desert Fathers

The farmers’ market on wheels tackling one of America’s worst food deserts

Sergio: Why did your family migrate to the US?Rodolfo: The reason why my family moved to the US was because both my grandfather and my biological fathers struggled with addiction, with alcoholism and drug abuse. They were just not very... Mostly my biological father, he really wasn't always there, and he was always very violent towards my mother. My mother had me when she was 14 years old. When she got pregnant everybody decided well, okay, she messed up. She is this, that, like very, very taboo. She wasn't really accepted in the family anymore. It wasn't so much my family and I moving to the US, it was just my mother and I when she was 16 and I was two and a half years old. They weren't really interested in what was going on with me or my mother. She just wanted a better quality of life for her and for myself.Rodolfo: In Mexico at 16 years old, with no type of education past probably middle school, she knew she wasn't gonna get very far. I guess she made that decision in order to have a better quality of life for her and myself, she went on. She was 16, and I don't know how she did it. I don't know the details and all that, but she met the right people, or she got in contact with the right people, and she went over there. She went to the United States. To this day, I still remember a lot of the things, even though I was very, very young. It's something that I always tell everybody that I meet, it's not just for this interview.Rodolfo: I always remember the bad things that happened or the very... I don't know if it's because it had such a big impact in my life and my mother's life or just because of how everything was set up. I remember everything that happened from start to finish. From the beginning where we got picked up, to being in the desert. I still remember eating cereal with water. It was... I don't know, it was very, very... I feel like it was... it obviously had an impact psychologically, because I still just have a lot of anxiety when I'm in certain places that I'm really accustomed to. A two, three year old in the middle of the desert, it definitely had to have an impact on me.Sergio: How old were you when that happened?Rodolfo: I was two and a half years old, so that's why I'm saying it's very odd for me to be able to remember that at a very, very young age. It wasn't only that, just even when I was here, when I was two, two and a half, I used to remember asking my mom certain memories that I had. She would say, "Oh you were one year old, one and a half years old, how did you remember that?" It was always very, like a violent, violent memory that I had. It was more so like my father being drunk or high or whatever and coming in the house. Taking any little money my mom made for the week, in order for him to keep on doing what he was doing. Just coming in and just tearing up the place.

A vegetable garden can do more than save you money -- it can save the world. In this talk, Roger Doiron shows how gardens can re-localize our food and feed our growing population.

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA -- in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where "the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys."

My mother, she had to cross the bad way. She went through the desert, she went through the river. My sisters and I, we went through the bridge, like the regular crossing, but we used other people's papers. My middle sister, they cut her hair off completely, and I had to call her Jose.Luisa: She had short, short hair. My sister's hair was up to her waist, and my mom just shaved it off and her name was Jose now, and it was a game. I didn't know what was happening, of course.

Mike: And I remember it was me, my mother, my two little brothers—my sisters weren't born at the time—and the two coyotes, the people that cross you. Yeah, I remember that, because that was really, really hard. Just being three days in the desert, especially when you're like three or four, that right there just takes a toll—

After that, they procure what is needed for the next seven months of the journey, because in the desert one travels an entire day and night before reaching potable water; however, every day and a half, they can find plenty of it, enough for fifty or a hundred people or even more. And if it happens that a rider, tired by the journey, falls sleep or for any other reason he separates from his companions, he will often hear the voices of devils, similar to the voices of his companions, often calling him by his own name.

authorizetakeofupto1,169deserttortoise(Mojavepopulation)within12,264acresofdeserttortoisehabitatand31,282acresofpotentialhabitat

Here is no water but only rock