Gardening at the Margins: Convivial Labor, Community, and Resistance

Tucked away in the backyards of California's Santa Clara Valley lies a revolutionary secret hidden in plain sight: people of all backgrounds are growing ancestral food in home gardens. In doing so, they are reconnecting with the land and their communities through convivial labor. Ethnographer Gabriel Valle spent four years visiting local home gardens, chatting in kitchens, and accompanying his interlocutors to public spaces to forage for food that is often overlooked and left to rot. Pulling from in-depth interviews, participant observation, and garden conversations, Valle's research aims to provide answers to the following question: "What practices do home gardeners engage in to protect against vulnerability, attain social mobility, improve health and wellbeing, and strengthen ties to the neighborhood and community?" (160)His answers fill a resounding gap in the literature. Histories of the Santa Clara Valley often describe the region's agricultural industry or celebrate Silicon Valley as a place of innovation, technological progress, and wealth. The historical attention paid to these industries, while important, further marginalizes understandings of the working class and their lived experiences of resistance and autonomy outside of industry. It is in these margins that Valle seeks the beans, squash, corn, tomatoes, and herbal medicines that serve as proof that the people of the Santa Clara Valley "pursue dignity and autonomy by growing, sharing, and consuming food" (20). The home gardeners in this book enact what Valle calls "convivial labor"—production and labor outside of the capitalist system that produces value for those who practice it and has the potential to "[fulfill] our species-being" (13). Convivial labor takes place in autonomous spaces that push back against hegemonic and capitalist forces that have alienated people from feeding themselves and maintaining good health. Valle posits that contemporary US life under capitalism has alienated the average person from the land and the food it can produce. He highlights how immigrants to the United States experience this alienation differently, as they recall living off the land and experiencing better health and "the good life" in their home countries. Their transition to becoming low-income wage earners in the United States often forces them to rely on processed and unhealthy foods that negatively impact their health.Valle's five chapters consider food and the land in relation to place-making, happiness, healing, and revolution. Interspersed between the chapters are interludes that feature poignant moments and images, from the garden to the kitchen, where certain skills and recipes highlight the ingenuity of convivial laborers, who literally sow the seeds for sustainability and community health. In the image of the Santa Clara Valley that Valle paints for his readers, working-class voices, practices, and behaviors offer hope for the future that functions outside of policy and rights, and instead acts. Home gardeners get their hands dirty and problem-solve through the production and reproduction of food. At times, Valle's interlocutors and their stories get lost in the sheer number of theoretical connections he makes; yet that does not detract from the fact that the text makes important ethnographic and historical contributions.Chapter 2 makes a particularly strong case for gardening as a lifestyle connected to self-determination, resilience, and Indigenous lifeways. Relying heavily on examples from Indigenous Ohlone history in what is now California, Valle traces how violent histories of conquest and capitalism function to strip people of their ability to produce their own food. He connects these histories to historical memory and practices in Grandma's garden, where she enacts Indigenous foodways that push back against empire. Valle succeeds in highlighting the ways all people, but especially Indigenous people, have been structurally and violently removed from life-sustaining lands and practices. In this process, they have been forced to live life at the margins, consuming unhealthy foods that revolve around convenience instead of nutrition, sustenance, and communion with humans and the environment.Gardening at the Margins offers students and scholars of environmental anthropology, food studies, and Latinx studies a critical community-engaged account of home gardens in the Santa Clara Valley, an overlooked site of California labor and ethnic history. In it, Valle does not despair. Instead, he "celebrate[s] the acts of gardening, cooking, and eating as potentially emancipatory" (16). Readers can expect a close look at the cultivation and sharing of food via tiny moments of joy, community, solace, and connection. Building on Joel Robbins's "anthropology of good," Valle's gardens "emphasize how people imagine better worlds and . . . how they work to enact them" (35).