Friends Celene Navarrete and Chiara Arroyo recently opened La Librería, a Spanish-language bookstore for children, on West Washington Boulevard in Central Los Angeles.

A recent Census Bureau survey found that in Los Angeles County, almost 57% of California residents speak a language other than English at home. And yet, in Los Angeles, a city of 4.9 million Hispanics, with 64.6% of children enrolled in its public schools identifying as Latino, there wasn’t a single Spanish-language bookstore for children.

At least, not until last month, when friends Celene Navarrete and Chiara Arroyo opened La Librería, a Spanish-language bookstore for children, on West Washington Boulevard in Central Los Angeles.

Both Navarrete and Arroyo were part of the book fair committee at their children’s school, Edison Language Academy in Santa Monica. They were very disappointed to see the lack of quality Spanish-language literature for children being brought to the fair. “We weren’t seeing the books that we were expecting, the books we read as children,” Arroyo said. “We weren’t seeing the books our friend’s children were reading in Spanish-speaking countries. We have our own beautiful collection of children’s books at home, and it was sad for us to think that only our children or some children were able to have those books, and not the whole school. So we decided to improve things.”

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