While much of the country stocked up on toilet paper during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Robyn Rodriguez and her husband, Joshua Vang, invested in vegetable seeds.
They saw the pandemic as another consequence of the climate crisis and as symptomatic of something deeper than a widespread disease.
Rodriguez and Vang also lost their son during the pandemic. The sense of loss prompted them to launch the Reimagination Farm in Lake County in north-central California. Having opened Saturday, it will incorporate intergenerational farming techniques that draw from their Philippine and Hmong ancestries, along with local Native American Indigenous land knowledge.
“Loss just prompts you to want to live more fully, live more aligned with the things you say you want to do,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez and Vang are currently growing various flowers and vegetables — including lettuce, carrots, beets, cabbage, cucumbers, herbs and bok choy — on the farm. But it will also provide learning experiences, including programming to increase nature awareness and basic survival skills geared toward Black, indigenous and communities of color that have historically been deprived of the benefits of nature.
Rodriguez also reflected on how Philippine and Hmong communities have been dispossessed of land in their ancestral homelands because of colonization and war — both of which she said are deeply Western projects of domination: economic domination, political domination and military domination.
She added that the history of Filipinos’ early migration to the U.S. is deeply tied to industrial agriculture.
“There are lots of ways in which we’ve been severed from our relationship to the land through these histories. Then, internal colonization in many ways has also kind of dissuaded us from a connection to lands, along with structures of white supremacy,” she said. “I think that there is this notion in our culture as Filipinos that going back to the land is a backward…
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