On a drizzly afternoon at the Dover Community Garden, a group of growers hunched over the pieces of a compost bin.
Glancing down at the instructions, Eva McClave, who serves on the garden’s board, offered guidance for constructing it to a couple of volunteers pitching in this group work day.
“Folks can come and work on their plot whenever they want, but there's something really special about working together on a project,” she said. “So I try to schedule work days like this every couple weeks.”
Together, they've installed rain collection barrels and planted flowers on the property.
The garden has existed for a while, but McClave said it’s gained a lot of momentum in the past year.
In early spring, a group of volunteers cleared and tilled the land and divided it into fresh plots. Come planting time, a lot of people were interested in the space — especially Guatemalan immigrants, McClave said, who claimed seven of the garden’s 11 plots.
Today, the Dover Community Garden is growing more than tomatoes and peppers. Its members are cultivating cross-cultural connections.
A growing Guatemalan community
A sign outside the gate states the garden’s hours in four languages: English, Spanish, K'iche and Ixil. It’s just a taste of the seven indigenous Mayan languages spoken across northeast Ohio’s Tuscarawas County.
Mayan immigrants from Guatemala have been settling in the area for decades, drawn to jobs in industries like agriculture.
“Poultry processing and things like that [were] a big draw, I think, and folks just looking for refuge and safety,” McClave said.
In 2000, less than 1% of Dover’s population was Latino. Today, that number has jumped to nearly 8%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And Latinos make up an even larger percent of the local student body: McClave says about a fifth of kids at Dover City Schools have a Guatemalan background.
For some of their families, the community garden offers an opportunity to grow traditional foods that might otherwise be difficult to access in rural Ohio.
Cathy Brito, who has lived in Dover for nearly a decade, says gardening reminds her of Guatemala.
“My family, we [had] a garden for the beans and the corn and everything,” she said. “But it’s the first time we do this here.”
She didn’t have the strongest yield this year since an animal devoured much of her crop, but a squash plant is still going strong. It’s not a zucchini or pumpkin.
“In my language, it’s güisquil,” she said. She uses the large leaves to make a tamale-like dish and puts the fruit in soup.
‘Coexistencia’
In addition to their traditional foods, Guatemalan gardeners have also shown their American neighbors how to use tools like the azadón — a type of hoe.
They’ve also demonstrated a companion planting method with the “three sisters,” where beans wind their way up corn stalks and squash leaves shade the soil.
Brito is sharing these traditional techniques with her young daughter. And she’s learning new practices too.
Eva McClave said after her family trellised tomatoes on a wire arch, immigrant families followed suit, building similar structures out of sticks.
“It was really cool,” she said. “The idea of planting vertically was a shared vision, but everyone did it differently.”
This type of cultural exchange shows the true beauty of the community garden, said Geronimo Ramirez. He works with Comunidad Sol, a nonprofit that advocates for the local Mayan community.
“In the Maya cosmovision, there's the idea of coexistence. There's coexistence with the Earth, but also coexistence with other people in our community. And that's what the garden allows us to do.”Geronimo Ramirez
“In the Maya cosmovision, there's the idea of coexistence,” he said through a Spanish interpreter. “There's coexistence with the Earth, but also coexistence with other people in our community. And that's what the garden allows us to do.”
Gardening as an act of resistance
At a time when many people in the immigrant community fear being deported or separated from their families, Ramirez says gardening is also an act of resistance.
During the Guatemalan Civil War, the military used food as a weapon, he said. Soldiers burned fields of corn and beans and blocked humanitarian aid, systematically starving entire villages.
By the time the 36-year conflict formally ended in 1996, more than 200,000 people were killed. The vast majority were Mayan.
“So an opportunity to grow here is just another way of showing resistance — that I survived and I am continuing to survive and thrive,” Ramirez said.
“We miss our country. We miss our family, but we serve life here,” he added in English. “This is our community too.”
By the end of the afternoon, the community-assembled compost bin was labeled with bilingual instructions and was ready to accept food scraps. Next year, it’ll enrich the soil here, so people can continue to put down roots.
