TIERRAS MILPERAS
Milpas and Community Gardens Watsonville y Pajaro, California
Update
So we moved…sharing with you what we’ve been busy with in our social media as we finish the season of our fourth year…onward.
09/05/2024
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 over 13 years our collective of families plants and cares for 5 community gardens, 1 community orchard and recently a 4 acre community farm located in the Pajaro Valley (Watsonville and Pajaro), CA.
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 shared 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…
