By Angela
Maria Spring
Angela Maria Spring and Tara Campbell at Artomatic |
What
does it take to create a bookstore by people of color, where everyone is
welcome? As Duende District Bookstore enters the final days of its second
pop-up venture (at La Mano CafĂ© in Takoma), it’s a perfect time to reflect upon
how we got here.
The
vision for Duende District first began to take shape after I visited Puerto
Rico for the first time since I was 12 years old. As a child of immigrants,
sometimes you have to go back to the place where a large piece of your identity
was formed before you were even born. That’s what Puerto Rico and Panama are to
me. It shook me loose from a lifetime of living a double identity, the feeling
of never being solidly formed.
Duende District Pop-up at La Mano Cafe |
When you
see your people on the streets of your neighborhood each day, but hardly ever
in the bookstore you work at, and you go back to a country where everyone looks
like you, acts like you and owns all the businesses, coming home to the exact opposite
is quite a shock.
I’ve
been a bookseller for nearly two and half decades, and it was past time to find
the courage to venture out on my own and create an amazing, gorgeous bookstore
that will embrace and serve my community, as well as other communities of
color, then extend the invitation to everyone.
When I met
Tara Campbell, a fellow writer of color, at a book group of local women writers
this past February, I was only just beginning to think about what it would take
to open this bookstore of my dreams.
Tara is also
the literary coordinator for Artomatic, a non-profit organization that hosts a
six-week arts and literary festival each year in a building either slotted for
demolition or change. I had left my job as the floor manager at Politics &
Prose in late 2016 and my original plan had been to have a pop-up venture by
the end of 2017.
But when
Tara mentioned that Artomatic was looking for a start-up bookstore to work
with, well, when opportunity knocks, you take it. I decided to use the
experience to put together the pieces of a mobile bookstore and start my first
crowdfunding campaign to test the viability of the business idea.
Part of the Children's Book Selection |
From the
end of February to today, Duende District has gone from a conceptual bookstore
“installation” in Artomatic to a mobile pop-up bookstore operation with a fully
funded Kickstarter campaign to back its existence. We are already forming
strong partnerships with different communities in the DMV and lining up future
pop-up opportunities in the coming months, including The Writer’s Center in
October 2017.
I
couldn’t have done this without such strong support of the D.C. bookstore and
writing communities.
For more
information and our hours, visit www.duendedistrict.com.
Angela Maria Spring is the founder and
owner of Duende District Bookstore. She is originally from Albuquerque, N.M.
and holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence. She has been a buyer and manager in
indie bookstores in New Mexico, New York City, and Washington, D.C. Her poetry
has appeared in numerous publications, including District Lines, Tar
River Poetry, and Revolution House.
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