The
Winter Harvest Of
The South Central Farmers
By Leslie Radford
22 December, 2006
Countercurrents.org
LOS ANGELES--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 has contributed to Counterpunch, Dissident
Voice, and other publications. She can be reached at [email protected].
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