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Now
With little fanfare--no celebrity visits,
no circling sheriff's helicopter--the South Central Farmers opened
a community center last week. Tables jammed with Swiss chard,
radishes, pomegranates, almonds, squash, and grapes lined the
sidewalk and overflowed crates. South Central residents were
choosing among organically grown produce that was tastier and
more colorful than anything in Wild Oats or Whole Foods, fresh
from the new farm.
The center is a slap in the
face to two Farm opponents, developer Ralph Horowitz and District
9 Councilmember Jan Perry, but it's only another round in the
Farmers' struggle, and that struggle only an apex in a decades-long
battle between the people and land developers in Los Angeles.
The center itself is four freshly
painted rooms, lined with art and photos and reminders of the
fight to save the Farm, waiting for more art, music, and computers.
Here the Farmers and their supporters will meet to assess the
South Central community's needs and how best to meet them, where
they will teach healthy eating to all who will listen.
And they will use the center
to pressure local officials to take "a principled stance,"
as Tezozomoc put it. He and Rufina Juárez have led the
Farmers through the eviction and on to these latest contributions
from the Farmers to the most industrialized areas in Los Angeles.
With evident pride, he added, "We delivered what we promised:
we said we'd raise the money to save the Farm, and we did. We
promised to deliver healthy food to the community, and we are.
We'll be here every month."
Across the street is a vacant
lot where the South Central Farm once grew. The trees were pulled
from the ground and their roots imprisoned in wooden cages for
transport to Huntington Park, after Perry refused to find space
in her district for this living memorial of the Farm. But the
fight for the land at 41st and Alameda goes on still, in courtrooms
and in low-key conference rooms.
Some of the original Farmers
have gone in different directions. Some are digging plots in
Venice, and some in gardens in Watts, newly opened because of
the Farmers' eviction. Some have given up the skills of generations.
But some, a hundred or so families, are holding on to the original
vision to raise fresh, healthy food for the inner city.
That group, now an incorporated
non-profit, has acquired a small school bus. On Friday nights,
after work, families climb aboard and travel for hours into the
Central Valley, the vast farmlands north of Los Angeles. Not
long past dawn, they are in the fields of their new farm, churning
the earth, planting and watering seeds, weeding the tiny sprouts,
harvesting their first winter crop, and, a day later, driving
it along Interstate 5 back to South Central. Sunday is back
to the field, jamming a week's work into a weekend.
The new farm doesn't have a
name yet, but its produce will soon appear at farmers markets
across Los Angeles proudly carrying the South Central Farmers'
brand.
The new farm, now fourteen
acres with a hundred and thirty more available for eventual cultivation,
isn't the old Farm. It isn't as picturesque: just row upon row
of crops dotted with a wife and husband or a father and daughter
carefully pulling weeds away from tiny green onion sprouts.
Toddlers still run through the furrows, but the bougainvillea-laced
fences that marked garden plots, the homey tarps sheltering hammocks
and tools, are gone.
It was just after the eviction that a benefactor came forward
with the offer to turn part of his organic farm over to the Farmers.
As Ruben, a Yaqui Indian from the area who has joined the original
Farmers, describes it, the connection was fated. The landowner
and a speaker for the Farmers found themselves at the same speakers'
table for a Central Valley gathering. The landowner, who hadn't
heard of the Farm, decided by the end of the Farmers' story that
he would figure out a way to bring the Farmers north.
The plan nearly collapsed when,
just weeks later, the landowner was killed by a motorist. But
the Farmers' magic is infectious, and the son proved to be as
generous as his father.
Generosity has come in fits
and starts for the Farmers. In 2003, after years of squabbling
about the future of the land, the Los Angeles City Council voted
to sell the fourteen-acre swath of land owned by the Harbor Commission
back to one of its original owners, Ralph Horowitz, at nearly
the same price the City had paid when it bought it from him in
1986. The council spurned the three hundred and fifty Farm families
who had painstakingly rescued the informal dumping ground and
drug stop and turned it into a thriving Farm, delivering fresh
produce to the most neglected areas of the city. Horowitz promptly
raised his asking price for the Farm to three times what he had
paid for it. Low income Farmers took time from their jobs and
the Farm to work the corridors of City Hall. Support poured
in from around the city and the world, including legendary environmentalists
and celebrities, demanding the council rescue the Farm. The
fight threatened to devolve into a Brown-Black conflict when
African-American Councilmember Perry pulled in favors and tossed
around threats to hold the city council together against the
Farmers. But when the Chicano Mayor, elected in a fragile Chicano,
white liberal, and African American coalition, abandoned his
Chicano base, the real players were revealed.
The political story of the
City of Los Angeles has never had much to do with stars or studios.
The real power players have been land developers, seducing politicos
with campaign support in exchange for facilitating permits and
directing federal redevelopment funds their way. It was predictable:
as Chicanos exercised enough political muscle to elect a mayor,
that same mayor, with open aspirations for a governorship, would
have to choose between the poorest members of his ethnic electoral
base and the entrenched power brokers. When Chicano Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa failed to deliver a promised $5M to help save the
Farm, the developers had found their candidate.
Land has been the major L.A.
commodity since Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler bought
up the San Fernando Valley, but by the 1980s L.A. had little
left to develop. The 1992 South Central rebellion was not the
only uprising in Los Angeles of that decade. The other was the
quieter white Westside rebellion, begun in the late 1980s when
gated communities and home owners' associations demanded that
developers stop the encroachment of renters, in barely disguised
code for racial and cultural redlining. That rebellion culminated
in 1994 with the passage of the draconian Proposition 187 (later
largely overturned in U.S. District Court). The message was
clear: burgeoning Black and Brown populations would be squeezed
into the tightly bounded East Los Angeles and South Central neighborhoods.
The inevitable tensions would be quelled by police batons.
When the batons landed on Rodney King, South Central burned.
The city purchased the land
that became the South Central Farm from Horowitz and others in
1986 for a massive incinerator project, but South Central residents
organized as the Concerned Citizens of South Los Angeles and
halted the burning of 1600 tons of trash daily in their neighborhood.
In 1994, the city sold the property to the Port Authority, since
it lay on the soon-to-be-developed Alameda Transportation Corridor.
The Port Authority turned it over to the L.A. Regional Food Bank
so that agency could assist the Farmers who had taken root on
the land.
But developers always win in
Los Angeles, even when intolerant Westsiders and environmentally-conscious
Southsiders push them out. The developers of the eighties remade
themselves into redevelopers of the nineties, taking land already
in use and finding ways to squeeze out a little more profit by
demolishing the old and erecting the new. The city council found
two ingenious solution to both the 1992 Rebellion and the Westside
homeowners rebellions: the South Los Angeles Comprehensive Economic
Strategy, a plan to industrialize and commercialize much of South
Central, with a gaggle of federal subsidies for redevelopers
to raze damaged and undamaged mom-and-pop stores and replace
them with strip malls replete with low-income, low-skilled jobs.
When Councilmember Perry last month offered three hundred acres
of land for development in her district, she was including half
a dozen projects still earmarked for federal assistance to redevelopers.
Perhaps, when they voted to
sell the Farm to Horowitz, city council members had in mind the
cartoon stereotype of a somnambulant Mexican lounging, lethargically
oblivious, against the spines of a cactus, hat pulled over an
unseen face--the same graphic emblazoned on developer Horowitz's
letterhead. No one predicted that the Farmers would line up
celebrities like John Quigley, Daryl Hannah, Julia Butterfly
Hill, Joan Baez, Martin Sheen, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, and
Willie Nelson to bring influential Westside liberals to their
cause. No one predicted the Farmers would call up international
support, not the least of which were farmers rebelling against
development and its erosion of traditional life--commonly dubbed
"progress"--in Atenco, Mexico. And no one predicted
that young people from across the Los Angeles, unjaded by political
"realities," would risk incarceration for the Farmers.
The Farmers managed to raise
the $16M Horowitz was demanding, largely from the Annenberg Foundation,
but Horowitz turned it down. On June 13, less than a week after
the sheriff's re-election victory party, sheriff's deputies burst
through the barriers erected around the Farm by supporters encamped
there for the three weeks following the eviction order. Quigley
and Hannah were plucked from a California black walnut tree with
an immense hook and ladder fire truck propelled across two generations
of labor, crushing original corn and nopales under massive tires.
Fourteen mostly young people, arms locked into concrete-filled
oil drums, were jackhammered out and hauled off to jail.
Apparently Horowitz hasn't
found a buyer for the land. Under his custodianship, in the
six months since the eviction, the block has reverted to the
dump and drug haven it was before the Farmers rescued it. Perhaps
$16M is too high a price, or perhaps the problem is the echoes
of the struggle still there, in the remnants of banners and children's
drawings taped to the fence, in the tiny child's plastic chair
buried among discarded sofas and tires. Horowitz is preparing
to grade the land himself. It seems sixteen million dollars
is too much to ask for land already paid for with sweat, community
prayers, and the sacrifice of young people standing in the path
of bulldozers.
But the eviction was then.
Today, breakfast on the new farm is instant coffee, tortillas,
beans, and chicharrones. Then it's into the fields, with a
crew of fifteen. As many as thirty Farmers have worked the new
farm on a weekend, but many more, because of age or disability
or work or family commitments, are waiting amidst the asphalt
and concrete of South Central, hoping to return to the site of
the original Farm.
I'm paired with Juan, a ninth-grader
who glibly rattles off what colors you can't wear on which blocks
in his neighborhood. Seventh and eighth grades were problematic
for him, arguments with teachers and fights, but this year he's
avoiding trouble, he explains matter-of-factly. A few minutes
later, he pulls out one iPod earpiece to tell me that he wants
to be a farmer and a lawyer, to protect the farm.
The work is slow and grueling.
When hours are marked by only yards, even feet, of progress up
a 1500-foot furrow, it pays to stay in the moment. I'm too slow
to do much good, so I get to sit and kneel in the trenches as
I pluck through the tiny green onion stalks, but Maria all but
runs down her row in a crouch that makes me wince. "We
all do what we can here," I'm reassured. The Farmers collectively
decide to abandon the rest of the green onions to the weeds--the
market price isn't worth the labor of picking weeds from the
tiny sprouts--and to move on to the carrots. Now I understand
the high cost of organic produce--it's this, the interminable
weeding that agribusinesses alleviate with a killing rain of
pesticides.
Lunch is chili, salsa, oranges, and buttercrunch lettuce with
the dirt shaken off. Winter crops are the hardest, I'm told;
spring will bring ochre and, of course, original corn, both easier
to tend. There's a small squabble between the Mexicans and the
Peruvians about whether the tortillas should be cooked directly
on the fire's ashes or on a grill. The grill proponents win,
but one Mexican whispers to me that the charcoaled tortillas
are better. I'm handed a bunch of the freshest, crispest spinach
I've ever tasted, and we all snack on the leaves. Next week,
the spinach will arrive in South Central.
About half a mile away and
far overhead, a helicopter rumbles by softly. One Farmer points
skyward and comments, "It's Jan Perry looking for land for
the Farm." Fits of laughter follow: last month, Perry
had tried to salvage her reputation with a much-ballyhooed publicity
ride in a helicopter over Los Angeles ostensibly to find vacant
land for the Farmers.
The afternoon is more of the same, albeit a little faster--the
carrot tops are easier to spot among the unwanted grasses, and
the ground is softer. Stefanie and her father slowly overtake
me one row over. Stefanie confides with a mischievous grin that
she plans on being a councilmember and unseating Perry. But
her dad and I can only look at each other, silent across the
language barrier. "Aqui estamos," he offers. "Y
no nos vamos," I finish the Farmers' now famous chant.
We begin a litany of Farm chants until they move out of range.
A couple of rows over, four-year-old Sandra practices her numbers.
"Eight, nine, ten," she concludes. "Eleven,"
I add. She looks up, surprised, and then giggles and launches
into a count to twenty for me. Her mom looks up and beams.
And then there's Rusty, who has no language barrier. He romps
across the fields, sometimes with a mouthful of almond branch.
He stops occasionally, offers a couple of kisses, and flops
over in a furrow for tummy rubs.
The irrigating is finished;
it's dark now. Produce is boxed up for transport back to the
city. Maria, Berto at her side, waves me over. We start the
long walk back to the trailer. Five-year-old Berto tries to
translate for us, but he doesn't quite understand what he's being
asked to do. "Almendra," I stumble, following Maria's
lead. "Arboles." "Trees." "Casa móvil."
"Trailer house," Maria enunciates carefully. She
signals that she's a garment worker, as she heats a pot of water.
The garment workers in the crew protect their hands with latex
gloves so they can delicately handle the fabric at their jobs.
The rest of the Farmers trickle
in. We sip warm horchata, sweetened with sugar and cinnamon.
The portable TV reports on the outcry against Mel Gibson's "Apolcalypto."
While the Farmers ruminate about the film, Stefanie tries to
write a book report on "A Catcher in the Rye." One
of the Farmers runs through a series of stretches on the floor,
and everyone laughs when Berto lies down and mimics him.
I'm hitching a ride with the
produce and the driver is ready to go, so I have to leave my
half-drunk horchata. Driving through the darkness, the driver
explains that the new farm is a haven from the daily frustration
of language differences and dehumanizing urban life. On the
new farm, as on the original, they're creating a community that
shares traditions and stories, where the Farmers manage both
labor and product, and where children learn respect for ancestral
traditions. An electric line needs to be run to the trailer
and a septic tank needs to be installed, but soon some of the
Farmers will move to their new farm.
The Farmers' problem now is
distributing what, in a few months, will be thousands of pounds
of food. They have their agricultural producers certification
to allow them entrée to farmers markets, they have fellow
Farmers and supporters back in L.A. to work the booths, but they
need a refrigerated truck for the nearly fifty tons of lima beans,
broccoli, peas, cauliflower, and other crops coming in soon.
It's pouring rain as we climb up the mountains, and I ask what
will happen to the produce if the tianguis is rained out. "We'll
give the food to Catholic Charities and Food Not Bombs,"
the driver tells me. "That's what we do with whatever's
left." The L.A. Regional Food Bank, the original Farm's
sponsor but which ultimately abandoned it to the city, isn't
on the list. But Catholic Charities has braved a sweltering
blaze of political heat with its unflinching support for immigrants.
And Food Not Bombs cooks healthy
food for the homeless in MacArthur Park, next to the downtown
section of Perry's council district. Perry, the champion of
industrialization for South Central, has been equally vehement
in directing police roundups of the homeless to gentrify downtown.
"Maybe Food Not Bombs will let us hang a sign." The
driver begins to smile. "Healthy, organic produce for poor
people, brought to you by Food Not Bombs and the South Central
Farmers." "Hi, Jan!" he quips. In the intermittent
glow along the highway, he is grinning from ear to ear, and the
lights of L.A. twinkle over the mountain crest.
Leslie Radford is a correspondent for Aztlan Electronic
News and L.A. Indymedia. She can be reached at leslie@radiojustice.net.
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