Gentrified Bodega

the Corner Market, the Boutique Grocery

Chiseled paper rectangles with perforated edges in magenta, chartreuse, and indigo hues move on the breeze, strung up between metal parking signage, the peach-tone stucco building facade, and a ‘curtain fig’ disrupting the pavement and providing safe harbor for weeds. Above a wide stone stoop, yellow and red onions, bananas, potatoes, and avocados stack high in wooden bins, with nuts, snack mix, and cinnamon sticks housed below. Two glass doors framed in blue-painted metal and peppered with posters relay information about EBT use, health-conscious eating, and a variety of upcoming neighborhood events, next to an enormous advertisement for Blue Bunny ice cream. The doors are swung wide to a bank of refrigerators housing broccoli, all variety of peppers, bright bunches of Mexican cilantro and parsley, tubs of salsa, and a bounty of ‘California-grown produce’.

Like any human accustomed to city living, when I first move back to Los Angeles I intuitively seek a certain kind of familiarity. Biking to Super King up San Fernando or Superior Grocer on Figueroa feels something like the Supremo Food Market on Walnut in West Philly, or the Key Foods on Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn, the Hawthorne Costco of my childhood, Berkeley Bowl in the East Bay, or the Japantown Safeway in San Francisco. The street intersections and supermarket aisles carry ghosts. East coasters on the west coast, B & I keep a running list of spots that we can pop into for a breakfast sandwich: Best Donuts in Redondo Beach (where my dad used to go as a kid) or Maggie’s Doughnut in Macarthur Park. The corner bodega and its breakfast counter is a deservedly venerated typology, serving up a styrofoam cup of coffee, an egg and cheese in yellow paper, on a winter morning. Deeply place-based, yet broadly relatable, the charm in these details sits somewhere in the everyday frustration of a regular commute between home and work, or in the vaguely irritating necessity of doing errands.

When I think of the corner market in the context of Los Angeles, I wonder about the accumulated knowledge and oral histories documented by C’s friend, a surfer in San Diego who at the time of the L.A. riots was the only Korean journalist reporting on relationships between Korean shopkeepers and Black folks protesting police brutality in South Central. His journalistic work complicates a binary that would reductively pit Korean business owners against Black Americans. Still, these private businesses disrupted the balance of how communities in the area had been providing for and sustaining themselves. The corner market has historically been a disrupter that crowds out longtime residents and threatens the equilibrium of place, and a critical infrastructure that provides for a given neighborhood. In Los Angeles, owners will often have an established relationship with the regular vendor at the curb out front, or in the parking lot next door. Frequently, a plastic case filled with breads and sweets from a local panaderia remains stocked at all hours of the day.

Midday monday, I take my usual six minute bike ride up Cypress Ave for queso fresco and two avocados at Lupita’s. “I don’t know how to ride a bike!” Miguel tells me at checkout by way of conversation, then quickly laughs and divulges that he can. Still goofing, he asks, straight-faced, if I’ll teach him to bike. I’ve been four months living in the neighborhood now, and though I was born in L.A., this market and her surrounding neighborhood context are new to me. The next week, Miguel jokes that I “probably don’t remember his name”, and when I do, he laughs too loud and says he can’t remember mine. “It seems less important,” I say, “to know the names. I mean, you know everybody that comes in here.” “Yeah, I know faces -.” “I think that matters more, actually.”

The neighborhood has historically been hit by food apartheid, a term coined by Bronx-based farmer and food justice advocate Karen Washington to better describe what the USDA would term a “food desert”¹. Cities and public infrastructure are actively designed to provide or deprive a given neighborhood, community, zip code, or voting district of access to grocery stores, transit, green space, among other amenities. “Apartheid” is a more accurate way to describe this process than “desert”, which carries the implicit suggestion that these resource-dense or resource-deprived areas occur naturally. The lack of sufficient grocery store options is commonly served by stopgap solutions like corner markets, regular street vendors, and fast food joints.

Launched in 2021, an LA County initiative called the “Healthy Stores Refrigerator Program” provides fridges at no cost to store owners. The objective is to stock “California-grown fruits, vegetables, nuts, and minimally processed foods,” with the understanding that “Los Angeles county residents, especially those with limited transportation, depend on their local community grocers for everyday needs, making these stores critical to the health of a community.”² Like Lupita's Market in Cypress Park, With Love Market & Cafe in Pico Union participates in the refrigerator program, and their work goes beyond supplying provisions.

When L and I go there on a Saturday morning in mid February, a class taught in the back courtyard has gathered a large group of families with young children. Andrew, working the cash register, tells us that these classes are typically taught primarily in Spanish. Today, they’re talking about the organized opposition to an oil drilling site at Jefferson and Budlong, to galvanize protest of another oil site on Adams, and educating folks about the pollutants in their local areas. Listening in, he and L laugh in recognition that they’re catching a word or two, here and there, about environmental consciousness and community safety. These groups are a repeat occupant at the market, even years ago when L had first moved to L.A. in this neighborhood. These educators and advocates teach parents about the points system for school choices, and the EBT program at the store where a 10 dollar purchase “of milk, or eggs, or anything” will earn them 20 dollars of free produce daily. This initiative is established at Farmer’s Markets –I had used my food stamps weekly at the West Philly Farmers Market out of Clark Park in this way– and Andrew tells us that this will be one of only five places starting to run this program out of brick-and-mortar locations around Los Angeles.

Counter to Lupita’s Market in Cypress Park, Lanza Brothers Market in Lincoln Heights, Vince’s in Glendale, or Roma Market in Altadena, there are some additional items stocked at With Love Market & Cafe in Pico Union, La Tropicana in Highland Park, or Sara’s in City Terrace. Bags of flour and steel cut oats with a little bearded white man printed on the logo, coconut-based vegan butter, hand and dish soap in pastel tones with an array of matching scented candles, almond milk in tetra packs, sparkling drinks in cans, and coffee beans sold in small, bright paper packages. Locally made tortillas and loaves of bread delivered fresh from a nearby bakery, the canned products of various small businesses and food pop-ups local to the area, populate the shelves.

I clock some of the brand imagery and packaging aesthetics as indicators of economic disparity and rapid change in the neighborhood, but make a concerted effort to stop myself short of drawing out false equivalencies. The aesthetics of these spaces and their product sales are not revealing in and of themselves. Are the cash flows supporting longtime residents, a family of shopkeepers for three generations, who have made changes to their stock to accommodate and appeal to a rapidly changing population, thereby preventing their own eviction and displacement? Are fair wages, ethical labor practices, and direct communication with spice farmers across the Indian subcontinent a founding tenet of the business that sells this pricier product that they carry?

Contrary to these corner markets that will occasionally stock ‘specialty’, ‘fancy’, ‘bougie’, or insert-your-favored-euphemism-for-‘expensive’-here products, the boutique grocery is designed solely for the sale of such items. “I’m not even angry that it’s there, it’s just the most boring thing I could possibly imagine,” A says to me, remembering the 2021 opening of a boutique grocery a block away from his house at the time. We run into each other at the coffeeshop Monday morning, yammering away to put off a day of erranding. Mostly, we’re speculating about the internet-based hype that accompanies boutique grocery openings, and noting that their dull aesthetic sameness is generated by a pervasive online monoculture that erases locality from storefronts. This erasure, as articulated by 2012 Sarah Schulman,

“There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.”³

The boutique grocery bears no real semblance to the deceptively similar architectural typology of the corner market aside from a. relative scale and b. baseline programmatic intent: the sale of food products. When J texts me Friday afternoon, apropos of nothing, she drives home this very point: “Also I just passed a bougie grocery store called “provisions” and I just think it’s so funny how we live in a society that needs alternative markets that are marketed towards the economic elite/upper class.” Exchanging exasperated notes on corner stores and boutique groceries in our neighborhoods, J rounds out our collective diatribe with “they’re co-opting these old terms that were generally directed to the everyday person”.

Per Angela Davis, words are constantly being commandeered, commodified, and thereby rendered obsolete by capitalist acquisition.⁴ The latest casualties include ‘provisions’, ‘general store’, or ‘bodega’, so used by the 2017 tech company that sought to replace corner markets and mom-and-pop stores with vending machines. “Bodega” a vending machine tech company, which, in case you forgot, quietly amassed millions for years, after having been publicly cancelled on Twitter for its heedless co-optation of language and renaming itself “Stockwell”.⁵ One criticism of internet-based businesses that market their products through boutique groceries has blanketly coined the phenomenon “smallwashing”.⁶ This urge to broadly generalize belies a bland misapprehension, and stops short of naming that the boutique grocery's effort to copy and take on the attributes of a small business is, in fact, a reaction to the aesthetics and practices of real small businesses and worker cooperatives.

That the corner store becomes a vital care infrastructure over time through the collective will of its neighboring community is not something that can be replicated by the top-down design of a new storefront. Social interaction in the boutique grocery is contrived and somewhat pre-determined, in that it attracts only a subset of affluent clientele. Many boutique groceries are helmed by out-of-towners who have never lived in the city, do not understand their local context, and it shows. The design of these vacant, placeless spaces is a direct result of the geographic and cognitive distance between owners and the locality. The American design of public space, which increasingly is heavily controlled, patrolled, and policed, armed with designs that prevent unhoused people from sitting or staying comfortably, is useful to consider in this context.⁷ The way that a public plaza is regulated and managed, rather than free or democratic like a vacant lot, is a useful analogue for differences in the social fabric of the boutique grocery versus the corner store.

Nonetheless, to simplistically flatten the boutique grocery as a typology neutralizes the complexity and contradiction inherent to placeless design and the way that the internet has homogenized and flattened consumer choices. The cycle is self-perpetuating:

“Since the mirror of gentrification is representation in popular culture, increasingly only the gentrified get their stories told in mass ways. They look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world. If all art, politics, entertainment, and conversations must maintain that what is constructed and imposed by force is actually natural and neutral, then the gentrified mind is a very fragile parasite.”⁸

The hollow spectacle of the boutique grocery is just one small piece of this very fragile parasite. There is enough creativity and innovation at the heart of various approaches people are taking to grow their small food ventures and businesses, corner stores, pop ups, and mutual aid distributions that we can build new frameworks for food access. The internet is, after all, a place where none of us live.

Papel picado is an indicator of place, carrying an aesthetic specificity that welcomes folks living in the surrounding area. The bike ride to my corner store is an errand that I genuinely look forward to, one that knits me closer to my neighbors, waving from the crosswalk, or picking produce side by side. Still, I detect a slight dislocation from myself when I come to Lupita’s, a self-distancing chagrin at being second generation born here in Los Angeles, and still somehow non-Spanish-speaking. The feeling mirrors what T and I like to call ‘our subtle asian feels’, a phenomenon that, for me, will sometimes hit when we all go to the SGV for dim sum, relying on K or J to order for the table in Mandarin, translating for the rest of us whenever a cart passes by.

At best, there should be a certain self-consciousness where we meet the city. The multiplicity of perspectives, diversity of backgrounds, and density of varying opinions is the draw of the urban environment. We might otherwise enumerate the achievements of city dwellers merely as having obliterated natural waterways, deprived hillsides of native plants, and irrevocably damaged local ecosystems. We owe it to everything we’ve destroyed to make something of the intersections we have constructed in the built environment, and enact our reparative work from there. Individual consumer choice, either at the boutique grocery or corner market, will not remedy the destructive structuring of late capitalism. But prioritizing time spent in accessible and democratic spaces in the city allows us to encounter each other and our own contradictions, inviting challenge and change. The corner market is still a hub for place formation, a multi-layered space in rapidly changing neighborhoods, a vital cornerstone for longtime residents, and it is not in competition with any spaces that are merely the product of its own commodification.

1. Anna Brones. “Karen Washington: It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid: The community activist pushes the food justice movement beyond raised beds, food pantries, new supermarkets, and white leadership”. Guernica Magazine. 7 May 2018. https://www.guernicamag.com/karen-washington-its-not-a-food-desert-its-food-apartheid/

2. Hilda L. Solis. “Los Angeles County Healthy Stores Refrigeration Program Promotes Healthy Food Options in LA Food Deserts”. Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda L. Solis First District. 13 May 2021. https://hildalsolis.org/los-angeles-county-healthy-stores-refrigeration-program-promotes-healthy-food-options-la-food-deserts/

3. Sarah Schulman. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. Print. 2012.

4. Angela Davis, Adrienne Maree Brown. “50 Years of Imagining Radical Feminist Futures”. UC Davis Women’s Resources and Research Center. 17 November 2020.

5. Kate Clark. “Bodega, once dubbed ‘America’s Most Hated Startup,’ has quietly raised millions: The startup – now Stockwell – is backed by GV, NEA, and DCM Ventures”. 25 September 2019. https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/bodega-once-dubbed-americas-most-hated-startup-has-quietly-raised-millions/?guccounter=1

6. Emily Sundberg. “Welcome to the Shoppy Shop: Why does every store suddenly look the same?” New York Magazine. 25 January 2023. https://www.grubstreet.com/2023/01/why-every-shoppy-shop-looks-exactly-the-same.html

7. Michael Sorkin. Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Hill and Wang. Print. 1 March 1992.

8. Schulman, 2012.