Now it's us!
An immigrant community in Los Angeles demands urban farmland
- by Henrik Lebuhn -
Since 12th September 2005, the „South Central Farmers’“ case has been heard in the appellate court of Los Angeles. 347 families from Latin America, most of them illegalised, have sued the city because it had sold the former derelict land with its newly planted gardens. The land had been appropriated by the farmers; the gardens are therefore officially “non-existent”. The ‘campesinos’ are now organising an unequalled campaign against the privatisation.A ten minute drive south of Los Angeles' financial district, the city's impressive skyline still seems so close you can almost touch it. The skyscrapers' sparkling glass facades form a sharp contrast to the poor district of South Central. This area is considered extremely deprived with predominantly african americans and latinos living here, and most people in Los Angeles probably think of unemployment, drug problems and gang violence when they hear about it. This is where the Campesinos del Centro Sur, the South Central Farmers, have their gardens, right in the middle of an industrial belt which divides South Central and Vernon with it’s innumerous sweatshops and warehouses. On a 14 acre industrial wasteland at 41st Street and Alameda more than a thousand immigrants, many of them from Latinamerica, have lovingly established dozens of fruit and vegetable gardens - a green oasis in the middle of a concrete desert.
„It’s been 12 years now that we started the gardens. At that time this property was full of construction waste,“ says Pedro Barrera. The native mexican was here from the very beginning. Today he proudly points at the huge banana plants in his garden. The mild climate of Los Angeles allows up to four harvests per year. This way the Campesinos can easily cover about one third of their food supply. On weekends neighbors and friends stop by for a walk through the lush gardens. Farmers and visitors trade, sell and give away fruits, vegetables and herbs. In districts like Vernon or South Central, where the average familiy income amounts to about 1,500 dollars per month, this form of solidarity economy makes a huge difference for everyone.
In fact, the gardens on 41st Street only exist due to a chain of peculiar coincidences. Until the mid-eighties the property was populated with warehouses. In 1986 the city took the land by eminent domain. The property was purchased for 4.7 million dollars from the owner, Ralph Horowitz, in order to build a trash incinerator, which eventually never happened. Environmental activists and grassroot organizations massively protested the city's plans and considering South Central's explosive social mixture and notoriously rebellious athmosphere, the idea to turn the 14 acres into a toxic wasteland was finally abandoned.
It's the district where the Watts Riots broke out in 1965. Arresting an allegedly drunken driver, african american Marquette Frye, the police provoked a large-scale civil disorder. It took the police and the National Guard six days to get the riots under control. 34 people were killed, almost all of them black. With the Rodney King case of 1992, South Central became again the starting-point of massive uprisings. A California court found four police officers not guilty of beating up King while he was lying on the ground. An amateur video, showing the officers' brutal attack on the black man was broadcast on tv-stations nationwide. After the scandalous decision, made by an all-white jury, the riots started in South Central and quickly spread to other districts. 50 people died during the clashes, 4,000 were injured and 12,000 people were arrested. The damage totalled more than one billion dollars.
Facing the heated, atmosphere the city renounced it's plans for the construction of the incinerator. Instead the property on 41st Street was sold to the Port Authority and later abandoned. „And now we are here,“ says Barrera. 350 predominantly low-income families came and cleaned up the trash, divided the property into plots, fenced them in and started to cultivate the land. The Los Angeles Food Bank, which has been the administrator of the property since the early 1990's, found an arrangement with the group. However, the farmers were never granted an official permission to use the land. In 2002 this became their fate, when the original owner, Ralph Horowitz, claimed he had a 'right of first refusal' and decided to repurchase the prime industrial real estate. When the developer Horowitz, who wanted to build new warehouses, filed a suit against the city, it first seemed like he would have to look for a different piece of land. But then the lawsuit was surprisingly settled. For 5 million dollars the property was sold to the Libaw-Horowith Investment Company., perhaps for as much as 10 million dollars less than what it was actually worth.
The Campesinos, who at this point had been cultivating the land for over ten years, weren’t even informed about the lawsuit. The deal obviously appeared quick and dirty and was settled without any publicity. In fall 2003 the farmers received a letter saying that they would have to leave the property within a couple of weeks. An eviction was announced for February 2004 and more than likely neither the city nor the owner Ralph Horowitz expected any considerable resistance. Contractual arrangements had never been made with the Campesinos and many of them were actually undocumented and didn’t even speak English.
But the city had underestimated the Campesinos' will to defend their gardens. Instead of giving up the property, the farmers got together to discuss how to put up a fight against the politics of privatization. The solution: Get as much publicity as possible and push the political price the city would have to pay for an eviction. The Campesinos founded the South Central Farmers and started to network with homeless organizations, the black community, churches and environmental-activists. Within a few weeks they conjured an unprecedented campaign. They protested in front of the Los Angeles City Council, canvassed for the preservation of their gardens, set up a website and had celebrities like the actor James Cromwell send them greetings of support.
In February 2004 the the renowned attornies Hadsell & Stormer were intrigued by the case and decided to take it on. Reviewing the files, the lawyers noticed that the city had bipassed several commissions and procedures concerning the property's sale. Obviously someone had been in a hurry to sell the public land. Three days before the eviction on the 27th of February 2004, Hadsell & Stormer announced that the South Central Farmers would file a lawsuit against the City of L.A. for violating the administrative code. Hadsell & Stormer managed to get a temporary restraining order and the eviction was stopped literally at the last minute. The first day in court was scheduled for the 2nd of January 2005. Suddenly the South Central Farmers had won an entire year.
But the families’ situation is still precarious. „We can possibly win the trial and we hope we will. But the city can turn around the next day, do what it has to do and sell the property and still the farmers could be evicted,“ says Patrick Dunevy from Hadsell & Stormer. The lawyers specialize in politicial cases. For them the lawsuit against the city has mainly strategic character: "What this lawsuit is doing is buying some time. There is no way legally that we can require that this property is set up for the use of farming. That’s a poitical decision. And that’s where we need people to get involved.“
With the recent election of Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa as new mayor of Los Angeles chances have gotten better that the campaign to save the gardens will succeed. In 2004 Villaraigosa, a chicano from East L.A., was the only member of the City Council that actually visited the gardens and talked to the farmers. Now, having won 84 percent of Los Angeles’ latino votes and almost half of the black community’s votes, the pressure on Villaraigosa is high to show his commitment with low-income voters and people of color.
Behind the dispute over the gardens on 41st Street stands one of the sharpest contemporary social conflicts in the US: The struggle of latino immigrants for social and political rights. The latinos are the most recent immigrant group in California today, with 35% of the population making it also the biggest. At the same time they are reportedly the poorest and one of the most marginalized groups. More than 20% live below the poverty threshold. 15,000 to 20,000 day laborers, many of them undocumented, struggle day by day to survive in the Streets of southern California. As kitchen staff, construction workers and janitors, they provide the lubricant for America's low-wage economy; exploited and with no access to public resources.
But undocumented immigrants and migrant workers have started to organize. In so called workers' centers, they protest for labor and immigrant rights and try to build a bridge to the union’s left. After long talks, the ‘National Day Labor Organizing Network’ in Los Angeles finally got the regional unions' support for a legal proposal protecting day laborers' workplace rights. Compared to other immigrant communities from Asia or Eastern Europe, latinos have one particular advantage: they are not only the biggest minority, but also speak the same language. Organizing their community might therefore ignite unexpected forces of resistance.
Concerning the struggle over the gardens on 41st Street, the South Central Farmers have from the beginning found support from groups outside the boundaries of the latino community. Other initiatives affected by the city's politics of privatization have taken notice of the latinos' successful protest. Several black civil-rights activists from Watts have attended the farmers' meetings, as well as the graffiti sprayers from Belmont Art Park in downtown L.A., who's public park has been closed by the city with plans to develop it. If the conflict about the gardens on 41st Street transgresses the ethnic and racial boundaries between the black and the latino community and brings the social struggles from different neighbourhods together, it would be a success that should hardly be underestimated - and a minefield for the politial and economic elites in L.A. Whatever the outcome of the garden lawsuit, the struggle has just begun.
A German version of this text was published at: iz3w, Nr. 284, April/Mai 2005, pp. 8-9.
Addendum
By the end of July 2005 the lawsuit ended with a sentence against the South Central Farmers. Although the city of L.A. violated the adminstrative codes, the court found the property's sale to be legal. It becomes more and more likely that the gardens will be demolished within the next three or four month. The South Central Farmer's campaign is still running. If you are interested in the current situation, check out their website or get directly in touch with the Campesinos. With solidarity and support it is still possible to save the gardens on 41st Street.
© 2006