Homeplace encompasses the private and public worlds people navigate: it is the physical structure that provides shelter for us and our things and it is the outside environment where strangers become our beloved community. 

Home is the combination of smells and sounds of a family gathering in Watts, California; the abundance of fruit and nut trees in the backyard of my childhood home on Mary Avenue; the piercing laughter after a story well told by my best friend Lawrencia to my mother; and more. Home is also the one place where I am unable to escape the complexities of reality; home is confronting but accepting. Home is familiarity, comfort, and, most of all, belonging. The search for home is ever-constant which forces me to self-reflect on the environments around me. 

Understanding how an individual feels a sense of home and a sense of belonging to a place is essential in understanding how a place shifts from being just a place to being home. Home encompasses the private and public worlds that people exist in: it can be the physical structure that provides shelter for people and their property or the outside environment where lived experiences happen.  Home centers the intangible feelings in a space and gives it a place to exist, in objects or in a physical space. Having a sense of home also allows communities to assert autonomy: to participate in decision making, claim ownership, make connections, and become rooted.

In 2017 as I was completing my masters thesis I grappled with how to tell the story of the changing, predominantly Black and Brown community I grew up in - Watts, California. While many studies and papers explored the impact of urban renewal, redlining, and block busting that shaped Black communities, I was interested in understanding how the sense of home had been created in spite and collecting these stories to insist that practitioners responsible for shaping the built environment must have an understanding of the emotional experiences of a place. Through personal connections and referrals, I connected with community leaders, business owners, academics, new residents, and family and captured what home meant to them. I photographed them in their home as well as went on walks throughout the neighborhood capturing external representations of what they shared with me. As a study in my own home that I had not returned to since the age of 14, this project was also a journey of self-discovery. This research is both a personal and political statement about the power of sustaining the homeplace, as a place of refuge and safety for Black communities. The results of this intimate research was Home: Collecting Narratives, Promoting Dialogue, and Guiding Change, a photo essay with supporting text detailing my process and findings. 

You can learn more about the concept of the homeplace from bell hook’s essay Homeplace (A Site of Resistance).