16-Year-Old Marya Inga's Second Home Is the Family Bodega

Marya Inga has broad shoulders and long black hair. She lives in Queens and her parents are from Cuenca, Ecuador. She is 16 years old and she typically works between 40 and 50 hours a week.

Marya has been working at her mother's bodega since she was six and at 12 she was old enough to look after the store by herself. Today she and her mother run the bodega as more or less equal partners. "I can order in deliveries and everything," says Marya. "And if my mother's not here, then I have to be here." Marya has a younger brother but he is unable to help at the store because he and his father run a different bodega of their own. "Some of my uncles have bodegas too. Yeah, we're like, everyone in the family has to have a bodega."

Marya's bodega stands across from a gas station and has a bright yellow awning, but inside it is dark and slightly dirty. The milk is often sour and the bananas are overripe. Like many bodegas, it is essentially a bar and the primary business is beer and cigarettes. On any given night there are four or five men hanging around drinking, and like a bar, the grocery keeps long hours. It's open until 2 in the morning on weeknights and 4 on weekends. "At New Year's we were open all night. I went to bed on January 2nd."

Because of the store's long hours, Marya often has to work by herself until 11 o'clock at night. I ask her if she ever feels frightened. She answers no, but then she remarks that the bodega has been robbed twice. Earlier this year the bodega was robbed while it was closed, and before that it was robbed one midnight while Marya and her mother were still at work. Marya was 10 years old.

"Like five or six guys came with guns and they knocked my mother down and put guns around her. Then they knocked me down and put guns around me and they stole like $10,000. For three months I never wanted to go to the store again because I was terrified. I couldn't even get out of the house. My parents had to send me to therapy." What happened next? "I got over it," says Marya. "I catch people stealing sometimes but I just yell, 'Put it back! Put it back!'"

It is hard to imagine a teenage girl so incapable of whining. I ask Marya to name her favorite thing about working at the bodega and she says, "I just like to help my parents." She does not mind working 10-hour shifts most weekends, and she doesn't even object to doing the family laundry. "I've been doing the laundry since I was seven. I'm used to it." When I press her for complaints, she can only think of two. She doesn't like to be too busy, "because then I can't be chillin' with my friends." And she doesn't like it when customers hit on her. "Most guys that come here are like my family, but some guys that come here I hate. The guys I hate are like, 'Oooh, hey mami, when can we go outside?'"

Marya doesn't get a salary for the hours she works. Instead she gets a weekly allowance of $50, and she says it's more than enough. "My mother gives me anything I want and I don't really want her to pay me because anyway my parents have to pay for my school. I've never gone to public school in my life." She and her brothers all go to St. John's Prep, a private parochial school: "It costs $5400, and that's only tuition."

A junior in high school, Marya is taking AP Spanish, which she describes as mostly Latin American history, but her favorite subjects are math and computer science. "Yeah, I've always been good at math."

Marya hopes to win a scholarship to St. John's University and then become a lawyer or an accountant. But she doesn't regret working with her mother. "After a while it becomes part of your life. Being here is like a second home. If I don't come, then something's missing for me in the day."