TIERRAS MILPERAS
Milpas and Community Gardens Watsonville y Pajaro, California
Update
Help Move Tierras Milperas to Community Lands: GOFUNDME URGENT NEED TO FIND LAND TO MOVE OUR COMMUNITY GARDEN
05/18/2023
Who We Are
We come from many generations of farming our traditional milpas in the global south as campesinos/as (small scale farmers). The milpa has fed and provided nutrition to our communities for millennia. For the last 13 years we have planted and cared for 6 community gardens in a mosaic of 3 acres of land throughout the Pajaro Valley (Watsonville and Pajaro).
As a migrant community and farmworkers we find ourselves amid one of the most productive valleys for the extractive agroindustry, in the Central Coast of California- surrounded by monocultures of berries frequently exported to 5 continents.
Over the last five years we have organized ourselves through our customary form of assembly as our central form of decision-making: a space of knowledge creation and sharing representing the communality that emerges from our milpas (biodiverse cornfields). This is how we transformed into Tierras Milperas in 2020.
Our Work
We are liberating our original livelihoods from the extractive agroindustry by reconnecting our ~110 campesino/a families to the living memory of our native seeds, customs, our traditional forms of social organization, and innovating alternative forms of community exchange and community economics.
With our assembly we are transitioning towards community stewardship to attain communal farmland tenure and ecological sustainability using traditional farming practices in dialogue with California Native communities, native seed stewardship, transterritorial organizing with campesinos/as in the global south, and agroecology.
Milpa Food Sovereignty
10,000 years to today…
