Leave your slippers at the door! If you don’t you might get a beating with those same slippers.

Tsinelas - that's what we called them. We wore them everywhere - at the beach, out shopping, playing sports, on the streets, to church and at school. The most important rule is, never step inside the house with your tsinelas!

An entryway overflowing with tsinelas signified that a home was full of love, family, friends and YES - food. The leaving of slippers at the door, followed by a casual “Tao Po?” (“Anybody home?”), was indoctrinated as the practice of respecting one’s home. 

The Spanish “elite”  imposed this footwear onto our culture as a symbol of status - and those without slippers were considered poor and lower class.Prior to the colonization of the Pacific Islands, indigenous Filipino people lived predominantly barefoot. Back then, a home’s entry would have looked much different.