Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (16 page)

By 3:45 p.m., a mob of three hundred had gathered at the Los Angeles courthouse. By evening, all hell was breaking loose. The overwhelmed police retreated from the areas of the worst violence. There were three-plus days of roaming mobs, beatings, murder, looting, and arson. Los Angeles was imploding. On the fourth day, the army, the National Guard, and the marines arrived with 4,000 heavily armed soldiers to restore order to the city. There were 55 people reported killed; between 2,000 and 4,000 were injured, depending on the source; 12,000 people were arrested; and there was upward of one billion dollars in damage. The episode would later be known as the LA Race Riots of 1992.

Doris Bloch was the director of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank located in South Los Angeles at the time. When the Department of Agriculture and city asked her what else they could do to help to restore some normalcy to this battered neighborhood, she pointed to the derelict strip of land across the street. It was, by most accounts, a garbage-strewn, rat-infested brown space. The city had acquired this land in 1986 to build a trash incinerator, but the community protested and the incinerator was never built. Bloch proposed starting a community garden as a way to heal the community and to address the issue of hunger and reliance on the food bank by area residents. In 1994, the city granted the LA Regional Food Bank a “revocable permit” to establish a community garden and occupy the land.

With a large Central and South American population in South Los Angeles, and with many more recently arrived Latinos with extensive agricultural experience, “the gardens,” as they were known, quickly transformed the blighted eyesore into an unbelievably lush and productive fourteen-acre oasis. Not only did it produce food but it functioned as a “third-space” like a town square that many Latinos were familiar with, a social gathering place where news was exchanged and celebrations were held. And it took the place of urban parkland, allowing green space for family picnics and get-togethers. It provided shade and clean air in a city that suffers from severe air-quality issues. Moreover, it was a haven for kids to run through, and for the Latino gardeners to reconnect with their cultural and spiritual roots. Heirloom vegetables, fruits, and herbs prized by the Mexican community were grown here, such as various types of corn, Mexican wild yams,
chayote
(a pear-shaped gourd), banana, avocado, guava, amaranth (a flowering herb with edible seeds and foliage), sapodilla (a Central American tree fruit),
epazote
(a pungent green herb, similar to cilantro) and
hoja santa
(another green herb, whose name translates to “holy leaf” in Spanish).

Devon G. Peña, professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, inventoried the plant life at the South Central Farm and
believes that there were between 100 and 150 different plant species growing there, an example of mixed farming that took into account plants for medicinal, nutritional, and spiritual uses, as well as practical farming approaches such as companion planting. (Corn, squash, and beans are referred to as “the three sisters,” as the corn provides the stalk that the bean plants can climb up, squash provides a groundcover under the corn, and beans help with moisture retention in the soil and keep weeds from growing and using up valuable soil nutrients. As it turns out, these three crops are also nutritionally symbiotic when eaten together.)

Aerial photos of the garden show how it was a verdant living rectangular island floating in a sea of asphalt, warehouses, and empty streets. But not everybody in the community was happy with it.

Some gardeners would sell some of their excess produce, which gave the impression that the farmers were profiting from their plots. This was likely just a scapegoat for the community friction that was developing as the Latino presence in the community grew and the older, more established African American powerbrokers in the community felt left out (even though it should be noted that the farmers were helped along in their community organizing by members of South Central's African American community, many of whom had decades of grassroots activist and civil rights experience).

Robert Gottlieb, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban Environmental Studies at Occidental College and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute in Los Angeles, concludes in his 2007 book
Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City
that the South Central Farm had become “a showcase for inner-city food security, urban greening, and a new type of public and community space.”
⁸
Gottlieb adds that “people were suddenly interested in what was going on there.” The story got even more complicated as a third player entered the scene. “Perhaps, most importantly, Ralph Horowitz, the owner of the property when it was first taken over by the city, decided he wanted the property back.”
⁹

The parcel of land had become valuable again because it was a safe, clean, and orderly part of an inner-city community. It was also located on the Alameda corridor, a freight rail yard that ran between the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach. And the previous owner, claiming that he was entitled to the right to repurchase the land under the original sale agreement in 1986, successfully sued the city for the right to get it back. Neither the decision to sell the land nor the sale price or terms of the sale agreement were publically released until after the deal was done. Unbeknownst to the farmers, the site was quietly resold to Horowitz in a murky agreement. Later, it was discovered that Horowitz essentially was allowed to buy the land back from the city for just over five million dollars, almost the same price he had sold it to the city for some seventeen years earlier.

It can only be assumed that the farmers were expected to acquiesce, that they would not want to bring too much attention to their cause. Instead, the farmers sought legal advice, reorganized their plots among themselves, and, most importantly, started calling themselves the South Central Farmers Feeding Families. It was decided democratically among the farmers that families should be limited to the number of plots they worked as a sign to the outside that this was not a struggle to make money on the land but was viewed as a right to feed themselves and their families.

Being bullied and pushed into a corner was not an unfamiliar feeling to many of them. This time, however, they decided that they were not going to just leave quietly. They were tied to this land emotionally and spiritually. They were going to fight back.

Tezozomoc, whose father had been one of the original gardeners and who taught many of the farmers how to cultivate their land and grow food successfully, took on the role of political organizer, activist, and outside liaison, as did Rufina Juarez, an articulate and indefatigable farm laborer. The farm's story expanded from one having regional interest to reaching a worldwide audience when filmmaker Scott Hamilton Kennedy captured the final days of the farmers’ struggle, which ended with SWAT teams in riot gear arresting protesters and farmers, as well as
bulldozers razing stands of corn, guava, and avocado trees, in his 2008 documentary
The Garden.
The eighty-minute film captured the birth of urban farming as a political movement in the United States and the galvanizing moment when food-security issues hit the political agenda.

On the morning of June 13, 2006, Los Angeles police in riot gear used chainsaws to cut through the fencing to enforce an eviction notice. Farmers and protesters who didn't go quietly were arrested. Shortly thereafter, bulldozers razed the more than 350 garden plots. It was the most widely publicized showdown at an urban garden.

The land today is once again derelict, unproductive, ugly, and under surveillance to guard against squatters and the return of any of the farmers. (The city established an alternate seven-acre site in Los Angeles for the South Central Farmers, but most found it unacceptable, in part due to its location and in part due to the fact that it was in a power corridor with high-voltage power lines crackling overhead.) Viewed from the road, the original location of the gardens is a strangely barren site hemmed with chain link to prevent the farmers from returning and planting. The grooves of the bulldozers’ routes as well as the outlines of the former plots are still visible from above via Google Earth
^®
.

Following the story and watching the surreal news footage of bulldozers pushing over avocado trees and trampling gardening sheds in Hamilton's documentary left me with a sense of bewilderment. Was that really the end of this incredible farm? Were the bulldozers really the final word in a fight that seemed to have so much hope and so much potential? Wasn't this the perfect answer to extreme urban poverty, disenfranchisement, malnutrition, health issues, and cultural displacement that a multicultural city like Los Angeles should have been supporting? This is what I hoped to find out by traveling to Van Nuys in 2010 to meet Tezozomoc.

It had been four years minus a week since the farm's final eviction notice was posted as I sat across from Tezozomoc. In real life, he's a mountain of a man. The long, wild, wavy hair he sported in
The Garden
has been short-cropped and is salted with middle age. First I asked about his
single-identifier indigenous Mezoamerican name. “Just Tezozomoc,” he replied. “It's a form of de-identification,” he added, cracking a sly smile.
¹⁰

I asked him what circumstances brought his family to Los Angeles in the first place. Tezozomoc's family came to Los Angeles in the 1960s, drawn by the promise of better economic prospects, displaced by the attempt to industrialize agriculture that had been devastating traditional subsistence farming communities. “We all come from rural farming people. We've been farming for thousands of years,” he explained in describing the Latino population that coalesced around the garden. “We were all pulled here by economics. We're a product of the Green Revolution.”

Tezozomoc's father worked as a janitor but became disabled, so he was unable to continue to work. The garden became his passion. “It was a way of reconnecting.”

“It never started out as apolitical statement,” Tezozomoc continued. “It started as an evolutionary adaptation. We're hungry. We can't get a job. We're old. If you went to work, as a single mother, someone would have to take care of your kids, and you couldn't afford that.”

One of the first ideological battles the South Central Farmers fought was against being called gardeners. “We weren't gardening. We were growing food!” To differentiate themselves from this world of gentry gardeners, the campesinos eventually called themselves the South Central Farmers Feeding Families and became a self-governing organization.

“That was very important because we wanted to highlight the fact that we weren't doing this for fun. We'd rather
not
be doing this. The question of food is not a theoretical construct. It's a matter of life and death.”

“You can misunderstand our struggle, because our struggle was defeated because they didn't want us to be an example of the common.’” It did, however, kick at the cracks of the status quo and brought to light the barriers that are used to keep the rights and privileges of the “haves” out of reach for economically and socially marginalized people. The garden and the gardeners represented a type of “outsider” behavior that was rarely tolerated in deeply capitalist, imperialist economies like the
United States: the farm did not assign value to the land in terms of its economic ability to produce income, but rather it was valued in noneconomic terms for its social, cultural, and knowledge-keeping capital. Perhaps even more offensive to the prevailing American sensibility, the farm raised the question of whether a nonoccupying owner who held a legal claim to a piece of land really should triumph over productive occupants providing a demonstrable social good.

“What we represented, what South Central represented, was a form of escape…an escape from that system of control. Why? Because somehow we managed to get a piece of land. Somehow we managed to make decisions on it. Somehow we managed to sustain life on it.”

Tezozomoc wishes that the documentary had been more explicit about what he perceives as the heart of the problem, “the whole question of survivability in highly urbanized spaces,” as he put it. “The facade of urbanism is something that we're all going to have to engage with at some point. This is an unsustainable environment any way you slice it.”

Concessions were made by the city, and an alternate gardening site was established. Some of the farmers dispersed but many continued to grow food. It also served as a catalyst that sparked other indigenous urban food gardens, and it presented a model for community-based self-rehabilitation and self-reliance through urban organic agriculture.

As I probed further on the subject of food security in Los Angeles, Tezozomoc grew quiet. “I don't know what makes this city tick. There's no industry anymore. Los Angeles is having a hard time maintaining its state of exception from nature.” He hinted that the answer to Los Angeles's current crisis may be beyond the scope of urban agriculture. The future is a return to healthy, local, natural food. Urban agriculture puts that discussion front and center, especially in a place like Los Angeles.