Showdown at South Central Farm

In 1991, Daniel Perez decided to “beautify” a median strip in Manhattan on a block of Broadway between 153rd and 155th streets. Perez, who grew up in a small farming village in the Dominican Republic and lived in an immigrant neighborhood between Harlem and Washington Heights, cleared land that had been filled with old newspapers, garbage, and weeds. He planted enough seeds to grow 131 corn stalks (some as high as six feet) and some black beans he had purchased from a Korean grocer. “I planted with the idea that this is my own little contribution, my own little Cibao,” Perez told New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers, referring to the farming region in the Dominican Republic. As the corn and beans grew, neighbors came to the plot with grocery bags to take food home. “They all tasted great to me,” Perez happily reported.

Perez’s love of farming and immigrant cuisine contributed to his desire to transform even the most unlikely urban landscape. But his action, however unusual, exemplifies a key immigrant connection to the growing of food: the rise of the immigrant community garden. Since the 1980s, hundreds of urban community gardens have been initiated and expanded by Latino, Asian, African, and Caribbean immigrants, among others. Immigrant day-laborers in Los Angeles and elsewhere have established small garden plots in areas where hiring takes place. These new immigrant gardens have strengthened a community garden movement that has found itself constantly subject to the shifting whims of private developers, limited support from local government, and the absence of public policy to support community agriculture in urban spaces.

Re-claiming an Abandoned Site

The promise of immigrant gardens and the realities of urban land use clashed earlier this year in one of the most contentious and well publicized garden battles yet. The South Central Farm, once one of Los Angeles’s largest community gardens, occupied a site in South Los Angeles adjacent to the Alameda corridor, where railroads carry freight from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. In the 1980s, the 14-acre site was taken over by the city of Los Angeles as part of its plans to construct solid waste incinerators to relieve capacity problems at landfill sites. Local residents and environmentalists opposed the incinerator, and the city abandoned the project in 1986. For several years the land remained vacant and filled with tires, old appliances, and trash - a common sight in the area.

Then, following the 1992 civil disorder and increasing focus on food safety, the city of Los Angeles, in conjunction with the USDA and the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank (located across the street from the abandoned site), worked to establish a large community garden in the space. The garden would allow families who used the food bank and other local residents to grow food and, ideally, depend less on the food bank.

At first, the site attracted only a handful of gardeners. But after a formal dedication ceremony, a number of farmers, including Latino immigrants who had initially hesitant, began to establish plots. From the mid-1990s until 2006, the South Central Farm, as gardeners came to call it, evolved into a striking landscape. Eventually as many as 350 Latino gardeners (or campesinos) participated in growing such crops as corn, beans, and nopales cactus, and herbs like jimsonweed and cilantro. They grew guava and other fruits. “The plants sown only intensified the otherworldliness of the place,” reporter Emily Green said of the garden in a 2004 Los Angeles Times magazine story. Latino New Urbanist James Rojas characterized the farm as a mini “pueblo” for its community activities. Land that was otherwise surrounded by warehouses, truck traffic, and the Alameda rail lines, was completely transformed.

As an urban place, the farm also turned into a safe haven - drug-free, gang-free, and graffiti-free. Reconstructing a kind of urban plaza and green space familiar to Latino immigrants, the garden facilitated social networks and was a gathering spot for families. On any given day, it attracted as many people as could be found in some city parks. The campesinos also established traditions like the Garden Day L.A. celebration, where food and plant vendors, musicians, and folklorica dancers gathered for a day-long fair.

Most of the campesinos were recent immigrants from Mexico and Latin America, and many had arrived in the country within the decade, according to a survey of the gardeners conducted in 2004 by the Occidental College Urban and Environmental Policy Institute. The survey also showed that over 90 percent of those surveyed indicated that they felt connected to the land when gardening and enjoyed spending time with family and friends there. They shared crops with others and taught their children and grandchildren to garden. They told researchers they were growing foods that were “healthier than many foods that [they could] buy.” About half of the participants lived nearby, while others took the bus or biked to the site, since they had no other place to garden.

The Owner Wants It Back

As South Central Farm became a showcase for inner-city food security, urban greening, and a new type of public and community space, the publicity the farm attracted may have been jeopardizing its existence. People were suddenly interested in what was going on there. Perhaps most importantly, Ralph Horowitz, the owner of the property when it was first taken over by the city, decided he wanted the property back.

In 1994, the city transferred the property to its Harbor Department as part of its Alameda Corridor transportation plans. But as more time elapsed and the South Central Farm became an increasingly visible and celebrated part of the landscape, Horowitz, who wanted to develop a warehouse project that took advantage of the location along the Corridor, initiated legal action against the city to force the issue. In conjunction with the local City Council representative, Jan Perry, who supported the warehouse project, Horowitz also proposed reserving a small area of the site for soccer fields. In 2003, the city council, with Perry in the lead, agreed to sell back the property for essentially the same amount the city had paid 17 years before.

Racial Tensions Fuel the Fight

A bitter and protracted struggle took place during the next three years, including a lawsuit filed on a pro bono basis by Hadsell & Stormer, a progressive law firm, on behalf of the farmers. Two young farmer-activists decided the only way to save the farm was through action, including strong attacks through fliers, press releases, and web postings against the developer.

Council member Perry, who is African American, was allied on the issue with a predominantly African-American community development organization that had first opposed the incinerator project because of potential health and environmental impacts. Working closely with Horowitz, they sharply opposed the farmers. The tension between the two groups, with its implied racial overtones (African American against Latino immigrants) and changing community demographics (the large influx of Latino immigrants from Mexico and Central America in an historically African-American neighborhood), complicated the debate. Much of the rhetoric focused on the value of the urban farm versus the assumption of property rights.

Perry told LA Weekly in June that she wanted to see environmentally sound jobs created on the site and a redevelopment project that would pump money back into the neighborhood. She told another L.A. news service that she had always advocated a plan to find alternative locations for the farmers.

As the fight intensified and the developer sought an eviction notice, groups from all over the country made efforts to buy the land back from Horowitz. A group including the Trust for Public Land and the Annenberg Foundation came up with $16 million to repurchase the property, saying they intended to keep the farm going and create soccer fields.

Though that amount was triple what Horowitz had been paid three years earlier, Horowitz refused. On June 13 at 5 a.m., sheriffs’s deputies began to arrest the gardeners and their supporters, bulldoze fences, and tear up the farm. Several immigrant farmers fled, given their undocumented status, while others were arrested. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sought to facilitate the Trust for Public Land deal in the days before the evictions, but to no avail. At a press conference later that morning, the mayor called the evictions “unfortunate, disheartening, and unnecessary. After years of disagreement over this property,” he said wearily, “we had all hoped for a better outcome.”

A Continuing Saga

Though the farm has been bulldozed, the South Central Farm saga has not ended, nor have all the subtle implications been explored. The farmer leadership has vowed to continue to mobilize (see southcentralfarmers.com), their lawyers have gone back to court, and the mayor’s office is seeking other land for the immigrants to cultivate.

The story of the farm, similar to Daniel Perez’s story of his “own little Cibao,” provides a twist on the usual immigration debates that the media endlessly rehashes. It ultimately provides a story line of immigrants enriching their own and others’ lives, and it is in many ways a battle over how to save, reuse, and expand urban farmland - an increasingly important subject with a record number of immigrants living in American cities. “Our connection to the land is in our blood,” South Central Farm organizer Rufina Juarez declared at a recent ceremony, where 30 of the farmers were honored with a social justice award for their work. “It is a connection that comes from generations who worked the land and who made growing food a part of life itself.”

Robert Gottlieb is a professor of Urban and Environmental Policy at Occidental College. This article is adapted from a chapter in his forthcoming book, Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City, to be published by MIT Press in 2007.