THE BODEGA
A Cornerstone of Puerto Rican Barrios (The Justo Martí Collection)
By Carlos Sanabria
Published 2016
48 pages; 8.5 x 8.5
ISBN: 978-1-945662-06-5 (paperback)
About this book
The Bodega: A Cornerstone of Puerto Rican Barrios (The Justo Martí Collection) by Carlos Sanbria. From the 1940s to the 1970s bodegas, those ubiquitous corner-stores, in New York City’s barrios were more than places where Puerto Rican recent immigrants bought their groceries. As the photographs in this photo-essay book demonstrates, they were also anchors for the social and cultural life of neighborhoods. This photo book is based on a selection of bodega pictures taken by the well-known photographer of New York’s Latino life Justo Martí.
Table of Contents
About the Author
Carlos Sanabria is a professor of Latin American Studies at Hostos Community College
Reviews
Justo Marti’s collection of photographs of bodegas in the 1960s embodies images of a Puerto Rican community in New York City at a point of great promise as well as of great social challenges. As the son of a bodeguero and nephew of many bodegueros, I grew up in the Los Sures section of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg witnessing both the promise and tragedy of this community institution. While at the same time that the bodega stands as a testament to the legal and extra-legal entrepreneurial spirit of the Puerto Rican people at a time when the culture of poverty projected a welfare-dependent community, the bodega also reminds one of the loss of an important Puerto Rican path to the American middle class. It is notable that today the word “bodega” has gone from being identified as a small Puerto Rican grocery store to become a general term for these establishments regardless of the national-origin of the owners or its size. In Marti’s photographs of bodegas I see a tribute to my late and beloved bodeguero-bolitero father, Mel, and his generation of bodegueros who helped to define much of the Puerto Rican experience in this city in making New York the unique multicultural urban center that it is today. Angelo Falcón— President, National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP)
