RAICES Pieces: Holiday Edition 2023
Our RAICES Pieces: Holiday Edition 2023 features small businesses owned and operated by immigrants, books for adults and children, and family television viewing opportunities from RAICES community members and businesses that have strengthened our mission. Click on the buttons below to search by gift type.
Small Business
Vida Mia Boutique
DACAmented San Antonio based Vida Mia Boutique, an online retail business selling jewelry and accessories.
Small Business
Sugar-Free Mexican Candy
Founded by Annie Leal, who was born and raised in Mexico, chamoy was a staple of her childhood. She loved how it made everything taste sweeter and a little spicy at the same time. When her dad was diagnosed with diabetes and could no longer enjoy this delicious Mexican sauce, I Love Chamoy was born. Annie created chamoy with her dad and many other people to limit their sugar intake. After spending months recipe and ingredient testing she created a sweet, tangy and spicy chamoy–with no added sugar. Try I Love Chamoy this holiday season!
Small Business
Iber: 100% handmade, natural African tested ingredients
Iber! Naturals is a skincare company rooted in African ancestral knowledge. Pronounced ee-bair, ‘iber’ is a statement used to express the meaning ‘you are beautiful’ in the language of the Luo people, a proud Nilotic tribe from East Africa with origins along the River Nile.
Small Business
Essential Cookware & Dinnerware
“As immigrants, my partner and I found Our Place in America by cooking and sharing food with new friends who became our chosen family. That’s why we started Our Place: to build a bigger table, one that would have room for all of us.” Shiza Shahid, Co-Founder
Small Business
Functional Kitchenware
Honoring Tradition: Throughout the world, preparing and sharing food binds communities, continues traditions, and tells the story of our heritages. For friends (and co-founders) Eunice and Dave, cooking for and eating with family has carried their Korean and Vietnamese traditions across oceans and into their own homes.
Small Business
Art and Designs
Art and Design by Brayan Montes-Terrazas who identifies as a Queer, Undocumented, Latinx immigrant.
Small Business
Fine Chocolates & Sweets
“For many years during our visits to Jordan, my last stop always had to be Semiramis for a final pickup of chocolates and sweets. In summer 2017, during one of my trips to the shop, the idea came to me to bring the goodness of Semiramis to Houston, Texas. I am looking forward to sharing an amazing product, that I love, with our community. I am proud to announce the establishment of Semiramis (now Lunaria) in Houston, Texas, in hopes of bringing the tradition of hospitality and signature taste to you!” Wafa Nemry, Owner
Small Business
Homemade Mexican Fashion
By collaborating with local artisans, our mission is to start a chain of positive events that bridges small pueblos to big cities and empowers these communities to share and preserve their unique craftsmanship. In Spanish, there’s a saying “aportar un granito de arena” which can be interpreted as “make a positive impact, no matter how small.” Casa Xali is our “granito de arena” (our grain of sand). All Casa Xali items are handmade in Mexico by local artisans. 5% of all sales are donated to RAICES, an organization that defends and fights for the rights of immigrants and refugees.
Small Business
Digital Prints
Julio Salgado is the co-founder of DreamersAdrift and the Migrant Storytelling Manager for The Center for Cultural Power. His status as an undocumented, queer artivist has fueled the contents of his visual art, which depict key individuals and moments of the DREAM Act and the migrant rights movement. Undocumented students, organizers and allies across the country have used Salgado’s artwork to call attention to the migrant rights movement.
Salgado is the co-creator of The Disruptors Fellowship, a program at The Center for Cultural Power for emerging television writers of color who identify as trans/and or non-binary, disabled, undocumented/formerly undocumented immigrants. His work has been displayed at the Oakland Museum, SFMOMA and Smithsonian.
Small Business
Socially responsible apparel
Before NEOCOCO, Amrita Thadana graduated from the Parsons School of Design, The New School, and worked as a Fashion Stylist for 15 years. She spent most of her weekends volunteering with resettlement organizations which immediately opened her eyes to the magnitude of the refugee crisis. While interacting with many displaced + refugee women, Amrita took the time to carefully listen to their stories surrounding oppression, women’s rights, racism, and sexism and understand their needs. She quickly learned that refugees still face massive challenges after receiving asylum — some of which include finding housing, overcoming language barriers, adjusting to a different culture, securing a job, surviving on food stamps, and using transportation. With hopes of making a positive difference, Amrita founded NEOCOCO in the fall of 2017. Starting a social impact company that empowers refugee women through community, femininity, and hand embroidery has allowed Amrita to combine her fashion experience with a cause that’s very close to her heart.
Small Business
Delicious Coffee by Refugee, Immigrant + First-Gen Creators
The vision of Immigrant Love is threefold: First, in creating each box we source from small businesses owned by immigrants, refugees, and first-generation Americans serving communities across the nation, providing them both a major bulk order and ongoing marketing to potential new, well-targeted customers. Second, to reach even more small businesses, we contribute 5% of our profits toward zero-interest, zero-fee loans to immigrant and refugee entrepreneurs through our partnership with crowdlending non-profit Kiva U.S. And third, more at the “heart” level, we aspire to help create a nation in which immigrants and refugees are celebrated. Our team’s hope is that more will see the dignity, nuance, and spirit present in the lives of immigrants and refugees across America – at least in small part – through this box.
Small Business
Luxury African Decor
Nana Quagraine, Founder: Born in Ghana, raised in South Africa, and now living in Brooklyn, New York, Nana always loved the unique contemporary African design items she found on trips home. But she realized these designs were largely hard to access globally. Nana launched 54kibo in 2018 along with a team committed to sharing the endless creativity in Africa and its Diaspora.
Small Business
Bronx Craft Chocolate
Made in the Bronx. Growing up in the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, the Maloney brothers were always surrounded by cacao trees and enjoyed eating chocolate made from the trees that they had grown and picked themselves. Cacao and chocolate are staples of Caribbean culture and an inherent part of the Maloney family livelihood. Upon arriving in the U.S., the brothers realized that the same quality of chocolate that they were able to enjoy back home was highly scarce in America and decided to bring to the market a type of chocolate that elevates the taste, coupled with a level of unparalleled refinement and quality to the selections available.
Small Business
Artisan Haitian Chocolate
Artisanal chocolate handcrafted by Haitian women using ethically sourced cacao grown by more than 3,000 Haitian farmers originally trained by volunteers from Agronomist and Veterinary without Borders.
Small Business
Dark Matter Coffee
An innovative culinary family fueled by community and passion to deliver the most intellectually honest coffee you will experience. Dark Matter Coffee® adheres to a philosophy where quality coffees are sourced based on traceability, innovation and social responsibility. Sustainability and fair business practices are very important to us. We have created direct partnerships with farmers in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, and Mexico. These partnerships have grown to become family, allowing us to directly source our beans from the plant to the cup. This sourcing transparency yields fair business practices and unparalleled quality control, a difference that can be tasted in every cup.
Small Business
Organic Tea
Numi was founded in 1999 in Oakland, California by brother and sister Ahmed Rahim and Reem Hassani with a vision to share the transformative, healing power of tea with the world. They named their company after the steeped dried desert lime they drank in their early childhood in Baghdad, Iraq. The drink symbolizes hospitality and community (numi means “citrus” in Arabic). Creative, conscious change-makers, they have introduced little-known herbs and teas to the United States, while advancing human rights and sustainable causes around the globe.
Small Business
Artisan Drinking Chocolate
Founded in 2016 by Karla McNeil Rueda, an Honduran Woman, Industrial Engineer, and Culinary Artist. Karla couldn’t find all-natural and sustainably-made chocolate drinks that were up to her high standard of quality, flavor, and purity. So, she started Cru Chocolate to make them for herself and for people like her who refuse to compromise their ethics and taste for a drink. Working closely and directly with passionate and skillful farmers allows Cru to bring the freshest, most potent, and highest-quality ingredients from the farm to their workshop in Roseville, California.
Good Reads
Recipes from Our Iranian American Family
A gorgeous cookbook filled with 78 delicious cook-at-home Iranian American recipes from beloved mother-and-daughter duo Roya Shariat and Gita Sadeh.
Good Reads
Francisco Cantú
For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Cantú tries not to think where the stories go from there.
Plagued by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the whole story. Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River goes behind the headlines, making urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides of the line
Good Reads
Alejandra Oliva
A chronicle of translation, storytelling, and borders as understood through the United States’ “immigration crisis,” in this powerful and deeply felt memoir of translation, storytelling, and borders, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a powerful chronical of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border. Having worked with asylum seekers since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone’s trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the U.S. immigration system.
As Oliva’s stunning prose recounts the stories of the people she’s met through her work, she also traces her family’s long and fluid relationship to the border—each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande. With lush prose and perceptive insight, Oliva encourages readers to approach the painful questions that this crisis poses with equal parts critique and compassion. By which metrics are we measuring who “deserves” American citizenship? What is the point of humanitarian systems that distribute aid conditionally? What do we owe to our most disenfranchised?
Good Reads
Nishanth Injam
Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world and in its American diaspora—all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home. Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Nishanth Injam’s stories question what it means to have a home and to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as it is people who are ready to accept you as you are. A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to the United States from India in his twenties. The Best Possible Experience, his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal inquiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing the home he left behind, before it was lost.
Good Reads
Martyna Majok
Two compelling, uncompromising plays about the immigrant experience by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Cost of Living. With humor, grace, and an unsentimental eye, Martyna Majok explores the challenges immigrants face as they strive to carve out a place in a harsh and often indifferent America. In Ironbound, Darja, a Polish immigrant, negotiates the terms for her future at a rundown bus stop in New Jersey. In Sanctuary City, two undocumented teenagers seek refuge in each other and make a pact to stake their claim in America together.
Good Reads
Thien Pham
A moving young adult graphic memoir about a Vietnamese immigrant boy’s search for belonging in America. Thien Pham’s first memory isn’t a sight or a sound. It’s the sweetness of watermelon and the saltiness of fish. It’s the taste of the foods he ate while adrift at sea as his family fled Vietnam. After the Pham family arrives at a refugee camp in Thailand, they struggle to survive. Things don’t get much easier once they resettle in California. And through each chapter of their lives, food takes on a new meaning. Strawberries come to signify struggle as Thien’s mom and dad look for work. Potato chips are an indulgence that bring Thien so much joy that they become a necessity. Behind every cut of steak and inside every croissant lies a story. And for Thien Pham, that story is about a search–for belonging, for happiness, for the American dream.
Good Reads
José Olivarez
In this groundbreaking collection of poems, José Olivarez explores every kind of love—self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural. Grappling with the contradictions of the American Dream with unflinching humanity, he lays bare the ways in which “love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts.” Whether readers enter this collection in English or via the Spanish translation by poet David Ruano González, these extraordinary poems are sure to become beloved for their illuminations of life—and love.
Good Reads
Reyna Grande, Sonia Guiñansaca, and Viet Thanh Nguyen
This anthology of essays, poetry, and art seeks to shift the immigration debate—now shaped by rancorous stereotypes and xenophobia—towards one rooted in humanity and justice. Through their storytelling and art, the contributors to this thought-provoking book remind us that they are human still. Transcending their current immigration status, they offer nuanced portraits of their existence before and after migration, the factors behind their choices, the pain of leaving their homeland and beginning anew in a strange country, and their collective hunger for a future not defined by borders.
Streaming Now
A24
Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrest apart after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. Two decades later, they are reunited in New York for one fateful week as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life, in this heartrending modern romance.
Streaming Now
A24
Mo Najjar straddles the line between two cultures, three languages and a ton of foolishness as a Palestinian refugee constantly living one step away from asylum on the path to U.S. citizenship.
Streaming Now
Apple TV
Little America is an anthology series that observes the funny, romantic, heartfelt, inspiring, and surprising stories of immigrants in America.
Streaming Now
NBC
John Leguizamo road-trips across the country to bring viewers inside America’s thriving Latino communities – all with his characteristic edge, energy and wit.