The Dive, Season 01

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WE LIKE SCREEN BREAKS Dear friends,

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We’re very excited to welcome you all to Minnow’s new zine-letter, The Dive! In a world dominated by screens that demand our unwavering, yet scattered, attention, The Dive is our attempt to swim upstream, if you will. It’s an opportunity to share with you, our community, the depth and fullness of our work that only a printed format allows. Sometimes we’ll expand content from our blog, and other times we’ll feature content never shared before or from a close partner or client. We’ll also be commissioning artwork from creatives who align with our cause, so they too can grow their community and work with us. We hope that the result is a slow, beautiful, engaging experience.

In this inaugural edition of The Dive, we begin by re-introducing ourselves. You’ll read about how and why Minnow staff spent time creating a distinct organizational identity and accompanying image and voice guidelines to reflect our values.

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We also share a conversation with Cristina Juárez from Pixca Farm, on being a cross-border woman farming on Kumeyaay land. Lastly, we share a brief update on our work with Kai Poma, an Indigenous-led land conservancy governed by three federally-recognized Native American Tribes to welcome back their ancestral lands.

So, why call this a zine-letter and why are we using this format? As a small team with limited skills and capacities, the zine format allows us to showcase the rich visual documentation of the people and places we work for with flexibility. It’s not a magazine, and it’s not simply a newsletter. It’s also a nod to the role that zines have played in creating community out of isolation, empowering self-expression, and subverting dominant culture.

Like much of what we are doing, publishing a physical zine-letter in what sometimes feels like an increasingly digital world is also an experiment. So whether or not this works–and we want to hear what you think!–we’re opting to try it out as another way of keeping in touch with all of you, our friends and supporters. In that sense, The Dive also represents how we stay accountable to you for remaining loyal to our mission.

So, why not take a screen break to receive some beauty and inspiration through the stories of our clients, the food they grow, and the lands and places we care about? We hope you enjoy this first edition of The Dive!

With joy, Anchal Bibra, Mai Nguyen, Javier Román, & Neil Thapar Co-Directors

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PRESENTING OURSELVES A look at the design processes behind Minnow’s image and voice guidelines

By Javier Román-Nieves Director of Strategic Storytelling

ABOVE: Last year’s season’s greetings included one of a series of seven postcards featuring flowers from Pixca Farm.

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e are thankful to our friends and supporters for the many compliments and positive messages received through the first few months of unveiling our newly redesigned website, organizational identity, and new logo. The same is true of our New Year’s mailing, which previewed our next season’s topic, Kai Poma, through a selection of postcards. Our Minnows (monthly donors) also received a numbered lino print by my co-director Anchal Bibra, inspired by the lands we are helping to be returned.

As much as we were thankful for all the messages of appreciation for the thought and love that have gone into these materials, it must be said that none of this was by accident. It was the result of following through with how our organizational identity was designed. After all, everything around you–from the luminous screen you are reading

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this on to your clothes, the mug you may be drinking from, the piece of furniture holding your body, or the sidewalk, vehicle, or ceiling of the space you’re at right now–has been designed before coming into existence. And, while good design can easily be overlooked, bad design can make you miserable or even kill you, so there are many reasons to care about it!

It wasn’t just that Minnow already existed while we were still sorting out internal and external details of our organization–like our governance responsibilities, job descriptions, and work plans, to name a few. We were also providing services and support to our clients while we were doing this. So, what has gone into creating our organizational identity? A lot!

Building the plane while you fly it and then some

From our color palette to our photography, our fonts and how we use them, to our very own first logo–we’ll dive into the ideas, considerations, and design processes that went into figuring out how we wanted to present ourselves to partners, friends, supporters, clients, and the world.

You’ve surely heard or used the phrase “building the plane while you’re flying it.” A colleague used it after asking my fellow co-director Anchal Bibra and I how we were doing a few months into our jobs.

The phrase seemed helpful to describe how our organization was We began in October 2021, but it coming about, except that the plane started before we were building was, as it turns out, also a firefighting tanker!

Minnow’s new storytelling Co-Di-

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rectors, Anchal Bibra and I, joined co-founders and co-directors, Mai Nguyen and Neil Thapar, in the fall of 2021. Shortly after, our team met in San Diego for our first quarterly work retreat. We spent a week learning more about each other, how we came about as persons and as an organization, and drawing a path forward defining small and big-picture goals. We also met with two of the worker co-owners from our first farmer client, Pixca Farm, and had lunch with members of a close partner organization, the San Diego Food Systems Alliance.

own? Minnow’s founding co-directors had been going at it since October 2019, and since then, we had only a temporary word-based logo and a landing webpage that was more of a placeholder than anything else. Minnow wassomewhere between fry and juvenile in our lifecycle, swimming in a pond but still not ready to take on swifter currents!

became obvious: we needed a basic communications platform in place before anything else! Some of these immediately needed items were: a website we could send people to check out our work and what we stood for; a newsletter where we could periodically give an account of the work we were doing; and last but not least, a plan for our social media outreach efforts.

First things first

Of course, the website would be informed by Minnow’s updated strategic statements–our vision and mission, principles, and work culture–which we discussed but hadn’t polished. That was one more item in a long list, and a very important one because it would also be crucial for a purposeful approach to our audiences which, in turn, was an integral part of our strategic communications and grassroots fundraising plans! These efforts had to be completed before

After adopting some basic workflows for media file management, we looked at the storytelling goals We were happily swimming among drafted in that first retreat, breaking our fellow Minnows after those them down by projects and their kick-off sessions, eager to have oth- subtasks. Next, we considered them ers join us in our cause of securing in relation to the goals of our proland tenure for farmers of color and gram areas, including land tenure, advancing indigenous sovereignty resource mobilization, and internal in California. Yet, how would we governance, while also considering invite others to swim with us when our client and grassroots fundraiswe didn’t have any waters of our ing needs. One pressing takeaway

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envisioning an image and voice for Minnow.

A note on branding and brand guidelines

To sidestep both the egregious history of “branding,” which notoriously includes the victims of the Atlantic slave trade, and its present consumer-culture connotations, we chose to refer to what would otherwise be “brand guidelines” as “image and voice guidelines.”

People usually use “brand identi-

ever-fluid audience definitions, the definition of a core experience for a brand was still needed. The what and how that would look like for Minnow became a consensus-based process.

spectrum, and from both creative and client perspectives. Again, in looking at near and long-term goals, we recognized the need to co-create our own image and voice guidelines while accommodating other work to proceed simultaneously. We Our image and voice guidelines would finish building the plane collect the outcome of that process, while flying it and extinguishing and serve both internal and external fires. purposes. They will be constantly referenced to maintain visual And so, we recommended our and tone coherence among our whole team join us in an ongoing co-directors’ communications. The effort to co-create the concepts guidelines will also be shared with of our image and voice first for consultants and collaborators to be internal use in producing a robust

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ty” to refer to the topic at hand, though. But besides carrying the added complexities of an “identity,” this usually includes an organization’s strategic statements. In contrast, guidelines on their own don’t necessarily do so and cover specific usage rules (e.g., use our logo this way and not that way, our official fonts are this and that–without going into mission or vision details and the like).

followed with that same purpose in mind.

Now, brand guidelines run a wide budgetary and time gamut, from a-few-thousand-dollars-one-person concepts for small businesses done in a few weeks, to six-figure efforts done by whole marketing and design teams through many months of work, and typically involving participation of an organization’s board members, executives, and While many brands resort to typog- often wider staff. As Minnow’s raphy and images inspired by the storytellers, we came in with International Style to accommodate experience on both ends of that

organizational home for Minnow, and only then to polish the details of guidelines for external use. And this is where we’re at.

Making a dress code

One usually joins a workplace where everything is already set up.

You are given brand guidelines to follow, shown where files, logos, and presentation templates are stored, get the spiel from human resources, and navigate into an existing work culture. At Minnow, however, in adhering to our MINNOW

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democratic workplace principles, our co-founders welcomed us into actually contributing into those components collectively as co-directors.

Instead of receiving something premade for us, it would be ourselves as part of a team, carefully choosing and crafting how we would present ourselves to the world. As storytellers, we had been entrusted by our co-founders with the huge responsibility of leading this process. No pressure!

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This is where our mood board came in. Mood boards used to be literal bulletin boards or office walls where creative staff would attach clippings of text and (mostly) images that showed the intended feeling or experience that a project had to convey, thus the “mood” part of it.

Think of the notion that remains with you of a clothing brand after visiting their store, or the general impression you take away from a restaurant for which you would return, or the vibe you expect to get from a movie after watching a trailer. A mood board is a collage of bits and pieces that, taken as a whole, communicates the intended look and feel of something.

Another way to look at it is by thinking about what people want to convey for event attendees when they specify dress codes–and then staring at your closet and trying to match that code after googling images of what it means. Except that with Minnow’s mood board, we created our own dress code, not what anyone else wanted for us.

Doesn’t that sound exciting? Hell yes, it was!

Establishing our collective mood

To create our collective mood board, we asked ourselves to provide references around two main

ABOVE: Minnow’s official mood board, with contributions of all co-directors.

PREVIOUS PAGES & NEXT SPREAD INSET: A selection of photos showing staff members during Minnow’s work retreats from last year.

prompts, one for our image and one for our voice. The first was to list at least three organizations, brands, or entities that each co-director liked and to briefly explain why or how that would be relevant for Minnow. The second was to list at least three podcasts, TV series, newscasts, or any other example that could convey each co-director’s favorite way of listening and talking about the world and its problems and explain why.

retreat, we shared many things in many different conversations, but all under the aspiration of what Minnow’s image could look like. From Le Labo Fragances to Supreme or Patagonia, on the lifestyle brand side of things, to the Castanea Fellowship, A Growing Culture, or Slow Factory on the more organizational and activist side, to name a few.

Voice-wise, we shared the short documentary video from the Somali Bantu Community Association, These references could be our listened to podcasts from The Red media appearances as co-directors, Nation, marveled at Fibershed’s books, comics, paintings, documentaries, or single-version works, extensive storytelling efforts, and watched the San Diego Food Sysbut not necessarily a media outlet tems Alliance’s Food Vision 2030 or recurring series or production. trailer. This dive would eventually We included screenshots and grow into a 40-item long brand copy-paste texts from our contriecosystem assessment in the latter butions and invited everyone to part of the process. Minnow’s stobring opposing selections. That is, references of things we’re set on not rytellers then assembled the actual mood board with the images and emulating, looking, or sounding references submitted by all co-dilike so that nothing put up on the rectors. We could either take a basic final mood board would be unlikapproach to this by sharing just a able or off-putting. few sources and notes or be very detailed in explaining why and how Leading up to that first in-person

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each reference seemed important for Minnow. The crucial thing was for all co-directors to chime in and be represented in the process.

While our mood board was created by the end of our first quarter working together, subsequent phases took months. These included drafting an image and voice concept, followed by basics like collectively designing a logo, choosing our official typefaces or fonts, an official color palette, and many other details we’re still sorting out today.

The brand assessment process

We mentioned some references from organizations and business brands shared among Minnow’s co-directors at the beginning of this process. Then, on par with our mood board, those references were gathered into a structured comparison along with different nonprofits, partner organizations, and other examples we looked up.

This exercise became our brand ecosystem assessment. It looked at

a total of 40 references, comparing them through four categories: the entities’ names and official logos, specific characteristics of their logos, the logo’s relationship with their website and brand identity, and descriptive summaries of the look and feel for each reference’s website.

There were several takeaways. The most memorable brand experiences held solid visual connections between logos and website color schemes, typographic approaches, and sometimes content structuring. Yet the majority of websites tended towards blocky or mosaic content structures. While land or farm-related organizations tended to rely almost exclusively on nature or farming imagery, commercial brands centered their products, often framed as seasonal or limited.

Then there was the topic of size and longevity among the brands assessed. We identified three standard website extents; introductory and small, well-established and large, and curated and limited. This trait

helped us consider our expectations on what the extent of our website should be. Being a four-person startup nonprofit, we couldn’t present ourselves like a fully-staffed or long-standing brand even if we wanted to. So instead, we became fixed on being more of a slow, artisanal, or boutique-sized brand, something truer to the reality of our organization’s development at the time. But how do we want to look and be perceived then? Here is where the concepts and intents shared in our mood board came in.

Our image and voice concept

We drafted a synthesis of what we aspired for our image and voice concept by combining takeaways from our brand ecosystem assessment with our mood board’s subjects and intentions. Among these subjects was the need to center the artistry, colors, and imagery of the peoples and lands we work for. This artisanal aspect was mainly visual, but connected to other references that focused on the presence of food and the senses in culture and MINNOW

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film. Another important topic was serialized approaches to subjects, in references to series, podcasts, and TV shows.

An additional contribution included word-based activist art and cultural jamming, which connected with other mood board references to political art, counter-appropriation, and activist art from different places and struggles. Yet another one linked some of the latter topics with typography, protest art, illustration, and with the value of clear intentions in graphic design and visual storytelling. After reflecting on how other organizations present themselves, we derived our image and voice concept from interconnecting our mood board’s intentions. We call it our Five-Point System, which hinges on five concepts: Seasonality, Sensoriality, Deep Dives, Typography, and Space.

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TOP: Some hand-drawn sketches from different moments of the logo design process. ABOVE: A handful of the most notable directions explored during the design process after digitizing the favorited sketches.

Seasonality is rooted in the annual cycles of the Earth, which grounds our work to the land and its rhythms. Sensoriality gathers the tactile and sensorial, including colors, smells, and textures, but as a function of the seasons and the places and people we serve. Deep dives refer to how we choose and focus on topics for our conversations and storytelling during a season. Typography is self-explanatory but entails being intentional about our visual approach to the written word since this conveys meaning all by itself, thus hopefully helping us share our place in the world. Space, lastly is simply the backdrop against which all other four points unfold, and implies being mindful of the spaciousness in everything from the computer screen to the margins of a letter, the layout of a web page, or the many physical characteristics of a place, farmland, or landscape.

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In a way, the last component of our Five-Point System hints at how these otherwise loose concepts are brought back to our workplace, whether behind the screen or out in the field. To give you a sense of how we apply this model, Seasonality ties us to change and to reflect on the topics we’re working on for a season. Sensoriality takes our attention to the visuals and textures found in our work to communicate those to others. Deep dives are how we frame and tell the stories related to those seasonal topics, using Typography purposefully while being mindful of Space in the broadest sense of the word.

included anything from the bold directness of activist text-based slogans, to the subtle, more didactic qualities of captions and small print applications.

We first looked at existing fonts shared across our devices’ operating systems, but those weren’t too appealing. Then, we briefly considered investing in licensing an original typeface from a dedicated foundry, which we quickly discarded since the cost of paying for and maintaining the usage of licensed fonts among a team of primarily

moods for our identity suggested the latter.

In the end, we looked for both serif and sans serif typefaces from what was available in Google Fonts.

During this search, we noted the high number of type designers from Spanish-speaking countries, of whom many were women. It was refreshing for what otherwise has been a traditionally male-dominated and highly niche field. Soon enough, we shortlisted several pairs of serif and sans serif typefaces, with our final selections being

Minnow’s Five-Point System guides how we structure and approach work in time, while also deriving our look and feel from that same work, along with its places, people, and sensory characteristics.

Yet, some essential elements had to be defined before these seasonal work cycles could begin.

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The search for typefaces

Designing an original typeface from scratch was an expensive, resource-consuming endeavor for a four-person team without that specific technical know-how. So, selecting Minnow’s official typefaces was a straightforward process guided by several requirements.

First, there was the need for some continuity with how Minnow presented itself until then, notably with an all-caps, text-based logo using a sans serif font in dark green.

Then, there was the need for our fonts to be compatible across our work platforms; Google Workplace, our devices’ operating systems, and Squarespace, our web host. Finally, we wanted our fonts to be versatile enough to convey the range of moods allowed by our Five-Point System. As typeface uses go, this

non-designers would prove difficult and over the top. After shopping around a bit more, we finally decided that choosing typefaces from Google Fonts would meet all our requirements most cost-effectively.

At that point, our search was narrowed to two main options. One was sticking to a sans serif font, like the one we had already been using in our initial logo and communications. The other was shifting entirely to a serif font. Continuity with what was before suggested the former. Broadening the range of

based on readability and the number of fonts included with each. As a nod to Minnow’s initial image, we decided to use a sans serif typeface as our primary selection to us in our name, slogans, headers, and the like.

To allow a more extensive range of moods and graphic applications, we decided also to select a secondary typeface with serifs, to use in text publications, letters, and anything that had to read more formally.

Minnow’s color palette

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color palette was less straightforward but much simpler than the previous processes. Also as a nod to how Minnow had previously presented itself, here, too, we chose to keep green as part of our palette, regardless of additional colors we ended up choosing.

We started by trying two very different roads, but both seeking the same objective: to have a fixed color palette for Minnow’s website and communications materials that could coexist with the temporary color palettes from any given season. One road was parametric. It attempted to distill colors from our mood board using statistical tools to find average hues. The other road was subjective. It focused on our associations of colors and their meanings.

While applying a parametric method several times to the mood board 20 produced the kind of neutral, toned-down colors you’d expect from averaging or mixing lots of colors, the subjective approach proved more direct, albeit the many caveats that symbolic color associations may have, like cultural

context.

The time and resource constraints of the parametric approach soon tipped the scale for a subjective association of colors grounded on our local context, which was also part of our image and voice intentions. And so, we kept a green that echoed Minnow’s initial image, paired it with a purplish blue that spoke to us of the water crucial to our client’s work, and added a warm pair of yellow and orange that reminded us of marigold and California poppies. With an official palette defined for Minnow, we allowed enough space for seasonal colors to stand out depending on what we’re working on in any given season. So now we had one last component to decide for our image and voice.

Our new logo

Anchal Bibra and I set out to sketch new logos probing different directions, all trying to accomplish three objectives: communicating our name, conveying our image and voice, and maintaining continuity with what was already in

use. We also wanted to somehow reference our local work context in California.

From there, most of our sketches could be grouped into three main directions: all-caps type-only logos, name plus graphic element logos, and the highly speculative ever-changing logo. The first, all-caps type-only, turned out to be more like variations of the temporary logo in use by Minnow. The highly experimental ever-changing logo direction appeared innovative but implied an intense, ongoing process beyond our team’s capacity to maintain. And so, the second logo direction of a name plus a graphic element quickly proved more useful, eventually giving us our top option to polish.

As you can see from some of our process sketches, some interesting routes were explored. Several were based on simplified icons of a fish that proved too close to religious symbolism for us. Other variants of this direction appeared too formal for the small-team organizational identity we wanted to convey. Yet another option also caught our

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attention for a while, a bubbly hand-drawn logo that traced an oval that reminded us of a fish pond–its playfulness and informality were appealing.

Several graphic themes were commonly explored through all these directions. Some made their way to the final logo, including influences like Oakland’s contemporary graffiti and its vintage signs–which have also inspired other logos–along with Indigenous iconography and M.C. Escher-like tessellations. Then there was the famous Oakland city logo, drawn in the early 1970s by Wally Carroll, the city’s public information officer at the time. The tree’s offset lines were akin to both Lance Wyman’s widely influential Mexico 1968 Olympics identity design and Walter Landor’s famous 1975 Muni worm logo. These similarities also related our work to places with shared cultures and histories.

The variation that led to our final logo was an attempt to keep the fish and the offset lines, so we could avoid the religious associations of previous variants. We

approximated this by reverting to a discarded sketch of clasping hands and delineating the fish from them.

In the end, the two minnows in our logo echo the same hands we see working the soil and protecting its waters day in and day out.

These elements, in turn, became referenced by the offset lines, which we see as crop rows, land, or water ripples–all fundamental to the work of our farmers.

The last reference embedded in Minnow’s new logo is that of East and Southeast Asian name seals, like the Japanese hanko or inkan, or the Chinese zhuwen. This further grounds our logo in those cultures’ contributions to California, and is a function of its final shape.

We call the parts of our logo–the name and the seal–and we use both parts in official communications by often separating them, by beginning with our name and ending with our seal, or by “stamping” an item with both name and seal together as our complete logo.

Almost done, but not quite

While this article summarizes

And so, the process continues.

Many work documents and presentations were referenced in the writing of this article. Those same references are informing our image and voice guidelines document, which we’ll be able to share with consultants and collaborators to keep presenting ourselves how we’ve done so far, with intention and purpose.

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Until then, thanks again to our friends and supporters for making this work possible and for the enthusiastic comments and encouragement you’ve shared so far with us. We hope to keep it up! ◆

Official logo

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the main ideas and processes that went into designing our image and voice guidelines, this has also been a learning process, with experimentation and adjustments still being made. One example of this is how we define a season and its duration. While the idea behind seasonality is to ground our work in the natural seasons of the Earth, we noticed early on that, given our commitments and capacity, initial seasons would have to be biannual in duration.

Typography

Seasonality

Space

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Name

Seal

LEFT: Initial image and voice applications in print. ABOVE: Minnow’s Five-Point System for its image and voice (left) and Minnow’s official logo and its parts in white, set on Minnow Purple (right).

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SOWING THE WAY FOR THE DEAD

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By Javier Román-Nieves Director of Strategic Storytelling

Cristina Juárez García talks about living a cross-border life and cultivating cempasúchil on Kumeyaay soil, from Pixca Farm to Inecui Flowers.

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Cristina Juárez García was born in Mexicali to a school teacher and a cross-border worker from two migrant families originally from Sinaloa and Jalisco. Her parents moved repeatedly before settling in Tijuana, from where she eventually left to complete her studies in San Diego. Self-identifying as a cross-border woman, Cristina founded Pixca Farm alongside Leonard Vargas, José Alcaraz, and Erik Rodríguez to grow and distribute culturally relevant food for the South Bay community of San Diego. From March 2021 through September 2022, Minnow provided Pixca Farm with cooperative and business development workshops led by our Director of Farm and Policy Programs, Mai Nguyen, in collaboration with Sona Desai of the San Diego Food Systems Alliance (SDFSA). Cristina sat down to talk with us about growing up on both sides of the border, Día de Muertos, and cultivating cempasúchil flowers on the Kumeyaay borderlands.

JRN Can you tell us about your family and how the cross-border life looked like for you growing up?

CJG My mother tells me how my Tata–my grandad on her side–used to work for a farm owner and made a living for a while harvesting cotton, which predominated in Mexicali back then. When the harvest was over, my Tata would ask his boss if he could take his family to glean the cotton fields. He would sell that and make some money on the side for the expenses of their thirteen children. Their story reminds me that I come from a family that has farmed for generations and that we’ve worked for other people since.

Mom’s family is from Sinaloa, where many migratory families used to move north on a seasonal basis. People would go from field to field working on different harvests, depending on what was available–tomatoes, strawberries, you name it. So they also migrated but ended up further northwest, in the Mexicali Valley.

Dad’s family comes from a town in Jalisco called Colotlán. While we lived in Mexicali, he would often visit Colotlán, like many other migrant families who wanted to be in their homelands, but their offspring were already growing up elsewhere. Whenever he went to Colotlán, he’d bring back many things, like cheeses, plants, and so on.

Teachers in Mexico are usually sent to different places for their training before being permanently assigned somewhere. So, when my mom finished her education as a teacher, they sent her to San Quintín, Guadalajara, and elsewhere before being assigned to Tijuana. That’s how my parents moved there, leaving their families behind in Mexicali. While we already had two older siblings at the time, my other sister and I were born there,

as I am the youngest. After that, my parents stayed in Tijuana for some time, always hoping to return to where their families were, which we did when I was three years old.

I hear you moved around with your family often and wonder, how much of this is also part of your cross-border identity?

One time Mai pointed out how I always seemed to move from place to place for as long as they knew me. I remember telling them, “Yeah because I’m like a calendula, easily transplanted.” It withers initially, but then it’s very resilient and used to change. Indeed, this can have its advantages and its disadvantages, right? Later, we moved to Mexicali, where I grew up, and went to primary and high school. We had tourist visas to come and go, and that is where my cross-border identity comes from, as I was always living in cross-border cities.

I remember that while at Mexicali, my dad would fish in a channel that divided it from Calexico, our border city. We lived in a neighborhood near the border but not right next to the checkpoint. The road to my primary school went along the fence, so it was normal.

I grew up looking at the wall every day. We got to see people trying to cross the wall. There was an area where the fencing was spaced widely enough that you could see lots of farming fields on the Calexico side. Those were los fields, row after row of vast expanses of mono-crop farms with anything you can imagine–lettuces, onions, cabbages.

You later majored in sociology and eventually became disenchanted with academia and research. Did you start farming before or after this, and did growing up as a cross-border woman affect what came next for you?

Yes, growing up in this context impacted the rest of my life. When I graduated middle school, my parents, out of nowhere, announced that we were moving to Tijuana. There was no family discussion about it, no prepping or anything. It happened just like that! Eventually, we learned that Dad had gotten an appointment to get papers for my family since he was already a resident. So that was how we came back to Tijuana. My mom also knew San Diego and Calexico and thought that if we continued our studies in San Diego, we’d have more opportunities than in a small city like Calexico.

We went to Ciudad Juarez only a few months after starting high school in Tijuana because they gave us our migration appointment there. It took a year to get all the paperwork together. After that, my sister and I MINNOW

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enrolled in school at Chula Vista, San Diego, and that’s how we eventually moved here. I went to community college and continued to San Diego State University, navigating an entirely different system, which felt strange. It seemed like a frigid place in general, somewhat alienated, where each person was in their own thing, nothing like what I had grown up in. At that time, we used to cross the border every single day.

It was around the time of the attacks on 9/11, so we made gigantic lines to cross, at times four hours long.

Why did you have to cross the border daily?

Because the rest of the family still lived there! Only my sister and I came over to study, and Dad, who worked here. My third sister stayed in Tijuana with Mom. We all lived there. There was that and the cost of living. My parents already paid for a home there, so paying another rent over here was too much. We had to get up early, like four o’clock, to get in line and do everything. But at some point, my dad either got too tired of it or saw how exhausted we both were. Then he made the additional sacrifice of renting another place in San Diego, where we stayed through the week, going over to Tijuana for the weekends. That was through high school and community college, but it varied. Sometimes we could 26 rent a place, and sometimes we couldn’t. It happens to many people who live a cross-border life because you cross daily or often.

Is it then that you get disheartened with research? And I ask you because I have my disappointments as well. I read something you had said with which I wholly identified, this thing of academia creating knowledge for knowledge’s sake and not doing anything with it. I’ve felt that, too, and wondered when you first noticed it.

That happened when I graduated from the university.

I worked part-time as a research assistant on several projects simultaneously, which was like having a full-time job. I got most involved with a study about labor exploitation among undocumented migrants.

I interviewed undocumented migrant workers about labor rights and violations they had lived during their time in the US and what type of exploitation they had experienced. I heard many terrible things that my mind just purposefully forgot. While doing this research, I noticed a sort of greed in the way funding was sought to keep this work going.

There are a lot of good intentions among those involved, but not enough interest in bringing justice to these people. That seemed unjust to me, somewhat extractive, that we were squeezing all these stories out of people and paying them some small amounts of mon-

ey, which is why they would sit down and tell them to us, out of necessity. But I never saw any results coming from all that research. We didn’t distribute copies of that work to these folks so that at least they knew they weren’t alone going through those things, that there was an extensive network of people suffering through the same things. We didn’t put together a training about labor rights for them either. None of the many things we could have done were done. I was so disillusioned that I got out of that kind of work and moved to nonprofits, where I also ended up heartbroken.

So, that’s when you get into nonprofit work in Chula Vista, San Diego?

Correct! I started working at Olivewood Gardens, a nonprofit nearby in National City. That’s where I met Leonard Vargas before founding Pixca Farm. I applied to that job because working directly with the community was an awesome idea. I have many good memories from that job. It gave me many good things, like introducing myself to farming in an urban context and being more purposely dedicated to food sovereignty. That was not a principle from the organization but a personal conviction–taking a shovel, sowing the land, and having that autonomy as a people.

Is that when Pixca Farm is born?

Yes. Leonard and I had built an excellent professional relationship. We considered starting an independent project along the lines of something I had helped create there: an internship for students from a high school near our workplace. Working with young people caught our attention. It was a way for them to earn extra money while learning about farming. Leonard being from a different generation and all, we thought youngsters also needed to know about agriculture, mainly because the age of farmers in the US is generally old. We need more young farmers, and since working in the field and with youth were things I was starting to enjoy, we decided to start Pixca Farm.

When I returned from some time off from Olivewood, Leonard told me he had found a piece of land he had started working on. So I checked it out and asked if I could continue working on it with him. He had the idea of doing a small monocropping plot, a pumpkin patch, or watermelons in the summer since he was initially going to do it alone and had very little time because of his full-time job. But I arrived already with a team mentality. I proposed we do a variety of crops instead, with enough plant diversity to create more of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) project.

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So I started recruiting people who wanted to subscribe to the CSA, and that’s how we started. We planted our first crops during winter, so we went with ejotes and cabbages. I then suggested we name the farm, as we had started offering our products to folks. After some brainstorming, I proposed Pixca (harvest) to Leonard.

He spent two days thinking about it before coming back to me and saying yes, that he loved it. So that’s how we named our project: Pixca Farm.

I wanted to ask about the border situation after you’ve farmed right by it. You have acknowledged standing on borderlands while guiding groups visiting Pixca, then there’s the wall right there, and every time I’ve gone, there’s also that Navy helicopter hovering around.

That caught my attention because, being a birdwatcher also, a lot of times after getting there, I tried to listen and identify birds by their song until that noisy helicopter started circling. It reminded me of growing up in Puerto Rico during the 1980s, when the cold war was still present. The US military would do such shows of force regularly. You could hear military planes and helicopters doing combat exercises almost every day.

That ended in the 1990s, but hearing that helicopter over Pixca reminded me of being impacted by that military presence. Identifying yourself as a cross-border woman, how has that vision from one side of the border as a girl growing up changed now that you have come to farm on the other side of the wall?

That wall is the wall of shame, as we call it. It violates all our rights as people to migrate, and I am against its existence. I am also against the militarization of the wall. Being able to cross the border is a way of disrupting what they want to accomplish by closing it to people. They want it to be exclusively for commerce, just for their benefit and for goods for them, be it oil or whatever Mexico produces now and for what they used to manufacture when NAFTA was created. They don’t care about the people. We’ve never been a priority for them, except when we have been convenient. That’s when they’ve created all these programs for migration that you’re already familiar with, like the braceros and all the other campaigns they’ve initiated whenever they need workers, “we have to open the door for them!”

Being on this side is a privilege because I still have a lot of relationships in Tijuana, and I can feel the difference. Perhaps I didn’t feel that when I was a little girl because Mexicali was all I knew. But knowing both sides now, I recognize my privilege of being here, my privilege of being able to cross, and the privileges I enjoy being here. I also miss many things we don’t have here, and that stay there. So there is longing on both sides.

What came to mind while farming there is that I also hated being there when the helicopters came. That was the worst. I sometimes planned my days to be there when I knew helicopters wouldn’t be around. I’d either go early in the morning or later in the afternoon to avoid them. It’s a form of psychological terrorism for me, mainly because, even when I’m not a birder like you, I like being in nature and with birds, and that interfered with my tranquility and being able to work at ease. At the same time, having to work there with them circling above most of the time, I also learned to ignore them. I would also take headphones to block their noise. When the helicopters are around, they tend to eliminate everything else, including silence and all other sounds of nature. Even human interactions are interrupted by their noise. That’s what I felt. Another thing is that when people offered to take drone photos of our farm for us, they could do that if they went two blocks away from the farm, over the community gardens, but not right over Pixca because it is part of the militarized area. That speaks a lot about this sense of controlling even the airspace, which you cannot see.

You’ve mentioned a lot of interest in collaborating with Indigenous Peoples, particularly Kumeyaay or Diegueño communities in San Diego and Baja California. I found it interesting that, for example, Monte Tecate (Tecate Peak) could have so much importance for many people in these lands, as a sacred place to the Kumeyaay or as a cultural landmark for Mexicans.

And, of course, there’s even a beer that takes its name.

How have you understood the coexistence of different peoples in these lands? How have you thought about those relationships while working on the floodplain of the Tijuana River, which is born at the foot of that mountain?

The Kumeyaay are still there, even after being divided by the border. They are divided by it because some are issued a card that authorizes them to come and go, but some aren’t. It’s very controlled and hard to prove to the state if you are Diegueño or Luiseño. So working on that soil, I’ve had to ask for my own permission to farm those lands. To much honor, I feel that I’ve done so in a way that aligns with some of the values I know Indigenous Peoples practice to revere the land in similar ways.

Being part of an agricultural project, it seems to me very important to know not just whatever little piece of land you have. You also need to know the people who have been there longer than you, who know that land more than you, who know more about the plants than you, and who know how your actions will affect the land or balance or throw off its many relationships. As I’ve discussed with Mai, I have thought about this a lot MINNOW

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and wish we’d done even more things.

I think it’s imperative to value the history of a place.

That includes not only what is written but also what birds tell you when they migrate or what plants tell you when you think they are dead in the winter but come back in spring. All these stories are not written or oral.

You have to be there to observe and live them. I have had the privilege of having connections with Kumeyaay folks on both sides of the border, and everything I’ve learned from them has intensely nourished the way I’ve gotten to admire and honor these histories and ways of seeing. I’ve also applied all I can from that to my own life.

Let’s talk a bit about Día de Muertos and the cempasúchil flower, thinking about that same relationship with the land. I got to live through several Día de Muertos while living in Mexico City and noted that, particularly in the community aspect of its celebration in smaller localities around the city, the cempasúchil functions as wayfinding between the living and the dead. The petals are used literally to pave temporary trails and to carpet walkways in houses between their

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altars and the streets. Cempasúchil is an essential aid for the comings and goings of bodies and, let’s say, souls during the celebration. Have you thought about how, by cultivating cempasúchil on Kumeyaay land, you are sowing the way for the dead of those celebrating Día de Muertos in San Diego? Do you think your clients make that connection between land, place, and communing with their ancestors?

You’ve had that privilege of being in those places during Día de Muertos, in spaces of honoring I haven’t been at. I thought your question was very beautiful when I first read it because it immediately transported me to the cultivation of cempasúchil. It seemed like, wow, I wonder if I’ve had that same connection and excitement I got from your question. It made me feel wonderful things because I’m sure I’ve had that connection in different ways. Cempasúchil is one of my favorite flowers, at least among the ones I’ve been able to connect with through farming.

Each time I’m going to sow it, I tell it, “I’m about to sow you!” Each time I’m going to water it, I tell it, “You’re doing great!” I cheer them on each time I culti-

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vate them. I tell them, “Wow, you’re so impressive right now!” I can see ten thousand cempasúchil flowers, and every single one of them fills me with excitement. I have cultivated them with a lot of intention throughout all this time and also offered them with a lot of intention to people. I feel that is all I can do, what I have under my control as a person, being able to offer the best of me and the best I can do for others, with the hope that they can do the best with the flowers once they receive them. I feel many people here have that same connection, but it’s those who have worked on cultivating it within themselves.

On this same topic, there’s been discussion about the popularization and sometimes even cultural appropriation of Día de Muertos, both by people without a Mexican identity and by others trying to recover their Mexican roots and regenerate ties lost by cultural assimilation. How have you considered these topics, given that some of your clients could be people undertaking these journeys with their identities? Have you thought about where you draw your limits between cultural appropriation and authenticity?

There are a lot of people who have gotten cempaúchil for their first year ever putting up a Día de Muertos altar. They generally speak Spanish, and I’m unsure what to make of that. Then there are always a few gringos.

When I read your question about my limits, I started thinking about that one word, limit, because my boundaries are just those of offering the cempasúchil.

But even while selling it, I did set a limit once. This one time, a couple came to get their cempasúchil bundle on the last day of that year’s sale. We were at the Centro Cultural de la Raza doing a pop-up event. Many people from the center attend our stand, so we set up our bouquets for sale. I don’t know if this couple just saw the flowers and wanted to buy them, but they started asking how to use them and set up an altar. I was exhausted and don’t remember well now, but several things came up with them.

First, they said the flowers weren’t wrapped well enough. They returned them, and we had to wrap them up again. Then it was that some of the flowerheads had bent, but cempasúchil is very fragile, and that’s normal. Besides, people take the flower heads off to use them for many things, not just altars, and

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yes, you can take off the petals or use the heads in one piece. The thing is, they returned the bouquet a second time. It was the first person in four days of the sale who returned anything, so we said, OK, sure, we’ll wrap you up a new one. But they kept making all these comments and questions about how to use them, and I remember that being the limit for someone tired and fed-up. I just turned away, and someone else took care of them. I couldn’t do it anymore. Those were very disrespectful requests on their part, just plain ignorant.

That’s when I was able to know what kind of people were getting cempasúchil as a way to play along with a tradition that’s becoming popularized.

I was thinking about son jarocho, a musical style I play that has many ways of tuning the instruments. Its popularization has made it so that just a particular form of tuning, the 440, gets used because it makes it easier for more people to pick up the style at the expense of regional or place-specific tuning. It’s the same thing when cultural traditions are popularized. There’s some standardization involved where details are lost so that more people can appreciate the thing as a whole or adopt it. It stops being as complex or having depth, meaning, and symbolism. It even starts to evolve and adopt others that aren’t necessarily its originals. Still, in 30 the end, it becomes the Día de Muertos over here.

I don’t pretend to say there’s an original Día de Muertos from Oaxaca, Puebla, CDMX, or Michoacán. Día de Muertos is always different, particularly if you go between little towns. Sometimes it’s not even on November 2. Back in the day, it started earlier, like it did in pre-Hispanic times. Catholicism standardized that date in Mexico, so it’s something very complex, but that’s where I think I drew my limit. I’m not here to educate or tell you how to use your flowers. If you come to buy them, I’ll have flowers for you. I feel like we all deserve to have flowers. We all deserve that connection, which has been healing for me. It has brought me life. I hope we can all have that because the world would be better if we could all feel that connection with flowers.

That brings us to Inecui, a new project working exclusively with flowers that grew out of Pixca Farm. Could you tell us more about how it started and what’s next?

Pixca Farm is an evolving project. It started with much love and has gone on with its struggles. Every day there was very beautiful and hard at the same time, physically for the body and logistically, as it is when starting any business or endeavor like that. We wanted to do it differently, in a way that was not corporate or loan-based, which was difficult, especially in its first years. But, as I remember, they were full of emotion and inspiration.

Much effort and energy went into beginning this project from just an idea. When you’re in love with something, you give it all, and I feel like it was a beautiful period in that sense.

But if I look at it financially, that we weren’t paying ourselves initially, that changes a bit. It wasn’t just us there either. There were a lot of people who’d go and help us. We had family and friends days when people would show up and help us on the farm on Saturdays.

We’d work and then grill some food to share. We had a community dynamic in the beginning. But with COVID, all that had to stop. Besides, we couldn’t have family or friends as volunteers once we became an official business anyways.

So, we limited the folks who could help us and focused on making the project economically sustainable. It was essential for me, given that very same story about the labor exploitation projects I was involved with, to be able to say that we met every workplace requirement since labor laws usually follow histories of farm workers and their struggles, as it’s been the landowners who’ve been historically given the upper hand. So, respecting and

ABOUT THE ARTIST

The artist commissioned to work with the season’s topic of Minnow’s first zine-letter is Elizabeth Barreto Ortíz (she/her, they/ them), a visual artist, educator, and muralist from Puerto Rico who uses urban art to work in public spaces. Their work explores how the life experiences of a queer woman with a feminized body are displaced and lived through colonized spaces. Elizabeth also reflects on the arts’ political, economic, and sociocultural impacts on communities.

Their work is known for exploring the struggles of women’s rights and gender violence, often collaborating with feminist groups and collectives in Puerto Rico, like Taller Malaquita, Todas PR, Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, and Jevas Cerveceras.

Such collaborations have entailed feminist, antiracist, trans-inclusive, and decolonial projects led by women and dissidents fighting for equity and justice from their respective communities or labor sectors. Puerto Rican culture, anime, guerrilla art, urban art, and graphic design are some of the visual influences found in Elizabeth’s work.

In their illustration for The Dive, Elizabeth created an imaginary landscape inspired by Cristina Juárez García’s interview with Minnow, using personal references and experiences working with Día de Muertos imagery in Puerto Rico and Ciudad de México.

It shows a sort of cempasúchil superbloom or farm extending across a broken border wall and tended by the living and their ancestors. Additional vignettes spread throughout this edition and shown here capture the cultural lifecycle of the flower–from seed to cultivation, myth, sale, and its eventual use in Día de Muertos ofrendas.

Follow Elizabeth’s work on her Instagram @cookingood. If you or someone you know would be interested in collaborating with Minnow in upcoming issues of The Dive, please subscribe to our mailing list and watch for our next call for artists and illustrators.

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attaining economic sustainability is very important for me in these projects, just as knowing how many hours are needed to grow a particular crop and how much time and effort is involved in setting a just price. Of course, you can sell at lower prices if you are subsidized, but that doesn’t make prices necessarily just.

All that formalization came after COVID. There was also a flood, and we had to grow flowers to have a product available to sell more quickly and to recover. It was the first time I worked so much with flowers and felt a special connection with them. I started to like them more and more until I took over flower cultivation, processing, and sales while the other farmers took care of growing vegetables. At some point, I started making flower arrangements for sale, which was my initial training, putting up about 50 bouquets on our farmstand daily. It was intense. Inecui was born out of that process because some people wanted to get involved, but Pixca Farm needed more time to grow in numbers.

That’s when Inecui became an offshoot focused exclusively on flowers, first as a six-month pilot project that these people could join before it could be decided if it

became an independent project or remain under Pixca Farm. That happened in May of 2022, with the understanding that I would focus on developing the project and the others would stay in charge of Pixca Farm. And so Inecui was born with other coworkers. We harvested flowers from Pixca and aggregated from several growers in San Diego. They were all flowers from the region.

We started distributing them in different places and doing pop-ups. After six months, the people who had been in Inecui with me and I decided it would be an independent project from Pixca Farm, and that’s how both projects took different paths.

I always thought I would remain on both projects and treated Pixca Farm as a life-long commitment.

Still, other circumstances made me decide to leave Pixca Farm, including health considerations. So last November, we made it public on Día de Muertos, also to have the support of all our ancestors. But it was a hard decision that took a toll. It hit me as a loss and has required mourning.

Can you share more about the workshops you participated in with the San Diego Food Systems Alliance

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(SDFSA) and Minnow?

It’s all been an incredibly enriching experience in many respects. To begin with, feeling the support of both organizations and their people, in particular, Sona Desai and Mai Nguyen, felt like a huge hug, as if they were pouring warm tea into the little plant that was Pixca Farm, and that they were adding fertilizer so we could grow better and stronger. I learned so much about cooperative development during those workshops, on how to maintain a healthy co-op, grow it sustainably, and put your vision ahead of you along with interpersonal relationships within a worthwhile workplace environment.

I feel like these are resources that should be available to all cooperatives and every business interested in becoming a cooperative, so they can become a workplace able to offer such benefits to everyone who is working there, sharing equitable benefits as coworkers and owners instead of having a boss that takes most of the decisions and benefits in a vertical organization. I know there are vertical co-ops too, but my focus is on horizontal, worker-owned co-ops. It has become a way to see the world for me, and it would be impossible to establish a project right now in any other way than that.

The workshops with SDFSA and Minnow gave me many tools to share among my circles. It’s not something that stayed only in Pixca Farm. It’s been instrumental in beginning Inecui as a women-owned cooperative, and I’ve been sharing this knowledge with many interested people. It would be amazing to see it shared more and more and that there was access for anyone interested in learning more about similar training. I know Mai’s knowledge is in their head and limited to their time, but it would be awesome to have more resources to create a region of cooperatives here in San Diego, where they are so limited. I wish we could all believe in cooperativism.

Pixca Farm was in the process of identifying land to relocate when their existing facilities were flooded during the catastrophic rain events last January and as they prepared for the new growing season. After a successful GoFundMe campaign for emergency relief, their next steps are to be announced. Inecui Flowers is currently working to formalize itself as a woman-owned worker cooperative. You can find their flowers in pop-up events throughout San Diego or on their Instagram account. ◆

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IN THE WORKS: KAI POMA

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ABOVE: The ocean view atop the bluffs of Coastal Yuki, Yuki, and Pomo sacred land being returned. NEXT PAGE: Staff from High Water Mark LLC (left), Minnow (right), and Kai Poma’s Eddie Knight (center), taking in the view during a joint field visit last year.

A preview of the challenges ahead for California’s first taxexempt, Tribally-incorporated nonprofit created for a land return

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By Neil Thapar Director of Land & Financial Redistribution

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f you have wandered around our new website, you probably saw a black-and-white video loop reminiscent of this spread. You may have also received our postcard featuring a similar vista earlier this year. The imagery is of the same place, the ancestral lands of the Coastal Yuki, Yuki, and Pomo Peoples, along a stretch of coastline in present-day Mendocino County, California.

In the next issue of The Dive, we’ll be sharing more about the histor-

ical return of these lands from the State of California to three federally recognized Native American Tribes whose members and ancestors have stewarded such lands since time immemorial. We’ll also consider why, even in the context of a “gift” of land from the State, high financial and emotional costs come with executing such a transaction.

Next season’s zine-letter will also feature the key partners we’ve been

fortunate to collaborate with in making this land return happen.

For now, we want to set the stage by way of some background ahead of our deeper dive next season.

Long story short

Four hours north of the entrance to what we know today as the San Francisco Bay is a stretch of coastal bluffs, sandy beaches, and rocky shores that Indigenous People have called MINNOW

home for many millennia. Several waves of colonization of these lands and their peoples strained their relationships with one another under claims of exclusive “ownership” by settlers. In the 1970s, the state government came into “ownership” of these lands through the California Department of Transportation, or CalTrans. The settler name still used for this place is “Blues Beach.”

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Even with strained relationships, Coastal Yuki, Yuki, and Pomo Peoples have maintained a close relationship with much of the land in their territories, including Blues Beach. This is true despite the distance separating the reservations where these Indigenous Peoples were forcefully removed to, far away from their traditional territories. In 2005, several members of three federally recognized tribes with Yuki members–Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians, Round Valley Indian Tribes, and Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians–alerted Caltrans of the ongoing looting of cultural resources at Blues Beach.

There is a lesson in the commitment we’ve come to understand from Indigenous People–removal from one’s homelands does not remove one’s responsibility to be their steward. After years of conversations with Caltrans and suggestions for more engagement with Tribes in managing the area, the Tribes finally proposed that Caltrans simply return the parcels to the Tribes.

In 2021, the state senator for the district encompassing these lands authored legislation (SB-231) to prescribe the specific process and parameters of the return. The legislation created many requirements for the Tribes to receive this land back. One of these was to create a tax-exempt, nonprofit entity capable of holding title to the land.

years, unclear responsibility over who managed the lands led to signs of neglect, including litter, soil disturbance, unmanaged vegetation, road runoff going into waterways, public safety concerns, and pillagAt this moment, our partners at the ing of cultural resources.

California Tribal Fund invited us to Unfettered access without clear meet with members of the Tribes to learn more about the project and guidance on what appropriate access means in the context of explore working together to create Indigenous sovereignty is one the necessary land-holding entity. of many challenges facing this Ultimately, our work together led If you’re asking yourself, “Why not just return the land directly to the Tribes?”, we did too, and we will share more about that in our next issue.

to the creation of Kai Poma, the state’s first tax-exempt, Tribally-incorporated nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to receive and hold onto these lands on behalf of a consortium of federally recognized California Native American Tribes.

Caring for the sacred

It makes sense that the people who care more about this land are also the ones who first brought its many problems to the attention of Caltrans. This is especially true after we found out that, for nearly two decades, Caltrans did not even have these lands listed in their land “ownership” inventory. Over the

landscape. However, Kai Poma is well-positioned to address this very issue once it assumes its role as steward. Like all land, this place is to be revered and cared for.

What does reverence for the land look and feel like on the ground?

It’s a difficult question for those of us raised within the cultural context of Western society and its institutions. How we understand our relationship to place is influenced by concepts of domination, extraction, and recreation–so imagining something different requires effort on our part. For this reason, every land return story holds many possibilities for learning, healing,

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and improving everyone’s lives by restoring joy, belonging, and reverence to the land.

Sovereignty between the ocean and the road

ticularly regarding land. For many Indigenous People “ownership” is a strange concept and one that, when conferred to them by the settler state, has always come with strings attached.

We approach this effort with the clear intention of restoring Indigenous Sovereignty. The Indigenous Environmental Network offers some meaning for this term, stating it “consists of spiritual ways,

As we’ll see in our next issue, this is indeed the case for Kai Poma, since SB-231 includes a poison pill that fundamentally undermines its sovereign control of the lands being returned.

nous Peoples.

Going together, going far

We expect this land return to be completed around this same time next year. As we work towards finalizing its legal and structural details, we reflect with gratitude on the opportunity to work with the Kai Poma leaders and their communities, the partners we’ve brought along with us, and those we’ve met along the way.

Our friends at California Tribal Fund introduced us to this effort, connected us with the Tribal representatives, and graciously expanded their otherwise all-Indigenous portfolio of grantees to include Minnow. They also provided seed funding for Kai Poma to jumpstart operations as a nonprofit, enabling the services of High Water Mark, LLC. This Native American woman-owned environmental consulting company recently completed an onsite environmental assessment that will support ongoing cultural resource assessments.

culture, language, social and legal systems, political structures, and inherent relationships with lands, waters and all upon them. Indigenous Sovereignty exists regardless of what the nation-state does or does not do. It continues as long as the People that are a part of it continue.”

Again, it consists of the inherent relationships with lands, waters, and everything upon them. How do we give life to this notion of sovereignty within a legal system specifically developed to justify and legalize its destruction? Even the notion of “ownership” as a near-absolute right is highly problematic, par-

We navigate such contradictions to do our work. Though Kai Poma’s leadership recoils at the idea that the Tribes will now become “owners” of the land, we recognize that who “owns” the land matters and that it is essential for Kai Poma to become the “owner” if this part of Turtle Island is to be cared for and honored.

We also navigate the reality that Kai Poma is born from and will be governed by three independent and sovereign Tribal Nations. There is much work ahead in restoring and rebuilding sovereign relationships to the land and amongst Indige-

As project lead and attorney for this project, I was joined by two like-minded, experienced, and grounded lawyer-advocates, Hasmik Geghamyan from The Geghamyan Law Office and Stephanie Dolan from the Center for Nonprofit Law, to manage the ongoing legal, legislative, governance, administrative, and fundraising tasks of this effort.

We cherish the relationships we have built and are guided by Eddie Knight, Patricia Rabano, and Tina Sutherland – the leaders and Tribal representatives of Kai Poma, with whom we walk this path. We look forward to sharing more about this effort in our next issue! ◆

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COME SWIM WITH US! This first edition of The Dive was made possible by your support! The individual and monthly contributions from our dedicated community of friends and donors allow us creative freedom in our storytelling efforts. So, from all of us at Minnow, thank you!

Using all of our gifts will inspire, inform, and ultimately shift the narrative around Indigenous land stewards and farmers of color, and their proven solutions to climate change. At Minnow, solidarity grows from tending to the invaluable relationships that make up our community.

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As we grow our outreach and communications efforts, we remain committed to sharing the stories of the farmers and Indigenous land stewards we serve. We believe in the power of these stories to advance our vision–a world where all beings experience joy and belonging with reverence for the land.

We hope you will help us share The Dive with your friends, family, and collaborators. We have limited additional copies so if you want to share some with your community, please drop us a line at: info@weareminnow.org!

Please support our work by starting a monthly donation or making a one-time contribution!

Scan the QR code on the right or visit: www.weareminnow.org/get-involved.

With gratitude, Anchal Bibra Director of Resource Mobilization & Engagement

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PICTURED TOP TO BOT.: Eddie Knight, Patricia Rabano, and Tina Sutherland, leaders and Tribal representatives of Kai Poma.

Join our pond of monthly Minnows and support our work.

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1428 Franklin St. Oakland CA 94612

www.weareminnow.org

The Dive, Season 01, was made possible with support from the Food and Farm Communications Fund.

Minnow is a fiscally sponsored project of the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

Minnow shapes a world where all beings can experience joy and belonging with reverence for the land.

Such conditions repair the harms of settler colonialism that persist under capitalism and white supremacy. By securing land tenure for California’s farmers of color and indigenous communities, Minnow supports the heritage and foodways of those most affected by state-sponsored dispossession.

Through democratic ownership of land and food systems, colonized peoples can thrive in their cultural practices while contributing proven solutions to climate change.

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