Spanish-language literature widens its reach in Los Angeles

Balloons, children and a band playing Latino music. On Sunday afternoon, there was a festive atmosphere at the intersection of Buckingham and West Adams streets in Los Angeles to celebrate the opening of the LA Librería bookstore. LA Librería has been around for 12 years, but has now found a larger and better space to continue to offer Spanish-language books — which is a rare find, even in a city where 40% of the population speaks Spanish. That was reason enough for an entire community to celebrate. There were tacos, mezcal and many books in Spanish for children and adults.

LA Librería’s new home is in West Adams, a neighborhood in South Los Angeles. It was created in the 1920s, where farmland and marshy land gave way to large houses for the workers who came to the city because of the booming construction and manufacturing industries. A century later, the area is once again undergoing a transformation — now thanks to gentrification. Small family-owned businesses have disappeared to make way for apartment buildings, shopping malls, trendy restaurants and modern boutiques. The bookstore now occupies the space of a defunct office furniture store.

Chiara Arroyo, one of the founders of the store along with Celene Navarrete, believes that opening the bookstore in the new neighborhood has consolidated the project they began together in 2012 to address a specific concern: that their children speak Spanish, with all the cultural burden that this entails, in one of the most important cities in the United States. They met as mothers of a public school that had a Spanish immersion program. But they found that the program did not reflect the great diversity of the city. It did not have enough books. Neither in quality nor in quantity. They decided to change that.

That's how the company started. “In those years, we were told that Latinos don't read, that paper books were going to disappear, that English is more relevant than Spanish, and that independent bookstores weren't going to be able to stay afloat. Instead of all this, we found an answer that has brought us great satisfaction,” says Arroyo.

Today, some of LA Librería’s most important work takes place outside the store. The company supplies books to public school libraries and classrooms. It also creates collections tailored to the curriculum for different centers and school districts. They began working in Los Angeles, where they now collaborate with 140 educational centers. Later, they expanded to Southern California. Years later, they were working throughout the state, the most populated in the United States, and now they are operating nationwide with a presence in regions as far away as Wisconsin, where the Hispanic community has grown by 8% in the last decade.

LA Librería’s work is in line with one of the ambitious aspirations of the California Department of Education, which a few years ago set the goal of having half of all public primary school students speaking at least two languages by 2030, and 75% by 2040. Arroyo and Navarrete point out that this race has already begun and starts at preschool, before students reach the public system.

In LA Librería, children will find a selection of children’s literature in Spanish that is difficult to find elsewhere in the city. From independent publishers such as Leetra and Libros del Zorro Rojo to books from major publishers such as Penguin Random House and Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica.

“We have noticed a great interest in the Hispanic community that does not speak Spanish: young mothers and fathers who were educated in English and who feel the need for their children to relearn the Spanish they lost. It has been very nice to see how they support bilingualism to recover part of their identity,” says Navarrete.

Two years ago, in response to the boom of Latina writers, LA Librería expanded its catalog for adult readers who are looking to get in touch with the trends. A prominent place in the new store displays books in Spanish and English by Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez, novels by Mexico’s Dahlia de la Cerda, non-fiction works by Cristina Rivera Garza, poetry collections in Spanish and English by Nicanor Parra and Pablo Neruda, as well as the latest releases by popular representatives of Latino literature in the United States, such as Cristina García and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.

“Many adults do not read in Spanish. And a year ago, an interest began to emerge in Hispanic authors translated into English, especially female authors. It is starting not only among the Hispanic community, but also in the English-speaking community, who are reading these writers in English,” says Celene Navarrete, who adds, however, that the main focus of LA Librería is children’s literature.

This commitment is not only seen in the interest in literature but also in other arts. This weekend marks the beginning of the sixth edition of the Los Angeles Libros Festival, which takes place in the central library in downtown LA. For the first time, the opening day of the festival — Friday — will be exclusively for students visiting from five schools from areas with a high Latino population such as Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles and West Compton. For many of the students, it will be the first time they attend a festival with books in Spanish and English, and that features several authors. On Saturday, it will be open to the general public. LA Librería will then do what it does best: share its pride in a bilingual culture.

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