For the immigrant farmers of Catatumbo Cooperative Farm, working on land brings them closer to home.
By Alexandra Arriaga
(Photo: Samantha Cabrera Friend)
This profile is part of our How a Community Heals series.
Walking between rows of radishes, potatoes and onions growing in a farm on Chicago’s Southeast Side, a lesser known plant sprouts. At least, lesser known to some.
To many in the U.S., verdolaga, with its thick red stem and droopy leaves, is seen as a weed. But for the Latinx immigrant farmers who founded the Catatumbo Cooperative Farm, it’s an intentionally grown and edible plant that is a direct connection to ancestors and their ways of life.
Ireri Unzueta Carrasco, one of the three founders of the cooperative, says they often think about what a friend once told them — “weeds are just plants we lost our relationship with.”
Catatumbo sits on land in the South Chicago neighborhood on the Southeast Side, the most industrialized area of the city known as a “sacrifice zone” among local organizers. They say their neighborhoods have been unfairly burdened with pollution from local industry for decades. This spring, Stop General Iron organizers went on a hunger strike to push back against the relocation of a metal recycling plant from Lincoln Park, criticizing the move from the primarily white and affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood to the working-class Latinx and Black community as an act of environmental racism. Catatumbo is a respite from the industry that surrounds it.
Co-founders Ireri Unzueta Carrasco (right) and Jazmin Martinez (left) (Photo: Samantha Cabrera Friend)
Now in its third growing season, Catatumbo is a place where community members can come and regain their relationship with — and in turn heal — the land.
“We’ve had folks who come out and say, ‘Wow, I never imagined that something like this would be possible in my neighborhood,’” explains co-founder Jazmin Martinez. “It’s healing for the neighborhood, it’s healing and repairing the damage that was done to the land as well.”
Unzueta Carrasco and Martinez founded the cooperative with Vivi Moreno who a few years ago led them to Soul Fire Farm, an Afro-Indigenous community farm in New York that centers anti-racism and food justice in agriculture. They were inspired and wanted to find a way to bring this work and farming ethos to Chicago.
The three gender non-conforming immigrant farmers developed their idea into reality in 2018 through Urban Growers Collective, a nonprofit which serves as an incubator program to develop community-based food systems. Urban Growers Collective operates eight urban farms on 11 acres of land, predominantly located on Chicago’s South Side.
Co-founder Vivi Moreno with fellow farmers (Photo: Catatumbo Cooperative Farm)
As an immigrant with parents from Oaxaca and Mexico City, Unzueta Carrasco said migration has shaped their views of land and geography.
“Our histories include murder and exploitation; I think to me, that influences why I work on the land,” they said.
For Unzueta Carrasco, farming is a tool for healing that can be a counterpart to the buildup of anger and resentment in communities hurting from colonial histories and ongoing environmental racism.
“There’s a lot of land that has been poisoned in different ways [and] working with the land has become part of my survival strategy,” Unzueta Carrasco explains. “Being resentful and angry is useful and has been a good survival strategy, but can also be detrimental.”
Martinez says their background as an immigrant from San Luis Potosí in central Mexico drew them to working on the land. Every generation before them worked on the land as campesinos. Martinez says while their family’s migration meant a change of lifestyle from their ancestors, the farm has brought their family together and given their parents a sense of nostalgia.
“My parents would say, ‘We grew up en el rancho, we don’t want you to go through what we experienced,’ so when I started to get into this work, there were a lot of question marks,” Martinez remembers. “So since the pandemic, I started to go to the farm with my parents and do the work together, we began to develop a relationship.”
Martinez says allowing immigrant communities the space and land to explore farming in Chicago is a form of healing.
“Not just my parents but we have other folks who are immigrants, specifically from Latin America, who say, ‘Wow, this reminds me of back home,’ ‘Wow, you’re growing the things I used to grow, we had goats and chickens,’” Martinez recalls.
“This is nostalgia for the homeland, wherever that homeland is, because a lot of folks don’t have access to go back.”
Catatumbo Cooperative Farm regularly seeks volunteers to help work on the site for those who are interested. Follow them on Instagram @catatumbo_coop.
Alexandra Arriaga (she/her) is an independent reporter in Chicago, often reporting on stories centering the city’s immigrant communities. She was recently a reporting resident with City Bureau where she covered how immigrants participate civically.
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