Miguel Ramos says that at nearly every stop on the four-month bike ride he took from Los Angeles to Guatemala in 2012, someone asked his group two questions, “Where are you coming from?” and “Where are you going?”
On the surface, they were typical ice-breaker questions. It wasn’t until the group was invited to a Baktun ceremony, which commemorates the end of a Mayan calendar cycle, with Guatemalan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú that Ramos understood what they meant.
“As Indigenous people, we don’t know who we are unless we know where we come from,” Ramos, 38, said.
He completed the “reverse migration” bike trip with a vision of how he could use what he learned about cooperative living, native plants and food sustainability. Ramos enrolled in graduate school to study urban planning, got a full-time job and saved money to buy a house in East Los Angeles. That’s how Casita del Barrio was born.
Behind a metal fence, stalks of corn, beds of squash and tomatoes grow in the frontyard. A desert mural lines the walkway to the backyard where a rooster crows and rain barrels are set up to capture water. Casita is also a co-op living space where Ramos and his family live and host community events about topics ranging from Indigenous yarn dyeing to growing food.
Artist Dalia Palacios was one of the first people to move into Casita. She met Ramos after he returned from the Guatemala bike trip when she was an intern with the Sierra Club. The two became friends and once Ramos bought the three-bedroom, one-bath, 90-year-old fixer-upper in 2017, Palacios was part of a group he enlisted to work on the house and plant the garden.
Ramos told her his idea of a housing co-op for like-minded residents working together and sharing their expertise with the community as a way to connect with the land and their ancestors. Palacios was looking for a safe place after leaving a relationship. She moved in and started offering free art workshops.
“I was able to focus on cultivating community but also getting to know our neighbors and organizing these events, whether they were knowledge shares or skill shares,” Palacios, 33, said, adding that a receptive audience helped build her confidence as an artist. She went on to have solo exhibitions and work as a teaching artist at elementary schools.
Everyone who lives or has lived at Casita has something important to offer. For Ramos’ partner Ellie Guzman, it’s her passion for cultural planning and growing food and herbs.
“I feel like the pandemic really taught us how weak the systems we live in are, in particular our food system,” Guzman, 30, said. “It was really important for us to know how to grow our own food and share with folks.”
Latinos and African Americans in Los Angeles County experienced the highest rate of food insecurity during the first months of the pandemic due to job losses and reduced access to healthy food, according to L.A. County Public Health.
Much of the food grown at Casita is in containers because of the proximity to the shuttered Exide battery recycling plant contamination site. Ramos points to the street corner, which is just outside the limit of the 1.7-mile cleanup area. After moving in, he used a home test kit to look for lead in the soil. He said lead levels were much higher than federal and state standards.
To help clean the soil he tried phytoremediation, which is planting crops such as corn and sunflowers to absorb the pollutants. It’s worked and lead levels have dropped, he said. Casita is currently part of the Propering Backyards project of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County that tests using the mineral zeolite for lead abatement.
Ramos planted corn to grow alongside native plants from seeds that have been passed down from generation to generation like white sage that only grows in Southern California and Northern Baja and is endangered because of overharvesting.
Sharing Indigenous and ancestral practices is an important part of their mission, Ramos and Guzman said. So are seasonal events such as their Seeding Abundant Futures classes that demonstrate how to grind maize using a stone and a bicimachina pedal processing machine, a bicycle powered grinder that Ramos first saw in Guatemala and put together in his backyard with the help of friends.
One of those friends was Ishi Sesmas, 26, who has worked on art and building projects at La Casita over the last six years. He was going to Cal State L.A. and living in his car when he met Ramos who offered him a place to live and a space to create his art, he said. He moved into Casita in the spring of 2024.
The Interdisciplinary artist hadn’t experienced collective support and solidarity before meeting Ramos and it’s changed his life and worldview, he said.
“To be able to have space, that is very significant because there are many powerful, beautiful and creative individuals and they just want to help their communities,” Sesmas said. “Casita embodies what you can experience when somebody has access to property and land.”
The artist wasn’t the only one moved by who he’s met at Casita. Ramos remembers the first time he met Guzman at a networking event he put on for creatives. It was crowded — about 50 people getting to know each other — but Ramos was so intrigued by Guzman that he found himself chatting with her most of the night.
On one of their first dates, Ramos helped Guzman build a garden box at her parents’ house. Growing food has ancestral significance for Guzman, whose grandfather traveled from Mexico to California every year as part of the Bracero farmworker program to earn money for food.
The couple hope to continue growing Casita’s offerings as they juggle full-time nonprofit jobs and their toddler.
Ramos saw gentrification push people out of Highland Park where he grew up. He knows that space is hard to come by and he and Guzman want to continue sharing what they have with future generations as their family grows.
“These practices of building businesses out of our homes comes from what our families did” in their home countries, Ramos said. “How do we continue to do that, but with community? To share their skills, their loves, that’s what I’m excited for.”
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