About Us

The Company

Libros Latinos first opened its doors in Santa Monica, California in 1973. In 1977, we moved to the sunny city of Redlands, located 70 miles east of Los Angeles. We remained here until 2008, when most of our operations re-located to San Francisco, with the exception of one Redlands office. 

More changes were afoot in 2015, when Libros Latinos acquired Latin American Bookstore, a long-standing purveyor of books to university libraries. At the time, we decided we could better serve our clients through a merge of operations to a unified location. Once again, we chose to make the Redlands Area our home base. Our SanFrancisco office was permanently closed on July 1st, 2017.

Throughout the course of these transitions, Libros Latinos has become a leading supplier of public, university, and institutional library collections. Notable clients we've served include the National Library of Medicine, The Getty, U.S. Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library. Our specialties include fine arts, history, and medicine books from throughout Latin America, with a strong emphasis on academic, rare, and out-of-print publications.

The Latin American Bookstore has also been successfully established as a specialized supplier of contemporary books from Latin America and Spain; its extensive product list can be found at https://www.latinamericanbooks.com/

Ownership

Current owner Alfonso Vijil has run Libros Latinos since 1984. He also owned Libros Centroamericanos from 1986 to 2007.

A graduate in Economics at UC Berkeley, Alfonso first began learning about the Latin American book trade at the acquisitions department of The Bancroft Library as a college freshman. He sold books from Central America and the Caribbean to put himself through college and graduate school. After graduating, he worked in banking from 1980 to 1983, whereupon he took over Libros Latinos. He helped start Mexico Norte with George Elmendorf.

Since acquiring Libros Latinos, Alfonso has traveled most of the western hemisphere looking for books on Latin America. In 2000 to 2001 he worked with Alibris, an online store that sells books and other media through an online network of independent booksellers,  to develop their foreign language section. In 2015, he took over the Latin American Book Store of Ithaca, New York, and moved it to Redlands California.Over the last 40 years, Alfonso has also curated an extensive collection on the history of books in Latin America as well as a substancial corpus of works from Nicaragua.