Paradise Transplanted by Hondagneu-Sotelo Pierrette;

Author:Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

FLUID AND IMAGINARY HOMELANDS: “I FELT LIKE IT WAS INSIDE ME”

At the gardens, no one clung to authentic replication of homeland foods and plants. People hailed from different countries and regions, so they shared regional traditions and a kind of intraethnic Latinidad unfolded on the table and in the soil. Rather than preserving homeland culture in some rarefied way, as if in a museum, the garden members liked tasting and growing new plant foods (kale, broccoli, brussel sprouts) that they didn’t know about back home, generating a vibrant, porous, shared culture. Corn, squash, beans, tomatoes, and chiles remained the unalterable foundation for this shared food canvas, but they added new ones.

Most of the gardeners came from rural areas where they cultivated land, but a few community gardeners had connected with their cultivation traditions only here in Los Angeles. Armando, one of only a handful of men who regularly participated at the Franklin garden, was one of them. Because he grew up poor and landless and had lived on his own since age thirteen, he had never prepared the soil or grown his own crops in Puebla, Mexico, where his grandfather had cultivated sugarcane. He grasped onto this fact as though it might restore a place-based dignity that he had been deprived of himself and that he might now pass on to his son. Land, tierra, was the principal rallying cry during the Mexican Revolution, and it continues to be fundamental to the national vision of Mexican sovereignty. With rural-urban migration and the growth of cities, Mexico is now a predominantly urban society. Moreover, NAFTA and neoliberal policies adopted in 1992 modified the ejido system, a form of communally held land that was institutionalized after the Mexican Revolution and that had defined land tenure for indigenous people cultivating maize since before the European conquest.44

For Armando, who had never grown his own crops in Mexico, the garden filled two gaping holes in his life. First, the garden was a setting for becoming a devoted dad, something that he regretted not doing with his first son, now a young adult who lived in Mexico. Second, the community garden allowed him to connect with ancestral traditions that he himself had missed out on. He found deep satisfaction in passing on this ancestral legacy to his seven-year-old son, Oscar. “I want him to learn how to work the soil, how the trees bear fruit, so that he can see where it all comes from,” he explained, “and how enjoyable it is to harvest and eat what you grew . . . so that he can see what the earth can give us.” For Armando, growing and eating these foods became an experience not unlike religion, a practice that connected the tierra (earth) of the homeland past with the present lived geography in Los Angeles, California. Although he had never grown his own crops or held land back in Puebla, harvesting his crops here in the garden, he said, “gives me that sensation that I’m back there in my pueblo, and that I’m harvesting something there in my town.

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