Immigrant Homeland Re-creation and Belonging in Urban Community Gardens of Los Angeles

• In Event: 435 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Paper Session. Home and Belonging

Abstract

This paper extends the definition of the domestic sphere to include urban community gardens which serve as critical spaces that undocumented Latino immigrants use to sustain themselves and to re-create homeland and belonging in urban Los Angeles. Illegality and legal violence, poverty, racial discrimination, marginality, gang activity, heavy police presence and underemployment in low-wage sector jobs and in informal sector characterize urban life in these neighborhoods. I focus on a range of home-making and healing practices that occur in urban community gardens. First, in the context of crowded, substandard apartments in a hyper-urbanized locale and the closed circuits of cross-border return migration, the urban community gardens serve as shared domestic space. Secondly, these are also healing spaces, as the urban community gardeners cultivate and share a range of medicinal herbs (ruda, yierba buena, chichicastre). They use the gardens as informal homeland pharmacies, and they experience palliative remedies for a range of intimately experienced social problems, including loneliness, social isolation, and the depression and anxiety that comes from living with poverty and illegality. All of this is tinged with the healing aspect of being among plant nature and in open air. The urban community gardens momentarily become sanctuaries of self-care and community care, serving as healing homes. Thirdly, the urban community gardens are incubators of social capital, offering gathering spaces that are particularly important to groups such as the indigenous, the undocumented, and immigrant women, groups who find access to public spaces and trusted connections particularly limited.

Author

• Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California