Two years ago, I took a community-based service-learning course (required at CSUMB) that connected me with the Rural Development Center (RDC), a local small farm education program. The RDC teaches Spanish-speaking individuals and families how to start and manage their own organic farming businesses. It’s an incredible empowerment program here in the Salinas Valley where Spanish-speaking farm workers compose a large part of the population. My service at the RDC has ranged from field work with student farmers to a liaison between farmers and their English-speaking customers. The service assignment evolved into my senior research project on organic farming and more involvement with RDC farmers. My close relationship and work with the farmers constantly raises issues of power, privilege, economics, culture, and language barriers. “Terreno” reflects these issues. I started the story in an introductory creative writing class titled “Writers as Witness” taught by Frances Payne Adler. The class centered around social action writing, using words to “break silences” about our world and what we see. In this way social activism and creative writing become one and the same—where the student practices a genre in a context of social
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric