Small Family Farm

Chiquita and Hector Luis currently care for their family’s ancestral small family farm with several of their siblings. Their small family farm historically sustained two crops central to Caribbean colonial economies: sugar cane and tobacco for cigars and cigarettes. Roots indigenous to the Caribbean and Africa, corn, plantain, pana, and fruit trees, alongside chickens and hens, have always served to feed the family. Chiquita and Hector Luis currently plant food and medicinal staples, as well as maintain plants that had been stewarded and introduced by their ancestors before them including habichuelas, ají dulce, malanga, gandules, culantro, yautia, plátanos, guineos, chinas o naranjas, toronjas, guayabas, chayote, guanabana, and yerba buena, among many other food and medicinal sources, to meet their family’s and community’s everyday needs. They also seek to restore the local ecologies and the spring that used to provide fresh, clean, water to the whole community by re-introducing and stewarding autochthonous trees such as ceiba, capá blanco, and algarrobo trees. Turtles have returned to the nearby creek; a sign that the spring where they used to bathe as children is recovering from decades of deforestation and harmful pesticide and herbicide use encouraged by state-corporate partnerships in the agricultural sector.