How to Learn from the Land
By Steve Vásquez Dolph, PhD, Global Studies & Modern Languages, Drexel University
“After all, radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’”
– Angela Davis
In the early summer of 2022, in time with the full strawberry moon, a group of Drexel University undergraduates and Philadelphia neighbors convened for a one-week intensive course on food and land security in our city. College and community students spent the week learning together about issues at the intersection of community health, gentrification, and cultural preservation. For this week, the city and its gardens were our classrooms.
Students' flower offerings decorating the temazcal at Iglesias Gardens (El Terreno) in North Philadelphia. Copyright: "Ginny Robison @SpunkieConnections". Used with permission.
Our instructors were leaders in food culture work, mostly women of color embedded at the front lines of these issues. We partnered with three local community agriculture sites — Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden, Iglesias Gardens, and Norris Square Neighborhood Project — where we spent mornings working with the land, sharing stories of resistance and regeneration, and taking part in culturally relevant meals prepared by these same teachers: Lex Wiley and Chef Laquanda Dobson at Sankofa; Cesar Viveros and Erendira Solano at Iglesias; and Cesali Morales and Iris Brown at Norris Square.
After these meals, students scattered to the wind, some to their homes, others to their jobs or other classes. They left with tired hands and warm bellies, and notebooks deep with reflection questions. Those with time took part directly in virtual afternoon sessions during which we watched and discussed pre-recorded bilingual conversations with our global partner, Plenitud PR, an agro-ecological farm and community hub in the rural mountains of western Puerto Rico. (We facilitate an immersive travel course there during our winter intercessions.)
The principal objective of this course — which will run again this September — is to bring students into immediate contact with food security projects through close, hand-to-hand work alongside expert practitioners. Through the virtual sessions, they are encouraged to make connections to global conditions and to structural parallels. And through the open learning platform, where they can access readings, reflection questions, and discussion prompts, students cultivate intellectual curiosity and an analytical framework.
In Philadelphia, food insecurity — lacking reliable access to affordable, nutritious food — affects about one in six families. Rooted in structural inequity, land dispossession, and environmental racism, this condition has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: studies indicate that among children the rate is closer to one in three. Although many programs address food and land insecurity at the individual or neighborhood level, few situate cultural preservation at the center of their practice. (Puerto Rico, a colony of the United States, experiences acute food insecurity despite an abundance of arable land.)
As a humanist whose primary teaching happens in Spanish, this focus — a culturally-rooted response to structural violence — is where I most want to hold our students’ attention. But cultivating this kind of attention requires an abundance of intention. This begins at the partnership level. Our community partners are ones with which we have longstanding relationships, as volunteers, friends, mentors, and collaborators. This course was embedded in a larger vision of shared concern and mutual trust manifest through alignment with projects like Lessons of Da Land.
Our land-based teaching practice is also grounded in critical reflection: the projection of collective analysis onto lived experience through imaginative exercises like journaling, mind-mapping, and illustration. For students, this practice facilitates the integration of their interior or affective experiences in the course — the shared emotional and physical labor to clear a parcel of earth, for instance — with larger questions about the history and futurity of urban agriculture that they encounter in their readings. Critical reflection in our work is not supplementary but complementary. It closes the circle.
A secondary objective of the course is to help students grasp the oftentimes intangible connections across our three host sites, and the sovereignty movements they exemplify. Each site represents a distinct ethno-cultural focus: West Africa for Sankofa, Central Mexico for Iglesias, and Puerto Rico for Norris Square. These community agriculture projects are also embedded within distinct neighborhoods with divergent histories. We focused on what they hold in common: an intergenerational struggle to repair their frayed connections to ancestral knowledge. A diasporic lens reveals their complementary natures.
“Companion planting” is a traditional form of agriculture that involves the close association of different plants to offer mutual protection from pests, support pollination, provide shelter, or promote growth. A familiar example from the kitchen garden: planting marigolds with tomatoes to control aphids, which are repelled by volatiles produced by the flowers. A form of polyculture, companion planting braids indigenous knowledge around biological science. Alongside its value as an agricultural technique, companion planting is an expression of the complementary nature of these radically distinct epistemologies.
In Food and Land Security, this dynamic is embodied in three “sisters” — corn, beans, and squash — the protagonists of an agricultural technique refined across the Americas over thousands of years. The mutual aid relationship among this trio of plants means the corn, which grows first and fastest, acts as a trellis for the beans, whose nitrogen-fixing bacterial symbiotes replenish the soil, which is shaded by the squash, its broad spreading leaves acting as a living mulch. Our course is bookended by half-day workshops where we extrapolate this form of companion planting into a strategy for educational and social change.
A paradigmatic form of agro-ecology, the Three Sisters are the basis of milpa, a Mesoamerican concept that encompasses not only botany, but land tenure, social hierarchy, and spirituality. By organizing the course around this iconic trio, and repeatedly calling our attention back to it, we more easily distinguish the rhizomatic connections between a range of social and environmental concerns, from intensive gentrification to gender violence. On the flipside, we can interrogate top-down “sustainability” projects with a simple question: Is this milpa? Thinking with milpa we understand the primacy and persistence of the commons as an organizing principle of the practice of everyday life.
In practical terms, the classroom as milpa signifies a space of belonging, structurally oriented to disrupt the bureaucratic and relational disparities between the campus and the community. Our curriculum is co-designed over months of conversation with our community instructors, who share ownership of the content and are compensated according to an ethic of abundance generated through shared investment. And we match our efforts in course design with initiatives toward equitable access, to stall or even reverse the extractive resource flows of urban campuses. As a rule, all the intellectual and physical capital that comes into the program cycles back into the community.
Students and scholars of culture shipwrecked on the shores of the Anthropocene need not manufacture an antidote for climate grief and political alienation from the flotsam of late capitalism. We can forgo all the natty neologisms, looking-glass portmanteaus, and novel (seeming) paradigms that have rarefied the language of the environmental humanities. Our teachers have already chastened us against this rhetorical skylarking. The forms of education and inquiry needed to remake university life are already present all around us. We need only kneel to the Earth, reach across the space between ourselves and the land, and grasp them at the root.
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Steve Vásquez Dolph, PhD (he/him) is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish in the Department of Global Studies & Modern Languages at Drexel University, where he also serves as a Teaching Faculty Fellow for the Lindy Center for Civic Engagement and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences. His teaching and research situate the intersection of migration and climate change in the Americas, with a particular focus on food and land sovereignty projects. Steve's teaching practice is rooted in longstanding partnerships with community-based organizations in Philadelphia and Puerto Rico, whose educational missions he supports through coursework, research collaborations, and co-learning experiences. Working principally from his identity as a child of the diaspora, and his perspective as a first-generation American, Steve works intentionally to expand access to and diversify participation within community-based global learning programs in higher education.
Institutional Context: Drexel University is an R1 research institution located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and founded in 1891 as the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry, by Philadelphia financier and philanthropist Anthony J. Drexel. From its inception, Drexel has emphasized practical training in tandem with intellectual development. Today, this focus is most visibly manifest in Drexel's cooperative education program, which places most students in multiple long-term internships as part of their degree requirements.
Snapshot Institutional Profile (for comparative purposes as part of the broader project described below):
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This entry is part of a Public Writing Project, Higher Education for the World We Need, co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Initial reflections in that writing project will be posted here, on the blog of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). The Collaborative is a multi-institutional community of practice, network, and movement hosted in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. The Collaborative advances ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.
The 2023 Collaborative Unconference will be hosted @ Lehigh University from June 7 to 9. See Reimagining the "Impact" in Impact-Focused Education for more information and affordable registration. Registration closes May 26.
Save the date for, Stepping into the Work: Expanding understanding of global positionality, responsibility, and opportunity, a Collaborative gathering in partnership with the Global Engagement in the Liberal Arts Consortium at Haverford College, immediately outside of Philadelphia, November 10 and 11, 2023.