For decades, bodegas have served as the vibrant anchors of Latine communities across the United States, playing a particularly iconic role in the cultural landscape of New York City. Stocking everything from staples like plantains and casabe to trusted over-the-counter medicines, these modest neighborhood shops have long bridged the gap between American daily life and the native countries of immigrant families. For countless parents and grandparents, walking into a local bodega to find familiar goods and converse in Spanish with the person behind the counter offered an immediate sense of comfort, belonging, and community, completely independent of socioeconomic standing or citizenship status.
This profound cultural bridge serves as the inspiration behind Bodega Stories, a forthcoming memoir by journalist and debut author Amaris Castillo. Slated for publication by the University Press of Florida on September 8, 2026, the book combines narrative prose with original photography captured by Castillo herself. The memoir intimately chronicles the lives, daily struggles, and enduring dreams of her Dominican immigrant parents, as well as the diverse community served by their family business, Orlando Latin Market, located in St. Petersburg, Florida. Beyond exploring her unique upbringing inside the aisles of the store, the book examines how growing up in a bustling retail environment taught her to observe humanity with deep curiosity, embrace her rich Dominican heritage, and understand how the physical places of our youth profoundly shape who we become.
"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 growing up in Crown Heights before her family relocated to Woodhaven, Queens, ultimately settling in Florida during her high school years. Looking back, she believes her formative experiences naturally nurtured the storyteller within her.
"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 began the reporting process for Bodega Stories, her objective extended far beyond merely documenting the history of her parents’ establishment. She set out to capture the genuine human experiences of the store’s workers and the eclectic mix of customers who walked through its doors day after day.
One such encounter involved Yanick, a Haitian customer who visited the market around New Year’s Day to gather specific ingredients for soup joumou, the traditional Haitian soup deeply associated with the nation’s independence. Castillo watched as the customer carefully selected pieces of calabaza squash and searched through the meat freezer for beef. At first, the underlying significance of the transaction did not immediately register.
"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 explains.
Yanick later confirmed that she was indeed preparing the traditional dish for her family to mark the January 1 holiday. For Castillo, the fleeting moment crystallized a profound reality she had been observing inside her parents’ bodega all along: customers were rarely visiting the store strictly for routine grocery shopping. Instead, they were 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 feels almost inextricably linked to the metropolitan identity itself. It evokes the image of a tiny neighborhood corner store where one can purchase everything from a classic bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich to platanos, avocados, Vicks VapoRub, and laundry detergent, usually accompanied by a friendly bodega cat lounging nearby.
Although bodegas are frequently viewed as synonymous with New York’s Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhoods, Castillo places these institutions within a much broader historical trajectory of immigrant entrepreneurship. She notes that neighborhood shops were previously established by generations of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, and emphasizes that Puerto Rican communities played a vital foundational role by helping to establish the very bodega culture that later immigrants would inherit.
"In the 1920s, especially Puerto Ricans, they opened a bunch of bodegas, restaurants, botanicas, and boarding houses," she says. "So they really helped pave the way for Dominicans, I would say, with bodegas."
As Dominican immigration to New York surged through the 1960s, 1970s, and particularly the 1980s, a wave of Dominican immigrants began purchasing storefronts from aging Puerto Rican proprietors. Castillo’s family eventually joined this immigrant lineage, successfully transplanting bodega culture down to the sunnier climate of Florida. Their Dominican-owned business, 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.
Growing up inside the market and later returning to document its daily rhythm introduced Castillo to regular shoppers whose ordinary errands revealed larger, deeply moving narratives about culture, displacement, and family resilience. Among them is a Cuban customer who routinely purchases plantains because his wife delights in making chicharitas, the thinly sliced and fried plantain snack popular in Cuba. Another familiar face is Deisy, a Cuban woman and former cashier who still drops by the store simply to catch up with Castillo’s parents and former colleagues. Deisy bears a striking tattoo depicting a map of Cuba divided into its fifteen provinces, with Cienfuegos, her birthplace, highlighted with distinct prominence. Behind the geographic map lies the nation’s flag, its bright blue stripes artfully designed to resemble the turbulent ocean waves where the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean converge. Deisy fled her homeland alongside her boyfriend in 2019 and chose to get the permanent artwork knowing she would likely never see her island again.
Similarly, a Dominican customer named José visited the market to purchase ingredients necessary for sancocho. Because his wife was unwell, he was stepping in to help his sister-in-law prepare the traditional stew.
For Castillo, the family business functioned as an informal cultural classroom where she absorbed firsthand knowledge of Haitian culinary traditions, Cuban comfort foods, and the subtle regional variations of sancocho found across Latin America and the Caribbean.
However, Bodega Stories explicitly avoids painting a romanticized portrait of immigrant-owned commerce. Castillo is careful to draw a firm distinction when discussing the realities of the trade.
"I don’t also want to romanticize bodegas because that would diminish the realities that bodegueros face," she points out.
Those unvarnished realities involve escalating operating costs and the increasingly precarious economics of maintaining a small business, particularly in major metropolitan hubs like New York City and rapidly developing areas of Florida where commercial rents have skyrocketed. They also encompass the heavy emotional toll of the immigration crisis unfolding directly around them. Castillo shares that her parents have frequently listened to customers grapple with the devastating impacts of deportation, with spouses or close loved ones suddenly detained or removed from the country. Some patrons have walked into the store visibly shaken, weeping, or consumed by a deep sense of 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 notes.
This emotional support highlights another essential function of the traditional bodega: it serves as a steadfast physical space where people can show up, seek solace, and maintain their dignity even when their personal lives feel as though they are falling apart. Castillo recalls one customer whose husband was detained by immigration authorities, leaving her with the daunting task of continuing to care for her children.
"She still has to go to the store, and she still has to get dinner ready," she says.
Shifting immigration policies and political pressures do not erase the fundamental human need for basic sustenance. Children still need to eat, families still require dinner, and amidst turbulent external circumstances, the bodega remains open.
Yet sustaining that vital community role is growing increasingly difficult, particularly in New York, where soaring inflation, operational costs, and aggressive gentrification continually threaten the neighborhood bodegas that have long served as lifelines for immigrant populations. For the dedicated owners who run them, these businesses are not matters of nostalgic sentimentality; they are essential livelihoods.
Castillo’s own parents have navigated their share of difficult financial years. There are times when she calls her mother to check in on the business, only to be told that trade has been exceptionally slow. While Florida may have once offered distinct economic advantages over New York, including a more manageable cost of living, that dynamic is shifting rapidly.
"There’s a lot of development in Florida," she observes. "Because everybody’s moving here."
Ironically, the internal migration trends that helped foster the growth of new Latine communities—and subsequently new bodegas—are now contributing directly to the rising cost of living. Ultimately, however, Bodega Stories stands as an enduring love letter to Castillo’s parents, who are now in their sixties and continue to work grueling hours. Unsure of when they might finally achieve financial security and retirement, she wanted to honor and permanently document what they have built over a lifetime of labor. When she reflects on the broader concept of the American dream, she recognizes something her parents have already successfully materialized 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 testament to their perseverance, her parents even managed to construct a retirement home in Salinas, a quiet fishing village in the Dominican Republic, complete with dedicated rooms set aside for Castillo and her own children. For the author, the physical market represents years of intense personal sacrifice translated into tangible reality.
When asked what ultimately motivated her to write about her parents, their arduous journey, and the remarkable individuals she encountered across the shop floor, her answer remains grounded: "I want to validate their work. That’s something I’ve taken on," she explains.
Even though the book centers on them and carries a dedicated tribute, it still feels incomplete to her.
"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 the book project initially began as an effort to document her family’s personal narrative and the everyday lives of the surrounding community, its broader resonance has inevitably shifted alongside the contemporary political climate. At a time when immigrants are frequently reduced to polarizing political talking points, Castillo hopes readers will look past the rhetoric and see real 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, Castillo wants readers to understand that the immigrant experience is never defined by a single monolithic narrative. Thousands of ordinary stories unfold every single day across homes, restaurants, salons, churches, community centers, and neighborhood bodegas.
"Most of the people in this book… are just trying to make it," she notes. "They’re just trying to live the best life they can live."
Even as traditional bodegas face an increasingly uncertain future in a rapidly changing economic landscape, Castillo hopes readers will continue to view them as spaces of shared joy—an invaluable cultural experience well worth protecting and preserving.
"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."
