How a Queer and Trans Latinx Gardening Collective Is Working to Reverse Food Insecurity in Atlanta

It all begins with an acknowledgment. An acknowledgment of the occupied Muscogee land, an acknowledgment of the hardships bringing everyone together, and an acknowledgment of everyone in attendance. This is a community. This is an ever-growing family. This is Mariposas Rebeldes, and their monthly meeting has just begun. Members hail from all over the Atlanta area in search of equitable solutions to a calamitous problem: America’s food insecurity epidemic. Across the most populous area of the Deep South, residents struggle to find nutritious food within their own neighborhoods, with clusters of fast-food restaurants occupying real estate where a grocery store could be.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has only compounded these disparities, but Mariposas Rebeldes is tackling the issue head-on. In late February 2020, the gardening initiative, comprised of queer and trans Latinx community activists, was birthed in the backyard of cofounder Israel Tordoya. One small garden fortified the collective’s expansive mission—to empower people to take food systems into their own hands. Honing in on the promotion of precolonial agricultural techniques, Mariposas Rebeldes guides Atlantans on monthly botanical walks, presents workshops with chefs, food scientists, and farmers, and hosts virtual drag shows.

Workshops to date have included one on making tinctures out of locally-foraged herbs, and another on the indigenous Mesoamerican practice of nixtamalization, a way of treating corn for use in foods from tamales to tortillas. Next month, the group is putting on a Dandelion Festival, an outdoor event featuring dandelions and other commonly-found and foraged herbs, where attendees will share recipes and food, with no buying and selling allowed, inspired by the Mexican tradition of “Cambalache” or “exchange or trade.” 

“They learn about sustainability; they learn about alternatives to capitalism,” says member Edric Figueroa. “We’re not saying that we’re going to build that overnight—it’s a slow process—but here’s what Mariposas is doing.” Forming this collective and providing applicable skills to the community has also created space for residents to “learn those skills, practice those skills, fuck up, and try again,” Tordoya says.

Most ambitiously, Tordoya and other Mariposas have also created their own line of tempeh, utilizing corn sourced from a women’s co-op in Mexico and beans, and are selling it at local outdoor artist and food markets all over the city. MaripoSnax tempeh is a culmination of what Mariposas members have been striving for: reclaiming traditional foods that their ancestors ate while taking the means of food production into their own hands.

After graduating from pharmaceutical school, Tordoya started interrogating the impact of Western medicines on communities of color. “Is our current pharmaceutical system really the best way to make people healthy?” they wondered. “Or is this just like putting a Band-Aid on the wounds that capitalism and the pollution of our planet is causing?”

Posing these questions led them to join food justice initiatives. “Working in food justice, it became so clear to me that food is medicine,” Tordoya says. “Not to oversimplify things, but the primary reason people are unhealthy is lack of access to nutritious food.” Tordoya met Mariposas cofounder Wotko Tristán when they both joined Food Not Bombs, a volunteer-based organization servicing over 65 countries in anti-war efforts and the sharing of free vegan and vegetarian food.

“I think of food autonomy as more like the capacity to choose what foods we can grow, process, and enjoy, and share,” Tristán says. “When a community satisfies those needs, nobody’s hungry. That is a perfect picture of food autonomy. We don’t have that anywhere in the world.”

Mariposas Rebeldes is a nonhierarchical collective. Tordoya and Tristán insist there are no leaders, and membership remains flexible for participating community members to take what they need and leave what they don’t. The group initially congregated in Tordoya’s backyard garden in Atlanta’s Eastside neighborhood of Edgewood, where they could learn planting techniques. But midway through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Tordoya’s landlord evicted them from their home, uprooting Tordoya’s life and the overall operation of Mariposas Rebeldes.

“We were displaced from the original garden at Israel’s house because Israel’s landlord decided to not renew their lease in the middle of a pandemic,” explains Jesse Pratt López, the activist and photographer who shot this story. Staples of their community’s culture, from maize to ancient grains like amaranth, were left unharvested. “We’ve been able to thrive regardless,” López adds. López has been a Mariposas member since the group’s inception. Moving forward, she hopes to revitalize the garden in collaboration with Westside Atlanta–based Saint Sol Art Collective this spring.

The group has received a grant from A Well-Fed World, which in combination with their crowdfunding efforts has allowed them to begin the process of making offers on land. In a further effort to achieve this goal, Mariposas Rebeldes has created a GoFundMe for donations in order to build infrastructure, create housing, and continue servicing the Atlanta metro area.

More than 2 million Georgia state residents live in a food desert, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation. DeKalb and Fulton counties, which contain the Atlanta metro area, have 35 food deserts alone. “I’ve lived in every single part of Atlanta. The lack of access to food, it’s an epidemic in Atlanta, and especially in Black and brown communities, is just constant food deserts and no access to quality food,” López says.

A key principle for the collective is reclaiming the land for those who have nurtured it. “We can look at examples from peasant food webs,” Tordoya says. “Even though these people don’t own the land and only have access to 30% of all agricultural land in the world, they feed 70% of the people in the world, compared to the industrial food chain which is pretty much the opposite.” America’s farming industry is one of the whitest workforces in the country. It also accounts for one of the most traditionally male-dominated industries, but the tide is turning. Recent data suggests that the gender gap is closing in agriculture, and that more Latinx farmers are becoming landowners.

Figueroa notes that several Mariposas Rebeldes members, both primary and otherwise, come from migrant worker families who harvest food, yet live in conditions that prevent them from reaping the fruits of their labor. “We need to build our own gardens, reclaim our own land, so that Latinx and Black folks aren’t just the ones who are harvesting food for everyone else,” says Figueroa.

“We’re an intergenerational chosen family of queer and trans Latinx folks from different countries, different backgrounds,” he adds, “but we all share this common goal of liberation through food and reconnecting with our roots.”

While Mariposas Rebeldes is just a year old, food deserts are an age-old problem without one clear solution. As the collective continues to build, they hope to better the health and livelihood of Atlanta’s Latinx and Black neighborhoods one day at a time. “The only way that we’re going to arrive at those solutions is by working together,” Tordoya says, “and by pushing on it from a lot of different directions.”