Farmers Feeding Families: Agroecology in South Central Los Angeles
Devon G. Peña
Professor of Anthropology
University of Washington
Lecture presented to the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Colloquium
University of California – Berkeley
October 10, 2005
The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world.
-M. Foucault, Of other spaces (1967).
Imagine a space where families gather everyday to work on the community farm. Imagine they have made this special place into a sustainable source of local food. They have created an edible landscape, a green mosaic conjoined from a wide variety of native food crops, medicinal plants, fruit trees, creepers, crawlers, and cacti. Imagine that the people plant family heirloom seeds that have been carefully selected over the generations. Imagine the seeds are at least five thousand years old and are drawn from the ancestral crops of the Americas. Imagine a space where indigenous women cultivate heirloom crops and weave visions and memories of their cultural identity and heritage into the landscape. They are making place; they are making home. Imagine the passing of their knowledge to the next generation in memories of plant stories and the social and ecological skills of the farmer. Imagine youth eagerly assisting with the cultivation of heirloom maíz, frijol, calabaza, guayaba, chipilin, and chilacayote. Imagine youth who know hundreds of wild and cultivated plants, their nutritional and medicinal properties, and what it takes to grow them naturally.
Now imagine this space is located not in rural Mexico, say Oaxaca or Michoacan. Instead, imagine it is located in the heart of the urban core of one of world’s largest and most important global cities, Los Angeles, California. Imagine then nothing less than the amazing fourteen-acre urban farm known as South Central Community Garden located at 41st and Alameda, across the way from Vernon and a few minutes from Watts.[1]
South Central is very likely the largest urban farm in California and is believed to be one of the biggest in the U.S. For thirteen years, the community – including native peoples of Mixtec, Tojolobal, Triqui, Tzeltal, Yaqui, and Zapotec descent – has relied on a rare piece of urban open space to grow food while becoming self-reliant and building a sense of community. South Central Farmers Feeding Families is a grassroots organization of 360 families. The farmers created this collective organization in September 2003 in response to City land use politics and the development interests that drive these, and an elite-dominated regional food bank that is at its heart anti-democratic and considers the self-organization of the farmers to be a threat. In a collective fashion, the farmers now democratically manage a landscape that is filled not just with native row crops, fruit-bearing trees and vines, and medicinal herbs, but is a vibrant space filled with social life and buzzing with the moral density that comes with sustained conviviality.
Like other anthropologists, I often marvel at the sustainable and equitable nature of the agricultural practices of indigenous farmers around the world. Mexico’s native ethnic groups have created one of the world’s great centers of agricultural innovation and botanical knowledge. Mexico is a “Vavilov Center,” an important world center for the original domestication of wild plants, including mainstays of the global diet like maize, bean, squash, peanut, chocolate, tomato, sweet potato, avocado, guayaba, and chayote. The South Central Farmers are a contemporary extension of this Vavilov Center and thus stewards of a significant cultural and natural resource.
I visited South Central in June and July to initiate a pilot study of plant biodiversity in this remarkable urban agro-ecosystem. I had an opportunity to identify 35 species, each with a multitude of medicinal or nutritional uses. Many of these plants have spiritual significance. I currently estimate a range of 100-150 species across row crops, trees, shrubs, vines, cacti, and herbaceous plants.
My lecture today focuses on the theme of urban agriculture, which is emerging as a significant force in Latina/o urban social movements (see Peña 2002; Pinderhughes 2003). There are more than 15,000 organized community gardens and more than 1 million gardeners in the U.S. (1995). There are urban community gardens in all top 50 Latina/o urban core cities. Mexican-origin gardeners are involved in more than 40 percent of the total number of urban gardens and not all are in Southwestern states. Urban community gardens annually produce more than $25 to $50 million of vegetables, fruits, and herbs. These landscapes also provide significant ecological and social benefits. Through the farming activities of indigenous migrants, urban community gardens can promote the in situ conservation of the genetic diversity of heirloom varieties and land races.
As an urban land use activity, agriculture presents itself as oddly out of place. It seems wholly “incompatible” with the management of space under the rule of the commodity form in the global city with its astronomical “ground rents” and inflationary, even speculative, real estate markets. Urban community gardens embody a pattern of resistant use and the re-codifying of space wherein local neighborhoods assert control of places for communal uses that lie outside the purview or control of the market. These gardens are thus heterotopias in the making. There are interesting ties between urban agriculture and what I understand is a struggle for food sovereignty,[2] a concept that combines the rich notion of local food security with the idea that food sources are consistent with cultural identities and involve community networks that promote self-reliance and mutual aid.
Deep-rooted social movements for ecological democracy have indeed risen in urban core communities across the U.S. The emergence of these movements is a result of decades-long struggles by communities to control their own ecological and economic futures by creating sustainable and just neighborhoods. Against the surveillance grids, jacked-up ecological footprints, and fragmented pastiche-like architectural echoes of failed suburbia that define the post-Fordist cities of neoliberal dreams, inner-city urban forms are being reinvented and reshaped from the bottom-up through the spreading multitude of heterotopias, the diverse shifting mosaic of cultural forms that everywhere transform space into place. Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991) proposed the concept of thirdspace, what he termed espace veçu or “lived space,” to describe this type of grassroots urbanism.
This research report presents one example of thirdspace as it is being produced across North America by transnational Mexican migrants and native-born Chicana/os. I am referring to the increasingly ubiquitous jardinitos (little gardens), huertos famliares (kitchen gardens), larger organized urban community gardens, and peri-urban farms that have taken root across Latina/o urban landscapes in places like Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Albuquerque, San Antonio, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Gary, Miami, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The struggles to create spaces for urban agriculture in Latina/o inner cities are poignantly evident in the unfolding campaign to protect the South Central Community Garden in Los Angeles from rapacious developers.
I hope to shed some light on the agroecological practices and underlying motives of the people farming and waging struggle at South Central: The events at South Central are ultimately about the relationship between people and the plants they cultivate understood as a pathway to their own wholesome identity as a people and community in place. Suffice it for now to assert that it is in the interstitial spaces of cities that transnational communities are remaking local places. Cities are the autotopographical canvas of the subaltern (cf. González 1995). Autotopography is an appropriate concept since it involves self-telling through place-shaping or place-making. LA is the place where the ancient heirloom seeds of land race maíz, calabacita, and frijol find their way up north from Oaxaca, Chiapas, and other points south to meet and grate-up against the hot pavement of freeways and parking lots, growing through the cracks and thriving in vibrant inner city cultural landscapes – the socially-driven spaces defined and shaped by the grassroots.
Identity, vernacular foodscapes, and food sovereignty
The concept of food security has become a rallying cry of the local food and slow food movements. In this movement context, the concept most often refers to access by local people, regardless of their class, race, age, or other social status, to a safe, nutritious, and stable source of food. However, some anthropologists and political ecologists emphasize an additional dimension: According to Debora Barndt, “Food security is achieved when people have access to adequate amounts of safe and nutritional foods that are both personally and culturally acceptable.” (Barndt 1999: 264; italics added)[3] Food security involves access to local, safe, and nutritious food. However, when food sources are consistent with our individual and family heritage foodways, we can refer to a state of food sovereignty. In making this claim, I am not proposing that we champion a nationalist identity politics around Mexican native crops, foods, and cuisines. On the contrary, I am merely pointing to the constantly shifting varieties of regional and sub-regional cuisines characteristic of Greater Mexico, sur y norte, and how these are manifest in the types of crops selected by diverse origin Mexican migrants for their urban huertos familiares (home kitchen gardens). These practices – explicitly linking field to table – are one of the continuously reproduced forms of cultural and ‘natural’ capital that Mexican indigenous migrants to the USA have used in a strategy to construct what Lauren Baker (1999: 257) calls “vernacular foodscapes” that nourish bodies and identities.
Jardín y identidad. Jardín is Spanish for garden. In the Latina/o urban core, vernacular foodscapes are expressions of thirdspace dynamics – they are results of communities appropriating spaces to support urban agriculture, a pattern that seems particularly important to low-income immigrant communities (see Pinderhughes 2003; Peña 2002). Urban kitchen gardens, as well as more collectively-organized community gardens, are impressive for their scope, vigor, cultural significance, and role in struggles for more ‘sustainably-just’ cities. El jardín is a space for the charting of individual autotopographies – self-telling through place-shaping. This is certainly true of the classic home-based kitchen gardens one sees across the LA basin.
The transnational migrants have transposed their kitchen garden tradition into the vernacular mosaic of community gardens and farms across the U.S. Most often, community gardens are located in contested space, involving the counter-claims of developers, speculators, planners, and even philanthropists. This is the case with South Central which itself established as result of an earlier environmental justice struggle against the siting of trash incinerators. In one of the classic episodes in the historic struggle against environmental racism in LA, Juanita Tate and the Concerned Citizens of South Central led the opposition to the incinerators and the community asserted and allowed to flourish a claim for an alternative, more healthful and community-oriented, use of this contested space that eventually became the community garden.
In this sense, el jardín is a communal expression of a community’s political power as asserted through the demand for space to support local families by encouraging conviviality, the intermingling of mixed generations and ethnicities, and thus the reproduction of original as well as hybrid identity formations and cultural practices through conscious place-making. El jardín is a source of plants for medicine and traditional recipes; it is a diverse polycultural agroecological space that biophysically and symbolically connects the migrant to her origin community. This allows for a transnationalization of a sense of place. El jardín is the canvas for the telling of personal stories in a strategy to maintain cultural identity through the preservation of cultivars that resonate with one’s foodways and in no small measure is the result of the presence of recognized culturally meaningful plants.
Many of the urban gardens I have visited are quite simply by-products of attempts by migrants to replicate the huerto familiar or hometown kitchen garden that they had in Mexico. In fact, a quick comparison of the classic Maya kitchen garden and the typical modern family plot at South Central reveals that Mexican gardeners are still growing the familiar sacred trinity of Maize (Zea mayz L.), Beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), and Squash (Cucurbita pepo L.). They are also growing Avocado (Persea americana), Banana (Musa sapientum L.), and the traditional aromatic and medicinal herbs that are mainstays of the classic Mexican hortaliza or herb patch (compare Figures 1 and 2 below).
The gardens are important as sources of fresh organic vegetables, fruits, and herbs to supplement a family’s food security. However, these jardinitos are also iconic spiritual and political symbols of a process involving nothing less than the re-territorialization of place as a home by transnational communities (which is a biophysical and discursive process). In this manner, Chicana/o Mexicana/os are linking Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacan, Zacatecas, and other states south of the border with communities in transnational flows that crisscross El Norte from Laredo to Chicago, Albuquerque to Atlanta, Tijuana to Seattle, and San Diego to New York City or Boston. The twenty-first century may thus be remembered as a time when large cities like LA became ‘transnational suburbs’ for indigenous Mexican immigrants as they made their way north to colonize the entire West Coast from Tijuana on the border, to the Santa María Valley near Santa Barbara, to Forks in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, where they intermarried with the Makah First Nation at Neah Bay on the Strait of San Juan de Fuca. Indeed, the spatial transformation of metropolitan basins like LA is part of the gradual re-colonization, even re-conquista, of El Norte by Mexican-origin peoples with roots in many distinct regional and ethno-linguistic source communities that have literally used the city as a “machine for globalizing networks” (Hillier and Netto 2002). This seems especially the case over the past three decades (1980-2005) when the geographical and cultural sources of Mexican migration shifted to include a growing number of indigenous communities (Fox and Rivera-Salgado 2004).
These indigenous Mexican migrants constitute the multinational/multiethnic sources of a socio-cultural mosaic and are important forces redefining the basis of a sustainable Latina/o urban ecology. Without essentializing their identities, we can acknowledge the wisdom of their autotopographical interventions and adaptations to a new place. We might acknowledge something native-born Latina/os may often take for granted – the usurpation of our community’s tradition of common vernacular landscapes, which has been erased by the march of the homogenizing forces of the spatially-ravenous neoliberal grid city, and its ruthless commoditization of place.