errorWhen the audience attending the lecture noted Raul’s punk style, someone asked how he squares punk’s nihilism with the vision of a sustainable city. “Punk screams that there is no future.” Raul answered in Spanish “Yes, there is no future if we keep on acting this way. And yes, there is no future, but there is a present.”

Raul was visiting from Mexico City and arrived with the Zapatista Support Network to the Schindler House, an Austrian Artist Residency Program on the Westside. Kobe, a Belgian Artist, had been organizing informal discussions on a variety of topics in the architecturally historic house’s garage. Raul was there to talk about a project he is involved with in Mexico City, the Communidad Ecologico-Social Tierra Viva.

Presently, Tierra Viva finds its home in Hueltuecoyolt, one of the myriad suburb/slums on the outer ring of Mexico City- the world’s most populous city. The Group, in their own words (from www.laneta.apc.org/tierraviva) “is a project working to create a model of sustainability and to share alternative techniques with communities who seek being self sustaining within the urban zones. Carried out by youth and having as a base the constructive force and solidarity of youth collectives committed to nature. Tierra
Viva is a project whose intention is the improvement of our own, distinctly urban habitat, bringing together diverse ecological and social techniques to be applied in the city.”

Raul noted the horrible ills given birth by urbanization and modernization, homelessness, psychological dislocation from centuries old traditions. By looking at the air of Mexico City, it is so obvious. Yet along side this knowledge, he also sees the wonder that the confluence of people and culture that a city has to offer as an amazing thing. Biting this hope is the somber knowledge that globalization can both further kill the planet and leave Mexico ever more dependent on corrupt and distant corporate powers.

For these reasons then, it is inimical to the project that the land is within the city. They are not into retreating “back to the land.” The Tierra Viva project aims to create a viable alternative in the heart of the Mexico City- the present capital of Mexico and the former capital of the Aztec Empire. The group, reportedly comprised of 40 active participants from across all classes has begun to organize in the first phase of making a functioning green city. In this city that grows like cancer, many of the outlying areas of Mexico City are first claimed through squatting rights. The group is searching for site within the city that they can squat on then go through the legal process of outright purchasing.

The TierraViva collective is modeled after the Zapatistas and imagines that the institutional structures they build will both work from the old indigenous knowledge of the pre-Columbian peoples of Mexico and provide a social structure that accounts for the diversity of modern life. Raul recounted with how close to possible their dream is just in the very fact that so many residents of Mexico City have a direct memory of agricultural life. And that so many people from all classes dream of returning to the countryside from whence they came. The radical shift that the TierraViva group makes is that they boldly say that this dream can be realized in cities.

Therefore, TierraViva is more then a scheme to by a plot of land, They see ecological thought to have both an economic bent and a social bent- in the United States, the term is Social Ecology. Raul highlighted Social Ecology ideas like the dual need for both autonomy of individual and groups and the communitarian need for peoples assemblies to work out community problems. Embracing Social Ecologies community the group challenges itself to go beyond Raul’s punk looks. They have already set up agronomy classes for street kids. And in a great conundrum- thought they call the TierraViva project a youth project, they seem count on the knowledge of elder members who remember the rural farming practices of their youth.

With a long term vision (they have been together for 4 years) the project has a lot of relevancy to Los Angeles. The cities are similar faceless sprawls. Many Angelinos have memories of when the city was more orchard and farm then concrete and tar. While speaking, Raul passed around a photo-album of the TierraViva project. Like a lot of DIY stuff I’d seen, the book was cut and colored, full of youthful poses. This project feels like so much of the really good anarcho-stuff I’ve seen in the US, all-age show spaces- squatted houses, slug and lettuce gardens. What trips me out so much about it is the layering on top of all this style the indigenista approach that also feels so right to LA.

Raul can be reached by e-mail at raulsenk@yahoo.com.
TierraViva can be reached at cestierraviva@yahoo.com.
They are looking for funds to by land. Donations are being sought.

Growing up in a somewhat nearby suburb, around ten miles from downtown (which is roughly the same distance away to the east as Sepulveda Blvd is to the West), I have memories of suburbs surrounded by agriculture/agribusiness. Some people still raised chickens and sold eggs to the local ranch market through most of the 70's. Go back to the 60's, and the area was dominated by dairy cows (and drive through dairys selling that milk).

There are still strawberry fields where the 60 and 605 meet, and migrant workers still pick them, and people still buy them from the berry stands when they can. Up the street, they just opened a Fry's, and down the freeway a bit, is the virtual airstrip for computer parts arriving from Taiwan into Los Angeles. (Incidentally, the cows were moved out there in the 70's. Again, in the 80's, they were moved to the Inland Empire.)

The first residents in these areas were often the people working on the local ranches, so they understood farming and growing food. A lot of them were also farmers in the area. Gardening was common and popular, and something of a prerequisite for participating in the suburban lifestyle of comparing gardens and trading fruits.

The current thing in Rosemead is the (notorious) Vietnamese vegetable garden. Notorious because they garden in front of the house, not in back, and because the vegetables are not decorative, but for eating. Lettuce and chiles. They recall the old-style houses in the area that were somewhat decrepit by the 70's, but sported a milpa, or cornfield, in front or on the side. These vestiges of suburban peasant agriculture seemed to disappear with the land boom of the 80's, and the urbanization/gentrification of eastside suburbia. Newly affluent people with agricultural memories have taken over these houses and added micro-farms.

In the other valley, up near Reseda, there's a dying population of orange and lemon trees, a symbolic nod to the orchards that covered the San Fernando Valley, before the military industrial complex made the area its home in the 50's.

On Sawtelle, there's still vestiges of the Japanese farming community. The big nurseries are still operating, and I guess people are still buying. Believe it or not, there were still Japanese farms in Hollywood in the 50's (count the number of old flower shops in the area). In the 50's there were farms in Culver City, Venice, Santa Ana, Monterey Park, San Gabriel, Van Nuys, Whittier, Mar Vista, Montebello, Torrance, Carson, Compton, etc.

Many of the first settlers in the suburbs were farm laborers and migrant workers.

In LA County, if you see a house on a flat property, that house was probably the first house ever on that property. Figure out its vintage, and you'll have figured out when the area was last a ranch, or a farm, or a huge vacant lot.

Along the San Gabriel River, in El Monte, I saw a rodeo. It was in Spanish, and the sponsor was Power 106.