Refugee Community Gardens and the Politics of Self-Help

ABSTRACT This article examines the history of community gardens set up for refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 1980s as a window into debates surrounding resettlement, economic inequality, and welfare dependency in the United States. It argues that despite advocates’ emphasis on the continuity to the past that gardening has provided for refugees, refugee gardeners identified a vast disjuncture between their rural existence in Southeast Asia and the functions of vegetable growing in the U.S. Through community gardening, refugees nonetheless leveraged their intimate knowledge of nature and the environment to gain a measure of economic empowerment.