By Enoch Naklen
The inside of Cafe con Libros is a bibliophile’s dream where floor-to-ceiling shelves line the left and right walls to create a corridor of stories. Nestled among the mixed names of literature, colorful handbags hang from racks with their textures adding a domestic warmth to the room. The newly released handbag was added at the beginning of Women’s History Month as a collaborative graphic bag with the labeling NYC Black Woman Bookstore Crawl.
This bag serves as a physical testament to a movement that was catalyzed by Jeannine A. Cook, the founder of Philadelphia’s Harriett’s Bookshop. Cook, a curator and author, is widely credited with providing the blueprint for the modern bookstore crawl. Her mission to celebrate women authors and activists through “literary tourism” sparked a viral template for solidarity that directly influenced the New York City scene. Saige, one of the bartenders and administrators of the Cafe con Libros team, explains that the crawl was born from that specific energy of togetherness.
“It was at that event that a bunch of the bookstore owners were like, ‘Oh my God, is this the first time that we’ve all been in the same room together?’ And it was,” Saige tells Our Time Press. “From that momentum and from that energy, it was sort of just like, we need to do something with this.”
Beyond the marketing, Saige emphasizes a deeper necessity for the alliance that Cook’s model inspired. “I feel like there’s times where we’re all struggling and we want to build a space in a community where we feel like we can support each other because we’re the only people who kind of know what it’s like to go through what we’re going through.”
Saige can be seen opening the cafe and setting up the pastry display before grounding coffee beans in a handmade grinder, the silver machine whirring as she prepares a fresh brew. She moves with precision, roasting and tamping the grounds before pouring a choice of milk to complete a cappuccino or a steaming hot chocolate.
This sensory experience is set against a backdrop of comfort; chairs are positioned conveniently to look out into the city streets, while others face inside for a panoramic view of the books. Located on Rogers Avenue in Crown Heights, the shop is positioned conveniently next to a K-12 school, two bus routes, and a couple of newly opened apartment buildings on the block, leading to a diverse customer base of teachers on lunch breaks and crossing guards.
This vision of a community living room was central to why Kalima DeSuze founded the shop. Saige explains that DeSuze noticed her own family “don’t really read as much,” and so “she just wanted to build a space for people like her to come in and have community and be able to share the stories and get to know them.”
The intersection of a bookstore and a cafe was a natural extension of her heritage. “Coffee is a huge part of the culture,” Saige says. “Morning, noon, at night, you’re always drinking it. So that’s a combination of the traditions of her culture with her compassion [for] community.”
However, navigating that identity comes with the challenge of resisting categorization. Saige mentions that DeSuze often struggles to get support as who she is authentically because “she either has to align herself as being a black bookstore or being a Latina bookstore owner with the realities that she’s both.”
DeSuze envisions Cafe con Libros as a niche third space for the community and by the community. By keeping the space small and intentional, she has rejected the desire to become a big chain, opting instead to maintain a “cult classic” environment where neighbors can find themselves represented on the shelves and welcomed at the counter.
All photos by Enoch Naklen