Youth Blooming Agrarian Lands and Community Life

Return to the Land and the Commons: The Flowering of Growing Justice

Growing Justice, located in Watsonville, California, is a youth-led initiative where young people grow food with their migrant elders from Michoacán, Oaxaca and Jalisco, Mexico. Alongside their parents and grandparents, they tend El Jardín del Río, or River Garden, creating a community space of resistance, memory and hope. The garden comes to life among the corn plants, under the shelter of the pumpkins and in the intertwined embrace of the beans: this is the milpa in its maximum splendor. Stories shared between generations resound, evoking the migratory journey from south to north, memories of lands, now far away, and the legacy of millenary agricultural practices. Elders share their knowledge with the next generation, knowledge from other lands, where they learned to take care of the water, to protect the forest and to love the animals. Every seed sown in the garden is a form of collective resistance to capitalist individualism and the extractive model of industrial agriculture.

Join CAN and the youth who are making agrarian lands bloom. Your donation contributes to youth-led initiatives such as Growing Justice that are leading the way in redefining our relationship to food and the community bonds woven around it.

What are we going to eat now?

CAN accompanies Growing Justice youth, co-facilitating garden activities and documenting their collective learnings, so together we can act on them. We do this in synergy with our partner, Tierras Milperas, a campesino organization of farmworker families that collectively steward community gardens in Watsonville. Together we published “¿Y ahora, qué vamos a comer? (What are we going to Eat Now?)”, a collection of recipes and reflections from 4 years of cultivating, cooking, building garden infrastructure, and celebrating with youth and their families, the campesino community and the people of Riverpark neighborhood in Watsonville.

“What are we going to eat now?” demonstrates the importance of “returning to the land, to the community, and eating well together from our experience in Watsonville and Pajaro.” It details the process of redesigning the garden with a focus on the milpa and community cohesion. Growing Justice youth and Tierra Milpera elders worked collectively to build an adobe brick stove for cooking on site, a bonfire pit to invite rest and dialogue in the evenings, and an area for the altar where the offering is made for Day of the Dead to honor the lives of those who have come before us. In addition, 24 recipes show how to transform garden produce into healthy dishes that bring comfort to daily life, soothing the body and the heart. These recipes are a tribute to the culinary tradition of Mexican campesino communities and other geographies of the South, to the seasoning of mothers, and the innovation of young people reinterpreting traditional dishes such as “quesadillas justicieras” or “discada milpera.”

See the recipe book here!

The flourishing of agrarian lands and community life intertwine at River Garden, building bridges between generations and returning to what is most essential: land and community. This connection nurtures relationships of affection and care beyond our immediate circle, creating a vital support network for migrant families. In the words of Growing Justice youth:

The work and commitment of Growing Justice youth has brought River Garden into bloom. Thanks to a strong foundation of community organizing, this garden will continue to flourish, and perhaps, its seeds will spread to other horizons.