The Fate of the South Central Farmers Community Garden

Yesterday the South Central Farmers Community Garden was raided and the farmers were forcibly evicted from their 14-acre plot of land—land they have cultivated for the last fourteen years. I visited the farm once and shared a blog with you about it. At five a.m. the invasion began when the farm was surrounded by the LAPD and the LAFD. I heard about it when I woke up at seven. I wondered why the eviction was being carried out when it had been reported that individuals and foundations, to pay off the developer, had raised the money, and supposedly Mayor Villaraigosa was now supporting the farmers.

I listened to the report on KPFK and tended to my job and my garden and my trees, wondering why gravity has a way of elevating the powerful and pinning down the people who could use the Yerba Buena and Manzanilla, people for whom organic isn’t a concept that originated in Whole Foods Market, but is instead a way of life.

A bulldozer came crashing thorough the chain link fence that surrounded the 360 plots of land and a saw cut down a branch of the tree on which Daryl Hannah sat. It all seemed part of the LA County Sheriffs Department’s show—a shameful performance before crops on their way to mulch—orchards, bushes and plants filled with meaning, lying in wait, a silent audience in the warm June wind. As I said in my previous blog, this is a farm that exemplifies what all cities must strive for as we overdevelop our urban centers and lose our agricultural lands. For some eyes, the South Central Farmers Community Garden is only a bit of green among the industry of South Central Los Angeles, but for me to be surrounded by banana and walnut trees and feel the warmth and inhale the smell of Central America in the midst of the most unattractive, smutty, ironic land in LA, is nothing short of a miracle. To see subsistence where earth and deep roots are unimaginable is magic.

Years ago in Brooklyn, my sister and I met Kofi. I think he was a Rastafarian, although we never talked religion. We were twenty-three and, needless to say, a little lost. He put us on a coconut water fast. It was all very Dan Millman, and definitely worth the clarity and energy I experienced from giving my digestive system its first nap in a couple of decades. Kofi mentioned several times that after this fast we ought to try a dry fast. I moved from Brooklyn to Uptown and never did try that dry fast, but what I have thought about consistently since my visit to the farm was Kofi’s reasons for why we should try it. He had predicted that in the future, a day would come when there would be no food. He had touched my heart and my sister’s and then his own, and said “We will survive.” 

The day without food has arrived for the 350 families who have subsisted on the food they have grown at the farm. The fate of the crops and the trees will be decided today. As for the farmers, it remains unknown.

Comments

[sarah mac]

so tragic and ignored...the importance of open space and sustainability. what the LAPD unwittingly did was kill the american dream...to have something to call one's own, that sustains us, even if it is shared with 349 other families. simply deplorable.