Overview

Gardening at the Margins tells the remarkable story of a diverse group of neighbors working together to grow food and community in the Santa Clara Valley in California. Based on four years of deeply engaged ethnographic field research via a Participatory Action Research project with the people and ecosystems of La Mesa Verde home garden program, Gabriel R. Valle develops a theory of convivial labor to describe how the acts of care among the diverse gardeners--through growing, preparing, and eating food in one of the most income unequal places in the country--are powerful, complex acts of resistance. The individuals featured in the book are imagining and building alternative worlds and futures amid the very real challenges they embody and endure. Climate change, for example, is forcing thousands of migrants to urban areas, which means recent immigrants' traditional environmental, nutritional, and healing knowledge will continue to be threatened by the pervasiveness of modernity and the homogenization of global capitalism. Moreover, once rural people migrate to urban areas, their ability to retain traditional foodways will remain difficult without spaces of autonomy. The stories in this book reveal how people create the physical space to grow food and the political space to enact autonomy to revive and restore agroecological knowledge needed for an uncertain future.

Full Product Details

9798212972444

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Gabriel R. Valle is an associate professor of environmental studies at California State University, San Marcos. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Washington in 2016 and is coeditor of Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives. Lee Osorio is an actor and narrator based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available