When I commented on the apparent lack of urban agriculture activity in Oakland in the mid 1990s compared to what was happening in Berkeley, Daniel Miller, founder of Spiral Gardens, replied, “Oh, there was plenty of urban agriculture taking place in Oakland back then. It was just happening in folks’ yards” . As I explain in Chapter 2 and in my discussion of the Black Panthers in Part 1 above, most of Oakland’s African American population can be traced to a large wave of migration from the rural South during World War Two. Many younger African Americans in the flatlands—second or third generation Oaklanders—talk about how their parents or grandparents grew up on a farm and what they used to grow. Many participants in flatlands urban agriculture programs—City Slicker Farms’ Backyard Gardening Program in West Oakland, for example—are middle-aged African Americans who grew up eating from their parents’ gardens in Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond. More recent arrivals have carried on such an agrarian tradition. The rolling range and orchards of the Peralta family’s Rancho San Antonio was long ago transformed by several waves of industrial and residential capital. Yet amidst the dense mix of once-stately ramshackle Victorians, craftsman bungalows, and worn out apartment complexes built in the 1960s and 70s, nursery pots tiny patches of Asian bitter eggplants and runner beans and Mexican quelite greens thrive. Fruitvale has long been Oakland’s Latino enclave.
San Antonio is the city’s most ethnically diverse district: 42% Asian and Pacific Islander , alongsidesignificant African American , Latino , and white populations . Many of these residents were settled in the neighborhood in the 1970s and 1980s, fleeing the economic and political repercussions of post-war Southeast Asia. Several refugee relocation organizations such as Lao Family Community Development, the International Rescue Committee, and Refugee Transitions are either located in this part of Oakland or locate families here due to affordable rent, proximity to public transit, and the presence of existing communities . Arrivals of refugees from around the globe—ethnic Nepalis from Bhutan, Burmese Karen and Karenni, Meskhetian Turks from Russia’s Black Sea region, Bosnians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Iraqis—have added to San Antonio’s ethnic diversity since the 1990s. Many of these recent immigrants come from agrarian backgrounds and cultivate vegetables in their yards. As I discuss in Chapter 1, immigrants such as these engage in urban agriculture for a number of reasons: to supplement their diets, to sell produce informally to other immigrants, to alleviate boredom, stress, or isolation in a strange new environment. For many it is a way to maintain ties to their homelands and cultural identity through agricultural and culinary traditions . Several coordinated urban agriculture efforts have taken place in this part of Oakland. In 1999 and 2000, garden activist Grey Kolevzon worked with community members and the Friends of Peralta Hacienda Historical Park to start an afterschool educational garden program at the Peralta House in San Antonio, the historic homestead of the Rancho San Antonio. Once the program was up and running, Lao Family Development, one of the resettlement organizations, proposed connecting the schoolchildren with Mien refugees at the Peralta garden, as well.
Lao Family had been having trouble advancing a literacy program for Mien youth. Inspired by a school in nearby Richmond that had created a successful tutoring program that brought Southeast Asian youth together with elders, the organization invited Mien elders to teach the youth about gardening. The project was hugely popular among the youth and their parents and an unexpected outcome was close collaboration between the neighborhood’s African American youth and Mien elders . The educational garden grew into a community garden that remains under the care of a number of Mien, Latino, and African American families . In 2003 the Alameda County Public Health Department, Oakland Unified School District, and EBAYC partnered with a number of other organizations including Cycles of Change, Urban Ecology, Oakland Children’s Hospital, Clinica de la Raza, the City of Oakland Parks and Recreation Department, and several community groups to form San Antonio Neighbors for Active Living. This umbrella organization applied for and acquired a Healthy Eating, Active Communities grant from the California Endowment, a foundation that funds health and wellness projects. While the initiative was broad in scope, one of the program’s goals was to “Establish and expand local and family-operated urban farms to supply organic fresh produce to school-based produce stands and neighborhood stores”. One of the projects funded was the development of the San Antonio Park Community Garden . As with Peralta House, immigrant parents were interested in the afterschool gardening program underway at Roosevelt Middle School in San Antonio. The grant allowed EBAYC/Cycles of Change to expand the program into San Antonio Park, across the street from the school. The grant also helped San Antonio residents establish and run Full Circle Farms in neighboring Alameda and Sunol, a peri-urban community 25 miles from Oakland . This is perhaps because they are growing for household consumption, an act not seen as particularly radical or tied to a particular movement.
Indeed, like the home gardens dotting the yards of Oakland’s industrial garden half a century earlier, the motivation for many is simply to grow food for their families. For many these gardens are also a means of maintaining cultural ties or agricultural and culinary knowledge, rather than an expression of a particular lifestyle politics or a radical rejection of the corporate food regime. Their invisibility, I argue, is also a result of the growing institutionalization of the urban agriculture movement and the development of the “non-profit industrial complex” that has both subsumed and fueled the urban agriculture movement in Oakland. Ironically, while these urban farmers are largely absent within the movement, they serve as material and symbolic inspiration for urban agriculture activists throughout the flatlands, providing concrete examples not only of how and what to grow in the city, but also what the city should look like and how its denizens should feed themselves. By the early 2000s, these various threads had begun to converge. The radical activism of the Black Panther Party and community coalitions of EJ activists laid the foundations of struggle against the devaluation of Oakland’s flatlands neighborhoods and forged the necessary links across race and class to draw attention to their struggles. Urban Habitat’s “flatlands framework” helped to illuminate environmental injustices in the East Bay and aided in this rescaling of the claims of neighborhood activists, expanding their spaces of engagement to include mostly white, mostly Berkeley-centered allies from the environmental, community gardening, and sustainable agriculture movements. The fusion of their concerns resulted in a social, economic, and environmental justice-oriented engagement with gardening that was able to tap into new funding streams for job training and school garden-based nutrition education. Activists sailed freely between projects and organizations, between Berkeley, San Francisco, Oakland, and the Bay Area hinterlands, plastic planters following funding streams and leaving behind new gardens in their wakes. Over the last decade, a new food justice-oriented urban agriculture movement has taken root in Oakland’s devalued flatlands, one that activists have built on a historical foundation of radical activism while drawing on the human and material resources of an increasingly institutionalized network that bridged urban agriculture, nutrition, and economic development and that was legitimate in the eyes of funders. This growing network of radical activists, urban gardeners, and institutions was new; it was more overtly political than the community gardening movement of the past, with more of a multi-racial, cross-class draw. It was even more political than the community food security movement that took hold in mid-1990s, drawing more explicitly on the spatial justice framework to define the inequities of food access in the flatlands and on the historical legacy and symbolism of Oakland’s past and contemporary social justice and EJ activism. Through its increasing connection with institutions, it has also been better positioned to interface with planners and policy makers. The new “food justice” movement has embraced urban agriculture as a key component. Urban agriculture is about more than simply urban gardening. It is a political act, a rejection of the corporate food regime and commitment to overcoming the devaluation of the flatlands. Indeed, even the use of the term “urban agriculture” is an act of scalar politics, whether conscious or unconscious; by calling what they do urban agriculture rather than community gardening, food justice activists in the flatlands are connecting their actions to those of urban residents in the slums of the Global South struggling to mend the metabolic rift inherent to urbanization . Furthermore, the adoption of the term urban agriculture also legitimizes urban food production by tapping into a decade of advocacy for urban agriculture as a sustainable development strategy in the Global South .
By invoking this new “scale frame” , food justice activists have expanded their space of engagement to a global scale, not unlike the BPP succeeded in doing decades earlier . 90 Also like the BPP movement, the city’s food justice activism in has been centered in West Oakland since the dawn of the new millennium, and urban agriculture has, in some ways, provided a new channel for the Panthers ideological legacy. Concerned with the lack of nutritious food in West Oakland, David Roach started up a farmers market at McClymonds High School in West Oakland in 1994. Four years later he started up an organization called Mo’ Better Foods that has worked to cultivate relationships between the few African American farmers still operating in California and West Oakland residents. Roach, an African American and key figure in the history of Oakland’s food justice movement, views agriculture as vital to economic development for black communities. In an address to the Ecological Farming Conference, Roach underscored the centrality of agriculture to a community’s self-sufficiency. African Americans need to actively engage in farming “to take care of ourselves… It’s okay to want to be a farmer. I want independence. I want freedom.” In his address, he was critical of the ways in which social services exacerbate poverty rather than investing in real structural reform: “Every agency has pillaged our community,” creating a system of “handouts that lead either to prison or unemployment” . Urban agriculture, according to Roach, should not be viewed as the solution, but rather should be viewed as only a small part of the solution. The structural issues—the decline of black farmers, the lack of community-owned retail selling healthy food, the lack of economic opportunity—must take precedence . Roach, along with Dana Harvey, a white woman, was heavily involved in organizing one of the first collaborative efforts to think holistically about the food system in the flatlands. In 2001, Roach, Dana Harvey, and the Environmental Justice Initiative, a local EJ program, organized the West Oakland Food Collaborative to come up with a strategic plan to improve food access and food security, while addressing the political and economic conditions of the city’s most devalued area. A nine-month planning process, funded by a grant from UC Davis, brought activists and agencies to the same table. In the end, they identified the following as necessary components of a vibrant West Oakland food system: a farmers’ market, liquor store “conversion”, a cooperative grocery, community green space, and small business development . The Mandela Farmers’ Market, and later the Mandela Cooperative Grocery both arose from this initiative . As Alkon explains, the Collaborative “cast the struggles of African-American farmers and foodinsecure West Oakland residents as manifestations of racism and poverty, which can be addressed through the creation of a local food system” , and ultimately served as a “hub for community organizing” . In 2003 another major food justice organization cropped up. Brahm Ahmadi, Malaika Edwards, and Leander Sellers had been working with City Slicker Farms when they decided to expand the network of urban gardens at other sites throughout West Oakland. Once the organization got off the ground in 2003 they hired neighborhood teens to be peer educators. They eventually set up a “mobile grocery”, a brightly colored panel van filled with fresh vegetables that parked in various locations around the neighborhood.