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“Barrio Centro sprawls next to a highway and sits directly beneath the flight path of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.” This description fits many Black and brown neighborhoods across the country; surrounded by industrial plants, factory farms, and expressways with the accompanying pollution. But the vibrant humanity enclosed within still shines bright, and the power of community cannot be snuffed out.

Growing Food and Latino Culture in Tucson’s Barrio Centro
by Lourdes Medrano

In a long-abandoned school playground, a small-scale farm is planting seeds for a more equitable and sustaining food system in a neighborhood where fresh, affordable food is hard to come by.

The Midtown Farm in Tucson, Arizona, is an offshoot of the Flowers & Bullets Collective in the Barrio Centro neighborhood. Tito Romero and Jacob Robles, friends since childhood now in their early 30s, launched the organization in 2012 to provide healthy food alternatives, to improve their neighborhood, and to share their Latino and Indigenous cultures. “The idea of growing food, being sustainable, has been a trend for some time in predominantly White, middle-class communities,” Robles says. “For communities in the barrio, communities of color, those trends don’t reach us as easily.”

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How do you put a price on home? On land? On community? Reporter Kali Halloway writes a thorough update on the fates of the Pigford families, who’s lives and livelihoods as farmers were priced by the USDA at a mere $50,000 after decades of discrimination. Since then, the Biden Administration has again attempted justice. The battle, however, is not over.

How Thousands of Black Farmers Were Forced Off Their Land
By Kali Holloway

In 1883, less than 20 years after emancipation, Curtis Gentry bought nearly 1,500 acres of undeveloped land in Shiloh, a rural community in the Alabama county where he had once been enslaved. Alongside his brother Turner, with whom he was able to reunite after emancipation—unlike the members of so many other Black families—Gentry cleared that property, uprooting trees, brush, and undergrowth. Once the land was arable, he planted and harvested an array of crops, including ribbon cane, corn, and peas.

“He was a hard worker,” Bernice Atchison, Gentry’s granddaughter-in-law, told me. “Not only did he clear his own land, but he took jobs helping white people clear their land.” He taught his family how to take care of the farm while he worked on other people’s farms, bringing in extra money to the household.

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