Sandra Pike Raichel co-owns and manages Vientos Tropicales, providing academic publications from Central American nations to research libraries around the globe. Sandy began her career as a bookseller in San José, Costa Rica in 1983, traveling frequently throughout Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. In 1986, she and her partner, Fred Morgner, began Vientos Tropicales.

The company moved from San José, Costa Rica to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1989. In 1994, Vientos Tropicales attained the distinction of being the first foreign book vendor in the United States to supply electronic bibliographic records to libraries.

From 1994 to 2005, in addition to her work at Vientos Tropicales, she co-owned and managed Mexico Norte, supplying books to libraries from nineteen northern Mexican states.

Her paper "Una experiencia de un librero con el formato USMARC" was presented in Spanish at SALALM XL in Athens, Georgia, and published in Societies in Constraint : Economic and Social Pressures in Latin America / edited by Robert A. McNeil. Austin, Texas : SALALM Secretariat, 1997. In 2001 she co-authored , with Lynn Shirey of Harvard University, the SALALM publication "Directory of Vendors of Latin American Library Materials."

Sandy has attended SALALM since the 1984 meeting in Princeton, New Jersey, and has been a member since 1986. She has participated in the subcommittees Marginalized Peoples and Ideas, and Librarian, Bookdealer, Publisher, and is past-president of the SALALM affiliated group, Libreros.

Sandy is an alumnus of Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa (Class of 1969). She has continued her education in Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

She lives with her husband and Yorkshire terrier "Jessica" in rural North Carolina, and is now at work on a bibliographic project of Chicano and Latino books published in the United States. Sandra served on the Executive Board of SALALM 2007-2010.