From barren plot to thriving garden

Yolanda Perez sets down her shovel after a long morning working in Calabasas Elementary School’s community garden. Rows of sprouting squash and bright red strawberry buds at Perez’s feet didn’t always jump out of fertile soil in this spot. Just seven years ago, the community garden was used as a dumping ground and eventually became a homeless encampment. Perez was one of a handful of vibrant women who helped transformed the deserted patch nestled between family homes and small farms in Watsonville into a thriving community space.

More than produce grows here now. The process of transformation shows how gardens can unify communities, says Laura Lee Lienk, an environmental studies professor at California State University, Monterey Bay, who has supported dozens of school gardens over the years, but was not involved with the Calabasas project. “The bottom line is not the garden itself. The garden is a vehicle to bring communities together and get people engaged in nature,” says Lienk.

The abandoned lot looked very different before researchers from UC Santa Cruz teamed up with the Calabasas community to create a place where book smarts and lived experience could share space side by side. Aiming to tackle local food justice issues, the partnership wanted to show how community gardens cultivate healthy relationships that connect people to the land and each other. While UC Santa Cruz researchers worked to secure grants, Perez got community members on board by inviting local people to bring their gardening traditions to Calabasas.

The project gave researchers a chance to help create a space where immigrants and farmworker families are welcome to grow the foods of their choice and share stories and experiences that connect them back to their own roots and to one another. By planting food together, the gardeners created a safe space where their perspectives, traditions and knowledge are made visible by tapping into non-traditional sources of knowledge. Along the way, both researchers and community members have learned just how empowering collaboration can be.

Today, corn sprouts high in the sky, pumpkins pop out of the ground and native plants guard the corners of the Calabasas Elementary School community garden. There were false starts along the way. The Calabasas garden was once run by a national organization that supports garden education, for example. But community members say they didn’t feel welcome in what felt like an institutional setting. The success of the garden has revolved around Perez and UC Santa Cruz’s determination to see the project through after a few false starts and to see success through the eyes of the community they hoped to serve.

Revamping the space

The change from a littered patch of land to a gardening oasis began in 2016 when Dr. Flora Lu, provost of Colleges Nine and Ten at UC Santa Cruz, secured a modest United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant. Shortly after getting the grant, Lu hired Linnea Beckett, who had a doctorate in education, fluency speaking Spanish, had lived in Watsonville and had a background in agriculture. Beckett’s unique background coupled with Lu’s sustained commitment to the Calabasas community perfectly positioned them to create a cohesive space. Lu and Beckett began recruiting students to work in the garden and met Michelle Hernandez Romero, an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz at the time, who now heads the garden alongside Perez.

With wild weeds above and rock-hard soil below, the disregarded garden had grown out of control. Armed with machetes and can-do attitudes, Beckett and the garden’s co-managers, Romero and Perez, whacked away at towering weeds and wild radishes with the help of the Calabasas community. The pipeless plot of land also had no water sources, so the group lugged heavy buckets of water back and forth from the nearest water source to bring the garden back to life.

The acre of land that now harbors 50 15-by-15 foot plots only began blooming last fall, as preparation took half a year with the team of researchers and community members working tirelessly and learning from one another. By embracing each other’s unique histories, the space now serves as a hybrid garden where Watsonville community members and college students from the UCSC preserve the space through constant collaboration and communication.

Co-educational gardens aiming to bridge the gap between community and academic knowledge are not that common and can be difficult to maintain without the right people, such as Perez. Perez and Romero co-manage the community garden at Calabasas, but Romero insists, “I’m the one learning from her.”

“I decided to make a world for me here, for myself, a world that was truly different and truly mine,” says Perez.

Perez used to garden with her grandmother in Mexico and fondly recalls being nicknamed her grandmother’s “tail” because she followed her around constantly. Totally independent at 11 years old, Perez navigated herself through many worlds despite only receiving an elementary school education. After working as a maid for wealthy families in Mexico for years, Perez grew restless imagining her entire life spent working a job she had grown out of.

“I decided to make a world for me here, for myself, a world that was truly different and truly mine,” says Perez.

Building a new life

When she came to the Unites States, Perez worked as a seamstress, sacrificing living near her family in Mexico for the chance to make a better living in America. While managing long hours and raising two young girls, she also survived domestic abuse. Shortly after separating from her husband, Perez was laid off after the sewing company she worked for went bankrupt.

Finding herself penniless and alone, Perez began working in the fields, knowing she would have to work longer hours to receive lesser pay. In an effort to feed the hopeful spark that her grandmother had planted, she decided to follow her green thumb to the Calabasas community garden. Perez’s daughters are both alumni of Calabasas Elementary School and once she heard what Lu and Beckett were planning, she was in.

“I wanted to be in a place where I was calm and happy. I wanted to do something that I liked to do and knew well, so I started coming to the garden.”

Perez laughs as she remembers when she had to explain to UC Santa Cruz students that strawberries don’t grow from trees, but actually sprout from the ground. “We need to learn, but we can also teach,” she says.

It was Calabasas that gave Perez the opportunity to give back to her community while sharing her skill set with those around her. “I’m happy and proud. I think that I’ve summed up everything in those two words,” she says.

Her dedication to the project has been integral to the success of the hybrid garden. “She’s that bridge and without her a project like this can’t be sustained,” says Lu. Perez’s legacy of land stewardship continues at Calabasas and reached new heights as she recently received her green card after nearly two decades in the U.S.

Perez’s contagious spirit continues to inspire those who work with her in the Calabasas garden as she works alongside Michelle Hernandez Romero to keep the garden alive. Romero is from Michoacán, a Mexican state known as “the soul of Mexico,” where agriculture and community go hand-in-hand.

Because of her undocumented status, Romero hasn’t been home in 13 years but says the garden “felt like this little piece of home.” When she first came to UC Santa Cruz, she saw garden spaces and campus activism “being led by white people. Whenever I needed to buy food, though, I came all the way to Watsonville because that was the closest supermarket that had the food that I wanted to buy.”

Taking the bus to Watsonville to shop at authentic Mexican markets for groceries was what initially drew her to the area, but the garden at Calabasas is what made her stay. Romero giggles as she recalls her first memories in the garden: “I didn’t even know how to hold a shovel. I was so embarrassed.” It was because of Yolanda’s service in the garden that she eventually learned how to master that tool, and much else besides.

Romero graduated from UC Santa Cruz last spring and is now the community outreach coordinator for the (H)ACER program, which aims to provide undergraduate students opportunities to participate in community-engaged scholarship.

“Agriculture is beautiful. Growing food is beautiful. Being a steward to the land, it’s very powerful. And you hold a lot of knowledge if you know how to do that,” says Romero.

Working with the local community, Romero was adamant to change the stigma around agricultural work through the collaboration at Calabasas. Working with the academic and local community at Calabasas allowed her to go through a big transition, she says: “For the first time in my lifetime, I felt like I was doing something that mattered for me and that mattered for other people.”

Romero was struck most by the misconceptions people have about the migrant community that she worked with. “Everybody here works in fields and to me it’s always been very frustrating that they’re seen as low skilled workers or people that don’t know,” she says,  tears forming behind her clear-rimmed glasses.

Challenging harmful stereotypes

These collaborations break down notions that immigrants are somehow taking resources away from American communities, but rather, are building communities up through empowering others to get their hands dirty while keeping their community strong says Romero. “Agriculture is beautiful. Growing food is beautiful. Being a steward to the land, it’s very powerful. And you hold a lot of knowledge if you know how to do that,” says Romero.

Calabasas Elementary School serves the highest proportion of migrant farmworker families in Pajaro Valley Unified School District. Collaborations like the Calabasas garden aim to honor the cultural knowledge that comes from the immigrant community in Watsonville by inviting parents to share their heritage and expertise in the garden. This back and forth learning comes with cultural knowledge sharing and community development that cannot be rushed due to the delicate nature of community-led partnerships, especially amidst political hostility.

“One of the things I realized is that this place is healing to a lot of people,” says Romero

With increased incidence of hate crimes and right-wing nationalism across the U.S. since the inauguration President Trump, spaces where people of color can lead collaborations and share knowledge openly can be vital to community building and public safety. Among the 97% of students at Calabasas Elementary School that identify as Latinx, 85% are Mexican and 64% are second language learners.

With such a high proportion of students coming from Latinx or Mexican descent, the garden at Calabasas serves as a place where new hierarchies of learning can flourish. Todd Westfall, the principal of Calabasas Elementary School says, “I haven’t seen anything like it anywhere.”

With Watsonville considered a food desert, the cultural exchange and experiential learning that that the garden supports isn’t “just about academic learning, it’s about social learning, emotional learning and being able to put all the pieces together,” says Westfall.

Westfall grew up in Watsonvillle and also attended Calabasas as a student. The food insecurity and poverty issues are clear with 96% of Calabasas students receiving free or reduced lunch. This issue sheds light on the lack of healthy foods and access to financial resources families have to eat the very food that Calabasas parents pick in the fields each day.

On top of alleviating the engrained food insecurity within the Watsonville community, the project also makes room for underrepresented perspectives to take a front seat in building community while feeding locals. After the garden was in full swing last fall, researchers and community members got together to put on a harvest festival at Calabasas to celebrate their collective efforts.

“Anything that we’re going to do here is always with the community’s input,” says Romero as she fondly looks over the ethnoecological garden. Through clear communication and consistent community meetings, Watsonville community members and garden caretakers discuss everything up front, with an eye to local needs and preferences. With the garden and surrounding green space serving as the only park or community garden for miles, Calabasas remains a beacon of hope where: “there’s somebody always willing to learn something new,” says Perez.

This sentiment also applies to Romero’s academic interests as she strives towards, “learning how to do meaningful research the right way. Research that uses methods that aren’t exploitive. Research that thinks about the community and thinks of a mutual relationship,” she says. Romero’s experience working with Perez and learning from other community members gave her a chance to reflect on how garden governance should work.

Lu and Beckett also have big dreams for the garden, including involving Calabasas’s teachers in maintaining the garden and growing even more food for the community. But first, she and her team have to find a way to secure the garden’s continued existence.

What is more profound,” she asks, “than creating spaces for relationships to flourish, and for people to be sustained in body, soul and mind?”

“When you’re working with parents and folks that are like community members that are not tied to an institution or an organization that can allow for them to get paid, it is exponentially harder to find ways to compensate them for the labor that they’re doing,” says Beckett who directs the (H)ACER Program at UC Santa Cruz.

Lu hopes that the garden can serve as a community anchor in Watsonville for many years to come. “What is more profound,” she asks, “than creating spaces for relationships to flourish, and for people to be sustained in body, soul and mind?”

© 2019 Katie Brown / UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program