broad ccc south central farm

Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Ritual Communication and Use Value: TheSouth Central Farm and the PoliticalEconomy of Place

Garrett M. Broad

Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA,90089, USA

This article examines factors that led to the destruction of the South Central Farm, a 14-acreurban garden that was bulldozed after a lengthy property rights battle. The analysis is guidedby 2 theoretical frameworks—J. Carey’s (1989) conception of the ritual and transmissionviews of communication, as well as J. R. Logan and H. L. Molotch’s (1987) treatmentof use and exchange value in the urban development ‘‘growth machine.’’ Although farmsupporters blamed political corruption, this work argues that their defeat was consistent withthe market-based logic of the contemporary city. While farmers demonstrated significantuse value through ritual communication, their efforts were deemed illegitimate in a politicaleconomic landscape that prioritized exchange value and was dominated by a transmissionview of communication.

doi:10.1111/cccr.12003

‘‘Aqui Estamos y No Nos Vamos.’’

(‘‘We are here and we are not going away.’’)

—South Central Farmers

In 2006, the South Central Farm (SCF), a 14-acre urban garden in South LosAngeles, was bulldozed at the behest of the property owner, Ralph Horowitz. Morethan 150 families, mostly low-income Latino1 immigrants, were evicted from thesite. This act concluded another chapter in the tortuous history of a 20-year propertyrights battle that alternately unified and divided segments of the Los Angeles public.This article explores the historical and ideological factors that led to the destructionof the SCF, guided by two complementary theoretical frameworks—James Carey’s(1989) conception of the transmission and ritual views of communication and Loganand Molotch’s (1987) treatment of use and exchange value (Marx, 1992) in the

Corresponding author: Garrett M. Broad; e-mail: [email protected]

20 Communication, Culture & Critique 6 (2013) 20–40 © 2013 International Communication Association

G. M. Broad The Case of the South Central Farm

urban growth machine. The interpretive analysis of this article draws from a reviewof dozens of published journalistic and governmental accounts of the case, froman archive of several years’ worth of blog posts on the South Central Farmers’website, from printed flyers and other materials distributed by the South CentralFarmers, and from a textual analysis of multiple film and video documentariesthat covered the conflict. The results of this work suggest that the actions of theSCFarmers were primarily characterized by ritual communication and were imbuedwith a depth of cultural use value. Still, this was outmatched and diminishedwithin the contemporary political and legal domains that resolve disputes over landtenure—that is, domains that promote exchange value, growth, and prioritize atransmission view of communication.

While the SCFarmers and their supporters argued that outright political corrup-tion and ‘‘back-room deals’’ were responsible for the destruction of their urban farm,this article contends that the landowner and the politicians with whom he cooperatedacted in a manner consistent with the regulations of the neoliberal American state.This neoliberal state, as theorists like Logan and Molotch (1987), David Harvey(2005, 2009) and others have outlined, is one in which the logic of markets pervadessocial life. In the cities of neoliberalism, political and economic power is garneredby influential capitalists who accumulate private assets through a process in whicheveryday residents are dispossessed of their wealth and lands through legal processes.Indeed, contemporary cities are key strategic sites for the articulation and deploymentof neoliberal practices (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). This case study of the SCFarmdemonstrates this state of affairs—while residents made a claim for ownership ofthe land on account of their long-term urban agricultural cultivation and culturalproduction, the original landowner’s market-based claim proved to be the strongerappeal in the eyes of city courts and policymakers.

This work begins with a review of the context of community gardening inurban America. It then puts Logan and Molotch’s Marxist-influenced theories ofurban development in conversation with the communication theory of James Carey.In so doing, it draws from Hay’s (2006) spatial materialist expansion of Carey’slong-standing framework—one that emphasizes the dialectical relationship betweenritual and transmission communication—as a bridge between the two theories. Thehistory, demise, and continued struggle of the SCFarm is then analyzed through theseanalogous theoretical lenses. Ultimately, this article continues a tradition, central tothe scholarly orientation of Carey himself, of using empirical examples to investigatethe role that communication plays in the production of space and in the maintenanceof culture across time. It enriches this conversation by connecting theory from thefield of communication studies with literature from urban sociology; indeed, whilewell-regarded in a variety of disciplines, Logan and Molotch’s concept of the urbangrowth machine has been underutilized in the work of communication scholarswho are interested in the political economy of place. In addition, this work offers anew perspective for scholars of urban planning and sociology regarding the ways inwhich communication dynamics contribute to land-use decision-making processes

Communication, Culture & Critique 6 (2013) 20–40 © 2013 International Communication Association 21

The Case of the South Central Farm G. M. Broad

in the neoliberal city. Concluding thoughts discuss how urban regulatory regimesmight rethink their understanding of communication processes in order to grantgreater legitimacy to the actions of everyday community residents, those who areinvolved in activities that optimize use value through acts of ritual, be it throughurban agriculture or other activities that contribute to the social construction ofurban spaces.

Community food security and urban community gardening

Deficiencies within the contemporary American food system pose serious problemsfor human and environmental health. Notably, in 2010, over 17 million U.S.households (about 14.5% of Americans) experienced food insecurity—that is, attimes during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable toacquire, enough food to meet the needs of all of their members (Coleman-Jensenet al., 2011). Low-income communities and communities of color are far more likelyto be food insecure and to live inside ‘‘food deserts’’ in which they lack access tohigh-quality and healthy foods (Larson, Story, & Nelson, 2009; Sloane et al., 2003).At the same time, there is increasing evidence to suggest that the contemporaryfood system is environmentally unsustainable in the long term. Modern agriculturalpractices in the United States—those that rely on heavy inputs of petrochemicalfertilizers and pesticides, as well as intensive monocultural growing practices—havenegative ramifications for the viability of soil fertility, pest management, biodiversity,and broader environmental sustainability (Perfecto, Vandermeer, & Wright, 2009).Further, the food system has become de-localized, and in large part globalized, to thepoint that food must travel hundreds, even thousands of miles from farm to table.This process has de-linked most Americans from their food, and has endangeredthe self-reliance of local communities (Gussow, 1999; Kloppenburg, Hendrickson,& Stevenson, 1996). As local spaces where fresh, organic, and nutritious fruits andvegetables can be grown, community gardens have emerged as one of the methodsthrough which these intersecting problems of the food system might be partiallyremedied.

Urban farming and urban community gardens have a storied history in the UnitedStates. Going back to the 19th century, city-owned lots were opened up to cultivationby immigrant communities; in later decades, so-called ‘‘victory gardens’’ dottedthe American landscape and provided substantial amounts of food to Americansduring World War I and World War II (Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010; Saldivar-Tanak& Krasny, 2004). After decades of a consistent but minimal presence in Americafollowing these wars, community gardening experienced a resurgence. In recentyears, gardens have been championed as way to improve urban community foodsecurity, what Hamm & Bellows (2003) define as a situation in which all communityresidents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through asustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice.Research has demonstrated that community gardens provide individuals with access



to affordable, nutritious, and sustainably grown fruits and vegetables at the sametime as they promote a variety of community-level benefits. They tend to improveneighborhood safety and aesthetics, encourage positive social interaction betweenneighbors of different ethnicities and class backgrounds, and often serve as a sitefor a variety of social, educational, and cultural events (Armstrong, 2000; Baker,2004; Saldivar-Tanak & Krasny, 2004). Further, community gardens have a specialimportance for many immigrant communities who are able to grow a variety ofculturally significant crops that are otherwise unavailable at local markets (Corlett,Dean, & Grivetti, 2003; Pena, 2006).

With that said, in much of the literature and public discourse about communitygardens, there is a tendency to romanticize the value that these spaces can contributeto individual, community, and environmental health. Community gardens have oftenbeen raised up as places that encourage social capital formation, interaction acrossethnic and linguistic difference, environmental sustainability, and food security.Absent from all but a few accounts, however, is a discussion of the limitations ofcommunity gardens, as well as of the very real conflicts that can prevent the types oflofty outcomes outlined above from being achieved. Community gardens are oftensites of struggle, both internal and external, and they are hardly universally recognizedas an optimal use of public or private land, especially in urban areas in which spaceis scarce and land values are at a premium.

Conflicts over community garden land have emerged among and betweencommunity residents, public officials, and private landowners. In an analysis ofthese disputes, Schmelzkopf (2002) argued that contests over community gardenspace might be understood through Lefebvre’s (1996) notion of ‘‘the right tothe City’’—community gardens operate as sites of resistance where communitymembers, often ethnic minorities with little political and economic power, claimrights to a space that is contested by city officials and landowners who see it as an unfituse of land with prime market value. However, community residents themselves arenot necessarily a unified and homogenous group either—as Baker’s (2004) researchdemonstrated, cultural pluralism within the communities in which gardens aresituated presents an additional set of challenges, as ethnic and linguistic differences(among other characteristics) contribute to the development of a heterogeneousset of interests and opinions among community gardeners and other communityresidents. Contestation over community garden lands, therefore, involves multipleactors whose interests can be aligned and opposed in a variety of ways.

The conflict over the SCF represents an ideal case study to paint a more nuancedportrait of the benefits, limitations, and challenges of community gardens. As a high-profile case in the global city of Los Angeles, the analysis can provide insight into howthe different interests of local residents, public officials, and landowners interact in avalue-driven dispute over community garden land. Urban development is one of thecentral sites of struggle between and among residents, policymakers, and developersin the contemporary city (Lefebvre, 1996), with community gardens a prime example,and is therefore a meaningful object of analysis with significant implications for both



communication scholarship and practice. Further, while scholarship on communitygardens has increased in recent years, communication theory has been noticeablyabsent in these published works. This article was motivated, in part, by thinkingabout the ways in which communication theory might contribute to an analysisof the functioning of community gardens, as well as of the conflicts that emergewhen community garden space is contested. How might a communication studiesperspective build upon previous critical work that has been conducted in this arena?In what ways could the inclusion of communication theory into this discussionimprove our understanding of similar urban land-use conflicts, beyond the domainof urban agriculture? With the use of James Carey’s thoughts on the role ofritual and transmission communication in society, this article introduces criticalcommunication theory into this body of scholarship. By putting this theoreticalperspective in conversation with Logan and Molotch’s Marxist approach, it providesa communication-oriented analysis of how urban development operates in thecontemporary American city.

Forty-first and Alameda and the SCF

At the time of its destruction, the 14-acre SCF was generally recognized as the largesturban garden in the United States. In order to understand the broader significanceof the garden, as well as the legal, demographic, and social dynamics that made thestruggle for its preservation a local and national story, it is necessary to detail thehistory of the land and neighborhood within which the SCF grew. The garden waslocated at the intersection of 41st St. and Alameda St. in the heart of South CentralLos Angeles, a moniker that to many is synonymous with urban poverty and crime.In 1986, the then-vacant lot was taken over by the city of Los Angeles through aneminent domain procedure with the intention to build a power-generating wasteincinerator. The Alameda-Barbara Investment Company, with Ralph Horowitz as itsprimary investor, was compensated a sum just under $5 million for the land.

That waste incinerator, however, would never be built, thanks to the efforts ofa group of residents who organized into the Concerned Citizens of South CentralLos Angeles. In what is often referred to as a triumph of environmental justice, thepredominantly African American Concerned Citizens teamed up with national andgrassroots environmental, slow-growth, and public interest law groups to successfullyblock the construction (Bullard, 1993). The land remained vacant until 1992, whenin the wake of the Rodney King verdict and widespread uprisings throughout LosAngeles—with South Central as the epicenter—Mayor Tom Bradley was approachedby the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank to see if they could use the land on a temporarybasis (Hoffman & Petit, 2006). The Food Bank, which was located directly across thestreet from the site, sent out a call to local residents and facilitated the organizationof a community garden.

In 1994, the city of Los Angeles, under the direction of new mayor RichardRiordan, sold the property to its own LA Harbor Department for $13.3 million. The



Harbor Department reaffirmed Mayor Bradley’s agreement with the Food Bank andcreated a mutually revocable permit that allowed the Food Bank to continue runningthe site until further plans for development were made. Shortly thereafter, the FoodBank informed the gardeners that their organization would no longer be able to affordto manage the garden, but in response, the gardeners insisted that they could managethe land on their own. By that time, dozens of low-income individuals and familieswere cultivating the land on 360 individual plots. Primarily Mexican and CentralAmerican immigrant families, the gardeners’ ethnic makeup was demonstrative of thevast demographic shift that had occurred over the course of several decades in SouthLA, as the community went from a majority African American to a majority Latinopopulation (Ong et al., 2008). Going by the name ‘‘South Central Farmers FeedingFamilies,’’ the farmers had set up an internal communal government structure,modeled off of the Mexican ejido system, that consisted of a junta council and ageneral assembly to make garden decisions (Hoffman & Petit, 2006). The food grownwithin the streets of South LA supplemented the income of many of the farmers atthe same time as it provided a measure of community food security within what wasotherwise a barren food landscape.

As time passed, several external developments, including nearby transportationinfrastructure, increased the potential economic value of the land. Former land-owner Ralph Horowitz’s interest in the site was renewed, but negotiations for hisdevelopment corporation to repurchase the land from the city fell through (Hecht,2006). In the late 1990s, Mayor Riordan began to discuss the conversion of the siteinto an industrial park as part of a broader economic development plan—a planthat was endorsed by the still active Concerned Citizens of South Central (Hoffman,2006a). Still, the garden remained, and in 2002 Horowitz’s new development group,Libaw-Horowitz Investment Company (LHIC), officially filed suit against the cityof Los Angeles due to breach of the original eminent domain contract. The cityopted to enter into settlement negotiations with LHIC and, in 2003, agreed to sellHorowitz the property for approximately $5 million, pending the dismissal of thelawsuit and LHIC’s donation of 2.7 acres of the site to the city for an athletic field.While this agreement was clearly below the market value at the time, it was approvedby prominent African American Councilwoman Jan Perry, whose district includedthe property, and was passed in a closed session of the City Council (Hecht, 2006).The move was also supported by the Concerned Citizens of South Central, who wereparticularly adamant about the provision of a soccer field—they argued that this useof public space was more accessible for all members of the community than was theSCFarm (Kennedy, 2008; Morain & Chung, 2004).

In January of 2004, Horowitz gave notice to the Food Bank that their revocablepermit would terminate by the end of February of that year. This prompted a seriesof lawsuits and countersuits between the SCFarmers and Horowitz. Representedpro bono by the progressive law firm of Hadsell and Stormer, the SCFarmersargued in court that their rights had been violated due to the city’s ‘‘back-room’’closed-session negotiations with Horowitz and the below-market value settlement.



They were granted an injunction to remain on the land until the case was resolved(Cinisomo-Lara, 2004). In late 2005, the court ruled that the sessions were legitimateand that the land must be turned over to Horowitz. Many of the 150 SCFarmerfamilies, along with local and national allies, insisted that they would turn to civildisobedience, if necessary, to retain their adopted land.

As eviction became imminent in May and June of 2006, protestors from aroundthe region and the country, including a number of Hollywood stars, musicians,and environmental activists, joined the SCFarmers at 41st and Alameda. Therewere reports that Horowitz was willing to accept a sum of $16 million for theproperty, but attempts by politicians like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosaand California Senator Barbara Boxer to negotiate with Horowitz were dead ends.So, too, were reported multimillion dollar monetary pledges from organizationslike the Annenberg Foundation and the Trust for Public Land. On 13 June, 2006,bulldozers uprooted crops in order to clear a path for sheriff’s deputies, who forciblyevicted hundreds of farmers and their supporters from the land and arrested 44 forobstruction (Marroquin, 2006a). Ten more protestors were arrested on 5 July, 2006,when a significantly smaller group tried to stop bulldozers from plowing over whatremained of the 14-acre garden (City News Service, 2006). A few weeks later, anotherjudicial decision upheld the sale of the site to Horowitz, and the SCF at 41st andAlameda was officially no more (Hetherman, 2006b).

Ritual and transmission communication, use and exchange value

James Carey’s 1975 essay, ‘‘A Cultural Approach to Communication,’’ distinguishedbetween two alternative conceptions of communication that exist within contem-porary culture. The transmission view of communication, he argued, was the mostcommonly recognized and dominant perspective in both communication studies asa field and throughout industrial culture. This perspective centers upon the idea ofcommunication as the ‘‘process whereby messages are transmitted and distributedin space for the control of distance and people’’ (Carey, 1989, p 15). Hay (2006)termed this the ‘‘spatial-bias’’ of communication, a perspective that is wedded topresent-minded ideas of progress through the management of space and geography.In an effort to counter this spatial-bias, Carey offered a cultural conception ofcommunication, grounded in ritual, that he argued was, unfortunately, only a minorthread in our national thought: ‘‘A ritual view of communication is directed nottoward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society intime; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs’’(p.18). As outlined by Rothenbuhler (1998), ritual can be thought of as either anoun or adjective. Ritual as a noun refers to rituals as things—rites, ceremonialevents, activities, and social objects—while ritual as an adjective refers to aspects ofthe everyday—ordinary activities, processes, and events. According to Carey, bothaspects of ritual are defining elements of culture; Carey’s mission was to revitalize this



notion and promote the value of ritual communication in the face of transmission’sdominance.

Carey’s work became one of the most influential and widely used in communica-tion studies, and is regarded as a foundation for American cultural studies. This movetoward thinking of communication as ritual has proved to be useful for both empir-ical and theoretical scholarship. Indeed, scholars have taken notice that many acts ofindividuals, groups, and institutions are characterized by ritual. A recognition of thisreality has had implications for the way scholars observe and study communicationprocesses, as well as the ways that theorists make sense of the social consequencesof these processes (Rothenbuhler, 2006). The concept has therefore proved to be avaluable a lens through which a variety of case studies have been conducted. Scholarshave employed the ritual framework to provide insight on a range of questions, fromanalyses of media rituals (Couldry, 2003) to issues of human trafficking (Soderlund,2006), among many other topics.

In the more than 3 decades since its publication, researchers have also offereda variety of important critiques and additions to Carey’s original conception.Notably, while Carey’s work painted a nostalgic and nearly utopian portrait of ritualcommunication as the constructive binding agent of preindustrial time (Soderlund,2006), several authors have demonstrated the ways in which ritual can be used asa tool for unjust authority and manipulation (Carey, 1998; Sella, 2007). An evenmore fundamental movement, perhaps, one which was actually prefaced by Careyin his original research, is that the binary conception itself is an oversimplificationof reality. As Hay (2006) argued, the tensions, breakdowns, and intersections ofthe transmission/ritual juxtaposition represent opportunities for a new and strongeranalytic framework. While this study works from the ritual/transmission separationas a guide for analysis, it is the interactive relationship between these two featuresthat is particularly vital to a clear understanding of the events in question.

Indeed, as Hay (2006) outlined in his spatial materialist expansion of Carey’sframework, simply countering the spatial-bias with a cultural one is not a particularlyintellectually productive strategy. Rather, he argued, the two approaches should beconceived of as involved in a dialectical process, ‘‘wherein space (and the spatialbias in communication research) is historically lived, practiced, and producedthrough bodies in motion’’ (p. 47). This perspective is ultimately concerned with the‘‘spatial and temporal (geographic and historical) production of culture, economyand communication’’ (p. 49). Hay’s intervention critiqued a practice in whichtransmission is defined as concerned merely with power and control, while ritualis offered as a contrast that performs a culturally restorative function in the faceof transmission’s dominance. Instead, his spatial materialist approach insisted thatpower exists in both domains, and suggested that analysts should investigate theconditions in which communicative power is exercised through time and acrossspace. Transmission and ritual communication, therefore, while distinct, should beseen as engaged in a generative relationship.



It is the productive capacity of the ritual/transmission dialectic that lends itselfparticularly well to a comparison with the Marxist political economic concept of useand exchange values, particularly as this concept was extended by urban theoristsLogan and Molotch (1987). Those authors began from the foundation that urbanplace is a social construction that emerges as a result of intersecting searches foruse and exchange values. For most local residents, use value concerns dominatetheir connection to place, as this relationship is, ‘‘characterized by intense feelingsand commitments appropriate to long-term and multifaceted social and materialattachments’’ (p. 18)—these attachments, they noted, are external to the market-based or exchange value of urban place. On the other hand, there is a consensusamong politicians, land owners, and other power brokers in the modern city on acommitment to the ‘‘growth machine,’’ a concept in which real estate development isprioritized as the avenue through which these key players can continually accumulateland, wealth, and power in the city. Growth machine associates unite behind adoctrine of ‘‘value-free development’’ that prioritizes exchange values and exertspressure on government bodies to resist residents’ claims for the use values thatmight undermine economic growth and development. The authors lamented thisstate of affairs, and showed that local economic growth alone does not necessarilypromote the public good, largely because it does not fully exemplify the use valueinterests of local residents.

Logan and Molotch’s work should not be taken as a definitive statement that onlyresidents can make claims in the name of the use value of urban place, and that businessowners and power brokers can only seek to maximize market-based exchange value.As the authors pointed out, capitalists derive their own use values from place as well,but ultimately, their ‘‘paramount interest is the profitability of their operations,’’ andtheir ‘‘attachment to place is much weaker overall’’ (p. 22). Similarly, homeownershipgives some residents exchange value interests in addition to use value concerns, butthis is usually not enough to override the interlocking community-based concernsthat bring homeowners and renters together. In addition, the high proportion ofrenters in many low-income communities means that, for the majority of residents,the exchange value concerns that motivate growth machine advocates are not thedefining aspect of residents’ attachment to their community. Similar to Carey’sframework, however, and not surprising given its Marxist foundations, it is clearthat the relationship between use and exchange value is dialectical in nature, andthat growth machine politics operate through the interaction of these two primaryconcerns.

For several decades, researchers in the field of communication and elsewherehave used Carey’s theories on the ritual and transmission aspects of communicationto analyze a variety of aspects of social life. Similarly, Marxist concepts of use andexchange value have long been utilized in critical theory, while Logan and Molotch’sextension of this work has been influential in urban studies and geography asa theoretical tool to analyze urban development and conflicts over land in urbansettings. A theoretical conversation between these complementary frameworks allows



for a communicative analysis of how value-laden land use decisions are made overcontested urban places. Indeed, Logan and Molotch argue that social action largelydetermines the attributes of place, and Carey’s theory is useful as a way to explicatethe communicative thrust of this spatial definition.

To follow this analogy, both exchange value and a transmission view of com-munication have been the dominant values of industrial culture. A transmissionview of communication desires to ‘‘increase the speed and effect of messages as theytravel in space’’ (Carey, 1989, p. 15), while those who are committed to exchangevalue seek to increase the speed and effect of development and the accumulationof capital into the hands of growth machine advocates. By contrast, use value andritual communication are inherently affective, cultural, and generally external tomarket concerns. Just like ritual communication, use value can be conceived ofas both noun and adjective—they both contain symbolic and functional utilityfor individuals in their daily practices of participating in social life. Rather than aconcern with growth, residents who prioritize use value through ritual are concernedwith preservation. Instead of looking to increase the speed of capital accumulation,they aim to maintain long-standing connections to cultural traditions that do nothave a quantifiable value. In the context of a dispute over urban place, a city thatprioritizes free-market exchange values will necessarily look toward a transmissionview of communication—transmission provides a vocabulary for growth machineadvocates to legitimize their control of space by capital concerns. By contrast, usevalues, cloaked in the language of ritual, are seen as potentially damaging to thegrowth machine, as they call for a legitimation of nonmarket values that are outsideof the control of those interested in capital accumulation. Use value claims, whileever present in the conversation, are systematically rejected in favor of transmission-dominated discourses that support the prioritization of exchange value in land-usedecision-making. The case of the SCF demonstrates how this theoretical conversationis manifested in a real-world instance of land use contestation, and it is to this topicthat this article now turns.

Ritual communication and use value in the lived experienceof the SCFarmers

With the establishment of the SCF, the once-vacant land was granted new andvital significance to the surrounding community. Beyond its value as an economicor even nutritional entity, it was the cultural use value of the SCF, articulatedthrough the language of ritual communication, that residents pointed to as its mostimportant quality. For the more than 150 families who came to garden at the SCF,their cultivation was at heart an expression of culture and community. The SCFwas almost exclusively cultivated by Latino immigrants and their first-generationAmerican children and families, most of whom lived within walking distance ofthe farm, although several traveled from miles away to participate in the project.Diverse in their own right, the gardeners included displaced Mixtec, Nahua, May,



Seri, Yaqui, and Zapotec peoples (South Central Farmers’ Cooperative, n.d.), and itwas clear that the SCF provided participants with a direct connection to the traditionsand practices of their native lands. Pena (2006) estimated that a range of 100–150species of plants, many with traditional Latino medicinal and nutritional significance,were present throughout the row crops, trees, shrubs, vines, cacti, and herbaceousgrowth throughout the SCF. Heirloom seeds used by gardeners could be traced back5,000 years in their origins, and the selection and arrangement of crops mirrored thatof the hometown kitchen gardens, or huerto familiar, common throughout Mexicoand Central America (Mares & Pena, 2011).

In interviews with journalists, the SCFarmers continually referred to the farmas a site for the preservation and remembrance of ancestral customs, as well as asafe place—a sanctuary—where families could congregate and be buffered from theharsh realities of economic disadvantage and crime that often characterized SouthCentral. This was the feeling of Tezozomoc, a farmer and spokesperson for theorganization: ‘‘I call it a hunger of memory. It’s a place you have when you wantto come back to a place and time when you felt good about your life’’ (Kugiya,2005). The language of community bonding and ritual permeated the remarks of thefarmers, as Marylou Escobar, a Guatemalan immigrant remarked: ‘‘The farmers arelike one family . . . This place is like school and church for me . . . When I sit here,I forget everything’’ (Kugiya, 2005). Indeed, the SCF was simultaneously school andchurch—children and teenagers learned traditional farming methods from friends,parents, and grandparents, while together the children, adults, and elders shared in acalming, spiritual experience that connected them to each other, to the land at 41stand Alameda, and back to the land of their home countries. Together, these activitiesencouraged what Pena (2006) termed a ‘‘transnationalization of a sense of place.’’

Perhaps the greatest example of this ritual convergence and transnationalizationwas represented by the Mexican ejido system of governance practiced at the SCF.In Mexico, the rights of ejidos were established in Article 27 of the Constitution of1917 as a key strategy for land reform. Formally owned by the state, ejido land wasset out to be controlled by the village as a whole, with each family given the rightto work portions of the collective property. Ejido land could not be sold, rented ormortgaged, either by individual families or by the collective community (Jones &Ward, 1998). While not without its problems, for decades ejidos provided some foodand land security for Mexico’s peasants, and was a primary site of both agriculturalcultivation and decentralized, communal governance across Mexico. Up through the1970s, more than half of Mexico’s land base was transferred to ejido control, as thesecollectives became formidable political and economic players at the municipal level.As neoliberal market reforms took hold across Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s, Article27 was amended to prohibit future ejido expansion and to promote the privatizationof communal resources. Yet, as Perramond (2008) demonstrated, the majority ofejidos have resisted this privatization: ‘‘For now, at least, the national state remainsembedded in the idea of these commons’’ (p. 368).



Across the border in South Central Los Angeles, the 360 plots of the SCFarmwere modeled off of this collective political and economic arrangement. The 14 acreswere divided into eight sections, with each section represented by a captain whogathered the farmers together to hold direct democratic votes. Voting was employedwhen there were specific problems or issues for which a decision needed to be made,including as they developed strategies in their attempts to save the farm (Hoffman,2006b). This system allowed an opportunity for the ritualistic procedures and valuesof the ejido to set the agenda for how the SCFarmers viewed their collective, interms of both agricultural cultivation and political activism. To the SCFarmers, thisexercise of traditional democracy, organized at a site of agro-ecological tribute andreclamation, was a source of significant, if not quantifiable, use value, that the farmersheld in the highest regard.

With that said, despite these transnational connections to native homelands,despite the intercultural and intergenerational social interaction that the farmfacilitated, and despite the farm’s status as a site of ritualistic worship and education,the use value of the site did little to impact its ultimate value in the market. And justas the ejidos in Mexico found themselves engaged in a struggle against the neoliberalethos of privatization, so too did the SCFarmers. Their collective was under siege bya market-based system, one that treated their ritualistic use value as an externalityworth little consideration in the land-use decision-making process.

This disconnect was brought into relief as they struggled to find common groundwith the landowner, Ralph Horowitz. Horowitz might have recognized that theritualistic actions of the SCFarmers added some sort of value to the land, but thiswas never granted primacy over his paramount interest, which was to increase themarket-based economic profitability of the site. Insulated in an economic and politicalclimate that rejected ritual communication as irrelevant to business concerns, thedeveloper was quick to dismiss discourses that did not conform to the language oftransmission as he sought to maximize economic growth. While the SCFarmers andtheir supporters celebrated the cultural and biological diversity on display in SouthLA, Horowitz patronizingly described the activities of the SCFarmers as ‘‘weekendgardening on little plots of land’’ (Laffey & Pepos, 2007). This disconnect wasexacerbated by language and cultural barriers that made it even more difficult for theSCFarmers to make their case that use value gave them a right to the space. Indeed,Horowitz admitted that he had had little conversation with the gardeners on accountof this language barrier. Still, this linguistic predicament was more of a symptomrather than a cause of the dispute over the SCF—even if both sides had enjoyed fluentcommunication, it is unlikely that the SCFarmers would have been able to sway thedeveloper to their side. Horowitz’s commitment to exchange value and the growthmachine meant that he was responsive to transmission-oriented discourses—in hiseyes, use value concerns and the language of ritual had no place in the conversationsthat oversaw land use decision-making.

The developer was not the only one who stood in opposition to the SCFarmers. Ina twist that symbolized the intercultural conflict of 21st-century South Los Angeles



between the once-supermajority African American community and the growingmajority Latino community, the Concerned Citizens of South Central, champions ofenvironmental justice in the 1990s, opposed the preservation of the full 14-acre farm.Led by Mark Williams and, until her death in 2004, Juanita Tate, the ConcernedCitizens argued that the SCFarmers’ disregard for property rights would make itdifficult for South Central residents to obtain temporary land-use agreements in thefuture. They also argued that their organization—with deep roots in the communityand a storied history with that piece of land—should have more of a say in the process.The struggle between the Concerned Citizens of Los Angeles and the SCFarmerswas highlighted in Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s (2008) documentary, The Garden,as the filmmaker clearly placed the Concerned Citizens in the role of villain. Thefilm, which drew from the comments of many of the SCFarmers, suggested that theConcerned Citizens teamed up with African American Councilwoman Jan Perry tocut a series of back-room deals with Horowitz in order to secure monetary gain forall involved, as well as a soccer field on the garden site, as desired by Tate and hersupporters.

This conflict helped to demonstrate the complex and dialectical nature of theritual/transmission and use/exchange frameworks. For Logan and Molotch (1987),the social construction of the city takes place through the ‘‘intersecting searchesfor use and exchange values.’’ In this process, urban residents do not necessarilyfind themselves in opposition to only government officials and entrepreneurs inthese contests over land use; rather, through an interaction with other historicaldevelopments and the realities of economics, race, class, and gender, these effortstend to construct a web of concerns that can lead to coalition-building amongpotential rivals or opposition between potential collaborators. In this instance, whilethe SCFarmers argued that the Concerned Citizens were seeking only monetaryexchange from the land at 41st and Alameda, the Concerned Citizens’ earlierenvironmental justice victory, as well as their longstanding tenure in the community,meant that they too could claim a right to the city on the basis of use value. AsConcerned Citizens spokesperson Mark Williams put it: ‘‘We want to be part ofthe solution, but a solution that includes active recreation, passive recreation, andgarden space—not 14 acres of garden, half of it for folks who don’t live in thiscommunity’’ (Hoffman, 2006b). Using the language of ritual to assert their rights,the Concerned Citizens and Councilwoman Perry believed a soccer field representeda valuable public space for all community members, including residents of theAfrican American community who were generally not members of the SCFarm.This was not merely an attempt to control space for the purposes of improving itsmarket value, but rather an attempt to preserve some of the cultural capital of theever-diminishing African American community of South Central. The ConcernedCitizens contended that the SCFarmers—some of whom were not actually from thelocal neighborhood—held an illegitimate monopoly over the space, and appealedto ritualized use value as part of their demand for an alternative use of theland.



This external strife was also matched by reports of internal conflict among theSCFarmers, and together these examples demonstrate that ritual communicationis not merely a salubrious antidote to the ills of transmission, but rather a morecomplex concept with its own negative potential (Hay, 2006; Sella, 2007). A featurestory in LA Weekly in March of 2006, entitled ‘‘Bushel of Complaints,’’ painted a fardifferent picture of the often idealized community of the SCF. There were reportsof severe and sometimes violent conflicts between a number of gardeners, as well asquestionable authoritative actions on the part of the two primary spokespersons andleaders—Tezozomoc and Rufina Juarez. There were allegations of unfair eviction,intimidation, forced participation in demonstrations, and mismanagement of cashcontributions (Hernandez, 2006a). Around this time, Councilwoman Perry helpedrelocated approximately 50 families to smaller community gardens in Watts andother nearby areas—some left in opposition to the leadership, while others weresimply looking for greater security in land tenure (Marroquin, 2006a).

Perry was repeatedly verbally attacked at LA City Council meetings by organizedgroups of SCFarmers, often with overtly racial epithets. In August of 2006, in responseto months of sharply directed public comment, the City Council went so far as todevelop new decorum rules that prohibited the use of profanity, loud or offensivecomments, or any remarks addressed to a single Councilmember (Marroquin, 2006b).Another Councilmember, Dennis Zine, also claimed that he had been harassed bya large group of people when he visited the SCF (Orlov, 2006). Mayor AntonioVillaraigosa lent vocal support to the SCFarmers and worked to secure either asettlement or alternative tracts of land, but his failed efforts to save the garden overthe years landed him on Tezozomoc and the farmers’ bad side as well (Hernandez& Zahniser, 2006). As fund-raising efforts collapsed before the destruction of thefarm, Deputy Mayor Larry Frank suggested that the failure should be attributedto Tezozomoc and other SCF organizers who were ‘‘never above publicly beratingpotential or tentative allies during the fight to save the land’’ (Hernandez, 2006a). Themost important of those potential allies—Horowitz—was repeatedly demonized bythe farmers in the press, with possible anti-Semitic overtones (Hernandez, 2006c).

Together, these conflicts highlight the drawbacks that come from the tendency todraw strict moral binaries between use and exchange, transmission, and ritual. Neitherritual communication nor use value should not be thought of as inherently good,nor should they be seen as existing in isolation from transmission communicationand exchange value, respectively. A recognition of this dialectic, however, does notsuggest that the concepts are not useful at all—quite the contrary, it allows for a morenuanced analysis of those moments in which ritual communication and use valueconcerns are outmatched in their interaction with transmission communication andexchange value. The following section demonstrates that the demise of the SCFarmwas ultimately representative of how, in the context of urban land-use decision-making processes, growth machine advocates still find a way for their exchange valueinterests to prevail, and in doing so, depend on the language of transmission to serveas their communicative rationale.



Exchange value and transmission communication in the SCFarm decision

With the support of several influential local and national politicians, as well as promi-nent entertainers and Hollywood stars, social justice and environmental activists,and innumerable members of a sympathetic broader public, the resolute SCFarmersseemed to be gaining momentum in the final weeks before their eviction. Despite allof the hard work that went into the formation, cultivation, and protection of the SCF,as well as the significant use value that these efforts bore, the SCFarmers were unableto preserve their space at 41st and Alameda. The SCFarmers continually cried fouland argued that the enforced land deals were illegal and unjust, but Horowitz wasable to prevail nonetheless. The value of the original property ownership agreementoutweighed anything that the SCFarmers, or their high-profile advocates, couldbring to the legal table, and thus provided a solid manifestation of the primacythat exchange value and a transmission perspective of communication still hold incontests over urban development.

There is perhaps no more concrete example of the convergence of the twotheoretical frameworks utilized in this analysis than the power imbued within thewritten contract that ensures legal ownership of land. Property rights, which standat the very foundation of capitalist economics and society, are solidified throughlegal contracts, which communicate to buyer, seller, and outside observers thatauthoritative control over space has been granted and must be recognized andrespected by all parties. Henceforth, any claims that argue for the preservation ofcitizens’ use value hold no legal bearing, insofar as they conflict with the pursuit ofeconomic exchange. In the case of the SCF, Ralph Horowitz saw no need to offer anyexplanation beyond his contractual right to the land in order to reclaim the lot at41st and Alameda. Horowitz, concerned with the defined exchange value of the site,argued in the language of transmission that the SCFarmers lacked any legitimate legalstanding, and went so far as to assert that the farmers should feel indebted to him.In 2004, he argued: ‘‘They’ve had approximately 12 years and 60 days for free on thatland—no taxes, no insurance payment, no rent, no nothing, for their own privateand personal use’’ (Flaccus, 2004). Horowitz found no reason to recognize the valuethat was added through the work of the SCFarmers or the value of the abundantplant life in its own right. A cultural, or ritual, view of communication did not fitinto his economic dealings, and this perspective was validated in the neoliberal legalprocesses that settled the urban development dispute.

Indeed, the SCFarmers and their attorneys recognized that the legal precedent wasprohibitive for their case, and they recognized as well that their cultural argumentcould only take them so far. Once again indicative of the interactive relation-ship between ritual and transmission, their strategy became multipronged—theyattempted to incorporate an argument more in line with the transmission view inorder to survive in the legal arena. ‘‘We’re looking at what is legally right and whatis morally right,’’ the SCFarmers’ attorney, Dan Stormer, said (Llanos, 2006). Theirargument in court focused on what they called a ‘‘back-room deal,’’ orchestrated



by Councilwoman Jan Perry in conjunction with the City Council and Horowitz,that delivered the land to Horowitz for a price well below the current market valueand closer to the original sum that Horowitz was paid during the eminent domainprocedure (Kuipers, 2005). ‘‘Whatever went on behind closed doors sure hurt thetaxpayers,’’ Stormer said (Hetherman, 2006a). In this sense, the SCFarmers attemptedto supplement their ritualistic appeal for the use value of their farm by attacking thelegal validity of the real estate exchange in the very language of transmission.

Unfortunately for the SCFarmers, the courts did not agree, and saw the deal struckbetween Horowitz and Perry as legal, fair, and binding. Political and judicial actorswere concerned only with settling the eminent domain lawsuit that had lingered onthe city of Los Angeles’ books for over a decade. With a binding contract in hand,the judge had to rule in favor of the man who had been granted authority overthat space. This perspective was crystallized in an LA Times editorial on March 11,2006:

There are lots of things that would be nice. But the land belongs to Horowitz,and he has every right to kick out the people who have been squatting there formore than a decade. The gardeners, or farmers . . . have made their plots into aspecial, almost magical, place. But no magic is so strong that it erases alandowner’s right to either his property or its fair value. (‘‘LA Gothic,’’ 2006)

Stormer wanted the court to do what was legally right and what was morally right,but he was mistaken to argue that one solution would encompass both provisions.As Councilmember Perry argued, the decision-making process boiled down to aprivate property dispute, and to disregard that was ‘‘not dealing with the reality ofthe situation’’ (Hernandez, 2006b). The case of the SCF demonstrated that, in thecontext of these urban development discourses and legal proceedings, the reality ofthe situation was that ritual communicative acts that emphasized use value wereseen as inferior to the communicative acts of transmission that defined exchangevalue.

Still, despite seemingly definitive rulings by public officials and the court system,years after the demolition of the SCF, the SCFarmers continued to persist, continuedto farm, continued to mobilize, and continued to fight for the land at 41st andAlameda, living up to their mantra: ‘‘Aqui Estamos y No Nos Vamos.’’ Remaininggrounded in a ritual ethic, a SCFarmers flyer declared: ‘‘The farmers of the SCFcontinue to seek an end to hunger and malnutrition, but their larger goal is to createa healthier diet based on respect for and revival of the cultural mores and customsthat have been lost as a result of the influence of fast food and low incomes’’ (SouthCentral Farmers, n.d.). Most importantly, the SCFarmers continued to tend theland, albeit in an area approximately 130 miles away from the grit of South CentralLA. With the help of a large donation from an anonymous donor, the SCFarmerspurchased a massive 85-acre swath of land in Buttonwillow, California, that wasofficially opened in June of 2010 (Baldwin, 2010). Although they were cultivating in a



new location, their connection to 41st and Alameda remained, as did their oppositionto the plans of developer Ralph Horowitz.

Horowitz’s plans to cash in on the exchange value of the land after the destructionof the SCFarm were met with steady opposition from the SCFarmers and their allies,who protested against the environmental and economic impact of several proposeddevelopments. After a number of failed starts, in a November 2011 decision, theLA City Council voted to accept a $3.6 million contribution from Horowitz. Thismoney would clear the way for Horowitz to sell the site to clothing manufacturers foroffice and warehouse space, and it also would waive aspects of a previous agreementin which he was required to build a park and soccer fields on the site, as theConcerned Citizens group and others demanded. Instead, that money would beplaced in a general fund for city parks and recreation. The SCFarmers and othercommunity members came out to the City Council meeting where this decisionwas made to voice their opinions—many SCFarmers found themselves unified withcommunity advocates for the park space who had once been their opposition, whileother community members believed that the decision would bring much-needed jobsinto the neighborhood (Tabuena-Folli, 2011). Once again, use value and ritual wereshown to be multilayered concepts with different meanings for different residents. Inthe end, however, the interests of powerful growth machine associates dominated thediscussion, as their concerns consistently outweighed those of community members.Then as before, in the struggle over the land at 41st and Alameda, communicativeacts of transmission proved stronger than ritual, and the potential exchange value ofthe site was granted primacy over its existing use value.

Conclusion

Using the case study of the SCF, and drawing from the parallel theoretical frameworksof Carey (1989) and Logan and Molotch (1987), this essay explored the tensionsbetween ritual communication and use value, on the one hand, and transmissioncommunication and exchange value, on the other. It has shown the ways inwhich the language of ritual communication defined the use value interests of theSCFarmers. Yet, grounded in the language of transmission, the exchange valueclaims of the property owner were recognized as the stronger and more legitimateargument in the land use decision-making process. Drawing from Hay’s (2006) spatialmaterialist expansion, this work has also demonstrated the dialectical quality of therelationships between ritual and transmission communication, use and exchangevalue. Analytical work that utilizes these frameworks should keep in mind that theyare most useful insofar as one recognizes that they are not strict binaries. Rather,they are engaged in a relationship, resulting in a tension that ultimately acts as agenerative force in the production of space and in the maintenance of society acrosstime.

This article has provided a contribution to scholarship on community gardens,specifically, and on urban development, more broadly, with the introduction of



communication theory as a lens to analyze the political economy of urban place. Byinterrogating the relationship and intersections between use and exchange value, ritualand transmission communication, it offered a nuanced portrait of how communityresidents, government officials, and property owners are embedded in a complicatedweb of value-driven, place-based concerns. Despite this nuance, it concluded that, inthis instance, transmission-oriented discourses that encouraged the accumulation ofexchange value in the hands of growth machine associates remained the dominantforce. Future research by communication scholars should continue to document andanalyze how these key themes are manifested in other disputes over contested urbanspaces.

Looking forward, it seems as if the most vital question is whether the law shouldmove to recognize ritual communication and use value on an equal footing withtransmission-based discourses of exchange value. Indeed, the neoliberal conventionsof growth machine politics are not a natural given, but rather are the product of along-term and value-laden process of social construction. It is possible to imagine acity, for instance, in which natural objects within the environment are granted theirown inherent legal status, as researchers like Stone (1972) and others have proffered.If this were the case, it would not have been so easy for Horowitz to order cityauthorities to blindly bulldoze the invaluable biodiversity that was present withinthe SCFarm. It is possible to imagine, as well, that the variety of other benefits thatthe SCFarm offered—including its contribution to community food security and its‘‘transnationalization of a sense of place’’—might be considered legally recognizableitems that could be levied against the exchange value interests of growth machineassociates in court.

If the regulatory regimes that oversee disputes over land ownership were to bereformed in such a way that the ritual communication and use value concerns ofeveryday residents could flourish, then urban agriculture would have a strongeropportunity to be used as a force to build bridges between cultures, generations, andethnicities, as well as to help move society toward long-term urban environmentalsustainability and community food security. Such a progressive movement wouldhave relevance far beyond the domain of community gardens, as it could serveas the avenue through which everyday residents might legally preserve countlessurban places in which use value is derived from ritual acts of communication.Communication scholars can play a role in imagining exactly what a discursiveand legal space that grants more power to the ritualized use value concerns ofeveryday residents might look like, as well as how such drastic reforms couldactually be implemented. As it stands, there is little to suggest that this radicalphilosophical movement is at all close to being reflected in contemporary publicpolicy. As Carey (1989) lamented decades ago, the transmission view of commu-nication remains the dominant strain in public life. The SCFarmers may stand bytheir motto, ‘‘Aqui Estamos y No Nos Vamos,’’ but so, too, does their powerfulopposition.



Notes

1 I recognize that the use of the term ‘‘Latino’’ is imprecise, and that its use might raiseobjections from those concerned with its inability to take into account diversity withrespect to gender, nationality, and ethnic background. With its use, I follow theconvention of major publications like the Los Angeles Times.

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