A Taste of Home: How Ethnic Grocery Stores Create Community

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A Taste of Home: How Ethnic Grocery Stores Create Community
Ethnic grocery stores have served as a cultural pillar of immigrant communities. Can they survive today’s economic challenges?

BY MICHELLE CHEN
11 MIN READ
DEC 22, 2022


(YES! Magazine) For many immigrants, the first place they feel at home in the United States isn’t the place they live, but the place they buy the ingredients for their first home-cooked meal. The grocery store—the bodega, halal deli, spice shop, Asian fishmonger—has historically been not only where they reunite with the smells of their grandmother’s cooking or their favorite childhood street food, but also where they can hear a conversation in their mother language again, buy an herbal folk remedy, or catch up on local gossip. That shop can be the rare place in a new country where a migrant feels as though they are, at least within those four walls, part of a majority.

While the first ethnic grocery stores—food retailers catering to a migrant or diasporic culture—in the U.S. opened up during the 19th and early 20th centuries in urban minority neighborhoods in coastal cities, today, such grocery stores have mushroomed around the country, wherever new migrant communities have sprung up. And often, the communities surrounding these businesses are growing more diverse and globalized, even as their storefronts serve as hubs of cultural tradition.

An Authentic Experience

At La Palma, a “Mexicatessen” nestled in San Francisco’s historic Chicano neighborhood, the Mission District, generations of Latin American families have come for enchiladas and tamales that taste homemade for nearly 70 years. The current co-owner, Aida Ibarra, purchased it with family members in 1983 after working for years in the hospitality industry.

The work of managing a specialty kitchen and catering and wholesale operation that supplies local restaurants, with just a handful of employees, is grueling. When the city was largely shuttered during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ibarra recalled how she felt an obligation to keep the store open, even though their business had suffered as the restaurants they usually supplied had closed. To limit the number of shoppers inside the store, customers had to line up outside, which frustrated some, but in the end, she recalled, “a lot of our customers thanked us for staying open. I guess they knew that it was a risk for us, too.”

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The Future of the Ethnic Grocery Store

As much as the ethnic grocery store has historically served as a cultural pillar of immigrant communities, in many U.S. cities, the rising cost of living, competition from online food delivery services, and displacement of non-white neighborhoods through gentrification could undermine long-standing immigrant-run retail stores and markets. .............(more)

https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2022/12/22/grocery-community-ethnic