For decades, small neighborhood bodegas have served as the vital heartbeat of Latine communities across the United States, casting a particularly dense and enduring network across the five boroughs of New York City. Stocking everything from staples like plantains, casabe, and fresh avocados to familiar household medicines and cleaning supplies, these compact corner stores have long bridged the gap between everyday American life and the ancestral homelands families left behind. For generations of immigrant parents and abuelos, walking into a bodega meant stepping into a space where they could source comforting cultural goods, swap news, and speak Spanish with the person behind the counter. In doing so, these establishments offered a profound sense of belonging, comfort, and community, operating as a sanctuary that welcomed patrons regardless of their socioeconomic standing or citizenship status.
That rich cultural bridge and deeply personal history inspired journalist and debut author Amaris Castillo to write Bodega Stories, scheduled for release by the University Press of Florida on September 8, 2026. Through a powerful combination of narrative storytelling and original photography captured through her own lens, the forthcoming memoir captures the daily lives, quiet struggles, and enduring dreams of her Dominican immigrant parents and the diverse neighborhood served by their family-run business, Orlando Latin Market, located in St. Petersburg, Florida. The book explores not only Castillo’s unique childhood growing up amidst the cardboard boxes and display cases of the store, but also how those formative years taught her to observe human nature with profound curiosity, embrace her vibrant Dominican heritage, and deeply understand how the physical places of our youth shape who we become as adults.
Castillo reflects that her intrinsic fascination with people stretches all the way back to her distinctly Dominican and Caribbean upbringing in Brooklyn. She spent the first decade of her life navigating the bustling streets of Crown Heights before her family relocated to Woodhaven, Queens, ultimately settling in Florida during her high school years. Looking back, she is convinced that growing up in motion across these distinct cultural landscapes nurtured the observant storyteller within her.
Her creative instincts surfaced early. In the first grade, she won a competitive storytelling contest alongside two other children, crafting a physical book that ultimately found a home in a special museum exhibition in New York City. Years later, working behind the counter and beside the aisles of the family bodega placed her face-to-face with a sprawling cast of unique neighborhood characters. Day in and day out, she watched humanity unfold in its purest forms, observing both the absolute best and the most difficult aspects of human behavior from a front-row seat.
When Castillo formally began reporting and compiling material for Bodega Stories, she quickly realized her mission extended far beyond simply documenting the business history of her parents’ enterprise. She was actively chronicling the intricate, often invisible lives of the store’s dedicated workers and the diverse array of customers who stepped across its threshold day after day.
Among those patrons was a Haitian customer named Yanick, who walked into the store around New Year’s Day intent on purchasing specialized ingredients to prepare soup joumou, the traditional, richly symbolic Haitian soup inextricably linked to the nation’s hard-fought independence. Castillo watched as Yanick carefully selected pieces of calabaza squash and searched through the meat freezer in search of beef. At first, the young observer did not fully comprehend the cultural significance of what she was witnessing right in front of her.
Spurred by curiosity, Castillo began researching Haitian culinary traditions online and quickly experienced a moment of profound realization. She understood that Yanick was meticulously gathering elements for a dish that carried immense emotional and historical weight for Haitians celebrating their heritage at the start of the calendar year.
Yanick later confirmed her suspicions, explaining that she was indeed preparing soup joumou for her family to mark January 1. For Castillo, that single encounter crystallized a larger truth she had been observing inside her parents’ bodega all along: customers were not merely stopping by for routine grocery shopping trips. They were searching for tangible pieces of home.
The author describes watching people arrive at the store driven by a distinct purpose, frequently seeking out the exact foods they loved, found comfort in, and recognized as familiar. These items served as a direct conduit back to their culture, reinforcing the fundamental reality that food is an inseparable pillar of personal and collective identity.
For residents of New York City, the word "bodega" holds a near-mythic status, feeling almost synonymous with the urban identity of the city itself. It represents the quintessential tiny neighborhood shop where a patron can acquire virtually anything—from a hot morning bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich to platanos, fresh avocados, a tin of Vicks VapoRub, or household laundry detergent—usually accompanied by a sleepy bodega cat keeping watch nearby.
Although bodegas are frequently conflated exclusively with New York’s prominent Puerto Rican and Dominican communities, Castillo contextualizes these neighborhood fixtures within a much broader, historical lineage of immigrant-founded corner shops established by Italian, Irish, and Jewish arrivals before them. She notes that earlier waves of Puerto Rican communities helped lay the foundational groundwork for the bodega culture that Dominican immigrants would later inherit and expand upon.
During the 1920s, Puerto Rican entrepreneurs opened numerous bodegas, restaurants, botanicas, and boarding houses across the city, truly paving the way for the wave of Dominican business owners who followed decades later. As Dominican migration to New York accelerated through the 1960s, 1970s, and particularly the 1980s, a significant number of arriving Dominican immigrants began purchasing established bodegas from aging Puerto Rican proprietors ready to retire.
Castillo’s family became a part of that ongoing lineage, eventually transporting bodega culture southward to the state of Florida. Their Dominican-owned enterprise, Orlando Latin Market, has steadily adapted over the years to serve an even broader multicultural demographic, which notably includes a substantial and thriving Cuban residential community. Even in a different geographic climate, the family clings to the terminology of their roots; as Castillo notes, her parents still refer to it as a bodega, and the family continues to use the word with pride.
Growing up inside the store and later conducting deeper reporting for her book introduced Castillo to everyday customers whose ordinary errands revealed compelling, larger narratives about culture, displacement, and family devotion. One regular visitor is a Cuban man who makes regular trips specifically to buy plantains because his wife loves preparing chicharitas, the thinly sliced, crispy fried plantains popular in Cuban cuisine. Another familiar face is Deisy, a Cuban woman and former cashier who still stops by the store simply to catch up with Castillo’s parents and former colleagues.
Deisy carries a deeply personal testament etched onto her skin: a tattoo depicting a map of Cuba divided into its fifteen distinct provinces, with her birthplace of Cienfuegos highlighted prominently. Behind the map flies the Cuban flag, its bright blue stripes designed to visually mimic the rolling 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 full well that she would likely never be able to return to visit her native island again.
Similarly, a Dominican customer named José once visited the store to gather the specific ingredients needed to cook sancocho, a hearty traditional stew. Because his wife was suffering from poor health, he stepped up to help his sister-in-law prepare the massive meal for the family.
For Castillo, the store naturally evolved into an informal cultural classroom where she absorbed firsthand knowledge regarding Haitian culinary traditions, Cuban comfort foods, and the subtle regional variations of sancocho spanning across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Yet, despite the deep affection embedded within its pages, Bodega Stories steadfastly avoids painting an overly romanticized portrait of immigrant-owned small businesses. Castillo remains rigorously intentional about maintaining that distinction. She notes that romanticizing the daily reality of running these shops would actively diminish the very real struggles and harsh economic pressures faced by contemporary bodegueros.
Those difficult realities encompass soaring operational costs, inflation, and the increasingly precarious economics of maintaining a small business in major urban centers like New York City and rapidly developing regions of Florida, where commercial rents have skyrocketed. Furthermore, the human toll of the broader immigration crisis unfolding across the country touches the store’s customer base directly. Castillo shares that her parents have repeatedly listened to patrons who arrive devastated after learning that a spouse or close loved one has been detained or deported. Some customers have broken down in tears inside the aisles, overwhelmed by a deep sense of defeat and uncertainty.
While it is frequently difficult for her parents to know how best to intervene in such devastating circumstances, they have consistently chosen to offer a comforting shoulder, a listening ear, and a welcoming environment. This points to another vital, understated function of the neighborhood bodega: it serves as a resilient space where ordinary people can show up and seek a moment of stability even when the rest of their personal lives appear to be falling apart.
Castillo recalls a specific customer whose husband was abruptly detained by immigration enforcement. Despite facing a terrifying new reality and a fractured household, the woman still had basic responsibilities to shoulder. She still needed to walk to the store, purchase provisions, and return home to get dinner ready for her children. Shifting immigration policies do not erase the fundamental biological needs of everyday life; children still require sustenance, families still need dinner on the table, and through it all, the neighborhood bodega keeps its doors unlocked.
That essential community role, however, is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, particularly in places like New York City, where relentless gentrification and compounding overhead expenses threaten the existence of neighborhood bodegas that have anchored immigrant populations for generations. For the business owners who keep the lights on, operating these stores is not a nostalgic exercise or a hobby; it is a vital, hands-on livelihood.
Castillo’s own parents have weathered notoriously difficult financial seasons. There have been times when she has called her mother to check on the status of the business, only to hear the discouraging news that things have been exceedingly slow. Although Florida was once perceived as offering distinct economic advantages over New York—including a more manageable cost of living—that landscape is transforming rapidly. Castillo notes that massive development projects are remaking the state because an influx of people continues to move into the region.
Ironically, the very waves of internal migration that helped build new Latine communities and spark new bodegas in the American South are simultaneously fueling rising costs and economic pressures.
Ultimately, Bodega Stories functions as a profound love letter to Castillo’s parents, who are now in their sixties and still laboring long hours inside the store. Unsure of when or if they will ever be in a financial position to truly retire, she set out to honor, validate, and permanently document what they have built from the ground up. When she contemplates the true meaning of the American dream, she sees something her parents have already manifested in tangible ways. They have achieved their own unique version of it: they serve as their own bosses, and they have successfully transformed a simple commercial enterprise into a beloved cornerstone of community life where they have watched local children grow from infancy into young adulthood right before their eyes.
Her parents’ hard work has materialized physically as well. They managed to build a modest retirement home in Salinas, a quiet fishing village situated in the Dominican Republic, complete with designated rooms for Castillo and her own children. For the author, this home stands as years of exhausting sacrifice made visible and permanent.
When asked what originally compelled her to write about her parents, their winding journey, and the diverse individuals she encountered across the shop floor, her motivation was remarkably straightforward. She wanted to validate their relentless labor, a responsibility she willingly took upon her own shoulders. Even though the resulting book is entirely about them and dedicated to their legacy, she admits that it still sometimes feels insufficient. She frequently wonders what else she can possibly do to demonstrate to them that every single sacrifice they made was entirely worth it, wanting nothing more than for them to truly feel seen.
Although Castillo initially embarked on the literary project to document her immediate family’s history and the lives of those orbiting their store, the book’s overarching cultural resonance has shifted in response to the volatile contemporary political climate. At a time when immigrants are frequently reduced to flat political talking points and targets of hostility, she hopes readers will look past the rhetoric and recognize the full humanity of the people being discussed.
She intends for the book to serve as an immersive window into the authentic lives of everyday people, particularly Latino immigrants. In an era where immigrants face constant vilification from various political corners, Castillo believes it is crucial to counter those narratives with genuine, grounded human stories that reflect who these individuals truly are.
Above all, Castillo hopes readers walk away with the understanding that immigrant life cannot be reduced to a singular, monolithic narrative. Every single day, thousands of ordinary, compelling stories quietly unfold across homes, restaurants, beauty salons, churches, community centers, and neighborhood bodegas. The vast majority of people featured in her book are simply trying to make ends meet and live the most dignified, fulfilling lives possible.
Even as traditional bodegas face an uncertain economic future in a rapidly modernizing nation, Castillo wants readers to view these spaces as centers of genuine joy and human connection—an irreplaceable cultural experience well worth preserving. She hopes the public develops a deeper appreciation for physical third spaces, the economic livelihoods these small businesses provide for their operators and workers, and the profound sense of belonging they foster for their loyal patrons. That sense of community, she emphasizes, is a rare gift that society should actively strive to protect and sustain.
