Immigrant Homeland Healing and Defiance in Urban Community Gardens of Los Angeles

• In Event: Migrations, Precarities and Illegalizations in the Americas, Panel I

Abstract

Illegality and legal violence, poverty, racial discrimination, marginality, precarity, gang activity, heavy police presence and underemployment in low-wage sector jobs and in the informal sector characterize urban life for many Latino immigrants in the United States. Some of them seek relief at urban community gardens, where they engage in a range of home-making and healing practices. 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 hybrid homeland and domestic spaces. Mexican and Central American immigrants and their families gather at these gardens to grow familiar foods that nourish them, such as maize, calabaza, chayote, chipilin, etc. In the process, they connect their children, some of whom are U.S.-born, with ancestral traditions, attaching them to homeland culture, and to an experience with la tierra. Secondly, the urban community gardens are also healing sanctuaries, providing medicinal herbs and they also serve as places with plant nature in open air that provide 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. Thirdly, the urban community gardens are places of sociability that may be especially important to the indigenous, the undocumented, and immigrant women, groups who find access to public spaces particularly limited. These garden gatherings sometimes yield mobilizations and contestations of power.

Author

• Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California