Two businesses founded by immigrants from Argentina and Peru, respectively, are looking to bolster the availability of Spanish-language books in the United States amid a hostile political climate, distribution challenges, and what they see as limited options for stateside Spanish-language readers. Their efforts point to a growing Spanish-language publishing community in the U.S., and the tendency of domestic publishers to focus on titles from Spain and Mexico while overlooking those from South America.
Gabriela Adamo, the former director of the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, who splits her time between Buenos Aires and Seattle, cofounded the subscription book club Líneas del Sur in 2020 to connect readers across the U.S. with contemporary Latin American literature not typically available in bookstores here. Now, she and cofounder Mariana Gutheim, an Argentine architect living in San Francisco, are growing the club to meet what they see as a real demand for Spanish-language literature outside of the usual offerings.
Every other month, Líneas del Sur picks one title from a Latin American independent publisher that would otherwise be difficult to purchase in the U.S. It imports and mails copies of that title to paid members (currently, there are roughly 70), with each shipment also including a specially designed postcard or bookmark from a Latin American artist. In the past three years, the club has selected 20 books from 16 indie presses, including Antílope in Mexico, Angosta in Colombia, Concreto in Argentina, and Cuneta in Chile. Featured authors have included such heavyweights of literary fiction as Uruguay’s Fernanda Trías, Ecuador’s Mónica Ojeda, and Argentina’s Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.
The Seattle-based club has grown rapidly over the years, with online meetings drawing members from as far afield as Florida, Ohio, and Texas. It also runs in-person meetings in Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle, as well as virtual literary panels, readings, author talks, and discussions on such subjects as Andean gothic fiction, Caribbean literature, and women writers.
Adamo says she sees Líneas del Sur as a kind of “testing ground for understanding Spanish-language readers,” who are often pigeonholed or otherwise misunderstood by U.S. publishers. “Spanish is not one thing in the U.S. There are so many different kinds of Spanish and so many different ways it is presented—radio, TV, books—and for different communities, which means it is fragmented and difficult to define.”
Looking ahead, Adamo says the club is exploring print-on-demand options and bookstore partnerships so that it doesn’t have to rely on importing books, which could become challenging due to the Trump administration’s constantly changing tariff policies. (Print books are generally exempt from current tariffs.)
Líneas del Sur is also planning to launch a children’s book club in March, spotlighting titles for young readers alongside its usual literary fiction selections. The timing coincides with recent crackdowns on Spanish-speaking immigrants, including children. “We think it’s particularly important now to encourage Spanish-speaking adults to read to their children in Spanish,” Adamo says.
An emphasis on authenticity
Ensuring young readers in the U.S. have access to Spanish-language books is also on the mind of Adriana Roca, who founded the Lima, Peru–based children’s publisher Pichoncito in 2019 and has since built a catalog of 60 titles. Now, she’s eyeing the U.S. market. In 2023, she moved to Boston to launch English-language editions of Pichoncito’s books while continuing to grow its Spanish-language list.
“It was obvious that the U.S. market needed the types of books and content we were providing,” says Roca, a former business journalist. “While Latin America is part of the daily conversation here, it is very superficial—and what we produce is authentic.”
Pichoncito publishes illustrated books about Peruvian history, culture, and food. Among its first English-language titles to be published in the U.S. under the new Pichoncito Fly Books imprint is Great Civilizations of Peru: 5,000 Years of Ancient Andean Cultures, released last fall. The original Spanish edition was featured in the 2025 BolognaRagazzi Awards’ Amazing Bookshelf exhibition at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.
Rounding out the publisher’s inaugural list of English-language titles, which are distributed by IPG, are books on Peruvian cuisine, Machu Picchu, and the history of the Incas. Roca says four more English titles are also in the works.
Perhaps even more ambitiously, Pichoncito will bring the original Spanish-language editions of these titles to the U.S. starting in September. “I saw how enthusiastically these books were received,” Roca says, “and it gave me confidence that we could also publish our Spanish-language titles here.”
An especially warm reception from booksellers also convinced Roca there is demand for a greater variety of Spanish-language titles. “Talking to booksellers like Los Amigos Books in Los Angeles and Chau Luna in New York, who have been fans of our work, it’s clear that booksellers are really craving Spanish-language books that go deeper than the surface,” Roca says.
Getting creative
Adamo’s experience of running Líneas del Sur has likewise proven to her that there’s a real demand for books that “go deeper.” She says there’s a robust Spanish-speaking audience who want to read “literature—the stories of Latin Americans in their own voices,” and not just the Bibles, commercial fiction, and self-help that tend to dominate the Spanish-language category in the U.S.
But with the closure of Lectorum, the largest independent distributor of Spanish-language books in the U.S., last fall, making Spanish-language books available stateside has become especially challenging.
Líneas del Sur, for one, has gotten creative by partnering with Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle and Medicine for Nightmares in San Francisco to make some of its book club picks available in those stores—a move Adamo calls “an experiment.” She says she has also approached the American Booksellers Association about establishing a committee for Spanish-language bookselling.
In the meantime, Adamo is working with a group of publishing professionals, led by editor and scholar Adriana Pacheco, to boost the visibility of the Spanish-language literary ecosystem in the U.S. Their mission: to launch a new online platform, Somos Literatura, that can serve as a comprehensive directory of Spanish-language publishing in Canada, Puerto Rico, and the U.S.
For Adamo, the platform addresses a big problem. “There’s little mixing between American publishers or the English-language world of publishers, distributors, and booksellers, and their Spanish-language counterparts in the U.S.,” she says. What’s more, the Spanish-language publishing in North America is “fragmentary,” making it difficult to share resources and act collectively.
In response, Somos Literatura is working to collect information about Spanish-language publishers, literary agents, translators, book fairs, awards, writing programs, and more into one database. Other founding members include Dejanira Alvarez, who runs the Spanish-language New York City International Book Fair; Eunice Rodriguez, an editor at Sundial House, Columbia University’s Latin American literature imprint; and Rosy Toledo and Lori Celaya, cofounders of the bilingual publisher Colibrí, dually based in Los Angeles and Oak Ridge, Tenn.
“The idea is to strengthen visibility, build community, and support the growth and recognition of Spanish-language literature in the U.S.,” says Pacheco, who lives in Austin, Tex., and also founded the literary podcast Hablemos Escritoras, which spotlights Spanish-language women writers and sells Spanish- and English-language editions of their books through its own Bookshop.org storefront.
Pacheco notes that, in the climate of fear engendered by ICE’s violent targeting of immigrants, there’s no rush to build the platform. She adds, “If people don’t want to share information—and they might not want to right now—they don’t have to.”
Efforts like Somos Literatura suggest that while individual operations such as Líneas del Sur and Pichoncito remain modest in scale, the Spanish-language publishing community in the U.S. is getting more organized and more visible. Both Adamo and Roca say they’re growing their businesses not despite the current political moment but because of it.
“I think big, beautiful books about Latin America are very important right now,” says Roca, who aims to double Pichoncito’s U.S. output in the coming years. “The more you learn about Latin America, and the more you know about its history and why it matters, connects the two continents in a way that helps you understand where people are migrating from and the culture that they bring and how sophisticated it actually is.”
Adamo agrees, emphasizing the need for international cooperation among publishers, which can ensure that more nuanced, diverse titles from Latin America reach U.S. readers. “Latin American publishers produce wonderful books, but then they don’t know how to get them to readers who might be interested in them beyond their own borders,” she says. “We are helping.”
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