KSHB 41 anchor/reporter Daniela Leon covers transportation-related issues in Kansas City. Share your story idea with Daniela.
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Mexican American girls living across Kansas City are now being represented in toy aisles across the country.
American Girl made headlines last month when they announced their 2026 American Girl of the Year was Raquel Reyes, a girl from Kansas City who proudly honors her Mexican roots, wherever she goes.
"I started writing books when I was a child, as young as 9 years old, and I started writing stories because I love books, but I never saw girls like you, and I in those books," author Angela Cervantes said in an interview with KSHB 41's Daniela Leon. " I never saw girls that represented my community, or heritage, that celebrated Dia de los Muertos, that had posadas, and I was always like, 'Where are those stories?'"
Cervantes is a Mexican American author who grew up in Kansas City and was tapped to bring Raquel's story to life.
Her first book on Raquel follows the young Kansas City Latina as she gets ready for an East Coast family reunion.
Raquel's family, a core part of her Kansas City story, owns a paleta shop, a type of Mexican Popsicle shop which typically uses fresh tropical fruit infused with Mexican flavors to create unique Popsicles.
Raquel's family shop mirrors similar Kansas City businesses like Palancana, a Kansas City business adding a Mexican twist to ice cream, Popcicles, smoothies and more.
"I wanted her family to be a family of entrepreneurs, because that really represents, to me, a Mexican American," Cervantes said. "We come here, we open up our shops, we share our culture, we share our heritage."
Records stored inside the Kansas City Public Library show Mexicans immigrating to the United States as early as the late 1800s, with an immigration boom to the City of Fountains in the early 1900s.
"There was a demand for railroad workers and packing house workers; We have the stockyards in Kansas City," Michael Wells, KCPL senior special collections librarian said.
Yearbooks from the 1930s, 20th-century Mexican magazines advertising Kansas City and fiestas in the Westside all gave glimpses of the families who shaped Kansas City.
Those families left a lasting mark that are still be seen today along Southwest Boulevard, through murals, steel canvases on wheels and events at the Mattie Rhodes Center, a Kansas City-based organization credited for keeping Hispanic traditions alive in Kansas City.
"People were like, 'Wow, she picked American Kansas City,' as if we don't exist here, or that we haven't been around for years and generations," Cervantes said. "My main mission in life is, one, to be the best writer I can be, but two, to bring our stories to life so that girls don't ever have to feel invisible or erased."
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