Just like people, seeds are portals that hold lineages within their membranes. Careful attention, curiosity, and the right conditions mean you might be lucky to catch a glimpse of the otherwise unseeable. Seeds and humans have a relationship as old as life on Earth. Under the shadow of multiple colonialisms and through the creation of subaltern ways of knowing, plants and people have built worlds within worlds together. Their symbioses are often unaccounted for and their ways of reaching for sun and water under the most brutal of conditions are still being understood. The seeds among us resist, survive, and carry on in the face of world-shattering events. The world is shattering and we need lessons more than ever.
Family of Antonio Chavez in the small city of Kerman, CA harvest marigolds and amaranth. Read more about the Chavez family here
I have spent the last 12 years clambering into the small pockets of society that are scattered like poker chips across the endless green of the 8 counties of California’s heartland. Immigrants and indigenous people made the Central Valley— they built it with their hands. Their connections to place are deeper than the state and national boundaries they represent. Enclaves and immigrant communities throughout the region retain vital links with villages and regions of origin in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, with diversity extending far beyond nationality to language, regional attachment, spiritual orientation, and cultural practice. Scanning the radio while driving down Highway 99 you’ll hear Hmong, Tagalog, Punjabi, Armenian, Triqui, and Mixteco, languages torn by military occupation and thrown into the dust to coexist. Cultural cuisines are densely packed in one glorious stretch of land, each preserved in the cocoon of segregation, but in the 111 degree Fresno summer heat, divisions between worlds melt away. You can find handmade dumplings behind a Tulare County Johnny Quick, paneer tacos at the truck stop in Dinuba, and lacy pupusas served alongside cold papaya salad on the way out of the Fresno city limits, all made by hands marked by the same sun.
CalEnviroScreen mapping tool reveals that California’s Central Valley, especially the San Joaquin Valley, faces some of the highest pollution burdens and community vulnerabilities in the state—driven by industrial agriculture, traffic, wildfires, and compounded by poverty, limited resources, and severe health impacts.
The tiny population centers of farmworkers, migrants and Tribal people in the most remote regions of this patchwork have historically struggled with the most acute impacts of pesticide exposure and the health risks that come with life spent working in the fields. These towns are famous only because the Grapes of Wrath documented a few of them and a few more were stops on Cesar Chavez’ March for Justice in the Spring of 1966. These settlements have been populated by waves of migrants over the last 100 years, left bereft by the state and federal water projects and rendered vulnerable to increasingly fatal summers. I went specifically to these cracks in empire seeking teachings of human and non-human adaptation at the rock bottom of land, water, and natural resource capture. I have been jamming a wedge in the door of systems collapse and peering in, what I’ve learned is that new worlds are being born as we speak. We just have to know where to hold our attention.
The Marigold Fund for Unincorporated California supports community-led natural resource management strategies including the growth of a soil-based bioresource economy, composting and other responsible biomass management, nature-based climate solutions for groundwater longevity, and sustainable green jobs that strengthen rural economies. Importantly, these projects are proposed by community residents living in the cracks of California’s agricultural patchwork, localizing benefits and keeping natural and financial resources in place. The Marigold Fund was formed over 10 years of strategic organizing by agroecology practitioners and farmworker community service providers who share a reparative orientation toward regenerative agriculture in the Central Valley. The Fund prioritizes agroecological land stewardship by farmworkers, small farmers, and Tribes whose legacies have built California agriculture. We believe that, like any mycological network, we will be most successful in re-growing human, animal, plant, and microbial communities, economies, and ecosystems if we start small and decentralized.
The Marigold Fund makes grants in unincorporated communities to build the power of the unrepresented agricultural workers and land stewards living in the literal fringes of democracy, the deeply rural communities that have been excluded from access to capital and political representation that would otherwise support their participation in core natural resources governance. The Fund’s movement for political and environmental regeneration is co-located in the Central Valley due to the region’s historic role as the backbone of California agriculture.
Acres of land used to hold silage and farm inputs, adjacent to a residential farmworker neighborhood in Kern County, CA. A sign reads “FUMIGATED- DO NOT ENTER”
On me: The left side of my brain, the botanist, is obsessed with seeing the unseeable through seed saving and floral population dynamics. My right brain, the attorney, led me in search of the most unseen places in California, to investigate and understand the human community characteristics that bloom under the pressures and freedoms of invisibility. After moving to California from the American South, through an adolescence and young adulthood obsessed with plants and agriculture, after an undergraduate education in plant sciences and over a decade-long career as an organizer and attorney, the California Central Valley has revealed itself to me and I am still uncovering day by day. The Valley is California’s forgotten heart, the seeds in the apple, and place of invaluable learnings for our moment. It is both history and forecast, showing us here in our own backyard how people from all over the world work together to create the conditions for survival in a landscape transformed by anarcho-capitalism and unfettered industry capture. California’s Central Valley is a place full of people from every latitude finding ways to survive and make home.
As modern life in the United States smudges blue and red into a pasty concrete, it’s time for Californians to take the voyage to the core, where the largest farmworker population in the United States lives, and has lived for so long that entire generations have seen the long term impacts of broken immigration policy tailored to benefit industry. To the districts where 70% of the population is enrolled in Medicaid, the highest numbers in the nation. Into the anarchic pockets of our own state where life has found a way. To build real connections with working class people who have been living at the bottom of wealth inequality that pours from the 2-party system, and dealing with the worst impacts of climate change for long before the current administration. To truly commune will not fix all of this, but to understand our past is an act of self love that helps us know our future.
Are you a cook, eater, policymaker, farmer, land or seed steward, funder or otherwise someone who wonders how to cut a meaningful path in the murk of the current moment? Maybe you want to begin partnering up with rural people and places to start reseeding this impossibly beautiful state together? There in the seeds of the apple of California, the magic of survival is taking place. I invite you to join me.
Download the Marigold Fund Concept Note here
Stay in touch by sending me an email: janaki.anagha@gmail.com and following me on Instagram @marigoldsociety