GET TO KNOW YOUR FOODSHED PEOPLE! MEET CRIS FROM PIXCA
Tell me a little about yourself and your roots.
My name is Cris Juarez García and, well, to start at the beginning, I was born in Tijuana and grew up in Mexicali so I consider myself a cross-border woman. My life has always been marked by the border and it was also visible in my family. My father crossed over to work and my uncles also crossed over to work and came back only seasonally. Growing up, I begin crossing the border more and I become even more cross-border and I also begin to see it as a political term for how to eliminate borders with our roles and our actions and from our own identity. At the age of 15 I returned to Tijuana and at 16 I began to go to school in the United States, living in Tijuana. I start to create community on both sides, community in Tijuana a community in San Diego. Over the years, the two communities begin to connect and intertwine, woven from my personal, social, family and politically active life.
Photo credit Magdalena Ramirez
In my professional life, I studied sociology and it is already like another little branch of life. I have done research. The research that most impacted my life and changed my way of thinking about this place where we are was with Dr. Zhang in the sociology department, which was about the labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants in San Diego. From there, at the end of the investigation, I start other research assistant jobs. I start working with non-profit organizations. Seeing how everything is part of the system, from academia, institutions and also non-profit organizations. I'm beginning to notice how discrimination is, how everything is based on charity, not solidarity. In the academy, too, with the teacher wanting to create all this knowledge, but at the same time not doing anything with the knowledge that is being created.
And that's also how this project of which I am now part of, Pixca, is inspired. It is a more grounded project, embraced and rooted in the same community. It is a project of agronomy, of cultivation. We grow flowers and vegetables here in South San Diego, right on the border. And we are a collective of workers, we are four members and well, we’re working at it.
How did you come into doing what you do?
My maternal family comes from Sinaloa and my father's family comes from a town called Colotlán, Jalisco. And the two of them met because they had migrant families who arrived in Mexicali. And that's where I grew up. I feel like I grew up far removed from everything political. I had a somewhat sheltered childhood, just home and school. So when I start at the university, I begin to get involved in organizations and my thinking and my person also evolve to a more horizontal model of life, seeking autonomy and dignity within my life based on Zapatista principles, inspired by all of the work they have done in the indigenous communities in Chiapas, visiting some of the communities. And well, inspired by that, work begins here in my context of starting to look for that community. And through Son Jarocho I begin to intertwine that fabric of the border more by participating in a collective in Tijuana called Quiquiriquí Coyotas, which is a Son Jarocho collective of cross-border women in Tijuana-San Diego, and also participating in San Diego with Son de San Diego, trying to write verses that represent the current situation of life through what we are going through.
Son Jarocho Collective Quiquiriquí Coyotas
What makes you feel connected to the land that you inhabit today, to this “foodshed”?
It helps me a lot to feel connected to the plants. All my life, I had always lived like in neighborhoods with just houses, parks and the library or school. And right now I feel that the place where I am spending my life is a very particular place because it feels like a more rural environment, more remote even though we are a few blocks from other neighborhoods. We are part of a community garden and at the same time, the community garden is part of a nature reserve. So we are surrounded by nature. And because it is a reserve, around the community garden there are ranches because there cannot be permanent structures. So there are many stables for horses and other animals. It helps me a lot to land and feel rooted to the place where I live, the feeling of belonging. To feel part of the environment in which I am. Not just creating relationships with humans, but also with the environment, with plants and other animals. Even when I only had tiny patch of land, a little garden, it makes you more focus on the microcosm, on that little piece of plant, everything that exists on that plant. The word Regenerate can be defined as:
to improve a place or system so that it is active or producing good results again
to renew life or energy or spirit.
What are your regenerative practices?
Spiritually, I grew up Catholic, so I feel that also having a more conscious thought and having my own vision of the cosmos has also helped me to want another form of spirituality. It took me a lot of work to get to know myself, actually what do I want, how I would like to live my life, with whom I would like to share my life and well, what still needs to change in our world to live a dignified life where we are all given worth. A world that is for everyone. Then well, from there this layer begins to be removed, I was imagining like an onion, that you begin to remove the dry layer that is no longer giving you much, and you want to get to that shiny part, the one that has the flavor, the one that is still alive from which a flame can still be lit. And I begin to have more awareness from my spiritual practice of wanting to regenerate my concept of what that rootedness is, the same thing we were talking about, so I think that this practice of working with the earth is a very spiritual practice where you can observe all these cycles of life and how it regenerates without us having to put in too much effort. As if life is naturally regenerative. And well, it is part of how I am living my spirituality in these times. And in other ways, too, for example, first leaving the university institution, working for academic research and realizing that it does not serve us--is to remove a layer with the realization that this is not for me. And then working with non-profit organizations—another big layer lifts. You have so much faith and so much energy and so much that you can invest as a person, at least me, in my projects, and to see at the same time that it is not giving me that, it is not helping me to evolve or regenerate as a person to be a better version of myself or a better being.
So then I also removed that layer and now we are here. Trying to regenerate myself in another way. Focused more on the community, but on the community that I can build on the impact we can have not only with regenerative practices at Pixca, but also in the community. How can you go with each action from day to day, how you can build something that only exists our mind, that only exists in our heart. How energy is transformed into something new, something different that, because we live where we live in a capitalist, neoliberal society, next to one of the most militarized borders, it has been very difficult but these nuclei are created and they are getting stronger and we are creating a vision of the world where we want to live.
That path of evolution presents itself in life. And I feel like it's that risk of wanting to keep moving. In all the analogies in my life, I think about plants and how they also evolve to adapt to their environment. But at the same time they also throw out their seeds to grow elsewhere. That plant didn’t stay all its life in on spot struggling. Instead, it says, well, here is an extension of myself. Well, likewise, if I feel that those opportunities for extension present themselves in our lives. And seeing which opportunity we really want the most, identifying where our heart is and then walking with the heart facing forward, that has led to very beautiful things in my life.
