruits, they opened a physical store that was inaugurated in 2015. Although it was small, the expenses of the new store forced them to redouble their pace and participate more and more frequently in community festivals. This has consolidated them as one of the best bilingual bookstores not only in Los Angeles, but in the entire country.
Of course not everything has been happiness. In 2020, when the COVID pandemic broke out and schools closed, Arroyo and Navarrete thought that all their efforts were about to go down the drain. Fortunately, they resorted to the different small business aid programs and managed to survive. One of the keys to survival was that the children, being at home, had much more time to read.
Then came the years of consolidating LA Librería and today they are in a process of expansion. To do this, they have abandoned their old premises and are now equipping a warehouse-type building where space will undoubtedly no longer be a problem.
The new building will be officially inaugurated in mid-June, so work to place the shelves and classify the more than 8,000 book titles is in full swing.
The idea is that LA Librería continues to be a meeting point between reading promoters, writers, readers, educators, etc., where everyone can exchange experiences, says Arroyo.
Although they are still in the preparation process, LA Librería already has again the beautiful books that have characterized it. Beautiful book covers in English and Spanish with stories and words in Nahuatl and Mayan, typical and happy colors, where the reader can feel identified in the deepest part of their roots.
