Gardening at the Margins: Convivial Labor, Community, and Resistance

Gardening at the Margins explores how diverse neighbors in California's Santa Clara Valley are using gardening to grow food and community, challenging dominant food systems and creating alternative worlds and futures. Through convivial acts of sharing, they are building on ancestral knowledge and learning new forms of farming, gardening, and healing, while also facing challenges such as climate change and the homogenization of global capitalism.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 25 October 2022
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Gardening at the Margins is a captivating narrative that explores the remarkable journey of a diverse group of neighbors in the Santa Clara Valley of California as they come together to cultivate food and foster community. Drawing on four years of immersive ethnographic field research through a Participatory Action Research project with the residents of La Mesa Verde's home garden program, Gabriel R. Valle constructs a compelling theory of convivial labor to elucidate the profound and multifaceted nature of the care practices among the diverse gardeners. These acts of care, encompassing the cultivation, preparation, and consumption of food in one of the most income-unequal regions in the country, serve as powerful and complex forms of resistance.

The participants in La Mesa Verde's home garden program actively engage in the practices of growing and sharing food to envision and actively work towards implementing alternative food systems that reconnect people with their food and communities. They draw upon their ancestral knowledge while also acquiring new skills in farming, gardening, and healing through the shared experiences of conviviality.

The individuals featured in the book envision and create alternative worlds and futures amidst the very real challenges they face and endure. Climate change, for instance, is driving thousands of migrants to urban areas, which means that the traditional environmental, nutritional, and healing knowledge of recent immigrants will continue to be threatened by the pervasive influence of modernity and the homogenization of global capitalism. Moreover, once rural people migrate to urban areas, their ability to retain their traditional foodways becomes increasingly challenging without spaces of autonomy. The stories in this book shed light on how individuals create the physical space to grow food and the political space to enact autonomy to revive and restore agroecological knowledge, which is essential for a uncertain future.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780816547326