When I bless a new community garden, I am not sprinkling holy water on a patch of dirt so we can have prettier tomatoes. I am consecrating ground for a fight. The fight is for food sovereignty—the right of a neighborhood to control its own food system, to grow what it needs, and to refuse the plastic-wrapped, overpriced, nutritionally hollow options that the market pushes into a zip code like ours. A garden is a declaration that we will not be forever dependent on the corner store that sells more liquor than milk. It is a quiet, leafy act of resistance against a land-use policy that has, for decades, treated our parish boundaries as a sacrifice zone.

I have buried too many parishioners whose bodies gave out from a diet shaped by scarcity and displacement. I have also watched a grandmother teach a teenager how to save seeds from a chayote, and in that moment, I saw the restoration of something that pavement and freeway construction tried to erase. This is not about a hobby. This is about who controls the food, the land, and the memory of how to feed a people.

When a Zucchini Is More Than a Zucchini

In a neighborhood where the nearest full-service grocery store is a forty-minute bus ride away, a garden bed of calabacitas is a direct challenge to the food desert label. But I have come to dislike that term. A desert is a natural ecosystem. What we have in East L.A. is a food apartheid—a man-made condition where access to fresh, affordable, culturally appropriate food is denied based on race, class, and the calculated neglect of zoning boards. A community garden does not just fill a gap; it begins to dismantle the logic that created the gap. It says: we can feed ourselves, on our own land, with our own knowledge.

Food sovereignty, a concept articulated powerfully by the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina, centers on the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture systems. It places the people who produce, distribute, and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations. In our context, this means prioritizing the growing of nopales, epazote, and maíz criollo over ornamental flowers. It means the abuelas who remember the milpa system teaching the younger generation that the soil is not a blank slate, but a living conversation with our ancestors.

The Roots of Hunger in East Los Angeles

To understand why a garden is a political act, you must understand the history of the land it sits on. Our parish, Our Lady of Solitude, sits in the shadow of freeway interchanges that were bulldozed through thriving Mexican-American communities in the 1950s and 60s. Eminent domain scattered families. Corner stores that once sold fresh produce from local farms were replaced by fast-food chains. The knowledge of how to grow food—knowledge that many of our elders carried from rural Mexico—was not lost; it was paved over.

This is the context of hunger here. It is not a natural disaster. It is a policy disaster. The garden, then, is a form of restorative justice. We are not just growing food; we are reclaiming the land’s memory. We are restoring a relationship that was severed by redlining, displacement, and the deliberate underinvestment that followed. When a parishioner plants a row of maíz, she is planting a flag of cultural survival.

From Food Desert to Food Apartheid

The term “food desert” implies a natural absence. But there is nothing natural about the lack of fresh food in a community that sits less than twenty miles from some of the richest agricultural land in the world. The correct term is food apartheid, because it is the result of deliberate economic and racial segregation. Supermarket redlining—the practice of major chains refusing to build stores in low-income neighborhoods of color—created the conditions we live with today. The garden is our response: a refusal to accept that our only options are processed, shelf-stable, and diabetes-inducing.

In our parish garden, we grow food that heals. Nopales for blood sugar regulation. Verdolagas, a wild green that many call a weed, but which our elders know is rich in omega-3s. These are not just vegetables; they are a pharmacopoeia rooted in indigenous knowledge. The garden becomes a clinic without walls, a place where health is cultivated rather than medicated after the fact.

Land Use Policy as a Spiritual Matter

In the Book of Leviticus, the land is not a commodity to be bought and sold in perpetuity. It is a gift from God, and the people are tenants, stewards of a sacred trust. The Jubilee year commanded that land be returned to its original families, a radical economic reset designed to prevent the permanent accumulation of wealth and the permanent dispossession of the poor. When I look at the zoning maps of our city, I see a direct violation of that biblical principle. Industrial uses are concentrated in our neighborhoods. Polluting facilities are permitted next to our schools. Vacant lots, owned by absentee speculators, sit idle while our children go hungry.

Our garden sits on a lot that was once slated for a self-storage facility. The parish organized. We attended zoning hearings. We brought the abuelas to testify, not as victims, but as experts on what the land needed to become. We won a temporary use permit, and then another. Now we are pushing for a community land trust that would take the soil out of the speculative market permanently. This is the long game of food sovereignty: not just growing food, but changing who decides what the land is for.

Tools for the Work: Policy and Practice

For other parishes and community groups looking to start this journey, the path is both practical and political. Here are some of the tools we have used:

• Community Land Trusts (CLTs): A model where land is owned collectively by a nonprofit, ensuring it remains affordable and community-controlled in perpetuity. The National Community Land Trust Network offers resources for starting a CLT.
• Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones: California’s AB 551 allows cities to offer property tax reductions for landowners who dedicate vacant parcels to agricultural use for at least five years. This can turn an eyesore into a food source.
• Seed Saving Libraries: We maintain a parish seed library focused on heirloom varieties from Mesoamerica. This is a direct act of cultural preservation, ensuring that the genetic heritage of our food is not owned by agribusiness.

The Liturgical Year in the Soil

Our garden calendar follows the liturgical year, not just the seasons. During Lent, we prepare the soil and plant the seeds, a physical act of penance and hope. The first shoots often break ground around Easter, a small resurrection we can touch. By Pentecost, the garden is a riot of green, a visible sign of the Spirit’s life-giving breath. On the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in December, we harvest the last of the winter squash and gather to make tamales, wrapping the masa in corn husks from our own milpa. The garden becomes a catechism: the cycle of death and resurrection, the Eucharist as the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, the communion of saints that includes the ancestors who first domesticated these plants.

This is not symbolism for its own sake. It is a pedagogy. When a child sees that the corn for the parish festival comes from the lot next door, she learns that God’s providence is not abstract. It is soil, water, sun, and the labor of her neighbors. That is a lesson no textbook can teach.

When the City Pushes Back

Food sovereignty inevitably collides with the machinery of land-use control. Last year, the city cited our garden for “unpermitted structures”—our tool shed and a shade ramada where we hold nutrition classes. The shed was built by parishioners. The ramada was a gift from a local carpenter whose father was deported. The citation was not about safety; it was about a system that cannot see a community-built space as legitimate unless it has paid fees and filled out forms designed for commercial developers.

We fought the citation. We organized a “garden court” on the actual site, with the abuelas sitting in the jury box and the city inspector invited to walk the rows and taste a tomato. He didn’t come. But the council member did, and the citation was eventually dropped. This is the other harvest of a community garden: political power. When people work the soil together, they learn to speak together. They show up at land-use hearings. They run for neighborhood council. The garden grows organizers as surely as it grows calabacitas.

Restorative Justice, One Row at a Time

We have also opened our garden to young people completing community service hours through the county’s restorative justice program. Instead of picking up trash on a freeway on-ramp, they learn to build raised beds and compost. They work alongside elders who remember farming in their home countries. The garden becomes a place of reparation—not just for the harm the young person caused, but for the harm the community has endured. It is a small, imperfect attempt to model what a just food system looks like: everyone fed, everyone contributing, the land restored.

This is not a program we designed. It grew out of a conversation after Mass, when a grandmother asked if her grandson could complete his hours with us. She said, “He needs to put his hands in the earth. It will remind him who he is.” She was right. The soil has a memory, and it is generous with it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between food security and food sovereignty?

Food security focuses on whether people have enough food, regardless of where it comes from. Food sovereignty asks who controls the food system. A food bank can provide food security. A community garden, when it is part of a larger movement for land justice and policy change, builds food sovereignty. It shifts power from corporations and government programs back to the people who grow and eat the food.

How does a community garden address systemic issues like redlining?

Redlining and disinvestment created the conditions where our neighborhoods lack grocery stores and fresh food. A garden alone cannot undo decades of structural racism. But when a garden is paired with organizing for land-use reform, community land trusts, and advocacy for public investment, it becomes a tool for reclaiming space and demanding that the city serve all its residents equitably. The garden is the visible proof that the community can steward land productively, which strengthens the moral case for policy change.

What if our parish doesn’t have land for a garden?

Start with what you have. A few raised beds on the rectory lawn. A container garden in the parking lot. Partner with a school or a senior center that has underused space. The garden is a means, not an end. The end is building relationships and political will around food sovereignty. Even a small garden can be a platform for education, seed saving, and organizing. And if you don’t have land, ask why. That question alone can start a conversation about land use in your neighborhood that may lead to surprising alliances and opportunities.

How does the liturgical calendar shape the garden’s work?

We plant and harvest in rhythm with the Church year. Lent is a time of preparation and soil amendment. Easter celebrates new life, and we often plant our first seeds around that time. Ordinary Time is the long, steady work of tending and weeding. The Feast of St. Isidore the Farmer in May is a natural time for a garden blessing. And the harvest festivals of autumn coincide with the feasts of the Archangels and All Saints, when we remember that we are part of a communion that stretches across time. This rhythm roots our work in something deeper than a growing season; it roots it in a story of redemption.

What Comes Next: A Call to Reimagine Parish Land

I look at the empty lots around our parish, and I see not blight, but potential. I see a network of gardens, each one a small act of reparation for the land that was taken. I see a parish that is not just a place of worship, but a hub of food production, seed saving, and land-use advocacy. This is not a utopian dream. It is the practical, necessary work of building a community that can survive and thrive in the face of economic pressure and climate uncertainty.

If you are reading this and you belong to a parish or a community group, I invite you to walk your neighborhood and look at the land with new eyes. Where is the soil? Who controls it? What could it become? The answers to those questions are the beginning of a garden, and a garden is the beginning of a more just world. Not because of the vegetables, but because of the sovereignty they represent.

Father Tomás Guerrero is the pastor of Our Lady of Solitude Parish in East Los Angeles. He writes at the intersection of faith, land justice, and community organizing.