El Jardín es Medicina: Connecting to Land, Memory and Culture through a Predominantly Mexican Immigrant-Led Community Garden

• In Event: Refiguring Presences in Garden-Based Education

Abstract

Objective: This paper explores gardens as sites for remembrance and healing. I present an autoethnographic analysis of personal and collective healing in a community garden grounded in my own experiences as a Mexican immigrant undergraduate student learning to be a researcher. This journey, situated within the broader context of a long-term community-engaged research project, involved building a one-acre community garden at an under-resourced elementary school primarily serving immigrant farm-working families of Mexican descent along California’s Central Coast.

Theoretical Framework: Engaging with feminist philosophers M. Jacqui Alexander, Cynthia Dillard, and Gloria Anzaldúa, my theoretical framework explores the intersections of community, belonging, longing, memory, and knowing through the practice of (re)membering. (Re)membering entails the reclamation, reintegration, suturing, and healing of our fragmented identities and experiences through meaningful engagement with our families (those here and departed), communities, the Land, cultural heritages, and personal histories (Alexander, 2006; Anzaldúa, 2015; Dillard, 2012).

Methods & Data Sources: Using an autoethnographic approach, I draw on vignettes developed from my field notes as an undergraduate fellow working closely with families to co-create and design the garden from 2017-2018. I explore themes of how people heal in the garden while interweaving my own experiences of (re)membering through my relationships with community members, the garden, and my loved ones from afar.

Findings: As gardeners and their families participate in community gatherings and daily interactions with community members and the Land, the garden becomes a space for recalling and reclaiming the significance of their/our knowledges and experiences. The garden fosters remembering by allowing us to vividly recall our histories and origins through the moments and spaces between work and home. It is in these moments where we can simply be, immersed in the garden, evoking memories of our loved ones, and reconnecting with them, our cultures, and our realities through our relationship with the Land. The garden serves not only as a place for cultivating food but also as an embodied learning environment. I conclude by asking, what are the attributes of a community garden that may give rise for practices of (re)membering? In other words, what design elements, community values, backgrounds, institutional arrangements may allow for a kind of third space to emerge (Gutiérrez, 2002) that help learners find a sense of purpose and belonging against the backdrop of immigration by bridging the gap between home and school, allowing for an approach to education that values students' cultural backgrounds?

Significance: The garden presents a cultural and educational nexus that addresses the wounds inflicted by immigration, particularly the discrediting and ostracizing of Mexican immigrant communities who are often marginalized and exploited. As a dynamic site for remembrance, the garden challenges conventional boundaries by centering the lived experiences, (agri)cultural practices and knowledges of diasporic communities, actively reconfiguring the way we understand and engage with learning in garden spaces.

Authors

• Michelle Hernandez Romero, University of California - Los Angeles

• Linnea K. Beckett, University of California - Santa Cruz