A common misconception about young Latinos in the United States is that they are inevitably moving towards cultural assimilation; that they have no interest in Latino culture and, moreover, no interest in learning Spanish.
For the past ten years, one company, Culver City-based Encantos Media Studios, has been fighting these misconceptions by creating original Latino content for children and their families. Led by founder and CEO Susie Jaramillo, a Venezuelan American artist, entrepreneur, and mom, Encantos was created as a culture-led family media brand that celebrates Latino heritage.
Over the past decade, this full-stack media and consumer brand has continued to build around beloved intellectual property, direct audience relationships, and a content-to-commerce approach.
Encantos’ flagship is Canticos, a love letter to Latino families, and today nearly 70% of the most engaged Canticos audience is in the United States. The company’s audience spans 20+ countries, and its core customers are second-generation, English-dominant Latino parents actively choosing to raise bilingual children—reclaiming culture, not learning it for the first time.
I spoke with Susie about Encantos’ trajectory and her vision for the future. Below is an edited version of our conversation:
Isaac Mizrahi – Tell me more about your vision. When you think about Encantos Media, what are you building?
Susie Jaramillo – We are building the next family media empire. Here is how.
I spent years running an agency serving the Hispanic market. I saw firsthand how much these families were being underserved, how much cultural pride they carried, and how little of the content landscape reflected any of it. The family media space was wide open. I knew someone was going to build the defining Latino family brand. As an artist and an entrepreneur who loves my culture, I decided it was going to be me. That is how Canticos was born, and it became the foundation on which Encantos Media Studios is now building something much larger.
Ten years later, it is not just a preschool brand anymore. It is a world that families live inside, across screens, stores, books, music, and soon, live experiences. My belief was that a brand families genuinely loved was the most powerful foundation we could build on, and that the right technology, including our app and increasingly AI-driven tools, would be far more valuable sitting on top of real cultural trust than it would be without it. That conviction shaped everything that came next.
Mizrahi – What trends are you seeing around Latino youth and the importance of Spanish for younger generations?
Jaramillo – The conventional wisdom is that Spanish fades with each generation. Our customers told us something different.
The vast majority of our most engaged families are second-generation, English-dominant parents who actively choose to raise bilingual children. Not because their household speaks Spanish at home, but because they do not want their children to lose what they almost lost themselves. They are reclaiming something. Spanish is not fading. It is being reclaimed. And that reclamation is one of the most powerful cultural forces in American family life right now.
Millennial and Gen Z Latino parents are leaning into language and culture with intention. They grew up straddling two worlds, and they are determined that their children will not have to choose between them. Canticos exists for that parent. We are giving families the tools to feel proud of it together.
That insight changed how we think about everything we build. It is not a language learning product. It is a cultural belonging product. And the market for belonging, it turns out, is enormous. Our audience spans more than 20 countries, but nearly 70% of our most engaged fans are right here in the United States. This is not a Latin American story. It is an American story.
Mizrahi – Tell me more about how this journey started. Tell me more about Canticos.
Jaramillo – Canticos began as a love letter to Latino families. I wanted to help families like mine pass down the songs, stories, language, and culture we loved. As an artist, I wanted to create a world of characters that children and parents would want to come back to again and again. We gave names and personalities to iconic characters: Los Pollitos, our chickies Kiki, Ricky and Nicky, Benji the Elephant, Lilie the Spider, Lola the Cow, Pin Pon, and more.
For many families, Canticos is not just content their children watch. It is a way to share where they come from, who they are, and what they want their children to carry forward.
What surprised even me is how deep that love runs, and how far it travels. Our characters have been viewed twenty three billion times on Giphy alone, not because we had their budgets, but because we had their families. That kind of cultural integration is not manufactured. It is earned over a decade of showing up authentically for one community and discovering that the community was larger and more influential than anyone had given it credit for.
The insight we kept coming back to is that Latino parents are not looking for content that teaches their kids to be Latino. They already are. They are looking for content that makes them feel proud. When you build from that place, families don’t just watch. They buy, they share, they come back.
Mizrahi – How do you see brands collaborating with your company?
Jaramillo – We think about brand partnerships as world-building, not sponsorship.
What we offer a partner is rare: genuine trust with Latino families across every part of their lives. Our characters are on their phones, in their headphones, on their bookshelves, and in their grocery carts. That is not something most children’s brands can say, and it is not something you build quickly. We built it over a decade.
We are selective about who we bring into that trust. We look for partners who actually care about Latino families and want to create something joyful, useful, and real, not just a campaign. The best partnerships we have had felt less like deals and more like collaborations where both sides were trying to make something families would genuinely love.
Mizrahi – What’s the future of Encantos Media?
Jaramillo – The next chapter is already in motion on several fronts.
Our Story Episodes are the beginning of a longer-form content strategy. We have always known that families wanted more than songs. They wanted narrative, character development, stories that unfold over time. The five million views our first episode generated in a single month, and the YouTube feature that followed, told us the audience is ready. We are building toward that.
We are also exploring how AI can deepen the Canticos experience in ways that feel personal and meaningful to families, from custom stories and products featuring their own child alongside beloved characters, to more personalized learning pathways inside the app. These are the kinds of tools that turn a brand families love into a brand in a family’s life.
This summer, we are expanding into Ralphs, Food for Less, Kroger Northgate Market, Sedano’s, Heritage Grocers, and Chedraui USA, that together reach millions of families across the U.S. We are also in conversations about new product categories, including toys, apparel, and seasonal collections that will bring these characters into more moments of family life.
And we are in early development of a Canticos Live theatrical experience in partnership with Pregones/PRTT, one of the most storied Latino theater institutions in America. Bringing these characters to life on stage for families is something we have always envisioned. Now we are building it.
Susie Jaramillo and Encantos Media give the marketplace a glimpse of how media and content creators can leverage the country’s demographic and cultural trends to grow their businesses. Moreover, they also provide an opportunity for brands who are looking to build genuine connections with young bicultural families. The future is bicultural, and brands that understand this will have a competitive advantage. It’s time to reinvent the traditional marketing playbook.
