For decades, small neighborhood bodegas have served as the vital heartbeat of Latine communities across the United States, most notably etching themselves into the cultural tapestry of New York City. Stocking shelves with everything from staple tropical items like plantains and casabe to familiar over-the-counter medicines, these corner shops have long functioned as physical and emotional bridges linking American urban life to the ancestral homelands of immigrant families. For generations of parents and abuelos, stepping into a bodega meant more than just running a quick errand. Finding trusted goods on the shelves and exchanging warm greetings in Spanish with the person behind the counter offered a deep, immediate sense of comfort, belonging, and community—a sanctuary where socioeconomic hurdles and citizenship statuses faded away.
That enduring cultural bridge inspired journalist and debut author Amaris Castillo to write Bodega Stories, a deeply personal memoir set for release by the University Press of Florida on September 8, 2026. Blending narrative prose with striking original photographs taken by Castillo herself, the forthcoming book captures the daily lives, quiet struggles, and resilient dreams of her Dominican immigrant parents and the diverse neighborhood patrons served by their family business, the Orlando Latin Market in St. Petersburg, Florida. The memoir explores not only Castillo’s formative experiences growing up surrounded by inventory and aisles, but also how working in the store trained her to observe human nature with acute curiosity, to proudly embrace her Dominican heritage, and to understand the profound ways in which our physical environments shape who we ultimately 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 navigating the vibrant streets of Crown Heights before her family relocated to Woodhaven, Queens, and eventually settled down in Florida during her high school years. Looking back, she recognizes that her unconventional, multicultural upbringing actively nurtured the storyteller lying dormant 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 initially set out to report and document the material for Bodega Stories, her vision extended far beyond merely recording the operational history of her parents’ storefront. Instead, she embarked on a broader chronicle of the everyday individuals whose paths crossed inside the shop—from the dedicated workers keeping the aisles stocked to the eclectic mix of regular customers walking through its doors.
Among those customers was Yanick, a Haitian woman who visited the market around New Year’s Day to purchase essential ingredients for soup joumou, the traditional, deeply symbolic Haitian dish inextricably tied to the nation’s hard-fought independence. Castillo watched closely as Yanick carefully selected pieces of calabaza squash and searched through the meat freezer for the right cuts of beef. At first, the young observer did not fully comprehend the significance of what was 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 explains.
Yanick later confirmed her suspicions, verifying that she was indeed preparing soup joumou to share with her family on January 1. For Castillo, that fleeting interaction crystallized a profound realization she had been observing inside her parents’ bodega all along: customers were rarely entering the store merely to shop for routine groceries. Rather, they were arriving with intent, actively seeking out 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" evokes an institution almost entirely synonymous with the city’s unique urban identity. It represents the quintessential tiny neighborhood shop where a patron can pick up anything from a hot morning bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich to fresh platanos, avocados, jars of Vicks VapoRub, and heavy-duty laundry detergent, usually with a sleepy bodega cat lounging somewhere nearby.
Although bodegas are frequently viewed exclusively through the lens of New York’s Puerto Rican and Dominican enclaves, Castillo situates these modern corner stores within a much longer, layered historical lineage of immigrant-run neighborhood shops established decades earlier by Italian, Irish, and Jewish newcomers. She emphasizes that Puerto Rican communities played a foundational role in establishing the very bodega culture that later waves of Dominican immigrants would step into and inherit.
"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 surged progressively through the 1960s, 1970s, and particularly the 1980s, a growing number of Dominican newcomers began purchasing established neighborhood bodegas from an aging generation of Puerto Rican proprietors. Castillo’s family ultimately joined this rich historical lineage, successfully transplanting authentic bodega culture down to the warmer climate of Florida. Their Dominican-owned enterprise, the Orlando Latin Market, has since 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 proudly.
Growing up embedded within the operations of the store—and later returning as a journalist to report for her book—introduced Castillo to a revolving cast of regular patrons whose ordinary shopping trips consistently revealed sweeping, larger-than-life narratives about culture, displacement, and familial devotion. Among them is a Cuban regular who routinely stops by to purchase fresh plantains because his wife delights in making chicharitas, the thinly sliced, crispy fried Cuban plantains popular across the island.
Then there is Deisy, a Cuban woman and former cashier who still drops by the market frequently just to catch up and reconnect with Castillo’s parents and her former coworkers. Deisy bears a striking, deeply personal tattoo depicting a map of Cuba carefully divided into its fifteen distinct provinces, with Cienfuegos, her specific birthplace, prominently highlighted. Etched behind the map is the vibrant national flag, its distinctive "bright blue stripes made to look like the waves where the Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean meet." Deisy fled Cuba alongside her boyfriend in an arduous journey in 2019 and chose to get the intricate ink knowing full well that she would likely never have the opportunity to physically set foot on her native island again.
Another regular, a Dominican customer named José, visited the market to gather the specific ingredients necessary to cook sancocho, a traditional, hearty Caribbean stew. With his wife currently struggling through a period of poor health, José was stepping up to assist his sister-in-law in preparing the comforting dish for the family.
For Castillo, the family store organically transformed into an informal, invaluable classroom where she absorbed rich lessons regarding Haitian culinary traditions, authentic Cuban regional cooking, and the myriad regional variations of sancocho spanning across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Yet, Bodega Stories steadfastly refuses to present a sanitized, overly romanticized portrait of immigrant-owned businesses. Castillo is exceptionally deliberate about maintaining this crucial distinction in her writing.
"I don’t also want to romanticize bodegas because that would diminish the realities that bodegueros face," she asserts.
Those harsh daily realities encompass skyrocketing operating costs, stubborn inflation, and the increasingly precarious economics of running a small independent business, particularly within fast-paced urban hubs like New York City and rapidly developing regions in Florida where commercial and residential rents have soared out of reach. They also encompass the heavy, emotional toll of the ongoing immigration crisis unfolding directly in their communities. Castillo shares that her parents have frequently found themselves listening to regular customers whose spouses, children, or closest loved ones have suddenly been swept up in deportations, leaving patrons walking into the store openly weeping and grappling with overwhelming feelings 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 says.
This comforting dynamic reveals yet another vital, underappreciated function of the modern neighborhood bodega: it remains a steadfast physical space where ordinary people can show up to find solace, even when their personal lives appear to be completely falling apart. Castillo vividly recalls one regular customer whose husband had recently been detained for deportation. Despite the crushing personal tragedy, basic survival demanded routine; she still had to manage her household.
"She still has to go to the store, and she still has to get dinner ready," Castillo points out.
Shifting immigration policies and bureaucratic enforcement do not magically erase the fundamental human need for basic sustenance. Children still need to eat, families still require warm dinners at the end of the day, and through it all, the local bodega keeps its doors unlocked and its lights turned on.
However, sustaining that essential role is becoming increasingly difficult, particularly in New York City, where surging overhead costs, aggressive corporate expansion, and rapid gentrification relentlessly threaten the neighborhood bodegas that have anchored immigrant communities for decades. For the hardworking owners behind the counters, this battle is entirely devoid of mere nostalgia—it represents their primary livelihood and survival.
Castillo’s own parents have endured their share of difficult, financially lean years running their store. She notes that during phone calls home to check in on the business, her mother will occasionally sigh and admit that foot traffic and sales have been "very slow." While Florida was once widely perceived as offering significant economic advantages over New York—including a more forgiving cost of living—that landscape is rapidly shifting beneath their feet.
"There’s a lot of development in Florida," she observes. "Because everybody’s moving here."
Ironically, the very waves of domestic and international migration that originally helped cultivate vibrant new Latine communities—and subsequently spawned fresh generations of local bodegas—are now major contributing factors to the surging cost of living in the region.
Ultimately, however, Bodega Stories serves as a profound, unreserved love letter to Castillo’s parents, who are now in their sixties and continue to log grueling hours behind the counter. Unsure of when or if financial realities will ever allow them the freedom to truly retire, she set out to deeply honor and document everything they have managed to build over a lifetime of labor. When she reflects upon the traditional concept of the American dream, she sees something tangible that her parents have already successfully achieved on their own terms.
"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 lifelong sacrifice, her parents even managed to construct a comfortable retirement home in Salinas, a quiet fishing village located in the Dominican Republic, complete with dedicated rooms reserved for Castillo and her own children. For the author, the bustling corner store represents years of relentless, backbreaking sacrifice made physically visible and enduring.
When asked directly what ultimately compelled her to write a book centering on her parents, their winding immigration journey, and the diverse cast of characters she encountered inside the bodega, her response is wonderfully straightforward: "I want to validate their work. That’s something I’ve taken on," she explains.
Even though the resulting book is explicitly about them and proudly dedicated to their legacy, 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 preserve her family’s personal history and capture the fleeting moments of those revolving through the aisles, the cultural and political resonance of the work has shifted dramatically alongside the shifting national climate. At a historical moment when immigrants are frequently flattened into hostile, reductionist political talking points across public discourse, she fiercely hopes readers will look past the rhetoric and recognize the complex humanity underneath.
"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 collective immigrant experience cannot be reduced to a single monolithic narrative. Thousands of ordinary, beautiful human stories quietly unfold every single day across the nation—inside residential homes, busy restaurants, local beauty salons, neighborhood churches, community centers, and, crucially, behind the crowded aisles of corner 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 economic future in a rapidly modernizing world, Castillo wants readers to view these institutions not with pity, but as centers of authentic human joy—an invaluable cultural experience well worth actively 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."
