Pomona has long been stereotyped as a cultural desert. It’s easy to see why. In Southern California, it sits in between two large sub-regions—not quite a part of the Inland Empire to its East, not a part of the San Gabriel Valley to its West. It straddles the L.Á.-San Bernardino County line, 30 miles from Downtown Los Ángeles. And over the decades, Pomona has grown from a predominantly white city to a city that’s 71.22% Latino, according to the 2020 Census.
Yet, like all stereotypes, Pomona being a cultural desert, stems from not knowing a place.
Pomona has designated a neighborhood “The Arts Colony,” dedicated to the creative arts, creative commerce and education.
The Haven is a 127-capacity concert venue and shows are always all ages.
For about a decade in the 2010s, the San Gabriel Valley Literary Arts Festival took place in The Arts Colony at the dA Center for the Arts.
Every second Saturday in the Arts Colony is the city’s monthly art walk.
And next to The Heaven is Café con Libros Press, a bookstore and literary non-profit, re-opened in 2017 and founded by Adelaida Bautista and Patricia DeRobles, celebrating the stories and traditions of people of color.
On October 1st, Pomona native, writer and poet Natalie Sierra took over the reins of Café con Libros Press (CCLP) from Patricia DeRobles.
When I spoke to Sierra about taking over the bookstore she said, “Pati asked me,” after Pati had “weathered many hardships, trials and tribulations, always finding the strength to carry CCLP through challenging times.” But these challenges, both financial and personal, had, by 2024, become too much to bear. Pati had lost a brother to cancer; her effort to provide required reading to local public school English classrooms fell through; and she lost, in the past year, another brother.
That’s why this past July, Patti decided to focus on family.
However, before Sierra was asked to take over CCLP, she’d been harboring the idea to open her own bookstore since she worked at the Montclair branch of Barnes & Noble. She’d muse with “my friend Alyssa…about how we could improve upon the current model, things we’d love to see, how we would make our space more intimate and inviting for, not just bibliophiles, but authors and artists of all stripes.”
In 2023, Sierra took her first steps and started Portable Magic Books, “where I sourced second-hand and new titles and sold them on eBay.” Soon after, Julian Lucas, a board member for Café con Libros Press, stumbled upon her virtual store and asked, “if I’d be interested in joining as an in-store vendor.” She jumped at the chance.
Natalie Sierra grew up “on [the] hard streets” of Pomona, where she “found love, friendship and connection on [its] playgrounds, in the Glass House,” (the city’s famous music venue), and “at the library,” as she was “a reading-obsessed teen.” She’s written “poems about its wicked beauty and the misfits and outcasts who have become like family. I’ve born children here. Walked down the avenues while Jacaranda blooms rained their pleasant fragrance down on my head.
“Driven down Holt to watch cars line up to meet S Workers in their lingerie and pleasers.
“I have family buried here. I’ll probably be buried here myself.”
So, even though Sierra initially hesitated when Pati first asked her to take over CCLP, despite the fact that she was already a board member, in the end, Sierra agreed because the need to care for and serve the community that raised her, through literature, was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. “What better way…than to help another person discover a love for reading, a passion for the arts?” She told me. “Give them a safe place to explore what those things mean in relation to their self-perception.”
As a result, Sierra has big plans for the store. “I’d love for Portable Magic and CCLP…to be a creative and cultural hub for the community.” And her mission statement is clear. She wants it to be a haven for all kinds to gather and share ideas, and to work on their projects. A perpetual salon for lovers and writers. Queer folx, BIPOC and people from historically underserved communities. Principles Bautista and DeRobles had initially begun to implement but, as educators first, didn’t have time to flesh out.
Bautista and DeRobles opened their first iteration of Café con Libros in 1997, between George Cuttress’ frame shop and the dA Center for the Arts on Main St. The two met as students at the University of La Verne, connecting as first-generation Mexican American college students studying to become teachers.
Their neighbor, The dA Center, had only moved to their Main St. location a few months before, but originally opened “in 1979 when a group of artists, poets and actors were seeking a space in the Pomona Valley to gather and create.”
Bautista and DeRobles opened their bookstore only a few years into their teaching careers. They were still establishing themselves and building the lives they wanted to live.
These Chicana feminists opened CCLP to focus on books by and about children and women of color. “‘We were told there was no market for that,’” DeRobles said in a Daily Bulletin article. “Well, we’re the market for that.”
Sierra feels the same way, which is why she’d like to bring a book festival back to Pomona, the first since the San Gabriel Valley Literary Arts Festival. Not only because that’s what the community desperately needs—to see writers who look and write about people who look like them–but to continue to build on Pomona’s artistic legacy.
In the end, the first iteration of CCLP had to close in 2002 because Bautista moved on and DeRobles gave birth to her third child. But with Sierra talking over CCLP this time, she can ensure its lasting impact. To nurture and inspire the next generation of readers and writers in Pomona. The same city that gave Sierra the space to escape into writing. “A pleasurable way to hide from the trauma of growing up and everything that comes with being a first-gen army brat of immigrant parents,” Sierra told me, “while also working out what those problems were and how to deal with them in the way only a moody Gothic girl can.”
That’s because, as Sierra said, “Pomona has a piece of my heart that nowhere else I’ve ever been does.”
“People know of Pomona, but they don’t know Pomona.” By taking over Café con Libros Press, Natalie Sierra is hoping to change that.
On October 26th, Café con Libros Press is hosting their 7th anniversary fundraiser. All are invited.
Los Angeles Literature 