LibroMobile is a shoebox of a space.
Santa Ana’s sole independent bookstore is all of 1,400 long and narrow square feet, nestled between a Boost mobile phone store and the shuttered Ice Cream Land shop at a bustling strip mall in the southwest corner of the city.
The businesses there cater to Santa Ana’s majority Latino population, including a Northgate Market, a pharmacy and a medical clinic with signs in Spanish and English, and the Bristol Swap Mall.
There’s also the Bristol Food Court, where the choice of cuisine — Korean, Japanese, Thai, Chinese, Mexican — reflects the kind of diversity bookstore owner Sarah Rafael Garcia, who spent most of her childhood in Santa Ana, embraces at LibroMobile.
The bookstore is just one part of the LibroMobile Arts Cooperative Garcia established in 2016, which also includes the Barrio Writers workshops for teens, and Crear Studio, with a gallery on Fifth Street, for artists.
The cooperative showcases local creatives drawn largely from communities of color — that Garcia herself is part of — as well as from the LGBTQ+ community.
Nurturing youth is a critical component. Young people 16 to 23 staff the bookstore.
Garcia’s goal is empowerment.
In outreach and stock on hand — more than 3,000 books, zines, graphic novels, and other literary and art products — LibroMobile belies its small physical footprint in the mall at Bristol Street and McFadden Avenue.
With an online component as well, LibroMobile exemplifies independent bookstores that invest in the community alongside selling books.
But as for all brick-and-mortar bookstores — independent or part of a chain like Barnes & Noble — maintaining a physical presence is an ongoing challenge.
This past year has brought uncertainty for LibroMobile, a nonprofit operation that still needs to meet a bottom line.A published author and multimedia artist, Garcia is not one to give up easily. She aims to keep the bookstore going in one form or another.
She’s outspoken and determined, a self-described “first-generation everything” who got herself off to college in another state and figured out how to manage that expense.
With her young staff, Garcia, 51, is like a firm but loving teacher who makes sure they learn to do business tasks and customer service the right way — for their benefit and the good of the store.
A passion, a mission
To Garcia, it’s not only business. It’s personal.
“When I start any community project, it’s because I see a need and a resource that I didn’t have growing up,” says Garcia, whose parents were immigrants from Mexico.
Garcia recounted her working-class background in a 2008 Orange County Register Hispanic Heritage Month essay about her father’s legacy. A teenage immigrant from Matamoros, Mexico, Rafael Castillo Garcia met and married Sara Elba Bustamante in Brownsville, Texas.
All three of their girls — Garcia’s the oldest — were born in Brownsville. The family settled in Santa Ana in 1978, where her father worked at The Orange County Register doing custodial work and handling the huge rolls of newsprint.
He wrote poems, played softball, and counseled youth in a church group. He died unexpectedly in 1988, four months after obtaining his U.S. citizenship.
The family relocated several times. Garcia graduated from Trabuco Hills High in 1992. On her own volition, she attended what is now known as Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, working several jobs to get by.
She began writing in a journal while earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology and Spanish. Her experience includes volunteering as a bilingual translator at a family clinic, conducting parenting classes for Volunteers of America in Texas, and working with youth in rehab facilities.
For financial reasons, Garcia switched to doing marketing for the likes of the American Heart Association and Kaplan, Inc. educational services. Then, in her late 30s, she earned a master’s in fine arts.
With a fellowship in hand, she embedded in the independent bookstore Casa de Resistencia, part of the Red Salmon Arts cultural arts organization in Austin, Texas.
Both Resistencia’s and Red Salmon’s work on behalf of indigenous communities continue to serve as role models for Garcia.
A bookstore — any bookstore — has never been just a bookstore at any time in Garcia’s life.
“It’s been a resource center, whether to escape from reality or to build a new world. When I envision a bookstore, it’s a collaboration of ideas from my positive experiences with other bookstores.”
Indie bookstore revival
LibroMobile Bookstore is part of a national revival of independent bookstores with an advocacy bent, trying to help all people to have equal rights, opportunities and fair treatment regardless of their background, and amplifying local voices.
Independent bookstores in general tend to be seen as comfortable spaces. And those with a more radical mission can serve as incubators and safe havens for ideas and actions that challenge the predominant culture.
The 2016 closure of the standalone Librería Martínez on Broadway, Santa Ana’s longtime Latino-focused bookstore, galvanized Garcia. She was an artist-in-residence at her city’s Grand Central Arts Center at the time.
Garcia launched LibroMobile that summer as a simple but eye-catching A-frame gardening cart she stocked with books and stationed in a stairwell at the Fourth Street Market food court.
Calling the space a “stairway to nowhere,” Garcia describes how it had a door and about 50 square feet of flat area before the staircase. Just enough room to store the cart. Community grants paid for the space but there was no electricity.
“People thought it was cute. But when it was hot it was hot and when it was cold it was cold.” Still, the stairwell era, which lasted just shy of a year, remains Garcia’s fondest iteration of LibroMobile.
She had gotten the idea for the cart after observing the street markets of Guadalajara.
“You don’t need a lot to make something happen. The idea of a garden cart being turned into a book cart, that’s cultivating diversity through literature and the arts.”
The stairwell was a popular site for couples to take engagement photos and for music videos to be shot. But development sent LibroMobile on the move in 2017 to an alley space across from the Yost Theater in promenade off Fourth Street.
The bookstore occupied a storage unit of roughly 200 square feet and a portion of the sidewalk. There was a pull-down door, electricity and an air conditioning unit.
While there, Garcia partnered with the Santa Ana Public Library, which provided a Wi-Fi hotspot. That relationship continues, with dedicated Wi-Fi in the store and a hotspot for popup events.
When the coronavirus pandemic shut down commerce in 2020, Garcia operated LibroMobile online book sales service from her and her husband’s living room.
People stuck at home turned to reading.
“We sold tons of books,” Garcia says.
Activism through arts
True to Garcia’s vision, LibroMobile remains about more than selling books.
The store donates books to support fundraisers; collaborates with Santa Ana Active Streets to advocate for bike lanes, road safety, and improved public transportation. It hosts groups like the Radical Sewing Club and creates visibility for local authors and artisans.
It publishes zines and is helping to preserve the local history of Orange County’s people of color through digital archiving — an initiative supported by UC Irvine.
LibroMobile has partnered on programs with such groups as the Viet Arts and Letters Assn. and the Black community’s OC Heritage Council.
“The idea is we can cultivate resources,” Garcia says.
LibroMobile settled into its current space on Bristol at the end of 2021. The walls are painted a calming light blue. Floating bookshelves feature autores locales — local authors — in the front room. Two armchairs near the entrance and others elsewhere invite visitors to sit for a while.
The counter where sales are made and book orders placed displays racks of children’s books facing the door. Spanish-language children’s books sell the fastest, says LibroMobile assistant manager Ashley Castelan.
Castelan, 19, started in June 2024 as a book adviser — stocking shelves, helping customers. She loves her part-time job at LibroMobile, especially the chance to talk with customers and learn how they fell in love with reading.
“They share so much here. They feel comfortable here. They feel safe here.”
On the countertop, a Toni Morrison votive candle shares space with books for adults with titles like “Making the Movement” about fighting for civil rights and “The Revolution Starts at Home” about confronting domestic violence were featured one weekday in late summer.
Books of poetry turn a floor-to-ceiling column into its own powerful statement. Patrons can purchase bags of locally roasted Tacita coffee, Wish Tea and artwork.
Information about becoming a book sponsor for the Santa Ana Reads program is part of LibroMobile’s support for that program. Bulletin boards throughout the store offer information about community happenings and available services.
There’s a bin to drop off donations to OC Mutual Aid for undocumented immigrants who have sequestered themselves at home for fear of being snatched off the streets in an ICE raid. Poems and drawings tacked to a wall across from a second room off the hallway express the pain of the war in the Middle East.
The original LibroMobile book cart has its own place at the back of the store, offering free books. A “Special Collections” alcove is stocked with secondhand non-fiction about communities of color, feminists and other social movements. Older reference books for in-store research lean high up on a shelf.
The larger of the two rooms off the hallway includes a record player and albums, children’s art supplies, and a printer that cash-strapped students from nearby Santa Ana College can use for free.
This room is also where Orange County Poet Laureate Gustavo Hernandez holds drop-in weekly office hours for anyone interested in poetry and literature.
Garcia was the force behind establishing the Poet Laureate program in 2021, initially in partnership with Orange County Public Library.
“It’s not about the title but having the visibility in the community,” says Garcia, whose poet laureate mission is to reach out with “culturally relevant social initiatives.”
Hernandez, a courtroom clerk with college degrees in English and creative writing, is the second honoree, tenured through 2026. The first was Natalie Graham, a poet who was an assistant professor of African American Studies and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Cal State Fullerton.
A Santa Ana resident since childhood, Hernandez’s first full-length poetry collection, “Flower Grand First,” was published in 2021. His second, “Bachelor,” is due in October. He met Garcia at a 2018 Barrio Writers showcase; she encouraged him to bring his self-produced chapbook of four poems to LibroMobile.
A poetry reading at the store further boosted his confidence and showed him there was a community hungry for the words of poets.
“I honestly don’t know if I would have accomplished the things I have to date without that solid foundation of community here, where I live,” Hernandez says.
The people who visit during his office hours can share what they’ve written or just come in “to talk poetry, talk books, talk any sort of writing.”
Hernandez sees how LibroMobile brings in people from the community. To him, that’s the strongest quality of the best independent bookstores he’s visited locally, regionally and in other states.
“I have a place here. The arts have a place here,” he says. “We are preserving. We are building something to help us grieve, to help us love, to help us understand each other.”
The struggle is real
The number of independent bookstores around the nation, with or without a social mission, has doubled since 2016.
There’s been growth even in the bigfoot presence of online bookseller Amazon, according to the American Booksellers Association, a trade organization that says it represents more than 2,500 indie bookstores.
(Late last year, the Southern California News Group mapped the locations of some 70 independent bookstores across the Southland.)
Money generated by sales and grant funding is necessary to keep LibroMobile’s doors open.
Sales began slowing in 2024, Garcia says. Arts grants and employment programs that underpin staffing of the youth who run the store dried up.
Garcia applied for other grants that could keep things stable through June 2026. As of this printing, she was waiting for word on those grants.
If it comes to shuttering the Bristol Street storefront, Garcia vows to reinvent LibroMobile once again on wheels. Perhaps this time with a converted electric vehicle that would save on fuel costs.
“The reality is we’re the only independent bookstore in Santa Ana,” she says.
“We will still exist. Whether I’ll have a roof over my head or not, I have no idea.”
