TIERRAS MILPERAS
Milpas and Community Gardens Watsonville y Pajaro, California
Update
New things are growing …
06/05/2025
Who We Are
We come from many generations of farming our traditional milpas in the global south as campesinos/as. 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 six 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 maize fields). This is how we became Tierras Milperas in 2020.
Our Work
We are reclaiming our subsistance life ways from the extractive agroindustry by reconnecting our ~110 campesino/a families with the living memory of our native seeds, customs, our traditional forms of social organization while experimenting others, and innovating other forms of community exchange and community economics.
As an assembly we are transitioning towards community stewardship to attain community farmland tenure and ecological sustainability using traditional farming practices in dialogue with California Native communities, native seed stewardship, transterritorial organizing with campesino struggles in the global south, and agroecology.
Milpa Food Sovereignty
10,000 years to today…
