Tending Culture as Community

Michelle E. Carreon, Food Justice Storyteller

What does culture mean to you, and how does your cultural practice shape our community?

Throughout our 11+ years as an organization firmly rooted in our community, our cultural practice at La Semilla Food Center has been influenced and inspired by both our region’s history and the countless human and non-human relationships we have nurtured over time. 

Cultural practice is integral to foodways. Foodways includes how we grow, produce, cook, and share food, as well as how we consume it and for what purposes. The decisions we make about what we grow, how we nurture the soil, and the ways we share this knowledge and the fruits of our labor with others are all examples of a practice. Making a choice to grow corn alongside beans and squash, known as the “three sisters,” and how we cook these vegetables based on our cultural heritage and family recipes are grounded in culture and reflective of regional and historical foodways.

Foodways also involve artistic expression. From poetry and songs to paintings and doodles, both written and visual forms of expression can be intrinsically tied to our relationships with food and our ecosystem. The significant connections between food and culture are vast and deep. What we learn and understand about foodways illuminates more and more about how we relate to each other and how we relate to the land we inhabit and continue to learn from. 

At La Semilla, we are closely connected to our Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem. At our farm, we grow crops that do well in a desert climate and have a strong connection to our region’s history. In 2021, staff and fellows were an integral part of designing and planting our Chihuahuan Desert Food Forest, where mesquite trees, cholla, sotol, agave, yucca, and other native plants grow together. Now, Raíces youth are learning about this burgeoning ecosystem and will see how it develops over time as an educational space.

La Semilla staff planting mesquite trees and other native plants last September (left).
Raíces youth learn about the Chihuahuan Desert Food Forest this February (right). 
(Photos by Michelle Carreon)

Our educational programs, policy work, and even our Farm Fresh boxes reflect a connection to the land and its history, as we work to increase connection with our Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem. At La Semilla, we work together collectively to plant, tend, and care for the land as it cares for and teaches us.

In addition to being influenced by our Chihuahuan desert ecosystem, we also acknowledge the border context within which we live and work. Our cultural practice cannot help but be both affected and influenced by the ways in which we navigate man-made borders. It’s impossible to define a singular “border culture.” This liminal space is complex and includes past and present examples of resistance in the face of militarized spaces and inhumane policies. 

Through our storytelling work, we are making more efforts to dive deeper into our local history. This includes archival research that uplifts lesser-known histories, such as histories of local foodways, labor, and forms of resistance here on the US-Mexico border. One example is the Bath Riots that took place on the international boundary between El Paso and Ciudad-Juárez in 1917. During that year, Carmelita Torres and other women workers who crossed the international bridge on a weekly basis protested against the ongoing inhumane and toxic delousing practices. Local news depicted the women as “amazons” and their actions as a “feminine outbreak”. What the Bath Riots exhibit, however, is a significant moment of resistance by women workers and a symbol challenging inhumane, xenophobic, and sexist practices in the name of “safety” and “security.”

Newspaper clipping from January 29, 1917 issue of the El Paso Morning Times. 
(Newspaper microfilm accessed via the Border Heritage Center at the El Paso Public Library)

In the same vein, our practice at La Semilla also involves telling our own stories and passing the mic to people from our region to challenge dominant narratives that often exclude or harm us.

How we “do culture” in our organization takes many forms, and all dimensions are interconnected and crucial to our goal to foster a healthy, self-reliant, fair, and sustainable food system in our region. Cultural practice is the manifestation of culture, and at every level of our work we are recuperating, preserving, and tending culture on the ground and within the broader systems we inhabit. At La Semilla, we are constantly in the process of co-creation and co-learning within our staff and with others in our community.

February 2022 All Staff Hike at Hueco Tanks led by certified guides Andrea Everett (Ysleta del Sur)
and Alex Mares (Diné). Corn pictograph on right. 
(Photos by Rubí Orozco Santos)

Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing the many ways that cultural practice is embedded in our work and throughout our multiple programs. This week, we launched our Chihuahuan Desert Cultural Fellowship. We gathered for the first time with this inaugural cohort at our farm, connected with the land together, and shared about our own cultural practices and how they are connected to foodways and community. 

Collection of shared items reflecting fellow and staff cultural practices.
(Photo by Michelle Carreon)

We encourage you to follow along with us and reflect on your own experiences and ways that you practice culture and connect with and contribute to our community!