The farm in the play flourished with cornstalks, hierbas, and fruit trees. But these plants bloom mostly in our imaginations, as described by the narrator, and with a little help from the puppeteers. The shadow puppets of growing cornstalks especially capture my imagination. Grise’s focus on the South Central Farm in Los Angeles strikes me as about as different a farm from my mother’s as you can get. Yet in other ways, the resonances run deep. The South Central Farm was the largest urban farm in the United States from 1994 to 2006. It, too, was a revolutionary collective born from the people’s struggle for access to soil and sustenance. In contrast to the rural setting of my mother’s childhood, the South Central Farm grew in an industrial area of a city famous for films, not food.
In 1994, South Central was piecing itself together again after the uprisings that followed the acquittal of four LA police officers caught on tape in 1992 brutally beating Rodney King, an African American man. Black and Brown people showed their disgust with this injustice, taking to the streets, upturning patrol cars, lighting fires. Looking back now, what might have seemed a throwback to mid-twentieth century civil rights demonstrations becomes prescient of contemporary protests—against Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson in 2014, which inspired #BlackLivesMatter, and summer 2020’s weekslong vigils for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Darius Tarver, and too many others. Looking back now, the so-called LA riots arose from the many demonstrations that came before and their spirit flows into all the others that follow.
a farm for meme helps us stay attuned to those energies that stir for justice as they move through the land itself and take shape in the foods we grow and eat. In the aftermath of the Rodney King protests, a small group of people, some of them immigrants from México, noticed an empty lot. They set out to plant corn, beans, and squash—the three sisters. They also planted fruit trees and healing herbs. (For a powerful one-woman show that documents the 1992 rebellion in Los Angeles, see Ana Deveare Smith’s Twilight.)
Grise reminds us that even the children know a world that plows under verdant community farms isn’t right—and it ultimately will not win out.
The narrator’s eyes light up as she looks into the camera and describes the maíz, but also the yerba buena, legumes, romero, and green amaranth. She recalls the butterflies in the walnut tree. She recounts all the things “we didn’t learn ... in school: how to turn a guayaba leaf into medicine, what day to plant the hierba mora.” The scene cuts to archival video of a woman grinding corn at a metate, the stone tool that dates back to pre-Columbian days. The corn captures my mother’s attention. She purses her lips and spits out a tsk before smiling and saying “¡Así no se hace!” She laughs, shaking her head, and tells me she’s skeptical that anything’s getting ground on that rock. It looks legit to me; I’m not inclined to question the viejita onscreen who’s older than I am but, yes, she’s younger than my mother.
Grise’s play, though, isn’t about the elders. She writes about Meme, V’s three-year-old middle child. It’s Meme who tells us: “When you pull something out of the ground, it grows back. Don’t worry. We’re going to plant more things.” He says this because the fourteen-acre beauty of South Central Farm was ground under the tracks of bulldozers in 2006. Meme, V, Li’l Man, and Baby camped out with others at the South Central Farm as long as possible, providing a human shield against the destruction. But eventually the farm succumbed to higher powers. The owner had other plans for the farm, and he chose to run out the families and their food.
Meme reassures us from his child’s perspective of resilience and joy. He enacts hope in the way that United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reminds us to do it: as a verb, as an everyday creation, and not as something we sit around waiting to arrive. To me, it’s no coincidence this play emerges in the middle of a global pandemic, amidst uprisings for racial justice across the United States and around the world. It creates community in defiance of the violence against the land and the people—both in the case of the bulldozing of the South Central Farm as much as in regard to the ongoing assaults on Black, Indigenous, and people of color in this country. Grise reminds us that even the children know a world that plows under verdant community farms isn’t right—and it ultimately will not win out. “We’re going to plant more things,” advises Meme. (For an update on South Central Farm’s ongoing activism, see this news article.)
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