Urban community gardens have emerged to address hunger & diet-related health issues while building community.

Growing Justice (GJ)—Cultivando Justicia centers urban gardens to create a just food system for migrant farmworker families in the Pajaro Valley of the Central Coast of California. Despite their location in the agriculturally-rich Pajaro Valley, hunger is prevelant. Often, the very people who labor in the food system are unable to put enough healthy food on the table for their own families.

Urban community gardens involving low-income, primarily farm working families have emerged to address hunger & diet-related health issues while building community. GJ youth are the children of Latinx farmworker families and urban community gardeners. GJ youth conduct interviews and co-facilitate community gatherings as they explore their cultural roots related to farming, food, and land.

Efren, UCSC GJ youth volunteer, learning how to plant traditional flowers with Tierra Milperas community gardener Hugo.

Food is part of a complex cultural matrix braiding together community, identity, relationships, nature, and celebration. Growing Justice builds on this cultural matrix, recognizing that everyday practices of growing and eating culturally familiar food offer alternatives to industrial food systems. Latinx migrant farmworker communities have been dispossessed of their land and labor, undermining their capacity to continue these cultural practices. Their children and grandchildren grow up in the borderlands where access to ancestral and campesinx knowledge, seeds, and community lands, is continually violated. Recovering, producing, and documenting knowledge with youth builds collective power and community. CAN uses an intergenerational approach that centers youth in this process. Youth reconnect to their cultural identity and history, reconstituting their relationship to community and land.

“When I see a fruit that is not very common here, but it grows where I am from, I remember and this connects my roots to Mother Earth and nature.”

—Community Gardener interviewed by GJ Youth 2017

GJ youth documenting July 2020 planting.

CAN has partnered with Tierras Milperas, a group of 110 Latinx migrant farmworker families cultivating bio-culturally diverse milpas in seven community urban micro-farms. Tierras Milperas is connecting with the GJ Youth Team, to facilitate an intergenerational learning community to reconnect Latinx youth from farmworker families in Watsonville, California, to traditional agricultural knowledge and forms of social organization. The process of recuperating, producing, and documenting traditional agricultural knowledge by youth will support an intergenerational connection needed to transform the local food systems and work towards community food sovereignty.

Without this work, the low-wage agro-industrial food system will continue to dominate the economy, people, and landscape in Watsonville. Farmworker families will face hunger and diet-related disease, and soils, covered in strawberries, will be contaminated and degraded. Perhaps most critically, we risk losing our understanding and imagination of what is possible.

Objectives:

1. Amplify young people’s challenges and aspirations as the next generation of food systems changers.
   

   During the COVID pandemic, community gardeners started seedlings at home to transplant into the garden.

2. Develop methodologies to recuperate, co-create, and document place-based and campesino agroecological knowledge and action. 
3. Reconnect and repower community organization through intergenerational dialogue to make possible systemic change in the food system.

How we do it:

1. We achieve these objectives through methods that center collective reflection and action.
2. We see ourselves as a learning community.
3. We gather to exchange knowledge and practice, tell stories, share in the work of cultivation and enjoy the preparation, consumption, and celebration of healthy meals. This approach encourages experimentation, strengthens social organization, and allows for collective reflection to continually shape actions.