Word: bodega
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...surrounding water by recycling heat from its swimming muscles. This allows great whites to hunt in cooler seas. "It seems to make them more vigorous," says Van Sommeran. The sharks are voracious eaters of seals when they patrol the Red Triangle--a 100-mile strip of California coast from Bodega Bay to Santa Cruz. They have enormous livers to store energy, and can go for months without eating. Nobody has seen great whites mate, but some biologists theorize that after fattening up off the coast, they head into the deep to procreate...
Columbia Market, a small Spanish bodega in the heart of Area 4, is one such store. The signs are in multiple languages, and the products inside are just as diverse. Fruits and exotic vegetables line the floors...
...Willie Bodega's dreams are more ambitious and outrageous. A drug lord who uses profits from the trade to renovate condemned apartment buildings, finance scholarships and provide seed money for business ventures, Bodega is working hard to enter the mainstream. "I'm talking about owning the neighborhood legally," he says. "The way the Kennedys own Boston." He and his acolytes envision a Spanish Harlem populated by professionals born and bred in the neighborhood--and beholden to Bodega's largesse...
Eventually, Bodega's forces try to recruit Chino. "It's about upward mobility," Bodega's right-hand man tells Chino. The temptation is hard to resist. "Why not us?" Chino asks himself. "If these dreams...take off, El Barrio would burn like a roman candle, bright and proud...
Quinonez knows this 'hood--readers may have to remind themselves that this is a work of fiction and not a memoir. His prose, detailed and passionate, brings the tale to life. Though operating from different moral bases, Chino and Bodega share the same dream: to make Spanish Harlem a neighborhood where moving up doesn't have to mean moving...