Part Two: The Years
I will not make the years sound easy, because they were not easy, and making difficult things sound easy is a form of dishonesty I have no patience for.
Guadalajara received me the way large cities received young women with nothing: with complete indifference, which was at least consistent. I found a room in a neighborhood on the outskirts — a small room in a house where three other women also rented small rooms, all of us organizing our lives around the shared kitchen and the single bathroom and the arithmetic of survival.
I gave birth in that room.
There was a midwife — a woman named Consuela who came from the neighborhood clinic and who was brisk and efficient and kind in the way of people who could not afford to be sentimental. She told me what to do and I did it, and at the end of the night I had a daughter.
I named her Valentina.
She had dark eyes and a face that already seemed to have opinions about things, which I took as a favorable sign.
The years after that were the years of doing many things at once. Waitressing during the hours Valentina was with the woman downstairs who watched children for a small fee. Studying at night for the equivalency certifications I needed. Selling things — first things I didn’t need, then things I made, then things I sourced and resold, and then the first real version of the business: an online shop that sold accessories and handmade items to customers I had never met, located everywhere.
There is a particular quality to the energy of someone building something when they have no safety net. It is not the romantic entrepreneurial energy that people described in interviews later, the passion and the vision language. It was closer to the energy of someone who understood that stopping was not an option and forward was the only direction, and who had converted this understanding into a form of fuel.
The shop grew. I brought in other makers. I expanded the categories. I started a label. The label developed a following. I brought in a partner, and then investors, and then we opened physical stores, and then more stores, and then the stores became a chain, and then the chain became a company that required a different category of thinking than the one I had been applying.
I hired people who knew the things I didn’t know. I paid attention to the things I did know, which were more than I had expected. I made mistakes and I corrected them and I made different mistakes and I corrected those.
After six years, I bought a house.
After ten years, I owned seventeen stores.
After fifteen years, the company had gone through a structure that I barely recognized from the outside anymore, though I knew every decision that had made it what it was.
After twenty years, the number on the balance sheet was one that I still sometimes held in my mind and turned over, because it seemed to belong to a different story than the one that had started in a room in Guadalajara with a midwife named Consuela and a baby with dark eyes.
