Niebla is the Tenderloin’s only bilingual bookstore — it sells books in Spanish and English, as well as coffee and pastries to accompany them. It is also the Tenderloin’s only bookstore, period. The last closest thing — The Magazine — which sold vintage and rare LGBTQ+ magazines, books, and ephemera, closed in early 2023.
Niebla means “fog” — Marífer Ramírez, who opened the store with her partner, David García, grew up in Xalapa, Mexico in a town “surrounded by a cloud forest.”
Niebla opened two months ago at 374 Golden Gate Ave. and the timing couldn’t be better. Ramirez is enamoured of all things spooky and Latino, she said. And with Dia De Los Muertos, the Mexican holiday on which people ceremonially welcome back the spirits of loved ones who have died, almost here, the couple are planning to celebrate.
Nov. 1 falls on a Sunday this year. Though the bookstore is usually closed, Ramírez and García are opening their doors to participate in the Tenderloin’s Dia De Los Muertos festivities.
The spooky landscape she called home also inspired much of the store’s inventory.
If it were only up to Ramírez, she’d stack the shelves full of Latin American horror stories, especially ones written by women.
Despite her taste in dark literature, Ramírez is a friendly face in the bookstore. She is the first person to welcome customers, and offers guidance on pastries as well as books. Last week she leaned over to a woman who studied the Mexican desserts that fill the store’s pastry case.
“How about the Pan de Muerto,” Ramírez whispers to the customer, describing the taste and texture of the traditional sweetbread. “It’s delicious.”
Niebla is all things Mexican, from the pastries to the decorations, books on shelves and music playing over the speakers. Ramírez contracts with two local Mexican bakers, Amidulce and Norte 45, for the noms on rotation and buys Mexican coffee beans from Oakland-based roasters, Proyecto Diaz Coffee.
As for the book selection, that comes straight from Ramírez and García, who bonded over a love for reading.
The pair met in 2017 when a mutual friend invited them both to a party and requested the two carpool. They then spent the entire drive discussing literature and music.
“When I went to his house for the first time I realized we had a lot of the same books,” Ramírez said, with a giggle. “When we moved in together we had tons of duplicates.”
García joined in as co-owner a few months after Ramírez rubber-stamped the business plans. He has a full-time job as an engineer but has always had a love for reading and creative writing. Before he moved to the United States in 2007, he studied writing in Mexico City and published a few short stories.
He’s put down the pen for now and focused on navigating the ins and outs of opening a business in San Francisco. Ramírez and García received a $50,000 Storefront Opportunity Grant from the city to open Niebla. The program gives new or existing business owners grants to retrofit and build out vacant storefronts in certain neighborhoods.
“For both of us, it’s our first direct business experience,” he said. “It’s been an intense crash course … It’s been a lot of research.”
It didn’t take any convincing for García to jump on board. Ramírez’s vision for the store matched García’s own ethos: that every community deserves a good bookstore.
“Niebla is a space that is trying to contribute to the existing book ecosystem in San Francisco,” García said. “At the same time we are also trying to bring a different point of view and fill some gaps for people like us that are interested in reading in our own language, in Spanish.”
The two love what Ramírez calls “uncanny horror stories” — a taste that she first developed growing up in her foggy hometown.
“I was obsessed with fantasy,” Ramírez said. “Fairy tales, vampires, ghosts.”
Her favorite story? Horacio Quiroga’s La Gallina Degollada — The Decapitated Chicken, a horrifying tale that is a South American classic.
The Tenderloin’s sizable population of Latin American immigrants is what drew Ramírez to the neighborhood in the first place. It’s too early to map out the business trends, Ramírez said, but the store is already home to a group of regulars. Foot traffic from the nearby federal and city buildings are leading more people into the shop for a midday espresso break; families that live directly above the store come down with their children to read. Horror books written by women are selling the most, as are poetry collections and fiction novels.
“We love the Tenderloin,” Ramírez said. “We cannot deny that there are a lot of challenges in this neighborhood but it is a neighborhood that has a lot of families and children so we need to work to make these spaces.”
