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Bloody, Beautiful, and Ours | Rafiana Martinez and the Vision for Borí Books & Café
- Damian Ali
- 22 hours ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 20 hours ago
Why This Literary Space Exists and Who It Is Being Built For
Founder Rafiana Martinez at a Borí Books & Café pop-up. Image courtesy of Borí Books & Café.
Borí Books & Café did not begin as a business plan or a brick-and-mortar storefront. It began as a feeling. A sense of longing paired with responsibility. For founder Rafiana Martinez, the idea grew from a lifetime spent between block parties and bodegas, between library shelves and the oral histories that shaped her upbringing in East Harlem.
For years, Martinez did not see a space where literature, culture, and everyday life fully lived together for Puerto Rican, Black, Caribbean, Latinx, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA communities. New York is full of bookstores, she says, but many feel curated from a distance. Beautiful, yes, but often emotionally detached from the neighborhoods they serve.
That absence is not accidental. It has deep historical roots. In her research on Puerto Rican activism in New York, Dr. Johanna Fernández, a historian at Baruch College and author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, has written about how Puerto Rican political and cultural history was systematically excluded from mainstream education.
Fernández has described realizing this erasure firsthand while researching the Young Lords, despite her own family’s proximity to their work. “I was flabbergasted that I had never heard of them,” she recalled, even though her father nearly died at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx during the 1970 takeover. “That’s when I realized history had been erased.” (Source: “Our Legacy Is Our Protest: Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies ‘Encuentro," by Kaila Maceira, November 7, 2025.)
The idea for Borí Books & Café started as a response to that absence. It became real the moment Martinez realized the vision was not hers alone. “When I shared the idea and people responded with, ‘We need this,’ that’s when Borí Books & Café stopped being a dream and became a duty,” she said.
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Borí Books & Café is taking its literary mission on the road through pop-up events across New York City, spotlighting authors, books, and community-centered cultural spaces. Borí Books & Café Brings Pop-Up Literary Events to NYC
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Rafiana Martinez, founder of Borí Books & Café, during a public pop-up event. Image courtesy of Borí Books & Café.
That sense of duty is at the heart of Borí. Martinez describes the space as a sanctuary. Not in an abstract way, but in a practical one. A sanctuary is a place where people are seen and validated without explanation. Where culture does not need footnotes. Where stories are honored rather than defended.
“Our stories are complex, brilliant, political, funny, painful, magical, and they deserve a home that reflects that,” she explained.
Growing up in East Harlem gave Martinez her foundation. Working in West Harlem sharpened her understanding of how systems, resources, and opportunity shape which communities are supported and which are overlooked.
Borí Books & Café exists at that intersection. It is both deeply personal and intentionally communal. A love letter to the neighborhoods that raised her and a vision for what culturally rooted spaces in New York can look like.
From the start, Martinez has been clear that Borí is not waiting for permission or perfection. On social media, she has been upfront about showing both the organized and the spontaneous sides of building something from the ground up. The polished moments and the behind-the-scenes reality coexist. Borí, she says, is growing its own personality in real time.
“Borí Books & Café was a dream a few years ago, just a thought,” she shared in an early post. “Every day that I work on the bookstore, and it’s not easy, it grows into its own personality.”
That philosophy carries into how Borí shows up now. While plans for a permanent location continue, the work is already happening. Education is not postponed. Community is not delayed. Through pop-ups, author features, and conversations that blend history with everyday life, Borí introduces people to writers and ideas now, not someday.
Martinez brings education and history to her audience through her signature Chisme Time moments, where what sounds like light-hearted storytelling becomes an entry point into deeper lessons. What begins casually often leads into conversations about activism, memory, and cultural inheritance. It is the same spirit behind her reminder: “This is our history; bloody, beautiful, and ours.”
Her poetry, rooted in memory, identity, resistance, and survival, also threads through the mission. “Poetry keeps me honest,” Martinez said. “It reminds me why spaces like Borí matter: our stories deserve somewhere to live beyond the page.”
Borí Books & Café is built on that belief. That culture is not supplemental, and that stories deserve space while they are being written, not only once they are deemed worthy.
To support the mission as it continues to grow, community members can donate to the Borí Books & Café crowdfunding campaign or attend upcoming pop-up events linked on the official pages.
Follow/Support:
Borí Books & Café: @boribooksandcafe
Help Fund Borí Books & Café
In Part Two of this Spotlight, TalkTeaV will take a closer look at the impact Borí Books & Café is already having, and why community support matters now.
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