Food Justice

6. Growing Justice

6 Growing Justice The Little Farm in Paper City Nestled in the Connecticut River Valley in western Massachusetts is the city of Holyoke. The poorest city in the state, with more than a quarter of the population living below the poverty line, Holyoke is also home to one of the most dynamic, hands-on, visionary food justice organizations in the country—Nuestras Raíces. For more than a decade, this group has been playing a transformative role in a community where half the residents are Puerto Rican, 60 percent qualify for food stamps, and 70 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Holyoke was once known as “Paper City,” an industrial town that relied on new immigrants from places like Ireland, Canada, and Poland as the labor pool for the mills. By the 1960s and 1970s, Puerto Ricans had begun migrating to Holyoke, looking for jobs in the mills. The earlier generation of workers had prospered sufficiently to be able to move up the hill from the tenements in the “Flats” and the downtown Holyoke neighborhoods near the mills, where the new Puerto Rican residents began to live. It was during this period that the paper industry began to relocate to the nonunion, cheap labor environment of the southern states and then eventually to the developing countries of the global south. Jobs in Holyoke disappeared, and the city became a poster child for economically depressed, de-industrialized U.S. cities. Work was hard to find, especially for the new Puerto Rican immigrants. Holyoke experienced a distinct income and ethnic divide between neighborhoods, with the poor neighborhoods facing a range of food insecurity problems and related health disparities, environmental hazards, and areas ridden with crime, drugs, and violence.1 124 Food Justice But the situation in Holyoke was not entirely bleak. The area had one of the most fertile soils in the state, and many of the city’s recent Puerto Rican residents had worked on homestead farms in Puerto Rico, growing avocados, bananas, and mangoes in their backyards and selling some of the produce in village markets. Growing food had been the passion of these new Holyoke residents, and they had the knowledge to turn what was otherwise a bleak and unutilized landscape into a place to grow food. With modest beginnings in 1992 and a little help from a college student, several of Holyoke’s newest residents got together to clean up an abandoned plot of land on which stood a burned-down church and converted it into La Finquita Community Garden, the Little Farm of Holyoke. Thus was born the Nuestras Raíces organization. At first, Nuestras Raíces could offer little more than an informal place for residents to meet and garden. Soon after, two more garden sites were established—El Jardín de los Girasoles (the Sunflower Garden) and El Jardín de la Roca (the Garden of the Rock, named for a remaining piece of the foundation of a five-story building that had once occupied the lot).2 In 1995, Daniel Ross was hired as executive director, and the next year the group successfully applied for one of the first USDA Community Food Project grants, which helped increase their capacity. Their flagship project, the Centro Agricola, was established. Centro Agricola offered a greenhouse and a plaza, and housed a restaurant, a shared use commercial kitchen, an office for Nuestras Raíces, a meeting space, and a bilingual library of publications on health and agriculture. The plaza was subsequently landscaped with flowers and plants reminiscent of Puerto Rico, and murals painted by community members adorned the building. The creation of Centro Agricola helped expand the organization, with hundreds of volunteers working on its development. The site became the pride of the community and a critical gateway to the downtown area where many of Nuestras Raíces’ constituents lived.3 With its greater capacity, the organization moved in several new directions , becoming a leader in the food justice, environmental justice, and social and economic justice arenas. It expanded to eight garden sites and two youth-managed gardens where more than 100 families now grow and harvest food and sell it at farmers’ markets. The gardens also provide a new green landscape for the city. Along with the Centro Agricola, they Growing Justice 125 became the heart and soul of the community, creating a new sense of...