Chef, farmer, and writer of Kitchen Kwento Aileen Suzara and I recently had a conversation about Filipinos in farm work. We asked ourselves how many Filipino-owned farms we know about in California.
I knew a farm I saw at my local farmers market in San Jose, Ibarra Organic Farms. At the mention of the name, Aileen’s excitement withdrew–not against the farm but because she had hoped to hear the name of just one more Filipino farm in California. We were unable to draw another between us.
Ibarra Farms has been family owned and operated since the 1940s and travels to more than thirty-five farmers markets all over the Bay Area.
Filipino Americans come from a long history of farm work. One of the first waves of migration from the Philippines to the US were of sakadas — farm workers on fruit plantations of Hawai’i in the beginning of the twentieth century who soon hopped to the fields of California.
Larry Itliong and Philip Veracruz had spent many years organizing Filipino farm workers in the 50s and 60s before working with the United Farm Workers. The Delano Grape Strike in 1965 was first called on by Filipino farmworkers and the organizers worked hard to bring Mexican farm workers into the strike, eventually leading to the formation of the UFW.
More than 70% of the population of the Philippines today are peasants and farm workers. We are a land-based people with a history of working the earth.
So it is somewhat of an anomaly that now, in the US and in California in particular, Aileen and I were unable to name another Filipino-owned farm.
The reality may be that Filipinos’ mostly violent history of forced migration–individuals and families leaving cycles of poverty to find better livelihoods in America. If generations left the lands for their children to do something ‘better,’ it makes sense that so few of us now are invested in re-membering that work. It will take a bit of healing for us in the diaspora to come back to the land.
Yet the land has been the backbone of the struggles of our people. It is our heritage. Part of the reason I am learning to farm is to bring my body back into its cultural memory. To re-cycle my history in my lifetime.
People in America are slowly coming back to a conscious relationship with real food–knowing where it comes from or growing it ourselves. The Filipino in America must also take part in that enlightenment. I recognize that it is up to people like Aileen and me who are drawn to this work to make it relevant to others in our community. The history of the Filipino in America is the history of our relationship to the land.
The land is our inheritance. We are the continuation of that story.
Adrien, I’m excited about Ground Theory. Thanks for your reflections on this conversation and many more to come. I learn more about the land from talking with you and with others, because we carry the land everywhere we go – whether living in cities or farms or towns, whether we work the soil or not. And I’m looking forward to finding out where our question and story of Filipino-owned farms goes – I know there is a complex history and so much to learn. Anyone out there want to chime in?
Thanks Aileen. As I farm and as I do more of this work, I become more an more aware of the abundance of nature available to all of us — even we who are rooted in the city. The great myth of modernity is that nature exists apart from our lives. It is the myth that we have told ourselves and the myth we witness breaking down in this time.