Community garden in Watts provides solace, fresh produce for immigrants
Conrado Esquivel calls his papaya tree “El tigre” for the legs sprouting from its base.
The pomegranates he grows are red or green, some bitter, some sweet.
On a recent afternoon, the chiles were just about ready to harvest, as was the berro, or watercress.
He has named this plot in Watts “Rancho el lorocito,” after the white flower that sprouted abundantly from a tree above his head as he sat in his usual spot, watching over the crops of four other gardeners.
Where Esquivel grew up, in Michoacán, Mexico, he didn’t eat loroco, but here he learned to cultivate it for the Salvadorans who stuff it in pupusas and other dishes.
That is the nature of this community garden, its more than 200 plots tilled by immigrants from all over Mexico and Central America. They have planted foods from their hometowns — the leafy greens papalo and chipilin, the herb hierba mora — sharing them with each other until one person’s traditions become everyone’s.
Many of the gardeners labored for decades on construction sites or in factories but never achieved the American dream of a house with a yard.
They come to this 11-block strip of land, framed by electricity towers at 109th Street, west of the Nickerson Gardens housing development, to feel the soil between their fingers, to watch the plants grow, to marvel at the orange butterflies, to remind themselves of home.
Esquivel, 59, has occupied his section of the garden for so long that he’s regarded as a leader, extending a warm hospitality to strangers.
“Go ahead and take one — with confidence!” he said, offering a visitor a guava from a nearby tree.
He farmed onion fields with his family in Michoacán before coming to the U.S. as a teenager in the 1980s, working in a refinery.
In 15 years nurturing plants here, he came almost daily from his home in Maywood but is hampered now by vertigo from diabetes.
“Here, you can relax,” he said. “You forget about a lot of things. If I couldn’t return home to sleep, I’d sleep here. I’d live here, at the foot of what I sow.”
For some, it was a stretch to come up with the $30 a month to rent a plot, which included water and other costs. Now, with the statewide drought, they are paying more — $40 a month, negotiated down from the $50 proposed by the Los Angeles Community Garden Council, which governs gardens in the city.
The garden, known as the Stanford Avalon Community Garden, used to be on 41st Street until Ralph Horowitz, the developer who owned the land, took it back in 2006.
The gardeners managed to raise $16 million in an effort to buy the land. Horowitz declined. Some gardeners branched off into a different collective while others found support from local politicians who helped them find a new strip of land in Watts. The fight was documented in an Oscar-nominated film, “The Garden.”
Most community gardens in L.A. are “hobby gardens” for more affluent demographics, said Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, a USC researcher who has written a book about California gardens. This one is “healing spot, homeland and economic generator” for a diverse group of immigrants — Indigenous, mestizo, Central American, she said.
Ana Bustamante and her husband, Luis Bustamante, secured a plot last summer. Starting a new garden has been difficult with watering limited to three days a week during the drought. What they hoped would be a corn crop had manifested only a few small sprouts.
Her husband walked between the rows, spraying a liquid fertilizer.
“Por eso no nos salió nada. Por el agua,” Ana Bustamante said. That’s why nothing has grown. Because of the water.
One plant, hardy as a weed, was flourishing — hierba mora.
Bustamante’s father, on his morning rounds milking cows and tending to his land in El Salvador, would tear pieces of the greens for her to eat in the mornings before school.
“It grows naturally as long as you water it. It has good vitamins, it gives you energy,” she said. “My father would say, ‘Here, so you don’t feel tired.’”