A Glimpse of Los Angeles, an Oasis with Deep Immigrant Roots


Ten minutes from my house, it sits on an unconventional hillside of fruit and vegetable trees, next to a decommissioned landfill, a highway, and the country’s largest port.

Emerging like a mirage from its surroundings, the San Pedro Community Gardens occupy six acres of city-owned land in the otherwise highly industrialized area of ​​the blue-collar port community of San Pedro in Los Angeles.

one time part ancestral land of the Tongva, California Indigenous people, the site – now divided into 224 family plots and one communal plot, each measuring an average of 30 feet by 40 feet – has provided physical and spiritual nourishment to numerous generations of migratory Angelenos since gardeners began cultivating the land. Here in the 1960s.

As many rural people have been pushed into cities and beyond borders by industrialization and urbanization, some have turned to gardens for shelter, connection with home, and preserving and transmitting their cultural heritage.

Raul Laly Fernandez small town of Purepero He joined community gardens in the Mexican state of Michoacán in 1986, nearly 20 years after emigrating from Mexico City.

“Most of the people who garden here used to live in small towns and farms in Mexico where they worked the land for other people who had fields here – we call them campesinos,” he said. “And when they came here, they now work in the city. For them, this land means a lot because working with the land here feels like they’ve come home.”

Mr. Fernández told me about his first days in the gardens: “Before I retired, I would come here after work, get a shovel and start working in the dirt. And all the stress at work, all the tension, was gone,” she said. “I would look at my plants or talk to my gardening friends. Sometimes we played cards, the Mexican games we know.”

For Mr. Fernández, the gardens provided daily recreation and community space that he found lacking in Los Angeles.

“Most of the people living in Mexico, especially in small towns and cities, go out to the plaza in the evening after work, where people gather,” he said. “They sit on a bench and talk, greet passers-by because almost everyone knows each other. We can’t do that here.”

As a Russian-Ukrainian American who moved to the United States as a teenager and later married a second-generation Mexican American, I find myself drawn to stories of immigration, broken connections, own culture, and a longing to build new homes.

When I discovered San Pedro Community Gardens in 2019, I instantly connected with the expressions of nostalgia I saw in this lovingly rendered landscape. At the time, amid California’s drought, the gardens had closed for water infrastructure improvements. They reopened in June 2020 and I continued to learn the story of the community through the trauma and disruption caused by the pandemic and exacerbated by structural racism.

Kimberly Mentlow, a new gardener born in Ohio and raised in Los Angeles, longs to be a part of the community. He just bought his land after three years on the waiting list. Working with gardeners—sweating with them, getting dirty, growing, and sharing things with them—was particularly important to him, he said.

“I’m really excited to get to know them, to experience them, to learn about their family or to express what their passion is, what they want to grow, who they are in their garden,” she said. “I can look into my friends Liz’s and Dave’s gardens and you know who they are. You can feel their art, culture, creativity, experience and love.”

By joining the garden, Ms. Mentlow also wants to escape the stress of her job and disconnect from the world. “Time passes and you don’t look at your watch,” he said from his time spent in the garden. “You are right at that moment.”

For many gardeners, family plots have served many generations and commemorate deceased family members.

Immigrated from Palermo, Italy, with his family in 1968, Johny Cracchiolo inherited the land from his father, who passed away 23 years ago. “This is my home away from home,” she said, almost crying. He said his father had been cultivating the land for 30 years. “So this is the conspiracy, my father and I for 50 years.”

Imelda Ladia shares a similar family background. After retiring in the Philippines, Ms. Ladia’s father immigrated to Los Angeles to join her daughters. In time she wanted to return to the Philippines, but Miss Ladia tried to give her a reason to stay.

“He loved growing plants, so we bought him a plot of land here,” he said. More than 30 years have passed since then. “We used to come here with my sister, uncle and husband and help him. We loved helping him and he was very happy.”

After her father died, Miss Ladia and her family decided to continue cultivating the plot as a celebration of her legacy. Our heart is in the garden, he said.

For some people, tilling at the San Pedro Community Gardens is a chance to mend the broken links with their ancestral homeland.

David Vigueras’ family has lived in Los Angeles for generations and uses that garden to reconnect with the lifestyles of his Native Yaqui ancestors from Sonora, Mexico. “I have traveled all over Mexico but never been to the homeland, Hiak Vatwe“said. “I try to imitate the way my people, my ancestors, approached this garden.”

Mr. Vigueras also values ​​the diversity of the horticultural community. “What I think is beautiful here is all the ethnicities in this garden, the different cultures people come from, and the fact that we all share what we grew up with,” he said. “There are Italians who grow Mexican chile, there are other people who grow Italian eggplants.”

“We do cross-pollination,” he said.

During my reporting, the gardeners in San Pedro greeted me and gifted me their wisdom, their stories, and the fruits of their labor. They also taught me how to work with soil and plants, which gave me a deeper understanding of the garden itself. Close friendships followed. In the end, the garden became the place where I spent the most time away from home in the pre-vaccine days of the pandemic, thanks to the relative safety provided by the outdoor community space.

My own family in Ukraine grows most of their own food, and so I was deeply concerned with the gardeners’ desire to recreate a piece of their homeland, reconnect with a lost way of life, and develop deeper roots in their adopted home – not by nurturing it all. not just the health of their families, but the health of the entire community.

Stella Kalinina He is a Russian-Ukrainian-American photographer based in Los Angeles. Their stories focus on human connections, personal and social histories, and the places we live in. You can follow their work Instagram.





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