2/13 Activity

7

c o m m u n i t y

f

The Urban Gardens of Nuestras Raíces

s o u t h h o l y o k e , m a s s a c h u s e t t s

“I am seventy-three years old, soon seventy-four. The twenty-

third of this month makes sixteen years I’m here.”

For all his adult life Alejandro Marrero has tended food. Un-

til he got this garden plot at La Finquita, Little Farm, the first

of seven community gardens in South Holyoke, Massachusetts,

created by a grassroots organization known as Nuestras Raíces

(Our Roots), it was always the company’s field, the company’s

crops, and the company’s profit. Alejandro came from Puerto

Rico for six months in 1965 for his first job as a migrant farm-

worker, recruited by a labor contractor to harvest flowers in New

Jersey. “Tulips,” he says. I speak no Spanish and he speaks only a

little English, so to help me understand, he illustrates, one hand

shaping a cup, the other defining its stem. He signs with hands

that know these flowers—he has picked them by the thousands,

perhaps by the hundreds of thousands. For gladiolas, his fingers

climb an invisible stem, rising into the air.

After the flower fields of New Jersey, Alejandro moved on to

191

Pennsylvania. “Asparagus,” he says. “That was the worst. All

day. The rows went from here to that building over there.” He

points to a clock tower on a hill across town. “You just go like

this all the way down the row.” He shuffles, bent double, one

hand pressed to his lower back. After that, it was tobacco on the

farms that stretch down the long exit road from Bradley Interna-

tional Airport, not far from Hartford, Connecticut. Shade-grown

tobacco. It’s called “stoop labor” by advocates of migrant work-

ers’ rights.

Then Alejandro got a job at a food-packing plant in Hartford.

“I worked the train,” he says. “A hundred thousand bushels a

day sometimes. All packed in ice on a train. It comes in and we

unload it. We rinse it, bit by bit, every bushel. We repack it, and

then, you know, they sell it.”

Before the hundred thousand bushels of broccoli or spinach

get to the supermarket, someone has had to plant, tend, harvest,

wash, and pack them. Alejandro used to be one of the workers, a

community of men without women, living in barracks, traveling

in buses, eating together, telling stories, making the loneliness of

their lives more bearable. All day every day in the field, like all

the other workers, he was exposed to the toxic chemicals used on

factory farms: pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers. When I ask him if

he knows what chemicals he was exposed to during the years he

worked in agriculture, he says no. Sometimes the workers were

provided with running water to wash their hands before eating

lunch in the fields, sometimes not.

Alejandro worked at the far end of our food supply, the invis-

ible end. Americans expect apples and tomatoes without blem-

ishes, long perfect spears of bright green asparagus. This means

that 85 percent of our fruits and vegetables must be tended by

hand.

Before the end of the day, I will hear several more men with

gardens at La Finquita describe their former lives as migrant

workers—Heriberto Santiago, Israel Rivera, and Juan Lopez. I

will hear them describe with pride how hard they worked, and

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

192

I’ll learn about the contractors who recruited them from Puerto

Rico. And the buses that took them back and forth between

the fields and the barracks. The long hours, the short breaks, the

exhaustion and danger and loneliness. And the bitter irony of

their poverty and hunger: What does it say about our society that

the people who grow our food are too poor to feed their own

families?

In their gardens, listening to their stories, I will begin to learn

the human cost of food. I will hear how, in the gardens of Nues-

tras Raíces, for the first time since they came to the United States,

the fruit of their labor belongs to them.

On the clear summer morning when I arrive at his garden,

Alejandro is planting beans. I must bow to pass under the lintel

of his narrow gate, part of an enclosure constructed of wood and

chicken wire. The fences of La Finquita are more symbolic than

practical—it would take little physical effort to force your way

through them. But no one does. All the symbolic marking-out of

portions of public land for private use are respected.

Standing astride a long clear patch of dirt he has raked

smooth, Alejandro leans down and makes a trough with a piece

of wood, then drops shining white beans, chicharos, into the dark wet earth. They soon look like a row of giant’s teeth. “Ev-

erybody plant different, you know?” he says. “Somebody make a

hole, put in one bean, two beans. I put a line in.”

As we talk, Alejandro continues to plant seeds drawn from a

yellow plastic butter container with a shallow layer of fine black

silt and water in the bottom.

“Alejandro,” I ask, “what are you going to do with all these

beans?”

“Give them away.” He laughs, throwing his hands up, shrug-

ging. What else? “This was all beans before.” He swivels right,

then left, his arm extended. “These beans, they grow like that.”

He pats a space three feet off the ground to show me how tall

they get. “They’re beautiful.”

Alejandro has already harvested his first crop of the summer

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

193

and given nearly all of them away. He loves to eat them with rice

and chicken and the traditional Puerto Rican salsa known as so-

frito. Now that Nuestras Raíces, with the help of the University

of Massachusetts Agricultural Extension Service, has imported

the seeds of aji dulce, “sweet pepper,” the main ingredient for sofrito, he can make his own from everything he grows right

here—tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and peppers.

In Alejandro’s ten-by-twenty-five-foot plot, there is no room

for weeds or waste. We are surrounded by fresh, safe food—

vegetables, herbs, and fruit—in every stage of new growth and

dieback. Though Alejandro can’t grow the mangoes and sugar-

cane, the pineapples, bananas, and coffee of his childhood home

in Puerto Rico, he has acquired a taste for the broccoli and egg-

plants maturing around us, and like his garden neighbors here

at La Finquita, he grows his own strawberries and shares in the

communal harvest of blueberries.

Several varieties of peppers and tomatoes hang thick and

heavy down well-staked rows. At the end of one long row of

newly sprouted seedlings, a specimen of cilantro has been al-

lowed to go to seed. It stands tall and erect, covered with small

round seedpods that look as if they’re made of gold. Bright or-

ange and yellow marigolds mark the corners near the gate. Pea

vines have woven themselves through the wide squares of the

fence that faces the long aisle between the plots, softening the

lines of chicken wire with delicate curves and curling leaves.

“Aji dulce?” I ask, pointing to a row of shining red chilies shaped like acorn lanterns, ripe and ready for picking among stout

green foliage. The sweet peppers have been planted among the

hot and the bland, habaneros and cubanelles.

“Yes, aji,” Alejandro says, smiling, surprised that I know. “What was that?” I ask of a row where nothing but thick dark

leaves of basal foliage remains.

“Cauliflower,” he says. Once he had harvested enough for his

own needs, he gave the rest away.

Alejandro was one of the first gardeners to sign up for a plot

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

194

at La Finq, as the gardeners call it. He knows everyone here, and

he remembers the history of the place.

“Before Finquita, this was church property,” he says. “It burn

down. When they started the garden, one sister, you know, sister

for the church, she stay in this house.” He points across the gar-

dens and past the parking lot. “She make a garden.” Now La Fin-

quita is home to more than thirty gardeners and their families.

“I get over here at seven-thirty in the morning, sometimes

seven, every day,” Alejandro says. “Then at night, six or seven,

I put the water. It makes me happy.” For many hours a day, every

day, all summer, in the intense heat and humidity, he comes here

to garden. When I ask if he thinks of Puerto Rico when he’s work-

ing here, he answers with a shower of yeses. “Ah, yes yes yes yes

yes,” he says, radiant. Then he reels off the Spanish names of all

the plants that make him think of home.

f

From the time Spain claimed Puerto Rico as a colony in the six-

teenth century through today, this Caribbean island—the small-

est of the Greater Antilles—has never been sovereign and free.

Puerto Rican citizenship is not internationally recognized.

Since 1898, when the United States won control over the is-

land at the close of the Spanish American War, Puerto Ricans

have lived under the American flag without the full rights of citi-

zenship. Though the shape of their land and their lives has been

determined by American trade and agricultural policies, Puerto

Ricans who maintain legal residence in their homeland have little

voice in determining their own fate. They have one nonvoting

representative in the U.S. Congress and do not have the right to

vote in federal elections. Only if they leave their homeland and

establish residency in the United States can they claim the full

rights and privileges of a citizen—but not of their native land.

Under Spanish rule, the wealth extracted from Puerto Rico

(which means “rich port”) was gold and then, when there was no

more gold, coffee. Under American rule, sugar replaced coffee, as

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

195

investors from the United States bought up vast tracts of land

on the coast for plantations. Enjoying years of special tax breaks

in addition to a ready supply of low-wage workers who did not

have the protection of the labor laws that shielded U.S. citizens,

American companies grew wealthy while our government im-

posed strict trade policies on the island and did little to improve

the quality of the natives’ lives. When the American govern-

ment banned the export of coffee, rural subsistence farmers were

driven from their small farms, where the cultivation of shade-

grown coffee had never precluded growing the food their families

depended on. Without this cash crop, they could no longer live

off the land, and without access to land, they could no longer

feed their families. Drawn from the land into a wage economy,

they crowded into urban slums and fell into poverty and hunger.

By the 1940s, after fifty years of American rule, Puerto Ricans

had one of the highest infant mortality rates and one of the low-

est per capita annual incomes in the world.

As industry boomed in postwar America, a mass migration

from the island began. By 1960, 400,000 Puerto Ricans—nearly

a fifth of the island’s population—had emigrated to the mainland,

many recruited by agricultural employers who paid their way.

South Holyoke, Massachusetts, became a destination for

these immigrants because of its high number of housing vacan-

cies, low rents, and proximity to farm and factory jobs. Seventy-

five percent of the population of downtown Holyoke is now

Puerto Rican. Most over the age of thirty were born in Puerto

Rico, and many of the elders used to be agricultural workers and

have had only a few years of schooling. The unemployment rate

for Puerto Ricans in Holyoke hovers above 25 percent. The sta-

tistics for substance abuse and teenage pregnancy are four times

the state average. Close to three quarters of the community’s

children live in poverty. There are no large supermarkets within

walking distance of downtown South Holyoke, where, as Daniel

Ross, the director of Nuestras Raíces tells me, half the city’s

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

196

available housing has either burned down or been condemned

since 1970.

The meaning of the gardens of Nuestras Raíces has many lay-

ers. It begins with Puerto Rico’s history as an ecological treasure-

house pillaged by foreigners. Next there is the history of Holyoke

as a nineteenth-century industrial town built on the labor of suc-

cessive waves of immigrants. Finally there is the story of what the

gardeners of Nuestras Raíces have created here.

“Ecology is the science of communities,” Aldo Leopold said

in an address to the Conservation Committee of the Garden Club

of America in 1947. “And the ecological conscience is therefore

the ethics of community life.” In their organic gardens, created

from vacant lots they do not own, a disenfranchised, landless

population teaches the wealthiest nation in the world what a

restorative urban ecology can look like.

f

“From the beginning, our dream was to build a greenhouse. We

wanted to create something that was sustainable for the organi-

zation, not something we’d always have to write grants for. We

wanted to generate income and self-sufficiency—business oppor-

tunities, jobs, microenterprises.”

Daniel Ross has been called “the Michael Jordan of commu-

nity organizing.” He has guided Nuestras Raíces from its early

years, when there was only one garden, La Finquita, and few

resources, to what it is now—a small complex called El Centro

Agrícola, which includes two renovated buildings, a greenhouse,

a restaurant, a bilingual library and computer room, a commu-

nity kitchen, a plaza, and soon a working organic farm on four

acres bordering the Connecticut River. With a greenhouse, the

group is able to propagate its own plants from seed.

“In the early spring, every bit of usable space in here is dedi-

cated to growing seedlings we sell to our community gardeners

and at the farmers’ market. Last year we grew tomatoes, pep-

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

197

pers and eggplants,” Daniel explains. The group’s specialty is aji dulce. Until it was introduced here, this variety of sweet pepper had never been grown in the United States. The first year they

grew starter plants from seed in their greenhouse, they sold five

thousand seedlings in a matter of days.

Daniel was a fairly recent graduate of Oberlin College when

he was hired as Nuestras Raíces’ first director, but he had already

had years of experience working for migrant farmworkers’ rights.

Born to Puerto Rican parents who immigrated to New York City

and then to Massachusetts, where he was raised from the time

he was seven, he knows how to move between cultures in a

small New England city where a well-educated, politically astute

Puerto Rican challenges persistent racist stereotypes.

“Most people here in South Holyoke grew up on farms,” he

explains. “Many of them first came here as migrant farmwork-

ers. The gardens are a way for the residents of Holyoke to put

down roots here while maintaining the heritage and traditions of

Puerto Rico. They’re also a way for the elders to pass knowledge

and traditions to a new generation.

“About five years ago, two of our elders and board members,

Francisco Ortiz and Eusavio Ibera, started our youth gardeners

program. On the first day, Francisco held out a handful of seeds

and said, ‘We’re going to plant these seeds, and pretty soon

tomato plants are going to grow. And then later this summer

we’re going to be able to pick tomatoes and eat them.’ The kids

didn’t believe him. One of them even called him a liar. ‘Tomatoes

don’t grow from seeds. Tomatoes come from the supermarket.’

You’ve never seen kids so proud as they were six months later,

picking their first tomatoes. It was amazing. They loved it. Fran-

cisco Ortiz was real proud, too.

“Now we work with over a thousand kids all over the city. We

have one plot set aside for the kids in each of our community gar-

dens. We work with after-school programs in all the neighbor-

hoods. We involve them in projects and take them on field trips.

We provide them with work during the summer.”

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

198

A hundred families are part of the community gardens, each

branching out to reach hundreds more, sharing food in the inner

city, where there is no other source of fresh, organically grown

produce.

Nuestras Raíces comprises eight gardens. Jardín la Finquita,

Little Farm, is the oldest. Then there are Jardín Girasol, Sun-

flower Garden; Jardín de Piedra, Garden of the Rock; Jardín Ciu-

dad Verde, Green City; Jardín Comunitario Jarvis Heights; the

Boys and Girls Club Garden; the John J. Lynch School Garden,

and the newest of the gardens, CuentaConMigo, Count on Me.

The first garden, La Finquita, came into being in the summer

of 1991, when Seth Williams, a student from Hampshire Col-

lege in nearby Amherst, began working with the residents of the

neighborhood of South Holyoke to create a community garden

as part of his interdisciplinary final project. Fluent in Spanish,

Seth had worked with other Latino communities as a volunteer.

La Finquita was the first project for which he assumed complete

responsibility.

With a few members of the community, Seth organized the

cleanup of a lot near the center of town. Raised several feet above

the street, La Finquita was created on the site where Precious

Blood Church, which had a long history in the immigrant com-

munity of South Holyoke, had once stood. Two buildings affili-

ated with the old Roman Catholic parish still stand—Broderick

House, a beautiful old brick building that serves as a homeless

shelter and has its own plot in the garden, and the old rectory,

which houses a soup kitchen.

Led by Seth Williams, the “pioneers,” as Daniel calls them,

pulled bricks, trash, and hypodermic needles out of the soil. On

one of the hottest days of the summer of 1991, Seth and a hand-

ful of men from the community used picks and shovels to dig a

trench a hundred and fifty feet long and three feet deep so they

could run a water pipe from the main pipe in the basement of

Broderick House to the site. When the plumber who generously

donated his time tried to connect the new pipe to the old plumb-

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

199

ing, one of the original pipes burst, flooding the basement. When

he couldn’t turn off the aged, rusted valve, the water company

had to send out a crew to resolve the crisis. Seth was handed a bill

for several hundred dollars. His credibility—and the fate of the

garden—hung on the good will of the Diocese of Springfield,

which owned the land and the flooded building, and the people

in charge at the water company, who finally canceled most of

the bill.

Organizing this garden was Seth’s education in the ethnic pol-

itics of South Holyoke. At every turn, he knew that it was his sta-

tus as a white college kid that helped win support. What he most

feared was that after he left, no one would come forward to pro-

vide leadership and the garden, like so many other well-meant

projects, would fail. It had to become a true grassroots organiza-

tion to survive.

Before leaving the area in 1992, Seth helped establish a board

of directors that included members of the Latino community as

well as several people from outside Holyoke. They worked to-

gether through 1993, managing La Finquita and working toward

the goal of owning their own greenhouse. In 1994, just as they

were gaining momentum, it was discovered that the president of

the board had embezzled all of the organization’s funds. Thirty

thousand dollars was missing. It became a citywide scandal.

At that point, board members from outside Holyoke slipped

away. “So it was left to some of the gardeners, Francisco Ortiz

and Eusevio Ibera,” Daniel says, “to step up to join the board of

directors.”

In 1995, through a small grant, Daniel was hired. “I made it

my focus to rebuild our credibility from the bottom up,” he ex-

plains. “That meant doing a lot of outreach work with the gar-

deners at La Finquita, building our membership base through

developing new gardens.”

To prospect for good garden sites, Daniel, Francisco, and Eu-

sevio went out to visit available lots. Did they get enough light?

Was there a nearby source of water? How visible were the lots?

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

200

Once they had selected good sites, they contacted the owners to

work out a rental agreement. Then they put up a fence, built a ca- sita for garden tools, hoses, and wheelbarrows, and began mea- suring out plots. People would stop and ask questions. Word got

around.

Once people started digging and putting their plants in,

Daniel says, the ones he calls the “nay-sayers,” the ones who

were sure it couldn’t work, began to come by to ask if they could

have a plot too. “That’s the moment that’s most important for

us. Because people here have heard so many promises. You know,

officials from government agencies that are supposed to be help-

ing them, professors from universities who are doing studies.

They’ve heard it all. And there have been so many years of dis-

placement, disenfranchisement. You know, buildings being de-

molished, people getting kicked off welfare. They don’t believe in

their own power. They don’t believe that anybody can do any-

thing. So showing a community that they can work together and

make a difference—having it be so visible and so real, you know

—even edible—that’s the most important outcome of our work. “That’s why I do it. To see that change in people’s minds. And

it’s big—that’s big,” Daniel says again. “And we’ve done it in ev- ery neighborhood across the city.”

f

“When I started working here, I didn’t see how important a

garden could be,” Hilda Colon says as we sit eating lunch in

Mi Plaza, the restaurant affiliated with Nuestras Raíces. She is

young, smart, motivated, and beautiful, a single mother and a

passionate convert to community gardening. “It’s amazing how

much you can accomplish with a community garden, the impact

it can have on the people in a community. Community gardening

is powerful. It brings people together. It preserves the earth, it

preserves good healthy nutrition, it preserves so many things—

friends, families, cultures, values, traditions.”

For seven years Hilda worked for Nueva Esperanza, a com-

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

201

munity service organization, trying to address the problem of

teenage pregnancy in the inner city. Seeing the same problems

over and over again, she found it hard to feel she was making

any difference. A divorced mother of three, she realized she was

burning out. So she came to Nuestras Raíces to work as one of

the office managers, thinking she’d try something different for

a while. She wanted to feel less exhausted and discouraged. But

when she saw how few women and girls were involved, she

couldn’t help herself.

“I guess when you have a calling, it’s kind of hard to stay

away from it,” she says, laughing. “Nuestras Raíces started with

men, so it attracted more men than women. I needed to have

more women involved, so I developed a girls’ program. Soon

after that I started encouraging the women gardeners to get

involved with the girls, to help teach them how to plant the

gardens. Then the women saw the need to meet by themselves.

That’s how the women’s program started. We renamed the

women’s program this summer. Now they’re called Raíces Latina.

“In Puerto Rico, whatever we use in the sofrito, we would

grow at our own house. We did all our own cooking and can-

ning.” Through their kitchen gardens, through canning, drying,

and cooking food, the women had always passed on their her-

itage. But when they came to the mainland United States, most

entered the wage economy. Unless they had learned good En-

glish, they could find only minimum-wage jobs, and once they

began to have babies, they couldn’t keep their jobs—day care

was nonexistent or too expensive. Living in the inner city with-

out access to land, they lost the direct link between the garden

and the family table.

“Here,” Hilda says, “it’s funny how much the girls didn’t

know. You know, I figured, they go to school, they study science.

So on the first day I said, ‘Okay, we’re going to plant lettuce and

we’re going to plant tomatoes.’ ‘Really?’ they said. ‘They could

grow here?’ I said, ‘In a few weeks, you will see.’ Then I said,

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

202

‘You know, if you take care of a plant, you’ll see how much food

you will get from it.’ So when they saw the tomatoes, peppers,

and beans that grew from the seeds they planted, they were just

so happy.”

What the founding male elders did for the boys in the gardens,

Hilda has done for the girls and women. In the gardens, the girls

and the women who guide them reclaim a vital part of their com-

munal structure, passing down knowledge from one generation

to another. “Even though the program was supposed to be for

girls from six to twelve years old,” Hilda explains, “the girls are

now fourteen, fifteen years old, and they’re still here. ‘I want to

do more,’ they say. ‘I could be a leader. I could teach the others.

But please, I don’t want to leave the program.’ Now every time

they see a vacant lot, they say, ‘That’s a big space—can we turn

that into a garden?’” Under Hilda’s leadership, the garden has introduced the girls

to a new relationship to South Holyoke. They have learned how

to see—they have learned that what lies under the buildings and

sidewalks and paved streets of this city and what is visible be-

tween the burned-out tenements is not dead blank space but dirt

—soil—the medium of life. The real ground of their existence

has become visible to them.

The girls of Raíces Latina can now imagine affecting the land-

scape of this urban center by turning empty lots into gardens.

They have the knowledge, the skill, the desire, and now the power

to affect the place where they live. The politics of urban space—

the very idea of “real estate,” the tension between public and pri-

vate space—has been transformed for them through the simple

act of learning how to plant seeds and grow their own food.

The women who are their mentors have also been profoundly

changed by the discovery that gardening has the power to

awaken their imagination and will. “As the women elders grew

in number,” Hilda says, “they also grew in ideas. They started

getting more involved. Some became garden coordinators. One

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

203

was the greenhouse coordinator for a while. One became presi-

dent of the Nuestras Raíces board, and another is on the charter

school board. I am really proud of them.”

Nuestras Raíces, under Daniel Ross’s leadership, offers its

members training in participatory democracy, in the discipline of

self-government and the building of consensus. Hilda has made

sure this experience is extended to girls and women.

“That’s one of the things that keeps me going—that I was

able to bring women into Nuestras Raíces,” she says, “and see

their growth, see them decide to become self-sufficient. You know,

the older women didn’t get very far in school. Many of them are

unemployed. Now they want to learn how to run a business. I tell

them it’s never too late to start. They don’t want it just for them-

selves. They’re thinking about their families, their community.

How can they better themselves? It’s unique, how through gar-

dening they’ve been able to grow in all aspects of a woman’s life.

It’s powerful that just by coming here to meet with these girls, we

grew to become something else.”

When I ask Hilda why she came to the United States, her an-

swer surprises me. “I never wanted to,” she says emphatically.

“But my mom wanted to give us more opportunities in life. She

felt she had to come here to do that. It wasn’t my choice. If it had

been my choice, I would have stayed in Puerto Rico. I wanted to

be a pediatrician. I had the grades and everything, but my mom

was always sick. She didn’t want us to go away for school. My

mother didn’t really care for me to move forward. She just

wanted me to go to work. When she saw how freely people lived

over here, it scared the heck out of her. In so many ways, she was

afraid we were just going to get lost in the world. That’s the

wording she used: ‘I don’t want you to get lost.’

“The women in the program have lived here long enough to

see that you really need to educate yourself in order to be some-

body, to have a good income and a good life. More and more

they advocate for girls not to depend on men. Some of the

women have been so abused. ‘You know what?’ they say to the

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

204

girls. ‘You need to learn, you need to study, you need to do some-

thing with your life, because you don’t want to be depending on

a man that’s going to kick your ass and you’ll have to take it be-

cause you’re not educated and you have nowhere to go.’ I see the

passion in them, trying to get the girls up to the next level. Even

though they’re not related, the girls are their children too. In

Puerto Rico we take care of each other’s kids. My children were

not only my children, they were the whole block’s children. I see

that in the women’s group. ‘You’re not only a participant here,

you’re my daughter too. I want to mentor you, I want to take

care of you, I want to advise you.’ You see that passion.

“In Puerto Rico, having a garden is about growing your own

food,” Hilda says. “Here it’s not only about food. It’s your way

out of your apartment if you don’t have your own house. It’s a

stress reliever. And it’s a way of screaming out, ‘I want to keep

my culture. I want to give this tradition to my children and leave

them with this gift, this pride.’ When you talk to the elders, you

see the pride in their eyes.”

To garden is to be drawn out of isolation. For the women, to

teach girls how to garden is to reclaim an aspect of their role as

esteemed elders.

I ask Hilda if she can remember when she first understood

what the gardens of Nuestras Raíces are about. She knows pre-

cisely which moment it was.

“I went to the garden and took my shoes off. I touched the

ground, I started planting for the first time. I remembered how in

Puerto Rico I would walk around barefoot. And I started think-

ing, ‘Well, no wonder these people enjoy this so much.’”

In the inner city, where else could you do this? You lose con-

tact with the earth.

“At Finquita,” Hilda says, her voice softening with affection,

“you can sit down with the trees, and you can see all the beauty.”

For Hilda, to sit down with the trees suggests a visit, as if with

intimate friends or kin. To sit down with the trees, to rest from

gardening and look at what the community has created there,

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

205

releases the flow of memory, returning her to the feel of her na-

tive soil beneath her feet and offering her a new, more promising

place in America.

f

Daniel Ross appears beside the table where Hilda and I are sit-

ting, talking. It is market day, and he invites me to drive with him

from garden to garden as he picks up produce.

In the middle of CuentaConMigo’s fifteen gardens, Edwin Ve-

lasquez has laid his plants out in an intricate grid, with long rows

of chilies several inches high alternating with seedlings. Daniel

pours seeds into a tiny plastic cup, then reaches out to Edwin,

who leans across a row of cilantro to receive it. “Slo Bolt Let-

tuce,” it says on the package. There are enough seeds in Edwin’s

hand to put fresh greens on his family’s table for the next four

months.

“I love it here,” he says. “I don’t have to buy anything now.

I got my lettuce, my cilantro, my peppers, my tomatoes. Every-

thing’s expensive in the store now. You plant, you don’t have to

buy. I got a wife and five kids.”

Daniel estimates that one garden plot can save a family a

thousand dollars in food in one season. Edwin has at least three

under cultivation. He came from Puerto Rico in 1975 and found

factory work in New York and Rhode Island before he settled in

South Holyoke. “Now I’m working for demolition,” he explains.

“They knock the building down, we clean the bricks.

“Every year I have gardens. I got one in Jardín de Piedra in

my name, I got one in Jarvis Heights in my daughter’s name. And

Nuestras Raíces lent me eighty dollars for plants and seeds, so

whatever I get here, I got to sell, to pay them back.

“Excuse me,” he says, turning from me to Daniel. “What you

selling these for there?” He holds up a fat bunch of freshly picked

cilantro.

“What do you want to sell them for?” Daniel asks him. “A

dollar fifty? A dollar?”

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

206

“A dollar.”

“Okay, a dollar.”

“Yeah,” Edwin says, grinning. “Make everybody happy.”

It’s a small but significant moment in the working of a local

economy where every participant has a say.

Once Edwin has filled two boxes to overflowing, he leans over

the fence of stakes and white twine to surprise me with a bouquet

of cilantro. “For you to take home,” he says, smiling.

I hold it with both hands and smell it, my eyes closed, the cool

leaves against my face. When I am home, standing at the counter

cutting up this cilantro for supper, I will know exactly who grew

it, where, and when. I will see Edwin’s face, radiant, and feel the

strength of his generosity to me. I will remember the dark earth

between the evenly spaced plants of his beautiful garden, how

the herbs are sown in generations. I will savor the welcome this

gift signifies, the gesture of acceptance Edwin offered me. I am

the stranger here; for Edwin, this is an extension of home. When

the gift becomes part of my evening meal, the ancient rite of gift-

giving, the sharing of food to establish community, has been

restored.

f

CuentaConMigo is the newest of the community gardens. The

woman who made it possible was part of Hilda Colon’s pro-

gram.

“I have pictures of what this place was before,” says Julia

Rivera, whose idea it was to put a garden at the end of West

Street Alley. “You should have seen it. Now people are here all

the time, keeping it clean. Everybody has put their heart into

these gardens.

“You see that garden for the 4H club?” she says, pointing to

the far corner. “That’s for the little kids in my program. They’re

learning to take care of plants. They come here every afternoon.

You see that corn over there? One of the kids started that from

seed in the community room. ‘That’s my corn,’ he says. ‘That’s

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

207

my tree,’ he says. He’s so proud of that corn.” A row of tasseled corn six feet tall stands near the chain-link fence.

“I’ve seen how giving people something to do makes them

change their mind about living in this place. We have a lot of

problems with drugs and gangs. This is something different. The

kids have the time to learn and play at the same time. They see

the benefit that Mother Nature gives us. And then they’re going

to bring tomatoes and lettuce into the house. It will help them

economically. Some of these people live on welfare. Here they

have something for free. And they love it, they really love it.”

The children have been given a portion of the garden along

the fence facing the street, and each of them has marked his or

her small part of it. welcome to my garden, a sign buried deep in cilantro says. Nearby, a pair of pinwheels, one red, one

blue, raise spinning faces above mounds of marigolds; a butterfly

made of white and yellow netting seems to hover above a bed of

ruffled lettuce. Someone has filled a white plaster swan with red

penstemon. A plaster cupid emerges from a mound of green. The

children have planted bright flowers all around it—yellow snap-

dragons, pink begonias, deep red geraniums, bronze coleus, mul-

ticolored pansies, yellow marigolds, and striped petunias. The

path through their fairyland of lettuce and angels, through the

inspired chaos of bright whirligigs and deep green herbs, mean-

ders. So many things in this brick city are hard, forced to go in

straight lines. Here the children can make the roads go any way

they want.

“You know, this is my first garden in the United States,” Julia

says. “My mother didn’t know how to read, but she knew a lot

about the garden. She used to tell me, ‘When you plant some-

thing, you put part of your life in it. You should give love to your

plants. They give back to you.’ So when I was making this gar-

den, it reminded me of her. In Puerto Rico we have just a little

space. But even if it was just an empty can, my mother would

plant something in it. Because in PR, you know, people used

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

208

to live on what they have out of the farm. That used to be all

we had.

“Some of these kids, they’ve never planted anything before.

But now they begin to see the idea my mother taught me—that

once they’ve planted something, it will give back to them. The

other day my kids were eating broccoli with dinner and they

looked up at me and said, ‘Mommy, we planted this.’ And I said,

‘Yes, we planted that.’ Teaching my kids something that I learned

when I was a little girl in Puerto Rico is amazing.

“I ask everybody, ‘Can you come see my garden?’” Julia says

as we walk toward the gate, where Daniel and Edwin have

finished loading the van. “One of the tenants, she’s my assistant,

I got her to come too. And now every time she sees something she

planted come up, she says, ‘Aiyee! I have peas! I have tomatoes!’

Yesterday she was crying here. She said to me, ‘I plant this. This

is mine. I never plant anything before. This is so beautiful, I love

it.’ So even though this is part of my job, it’s part of my soul, too.

I have faith in this place.”

f

“You can use your imagination,” Daniel said when I first visited,

three years ago, as we stood in middle of a large room with tall

ceilings and big glass windows across the front, where volunteer

workers were installing the front door. “This is going to be the

dining room of the restaurant.”

We walked outside and stood in a bare courtyard surrounded

by a sturdy chain-link fence. “There’s going to be a fountain

here.” Daniel pointed to a crescent of rocks on the ground beside

the greenhouse, which was attached to the little stucco building

that houses the Nuestras Raíces offices. “We’ll have planters

there,” he said, turning slowly to describe an arc from the Cabot

Street side around to Main. “It will be full of species native to

Puerto Rico, things that can survive the New England climate.

And in that corner,” he said, turning to face the brick building

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

209

with the hand-painted sign, centro de agrícola de nues- tras raíces, “some banana trees, bamboo, and sugarcane. And this will be seating space for the restaurant. People will come

right out that door there.

“You know,” Daniel said, “when Holyoke was a booming in-

dustrial town in the nineteen hundreds, this was all hotels and

horses and buggies and trolleys coming and going. This was one

of the hottest corners in America.”

The clock tower Alejandro invoked to measure the distance

he covered while stooped over to harvest crops is visible from all

over town, including the corner of Cabot and Main, where

Daniel turned from asking me to imagine the future to contem-

plating the past. Its four faces were originally meant to measure

time owned by the mills. The workers’ lives were ruled by that

clock. Who built it? The same men who had made their fortunes

from the textile mills of Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts.

Constance Green tells the story in her 1968 book, Holyoke, Mas- sachusetts: A Case History of the Industrial Revolution. In 1847 the men came from Boston to buy a thousand acres along the

great curve in the Connecticut River, hoping for another windfall

once they’d harnessed the power of a sixty-foot drop in the water

level at Hadley Falls. But unlike Lawrence and Lowell, Holyoke

was a planned city. In fact, Holyoke was the most important

planned manufacturing center in New England.

When the investors calling themselves the Hadley Falls Com-

pany met with local resistance to their plan to buy up all the land

and displace a Yankee community already disrupted by the shift

from agriculture to industry, they recruited a local man to act as

their agent. Once they had secured the land in the company’s

name, they mapped out a grid of tenement housing around a sys-

tem of dams and canals, which would use the power of the river

to drive the huge mills. As in the more established industrial cen-

ters just outside Boston, local women, the daughters of Yankee

farmers, were replaced at the looms by the first wave of immi-

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

210

grants. In Holyoke, those were usually Irish families fleeing the

potato famine.

Irish construction workers built the dams and canals, and

Irish immigrants first worked in the factories. Many chose not to

live in company housing, the three- to five-floor tenements that

still stand, now boarded up and burned out. They built window-

less shanties over holes dug in the earth until they could afford

something more habitable. Within a decade, the Irish established

their own parish churches and parochial schools, taking refuge

from Yankee contempt in a well-defended enclave.

Though religion and class were powerful barriers to accep-

tance for the Irish immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century,

knowing English made their transition to work and life in Amer-

ica far easier and faster than it was for the groups who came af-

ter them—first the French Canadians, then the Poles, all Catholic

as well, and finally the Germans, who established the first immi-

grant Protestant enclaves, building Lutheran churches and keep-

ing separate from both the native Protestants and the ethnic

Catholics. German immigrants tended to be highly skilled indus-

trial workers and moved into positions with better pay faster

than any other immigrant groups. They were also more politi-

cally active. It was German Socialists who led the first successful

strikes among millworkers.

When a recession undermined the plans of the Hadley Falls

investors before all of the fifty-four mills in the original plan

could be built, the Holyoke Water Power Company bought them

out. The coming of the Civil War a few years later stimulated

new growth in the economy, and the new mill owners, local in-

vestors, diversified quickly. They sold water rights and encour-

aged local businesses that would require their products, thus

creating a more interdependent economy. Still, the economy was

predicated on two kinds of exploitable resources: water and im-

migrant labor.

Holyoke became famous for the production of thread, silk,

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

211

cotton, woolens, and paper. At one point, over a hundred mills

were in operation twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

By the 1880s the city became the largest producer of paper in

the world, earning itself the name it was known by well into the

twentieth century: Paper City.

In the first decades of the 1900s, when eastern and southern

European immigrants came to Holyoke in large numbers, the

city was named the third worst in America because of the crowd-

ing and disease in its tenements. With the development of steam

and electrically powered engines, however, it lost the advantage

of its location on the Connecticut River. Through the twenties

and thirties, the city’s economy weakened, with only a few of the

big textile mills remaining open. By the late fifties and early six-

ties, when the Puerto Ricans began arriving in significant num-

bers, they were the only immigrant group to face a city in decline.

And only the Puerto Rican ethnic community revitalized the

inner city of South Holyoke by building on their agrarian her-

itage, creating a small-scale, sustainable economy based on or-

ganic gardening.

f

Late on the summer afternoon when Daniel and I went from

garden to garden collecting produce for the farmers’ market, I

walked back to the original garden, La Finquita, to rest. The path

down the center of the gardens has one small branch to the

right, which leads to a grassy spot where a picnic table and two

benches sit in the shade of a pair of maples. Red, blue, white, and

yellow stripes spiral up the base of each tree, giving the quiet

grove a festive look. A casita for tools and wheelbarrows has been painted midnight blue with deep yellow trim.

Up on this rise, I choose a bench and sit down. It’s cool under

the maples. The gardens are quiet and empty.

A man on a motorcycle races his engine, waiting for the light

to change. Sirens wail in the distance. But here, near the gardens,

a calm has settled. Pea flowers have opened in the afternoon

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

212

sun, unfurling ruffled petals on the twining bright green vines.

The gardens are planted thick and neat. It really does feel like a

small farm.

Here and there a rake or a hoe has been left lying between the

rows. Each marks a pause. The gardener will soon come back,

lean down, take it up again, and continue to work. As I study the

long avenue of garden plots, each with a tool carefully laid beside

the row where someone left off to go home and eat and rest

awhile from the intense sun, a question comes to me: Why are

gardens so often presented to us with the fact of human work

erased?

This morning, after I met Alejandro and before Daniel took

me to see the gardens, I sat here on this bench asking some of the

elders about their experience as migrant farmworkers. Candido

Nieves, a thirteen-year-old member of the boys’ group known as

Protectores de la Tierra, Protectors of the Earth, sat beside me,

translating.

The rows stretched from here to the clock tower. Alejandro said it first, when he tried to explain how far he had to go,

stooped over, picking asparagus. Later Juan Lopez, Israel Rivera,

and Heriberto Santiago all said the same thing. “Big big big

farm,” Israel said. The rows of onions, or mushrooms, or straw-

berries, went from here to that clock over there on the hill. The

rows of cucumbers were so long that when they looked up, they

could not see the sun.

Heriberto then got down on the ground, kneeling on the

cool grass under the painted trees of La Finquita, and smiled

with pride, miming how deftly he pulled back leaves with one

hand and cut the stems with the other, shuffling forward the

length of a row on knees and shins, left, right, swipe, swipe,

shuffle, shuffle. He drew the curved blade of the knife he’d

brought with him from Puerto Rico in the air. He couldn’t find

one like it here.

‘You worked like that all day?’ I asked through Candido.

Yes, for hours at a time.

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

213

Inching forward on his knees, as in some penitential rite of the

pilgrim. Now I understood how Heriberto could not see the sun.

Once Juan, Israel, and Heriberto left, I packed up my things

and followed Candido back into the gardens.

“Now will you show me your favorite part of the garden?” I

asked as we turned into the broad aisle that runs down the center.

It was hot and still, and Candido moved slowly. He kept walking,

as if he had not heard me. But then he stopped and turned.

“I like this part, because you see flowers, white flowers, every-

where,” he said. “They’re from the beans growing up the fence.”

He put one large hand behind a leaf and lifted it gently so I could

see the blossoms and the light shining through the intricate pat-

tern of white lines on the sharply cut leaves. “This is where the

fruit comes from, the bean. It comes from the flower. I like the

color in the leaves. The white lines on the green. How it matches

the white flowers and green stems. I like how the flowers are

formed. They’re like a little animal here. A little elephant, they

look like. And the shape on the leaf is like an insect, like cam-

ouflage. It looks like a little kite right there. A butterfly too.”

Candido is very tall. To look this closely at a leaf or a small

white flower, he must stoop over the trailing vine. I looked with

him, leaning into the leaves to see the opening flowers where his

imagination, still capable of wonder, finds an elephant, an insect,

a butterfly, a kite.

“I like walking here,” he said quietly. “It’s like a forest.”

The word sounded formal, as if Candido were describing an

august place, one best approached with the blend of awe and de-

sire I heard in his voice.

“When did you learn that the flower forms the pea?”

Seven years ago, when he joined La Finquita. “It was my first

time gardening here. We planted our own garden,” he explained.

Seven summers of gardening, learning from the elders how to

plant seeds, how to water, what to weed, and when to harvest.

“Look at those squirrels trying to eat,” Candido said, smiling

as we passed through the gate. “Look at the colors of the pep-

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

214

pers,” he added, at ease, gesturing toward the last garden plot on

the end.

“What do you think you want to do when you finish high

school?” I asked him as we stood at the corner of Cabot and

Main, waiting for the light to change so we could cross back to

the Nuestras Raíces office.

“I want to go to a culinary school,” he said. We turned at

the same moment, as people will who walk side by side, and

Candido smiled as he said to me, “That’s what I’m practicing in

school now. I want to be a chef.” An eighteen-wheeler lumbers

by. “I’ll probably work there,” he said, nodding toward Mi

Plaza, the community restaurant in the renovated building beside

the Nuestra Raíces greenhouse.

f

“What’s unique and effective about Nuestras Raíces?” Daniel

says in our last few minutes before I leave. “Here’s how I would

put it. A youth worker and an elder start aji dulce seeds in the greenhouse. When those little seedlings grow big enough, they

get sold to one of the community gardeners here or at the farm-

ers’ market. Then in August the pepper is harvested and sold to

somebody in the community kitchen, who produces sofrito. That

sofrito is then sold to the restaurant owner, who uses it in his

cooking and sells it to the public. This summer we’re going to

complete the circle by composting some of the food waste from

the restaurant. Then we’ll mix the compost into the soil of the

gardens and the greenhouse. So what we’re doing at its most ba-

sic level is recreating a healthy community and economy. We’re

building it from scratch because it’s been lost . . .” Daniel pauses,

then adds, “if it ever did exist.”

Nuestras Raíces is closing the circle, imitating nature in mov-

ing toward a sustainable, no-waste system that continually re-

news itself through the cycle of growth and decay.

“The only progress that counts,” Aldo Leopold once said, “is

that on the actual landscape.”

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

215

In the end, it’s a question of scale, the difference between the

inhuman length of a row of tulips or asparagus on an industrial

farm, measured by the distance from La Finquita to the clock

tower, and the length of a row of Alejandro’s beans.

If you could see South Holyoke from the air, the original plan

of the men from Boston would still be visible: the dam on the

great curve of the Connecticut River at Hadley Falls, the horse-

shoe of mills around the stepped canals that once drove their tur-

bines. But then, all around the straight bar of silver light that is

the calmly flowing water of the Race Street canal, you would see

the green oases of the gardens of Nuestras Raíces. And there, on

the corner where the coaches once stopped, you would see the

ribbed arch of a greenhouse beside a fountain and a brick plaza

surrounded by a raised garden. And on the wall above the entry

to Mi Plaza, you would see, at the center of a huge mural painted

by children, a blue-and-green globe displaying the familiar shape

of the Americas linked by a slender belt of land. From it a great

tree has grown—a flamboyan, native to Puerto Rico. Its blazing

crown—the same color as New England trees in autumn—

spreads wide, sheltering the land, its slender roots reaching down

to encircle the earth.

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

216