In the county’s agricultural heartland, a feud over church gardens and food sovereignty takes root

At midday during a typical week, the garden at Cristo Rey/All Saints Episcopal Church is a sunny, verdant spot. One can easily miss the number of gardeners milling about, many tucked away behind tall green stalks and rustling leaves, tending to the organic vegetables, legumes and herbs they’ve grown. 

Around an acre in size and made up largely of individual garden plots, the land is unassuming. But since 2021, the Watsonville community garden has been the site of a bitter and complex dispute between the church administration and Tierras Milperas, an organization that leases land for community gardens.

Until last spring, Cristo Rey/All Saints Episcopal Church was part of a network of seven gardens at community organizations and churches across the Pajaro Valley managed by Tierras Milperas. The nonprofit group aspires to help the region’s Latino and Indigenous farmworkers grow their own food.

Tierras Milperas and its founder, Hugo Sanchez Nava, offered farmworkers a vision of self-government and food sovereignty. According to that vision, the gardens were more than just church land where locals could grow vegetables; they were an opportunity for farmworkers to control their own destiny independent from the commercial agricultural operations spread out across much of southern Santa Cruz County and northern Monterey County. 

Over the past nearly two years, however, that utopian ideal has come under criticism. Cristo Rey/All Saints and a second church, Watsonville First United Methodist, have both cut ties with Tierras Milperas over concerns about how the group managed the gardens. The evictions have garnered national headlines in publications like Civil Eats over what Tierras Milperas and Nava have said are examples of classism and racism by church leaders.

Meanwhile, leaders of the two churches and some gardeners who have left or been removed as members of Tierras Milperas contend that the organization’s model of self-government was too political and that Nava and other leaders demanded total control over the church gardens and communication with gardeners themselves. 

The dispute raises questions about who gets to control the vision for these gardens in the agricultural heartland of Santa Cruz County.

‘A collective vision that comes from the people’

Created in 2021, Tierras Milperas is a new iteration of a previous organization that managed the garden network for over a decade.  

Mesa Verde Gardens created the garden network around 2011 with about 30 families and one garden at Cristo Rey/All Saints Episcopal Church on Rogers Avenue in Watsonville.

Eventually, the group grew to seven gardens and three orchards that served families mainly in the Pajaro Valley. Each garden or orchard was leased from churches, schools and city agencies. Families could rent a plot for around $8 a month to grow their own crops as a way to improve food security in the community. In 2018, Mesa Verde organizers told the Pajaronian that roughly half of its gardeners were food insecure. 

Hugo Sanchez Nava said he first learned about the gardens in 2018 while working as a community coordinator for Pajaro Valley Community Health Trust. The nonprofit, since renamed the Community Health Trust of Pajaro Valley, was acting as Mesa Verde’s fiscal sponsor – providing administrative and financial oversight and effectively allowing the garden group to function as a 501(c)(3) without having to acquire nonprofit status.

Nava says he was asked by Mesa Verde’s then-executive director, Vicente Lara, to advise how Health Trust could capture gardeners’ voices in its management of the gardens. 

Nava and the gardeners formed a governing body in 2018 called the General Assembly, which met monthly. Based on a Latin American model of self-government, Nava said the General Assembly was originally intended to gather opinions from gardeners on how the gardens should be run. 

According to Nava, many gardeners in this network identify as campesinos, or small-scale farmers, and are of Latin American – many also of Indigenous – descent. They bring agricultural knowledge and practices to these gardens, growing organic food to sustain themselves and their families, which, Nava said, they likely would not be able to afford otherwise. 

Nava began focusing the gardens’ new chapter on organizing gardeners to self-govern. He said he wanted to create a unified vision for the network that emphasized not only food but also land sovereignty. He felt the garden network was ripe for this kind of change.

“You can see that this is a super-productive agricultural region, and that’s what caught my attention,” Nava told Lookout. “I thought, well, how is it possible that there are these gardeners and they don’t have a collective vision that comes from the people?”

In 2020, the General Assembly voted to end its relationship with Health Trust after the organization brought in a new director who wanted the group to grow flowers rather than vegetables. 

How is it possible that there are these gardeners and they don’t have a collective vision that comes from the people?

Tierras Milperas’ Hugo Sanchez Nava

The group found a new fiscal sponsor, the Community Agroecology Network, or CAN, which Nava said was better aligned with its gardener-led next chapter. Nava became the organization’s coordinator and, according to him, the General Assembly voted to rename the group Tierras Milperas. (Tierras means land in Spanish and milperas refers to milpa, traditional Mexican farming practices that involve growing complementary crops such as corn, beans, squash and herbs together without chemicals.) 

In addition to the General Assembly, which is made up of all the gardeners in the network, two other smaller governing bodies were also created: El Consejo, an advising body made up of around seven gardeners from across the network, and La Comisión, made up of just two people: Carmen Cortez, the associate director at CAN, and Esteban Ortiz, a longtime gardener and local teacher.

‘The land belongs to those who work it’

At first, gardeners like Norma Luciano said they were excited for the new structure of self-government that Tierra Milperas was offering.

Luciano had been gardening with her family at the Watsonville First United Methodist Church for over a decade before Nava took over as coordinator of the garden network. She saw Nava’s vision as one in which any gardener who wanted could take a turn in a leadership role.

“They said, ‘We’re going to become independent, to run everything on our own and learn how to do so, all of us gardeners,’” Luciano said. “And because of that I said: ‘OK, definitely, this is great, let’s do it.’”

But soon Luciano began to notice problems. Luciano and her husband, Antonio Pantaleón, are part of a broader group of gardeners previously belonging to Tierras Milperas who said they had issues with the way the gardens were run by Nava. 

Luciano joined Tierras Milperas’ finance committee and said she was confused about why donations to the garden network were being used to pay Nava’s salary. She says she came to understand that Nava was paid because he was acting as the organization’s coordinator. Still, she felt that this was never made clear to gardeners. 

“If he had told us from the beginning, ‘I want to be paid so that this can be my job,’ that would have been a different thing, and perhaps we would have continued supporting him,” Luciano said. “But it was done secretly.”

She became increasingly upset about Nava getting a salary to work on behalf of the gardeners because she felt he wasn’t listening to their needs. 

For example, she says she recalls gardeners asking Nava and Cortez, who also serves on La Comisión, to buy them shovels. Though the pair said they would come take stock of tools needed at their garden, Luciano said they didn’t. 

Pantaleón said Nava would purchase equipment, like a large toolbox and a generator, that was not useful to gardeners working a small plot of land. “We are farmers, we don’t use those things,” he said. “We don’t need a generator.” When asked why he was purchasing these items, Pantaleón said Nava would dismiss him and tell him he didn’t know what he was saying, but provided no further answer. 

Luciano and Pantaleón said this was another reason they did not trust Nava’s leadership: All decisions about the gardens, regardless of input shared by gardeners at group meetings, would end up being made by Nava. And, they say, he was often dismissive if gardeners questioned those decisions. 

“They’d always say that they would do things to help out gardeners, but never did,” Luciano said.

At Cristo Rey/All Saints Church, gardener Pedro Ortega said under Nava’s leadership, gardeners would often break the rules, and the gardens grew less tidy than under previous management. 

He’s political. He says the land belongs to whoever works it, but this land belongs to the church. Cristo Rey/All Saints Church gardener Pedro Ortega

Ultimately, several gardeners said they often felt Nava had a different vision for the gardens than what many of them wanted: a space to grow healthy food for their families. 

Cecilia Magdaleno, who gardened in the Cristo Rey/All Saints gardens until a few years ago, said her dad, also a gardener, would sometimes come home from meetings with Tierras Milperas stressed out after hearing Nava speak about politics.

“Hugo’s ideology was very political. And for humble families, sometimes they do not understand political terminology or terminology that says, well, the land belongs to those who work it. That doesn’t apply for a person … who is from a community garden,” Magdaleno said.

Ortega agreed, noting that he felt Hugo wanted to take ownership of the land and limit the involvement of church leadership in the management of the gardens. “He’s political,” Ortega said of Nava. “He says the land belongs to whoever works it, but this land belongs to the church.” 

Nava said he respects that the land belongs to the church, and had no illusions that it belonged to Tierras Milperas. He said the phrase was referring to the importance of always prioritizing the land’s well-being – something he said the campesino gardeners are well-positioned to do because of the rich historical knowledge they bring to tending land, like non-harmful organic practices.

Conflict between gardeners at the Cristo Rey/All Saints church and Nava reached new heights when a family at the garden, Rosa and Santiago Clarín, were kicked out after Nava and other Tierras Milperas leaders learned the family had spoken to the church administration about their concerns with the organization’s management of the garden. Rosa Clarín, who had worked with her husband in the garden for over a decade prior to Tierras Milperas’ management, said she felt the experience of getting kicked out of the garden was intentionally humiliating.

Angelica Ortega, Pedro’s daughter, said the Claríns were voted out by gardeners on Tierras Milperas’ leadership team, the majority of whom didn’t garden at Cristo Rey/All Saints.

Luciano and Pantaleón, who garden at United Methodist, said they were similarly kicked out of that garden for questioning Nava’s decisions and probing for details about the budget and where funds were going in the gardens.

Robert Sommer, who took over as deacon at Cristo Rey/All Saints in the summer of 2022, said relations broke down between the church and Tierras Milperas leadership largely because church administrators were consistently blocked by Nava and Tierras Milperas administration from speaking directly with gardeners. 

“It’s our land and we’d been there for the multiple changes, so we wanted to hear the kinds of things that were going well, what works,” Sommer said. “We just wanted to hear input specifically from the gardeners.”

Safety concerns

Being unable to speak directly with gardeners also meant church leaders weren’t always able to keep track of who was coming into their gardens. That was important, Sommer added, because some gardeners had raised security concerns about activities that were happening on the land. 

Sommer wasn’t able to recall specifics about these security concerns, which had largely come to a head under the church’s previous deacon, Lawrence Robles. However, in a news release issued in June 2022 explaining its plans to terminate Tierras Milperas’ lease, the church wrote that the garden “has become increasingly unsafe, both for the gardeners and the surrounding neighborhood.” 

It cited three reasons behind the decision to terminate Tierras Milperas’ lease: “drug paraphernalia being left repeatedly on the grounds,” “a credible allegation of rape,” and “a recently hired employee of All Saints/Cristo Rey found dead under suspicious circumstances on the property.” According to Nava, the man who died was contracted by the church and had no connection to Tierras Milperas. Nava says he had been living in his car on church property and suffered from alcoholism, which was confirmed by other gardeners.

While the church initially told Tierras Milperas it planned to terminate the lease as of Aug. 1, 2022, discussions between Tierras Milperas leadership and church administration over the future of gardens dragged on through the fall, and by October 2022 both parties agreed to bring in a mediator.

The vision was completely different from what we had originally started the garden to be. Cristo Rey/All Saints Deacon Robert Sommer

Sommer says the purpose of the mediation was never about guaranteeing a new lease with Tierras Milperas. That would depend on whether the mediation was successful. It wasn’t. By May 2023, the mediated talks had irretrievably broken down and the church was preparing to formally end its relationship with Tierras Milperas. 

Sommer said what was discussed in mediation is confidential, but that throughout the yearlong back and forth, Tierras Milperas never permitted the church to speak with gardeners at Cristo Rey/All Saints. 

“We kept asking, ‘We want to hear their voice,’” he said. “Even in mediation, whereas Hugo and [CAN associate director] Carmen [Cortez] say that they were gardeners, they’re also management. And the two other people they had [in mediation] were not people who had plots on our property.”

Sommer said it became clear that Nava’s vision for the community garden excluded the church entirely and that under the new organized structure of the garden network, church administrators would not be permitted to interact directly with gardeners, nor hear from them around important issues like their safety. 

“The vision was completely different from what we had originally started the garden to be and what the garden had been,” he said. 

Meanwhile, a separate conflict was brewing between Tierras Milperas and the administration at the Watsonville First United Methodist Church after gardeners Luciano and Pantaleón were kicked out of the garden in August 2022.

That December, the church sent a termination letter to Tierras Milperas letting leadership know the church would not be renewing the organization’s lease.

John Song, pastor of the First United Methodist Church, said its administration decided not to renew the contract with Tierras Milperas after Luciano and Pantaleón told them about their concerns with the management of the garden. 

“Their behaviors were hostile towards gardeners,” Song said, referring to Luciano and Pantaleón being kicked out of the garden.

Tierras Milperas’ contract was coming up for renewal and Song said church leadership decided it would take over operations of the gardens and make them free for community members for the rest of 2023. This year, gardeners began paying the church for the cost of water, Luciano says. 

In its termination letter, Song asked Nava to let the gardeners know that they could continue to garden at no charge. He also asked Nava to provide the church with gardeners’ contact information so they could communicate this to gardeners directly. Nava, he said, refused.

Song said Nava and Cortez also confronted him after a church service one day, demanding that the church renew the lease with Tierras Milperas. Song says he was taken aback by the experience. 

As he was leaving church that day, he had an impromptu meeting with gardeners to tell them they were not being kicked out, Tierras Milperas’ administration was, and that individual gardeners could continue to garden at First United.

They were excited, Song remembers, and he realized Nava had told them the church was kicking them out. Later, Luciano says, the church held a meeting with gardeners to set the record straight. 

Angelica Ortega, one of the gardeners at Cristo Rey/All Saints, said Nava also told gardeners there that the church was kicking them out, when in reality the church was ending its relationship with Tierras Milperas, not the gardeners.  

She said Nava told gardeners that the church wanted their address, creating fear among some undocumented members that the church could use that information to call immigration officials. Sommer says that church administration asked gardeners for their name and email address only to be able to communicate with them directly, and never requested their home addresses.

“There was never a lack of respect between gardeners and Robert [Sommer],” Angelica Ortega says. 

‘They steamrolled over the community’

In a series of interviews in person, over the phone and via email, Nava disagreed with many of the complaints against him. 

Rather, he told Lookout, a small group of gardeners worked to spread false rumors and sow division among the group in concert with church leaders who wanted to evict Tierras Milperas in order to open their gardens up to wealthier neighbors. 

Nava said that the relationship with the church administration at Cristo Rey/All Saints began breaking down long before mediation, citing two instances in which he felt church administration was trying to end its relationship with Tierras Milperas. 

He said Lawrence Robles, deacon at Cristo Rey/All Saints prior to Sommer, tried to terminate the organization’s contract with the church in March 2022, saying it was void because Robles had not been the one to sign it.

Nava asked Robles to let him know how they could find a solution, but said he didn’t hear back until the church gave notice that it was terminating Tierras Milperas’ contract later that year. Nava also referenced a recorded meeting from August 2022 in which Robles mentioned wanting to invite new people to the garden and church, which he says Tierras Milperas took poorly. 

“I have visions of going around to the schools and inviting families and their children to come plant here, but right now, I’m not going to do that because right now, it’s not safe here,” Robles said in a recorded video of a meeting shared with Lookout, while discussing safety issues in the gardens. 

“This was interpreted by the General Assembly to mean that [Robles] wanted to liberate the church from the agricultural worker to invite neighbors around the church,” Nava said. “The people around the church are homeowners, people with financial means. The members of Tierras Milperas saw this as classist and racist, especially in a majority-white neighborhood.”

Lookout viewed dozens of video recordings of Robles provided by Nava. In them, Robles repeatedly assured gardeners that they were not being evicted and that he had reiterated this to Nava three separate times. Robles said it was his responsibility as the church’s head to address safety concerns, which he said had been raised by several gardeners at Cristo Rey, in addition to neighbors. 

He also assured the group that the church was not blaming these security concerns on gardeners, but trying to increase security for their benefit so that they could garden safely with their families. 

Robles said he only ever asked Nava for a list of gardener names, nothing else. “This whole space, for us, is sacred land,” Robles said in one video. “So we want to respect this place, but all those who visit the campus of All Saints do not respect it. And for that reason, a list with names that allows us to know, ‘OK, you’re not on this list, you’re not a gardener here, what are you doing here?’ That’s all we wanted.” 

According to a spokesperson from the Diocese of El Camino Real, to which Cristo Rey belongs, Robles declined to comment on this story. 

Addressing questions about his compensation, Nava says that Tierras Milperas was always transparent with gardeners about its financial structure, including that he would be paid to run the organization.

He says he would share financial reports with gardeners at monthly General Assembly meetings that included things like revenue, expenditures and Nava’s salary. From the beginning, Nava says it was made clear to the General Assembly that if he agreed to help build this new organization, he would be paid for his time. Nava said he made $25 an hour but currently makes $36 an hour after the General Assembly approved a series of raises starting in November 2022. 

He argues that the organization is putting less of its budget toward administrative salaries than under previous management. “Before organizing ourselves as Tierras Milperas, 80% or more of funds coming in for [the garden network] were paid towards salaries,” he said in an email. “Now it’s less than 30% of the total budget. The rest are funds for projects, materials, and for rent at each garden location we lease.” 

Rose Cohen, executive director of CAN, Tierras Milperas’ fiscal sponsor, said that she attended monthly meetings of gardeners across the network and heard about financial concerns only once, from one pair of gardeners who came up to her after a meeting to share their issues. She assured them that she kept close attention to the financial administration of the organization.

“I work with the Consejo every month,” Cohen said. “I come and review the finances with them. We have a bookkeeper, we follow all of the standard accounting practices. We have an accountant.”

As for complaints that he exercised too much control over the gardens, Nava said that as coordinator at Tierras Milperas, he doesn’t have the power to unilaterally make decisions on behalf of the gardeners or withhold funds or resources from anyone. According to Nava, every decision made at Tierras Milperas goes through a number of different filters, including leadership groups at the garden network and CAN. Eventually, he said, all decisions go to the General Assembly for input and approval. 

Nava acknowledged that some rules, like the amount of space between each plot, might not have been followed by gardeners, but he never saw these transgressions as excessive. Besides, these kinds of small rules weren’t where he was focusing his attention. 

“Whether the walkway had 3 inches wasn’t the important thing,” Nava said. “For us the big thing was organizing ourselves to have this community garden and projects like the greenhouse.” 

As for the families who were kicked out of Tierras Milperas at both Cristo Rey/All Saints and United Methodist churches, Nava says one was expelled for spreading rumors about safety issues in the garden and that the decision to remove them was agreed upon by the General Assembly.

“They were saying all of this about how there’s rape, murder and drugs happening here, and we said, ‘Well, this is now too much,’” Nava said.

According to Nava, the false rumors are ultimately what led to the Cristo Rey/All Saints administration’s decision to terminate the lease with the organization. But he still faults the church administration. “They took advantage to get out of our contract. They steamrolled over the community,” Nava said.

Nava said Luciano and Pantaleón were kicked out of the garden due to aggressive behavior at General Assembly meetings stemming from what he believes was their desire to seize power from him and run the garden network themselves. 

While he acknowledges that church leaders allowed most of the gardeners to stay at the two churches even after Tierras Milperas was asked to leave, Nava said he sees any action on the part of church administration that splits up the gardeners as an attack on the whole organization. He said allowing only some gardeners to stay and garden and not others is a mode of division.

“Evicting Tierras Milperas means evicting all its members unless they are no longer members of the organization,” Nava said. “The attempt to separate us from this organization constructed by all gardeners is to divide.”

According to Nava, 30 families from Cristo Rey/All Saints church have left the garden and moved to the plot of land the organization has most recently rented, a 4-acre former apple orchard in Corralitos. After losing gardens at Cristo Rey/All Saints and the First United Methodist Church but adding the Corralitos garden this summer, Tierras Milperas currently oversees six gardens.

Nava said his future vision for Tierras Milperas is to raise enough money to buy 40 acres where all the gardeners can garden together on land they own, and where they have space to carry out projects that will benefit the whole community, like constructing a greenhouse. 

Currently, Tierras Milperas is trying to raise $500,000 toward this goal, but Nava said he realizes 40 acres will likely cost 10 times this amount. (So far, the organization has raised nearly $8,000.) The garden network is also in the process of setting up two new garden contracts – one at a local Lutheran church and the other near the airport in Watsonville.

Nava said he has heard from families at Cristo Rey/All Saints that the garden under church management has become increasingly controlling. For example, he said, many areas in and around the garden have been locked with chains and now require a key, and that the church is now prohibiting gardeners from talking to one another in the garden. 

Sommer, the Cristo Rey/All Saints deacon, says that the church has not prevented gardeners from speaking to one another. Leopoldo Magdaleno, a longtime gardener at Cristo Rey/All Saints who remained there after Tierras Milperas left, said he generally hadn’t noticed much of a difference in garden management since Tierras Milperas’ departure.

‘The gardeners have won’

But Jose Sanchez, who worked in the Cristo Rey/All Saints garden since 2019, says the garden environment became stricter after church administration started managing it, referencing an onslaught of new rules gardeners were expected to follow. He left the church garden after harvest season in November for Tierras Milperas’s Corralitos site because he was disappointed with the church. He believes administrators blindly accepted gardener gossip and didn’t try to understand the truth behind claims being made about Tierras Milperas. 

Sanchez said he thinks gardeners choosing to stay at Cristo Rey are making a mistake. “When the church comes to accuse them of something next, they’ll have no leader to protect them,” he said.

All gardeners aside from those who were in leadership roles at Tierras Milperas were welcomed to stay at Cristo Rey/All Saints. According to Sommer, the vast majority of them – 97% – remained with the church this past summer and church administrators are focusing on developing individual relationships with each gardener. “If they’d like to stay, they’re welcome to stay. If they’d like to leave, they’re welcome to leave. It’s their choice,” he said.

Angelica Ortega, who now serves on a garden leadership committee at Cristo Rey along with Cecilia Magdaleno and Sommer, says it is not yet clear how many gardeners stayed with the church garden after last November’s harvest, though Magdaleno says 21 gardeners attended the most recent meeting at Cristo Rey in February. She added that the majority of Cristo Rey gardeners now have plots both with Tierras Milperas in Corralitos and with the church. 

For gardeners who were only ever concerned with growing vegetables and not about what the church administration or Nava said, the ability to have more space to garden is a net positive. “The gardeners have won,” Magdaleno said. 

Ortega believes gardeners do have some concerns with how the church is running the gardens, such as higher costs to rent plots of land and stricter rules, such as added security cameras. 

But she and her father, Pedro, said they hope the garden will ultimately be better than it was under Tierras Milperas’ management. They want to discuss improvements, like an agricultural expert hired by the church to help them get new plants and teach gardening classes. They want it to feel like a family space, where a new generation can come and take part in the practice of growing food. 

At the United Methodist Church, Luciano said gardeners are now on a commission with Pastor Song and other church administration. Her main goal is to teach workshops showing gardeners how to use organic practices. The administration, she said, is taking care of all the day-to-day necessities of the garden. 

Her husband, Pantaleón, agrees. “Now, all is well in the garden,” Pantaleón said. “Everyone has their little plot and everyone plants what they want. We’re good now – more independent.”

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