Hemos estado luchando:

Los Angeles is not a desert-- water is at turns scarce, but also abundant: in our tea, our plants, running seemingly endlessly from the tap, and in the storm drains when it rains. In one neighborhood you’ll see dirt lawns and posters warning against water waste, but a few blocks away freshly watered bright green lawns line another city’s streets, some hedges as tall as homes. In landscapes marked by industry in southeast Los Angeles County, there’s a little bit of both-- a fertility and a cautiousness. For some people, water is too expensive a resource to waste. [1] Others find ways to create abundance with what is available.

The southeast was the rustbelt of Los Angeles, a witness to once-bustling tire and steel factories, it also watched a mass exodus of white middle and working class people from the area along with those union jobs just as an influx of Black and brown workers were rising in the ranks. That industrial past still has presence and it makes for an abundance in people’s resilience--our hard work gene is strong. But the industrial past and present still haunt our lawns and fields, tempering abundance with literal danger.

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The 710 Freeway exit for Atlantic/Bandini Boulevard takes you past huge warehouses and railroad tracks between the City of Commerce and Vernon, just a few blocks from Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. The semis and eighteen wheelers snake their way past small cars and into the broad streets. You can easily ignore that the LA River is not too far away, a cemented version of it that no one takes a kayak into. Its banks blend into the grey sky of overcast days. In her book Where I Was From, Joan Didion describes a drive through Vernon as a wasteland of cement and empty streets.  But many of us know that inside these buildings are workers moving the millions of goods to and from the Port of Los Angeles into the rest of the country, day and night. A few hundred feet past these giants are tens of thousands of children, mothers, grandparents, business owners, politicians, artists, and environmentalists. Isabel Salazar Viramontes can say she has been and is, many of these things. People call her Señora Chabelita. [*]

The cement around the perimeter of the lawn was wet. Señora Chabelita’s lawn was two squares of grass in a Maywood residential area, just two blocks from Vernon’s industrial streets, and near the now-defunct but still deadly Exide Battery Recycling Plant. Beyond her lawn, Señora Chabelita’s front porch was covered in potted plants, flanked by plumeria or cacaloxuchitl with pink tips and white centers. Four aloe plants as tall as children edged the corner of one side of the porch. Vines and hanging plants like from various climbing plants graced the other side of the porch. It was a self-enclosed Babylonian garden in the middle of an industrial corridor. Her yard is welcoming and verdant, but Chabelita contends that “La tierra esta mala,” the dirt was no good for trying to plant crops like carrots and cilantro 35 years ago.

At first I thought Chabelita was referring to the lead crisis in the southeast, but she literally meant that the dirt was no good for her crops. For decades, the Exide Battery Recycling plant leaked deadly chemicals into the southeast air, depositing lead across an area spanning at least 10,000 properties, regulators have said. Although the community won a hard-fought battle in partnership with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice and closed the plant more than three years ago, tests conducted by the state showed more than 7,500 properties exceeded the California standard for lead in residential soil. Chabelita’s house is in an area checkered with properties that are slated for cleanup or that have very high levels of lead but don’t qualify for removal of the toxins. These homes are right next to each other.

According to the LA Times, only 270 properties have been cleaned. Chabelita’s yard has not been cleared of lead. We don’t talk about Exide the morning I visit. It is something we live with, the neglect of the state and abuse by corporations that lead to the crisis in the first place. She walks me through the rest of her garden instead.

At the edge of her porch, a lime and guayaba tree managed to grow tall as her roof. Our yards are both a place of refuge and frequently lined with lead.[2] Chabelita walked to a cluster of flowering plants. growing in pots with soil she purchased at a store.

“Esta es kalanchóe. Es buena para el cáncer. Se mastica la hoja, tres veces al día.” Kalanchóe, also known as widow's-thrill, has origins in Africa’s tropical regions and Madagascar. Chabelita knows so much about cancer and the plants it takes to combat it. Chabelita has been surviving cancer for over 20 years. Southeast Los Angeles lies between the Alameda Corridor, the Long Beach Freeway, surrounded by factories, traffic, manufacturers that once closed their doors, then reopened them to produce disposable furniture and toys. Aside from lead in the soil, the region is also stalked by environmental toxicity in the air, water, and also, our food.

“Mi batalla,” she called it, a breast cancer that morphed as she made drastic changes to her diet, continues to do cleanses for, and for which she and her children, have found a multitude of natural medicinal remedies.

She bought her house in Maywood over 35 years ago, a triplex with multiple sections, a tall avocado tree in the middle of it, shading a separate garden dedicated to la Virgen de Guadalupe. In that section of her property, there was a car that hadn’t been moved in a while, but along its front bumper were carefully placed plants, a crown of ferns for an automotive past.

Chabelita boiled water for tea in a beautiful crystal teapot with flowers etched on its side. Her own herbal tea was already steeped. She warmed water for mine. Some research shows that southeast LA soil has been tested at more than 1,000 parts per million for lead when the safe limit in California is 80 parts per million.[3] We cannot live afraid of everything we touch, and so, I drank my entire cup of tea and later drank the water that came out of my mother’s kitchen filter in Bell Gardens. The answers to our illnesses are sometimes hidden in our homes and cancer itself. Our water is not completely poisoned and our bodies are composed mostly of it.

“Y el agua, Chabelita?” I asked her. “How do you use it in your home?”

“Yo la cuido,” she said. “La conservo. Estamos en una sequía.”

She is a conservationist, a healer who used to own multiple small businesses (a flower and decoration shop among them) and opened her home to queer and trans Latinx friends when their families turned their backs on them. Chabelita’s yard is a safe haven for all.

 Chabelita uses a greywater system in her laundry room and uses water from the shower for her plants. She is humble about how she’s helped her community with her practices.

“Con lo poquito que yo se, le puedo ayudar a la gente,” she said. Recently, she helped a neighbors’ daughter overcome incapacitating pain during her menstrual cycle by sharing several herbal supplements with her family. In her own family, members who suffered from acid reflux who were non-believers in natural remedies are now evangelical about the supplements that balanced out their lives.

Like many other immigrants are migrants to southeast Los Angeles County, Chabelita had practice planting her own food (which sometimes doubles as medicine). This experience lives within her because of her upbringing in Jalpa, Zacatecas. A floodplain before the LA River was cemented, the southeast still has rich soil that people take advantage of, if they have the room to plant into the ground. If they know the soil is safe to eat from once the fruits have sweetened.

Don Jose said they’ve been in Bell Gardens about 20 years. Born to a family of ten siblings, Don Jose had six children of his own. He’s a shy man who was busy taking apart an engine out back. Their family is from Jalostotitlán, Jalisco where they had a farm back home, too. Edgar recalls milking cows when he was a boy. My mother nodded her head and said, “Es bonito el rancho.” She means the ranch from her memory and the one where she was standing that day.

On their one-acre of land, the family grows beets, daikon, okra, cilantro, quelites, nopales, savila, sugar cane, thyme, rosemary, lemongrass, bell peppers, and other vegetables. Edgar says they won't be growing bell peppers anymore since the crops were small in size and poor in quality this year. My mother observed that they just needed to water them more. I shrugged. The family knows their crops best, I told her.

“Esta cara el agua,” Edgar added. He didn’t say how much their water bill was, but admitted their bills were hefty and forced them to change how they watered the land. About fifteen years ago they stopped watering with sprinklers and started using a drip system. The nopales are the only thing they still water by hand, which ends up getting them more water than other plants. Their farm is pesticide and chemical-free, but not organic as it’s defined and regulated by the state.

They came to Bell Gardens via Pomona when their family first immigrated. Don Jose was working for a man who owned property in Bell Gardens and worked on the farmland they farm on today. “My dad worked the land and we lived in the house nearby,” said Edgar. The former owner offered to sell it to the Ornelas family who bought it from him immediately.

“It’s hard,” says Edgar about farming here. “Summers are especially hard here in LA.” Edgar is referring to the heat that beats down on their land. There is no shade, just like all those hundreds of miles of land in California’s central valley; it’s just him and his dad, and occasionally an uncle who helps them plants, seed, and pick their crops. He admits that he has it easier than other produce sellers who drive from as far north at Santa Maria and the Central Valley, taking many hours to get back and forth to market.

I asked Don Jose what he wanted people to know about water, about his farm. Talk to my son, he said, he’s the campeon, the expert. “Yo nada mas estoy en el rancho.” As if being the farmer is nothing hard.

“My dad’s humble. He doesn’t like the attention,” said Edgar, back at the family home on Clara Street. “I don’t take it for granted, that we can make a living off this work.” Edgar didn’t start off working with his dad. “I used to do other stuff, pero siempre le ayudaba.” He hints at stints in retail and other jobs, but doesn’t offer anything specific. What matters is that no matter what his job was, he always helped his dad.

When we get back to their home to talk to Don Jose, I realize that I’ve only seen hedges that tall in wealthy suburbs. A wayward watermelon ripened on the ground near a pot of geraniums. Passion fruit vines entwined in their avocado tree branches, dangling down where one could reach them. My mother noticed the maracuya when we walked in, their purple flowers giving them away to anyone who knows their fruit.

“No me vende unos?” my mother asked.

“No, it’s okay, we were going to give these away anyway,” said Don Jose’s wife who’d come out to greet us.

“This is probably where we’re gonna live forever,” Edgar said.

“Pues gracias a dios que pueden,” I said. So many families are facing rent increases beyond their means, paying $2000 for two bedroom apartments that sometimes, are falling apart.

Along the warehouses and freeways where even the river is cemented, on a porch or utility corridor-- you can plant nearly any seed and watch it grow. Southeast LA landscapes are still fertile, former floodplains nestled between two rivers and traffic. It is ground zero for planting food and ideas, growing families and businesses, but only if we are healthy enough and of course, only if there is water.