By Grayson Hester

Grace can be manifested in many forms, often appearing in the unlikeliest people and the most unexpected places. It can even show up in a plant.

Just ask Lupita Vazquez Reyes, the Community Gardens and Outreach Manager for Cultivate Abundance in Immokalee, Fla. For someone who has spent her entire life around farming, it was, rather fittingly, a plant that, in her words, served as her “saving grace.”

In November 2019, Vazquez became sick—really sick. Worse, she didn’t even know what was wrong. “I really don’t know what had gone on, but I was having breathing problems. And I was just feeling really fatigued,” she said.

At this time, Rick Burnette, CBF field personnel who co-directs Cultivate Abundance alongside his wife, Ellen, introduced Vazquez to a plant growing at the Mision Peniel garden in Immokalee would aid in healing her and ultimately help strengthen her connection to her heritage. That plant is called chaya.

“Chaya is a Mayan tree spinach that has intense and immense nutritional properties. And it’s considered a cardiovascular protector,” she said. “Most of all, it’s something that is very treasured in the Mayan culture in Mexico, including a lot of the people from Oaxaca, Chiapas,Guerrero and the Yucatan Peninsula.”

Vazquez, having been born and raised in Immokalee, shares an identity and a story with the robust community of migrant workers there. Most of them are first or second-generation immigrants from Central America, the Caribbean and, in her case, Mexico, drawn to Southwest Florida for its abundant agriculture and promise of work. Here, the majority of the U.S.’s winter tomato crop is grown, harvested, packaged and processed. It is a far cry from the glamor and glitz typically associated with more metropolitan South Florida. It is, in many ways, the picture of the so-called American dream, a coexisting diaspora of cultures, with the common goal of working towards a better life. .

“It is a community of immigrants. It is a community of agricultural workers and laborers. It is a beautiful community of brown and Black people; it is also a Haitian community,and a place where families struggle together and build collective resilience and joy all at the same time, every single day,” Vazquez said.

Immokalee is also, in other ways, proof of how America fails to live up to its own values. 

Florida has rapidly devolved into one of the country’s most expensive places to live, with housing serving as a main driver of the increase. While a large swath of people feel this crunch, it is the migrant workers who experience it most acutely.

A day’s wages for a migrant farm worker might fall somewhere in the range of $65-$100, a paltry sum earned if (and only if) they manage to pick a minimum of two tons of tomatoes that day. This would be an unlivable wage for an individual. For a provider, a role many migrant workers play for families both here and abroad, it is simply untenable. Added to the pressures of navigating our fractured immigration system, along with the daily needs of food and water, many migrant workers find, to paraphrase Howard Thurman, their backs against a wall.

“I do wake up angry sometimes…I have a lot of moments where I kind of lose it in this work. And I try to tell myself, ‘You’re being triggered because this was something that you have lived, but thank God, it’s you,’” Vazquez said. Indeed, Vazquez arrived at her position as Community Garden Outreach Manager (you can read more about Cultivate Abundance’s community garden in a past issue of Fellowship!) by walking the same path as those for whom she now advocates. 

It is a path begun long before Immokalee even existed, before the United States was a place to which people could migrate. It is that path which runs parallel to the roots of the chaya plant and the indigenous Mayan people.

“I came back to life with this plant,” Vazquez said. “And so, for me, chaya has been a way to connect with my family, my ancestry, my lineage, the teachings of my grandma; and it really brought my health back.”

This rootedness typifies Vazquez’s work, which is done, in true CBF field personnel fashion, among and with the community, not for them. She is the people she serves, descendants of the indigenous peoples of what is now Mexico and Latin America, offspring of immigrants grasping for safety and new life in a land which was stolen from them long ago.

Both her parents came from Mexico, initially drawn to South Texas for its proximity, but redirected to Southwest Florida at the behest of family who already lived there, for its opportunity. “My parents essentially came as migrant farm workers. They were both born in Mexico, were raised there, met in a border town, and then traveled together from that border town in the late ’60s and ’70s, ending up here at about that same time in Immokalee,” Vazquez said. “But they are two people who really had a strong sense of doing the right thing.”

In Immokalee, her parents found commitment in marriage and in organizing the migrant farm workers to seek better working and living conditions. In 1978, they gave birth not only to a child – Vazquez – but to a lineage of labor organizing and justice work. This legacy continues in Vazquez and her mother and in the spirit of her father, who died when Vazquez was just 17 years old.

Through it all, from her parents’ journey to the United States to the ongoing struggle for migrant and workers’ rights, faith has guided her every step. “It was this ability to see that our faith was this living thing—something that threaded into every part of our existence,” Vazquez said. “It was there whether it was us working and toiling in the fields, and maybe seeing an injustice and saying like, ‘I’m called to speak out on that no matter what it takes, because I know that my brother, my church, and my community are going to back me up no matter how hard it is.’”

Despite how xenophobic propaganda might paint communities like Immokalee, they are the tight-knit, supportive places Vazquez described. Like the chaya plant, which can thrive in cramped and hostile environments, Immokalee and other majority-minority places find a way, to paraphrase a Black church axiom, “out of no way.” They find, in each other, support and community, life and laughter, and the humanity so desperately lacking in the systems under which they toil.

“Most of the community is connected through a system that really reflects a sense of mutual aid and a sense of taking care of each other,” Vazquez said. “Often, systems that are put in place that are supposed to work in a community, government-led or state-led, don’t always seem to work, or the processes are very difficult.”

Vazquez benefits from and contributes to the assets of this community through her work, which is predicated primarily on the mitigation of food insecurity. Despite the verdant vegetation of Southwest Florida, the migrant workers responsible for feeding the U.S. are often denied the means to feed themselves adequately. Vazquez described a situation faced by many predominantly Black and brown communities across the country, one in which nutritious, culturally-appropriate food is hard to find and even harder to access. Grocery stores, far-flung and scant, often boast prices beyond what the people of Immokalee can afford, even if they can travel to them.

It is the work of Cultivate Abundance and its host partner,  Misión

 Peniel, to help provide the immigrant communities of Immokalee with food that nourishes their bodies and their souls alike. This work, of course, extends beyond person-to-person charity. It also concerns justice, which is achieved in correcting broken systems that have given rise to the need for charity in the first place. “We’ve created partnerships where we are participating in local food councils and policy councils so that we can talk about [the] culturally appropriate foods that we’re growing,” Vazquez said.

She advocates for her people not simply in the food she grows or the produce she distributes, but in the political advocacy she undertakes. It is a holistic effort for the making of a whole community.

Vazquez and the two organizations feed up to a thousand people per week, made possible by  community gardens which serve as the beating heart for this effort. In these gardens, connectedness grows and vegetables flourish. Connectedness is not just to each other, but to ancestry and the resiliency found therein. She knows it works because it worked, first, for her.

“Something with this chaya plant really connected with me…And I started to use it, talking to my mom about it,” Vazquez said. “I was talking to other people in my community to see if they knew about it.”

While no singular plant can constitute a well-balanced diet, just as no single activistic effort can set right our country’s inhumane systems, it can inspire new life. People are connected to each other and to those who came before them.  It can, in sum, symbolize grace.

In the face of insurmountable odds and screeching injustice, in rhetoric and ideologies that seek to separate, in systems that grind ever forward on the fuel of misanthropy, perhaps there is no better corrective, no more convincing a counterargument, than a garden.

“And I think that’s what gardening does for a person, for us humans; we begin to connect. We begin to see ourselves as an extension of what we see growing and of what we see,” Vazquez said. “The green of the plants, the color of the soil, the smell of the soil—there’s an awakening of our senses and a strong sense of grounding. It feeds our souls because of that connection.”

And perhaps, just as God sought to do God’s work on earth by assuming the form of a small, helpless baby, there is no more powerful a tool than spinach that grows on a tree.

“It got me started here in the garden; it gave me the confidence to say, ‘This is a space where I belong and I can be a contributor and… I’m in the right place.’ So this is the chaya.”