As a social justice student, I’ve had to engage with many works exploring the idea of “home.” I found myself particularly drawn to the theories of bell hooks. In Yearning: Race, Gender And Cultural Politics, she presents the connection between the homeplace and acts of resistance to oppression — “Those who oppress benefit when … we have … no ‘homeplace’ where we can recover,” she writes.
It reminded me of a childhood spent watching my mother work in the health care system which actively oppressed her. Striving to afford that “homeplace” for her children, she accepted the exploitation. Our family had two mattresses shared between the four of us — we managed, but it didn’t feel like what I thought a home should be. This was not the fault of my mother, who had so much being expected of her, and was already doing all that she could. Poverty socially reproduced me to be just as exploitable. By 16, I worked full-time across 3 jobs.
However, at some point, I began to realize that I did have a home — I just didn’t realize it.
As a child, I was always at my grandma’s business — everyone called it “The Store.” hooks redefines the home as a space “where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied … in the public world. This quote perfectly describes what the store was, beyond a wedding salon: the store was a hub where my family, and the Filipino community around us, were always welcome. We could take the time to reconnect, even without a special occasion to celebrate. It was a space that strengthened kinship and contrasted with the idea of the nuclear family; no one was excluded in this space where every generation could come together under a single “home.”
It was more than a family drop-in — it highlighted the teachings of our culture, resisting Western norms. We’d have family potlucks, the only places I’d see my cultural foods normalized. In the store itself, we also sold traditional Filipino ingredients — another means of resisting the white supremacy ingrained in my province.
I’ve always understood the idea of caring for others without the expectation of receiving something in exchange. And through studying social justice, I’ve also learned the term “mutual aid,” and realized that’s what this space fostered.
The space conditioned me to not expect reward from acts of kindness — those family potlucks, my cousin’s boyfriend driving me home or my aunt dropping off coffee. Mutual aid promotes unconditional acts of service and resists valuing materials, a concept integral to the Filipino community’s beliefs.
Post-pandemic, we’ve had to sell the business, and I can already see how this has changed relationships within my family. However, I will always be thankful for the space, as it was my introduction to the anti-capitalist functions of Filipinos living in the West. hooks’ reading has made me deeply appreciate the space I’ve come to understand as home.
Reflecting on how the store functioned in my life — a life under systems that actively exploit me, and people like me — has helped me understand that “home” isn’t just a physical location, but a site to nurture care through mutual aid and kinship.
Share this article
