Finding muchos tesoros for you all at the Feria Internacional del Libro today!

Heaven… I’m in heaven. 🙂

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When I first dreamed up the idea to bring Spanish children’s books to bilingual families, it stemmed mostly from my own passion to make sure my kid(s) were raised to be bilingual. So many of the opportunities I’ve enjoyed (career-wise and personally) have come around because of the languages I speak, and I’m grateful that my own babies have come long after the generation where immigrants thought teaching their kids another language besides English would rob them of opportunities in the United States.

I’m thrilled beyond words to have found a partner in Univision. Through all the ups and downs of starting a business (lots of downs!), my biggest break came in winning Univision’s Vendeme tu Sueño contest. I went into the auditions with my baby business idea outlined on a sheet of paper, and I came away from this Shark-Tank style competition 6-months later with an actual small business and $30,000 worth of pledged media support from Univision. I’m grateful to the judges who caught the vision of celebrating the many different cultures under the Latinx/Spanish-speaking umbrella.

So, mi gente! Look out for those book boxes coming to your doors muy pronto! Every single book is so carefully chosen, and my hope is that it’s a seed parents plant at home with their children. I believe so strongly in the power of reading, and what I want most is for parents and kids to love to read en español too, and to be able to create those moments together. And now that dream is a big step closer!

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Last night I went among a talented group of Latino entrepreneurs who all completed a week-long bootcamp at Seed Spot with me and I was one of three lucky new business owners chosen as a finalist for Univision’s Vendeme Tu Sueño competiton!

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One of the very best parts of the “Véndeme tu sueño” contest is Univision Arizona’s partnership with Seed Spot, an incubator that works hard to accelerate entrepreneurs that are solving important social problems. And one of the very best weeks of 2016, for me, was spent at Seed Spot’s Boot Camp in May with 13 other Latinx-led business ventures.

The five-day 9-5 experience was designed to give all of us– some established entrepreneurs and some aspiring– access to the education, support and mentorship that would help us bring our dreams to life.

Our community is doing such amazing things, and for me it was a blessing to be in the same room as other local ventures that are doing things I respect and admire, all of us trying hard to lift the Latinx community in the best way we know how.

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So, ok, I wanted to start this business. I had big dreams of a subscription service that would bring curated and VERY carefully chosen Spanish books to bilingual families every month, along with other book-themed items that would celebrate all of the different cultures and traditions under the Latinx umbrella.

I also had zero idea of how to start a business.

You know how there are some people that are seriously entrepreneurial? I… was not one of those people. I LIKED working for someone else.

But in this case it felt like I was being pushed to do something I was highly uncomfortable doing, and one of the biggest reasons I felt that way was that the audition for Univision Arizona’s “Véndeme tu sueño” contest was just a few weeks away. “It’s a sign!” I said to my husband.

And so, armed with only a piece of paper that roughly outlined my business plan, I sallied forth to convince the judges that I deserved one of the few spots in this Shark-Tank style competition.

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When my daughter Leila was born, my husband and I agreed that it was very important for us that she speak Spanish. I grew up in Mexico, and my husband’s Ecuadorian family speaks Spanish in their home in NJ. We had both seen all too often how family ties often suffered when family members struggled to communicate with each other across language barriers. I have my own parents to thank for a bilingual and bicultural upbringing that allows me to seamlessly jump from Spanish to English to (let’s be honest) Spanglish, and I desperately wanted to provide the same for my kids.

As a huge reader, one of the first things I did when I found out I was pregnant was look for books for my unborn bebé. I’m sure the experienced parents invited to our book-themed baby shower had a good eye-roll when we asked them to forgo onesies and diapers in favor of Spanish children’s books.

However, despite my best efforts to keep on top of finding new books, by the time Leila was a year old, I had memorized most of the books in our personal library and pretty much exhausted our library’s selection of Spanish children’s books. Having been disappointed one too many times by books that looked promising but then turned out to have weird/lame story lines or (all too often) seriously sub-par translations, I desperately wished someone would just hand me a stack of curated Spanish children’s books every so often.

And then one night, after reading “¿Eres mi mamá?” for the 4 millionth time, it finally hit me: I should be that someone. How many parents were in the same boat as me? Committed to raising bilingual babies but too busy to obsessively read Amazon book reviews (ahem…) and in need of a little extra support to raise bilingual readers.

And that, queridísimo lector, is how the tiny glimmer of an idea that became Sol Book Box was born.

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