Afro-Latina Antonette Franceschi-Chavez Talks Accessibility to Books for the BIPOC Community

When it comes to Latinx books, the publishing industry moves at a slow and steady pace, which means the level of Latinx and BIPOC representation is not as readily available, nor do many bookstores prioritize and center our stories beyond monthly observances. So while there is a struggle to get our stories published, there’s also a struggle to get our work on shelves. That’s where Afro-Latina bookstore owner Antonette Franceschi-Chavez comes in. She is the founder and owner of Casita Bookstore, a Southern California-based bookstore operating out of a bungalow-style house in Long Beach. Their catalog is comprised mostly of children’s books but they also carry titles for teens and adults across various genres. Through community engagement, they’ve managed to cultivate a thriving home for the local community of book lovers and are providing a much-needed space founded on values of diversity and representation for BIPOC.

“Our overarching mission is to ensure that we are representative of marginalized voices and that communities who have otherwise been ignored or pushed aside in the past are being heard and seen amongst the books on our bookshelves,” Franceschi-Chavez tells HipLatina. “Especially with our children’s books, we want to make sure that children nowadays feel like their communities, interests, and passions are being represented in the books they read.”

The bookstore’s influence is undeniable but this venture was actually a post-retirement goal that happened much earlier than expected. For seven years, Franceschi-Chavez worked as an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles, focusing on dual-language programming and fostering biliteracy, bilingualism, and bicultural pride in her young students. Having grown up in Los Angeles with only local book fairs or mobile bookshops as her only way of buying books, she’s familiar with the importance of accessibility. The majority of her students were Latinx but it was early on in this work that she found a significant gap in the literature and her curriculum.

“There weren’t enough books that were authentic for the children in my classrooms,” she explains. “And if there were any books in Spanish that were meant to be representative of my community, they were often just translations and a lot of translated books focus on being grammatically correct and don’t tend to be culturally correct. I knew that if I was going to sell children’s books, they were going to be representative of a diverse group of children.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the U.S. in 2020, Franceschi-Chavez stayed at home with her then-two-year-old-son and took a year off from teaching when hosting Zoom classes with him in the background simply wasn’t working. But instead of going back to her old job, she found a job at her local library, where she helped parents foster literacy skills in their own children. After she had her daughter, she craved a working situation that offered her more flexibility to spend time with family.

One day in September 2022, while she was still debating on returning to her teaching job, she was driving through downtown Long Beach when she passed by a retail building that looked like a little house. She envisioned taking her kids there and thought about the potential of moving up the schedule for her retirement dream to open a bookstore, which would not only fulfill her creatively but also offer a more flexible working schedule. By December, a mere four months after seeing the place, she signed the lease, redesigned the interior with the help of her husband, and officially opened the bookstore for business.

That said, it has presented an array of challenges she didn’t expect, including how expensive it is to purchase books even at wholesale prices, which then carries on to the price that consumers pay. This sometimes means that community members aren’t able to support the store by purchasing books when larger retailers like Amazon can offer the same book at a cheaper price. But that hasn’t stopped her from working with her community to find other ways to support Casita’s mission.

“We have been able to bring our communities together in support of larger social justice needs. We partnered with our local library to make sure that people are aware that libraries are here if you can’t go into bookstores and purchase a book, for example,” she says. “We host fundraisers to support families being affected by ICE raids and raise money for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. We partner with other small businesses and nonprofits who come and do art activities and Know Your Rights workshops. We’ve made great partnerships and friendships that have been eye-opening because I didn’t realize how interweaved in our community a bookstore could be.”

Some of her most rewarding moments have been when children come into the store and get excited about seeing a character who looks like them on the cover of a book or is depicted playing a sport that they themselves like to play. It reminds her of the reward that comes along with the risk of opening a small business in today’s climate and how important it is to BIPOC communities.

“I love that a-ha moment of a kid gravitating towards a book and a story and how we can bring the love of reading and books to anyone who interacts with us,” Franceschi-Chavez says.

There are also many other important aspects of running a bookstore that aren’t exactly as fun or exciting but that are foundational to having a functioning shop. From tracking inventory to curating events and managing social. Now with an eight and a three-year-old, she’s working on being better about collaborating with her husband and new employees to help with operational needs like organizing books, managing the Casita and events, and also running the register. It’s all in a day’s work for her and despite the challenges of competing booksellers, she’s proud of what the Casita community has become. Over the past three years of owning the bookstore, she’s seen so many ways that people have shown their support for Casita’s mission: following the store on social media, sharing the page with others, and, perhaps most importantly, attending events.

“When you show up to events, you’re not only supporting the bookstore, you’re also supporting the author or illustrator that might be at the event, or whatever community member might be hosting an event,” she explains. “You’re not just supporting us, you’re also supporting your community at large.”

In addition to running the bookstore, she’s also focused on improving accessibility to literature through a non-profit. She serves as the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Equity Through Literacy alongside Chief Financial Officer Marysol Perez. Since its formation in 2020, they work to assist families and parents with the resources they need to achieve literacy for their children. They aim to center family and community members as effective educators for children alongside schools and teachers.

“ETL came about at the beginning of COVID as a way to close the literacy gap in underserved communities while schools and libraries were closed,” she says. “My partner and I wanted to ensure that kids in marginalized communities, especially in areas where there are Title 1 schools, or high Spanish-speaking communities, had access to books at home and books their parents could read to them as well.”

Over the past five years, they have been able to donate over 19,000 new and like-new books, as well 4,000 backpacks with essential school supplies to families across dozens of high-need neighborhoods and communities throughout Los Angeles. They stepped up especially during the Eaton fires that devastated thousands of families and structures in Altadena, working with authors, publishers, and community members to donate over 1,5000 books to affected community members.

Through her work with both ETL and Casita, she’s dedicated to building bridges through books for both better representation in literature within her community and access to works otherwise unavailable. She notes:

“ I hope that we continue to find ways to remain a staple in our community and that people keep finding us. I love to see new people coming in who say they saw us on TikTok or Instagram, and drove all the way out to Long Beach just to see it. That makes me happy because people want this sense of representation community that is housed in our little casita.”

Casita Bookstore is located in 1440 E 4th St, Long Beach, CA 90802