Our Story · Nuestra Historia

This brand begins with a man I actually knew. My abuelito, Carlos Rios, got our family out of Camagüey, and then spent the rest of his life quietly rebuilding everything that leaving had cost.

The man who got us out.

Our family is from Camagüey, in central Cuba. That is where this begins... not at an airport, and not in a history book, but in a city our people knew by heart.

Carlos was a high-ranking military officer. When Castro’s government took power, the country he had served became a country with no place left in it for him. What had been a life became a situation.

So he found us a way out. Our family left on the Freedom Flights — the twice-daily flights that carried more than a quarter of a million Cubans to the United States between 1965 and 1973. Every seat on those planes was a family doing arithmetic no family should ever have to do: what to carry, what to leave behind, and who might not still be there when you came back. 

From command to a boiler room.

In New York, the man who had held rank became a building superintendent.

I want to be careful about how that sentence lands, because it is not the sad part. He made good money. He knew every family in that building. He fixed what was broken, and people handed him their keys and their problems and trusted him with both. Our family was deeply rooted in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and he served that community the same way — fully, and without needing to be thanked for it.

There is a version of the immigrant story where this chapter is the tragedy: the officer reduced to the basement. That version gets written by people who believe dignity is issued along with a title. Ours was never issued by anyone. Carlos took care of a building full of people the way he had once taken care of a command, and he built an entire family’s future out of it.

Later they moved to Florida — Orlando first, then Miami. That is where Carlos and Dulce passed away.

I knew him.

Most people building something around a migration story are working from photographs, census records, and secondhand memory. I am not.

I was in seventh grade when my abuelito died. I knew his voice. I knew what he was like in a room. The man who made every single one of us possible was someone I got to be in the presence of, as a kid, without understanding yet what I was standing next to.

That is the whole reason this company exists. Not to decorate a history, but to write it down while it is still first-hand — before it becomes the kind of story a family half-remembers and eventually gets wrong.

The women this family is actually built on.

My mother, Leslie, was born in New York. Her mother — my Nana, Isabelle — is one of the ones who came over on those flights as a girl accompanied by my Tia, Naomi. 

Isabelle graduated high school at sixteen and went on to college. Brilliant, in the way that is obvious to everybody in a room within about four minutes. She arrived in a country that was not designed to make things easy for a young Black Cuban girl, and she moved through it anyway.

Our family is small, and it is mostly women. Resilient, smart, independent, and entirely unwilling to be handled. Everything I am is downstream of them, and every piece we make is, in some sense, addressed to them.

And that is only my mother’s side.

My father’s mother was born in Trinidad, and so was her mother before her. His father was Costa Rican and Jamaican. They migrated to New York as well, and that is where my father, Sean, was born.

Camagüey. Trinidad. Jamaica. Costa Rica. Four places, one city, one family, one kid trying to answer “so what are you?” in under a sentence.

So when we say this brand honors Afro-Caribbean and Latino families across the diaspora, that is not us widening the net to sell more shirts. That is just us describing the dinner table.

How the story moved.

• Camagüey, Cuba · before

  A life with rank in it

  Carlos Rios serving as a high-ranking military officer, in a country that was still home.

• After 1959

  The ground shifts

  Castro’s government takes power. What the family had built stops being something they can count on keeping.

• 1965 – 1973

  The Freedom Flights

  The family leaves Camagüey. A family sponsor receives them in New York.

• New York

  The superintendent years

  Carlos works as a building super and makes a real living at it. The family plants itself in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. My mother, Leslie, is born here. So is my father, Sean, to a Trinidadian mother and a Costa Rican and Jamaican father.

• Florida

  Orlando, then Miami

  The family moves south. Miami is where Carlos and Dulce are laid to rest.

• Now

  Writing it down on purpose

  Me. Close enough to have known him, far enough along to understand what he did, and responsible for getting it on the record.

For the record.

Because a name is the difference between a family story and a family archive.

Why a brand, and not just a scrapbook.

We chose clothing because clothing goes where archives cannot. A framed photograph stays on a wall. A piece you actually wear walks into the room and starts the conversation for you.

Everything we make holds two things at once: pride and context. We are not interested in heritage as decoration — a flag on a shirt, a word in a language nobody at the table speaks. We are interested in receipts. Names, dates, archives, and honest conversation about what our families survived and what they made anyway.

Why “Sincerely.”

A letter signed sincerely is a letter you stand behind. It is the word you use when there is no performance left in you — when you have said the true thing and put your name under it.

Families like mine wrote letters home for decades. Letters that crossed water carrying news already old by the time it landed. Letters that said we are fine when they were not fine, and we will see each other soon when nobody knew whether that was true.

This is our letter back. Signed, not softened.

— Sincerely, from all of us