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
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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 elitedominated 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
The South Central area of Los Angeles has undergone a significant demographic transition over the past 30 years
from a predominantly African American to a majority Latina/o and principally Mexican-origin population.
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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
2
See Dodson (2005) for an excellent annotated bibliography on food sovereignty.
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neighborhoods. Against the surveillance grids, jacked-up ecological footprints, and fragmented pastichelike architectural echoes of failed suburbia that define the post-Fordist cities of neoliberal dreams, innercity 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
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lots, growing through the cracks and thriving in vibrant inner city cultural landscapes – the sociallydriven 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
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The UN defines food insecurity as the absence of adequate amounts of food or the condition of hunger.
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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 – selftelling 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
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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 ethnolinguistic 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 sociocultural mosaic and are important forces redefining the basis of a sustainable Latina/o urban ecology.
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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.
I have asked gardeners at South Central why they plant a garden and a dozen or so replied with
the same set of reasons: to supplement the family food budget; grow ingredients for traditional recipes;
grow organic (meaning grow my own to know where it comes from and is fresh); visit with friends and
family members (socialize); learn about traditional foods from elders; feel more at home (reminds me of
home); grow herbs and vegetables to supply family business.
The transnational polycultural kitchen gardens appearing across the West Coast are like the seeds
of resistance in spatial politics: These struggles emerge through the process of self-telling through placeshaping – autotopography – and unfold in these communal spaces to nurture conviviality. One gardener
at South Central, a 30 year-old Zapotec woman, described her involvement on one of my more recent
visits: “I planted this garden because it is a little space like home. I grow the same plants that I had back
in my garden in Oaxaca. We can eat like we ate at home and this makes us feel like ourselves. It allows us
to keep a part of who we are after coming to the United States.”
These cultural practices are consistent with the findings of other studies including research
focused on consumers of locally produced foods. Thomas Lyson (2004: 90, table 6.2) conducted a study in
1995 and cites the following reasons for consumer preferences for locally produced foods: recognizable
source of organic and/or fresh produce; participation in community; and the opportunity to socialize
(attending festivals and events). Research indicates that consumers of local foods and community
gardeners value access to organic produce and the enhanced opportunities that come with participating
in community events.
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The community garden serves as a space where people can take direct control of their own diets
and practice self-nourishing lifestyles. Gardening for oneself and family creates opportunities for
building a local food system that supports a more healthy diet. It is significant that the South Central
farmers appear more weight-proportionate and that obesity is not as prevalent as with the general
Latina/o population. Growing a garden resonates not just with the preservation of ethnic identities but
with the pursuit of a more healthy existence based on the ability to eat healthy foods.
Lyson and other proponents of what is sometimes called “civic agriculture” have largely focused
on white middle class urban consumers who are interested and can afford to pursue local foods through
farmers’ markets, CSA projects, or direct purchase from peri-urban organic farmers. In contrast, the
issues posed by my research focus attention on the local food sovereignty needs of urban Latina/os, most
of who are in the ranks of the working class, the unemployed, and poor. Some are displaced
‘environmental refugees,’ victims of global capital’s ever-expanding ecological footprint. The organic and
sustainable agriculture movements have largely neglected the food sovereignty needs of urban Latina/os.
Yet, the grassroots movement for urban agriculture presents one form through which members of these
marginalized communities are using their own cultural and natural capital to create an autonomous (selfreliant) approach that more effectively meets their needs for adequate, safe, nutritious, and culturally
resonant food sources.
Nopales or chain-link fencing?
Local autotopographical spaces like the huertos familiares at South Central are clearly
constructed in conscious opposition to the global commodity chains that constitute the dominant food
system. But this process is internally heterogeneous and can be highly contested. In the case of South
Central, which is still officially administered by the regional food bank, one example of the contested
nature of a communal space is posed by the difficulties and practical challenges of managing a few acres
of urban land to support the food production activities of some 360 families. The result, at South Central,
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is the division of the limited acreage by family plots of fairly uniform size (each approximately 200 to 260
square meters). But these are currently divided from each other by a maze of lower-grade chain-link
fencing that has been improvised over time.
However, one immediately notices a profusion of cactus corridors or cacti fencing emerging and
growing alongside the chain-link fencing (see Figure 1 below), perhaps presaging a transition to a more
culturally appropriate division of the space through a permaculture feature similar to the nopal (cactus)
fences that are more common traditional fixtures of the vernacular landscape across rural areas of
northern Mexico and especially Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. One gardener told me
that many people want to bring down the chain-link fences and are already replacing them not just with
cactus but sugarcane, banana, avocado, and other fruit-bearing trees and shrubs. Others are using vines
to cover the fencing. But in all these cases, the effort is to create a more natural (vegetation-based) set of
boundaries that all gardeners can enjoy and use. Their approach is to make the ‘fence’ part of a
permaculture-styled ‘edible landscape.’
The issue is not really about making a choice between nopales and chain link fencing – the
answer is obvious. There is, however, a deeper conflict. How the gardeners at South Central manage their
space collectively is a work-in-progress and is by necessity an adaptive process that seeks to be
responsive to the needs of a diverse community. However, the regional food bank organization and the
City of LA seem not to respect this process of autonomy in the management of a significant, and rather
rare, urban cultural landscape. South Central Farmers are at the center of a widening conflict over an
urban commons and springs from the political economic context of contested urban land use politics. The
over-valuation of urban spaces for commercial/industrial uses is the deeper cause of this conflict. The
community garden workers face a crisis embedded in the contested legal status of the land as property,
which defines it as a space that should be developed for commercial and industrial uses, but which
erroneously discounts the economic, ecological, and cultural value of this place to the community.
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Latina/o elected officials could declare that the case of South Central requires a unique
intervention, perhaps by promoting the establishment of a community-based land trust to keep the
property in common use. They can help this community draw the line and declare that the garden is a
protected space precisely because it nurtures conviviality (healthy communities). South Central is an
emerging cultural heritage landscape that merits protection as a living historical example of a just and
sustainable form of new urbanism.
“The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world,” wrote
Foucault. South Central is a small parcel of agricultural land in the urban behemoth that is the Greater
Los Angeles metropolitan region. Each huerto familiar at South Central is a site for the reconstruction of
the gardeners’ sense of place. This involves simple acts of autotopography in which they etch a story with
elements drawn from the home world, the very plants and landscaping practices that allow them to
produce a familiarized space. The survival of these heterotopias must confront the totality posed by its
opposite – the commodity-form ever yearning to usurp and fetishize space as a merchantable good
destined for consumption as fodder in the expansion of the neoliberal grid city.
LA needs a dozen more urban farms like South Central. It does not need to destroy a singular
natural and cultural treasure and replace it with more of the same: an impoverished, homogenous
landscape, a result of enclosure by privatization. The thirdspace human and natural capital created at
South Central over the past thirteen years must be valued as a model of grassroots new urbanism.
Inner cities across North America are being re-invented from the grassroots up in creative and
hopeful ways. There is a sustainable Latina/o urban ecology and the South Central farmers embody this
heritage of environmental self-governance. The process of re-visioning a sustainable and just city must
not be diminished by the encroachment of the heartless soul that is the post-industrial urban landscape of
neoliberalism.
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Let us close by going back to our imaginations: Imagine LA as a city without people, without
culture, without ecology. Imagine the empty warehouses and blank parking lots; the buried Zanja Madre
and the paved-over containment of wild rivers and creeks. Imagine light posts in place of a sacred tree,
South Central’s fallen Pochote. Imagine the silence – a space devoid of laughter and the chatter of
children and their grandmothers tending fields of ancient heirloom corn.
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Figure 1. Huerto familiar. South Central Community Garden (photograph by the author).
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Figure 2. Classic Maya huerto familiar (kitchen garden); courtesy of Columbia U. Press.
Ethnobotanical notes on Figs. 1-2: Some crops present in both the classical Mexican (Fig. 2) and contemporary LA huerto
familiar (Fig. 1) include Zea mayz (maíz), Persea americana (aguacate), Phaseolus vulgaris L. (frijol), Musa sapientum L.
(plátano), Hortaliza (yerbitas) including for e.g., Chenopodium ambrosiodes (epazote).
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