The postmodern ethnic condition in Ernesto Quiñónez’s Bodega Dreams

American Ethnic and Immigrant Novels: A Mere Commodity or a Discourse of Resistance and Reformation?

“…Moreover, by concluding the novel referring to the important and famous figures: "Zapata, Albizu Campos, Sandino, Martí, and Malcolm, along with a million Adelitas," 32 who were part of major political activism, various revolutions, and the Civil Rights Movement, Quiñónez, in Elías Domínguez Barajas' words, "advocates an anachronistic revival of the ethnic consciousness and solidarity that drove the civil rights movements of 1960s and early 1970s." 33 Domínguez Barajas further adds that although Bodega Dreams refuses to endorse a particular way of correcting social inequality, the novel does posit the possibility of "an alternate moral code as a permutation of the idealized political project of the fading civil rights movement." 34 Based on the social perspective captured in Bodega Dreams and Jesús Colón's A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1961), we conclude that in the span of four decades not much has changed concerning the socio-economic condition of Latinos in the United States.…”