Business
Column: L.A.'s only Spanish-language children's bookstore will soon get más grande
When Chiara Arroyo and Celene Navarrete decided to sell Spanish-language children’s books in 2012, they weren’t worried about customer demand.
As mothers with kids at Edison Language Academy in Santa Monica, they saw that the market for bilingual books for Latinos and non-Latinos alike was surging, especially as schools created dual immersion programs. As immigrants from Mexico and Spain, they knew that Spanish had been part of Southern California for over 250 years and wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon.
No, what made them fret was the eternal question Angelenos face:
LA Librería co-founder Celene Navarrete in her bookstore.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
How do you make it in L.A.?
“It’s so easy to be invisible in this city,” Navarrete told me as we walked toward the back of LA Librería, the brick-and-mortar store she and Arroyo own and run. “It’s so spread out. Promotion is so hard. You have to go community to community, street by street.”
Navarrete and Arroyo knew that success wasn’t guaranteed even in a city with a long Spanish-language literary tradition, a megalopolis where the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that nearly 40% of households speak Spanish. They were preparing to launch in an era when bookstores were closing, Amazon was dominating online sales and the publishing industry was preparing to pivot from paper to digital.
The two were undeterred, however, because of a sense of obligation brought on by disgust. The few children’s books translated from English to Spanish that they could find were riddled with mistakes.
“In English, you don’t publish a book with errors,” Arroyo said. “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.”
“Such tremendous prejudices,” Navarrete added. “When we saw the reality,” opening a store “became a necessity.”
They started with an online bookstore and began to organize school book fairs across the U.S. Next came a tiny warehouse in West Adams that opened to the public in 2015. Soon followed community festivals, contracts with schools to provide bilingual books and increasing fame as one of the few Spanish-language children’s bookstores in the country — and one of the only Spanish-language bookstores in Los Angeles, period.
LA Librería co-founders Chiara Arroyo, left, and Celene Navarrete in the stockroom.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
The COVID-19 pandemic nearly ended LA Librería, but Arroyo and Navarrete pulled through with the help of grants and the fact “that children went home with books to read,” according to Navarrete. The store has not only rebounded, but it’s also ready for the next stage of success.
I met Arroyo and Navarrete a few weeks ago at their new location: a long, single-story 4,400-square-foot building in Mid-City that’s double the size of LA Librería’s last spot and that they’ll officially debut in mid-June.
“We’ve asked ourselves if we were crazy many times,” Arroyo, 47, said with a laugh, then a look at Navarrete. They’re both gregarious but not grating and carry conversations with the grace and teamwork of Mookie Betts firing off a throw to Freddie Freeman.
Navarrete, 51, shook her head with a wide grin. “We don’t even believe what we have, because we’re so happy.”
Our tour began in the warehouse section, where 8,000 titles from across the Spanish-speaking world on all sorts of subjects rested in boxes and on huge steel racks better suited for tires. We spoke almost exclusively in Spanish, with me slipping into English a few times even though español was my first tongue. The two were sympathetic.
Books are displayed at LA Librería.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
“The interest for bilingualism is here,” said Navarrete, who’s also a professor of coding and computer information systems management at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “It’s changing the importance of keeping Spanish that we need to work on.”
“People want to feel represented,” said Arroyo, a former film critic for Spanish and Mexican publications. “They don’t just ask, ‘Do you have books about Guatemala?’ They ask, ‘Do you have books from Guatemala?’ They want to see themselves.”
Of Spanish and Italian heritage, Arroyo grew up in Barcelona, Spain, where “in every corner, in small towns, there was a bookstore.” Navarrete, a native of the Mexican state of Aguascalientes, was raised in a household where books weren’t as common but were nevertheless treasured. When the two met, they were taken aback by the paucity of Spanish-language literature available in Los Angeles. Festivals and bookstores had come and gone over the decades, done in by lack of funding and the precarious business that is book selling in the digital age.
LA Librería co-founder Chiara Arroyo.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
“Spanish has always lived here along English — all kinds of Spanish,” Navarrete said. “But most of what we could find was through Mexican eyes.”
We were now walking around LA Librería’s offices, which double as a packing area. Empty dollies and carts stood near two employees who readied books for delivery. Cool stuff was everywhere I looked. A compendium of Latin American folk tales. A young-adult version of radio legend Maria Hinojosa’s memoir. Picture books teaching Spanish speakers words in Nahuatl and Maya. Above us were giant papier-mâché heads of alebrijes — colorful Mexican folk art figurines — used at LA Librería’s recent appearance at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, where they hosted a signing for me.
“A book in Spanish in this city has a different meaning in this city,” Navarrete said. “A child learns to keep their parents’ language, or just learns it. For immigrant parents or grandparents, the books let them teach a new generation, but also let them remember.”
“It’s a mirror,” Arroyo said. “A portal.”
The two laughed at memories of the early days of LA Librería: How the warehouse began in their homes and moved to their first storefront. How demand soon exceeded supply. How customers quickly asked for readings as well.
“You know Charlie Chaplin?” Arroyo said. “Our first place was like that. We pull this, we move that, and our kitchen turned into a reading space, just like that!”
That won’t be a challenge at LA Librería’s new spot. The tour ended at the front of the store. Wooden planks and plywood sheets waited to be transformed into bookshelves. A glass-encased conference room the two jokingly call “the Fishbowl” will serve as a community gathering space for workshops.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Once the store opens, it’s time to work on more dreams. Deepening their relationships with L.A.’s other non-English bookstores. Their own publishing house. Expanding the Los Angeles Libros Festival, a bilingual fair they co-founded. Selling more adult books in Spanish.
“We have the kids’ world controlled, but we don’t know the adult world,” Navarrete said. “But pasito a pasito” — little step by little step.
She smiled. “The kids who bought our first books are now in college.”
Arroyo nodded. “Our spouses say we have the stars aligned for us. Maybe they’re right!”
State waste officials have taken another stab at rules implementing a landmark plastic waste law, more than two months after Gov. Gavin Newsom torpedoed their initial proposal.
CalRecycle, the state agency that oversees waste management, recently proposed a new set of draft regulations to implement SB 54, the 2022 law designed to reduce California’s single-use plastic waste. The law was designed to shift the financial onus of waste reduction from the state’s people, towns and cities to the companies and corporations that make the polluting products. It was also intended to reduce the amount of single-use plastics that end up in California’s waste stream.
The draft regulations proposed last week largely mirror the ones introduced earlier this year, which set the rules, guidelines and parameters of the program — but with some minor and major tweaks.
The new ones clarify producer obligations and reporting timelines, said organizations representing packaging and plastics companies, such as the Circular Action Alliance and the California Chamber of Commerce.
But they also include a broad set of exemptions for a wide variety of single-use plastics — including any product that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have jurisdiction over, which includes all packaging related to produce, meat, dairy products, dog food, toothpaste, condoms, shampoo and cereal boxes, among other products.
The rules also leave open the possibility of using chemical or alternative recycling as a method for dealing with plastics that can’t be recycled via mechanical means, said people representing environmental, recycling and waste hauling companies and organizations.
California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, filed a suit against ExxonMobil last year that, in part, accuses the oil giant of deceptive claims regarding chemical recycling, which the company disputes.
Critics say the introduction of these exemptions and the opening for polluting recycling technologies will undermine and kneecap a law that just three years ago Newsom’s office described as “nation-leading” and “the most significant overhaul of the state’s plastic and packaging policy in history.”
The “gaping hole that the new exemptions have blown” into the bill make it unworkable, practically unfundable, and antithetical to its original purpose of reducing plastic waste, said Heidi Sanborn, director of the National Stewardship Action Council.
Last March, after nearly three years of negotiations among various corporate, environmental, waste, recycling and health stakeholders, CalRecycle drafted a set of finalized regulations designed to implement the single-use plastic producer responsibility program under SB 54.
But as the deadline for implementation approached, industries that would be affected by the regulations including plastic producers and packaging companies — represented by the California Chamber of Commerce and the Circular Action Alliance — began lobbying the governor, complaining the regulations were poorly developed and might ultimately increase costs for California taxpayers.
Newsom allowed the regulations to expire and told CalRecycle it needed to start the process over.
Daniel Villaseñor, a spokesman for the governor, said Newsom was concerned about the program’s potential costs for small businesses and families, which a state analysis estimated could run an extra $300 per year per household.
He said the new draft regulations “are a step in the right direction” and they ensure “California’s bold recycling law can achieve its goal of cutting plastic pollution,” said Villaseñor in a statement.
John Myers, a spokesman for the California Chamber of Commerce, whose members include the American Chemistry Council, Western Plastics Assn. and the Flexible Packaging Assn., said the chamber was still reviewing the changes.
CalRecycle is holding a workshop next Tuesday to discuss the draft regulations. Once CalRecycle decides to finalize the regulations, which experts say could happen at any time, it moves into a 45-day official rule-making period during which the regulations are reviewed by the Office of Administrative Law. If it’s considered legally sound and the governor is happy, it becomes official.
The law, which was authored by state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) and signed by Newsom in 2022, requires that by 2032, 100% of single-use packaging and plastic foodware produced or sold in the state must be recyclable or compostable, that 65% of it can be recycled, and that the total volume is reduced by 25%.
The law was written to address the mounting issue of plastic pollution in the environment and the growing number of studies showing the ubiquity of microplastic pollution in the human body — such as in the brain, blood, heart tissue, testicles, lungs and various other organs.
According to one state analysis, 2.9 million tons of single-use plastic and 171.4 billion single-use plastic components were sold, offered for sale or distributed during 2023 in California.
Most of these single-use plastic packaging products cannot be recycled, and as they break down in the environment — never fully decomposing — they contribute to the growing burden of microplastics in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil that nourishes our crops.
The law falls into a category of extended producer responsibility laws that now regulate the handling of paint, carpeting, batteries and textiles in California — requiring producers to see their products throughout their entire life cycle, taking financial responsibility for their products’ end of life.
Theoretically such programs, which have been adopted in other states, including Washington, Oregon and Colorado, spur technological innovation and potentially create circular economies — where products are designed to be reused, recycled or composted.
Sanborn said the new exemptions not only potentially turn the law “into a joke,” but will also dry up the program’s funding and instead put the financial burden on the consumer and the few packaging and single-use plastic manufacturers that aren’t included in the exemptions.
“If you want to bring the cost down, you’ve got to have a fair and level playing field where all the businesses are paying in and running the program. The more exemptions you give, the less funding there is, and the less fair it is,” she said.
In addition, because of the way residential and commercial packaging waste is collected, “it’s all going to get thrown away together, so now you have less funding” to deal with the same amount of waste, but for which only a small number of companies will be accountable for sorting out their material and making sure it gets disposed of properly.
Others were equally miffed, including Allen, the bill’s author, who said in a statement that while there are some improvements in the new regulations, there are “several provisions that appear to conflict with law,” including the widespread exemptions and the allowance of polluting recycling technologies.
“If the purpose of the law is to reduce single-use plastic and plastic pollution,” said Anja Brandon from the Ocean Conservancy, these new regulations aren’t going to do it — they are “inconsistent with the law and fully undermine its purpose and goal.”
Nick Lapis with Californians Against Waste said his organization was “really disappointed to see the administration caving to industry on some core parts of this program,” and also noted his read suggests many of the changes don’t comply with the law.
Next Tuesday, the public will have an opportunity to express concerns at a rulemaking workshop in Sacramento.
However, Sanborn fears there will be little time or appetite from the agency or the governor’s office to make substantial changes to the new regulations.
“They’re basically already cooked,” said Sanborn, noting CalRecycle had already accepted public comments during previous rounds and iterations.
“California should be the leader at holding the bar up in this space,” she said. “I’m afraid this has dropped the bar very low.”
Jony Ive, a former Apple executive known for designing the iPhone, is joining forces with OpenAI, the San Francisco startup behind popular chatbot ChatGPT.
On Wednesday, OpenAI said it’s buying io, an AI devices startup that Ive founded a year ago, for nearly $6.5 billion in an all-stock deal, the largest acquisition in OpenAI’s history.
“We have the opportunity here to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer,” OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said in a video with Ive about the partnership.
The pair don’t specify what AI devices they’re working on, but Altman called it “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”
The partnership shows how OpenAI is taking on some of the world’s most powerful tech companies including Google, Apple and Meta that are also working on AI-powered devices to shape the future of computing.
Chirag Dekate, a VP analyst at Gartner, said the announcement reflected an “inflection point” in the tech industry, where future products and services will offer users more personalized and proactive assistance.
“This shift suggests a future where technology is less about the tools themselves and more about the intelligently orchestrated experiences they enable,” he said in an email.
Globally, spending on generative AI is expected to total $644 billion in 2025, an increase of 76.4% from 2024, according to a forecast by Gartner, a research and advisory firm based in Connecticut that focuses on technology.
The race to build AI-powered wearable gadgets and roll out more AI tools that can generate video, text and code and help people shop also means that major tech companies are recruiting top-tier talent. Earlier in May, OpenAI hired Fidji Simo, a former top Meta executive and the chief executive of grocery delivery startup Instacart, to lead the startup’s applications team.
Ive, a British American designer, is a well-known figure in the tech industry because he designed some of Apple’s iconic products such as the Macbook, iPhone, iPad and iPod. Joining Apple in the 1990s, Ive became Apple’s chief design officer in 2015.
He left the company in 2019 and started LoveFrom, a creative collective and design firm that worked with brands including OpenAI.
Silicon Valley tech companies have been working on gadgets, including headsets and glasses, for years but they’re still not as ubiquitous as the smartphone.
There have also been major flops such as Humane’s AI pin, a wearable virtual voice-operated assistant that was criticized for various issues such as providing inaccurate information and overheating. In February, San Francisco-based Humane shut down the AI pin after it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard.
But the fumbles haven’t stopped tech companies from barreling forward with building glasses, brain-computer interfaces and humanoid robots as they look to a future beyond the smartphone.
When Google released smart glasses in 2013 that could shoot photos and videos, the company faced concerns about people using the device to surreptitiously record other people or read text while ignoring others.
But the gadget resurfaced years later. This week, Google unveiled a prototype of its AI smart glasses at its annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, demonstrating how people can use the device to search for information about a painting, travel and other topics without having to type on their smartphone. The search giant is partnering with eyewear brands Warby Parker and Gentle Monster on smart glasses.
Last year, Santa Monica-based Snap unveiled the fifth generation of Spectacles, its augmented reality glasses that overlay digital objects on the physical world. The device, which was only available for developers, allowed people to play with virtual pets, conjure up images with a voice command or swing a virtual golf club.
Meta teamed up with Ray-Ban on smart glasses that include an AI assistant that can answer questions, translate and help take a photo. It’s also working on a more powerful pair of AR glasses that lets people take video calls, get recipe recommendations and multitask in other ways.
And Apple, which unveiled a pricey mixed-reality headset known as the Vision Pro in 2023, is also reportedly working on smart glasses.
In the video with Altman, Ive said the products that people use to connect to technology are decades old, so it’s “just common sense to at least think surely there’s something beyond these legacy products.”
“I have a growing sense that everything I’ve learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment,” Ive said in the video.
Director Darren Aronofsky has pushed artistic boundaries with movies including “Requiem for a Dream” and “Mother!”
Now his production company is working with Google to explore the edge of artificial intelligence technology in filmmaking.
Google on Tuesday said it is working with several filmmakers to use new AI tools as part of a larger push to popularize the fast-moving tech. That effort includes a partnership with Aronofsky’s venture, Primordial Soup.
Google’s AI-focused subsidiary DeepMind and Aronofsky’s firm will work with three filmmakers, giving them access to the Mountain View, Calif.-based giant’s text-to-video tool Veo, which they will use to make short films. The first project, “Ancestra,” is directed by Eliza McNitt. Aronofsky is an executive producer on the film. “Ancestra,” which premieres at the Tribeca Festival next month, combines live-action filmmaking with imagery generated with AI, such as cosmic events and microscopic worlds.
“Filmmaking has always been driven by technology,” Aronofsky said in a statement that referenced film tech pioneers the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison. “Today is no different. Now is the moment to explore these new tools and shape them for the future of storytelling.”
The push comes as Google and other companies are making deals with Hollywood talent and production companies to use their AI tools. For example, Facebook parent company Meta is partnering with “Titanic” director James Cameron’s venture, Lightstorm Vision, to co-produce content for its virtual reality headset Meta Quest. New York-based AI startup Runway has a deal with “Hunger Games” studio Lionsgate to create a new AI model to help with behind-the-scenes processes such as storyboarding.
Many people in Hollywood have been critical of AI tools, raising concerns about the automation of jobs. Writers worry about AI models being trained on their scripts without their permission or compensation. Tech industry executives have said that they should be able to train AI models with content available online under the “fair use” doctrine, which allows for the limited reproduction of material without permission from the copyright holder.
Proponents of the technology say that it can provide more opportunities for filmmakers to test out ideas and show a variety of visuals at a lower cost.
New York-based Primordial Soup said in a press release that Google’s AI tools helped solve “practical challenges such as filming with infants and visualizing the birth of the universe” in “Ancestra.”
“With ‘Ancestra,’ I was able to visualize the unseen, transforming family archives, emotions, and science into a cinematic experience that feels both intimate and expansive,” McNitt said in a statement.
The two additional filmmakers and films participating in the Google DeepMind-Primordial Soup deal are not yet named.
Google made the announcement as part of its annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View.
During the event’s keynote address on Tuesday, Google shared updates on its AI tools for filmmakers, including Veo 3, which allows creators to type in how they want dialogue to sound and add sound effects. The company also unveiled a new AI filmmaking tool called Flow that helps users create cinematic shots and stitch together scenes into longer films and short stories.
“This opens up a whole new world of possibilities,” said Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, in a news briefing on Monday. “We’re excited for how our models are helping power new tools for creativity.”
Flow is available through Google’s new $249.99 monthly subscription plan Google AI Ultra, which includes early access to Veo 3, as well as other benefits including YouTube Premium, Google’s AI models Gemini and other tools. Flow is also available with a $19.99-a-month Google AI Pro subscription.
Google is making other investments related to AI. On Tuesday, L.A.-based generative AI studio Promise announced Google AI Futures Fund as one of its new strategic investors. Through the partnership, Promise will integrate some of Google’s AI technologies into its production pipeline and workflow software and collaborate with Google’s AI teams.
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