| Sumario: | This article examines how Bodega Dreams (Ernesto Quiñonez 2000) engages post-1960s Nuyorican literary aesthetics. I argue Quiñonez simultaneously draws on and challenges these aesthetics' efficacy in community empowerment. Bodega Dreams speaks most closely to Piri Thomas' germinal novel, Down These Mean Streets (1967; 1997), which depicted East Harlem as a sanctuary from racist Anglo America. Bodega Dreams, however, implies East Harlem's streets are now mean because of social hierarchies amongst Puerto Ricans. By examining shared contexts of Civil Rights era Nuyorican literature and Quiñonez's contemporary novel, I show how Quiñonez's novel functions as narrative of fracture that deconstructs geographic, class, and ethnonational difference threatening Puerto Rican solidarity.
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