Month: August 2018

Categories
Women in Agriculture Project

There is No Experience

I push the bell on the front door of Bessie’s green, Hood River farmhouse and count to sixty, but am met with no answer. The only audible noise is a faint knocking in the distance, a sound I attribute to the farm workers lining the surrounding country roads. I ring again and wait another minute before deciding to try my luck at the back door. As I walk around, I hear the knocking again, louder this time, and look up to see an old woman with gray waves in her hair and an exasperated frown on her face, holding a cane high above her head and knocking it against the dining room window. She waves towards the back door with her cane, and it takes a couple more charade matches for me to decide that I should, indeed, let myself in. Bessie Assai, a 95-year-old, retired farmer, has every right to tell her guest,  a 22-year-old, able-bodied nomad, to let herself in.

Once inside her house, I watch Bessie slowly maneuver towards the kitchen table with her walker. I immediately feel the uncertainty that I often feel with older people, unsure of how much I should offer to help. From a young age, I was taught to help my elders as much as possible, to treat them like kings and queens because they hold more knowledge than I could ever fathom. Yet, I wonder if a woman who spent her entire life relying on the strength of her body might feel disheartened when others question her physical independence. When Bessie doesn’t reply to my offer to help, I watch her maneuver towards the dining room table, and I take the seat across from her.

From the moment of our window-charades, my short visit with Bessie met absolutely none of my expectations. After spending less than an hour in her home, I can find many adjectives to describe Bessie: hardworking, bright-eyed, charming, and collected. Yet, I can also think of one thing that Bessie certainly is not. Bessie is not interested in discussing the political implications of her intersecting identities: the child of two Japanese immigrant farmers, a woman, a farmer on her father’s farm, a wife of a farmer, and a mother. Instead, Bessie wishes to discuss the habitual: the everyday life of her mother and father while managing an orchard in the Hood River Valley, her childhood spent on that orchard, and her adulthood spent on the orchard owned by her and her husband, also located in the Hood River Valley.

Bessie’s focus on the habitual, rather than the political, is especially surprising to me given the historical oppression of Japanese immigrants in the Hood River Valley. Following the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the heavy immigration of Chinese labor subsided, and the Oregon labor market began to rely on Japanese workers. By 1909, over a quarter of the Oregon Issei  (Japanese immigrants) worked as migrant farm workers. The Issei population in Hood River, Oregon grew rapidly when, in exchange for clearing brush for other farmers, Issei farm workers could receive marginal land to begin their own farms.

At that time, many of these Japanese farm workers in the Hood River Valley took on the title of independent Farmer. Rather than awarding them respect, this new title caused many Issei farmers to face continuous oppression in the form of state and county-wide legislative efforts to take away their land, for fear of the new competition. Never mind that these Issei farmers introduced new ground crops, such as strawberries and asparagus to the region, as their new land lacked the trees necessary to grow the more common orchard fruits and compete with more established farmers.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, this bigotry reached its precipice. In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, designating the removal of any people of Japanese ancestry from a large zone of the west coast, including Portland and Hood River. All Issei in the area were forced to report to assembly centers, and eventually, concentration camps. In 1945, the war ended and the camps closed, freeing the Oregon Issei to resettle or move back to their homes. The 69 percent of Oregon Japanese Americans who returned to their homes faced exclusion from their communities, rallies to deny them of their citizenship, and other forms of opression. At this time, the Nisei (second generation Japanese-Americans) asimilated into the United States culture, likely fueled by the oppression their families faced when tied to their Japanese roots. These Nisei befriended their Caucasian peers, faced less exclusion, and enjoyed diversified options to choose their own life-paths.

Bessie echoes these feelings of Nisei acceptance, as she recollects feeling welcome in her community while growing up on her parents’ orchard. Aside from this reference to acceptance, Bessie focuses on the normalcy of her life on the orchard. When asked about her early days working on her parents’ farm, Bessie responds that no specific memory comes to mind, because everything just came naturally. Her adulthood spend on another orchard evokes similarly non-groundbreaking memories. This later experience was, “just normal,” she explains. Most surprisingly, when asked how her experience as a Nissei affected her experience growing up and farming in the Hood River Valley, Bessie responds, “there was no experience, we just farmed.”

Questions regarding Bessie’s gender identity produce a similar response. When asked how her identity as a woman affected her experience farming in the Hood River Valley, Bessie replies that it affected her “in no way.” Yet, I can’t help but realize how the affects of Bessie’s gender on her farm work emerge at other moments in our conversation. When discussing her mothers’ life on the farm, and how it differed from her fathers’ life, Bessie tells me that her mother did not, in fact, work on her parents’ farm. Instead, she got pregnant soon after coming over to the United States, and had to take care of the children, rather than farm.

Bessie experienced a similar phenomenon, and while she grew up working on her parents’ farm, her farm tasks did not carry over to the farm where her and her husband lived. Bessie’s reiterance of the fact that “all things were natural, nothing different” between farming in childhood and adulthood, more applies to her husband, also the child of Japanese immigrants, who completed the farm work on their orchard. Maybe Bessie’s life on her new orchard can be called “natural, nothing different”, but if so, it was only a “natural, nothing different” carry-over from her mothers’ life, rather than her own childhood spent farming with her father. Similar to her mother, Bessie had children soon after marrying and moving to the new farm, and taking care of the children became her primary job.

After speaking with Bessie, I wonder why she does not consider the different, expected tasks of her and her husband as indicative of a connection between her gender identity and her experience as a farmer. Most woman farmers I know are quick to describe the implications  of their gender, and how it affects their work and treatment as farmers. They cite memories of colleagues suggesting that they ask their husbands before making a business decision, or inadequate respect from other farmers in the region. Yet, most of these women are less than 50 years old, and while I would not guess it from her bright eyes and playful smile, Bessie is 95.

I cannot help but wonder if Bessie’s dissimilar response to the gender question holds generational, and possibly cultural, roots. Maybe, Bessie’s answers implies a sort of generational acceptance. Perhaps Bessie, her mother, and other women of their generations and culture, believed that there was no alternate option but to cease farm work and other income-generating activities once the children were born, as they had become accustomed to this practice. With little precedence for questioning this expectation, Bessie simply accepted it. Of course, I will not delegitimize the decision to play the role of full-time parent, one of the most draining jobs in the world. Plus, Bessie could have easily grown accustomed to women with dual farmer-mother roles from neighbors, friends, etc., and decided that she wanted to focus on the later half. * Yet, I wonder how Bessie’s answer would have changed, and whether she would have found a connection between her gender and work, were she born twenty years later.

As for Bessie’s answer to the questions regarding her Japanese identity, I am not sure why she strayed from the political. Was the Nisei assimilation into United States culture so strong that it overshadows any memories of her parents’ oppression? Or, did the memories of this oppression leave Bessie with such a sour taste in her mouth that she no longer wants to talk about them? Or maybe, Bessie simply remembers the habitual more strongly than she remembers the political. Maybe, she remembers the day-to-day planting of strawberries, the harvesting of asparagus that grew from her parents’ trees, and the bundles of juicy pears her husband would collect from their orchard.

Regardless of the reasons for Bessie’s apolitical focus, I hope that she can look back on her life as a farmer, a mother, and the work she has completed with her own two hands, and smile. I hope she can think about the legacy she passed on to her son and grandson, who continue to farm, and gloat. I hope she can reflect on the ability she has awarded all of her children to receive a college education and choose their own paths, and sense nothing but pride. Yet, if I were to ask Bessie whether she feels proud, she would likely tell me that her experience isn’t one of pride or shame. She would tell me that her experience just is.

*During another interview, soon after my conversation with Bessie, I learned that many women in the Hood River Valley, even women from Bessie’s mother’s generation, played the dual mother-farmer role, as well as the role of housekeeper, organizer, etc., etc. Likely, Bessie was accustomed to women who took on the mother-farmer role, but this dual-role was not common in her family, and thus, was not habitual to her. Of course, this introduces an entire other conversation, still relevant today, about “super-women” and the expectation that women do literally all the things, and how only mothers are made to feel guilty when they don’t parent full-time and work full-time and cook healthy meals and run marathons and organize the PTA and do all the things, but that is a whole 5,000 other blog posts!


Categories
Women in Agriculture Project

Her Everything

“Hello, I just want to introduce myself. My name is Emma and I am conducting a research project, traveling around the country and collecting stories from immigrant women in agriculture. I heard about your market and was wondering if there might be someone here I could talk to.” It was not my normal way of acquiring research subjects. Usually, these conversations materialize after a couple of emails back-and-forth, a forwarding to a co-worker, a referral to someone else, or maybe a few phone calls. Yet, when I decided to take a last-minute, long-weekend trip to Eugene, I decided to settle for a last-minute, long-winded research tactic as well.

Distracted by something, probably the avocado hummus and fresh pita I had just sampled at the Mediterranean booth beside me, I had barely put much thought into my I just want to introduce myself. By the time I considered my words, they had already fallen out of my mouth and sat, lingering in the air between myself and the woman behind the information booth. Why do we ever preface introductions with that phrase? How very manufactured! How very untrue! I didn’t just want to introduce myself.

Luckily, my introduction didn’t seem to bother the friendly woman working behind the information booth. She promptly pointed me in the direction of a stand just to the other side of the hummus vendor. In front of the booth stood the director of Huerto de la Familia, an organization that Silvia, the head of the Adelante Mujeres Sustainable Agriculture program, had briefly mentioned to me. Similar to Adelante Mujeres, Huerto de la Familia conducts a six-week organic agriculture course with the goal of capacitating latino families in Lane County, Oregon with the resources and education necessary to improve their food-security, health, and economic self-sufficiency.

Behind the booth stood a Mexican immigrant named Stella and her teenage daughter. Stella, I learned, had just completed the six-week course, and was selling her produce at the Eugene Saturday Farmers Market for the first time. I asked Stella if I could take a picture of her with the produce stand, and her daughter immediately jumped into the frame, adjusting her mother’s t-shirt and wisping back the strands of stray hair that intruded in front of her mother’s ears.

Watching Stella and her daughter interact, I suddenly grew aware of a fact that I had, absentmindedly, experienced countless times before: for immigrant women farmers, family involvement reigns crucial. We say it all the time: family is everything. We may roll our eyes at our family members, poke fun at them, and at times, they may represent our worst enemies. Yet, at the end of the day, most of us would do anything for our families. I often tell stories of my family, the loud New Yorkers, about the ruthless jokes and untempered bluntness, how stepping into my home may feel like stepping into the eye of a hurricane. But I love my family, they’re everything, I’ll add without a second breath. To immigrant women, this everything takes on a whole new meaning.

Before leaving Portland, I spent a second evening volunteering at the Adelante Mujeres CSA packing. This time, Silvia asked me to drive her just a couple blocks away, to the Forest Grove Farmers Market, where some of the women and men in the Adelantes Mujeres Sustainable Agriculture Program held booths. At one of these booths, a married couple sold boxes of fresh berries, hot peppers, and a variety of other produce items. As I bantered with the couple in Spanish, their teenage daughter worked the cash register beside them.

 

 

 

 

 

At another booth, a young boy sat alone behind the scale, a row of boxed ground cherries lining the table in front of him. His mother, I learned, had just left the market to deliver some of her produce to the CSA packing, trading places with Silvia and I. Thus, instead of asking the time-strapped farmer, I consulted the temporary boss, her son, who could not have been more than eleven years old, whether I could snap a picture of the stand. Her stand. His stand?  Well, the family’s stand.

I have seen it countless times before, but never put two-and-two together until I watched Stella and her daughter interact at the market in Eugene. I saw it at markets in New York, in Iowa, in Wisconsin, in San Francisco, and in Oregon. I saw it in the teenage girl who proudly listed the ingredients in her family’s traditional Dominican sweets, waving her hands over layers of milk and sugar at the Lents International Farmers Market in Portland. The families of immigrant women farmers, more often than not, play visible rolls in the farm business.

After my realization at the Eugene Market, I grow upset with myself-perplexed that this reality had taken so long to materialize in my distracted mind. Of course, family plays a crucial role in the businesses of immigrant women farmers, as for immigrant women farmers, family plays a crucial role in everything.

Sure, most of us say that our family plays crucial roles in our lives: they  support and comfort us, they provide an atmosphere of trust, and they provide an atmosphere of honesty (whether desired or not). Yet, for an immigrant, often juggling limited financial and educational resources, possibly a language barrier, and often a government stacked against them, the ability to trust someone takes on a much larger meaning. For immigrant women, family might represent the only group of people they can trust indefinitely. Parents trust their children, and these children can help with the farm business, as well. Often, children living in the U.S. have gained a stronger English-language education than their parents have received, and thus, they can soften the language barrier between their parents and customers. Children also help their parents by drawing in these customers, as children represent something we can all connect to. How many times have you been drawn to a vendor simply because their young children sit beside them behind the stand, sorting boxes of produce and matter-of-factly educating customers about organic pest management and companion planting, topics that linger half-way in the haze above their pigtailed heads?

Of course, this parent-child arrangement plays a reciprocal role for farming families. Through helping out at the market, the children of immigrants gain many important perspectives from their parents, as well. They observe their parents’ tenacity, gain business, monetary, and communication skills,  and  learn to value hard-work. They grow inspired to follow their parents’ lead, inspired to push onward, even when the odds, the neighbors, the education system, the health system, even the entire country, seems stacked against them. Maybe, in an ideal world, these children would not need to learn at such a young age that prosperity comes from treading water, endlessly, against the currant. Yet, immigrant farmers seem to believe that their children must learn the reality, no matter how harsh. Perhaps, it is crucial that they learn.

Once I internalized the importance of family for these immigrant farmers, I began to further consider the U.S. government’s practice of separating immigrant children from their parents, and the continued, ineffective reunification of these families. In that moment, just when I thought the unfathomable nature of this practice had reached its precipice, it grew even more incredible to me. In my life, my family acts as a necessity. At times, there might be anger, heavy-handed jokes, sarcasm, and even pain, but all of that bad is grounded in the deepest good, the deepest love, and the deepest trust. I can hardly imagine the importance of family to someone in an unfamiliar, even hostile, place. I can hardly imagine the importance of love and trust in a place where love and trust seems so difficult to find. Us non-immigrants say that our families are everything, but for immigrants, they truly are.

Categories
Poetry and Reflections

Tracktown, USA

In Eugene, I slept on the couch of an Herbalist.

If, in slumber, I leaned too far to my left,

the cushions would slump, sink, at a diagonal,

pulling my unconscious body down with them.

 

At 3 in the morning I’d awake to the sound of crickets outside the double doors

a nuzzle of black fur, a cat named Mortimer, pawing,

climbing his way towards me, then settling on my chest, his breathing

slowing to the rhythm of the dehydrator

that shriveled the marion-berries at our feet. Together,

pulled by a berry lullaby,

drifting back to the dreams we half-remembered,

awake when the crickets came again.

 

In Eugene I harvested blackberry leaves and mother’s wort

beside the Herbalist, learned to ease headaches and cramps,

nausea and allergies with bottles of sweet-smelling, earth.

We cleared patches of grass until our thumbs blistered and the sunflowers

awoke with smiles on their cheeks, risen from a warm-bedding earth.

We picked blackberries form the branches as we worked,

our browned gloves barely free of our hands

by the time the solid sweet crushed to liquid,

and bid hello to our parched tongues.

 

In Eugene I ran from the Amazon Park to the Willamette River,

light footsteps thumping past TJ’s Provisions “the best cannabis in town,”

a bleacher of dread-locked fans cheered me on from the sidewalk

in dazed stardom, “girl, you training for a marathon?”

They rose, hazy, while I fell, more alive. In Eugene.

 

In Eugene the Herbalist sang for me,

strummed her guitar to questions I never thought

I always wondered. The rhythms asked me what one says

before they say I love you. I told them I don’t know. I

told them ask the blackberries.

The Herbalist and I shared stories,

a plate of tempeh bacon, a bottle of red wine.

 

In Eugene I paid for a 10-dollar chair massage

from an old woman in a long, gray braid and a crinkled, orange tunic

at the Saturday Farmers Market. I reminded her

of Venita, the teenage cousin who listened to Stevie Nicks,

smoked cigarettes out the car window. She

wanted to be just like Venita when she grew up, thanked

me for reminding her to call Venita, sometime soon.

Another time. Another day.

There would be other days for weeding and planting,

for singing, for dancing and doing.

There would always be other days

In a town like Eugene.

 

In Eugene I slept on the couch of an Herbalist.

She gave me an album of love songs, tinctures of herbs

to kiss my sore throat,

two cloud-cushions to cup my tired, my lonely, my nomad limbs,

and handfuls of Concord grapes.

I felt lonely then loved then lonely again,

Then wondered if I might just move to a little house

with an herb garden,

grow blackberries around the porch,

adopt a cat and name him after an old, British man

once I reach California.

 

 

 

*Cover image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/734438651705888805/

Categories
Women in Agriculture Project

Brick Ovens and Organic Carrots: a Venue for Neighborly Discourse

If you attend, or ever did attend, Grinnell College, your inbox likely overflowed this weekend with emails from family members and friends from across the country.  This weekend, in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times, Jacqui Shine featured the tensions within the town of Grinnell, Iowa, home to both a progressive liberal arts school and the largest firearms manufacturer in the country. She highlighted how increased shootings throughout the nation have intensified the common, neighborly discourse between the two sides of the gun-control debate in town. As a Grinnell graduate myself, I reacted defensively towards my family members surprised email notifications: Of course! This is the story I’ve been trying to tell you whenever we talk about gun control! You need to read it in the New York Times to make it legitimate? Eventually, I was able to step off of my high horse, and kicking it into the corn fields, I began to think back on my experience navigating the various spheres of Grinnell, IA.

Ironically, in a sea of herbicide-doused corn and soybeans, I perceived the most evident merging of dissimilar political affiliations in the sphere of sustainable agriculture. On a Monday morning in late April 2018, I sat down with Melissa Dunham, co-owner of Grinnell Heritage Farm, the largest producer of organic carrots in the state of Iowa. Melissa is also the Executive Director of Local Foods Connection (LFC), a non-profit that removes the financial barrier to local food-access by connecting community members of limited financial means with local farmers, and providing these community members with CSA shares or farmers market credits. I got to know Melissa through my work with farmers in the Grinnell area, as well as by volunteering at a few of her LFC fundraising events. When I told Melissa about my traveling research project, she invited me to visit the farm for a practice interview, and in return, I offered to spend a few hours planting potatoes with her and her husband and co-farmer, Andy. That April morning, I found myself sitting on a rocking chair on the front porch of Melissa and Andy’s farmhouse.

Melissa and Andy

In the summer of 2017, the Dunham’s began hosting HaPIZZAness nights, community dinners featuring a buffet of wood-fired pizzas with seasonal toppings, as well as lawn games, wagon-ride farm tours, and fresh produce for purchase. These events play a dual role in the community: a fundraiser for LFC, and a venue for community members of different backgrounds to come together over a meal.

Melissa Dunham, who grew up in the twin cities, grew increasingly aware of the divisions within her adopted town of Grinnell after the 2016 presidential election. “During the election cycle, it felt like the community was more divided than ever. We wanted to do something that would bring the community together, that would literally bring people to the same table,” she explained. Prior to initiating HaPIZZAness nights, the Dunham’s hosted farm field days, events where interested individuals could work and learn on the farm for a morning. Unfortunately, very few residents of Grinnell attended these events, and rather, most attendees drove from Cedar Rapids or Iowa City. “We wanted to do something that would focus on our own backyard and everyone eats pizza,” said Dunham.

Indeed, it seems that the whole, big backyard comes out for pizza night. At these events, the Dunham’s have hosted small-business owners, high school students, professors, the president of the college, and even the former president of the NRA. At one particular pizza night, Dunham watched two next-door neighbors meet and exchange phone numbers for the first time.

Heading into the new presidency, Dunham knew the environment would  face accumulating attacks. Constituent support for environmentally-sustainable practices would grow increasingly necessary, and thus, an appreciation for environmental sustainability would grow increasingly necessary as well. With this understanding, HaPIZZAness nights took on a third mission: an opportunity to educate community members about the environmentally-sound farming methods used at Grinnell Heritage Farm. During these events, attendees could choose to tour the farm by wagon and learn about the farm’s various environmentally-conscious practices, including beetle banks, cover strips, and drip irrigation. Thus, HaPIZZAness nights became a unifying force not only through their success in bringing community members together, but also by presenting a town-wide opportunity for environmental education. 

In my experience, sustainable agriculture has represented a unifying force at locations that span beyond Grinnell Heritage Farm. At the Grinnell Farmers Market, low-income community members exchange EBT card dollars for tokens to be used at the market. At the six Grinnell Giving Gardens, run by the nonprofit Imagine Grinnell, any community member in need may stop by to harvest produce, with most of the produce donated to the MICA Food Pantry. Such town-wide access expands the demographic most likely to benefit from sustainable growing, moving beyond higher-income individuals with more leisure time and greater opportunities for environmental education.  In turn, these venues cater to community members of dissimilar backgrounds and political affiliations. Of course, I do not mean to imply that socioeconomic status determines every individual’s political affiliation. Yet, in Grinnell, Iowa, the spaces that cater to the widest array of financial abilities represent the spaces most likely to mix relatively progressive college affiliates with community members of diverse political views.

If the farmers market and Giving Gardens provide any indication, to foster community coalition, sustainable agriculture venues must prove accessible to people of dissimilar economic means.  Melissa Dunham commented on this power of access with regards to Local Foods Connection. “Everybody says vote with your food dollar, but 30-40 percent of our community does not have the ability to go out and vote with their food dollar,” Dunham explains. “A significant piece of our population does not have ability to vote… which is criminal almost. We are giving them back their ability to vote.”

In the political sphere, the population of Grinnell, IA casts votes for various candidates and policies. Many vote in a manner unlike the manner in which Melissa or I vote. However, regardless of how we vote in an election, we should all possess the ability to vote for food that is amiable to our health and the health of the environment.

Melissa points out that a donation to Local Foods Connection moves in two directions. “Say you were to donate $10,” she explains, “that $10 goes to support a family who is unable to procure that fund financially, but that same $10 gets spent with a local farmer that is farming in an environmentally-just way.” I can identify a third direction for that donation as well. As the donation allows community members to connect with local farmers and learn about the sustainable practices those farmers use, it adds a layer of environmental literacy as well. Some community members, without the opportunity to meet local farmers and consider  where their food is coming from, might not vote for environmentally sustainable agricultural practices. Yet, once aware of the merits of these practices, individuals grow increasingly inclined to vote with their fork, and choose food grown in a way that protects their health, the health of their children, and the health of the environment.  

Perhaps, once all people are given the opportunity to access and understand sustainable agriculture, it does not need to represent a politically divisive issue. Perhaps, once all people are given the opportunity to access and understand sustainable agriculture, it can become a subject of universal agreement. Perhaps, sustainable agriculture can become the topic where we all, both literally and ideologically, share the same table. Once we are seated around that same table, eating brick-oven pizza topped with organic beets and local parmesan, then maybe we can begin a conversation on the issues that truly divide us.

Helping plant potatoes at Grinnell Heritage Farm

 

Categories
Women in Agriculture Project

Adelante Mujeres

Adelante Mujeres means “women rise up,” an apt name for an organization invested in empowering and educating low-income Latina women and their families. Since 2002, Adelante Mujeres has lead programs in early childhood education, Latina girls empowerment, conflict management, sustainable agriculture, small business development, and healthy food access. I had the pleasure of volunteering with the Adelante Mujeres Sustainable Agriculture Program during one of their CSA packing events, and plan to volunteer with them again. On that humid Wednesday evening in early August, I learned that it is possible to stuff too many strawberries into a produce box, that there is, in fact, a most efficient protocol for flipping boxes of berries into paper bags, and that cherry tomatoes look more marketable once multiple varieties are mixed. I learned that effectively empowering a group of farmers, especially those who have been held back by inadequate programming and resources, might require fastidious organization and attention to the smallest of details. However, once those details are attended to, the results can be inspiring.

“There’s nothing like it,” Silvia explained, reflecting on her childhood days spent exploring her family’s farm in Oaxaca, Mexico. “I would climb a tree, grab hold of a peach, and just sit there in a branch eating the sweet fruit, or I’d pick a watermelon and cut it open to eat right there.” We were cleaning out bins in the kitchen of the Forest Grove Methodist Church, her washing and I drying. As soon as the farmers in Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable agriculture program arrived, we would organize their crops into these bins, and prepare them for pick-up by all share-holders in the Adelante Mujeres’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Silvia, the manager of the Adelante Mujeres Farm Business and Distribution program, held the dual immigrant-farmer title herself. After moving to Los Angeles, and eventually Oregon, she opened her own 26-acre organic farm not far from Portland, where she prided herself on fair conditions and wages for all workers. Unfortunately, the back-breaking gruel of farm management failed to provide an adequate profit after accounting for the many costs, and Silvia was unable to keep her farm.

Silvia Cuesta, Farm Business and Distributer Manager

Upon speaking with Silvia, her passion for farming and fresh produce grew so tangible that I could almost hold it in my palms. After losing her farm, Silvia could have easily succumbed to her disappointment, traded in coveralls for a business suit, brushed her agricultural aspirations away, and proceeded onwards to an unrelated career. Instead, she decided to use her experience in organic farming, as well as her understanding of the inadequate educational and monetary resources available to U.S. Latinas, and shifting gears away from her own farming pursuits, she sought to inspire Latina farmers and their families to move adelante.

Sitting down with Adelante Mujeres’ CSA manager, Azul, I learned about the  specifics of the organization’s agriculture program. Adelante Mujeres began in 2002 under two realizations: 1. Latina women were not actively participating in classes or activities in Portland and the greater-Portland community. 2. Latina women’s little participation stemmed from the fact that existing programs inadequately met their needs and limited resources. Adelante Mujeres has since expanded to provide programming for Latinx youth, children, and men, under the understanding that the setbacks encountered by Latina women often affect their families as well. In 2008, Adelante Mujeres began offering sustainable agriculture training classes to teach aspiring and existing Latinx farmers about land acquisition, farm business, and sustainable growing practices. Five years later, Adelante Mujeres launched their CSA program. For the first time, community members could sign up to receive a weekly bin of produce from these farmers, in turn providing the farmers with a steady and pre-determined income.

Azul Tellez Wright, CSA Membership Coordinator

Today, Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable agriculture training program supports 5 men and 5 women, all who sell their produce through the CSA, and to local restaurants. These farmers are mainly husband and wife pairs, all hail from Mexico, and about half grew up in the United States, while half are immigrants themselves. These farmers grow produce through various land arrangements: in Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable garden, on shared land, and in their own backyards. Some have moved on to launch their own CSA’s , and one has even acquired personal farmland. When I asked Azul to recount a particular instance when she experienced the empowering effect of the program, she smiled and told me that she sees it all the time. “Every single one of these farmers wants to farm, and every single one of these farmers has long-term, farming goals,”  she explained. To Azul, the most inspiring instance occurs when she sees the passion that these farmers express, again and again.

At the Wednesday evening CSA packing, four to five volunteers stretched plastic gloves over their hands alongside Silvia, Azul and the CSA program’s driver. Rows of tables lined the church’s fellowship room, each displaying a label with the address for a specific CSA pick-up location. The bins that lined the tables each designated a CSA member’s name and share-type. To the right of the tables stood a dry-erase board, with bright lines and letters denoting which and how many of each produce item belonged in each share-type. Each time a farmer entered the room, Silvia would go through their produce, fulfill their invoice, and within minutes, the volunteers’ hands would begin to move. Plastic hands dumped bright raspberries and blackberries into paper bags, plastic hands mixed cherry tomatoes, plastic hands weighed bags of arugula, and plastic hands placed sultry, purple eggplants into bins. Spanish answers responded to English questions arose from Spanish requests. The whole event resembled a mixed produce bag–half-filled with organized procedures and half with light-hearted conversations. We laughed, we talked, Silvia made sure I snapped a picture of the strawberries, a volunteer from Milwaukee told us about her teaching job at a Waldorf school, a young, volunteer couple asked me for the name of my blog.

 

 

Silvia herself exhibits a hybrid-personality: a mix of no-nonsense business and loving devotion. Towards the end of my first volunteer shift, a farmer walked into the room carrying a cardboard box filled with basil. I could tell from the way Silvia greeted him that she had known him for a long time. “This was harvested too soon,” she explained, looking him squarely in the eye as she and pinched a leaf of basil between her fingers. As my gloved hands sifted through the multi-colored tomatoes, I listened to them discuss the best methods for growing marketable, organic basil while ensuring it does not go to seed. That evening, as I listened to this conversations and others like it, I began to understand the farmers’ passion that Azul had referenced earlier. Each farmer who entered the room wanted to give everything they could to ensure their improvement and the longterm success of their agricultural pursuits.

I realized then that such success might require a couple tons of underripe basil, some tough-love, 26 acres of loss and disappointment, language barriers, and hours spent out in the field when you could be with your children. Yet, all of the farmers I met were willing and devoted to putting in that work. All of the farmers I met were willing and devoted to persevering in the face of limited land and resources. All of the farmers I met were willing to do all that it takes to ensure that those very children can one day follow in their mothers’ footsteps, and walk with them hacia adelante.

Categories
Poetry and Reflections

Chili Peppers and Poetry: a Day at the International Farmers Market

Portland is white. Portland is, in fact, 70.4% white, according to the most recent U.S. Census. Last Saturday, the white-nationalist, far-right group “Patriot Prayer” conducted a racist protest in Portland. When Portland police officers were called to the scene, they responded with pepper spray and stun grenades, attacking not the white-supremacists, but the anti-facist, anti-racist, counter-protesters instead.

I missed the commotion. I was on a Saturday morning 10-miler organized by the Portland Running Company, weaving through wooded trails, crossing the Hawthorne Bridge to capture the morning sun glinting off the Willamette River, chatting with marathoners and ultra-marathoners about mileage peaks and destination races. We logged blissful, sun-kissed, trail miles, rambling on about our greatest worries of the moment, like fitting in training with a full time career, how much weight lifting, and how much cross-training. All of us were white.

The best description I’ve heard of Portland’s whiteness came from a young, white man working at Lents International Farmers Market. “Portland is interiorly white,” he remarked, referring to the segregation of non-white people into the outskirts of the city, such as the Lents neighborhood. I realized that if I based my understanding of Portland’s inclusivity solely off of my Sunday morning spent volunteering at Lents International Farmers Market, I might gain a skewed perception. I felt such an ambiance of community, such a sentiment of welcomeness encompassed within that vendor-filled parking lot on SE 92nd and Reedway. But, then again, I’m white.

That morning, a young girl helped her mother sell the family’s traditional Dominican sweets, smiling with pride, waving her hands over the layers of Nutella, the powdered cookies, the tres leches, and the bizcocho dominicano. “Should I be in it?!” she eagerly inquired when I asked to take a picture of the duo’s market stand, her smile already locked in a parallel with my iPhone’s camera lens, her body already fixed into the frame. A farmer from Mexico cooked chili peppers in a cylindrical grill, the green vegetable flesh sizzling and crackling under a bright flame, challenging the 90 degree day. Vendors spoke in Russian mixed with Spanish mixed with Thai. The vast majority of their customers spoke English. Those customers were mostly white.

Live music followed poetry readings. Community members filled the tables and chairs that faced the performance stand. Harmonies and metaphors drifted through the air, tempering the spice of chili peppers and sweetening the kale. Audience members tapped their toes, hummed and nodded along, closed their eyes, and succumbed to the absent-minded smiles that drifted over their lips. A talented, teenaged, Japanese-American girl performed a flowing rendition of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” the English words intertwined with a Japanese translation. Her father and little sister sang along, proud in the front row. I watched six other performers read their poetry and strum their guitars. They were all white.

At the info tent, the market managers showed me fliers in English, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin.  At a nearby tent, a representative from Food Scouts worked to mitigate the childhood food-insecurity that plagues many low-income families in the neighborhood. She handed free, produce tokens to children between the ages of 3-13, lent pig-tailed elementary-schoolers rainbow chalk and coloring book pages, and showed them how to pickle bite-sized cucumbers in miniature cups. She, along with all of the Portland Farmers Market employees, were white.

Of course, I do not mean to criticize this market. I could never criticize  efforts to bring a sense of belonging to international community members, especially in the midst of such a homogeneous city. I could never criticize such a commitment to community sustainability, to offering food that is both sustainability-produced and culturally-appropriate. I could never call into question the smile of pride on the young Dominican girl’s face as she sold her homemade sweets, or deny the audience members’ humming and tapping, the peaceful symphony of poetry drifting through the humid air, mixing with the spicy aroma of chili peppers, together blending seamlessly into the Portland August heat.

At the same time, I begin to wonder about my own perceptions. Can I even comment on the feeling of welcomeness I perceived at the international market?  Can I even make these judgements when I enter every space I occupy feeling welcome? When I’ve felt a sense of community in every place I’ve ever lived? When I am a white person surrounded almost entirely by white people?

And I’m sitting here writing this wondering if it’s okay for me to write about Portland being white, if it’s ok for me to write anything about skin color, and I want to send this to my sister to ask if it’s alright to post, but I hate that the one person I can think to send this to is white, but I need to know if it’s ok, because I don’t know how to talk about being white, because everyone around me is so damn white.