Bodega Dreams

by Ernesto Quiñonez

East Harlem, a visionary drug dealer, and the dream of ownership.

For you if

you want to understand El Barrio through someone who grew up there and refuses to sentimentalize it

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

Supports independent bookstores

— OR —

Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$17 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

Willie Bodega runs drugs in East Harlem but reinvests everything in the community — paying rent for families, funding scholarships, buying buildings. He wants to be the man who gave Spanish Harlem back to its people. Quiñonez writes in a voice that carries the rhythms of the neighborhood — Spanish and English colliding, the bodega as the center of everything, the dream of ownership in a city that has spent a century taking from Puerto Ricans. A dispatch about what happens when someone decides that the only way to win is to play by rules nobody else will admit exist.

Where This Book Lives

Setting: Puerto Rico • Caribbean
Voice: Written by a Puerto Rican author
Themes: american dream urban poverty

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Capernaum(2018)

dir. Nadine Labaki

A kid sues his parents for giving him this life.

A Lebanese boy living on the street sues his parents for having him, and the film unwinds backward through the neglect and poverty that brought him there.

Why it’s here: Cast almost entirely with non-professional actors living some version of the story on screen — a 12-year-old's lawsuit against his own parents is the frame, but the real indictment is everything that made the lawsuit make sense to him.

Letterboxd ↗

Same pattern, different era

Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.

City of God

Paulo Lins