Star Tribune Takes Interest in our Gardening Project in Northfield
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on July 19, 2007
Nice article by Ben Goessling on yesterday’s Star Tribune South. Here is the link to the article, and here is the whole article if you just want to read it here.
Garden a seed for positive change
It might just be a garden now, but Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin sees a lot more than that in his first project for Northfield Latinos.
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Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin leans over to inspect the onion patch growing in his Northfield garden, and already he can see progress.”That’s $3 from here to here,” he says, stretching his arms to span a row of four plants. “That’s about what a farmer’s getting for a bushel of corn this year.”
He sees progress, too, when he gets a phone call later that night informing him that a local Latino family showed up, unannounced, to work on the garden.
That’s happening more frequently these days. And it’s all part of the plan for the Latino Enterprise Center executive director, who sees this little “gardening experiment” as the start of a big change in Northfield.
“We’re creating business development, leadership development and skill development,” he said.
This garden was Haslett-Marroquin’s first big idea to empower Latino entrepreneurs when he came to Northfield last fall, and it’s starting to take off.
Six Latino families and six high school students are growing vegetables in three spots in the northeast corner of Northfield.
Much of the food will feed Latino families, but part of the harvest will yield a profit: 5,000 onions are already committed to Northfield’s Just Foods Co-Op, and Haslett-Marroquin is formulating plans to handle additional interest next year, with an eye toward eventually starting a Latino farmers’ co-op.
He’s also talked with Maria and Rafael Estrada, owners of Maria’s Restaurant and Cantina in Northfield, about marketing their own salsa using locally grown vegetables.
“A lot of the Latinos that come up here are tradesmen. They aren’t entrepreneurs, so to speak,” Northfield Enterprise Center executive director Lee Runzheimer said. “We’re trying to say, ‘Hey, even though the types of Latino residents we have haven’t though about being entrepreneurs, there’s potential there.’”
Haslett-Marroquin’s hope is that the garden’s benefits won’t stop at financial profit.
He is using the project to create a community hub for Latinos, whom he’s often found to be isolated from the rest of Northfield.
He created an emergency network for Latino families to reach each other in case of immigration raids or gang activity, and he hopes to develop a mini-council to foster civic involvement.
“Every Saturday night for the next 12 to 14 months, we’re going to bring in leaders to educate us on everything they do,” he said. “A year from now, we’ll have a group of relatively well-trained representatives of the Latino community.”
And though he said he isn’t concerned Latinos had anything to do with recent news of a Northfield heroin problem, Haslett-Marroquin met with Police Chief Gary Smith to find ways to cut off any connection between heroin rings and gangs that might bring drugs into the Latino community.
“We’re not policing,” he said. “We need training on what it’s appropriate for residents to do.”
It’s all part of Haslett-Marroquin’s ever-expanding definition of progress.
“You get people doing things on their own, and you go, ‘Wow, this feels good,’ ” he said. “That’s when you know things start happening.”
Ben Goessling • 612-673-7252 • bgoessling@startribune.com
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