By: Melly Ramirez
I was taught humility before I was taught almost anything else.
It was passed down the way most things are in immigrant households — not as a lesson with a beginning and an end, but as a way of moving through the world. You don’t take up too much space. You don’t speak too loudly about what you have or what you want. You are grateful, and you show it by not asking for more than what you’re given. Humility wasn’t just a virtue in my home. It was survival. It was how you stayed safe in rooms that weren’t built for you.
And for a long time, I didn’t question it. Because it worked. It kept the peace. It smoothed things over. It made other people comfortable.
What I didn’t realize until much later was what it was costing me.
I have spent my life walking into rooms where I didn’t belong — or at least, where other people had decided I didn’t. As an immigrant. As a woman. As a Latina in the military, sitting at tables where nobody looked like me, trying to take up exactly the right amount of space. Not too much. Not too little. Just enough to be allowed to stay.
You learn to read the room fast when you’ve had to do it your whole life. You learn which parts of yourself to lead with and which ones to tuck away. You learn to translate yourself, constantly, for whoever is in front of you. And you get so good at it that eventually you start doing it automatically, before anyone has even said a word.
That’s what I’m doing when I shrink my business down for strangers.
I own a bookstore. A small, independent bookstore called Casa Luna. And I love it in a way that is genuinely difficult to explain to people who don’t already understand why it matters.
But here’s what happens when I tell someone outside of the book community: they smile in a way that doesn’t reach their eyes. They tilt their head. And then, almost every time, comes some version of the same question — “How’s your little shop doing?” Or: “Is that really a viable business?” Or just silence, and a look that says everything the silence is trying not to.
And I know what I do next. I’ve watched myself do it enough times. I laugh a little. I make it smaller. I say something self-deprecating so they don’t have to be the one to say it. I hand them the ammunition before they can reach for it themselves.
Every time, I hate that I did it.
Here is the thing people don’t seem to understand, or maybe just don’t want to: I am not building Casa Luna to get rich. I never was.
I’m building it because I grew up without seeing myself in stories. Because representation in literature is still a fight, not a given. Because independent bookstores are one of the last places where community and culture and access to ideas still live in the same building. Because I want little girls who look like me to walk into a space and feel like they belong in it — like the stories inside were written for them too.
That’s not a small dream. It just doesn’t come with a stock ticker.
And I have noticed, genuinely, that this bothers people. Not the business itself — the reason. When wealth isn’t the goal, when the metric isn’t scale or profit or exit strategy, it confuses them. It makes them uncomfortable in a way they can’t quite name. And so they reach for the smirk. The backhanded question. The little.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between humility and fear. Because I was taught they were the same thing, and I don’t think they are.
Humility is knowing your limits. It’s staying honest about what you don’t know and staying open to what you can learn. It’s the thing that keeps you grounded when things go well and keeps you moving when they don’t. I still believe in it.
But what I was doing — what a lot of us were taught to do — wasn’t always humility. It was preemptive shrinking. It was making ourselves smaller so the room didn’t have to adjust. It was protecting other people from the discomfort of our ambition.
And I don’t think I owe anyone that anymore.
If you are a first-generation kid, an immigrant, someone who has spent their life translating themselves for rooms that weren’t made with you in mind — I want to say this directly:
You are allowed to be proud of what you’re building, even if it’s small by someone else’s measure. You are allowed to say I own a business without the laugh at the end that makes it easier for them to digest. You are allowed to take up space with your dream, even if your dream is a bookshop, even if your dream is something that confuses people, even if your dream isn’t about money at all.
Humility is a virtue. Disappearing is not.
And the next time someone asks how my little shop is doing — I’m going to tell them, without apology, that it’s doing exactly what I built it to do.
Casa Luna is an independent bookstore rooted in community, representation, and the belief that everyone deserves to see themselves in a story.
