The Houston Latina-Owned Bookstore Redefining Love

No one place and person show the evolution of the romance literary genre quite like Andrea Sifuentes and her pop-up shop Mossrose Books, located in the Houston Ironworks. The indoor marketplace is a prime example of the EaDo transformation, turning old industrial spaces into trendy shops and eateries, very much a hip place to be. 

However,  Sifuentes ,34, is no recent transplant looking to capitalize on gentrification. She grew up just a few miles from the Ironworks back when anything east of US-59 was treated as a Houston’s ugly stepchild.

“I grew up in this area, but I was a huge reader as a kid, and there were just no bookstores that my parents could take me easily,” she said during an interview one busy Sunday afternoon at her shop. “Everything was West Gray or further out, and it was just hard for me to find books that I liked.”

Sifuentes set aside reading for pleasure as she went to law school. She moved to Rhode Island and then San Antonio, married entrepreneur Joseph Echavarria, and had a daughter while working in immigration and family law. When she moved back to Houston in 2023, her life slowed down enough for her to return to books for fun.

Romance was an easy jumping in point. Gone were the days when everything was about skinny white women falling for brooding lords in the Scottish Highland. Sifuentes discovered romance novels were now about all kinds of people, the sort of thing that she’d never read as a child.

“It was just after COVID, and I wanted to read again,” she said. “I found some romances that represented me. It was indie authors, but they had Hispanic characters, they had Mexican characters, they had Mexican families. I thought, ‘I can resonate with this.’ And then, even the ones that didn’t have characters that looked like me, they had storylines that mattered to me.”

What she lacked was a feeling of community. COVID had been very isolating, and book clubs didn’t quite fill her need for book-based companionship. Her husband encouraged her to start a pop-up bookstore, an idea she resisted until she realized that it would give her the chance to meet with people to talk about all the books she was reading.

At first, Mossrose would appear in a pop-up location once or twice a month, but demand and reputation quickly grew. Other people were looking for more than something to read as well. They wanted that spark of connection. 

There has been an explosion of independent and specialty bookstores over the last two decades. After Borders fell and Barnes & Noble started closing stores following intense competition from Amazon, indies found new life. Customers were willing to trade massive inventories for curated collections and local events. Even now, as Barnes & Noble grows by embracing local control, people just feel more at home in a place like Mossrose.

“I think smaller bookstores that cater to the people in their communities, that’s exactly what people are looking for,” she said. “I think that, especially post-COVID, we’re looking for those connections everywhere we can because we just found out what it was like to be without them. My goal is always to just have a space where people feel content and free to be exactly who they are and look for exactly what they want without, you know, any kind of just negative feelings about it.” 

Mossrose is dedicated to being itself rather than a corporately guided attempt to bring in everyone. Sifuentes’s Spanish-language section is a huge hit, though the selection in romance is still relatively tiny. Her books embrace fantasy, science fiction, and even horror, as long as it has a good love story. The people on the covers can be anything, not just waifs in corsets. Like love itself, the stories come in all shapes and sizes.

One thing that stood out was the way she stocks LGBTQ books. She doesn’t have a dedicated section, but keeps a good selection tucked in with the rest under their specific sub-genres and age groups. When asked why, she said the reason was twofold. One, that some people still feel exposed and uncomfortable browsing a special queer section. Two, that queer stories are just a part of life, the same as stories starring Mexican or Black protagonists, and should be filed as such.

It’s deeply refreshing to see that kind of book selection, and doubly so in the East Side being handled by someone from that area. Sifuentes and Mossrose are keeping it real, even when it comes to make-believe. 

“The pop-ups just kept getting bigger,” she said, and gestured to the second room her husband was renovating for the store to expand. “We’d have more and more people who would come looking for us or just [were] so excited to find \ the kinds of books that I had because they don’t really see [that] anywhere other than maybe their Bookstagram.”

Mossrose is open noon to 6 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays at Ironworks, 711 Milby. Follow them on Instagram.