The Republic of El Bronx

Power, Survival, and the City Bogotá Tried to Forget

For decades, a few blocks in the center of Bogotá were transformed into a nation inside a nation—one with borders, currency, government, diplomacy, and war. To the outside world it was chaos. To those who lived inside, it was order.

The Republic of El Bronx reconstructs the rise and erasure of Colombia’s most infamous enclave: how a street became a system, how survival became economy, and how the city built its own hidden foreign policy by pretending not to see.

Blending urban history, reportage, ethnography, and literary nonfiction, this book follows El Bronx from 19th-century commerce and railway modernization to drug micro-economies, sex trade negotiations, improvised justice, and finally the state raid that bulldozed memory in the name of progress.

The result is a portrait of a city at war with its own reflection—and a question that lingers long after the bulldozers: What does a city owe to what it destroys?

For readers of Katherine Boo, Teju Cole, Ben Judah, Valeria Luiselli, and nonfiction that treats cities as living intelligence, The Republic of El Bronx is a gripping examination of power at the street level.