In Dubuque, Iowa, I grinned at the mayapples, a green and white fractal-quilt in the shade. Back home in the Piedmont of North Carolina, the pert leaves were already drooping and most flowers were unripe fruit. The standardized division of months means something different in every place. Geographic movement is a kind of time travel, especially when one finds themselves in the Driftless region of the upper Midwest.
Spanning four states usually defined by their Midwestern flatness, the Driftless is an ancient sanctuary. As the glacial onslaught plowed south, the region was an eddy spared from the endless current of ice. An island of savannah, prairie, and karst, it welcomed ice age refugees of many species and indigenous peoples, including the Sauk and Fox people (Meskwaki).
An artist residency supported and facilitated by AgArts brought me to this sanctuary. My work was to interview and film landless immigrant farmers in the area, in particular a group of indigenous Ixil Guatemalans growing food at New Hope Farm.
A Skirt of Serpents. After a year of research from afar, I attempted to forget all the video calls, zoning maps, and historical trivia I’d accrued in preparation. Preparation has its function, but it is also a hook and line, yanking me away from a conversation and into the bird’s-eye of context.
In advance, I booked a week full of interviews and farm visits. I began with Mass. At Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church, the congregation streamed down the aisle, bearing flowers to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Only three-feet tall, the little Mary was dwarfed by the other iconography in the sanctuary, the center-stage golden altar to Jesus, a second Mary, hewn wood and stepping barefoot on a snake, and a third, the tragic marble Mary holding Jesus after the crucifixion. This day, all attention flowed from the Spanish-speaking congregation to the small figure in a green-starred cloak.
Many believers view the Virgin of Guadalupe as a manifestation of Mary who appeared in the 16th century to Juan Diego, an indigenous peasant. Others argue a more political context, that the figure is a Spanish Catholic appropriation of the Nahuatl goddess Tonantzin or Cōātlīcue. Mother Earth, goddess of fertility, is clad in a skirt of serpents. Chicana scholar Ana Andalzua writes that Guadalupe is a Spanish bastardization of the apparition’s introduction in Nahuatl — María Coatlaxopeuh, “she who has dominion over the serpents” or “the one who is one with the beasts.”
After Mass, I joined the feast downstairs. Arroz con tomate, frijoles refritos, pollo guisado, y un montón de melón. In Mexican culture, upon entering a room, it is expected that you greet each person individually. No half-waving, eye-smiles, or probling glances from across the room. Do not wait for a chance encounter by the trash can to introduce yourself. Move with intention, conversation will come later. Shake hands gently and look each person in the eye. Immediate introductions ease so much of the awkward party energy we’ve grown to expect in white culture.
Within ten minutes, I was spinning in conversation with a dozen immigrant families about their experiences living in the region, finding community, and struggling to maintain language and culture amidst overtime work, fear of policing, and English-only public schooling.
I was not alone. Awaiting me in Iowa were collaborators and hosts. Mary and Rick Moody welcomed me into their home at New Hope Farm. Their home is an adaptable hub for connection. A former Catholic Worker Farm, New Hope maintains the generous anarchism of Dorothy Day’s movement by offering land to the landless and a sanctuary for artists, writers, and all in need of peace. Mary is a steward of earth and community, beckoning and cultivating a place where all can belong.
Marion Edwards provided the technical foundation for this work, arranging for filming equipment. She greeted everyone we met with enthusiasm and compassion, beckoning our interviewees’ storytelling with constant eye contact. During our time together, Marion and I discussed her own work researching the history of Black businesses and land ownership in Dubuque. She plans to expand that work to investigate the history and future of Black farmers in the Midwest.
Miriam Alarcón Avila is an Iowa City-based photographer with whom I dreamt and organized the core principles of this work, beginning last summer. Our phone calls reached deep into the trauma of colonization and the ways our bodies and the food system express that violence. Miriam quickly weaves her histories with others’, converting empathy into collaborative storytelling. She stages her photographs by providing a loose frame and allowing participants to explore the extent, pushing through borders.
These connections to people and place are all thanks to AgArts. Mary Swander is fostering a network of people revolutionizing food systems and injecting creativity into rural communities. Because of her support, the Driftless and my Piedmont homelands are now linked and in solidarity.
Lost Mothers. Magdalena Gomez and I first met in the greenhouses behind Dubuque Rescue Mission. Baby wrapped tightly against her hip in a rebozo striped with red, blue, and black, she planted seeds in trays and recounted her history with the project. These are some of my favorite clips of film.
At New Hope farm, I listened to more of Magdalena’s stories, this time of her own childhood, as she and her sister-in-law Elena patted out tortillas by hand and prepared lunch for the work day.
Papas
por Magdalena
Casi toda la semilla,
mi mamá le gusta sembrar todo.
Adora mucha la semilla…
Ella nos llevaba todos
así de niños,
nos enseña de
de hacer hoyos
para poner las papas
como sembrarlo
ella hace los hoyos
grandes (brazos hace un círculo)
y luego
más grande así (extiende los brazos)
largo
y luego le ponemos
papas papas papas así
Y luego, este,
otro le tira, este,
tierra encima la semilla
Es algo bonito, porque
nos divertíamos junto con mi mamá
para sembrarlo todos
yo, con mis hermanitos, mis hermanitas, todos.
Y…
muy feliz.
Potatoes
by Magdalena
Pretty much every sort of seed,
my mama liked growing it all.
She loves it…
She took us all
as children,
she teaches us
to make the holes
for the potatoes
how to plant them
she digs the holes
big ones (arms form a circle)
and then
big like (arms extending)
long
And then, we put
potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, just like that
And then, right,
someone else chucks, right,
soil on top
It’s a nice thing, because
we had fun together with my mama
planting it all,
me, with my little brothers, my little sisters, all together.
And…
very happy.
When conversing in Spanish, I often find it difficult to describe events I remember in English. Etched in my mother tongue, it is an act of double translation to remember, rewrite mentally, and then enunciate family lore and formative memories. Magdalena did not learn Spanish until she was 19 years old and already living in the United States.
Her mother tongue is Ixil, a Mayan language. During Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, the nation’s indigenous Mayan population faced genocide from paramilitary and government security forces that were trained, funded, and armed by the U.S. In total, 140,000 to 200,000 people were killed, 83% of those killed were Maya. A 1992 CIA cable confirmed their knowledge of genocidal violence: “several villages have been burned to the ground.” The report continued, “The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is [pro-guerrilla] has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and noncombatants alike.”
Magdalena grew up in the final years of the war, which formally ended in 1996. She remembers hearing family stories of hiding in caves during military raids.
The civil war is just the latest tragedy in a long series of imperial violence. The United States began propping up dictatorships in Guatemala beginning in 1890, encouraging government theft of communal indigenous land. Biodiverse, subsistence farming was replaced with massive plantations of cash crops like coffee and fruit. By 1950, United Fruit Company, now the ubiquitous banana brand Chiquita, was the largest landowner in Guatemala. After a brief revolutionary period of land redistribution and pro-union politics, a CIA-plotted 1954 coup d’état returned the nation to the pro-business military regime. With their land stolen and abused by foreign corporations, small farmers rose up in guerilla warfare, leading to the three decades of civil war.
As Magdalena translated memory, I observed in her eyes the mismatched machinery seeking contact between Spanish and Ixil vernacular. Arms moving in precise, sweeping gestures, she traced the geography of her birthplace in the hills of Northern Guatemala. Magdalena is indigenous and a migrant. Of a land and exiled from it. Her culture survived extermination, but remains unhealed from decades of land theft and violence. The U.S. government has not issued any reparations to the families of victims and continues training and funding authoritarian regimes worldwide. Like rural indigenous people everywhere, Ixil young people face the impossible decision to maintain ancestral farming on broken land or migrate and often leave family behind. Magdalena made that decision as a teenager. Her brother-in-law Davíd came to the U.S. when he was 15.
Magdalena described her relationship with her deceased mother to two of us – Miriam and me. Shimmering smiles burgeoned beyond words. Borders and 60-hour workweeks kept her from visiting, from attending the funeral.
There is a frontier I was afraid to cross into, manacled by the trained distance of masculinity, whiteness, and journalism. When Magdalena began to cry, I filmed. But Miriam did not hesitate, she walked into the frame and held Magdalena’s head against her chest.
Landless. Above the floodplain of Dubuque, intricately latticed porches peer over wavering steeples. Beyond the steeples lie rails, casinos, and water. The Great River reclaims and obscures the city. Do be careful to avoid visiting the levees in the evening. A train may unceremoniously roll to a halt, trapping you against the shoreline until morning.
There is a piece of land, up above, on the edge of the east-facing bluffs. From this spot, I could throw a stone, over the steeples, skipping across the Mississippi into Wisconsin.
The lot is mostly turf, with scattered dandelion and violet. Where the slope momentarily flattens, a faded white wicker table and chairs mark the Gonzalez garden. The family cut from the turf a 20 x 20 square a few years back. I am with Eri, Alejandro, and their daughter Wendy on a cool, overcast morning. It is time to clear the patch.
The family hacks and wrenches at the mugwort, dock, and dandelions. The hoe held at an angle, Eri beats dirt loose and tosses each plant to the middle of the garden. A mound of uprooted greenery rises high. In a week, the family will shape the withered remains into a berm along the downhill edge.
The land is not theirs. It is owned by a woman in one of those beautiful Victorian homes perched on the bluff. This is not New Hope Farm. Similarly, it is land offered to the landless. But the generosity rings differently here. The owner is a board member of several nonprofits. Growing up, she had a stand at the local farmers market. Years back, the vacant lot went up for sale, and she did not want her panorama blocked by apartments for college students. Through the Catholic church, she met the Gonzalez family and some other Guatemalan families and thought they might like to garden there. She intends to move soon, and hasn’t yet decided if she will sell the land. Or perhaps build a tiny house for herself and let the family keep farming.
Luchar por – to hustle for / to fight for / to struggle for. Davíd and Jacinto worked the land at New Hope Farm. Magdalena and Elena would later head out into the field, and were preparing lunch now. Radish and chard seeds clenched and released in rows. Thick tortillas patted out by hand, flipped by hand. It is planting day at New Hope Farm.
The memories of these four flowed easier while doing these familiar tasks. Staged interviews struggled to invite their cast-out eyes and quick smiles. Running ahead of their parents to the family farm, the bird song, and the cool feeling of the earth when making holes for potatoes. They summoned the hills of Guatemala to the Driftless. There, the land was familiar. It was a companion to the Ixil people through many generations, teaching and listening. It was also a struggle. To defend that land and maintain it for the future continues to demand as much political work as the physical and mental labor of farming.
Now 2,000 miles directly North of their homelands, the Ixil community of Dubuque is adapting to new struggles for the land. The cold is a drastic adjustment. At New Hope, kale replaced corn husks in tamales, since it’s available for a much longer season. Planting adjustments are only the surface level battle. Access to land is the major limiting factor for immigrants with farming at the core of their identity. When land is available, as at New Hope or at other community farms, transportation is the next hurdle. Driving licenses are not available to many, due to their legal status or their inexperience. In Guatemala and much of Latin America, farms and communities are woven together. In Guatemala, Magdalena walked easily between school, home, the village plaza, and her family farm. In the United States, we banished food production from our neighborhoods and our identity.
La Diferencia
por Davíd
Si echas luchas por tus tierras,
y también la tierra da dinero…
Pero si tú estás dándole a la empresa,
pues,
estás creciendo la empresa.
Tú no estás creciendo.
Estás de abajo.
Pues, todos pueden subir de arriba.
Tienes que cultivar tu tierra tú mismo.
Es la diferencia.
The Difference
by Davíd
If you’re hustling for your land,
that land’s gonna make money…
But if you’re hustling for the boss,
like,
you’re growing his business.
You’re not growing.
You’re under him.
Like, everybody can get on top.
You gotta farm your land yourself.
That’s the difference.
Mary Moody showed me these woods when I first arrived. At dusk, we stood at the edge of the woods, where a gas easement meets a fallow field on a hilltop, listening to redwing blackbirds. That pompous trill, matched with puffed up epaulets, is the males’ border defense system.
Later, Mary told me she did not think of herself as the owner of New Hope Farm. Though she lives on that land and offers a lasting invitation to others to farm the land as well, it is not sharing. She explained, it is a rightness.
A Rightness
by Mary
It’s really great when
we’re here and there’s a, y’know,
(her eyes cast out)
a group of people in this field
and in that field,
and children on the swingset
and some people using the stove
to get a meal going that we’ll share.
There’s a rightness about that
that’s just incredible.
It goes beyond…
Well, it’s the spiritual nourishment
that, I believe, is so much greater.
Una Pertinencia
por Mary
Es bien bonito cuando
estamos aquí y hay, pues,
(sus ojos lanzan)
un grupo en este terreno,
y en ese terreno,
y los niños en el columpio
y algunas personas usando la estufa
para hacer una comida que vamos a compartir.
Hay una pertinencia sobre eso
que es totalmente increíble
Va más allá…
Pues, es el alimento espiritual
que, creo yo, es mucho más.
Down into the dust. I plagued a turkey in the woods above New Hope. Tangled masses of rotting trunks crossed the creek ravine, a labyrinth of deer trails beneath the oak and poplar canopy. No matter which route I took, I continued encroaching into turkey’s territory. On my final walk into those woods, the two farm dogs were with me. They chased, and the velociraptor stayed on foot. The nest must have been nearby, and turkey hoped to pull us away from the chicks.
Alive or cooked, I love turkey. It is benign and cryptic, like pileated woodpecker and screech owl, a woodland nymph of the Americas. I am entranced by turkey’s boil-covered face, its humble strutting. Despite the violence beneath the Thanksgiving myth, the turkey remains a symbol of generosity and gratitude for this land.
By the time I caught the dogs, feathers flew from their teeth. Belly-up, turkey thrashed with talons and beak. I tackled one dog and wrenched the scruff of the other. My body tensed as they squirmed beneath me, my forehead rested in the leaves and duff. Turkey smoothly sheathed its weapons, and sat down, four feet away, observing us. I returned its gaze and felt something shake loose.
Turkey scratched at my thoughts all day. Later that night, Psalm 44 came to me. It is meant as a tragic poem. I found it different then.
With your hand you drove out the nations
and planted our ancestors;
you crushed the peoples
and made our ancestors flourish.
How do I justify my place on this land? How does anyone? On a stolen earth, my heart is lost. Which ancestors do I honor?
Our hearts had not turned back;
our feet had not strayed from your path.
But you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals;
you covered us over with deep darkness.
What definitions are lost in the deep darkness? The jackals know no borders, only scent and opportunity. They are wanderers, scavengers.
For our souls have sunk down into the dust;
Our bodies cling to the earth.
From the limestone cavern, a whispered invitation. In the black eyes of the turkey, a truth commands. I crave whatever lies in that darkness.
Copyright © 2023 by Grant Holub-Moorman
Grant Holub-Moorman
Grant Holub-Moorman is a media producer and creative educator based in Durham, North Carolina. His work often remixes interviews, poetry, and archival materials to explore mythmaking in economy and ecology. Galleries, farmer cooperatives, public libraries, local history museums, and public radio stations have internationally featured his work.