By Jondi Gumz
If you’re looking for inspiration this time of year, consider the story of the Camacho family. They live in Soquel, and they wrote a children’s book called Taco Dude.
The family includes Anthony and Katie Camacho, Veronica, 16, who goes to Soquel High, and Ever, 12, who goes to New Brighton Middle School.
Antony and Katie became parents 9 years ago, thanks to the foster care system in Monterey County.
“When we adopted them, they had little concept of what a book was let alone the ability to follow what they perceived as complex storylines aka pages with more than three sentences per page,” explained Katie.
“Taco Dude was born, well, because we love tacos, but also because we wanted to create something that was easy and fun for people of all literacy levels to enjoy,” Katie continued. “Both the parents when reading and kids when listening.”
Both Katie and Anthony went to the same high school in El Dorado Hills but he was a year older so they didn’t meet until they were seniors in college.
It was Christmas Eve, and they were home from their studies — he from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and she at the University of Oregon — and their friends were at The Purple Place Bar & Grill.
“He was hanging out with people I knew from elementary school,” she said.
Something clicked and they married in 2010.
Katie had grown up in a family where adoption was a given — her mom and her sister were adopted.
Anthony is half Italian and half Mexican.
“My family is humungous and no one is adopted,” he said.
But he was interested.
The couple had traveled a lot and looked at international adoption until they realized so many children in their own backyard need forever homes.
The statistics touched Anthony’s heart.
Former foster kids in jail, pregnant, not graduating from high school, in prison — “it stuck with me,” he said.
“We had just bought a house,” he said. “I wanted to give back.”
He realized that growing up with his “old-school” parents, “I had a privileged life, a great childhood. It shatters me not everybody has that.”
The couple worked with New Families, a nonprofit in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. They went through the required classes, got certified, then waited.
The call came: A 3-year-old boy in a foster home in King City needed a forever home.
“We went down, met him and of course fell in love,” Katie recalled.
He came for overnight stays, and the couple heard about his sister.
A few months after the boy moved in, the couple learned his sister needed a home.
She was in Salinas.
She came for overnight visits, reuniting with her brother.
When the family moved into adoption, “she was 7 and didn’t know what a book was,” Katie recalled.
Anthony was not surprised.
Although his childhood was idyllic, he said, “My father never read to me.”
He wished for a book that would be easy to read, one his father could read, one that could get kids excited about reading.
That’s how the story of “Taco Dude” came to life.
This is an upbeat story with colorful eye-catching illustrations of Taco Dude and his friends.
I can attest my 3-year-old grandson found it very appealing.
Anthony found the illustrator Nessa Ledesma, well-known in Watsonville for her murals and a bilingual teaching artist with Mariposa’s Art, through Instagram.
“Her background really fit well,” Anthony said. “She was so easy to work with.”
The next step was finding a publisher.
Bookshop Santa Cruz stopped offering this service, but Anthony got a referral to Village Books and Paper Dreams, an independent bookstore in Bellingham, Washington, which invited them for a book signing in 2025.
“I couldn’t have done it in without them,” Anthony said.
That’s how a manager for Davey Resource Group and a public relations specialist at Google Cloud created a book with their children.
“We wanted them to have power in their story,” Anthony says.
His “secret motive” for creating the book is to normalize adoption.
And if it inspires more adoptions, he said, that would be “most magical.”
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Taco Dude is available locally at Two Birds Books, Bookshop Santa Cruz for $21.99. Information: tacodudeworldwide.com
TOP PHOTO: Anthony and Katie Camacho, with daughter Veronica and son Ever.