For the inveterate wordsmith, this outpouring of pleasure results in an intriguing thriller: How and when did a Spanish phrase which means “cellar” or “storeroom” come to be assimilated into English as synonymous with a comfort retailer, usually family-owned and open all night time?
During the primary half of the nineteenth century, “bodega” discovered its approach into English-speaking accounts of travels in Spain and Latin America, often in reference to the sale or storage of wine. By the 1870s, a wine store referred to as “The Bodega” had two places in decrease Manhattan. (A reviewer discovered the premises “excellently fitted up with all conveniences for the use of customers, including chairs and tables, a free lunch counter, etc.” to learn shoppers who had been primarily “the business men of the community.”)
As early as 1902, the time period was utilized in English as a Spanish phrase encompassing grocery retailer. That’s when William Eleroy Curtis, who served as U.S. Commissioner to a variety of nations in Latin America, wrote: “A friend in Caracas one day took me into a bodega, or grocery, kept by a former servant in his family who got his capital as a prize in a lottery.” A fawning 1940 New York Times profile of Cuban President Fulgencia Batista advised readers that the soon-to-be-dictator as soon as “clerked in a bodega,” which the paper described as “Cuba’s combination of grocery and bar.”
When was the phrase first utilized to neighborhood grocery shops within the U.S. typically or the Big Apple specifically? The Oxford English Dictionary traces this definition to 1956, when Time journal included the time period parenthetically in an article about New York’s rising Puerto Rican inhabitants: “Almost every sector of the city has a bodega (grocery) or two, and perhaps a Spanish-language movie house.”(2)
But we will return earlier. In her definitive quantity on the historical past of New York’s Puerto Rican group, the historian Virginia Sánchez Korrol quotes a current arrival who remembers working for the American Manufacturing Company in Greenpoint throughout the 1910s: “There was a small bodega on Franklyn Avenue near the factory which was owned by friends of mine and they sold hot lunches to the factory people.”
To make certain, it’s potential that the time period bodega was not in widespread use again then, however was as a substitute utilized by the employee to make clear a later recollection. Yet it’s clear that by World War II, the utilization was common. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a 1934 article in The New Yorker that talked about a “grocery and meat business” that was “called, in vast letters, La Flor de Quintana Roo — Bodega y Carnecería.”
And there’s extra. In her much-cited 1945 doctoral dissertation, Patria Aran Gosnell studied promoting in newspapers aimed toward New York’s Spanish-language newspapers group and located “an ever-increasing tendency on the part of Puerto Ricans to use distinctive names for their enterprises in the city” — together with “bodega,” which for the advantage of readers, she translated as merely “grocery store.” Elsewhere within the dissertation, Aran Gosnell herself used “bodega” as a generic time period for grocery shops.(3)
Mainstream papers quickly caught on. By 1950, the New York Daily News included coupons that may very well be redeemed at a lengthy checklist of shops, together with some explicitly referred to as bodegas. The time period quickly grew to become widespread within the promoting columns of town’s dailies.
By the Nineteen Sixties, the parentheticals had vanished. “Bagel-Bodega Area Gets Own Museum,” the New York Herald Tribune proclaimed in 1960, not troubling to outline “bodega” for its readers. “Pushcarts have given way to bodegas,” ran the headline on a 1965 New York Times article about a Bronx neighborhood. Again, the story supplied no definition. Thus it’s truthful to say that town’s editors had determined that their readers knew the phrase. In 1970, the Times even dropped at the overall reader the phrase “bodegeros” to explain the shop’s house owners.
Today, no person can agree on precisely what number of bodegas exist within the metropolis. Bloomberg places the quantity at 13,000. The official rely is simply over 7,000. A 2021 Grubstreet research estimates 8,000 bodegas, though solely 16 used types of the phrase of their names. (“Organic” and “gourmet” had been much more widespread.) Whatever the right determine, the beloved establishments are below menace.
Bodegas have lengthy been struggling. During the pandemic, a whole lot if not 1000’s collapsed. Others are barely surviving – significantly in high-crime neighborhoods. If the change to on-line procuring proves a permanent structural change, many extra will probably be in bother.
And that may be tragic. Richard Sennett, in his marvelous guide “Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City,” compares grand city avenues to exclamation factors and aspect streets to semicolons. Arriving at a nook, writes Sennett, “the urbanite experiences a shift in focus, a little sensory jolt.” One might proceed alongside the primary boulevard, or stroll a aspect avenue to discover what Sennett calls extra “modest” retail.
Bodegas, very a lot a side-street phenomenon, make immeasurable contributions to town’s richness.
And great late-night sandwiches.
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(1) The OED doesn’t warn the phrase sleuth that the article views Puerto Ricans by way of a considerably derogatory lens.
(2) Scholars have currently lamented how Aran Gosnell’s work was so lengthy neglected by historians. Some have accused her husband, Charles Frances Gosnell, of basing a few of his personal revealed articles on her analysis, however with out attribution.
This column doesn’t essentially replicate the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its house owners.
Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of legislation at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. His novels embody “The Emperor of Ocean Park,” and his newest nonfiction guide is “Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”
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