Bodega Dreams
by Ernesto Quiñonez
East Harlem, a visionary drug dealer, and the dream of ownership.
you want to understand El Barrio through someone who grew up there and refuses to sentimentalize it
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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
