// Trusted Wholesale and Retail Partner

We started our business in 2019 with the mission to provide hope and opportunity to Elsa Ortiz and her family in Guatemala. In 2018, Elsa tried to immigrate to the U.S. with her 8-year-old son Antony. They crossed the border and surrendered to Border Patrol with the intent of seeking asylum. Two days later, while waiting together for an asylum hearing, a Border Patrol officer came and told Elsa to go get Antony’s shoes. She did and returned to find Antony gone. She was deported to Guatemala two days later, screaming “Please don’t make me leave without my son”. We read about it in the New York Times just four days before we were to meet our son in Guatemala for a short vacation. We thought “Maybe we can help reunite Elsa and Antony.” We found a lawyer who would represent them pro-bono and found Elsa in Guatemala using social media. We took the legal papers for Elsa to sign when we went. The lawyer was successful in reuniting them, but it took three months. During that time we got to know Elsa and became aware that she had no hope and no opportunity to better her life. So, we started our wholesale/retail business in Albuquerque, NM to create a job for her in Guatemala. She would buy handmade Mayan products and we would sell them in the U.S. We named our company after Elsa. Three years later Elsa and Antony, and others who had children taken from them at the border, were granted humanitarian visas by the U.S. government. Elsa and Antony are now living, working, and studying happily in Virginia. We continue to support a second buyer and to grow our business to expand its capacity to spread hope and opportunity to others in Guatemala.