LA Librería, the only Spanish children's bookstore in Los Angeles, moved to a new space to enhance its outreach to the Hispanic community. 12 years after its beginnings, it has found a larger and better-located space to continue with an almost unique offer in a city where 40% of the population speaks Spanish.
LA Librería’s new 2,400-square-foot headquarters are modern and spacious, with glass panes, recycled wood bookshelves, bright wallpapers, colorful decorations, reading nooks for the little ones, and extensive room for activities and events. And, of course, piles and piles of books.
LA Librería is the only children’s Spanish bookstore in LA, and it has become a cultural hub for this city’s Hispanic community, providing access to a wide range of titles by both independent and large publishers across Latin America and Spain. Their main goal was is fulfill an important need: one for more and better books in Spanish. This, in turn, helps their children—as well as other immigrants’ children—grow up speaking Spanish and English. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 37.7% of LA County’s population speaks Spanish. Thanks to LA Librería, children, teens, and adults now have a physical place to discover literature in their native tongue.
LA Librería: The Origin Story
Chiara Arroyo, a former film journalist born in Spain, and Celene Navarrete, a Mexican coding and computer information systems professor, are the two women behind LA Librería.
They both live in LA, have Spanish families, and send their children to a Spanish public school. Arroyo and Navarrete met at their children’s school’s book fair in 2012. They bonded over the lack of available good books in Spanish and talked about the mistakes and stereotypes included in the available titles. “You don’t publish a book with errors. In Spanish, [American publishers] don’t care. They think that the Spanish-speaking families don’t have money? There’s negative values associated with Spanish,” Arroyo explains in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
They decided things had to change, and took matters into their own hands. In that same interview, they retell the process of compiling a selection of good quality, diverse books in Spanish for the school’s next book fair. It was a huge success, so they later set up an appointment-only showroom and started selling books to Spanish schools. Due to the high demand, they later turned the showroom into a bookstore-warehouse, which opened its doors in 2015, on Washington Boulevard. "When we were selling at these fairs, many people didn’t even know these kinds of books existed until they saw them. Let alone know they are available in a city like Los Angeles and in their schools. To have access to these books in your family’s language is a huge thing and can open up a discussion, especially because the language has been so stigmatized in the past,” Arroyo said in another article by the LA Times.
A New Space
The original bookshop on Washington Boulevard ran for nine years, from 2015 to 2024. After hosting several events and readings there, they realized they had outgrown the space and needed to expand. The new bookstore, double in size of the previous one, opened its doors to the public in September 2024 in West Adams, South Los Angeles. Once historic and traditional, West Adams has recently undergone a gentrification process: now it’s full of apartment buildings, vibrant street art, hip restaurants, ceramics studios, and boutiques that coexist with old Victorian houses and cultural landmarks, such as the UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Spanish Books Para Todos
LA Librería’s catalog is truly diverse. There are books from almost every Latin American country and even some titles in Indigenous languages from the region, like Nahuatl and Zapotec. They also have books in Portuguese, which is great for the better integration of Brazilian-Americans in the Latinx community.
“We have learned that the book industry puts Latinos in the same box and we try to do the opposite. We try to represent and diversify the selection,” Navarrete said to the LA Times. They also offer a selection of books for adults by Latinx authors, like Mariana Enríquez, Cristina Rivera Garza, Gabriel García Márquez, Rubén Darío, and more.
More Than A Spanish Bookstore
LA Librería is a community, a meeting point, and a place for children and teens to discover new ways of thinking and connecting with their heritage through literature.
LA Librería hosts cultural events with artists, writers, and musicians, and they work with social programs and initiatives that promote reading in Spanish. This Spanish bookshop in the heart of LA also works with 140 schools and educational centers across the United States to strengthen their educational programs.
The co-founders of this bookstore understand that language is not just a tool, but an intrinsic part of a person’s identity. “We’ve seen a great interest in the non-English speaking Hispanic community, like mothers and fathers of young people that had an English education and now feel the need for their children to recover the Spanish that they themselves lost. It’s been beautiful to see their support for Spanishism as a way to recover a part of their identity,” Navarrete said to El País. And the interest goes beyond the mere surface: As Arroyo said to the LA Times, visitors don’t just ask for books about Guatemala, they ask for books from Guatemala.
Spanish Bookshops: A New Trend?
In the present day, similar initiatives to LA Librería have surfaced in LA and other US cities.
One is Other Books LA, a Spanish bookstore in East Los Angeles that hosts events and readings, while also selling comics and zines. Libros Schmibros is a Spanish lending library located in Boyle Heights. Born in 2010, it has become a place for locals to discover books or participate in cultural events, like conversations with authors, classes for kids, and movie projections. Last but not least, Tía Chucha’s Centro Cultural is an independent bookshop and cultural center located on the outskirts of LA, in San Fernando Valley, that aims to transform the community through “ancestral knowledge, the arts, literacy and creative engagement,” according to the organization’s website.
Final Thoughts: Embracing Diversity to Overcome the Dangers of a Single Story
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie highlights the importance of stories in her famous TED Talk. She says that stories matter because they shape the way we see, feel, and interact with the world, especially when we’re young: “The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete." LA Librería encourages children to engage with different types of stories, like Latin American folktales, books in Maya and Nahuatl, titles about Frida Kahlo, climate change, biodiversity, LGBTQ+ novels, and more books that can be found in their carefully curated catalog.
The bookshop’s new headquarters helps children discover these stories in person, through its packed shelves, as well as through readings and events with authors. So it’s safe to say that LA Librería contributes to eradicating the “single story” of what a book should be, one title at a time.
LA Librería: Key Information
- LA Librería Address: 4572 1/2 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016, United States.
- LA Librería Catalog: It includes over 8,000 books, and 250 publishers—like El Zorro Rojo, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Ediciones El Naranjo, and Penguin Random House—which can be browsed in-person and online. They have graphic novels, picture books, non-fiction, chapter and activity books, and poetry anthologies.
- LA Librería Website: To learn more about the bookshop’s educational initiatives, such as school book fairs and cultural events, or to browse the catalog, visit its website.
- LA Librería on social media: Visit the bookstore’s Instagram or Facebook pages to be up-to-date with special events, reading recommendations, activities, and news.
- La Librería opening times: Tuesday to Friday, from 10:00 am to 4:30 pm. Saturdays and Sundays, from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm. Closed on Mondays.