In 2009, 27-year-old Melissa Rojas left Texas.
She moved from Dallas to California to pursue a dream career in fashion.
At first, she worked as an unpaid intern, then she landed jobs as a stylist for Gina Rodriguez and a personal assistant for Lindsey Lohan. One year later, she was employed by fashion house Thomas Wylde, where she met celebrities like Heidi Klum and lived out what felt like a fantasy, traveling to New York and Paris Fashion Weeks.
As her career was taking off, she was falling in love. Then, just before she got married in 2014, she was laid off. Other job applications didn’t pan out. Eventually, she moved out of the city to be with her fiancée, and she found out she was pregnant with a baby girl.
“I thought that I couldn’t fulfill my dreams if I was pregnant. In my mind, I felt like my life was going to have to stop and raise a child,” Rojas recalled in a recent interview with The Barbed Wire.
Her daughter Camilla was born in 2015.
“It completely shifted my way of thinking. I felt like, ‘Okay, well, it’s my reason to keep going’,” Rojas said. “She had the dark hair, she had lighter skin. She was just a precious little girl with her little button nose, and she was a good baby.”
There was a glimmer of hope, but it wasn’t easy. “I was responsible for another human being, that’s what kept me going,” Rojas recalled. Still, she felt emotionally off.
In those early months, she noticed a decline in her mental health. She felt sadness and a constant need to cry, and she lost interest in her own life. According to the Mayo Clinic, these are classic symptoms of postpartum depression, which affects about 13% of mothers in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Like 20% of other mothers experiencing those symptoms, Rojas never got an official diagnosis. At the time, she didn’t feel like she could talk to anyone about her mental health.
Her husband wasn’t helpful.
“He just blew it off,” she said, “‘You’re fine, you’re going to be fine.’”
“I feel like sometimes men can’t relate to us and in the Latino community, your mental health and depression is not really talked about and so women have to put on a strong face and just go on and do what you’re supposed to do,” Rojas told The Barbed Wire.
Then her marriage nearly broke her.
When Camilla was a toddler, Rojas’ husband told her: “I’m not in love with you anymore.” She found out he’d cheated on her with another woman, and that woman was pregnant.
“I was trying to tell myself that it wasn’t happening. I felt that I was losing control of everything,” Rojas told The Barbed Wire.
“Nobody was going to save me even though I was drowning,” Rojas said, wiping away tears. “Camila was the one that kept me going.”
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In 2017, Rojas came home to Texas.
She saved up for flights and flew back with her then-2-year-old daughter that September.
They landed in the Rio Grande Valley, where Rojas’ immigrant parents owned a farm in Donna, less than 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.
For Rojas, moving back to the small town felt like defeat. “That situation was really humiliating,” Rojas said. “You’re kind of reborn when you go through something like this divorce.”
Soon, she began reconnecting to her Mexican roots, away from the glitz and glam of L.A. She and Camilla immersed themselves in their family and started making daily drives to spend time with Roja’s madrina Alicia Treviño, her “very own fairy godmother” who lived about 30 minutes away in Hidalgo.
“We would just talk, chismear. I’m sure we chisme’d a lot about random stuff. I would tell her what happened with me, so it was very healing,” Rojas remembered.
As a kid, Rojas remembers looking up to her godmother. She was an expert seamstress and made Rojas’ communion and quinceañera dresses. Reconnecting during such a challenging time may have been a coincidence, or it may have been fate.
“I had a dream about Zarape, and just thought of the idea of Santa hats,” Rojas said. As she was looking for ways to celebrate the holidays with her daughter, she realized there weren’t enough reflections of her culture in the products around her. She went to her mom Dina and asked her for a $20 loan to buy the materials to start creating colorful santa hats — and she and her madrina went to work.
“I’m all about color and obviously I needed something to do, because I needed to take care of my daughter,” Rojas said, adding that she was inspired by the comfort, family, and vibrance of zarape. “So I just started selling it.”
Her business was born out of that dream: With the help of her madrina, Rojas started designing and creating items that she thought her daughter would wear, infused with elements of their family’s culture. Her signature items included the zarape Santa hats, t-shirts with a sewn zarape heart, zarape graduation stoles, zarape mouse and bunny ears, zarape headbands, and bows.
She began selling to her family, cousins and tias first, then their friends found out through word of mouth, texts and Facebook. Eventually Rojas’ creations made it to Instagram, and soon the whole town wanted her items. So she opened up an Etsy shop. She came up with a business plan, and she named it Chasing Camilla. “When you become a mom, you’re chasing your child,” she told The Barbed Wire. “I wanted to create a brand that would incorporate my love for my culture and my daughter.”
Soon her small business — and baby girl — started growing.
“I kept making stuff for her and (being) inspired by her, and then it just started evolving into importing items from Mexico,” Rojas said.
In the early days, Cami — as her mom lovingly calls her — was a staple on her mom’s Instagram grid. Now that she’s 10, she’s more like a business partner.
Rojas says her daughter helps with selling and merchandising, but she has also designed products for her mom’s store. Some days, Rojas says she feels like her daughter’s personal assistant. In ten years, she traded gigs in L.A. for her “honey morena,” brown-skinned little girl.
“What I like about her is that she speaks her mind, and she doesn’t allow anyone to just tell her otherwise, which is something I wish I had when I was little, because I felt like I was really meek and insecure,” Rojas told The Barbed Wire.
Rojas said the love for her daughter is also like a love letter to her younger self. Bullies targeted Rojas and her family. They were migrant workers and split their time between Michigan and Texas, following the blueberry crop season. Now, Rojas and her family get to travel for fun and to source materials and designs from Mexican artisans for her shop.
“I want to be able to provide Camila with a cool life, a good life,” Rojas said.
Now, Rojas wants to make sure other women like her — 43 and single — know that it’s not shameful to choose to love in a different way.
“I think we shouldn’t be looked at as, ‘pobresita, you’re single, you’re going to be alone forever. I hope she finds someone,’ I don’t think that’s right, because everyone’s happiness is different, we don’t have to grow up thinking that we have to get married and find someone,” Rojas insists.
Chasing Camilla has sold hundreds of products throughout the country at countless pop-up markets. She’s known for her Instagram live sales and has outgrown Etsy. Now she sells direct-to-consumer on her own retail website. Rojas’ designs have been recognized by Axios San Antonio for reinventing “the classic linen guayaberas.”
Last year, Chasing Camila made more than a quarter of a million dollars in sales, and now she’s in the process of buying her and Cami their first-ever home.
Thanks to that stability, the love she’s focused on is for her daughter Cami.
And while she’s happy to be free of her ex, he’s “not the reason I’ve come so far,” said Rojas.
“It’s Camilla, because of her,” said Rojas. “She was my light at the time that I needed it.”
Correction: This story previously asserted that Rojas’ daughter was weeks old when her husband cheated; in fact, she was a toddler. She was a personal assistant to Lindsay Lohan, not a stylist, as the story originally reported. The Barbed Wire regrets the errors.
