This study uses ethnographic narratives of a Santa Clara Valley community of urban gardeners gathered from 2012 to 2016 to investigate the lived realities and struggles of creating an actually existing home garden commons. Many of these gardeners are recent immigrants for rural Mexico, Central American, and South East Asia, and many descend from rural traditions of commoning. Nevertheless, the current conditions in the urban centers of developed countries are far different from their dislocations. I argue that this multi-ethnic, multi-lingual group of home gardeners makes use of their marginality as an inventive force to create an actually existing commons. A home garden commons is a place of contradiction that is both neoliberal and radical. The findings suggest that marginalized, oppressed, and displaced peoples use resistance to reconstruct the basis of their social interactions. The growing, sharing, and consuming of food together produces forms of social life that enable people to envision new ways of being and becoming in post-capitalist futures.
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