For decades, small neighborhood bodegas have served as the vital anchors of Latine communities across the United States, particularly within the bustling boroughs of New York City. Stocked with everything from tropical staples like plantains and casabe to trusted over-the-counter medicines, these corner stores have long bridged the gap between everyday American life and the ancestral homelands families left behind. For generations of immigrant parents and grandparents—often referred to affectionately as abuelos—finding these familiar goods and speaking Spanish with the person behind the counter offered a profound sense of comfort, belonging, and community, functioning entirely independently of socioeconomic backgrounds or legal citizenship status.

That deeply rooted cultural bridge inspired journalist and debut author Amaris Castillo to write Bodega Stories, a forthcoming memoir set to be released by the University Press of Florida on September 8, 2026. Through a poignant combination of narrative prose and original photography captured by Castillo herself, the memoir documents the lives, struggles, daily routines, and enduring dreams of her Dominican immigrant parents and the diverse community served by their family business, Orlando Latin Market, located in St. Petersburg, Florida. The book explores not only what it was like for Castillo to grow up working inside the store, but also how those formative years taught her to observe people with deep curiosity, fiercely embrace her Dominican heritage, and understand how the physical places of our youth fundamentally shape who we become as adults.

"I think I’ve always had a curiosity about other people, and that dates back to my very Dominican Caribbean childhood in Brooklyn," Castillo reflects. She spent the first decade of her life in Crown Heights before her family relocated to Woodhaven, Queens, and eventually settled down in Florida when she reached high school. Looking back, she firmly believes that her unique upbringing nurtured the instincts of a storyteller from a very young age.

"In first grade I even won a storytelling contest. It was me, and I think two other kids who won the contest, and I remember making a book that ended up in an exhibit somewhere in a museum in New York City," Castillo recalls. "So, I think working at the bodega, being up close to all the unique characters… I got to see the best in humans, and I got to see the worst in humans."

When Castillo initially began reporting and compiling material for Bodega Stories, her objective extended far beyond simply documenting the history of her parents’ enterprise. She intentionally set out to chronicle the rich, unheralded lives of the store’s workers and the eclectic mix of customers who walked through its doors day after day.

Among them was Yanick, a Haitian customer who visited the market around New Year’s Day to gather specific ingredients for soup joumou, the traditional and culturally significant Haitian soup deeply associated with the nation’s hard-won independence. Castillo watched as Yanick carefully selected pieces of calabaza squash and searched through the meat freezer for beef. At first, the young observer did not fully realize the historical and cultural significance of the routine transaction unfolding right in front of her.

"I started searching Haitian soup, and I realized, oh my god, I’m pretty sure what she was doing was gathering ingredients for this soup that means so much to her and other Haitians," she says.

Yanick later confirmed that she was indeed preparing the traditional dish for her family to celebrate on January 1. For Castillo, that quiet revelation crystallized a reality she had been witnessing inside her parents’ bodega all along: customers were rarely just shopping for random groceries. Instead, they were actively searching for tangible pieces of home.

"I felt like I was watching in real time people coming to the store with a reason, with a purpose," she notes. "And it was oftentimes to find the foods that they love, that they’re comfortable with, that they’re familiar with, and that is a bridge to their culture. Food is identity."

For residents of New York City, the word bodega can feel virtually synonymous with the urban landscape itself. It evokes the image of the tiny, neon-lit neighborhood shop where a resident can purchase anything from a hot morning bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich to platanos, avocados, Vicks VapoRub, and household laundry detergent, usually with a lazy bodega cat lounging somewhere nearby.

Though bodegas are frequently viewed exclusively through the lens of New York’s vibrant Puerto Rican and Dominican communities, Castillo places these institutions within a much broader historical trajectory of neighborhood storefronts established by generations of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants. She points out that earlier Puerto Rican communities played a fundamental role in establishing the very bodega culture that later waves of Dominican immigrants would inherit and expand upon.

"In the 1920s, especially Puerto Ricans, they opened a bunch of bodegas, restaurants, botanicas, and boarding houses," she explains. "So they really helped pave the way for Dominicans, I would say, with bodegas."

As Dominican immigration to New York City surged throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and particularly the 1980s, numerous Dominican newcomers began purchasing established corner stores from aging Puerto Rican proprietors. Castillo’s family eventually joined that historic lineage, successfully transplanting bodega culture down to the Gulf Coast of Florida. Their Dominican-owned establishment, the Orlando Latin Market, has steadily adapted over the years to serve an even broader multicultural demographic, including a significant population of Cuban residents.

"My parents, they still call it a bodega. We call it a bodega," she says with pride.

Growing up inside the aisles of the store and later conducting formal reporting for her book introduced Castillo to customers whose ordinary, everyday shopping trips revealed expansive narratives concerning culture, resilience, and family ties. One frequent shopper is a Cuban man who regularly comes in specifically to buy plantains because his wife loves to prepare chicharitas—thinly sliced and fried Cuban plantains. Then there is Deisy, a Cuban woman and former cashier at the store who still visits frequently just to catch up with Castillo’s parents and her former coworkers. Deisy carries a deeply personal reminder of her homeland: a tattoo of a map of Cuba divided into its fifteen distinct provinces, with Cienfuegos, her specific birthplace, proudly standing out. Behind the map is the country’s flag, featuring bright blue stripes purposefully designed to look like the rolling ocean waves where the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean meet. Deisy fled Cuba alongside her boyfriend in 2019 and chose to get the permanent ink knowing she would likely never be able to visit her native island again.

Another customer, José, a Dominican man, similarly came into the market to purchase the specific ingredients required to cook sancocho. Because his wife was unwell at the time, he was stepping in to help his sister-in-law prepare the traditional stew.

For Castillo, the store naturally functioned as an informal, multicultural classroom where she continuously absorbed knowledge about Haitian culinary traditions, Cuban comfort foods, and the subtle, fascinating regional variations of dishes like sancocho across different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.

However, Castillo is exceptionally careful to emphasize that Bodega Stories is by no means a romanticized, rose-tinted portrait of immigrant-owned entrepreneurship. She is deliberate about drawing a clear boundary between affection for the institution and the hard economic truths governing it.

"I don’t also want to romanticize bodegas because that would diminish the realities that bodegueros face," she states firmly.

Those daily realities encompass sharply rising operating costs and the increasingly precarious economics of running a small independent business, especially in competitive urban markets like New York City and Florida, where commercial rents have skyrocketed. They also involve the direct, emotional impacts of the ongoing immigration crisis unfolding immediately around them. Castillo shares that her parents have frequently comforted customers whose spouses or loved ones have been detained or subjected to deportation. Some individuals have walked straight into the store openly crying or expressing a sense of total defeat.

"It’s difficult for my parents to know what to do in that situation, but I think that they’ve always just tried to comfort their customers," she says.

That emotional sanctuary represents yet another vital, unspoken function of the traditional bodega: it remains a steadfast place where people can show up and seek solace even when their personal lives appear to be falling apart. Castillo recalls one customer whose husband had recently been detained for deportation. Despite the devastating personal disruption, life demanded immediate action.

"She still has to go to the store, and she still has to get dinner ready," she notes.

Shifting immigration policies and bureaucratic hurdles do not erase the fundamental human need for daily sustenance. Children still need to eat, families still need dinner prepared on the table, and the local bodega remains resolutely open amid the chaos.

Yet maintaining that essential community role is becoming increasingly difficult, particularly in places like New York, where relentless gentrification and surging overhead costs threaten the neighborhood bodegas that have historically served as lifelines for immigrant populations. For the actual store owners, this is not a matter of romantic nostalgia; it is their primary livelihood.

Castillo’s own parents have weathered notably difficult financial years. Sometimes, when she calls her mother to check in on the business, she is met with the disheartening news that things have been "very slow." While Florida was once widely perceived as offering distinct economic advantages over New York—including a historically lower cost of living—that landscape is rapidly transforming.

"There’s a lot of development in Florida," she observes. "Because everybody’s moving here."

Ironically, the internal migration patterns that helped establish flourishing new Latine communities—and subsequently new bodegas—are now directly contributing to the rising cost-of-living pressures threatening them. Ultimately, however, Bodega Stories stands as an enduring love letter to Castillo’s parents, who are now in their sixties and continue to put in long hours at the shop. Unsure of when or if they will ever be able to comfortably retire, she wanted to properly honor and document what they have built from the ground up. When she reflects on the traditional concept of the American dream, she sees something her parents have already successfully realized in their own right.

"They have achieved their own version of it," she says. "They are their own bosses. They’ve built this business into this beloved community cornerstone space that people continually go to and that they watched kids grow up into young adulthood in the store."

As a tangible testament to their decades of labor, her parents even managed to construct a retirement home in Salinas, a quiet fishing village located in the Dominican Republic, complete with dedicated rooms for Castillo and her own children. For the author, the bodega represents years of immense personal sacrifice made physically real.

When asked what ultimately motivated her to write extensively about her parents, their winding journey, and the diverse individuals she encountered at the counter, her answer remains grounded: "I want to validate their work. That’s something I’ve taken on," she says.

Even though the resulting book centers entirely on them and bears their dedication, it still does not always feel like enough to repay their efforts.

"I still feel like, what else can I do to show them that all their sacrifices are worth it?" she reflects. "I want them to feel like I see them."

Although Castillo originally embarked on the writing project primarily to document her family’s specific history and the everyday lives of their patrons, the broader social meaning of the book has inevitably shifted alongside the shifting political climate. At a time when immigrants are frequently reduced to polarizing political talking points, she passionately wants readers to see them simply as human beings.

"I want this to be something that people can sit with and immerse themselves in the lives of everyday people, especially Latino immigrants," she says. "I think especially in this time when immigrants are vilified left and right, I think it’s important to try to counter that with true stories. This is who we really are."

Above all else, Castillo wants readers to understand that the immigrant experience is never defined by a single, monolithic narrative. Instead, thousands of ordinary, profound stories unfold quietly every single day across the country—within homes, restaurants, beauty salons, churches, community centers, and, of course, neighborhood bodegas.

"Most of the people in this book… are just trying to make it," she says. "They’re just trying to live the best life they can live."

Even as traditional bodegas face an uncertain and challenging future against the tides of modern economic pressures, Castillo hopes readers will ultimately view them as vibrant spaces of joy and cultural preservation—an experience well worth fighting to protect.

"I would love for them to gain a greater appreciation for third spaces and a greater appreciation for bodegas and the livelihood that they provide for owners and bodega workers," she concludes. "And also the community and sense of belonging that they foster for many of their customers. That to me is a gift, and I think it’s something that we should try to protect and try to preserve."