The Rise of Bodega Nationalism

GONZO

No Human is Illegal Unless They're from Ohio

By Denzel Rust · June 23, 2026 · 7 min read

“Why the fuck I can’t just pull out my birth certificate and move up?” A burly white lesbian with a backwards Knicks snapback asks a black female street cop. It’s the morning of the Knicks championship parade. Three hours before showtime. The stud is upset because “bandwagon fans” have already claimed every good spot within two blocks of Broadway.

“I've been waiting for this shit my whole life!” she laments. “I’m not gonna be able to see shit.”

She points at some zoomer-perm college bros.

“Look at these. Fake. Fake. Fake fans. That’s what I’m saying I should be able to show you my birth certificate and you say oh, New York raised, real one. Let her ass up to the front!”

The cop is amused. She smiles, nods, and laughs. They’re chopping it up. The way real New Yorkers do when they’re drinking iced cafecitos at the bodega. She’s not bothered by the white lady’s appeal to birthright nativism. In fact, she seems to agree. Deport the bandwagoners. Remigrate the transplants. No human is illegal unless they’re from Ohio.

This is Bodega Nationalism, the rising phenomenon of people fiercely territorial about their sports team, their area code, and their borough, but mysteriously disinterested in the nation that contains them all. Someone who thinks America is an idea but Queens is a sovereign fiefdom.

The Bodega Nationalist craves to belong, but only in ways that are socially kosher. They prefer safe and inoffensive micro-identities to the daunting responsibility of citizenship. They’re here for the vibes, the jobs, the standard of living, but are deeply embarrassed by “vulgar” displays of nationalism. They’d watch UFC, but not if it’s on the White House lawn. Thousands of them have arrived for the parade.

I try to get as close as I can to the action, which isn’t very close at all. Heritage Knicks fans, the ones whose formative years were shaped by Ewing’s Game 7 loss to Hakeem, all got here at 3:00 AM and slept on the street. Even multiple blocks from the barricade, with no plausible line of sight, people are stuffed shoulder to shoulder. It’s 85 degrees but the humidity makes it feel like 100, and the wafting BO from Jersey-wearer’s uncovered armpits makes it difficult to breathe.

I walk away from the chaos to have a cigarette on Pearl Street. A couple black guys are lighting a joint and sitting on the street divider. A cop walks gracefully through their cloud of smoke.

“How long you guys been Knicks fans?” I ask one of them, code-switching into wiggerspeak.

“Shit, my whole life.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty two.”

“How long you think you gotta be a Knicks fan before you can be considered like, you know, a real Knicks fan and not just a bandwagoner?”

“Shit. Lotta them out here.”

“If you was around in the Carmelo years,” chimes in the other one.

“True.”

“They had seventeen wins. Seventeen wins in fourteen.”

“So like a decade,” I say.

“Naw more.”

“How long do you have to live in New York before you can call yourself a New Yorker?” I ask.

“Born and raised,” says the first, “Gotta be born here.”

What a bigot.

The conversation is interrupted by an Indian guy in athleisure climbing up a scaffold. Everyone starts cheering for him as he struggles to hoist himself up. When he finally reaches the top of the scaffold the crowd erupts, cheering his ascension to a higher caste.

“How long do you have to live in America to be considered an American?” I ask the same black guy a few minutes later.

“A citizen?”

“Just to be considered a real American.”

“I mean, just, if you here.”

Just, if you here. Simple as that.

I’m sympathetic to Bodega Nationalists because I can relate to them. They prove something fundamental about human nature: that people tend to be right-wing lunatics about the things closest to them. The teacher who votes blue but fantasizes about her worst-behaved students being sent to Guantanamo. The HOA apparatchik who wants their BLM yard sign protected by private security. In the case of the Bodega Nationalist, who has been denied a healthy outlet for his tribal libido, all that’s left are zip codes and sports teams. Coexist stickers for the post-national localwaffen.

I try to reroute up Pearl St. and see how close I can get to Broadway. I see “New York or Nowhere” T-shirts everywhere, a hugely successful brand co-founded by Quincy Moore, a transplant from New Mexico. A QR sticker advertises a mint nasal spray called HEZKUE that can give you “Boners in 5 mins.” An ambulance honks at flooding spectators but is outright ignored.

This is America. All created equal, elbowing for space in a zero-sum contest to be briefly entertained. To be proximate to the contagious force field of victory. Holding in piss, for hours, because once you give up your spot someone else will come and take your place. Cutting in line by pretending to know someone at the front. Sweating profusely through bootleg jerseys and microplastic shorts. Climbing up scaffolding and traffic poles for the chance at a better view than the one your parents had before you. It’s kind of a beautiful thing.

Back toward Battery Park, a man and his son are selling horns. Every few minutes they yell “HORNS HORNS GET YOUR HORNS!” then blow on said horns, which despite being made of cheap plastic sound like tornado sirens.

I ask the horn-hawker how long he’s lived in NYC.

“Born and raised,” I hear again. At least he’s not a transplant.

The parade comes and goes. I’m not remotely close enough to see the float. So, I decide it’s time to head uptown for a drink at the post-parade party happening, of course, at San Antonio’s.

Walking through Stone Street I see a group of college chicks carrying a large Target bag. They meet up with their friends and begin to pull out rolls of toilet paper. A blonde chick in light-wash jeans and a Knicks T sends one hurling through the air in a glorious inverse parabola. It sails over the wasted like a game-winning three before hitting a Chinese guy in the face. Swish.

“Where are you from?” I ask her.

“Montana,” she says.

“Would you ever move back?”

“No way.”

She is to the Bodega Nationalists what immigrants are to the MAGA coalition. And like those immigrants, she’s likely here to stay. But the truth is that neither group is really hated by their respective host populations (Chinese guy aside), they just threaten their sense of self. There is a crisis of identity in today’s America, a panic about verification. As we become increasingly interchangeable, we search for ways to exclude, and conversely, ways to exist.

How long have you been here? Have you suffered? Have you earned it? And where else do your loyalties lie? These are the questions we ask as we deliberate who deserves to watch the parade. And the answer, as always, is whoever gets there first.

I leave Stone Street and head uptown. Near the park, an old woman hands me a pamphlet.

“Are You a Real Fan?” it asks me.

Below are a series of questions:

How long was it since the Knicks won the championship? 53 years.

Who was the last Knick to win MVP? Maybe Carmelo. Not sure.

And the last question: What do all Knicks fans have in common?

I stare at the final question. It seems to be the one I was sent here to answer. Not being born in NYC, not knowing the answer to an arbitrary piece of trivia, not buying a bootleg T-shirt at the parade.

Whatever it is that all Knicks fans have in common, there must be an equivalent that all Americans share as well. The ones obsessed with protecting their border, their borough, and yes, their bodega. The ones who cheer for Team USA at home, but celebrate American casualties abroad. Blood-and-soil hipsters of the latest world order.

I flip the pamphlet over and realize it’s from a church group.

Answer #6: “They will all meet God one day.”