Farming Resistance and Resilience

Welcome to Essay #2. This Essay is important for many reasons, and also because we will build on Essay #2 for the final assignment in this class. Meaning, you want to do your best work on Essay #2 so that you have a solid foundation for the additional research and writing that will be added for your final assignment in this class.

In Parts I, II & 3 of Natasha Bowens’ The Color of Food: Stories of Race, Resilience and Farming, we are presented with significant historical and social context that conveys the injustices that face and have faced African American communities and farmers, immigrant communities and farmers, and Native American communities and farmers. These injustices are often perpetuated by systems of government and capitalism, as well as racism and xenophobia in society.

Still, in Parts I, II & III, there are moments of substantial resistance, resilience, triumphs, and understanding of the on-going support needed for farmers of color to sustain and expand their work.

Part 3 emphasizes these stories of resilience further:

“Despite a long history of injustice and discrimination, there is a growing community of Black farmers in the South who are resiliently coming up with ways to survive and thrive. They are transforming agriculture in the slow-moving South and innovating creative agricultural marketing strategies that are impacting the way we think about small farm and food entrepreneurship” (45-46).

“Despite the plight of many immigrants left with little choice but to join the unjust farm labor industry, workers are transitioning to owners, bringing back cooperatives and sending a lesson to all beginning farmers on how it can be done”  (46).

Your task for Essay #2 is to identify these experiences of resistance and resilience and to develop a claim (opinion, inference) that argues how and why these experiences are acts of resistance and resilience, and what is the significance of these triumphs. You will need to write about and quote at least 2 Portraits from Part 1 through Part 3. You will need to make a connection to at least 1 of our supplemental readings, videos, poems, or songs. Additionally, you will begin to focus this lens (of resilience) on local activism in the Bay Area. This focus will require your research of at least 2 present efforts towards food access, land ownership, and small farm sustainability in the Bay. This research aspect will continue to be developed for your Final assignment in this class.

*Note: While the focus of this essay is the theme of resilience across the topics of food access, farming and land access, you are still encouraged to emphasize connections to food in your essay. For example, In Part 3, Portrait 2, Transitioning to Sovereignty, Luis Castañeda explains, ” ‘Cubiertos are traditional Mexican candies made from calabaza, sweet potato or biznaga‘ [a barrel cactus plant] . . . ‘We grew up with these candies and now we could make them and sell them . . . Many people have already lost the memory of this traditional food. We could bring it back'” (55). Consider: What signficance do the cubiertos have for Luis in his personal life and business life? In his resilience as a farm owner? Here, we learn that Luis’ connection to traditional foods brings him not only nostalgia, but a means of income as a small business and farm owner. So, the theme of resilience in this essay is still deeply connected to the meanings, significance, spirituality and traditions of food. Please keep this in mind for your own writing.

Essay Requirements: 5 Full pages, Double-Spaced, Times New Roman Font, Size 12, 1″ Margins. MLA format required (I have modeled MLA formatting in all of my Lecture Content this semester. Quotations need author’s last name and page number. Please review Lecture Content this semester for additional examples.)