Amaris Castillo’s ‘Bodega Stories’ Is a Love Letter to the Bodega Culture That Raised Her (Interview)

For decades, bodegas have anchored Latine communities across the U.S., particularly in New York City. Stocking everything from plantains and casabe to familiar medicines, they bridged our American lives and the countries our families came from. For many of our parents and abuelos, finding those goods—and speaking Spanish with the people behind the counter—offered comfort, belonging, and community, regardless of socioeconomic or citizenship status.

For journalist and debut author Amaris Castillo, that cultural bridge inspired Bodega Stories, which the University Press of Florida will release on September 8, 2026. Through stories and photographs Castillo took herself, the memoir captures the lives, struggles, and dreams of her Dominican immigrant parents and the communities served by their bodega, Orlando Latin Market, in St. Petersburg, Florida. It explores not only her experience growing up in the store, but also how it taught her to observe people with curiosity, embrace her Dominican heritage, and understand how the places we grow up 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 says. She spent the first decade of her life in Crown Heights before her family moved to Woodhaven, Queens, and eventually settled in Florida when she was in high school. In many ways, she believes, her upbringing nurtured the storyteller in 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,” says Castillo. “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 reporting for Bodega Stories, she wasn’t just documenting the history of her parents’ store. She was also chronicling the lives of its workers and the customers who walked through its doors.

Yanick, a Haitian customer, came in around New Year’s to buy ingredients for soup joumou, the traditional Haitian soup associated with the country’s independence. Castillo watched her pick up pieces of calabaza and search the meat freezer for beef. At first, she didn’t realize what she was witnessing.

“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 making soup joumou for her family on January 1. For Castillo, the moment clarified something she had been witnessing inside her parents’ bodega all along: Customers weren’t simply shopping for groceries. They were looking for pieces of home.

“I felt like I was watching in real time people coming to the store with a reason, with a purpose,” she says. “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 New Yorkers, the word bodega can feel almost synonymous with the city itself. It’s the tiny neighborhood store where you can buy everything from a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich to platanos, avocados, Vicks VapoRub, and laundry detergent, often with a bodega cat somewhere nearby.

Though bodegas can feel synonymous with New York’s Puerto Rican and Dominican communities, Castillo places them in a longer history of neighborhood shops serving Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants. She says Puerto Rican communities helped establish the bodega culture Dominican immigrants would later 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 increased in the 1960s, ’70s, and especially ’80s, some Dominican immigrants began purchasing bodegas from aging Puerto Rican owners.

Castillo’s family joined that lineage, bringing bodega culture to Florida. Their Dominican-owned Orlando Latin Market has adapted to serve a broader community, including many Cuban residents.

“My parents, they still call it a bodega. We call it a bodega,” she says.

Growing up in the store and later reporting for the book introduced Castillo to customers whose ordinary shopping trips revealed larger stories about culture and family. One customer is a Cuban man who comes in for plantains because his wife loves to make chicharitas, thinly sliced and fried Cuban plantains. Then there’s Deisy, a Cuban woman and former cashier who still visits to catch up with Castillo’s parents and her former co-workers. Deisy has a tattoo of a map of Cuba divided into fifteen provinces, with Cienfuegos, her birthplace, standing out. Behind the map is the country’s flag, its “bright blue stripes made to look like the waves where the Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean meet.” Deisy fled Cuba with her boyfriend in 2019 and got the tattoo, knowing she would probably never visit her island again.

José, a Dominican customer, also came to buy ingredients for sancocho. His wife wasn’t doing well, so he was going to help his sister-in-law make the dish.

For Castillo, the store also became an informal classroom, where she learned about Haitian traditions, Cuban food, and variations of sancocho across Latin America and the Caribbean.

But what Bodega Stories isn’t is a romantic portrait of immigrant-owned businesses. Castillo is careful about that distinction.

“I don’t also want to romanticize bodegas because that would diminish the realities that bodegueros face,” she says.

Those realities include rising costs and the increasingly difficult economics of running a business, particularly in places like New York City and Florida, where rents have soared. They also include the immigration crisis unfolding around them. Castillo says her parents have heard from customers whose spouses or loved ones have been deported. Some have come into the store crying or feeling defeated.

“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’s another function of the bodega: It’s a place where people can show up even when their lives are falling apart. Castillo recalls one customer whose husband was picked up for deportation. Still, she had to take care of her family.

“She still has to go to the store, and she still has to get dinner ready,” she says.

Immigration policy doesn’t erase the need for groceries. Children still need to eat, families still need dinner, and the bodega remains open amid it all.

But that role is becoming harder to sustain in New York, where rising costs and gentrification threaten the neighborhood bodegas that have long served immigrant communities. For owners, this isn’t nostalgia. It’s a livelihood.

Castillo’s parents have also faced difficult financial years. Sometimes she’ll call her mother to ask how business is going, only to hear that things have been “very slow.” Florida may once have offered economic advantages over New York, including a lower cost of living, but that is changing.

“There’s a lot of development in Florida,” she says. “Because everybody’s moving here.”

The migration that helped create new Latine communities—and new bodegas—is also contributing to rising costs. Ultimately, though, Bodega Stories is a love letter to Castillo’s parents, who are now in their 60s and still working. Unsure when they’ll be able to retire, she wanted to honor and document what they’ve built. When she thinks about the American dream, she sees something they’ve already achieved in many ways.

“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.”

Her parents even built a retirement home in Salinas, a fishing village in the Dominican Republic, where Castillo and her children have their own rooms. For her, the bodega represents years of sacrifice made tangible.

When I asked what led her to write about her parents, their journey, and the people she met at the bodega, her answer was simple: “I want to validate their work. That’s something I’ve taken on,” she says.

Even though the book is about them and dedicated to them, it still doesn’t feel like enough.

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

Though Castillo began the book to document her family’s story and the lives of the people around them, its meaning has shifted with the political climate. As immigrants are increasingly reduced to political talking points, she wants readers to see them as people.

“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 immigrant life is not a single story. Thousands of ordinary stories unfold every day—in homes, restaurants, salons, churches, community centers, and, yes, 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 bodegas face an uncertain future, Castillo wants readers to see them as places of joy—an experience worth 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 says. “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.”