North East Trees is creating eco spaces for Latine communities in Los Angeles one plant at a time by organizing their “Salvia Mi Tierra” event three times a year. During this Latine Heritage Month, North East Trees aims to increase tree canopy and green spaces in underinvested communities in Southern California.
The event empowers the Latine community through the resilience and beauty of native plants, including Black sage, Purple sage, and Southern Californian Black Walnut.
With help from the Hispanic Access Foundation, these events are put on to support the Latine community’s participation in outdoor activities. These activities include being in nature, protecting natural resources, transplanting small Southern California Black Walnut trees, and planting Black and Purple sage plants to stay fight back against climate change.
Their motto is to introduce environmental equity, environmental justice, and rehab restoration to the community. “We were awarded a $5,000 grant to host this event with the Hispanic Access Foundation,” said Joe Laskin, Director of Development at North East Trees. Laskin leads fundraising, grants, and has established a relationship with the Hispanic Access Foundation.
Luis Sierra Campos is the Community Engagement Manager for North East Trees and has worked as an environmentalist rooted in justice and equity for over 20 years. Through community organizing, he brings the Latine community together to strengthen the connection between people and the earth.
Campos is the main organizer of “Salvia Mi Tierra” and was born to a lineage of farmers in Guanajuato, Mexico, where he always had a strong relationship with the earth.
“The idea is just to inspire our community to think of these issues and the fact that being knowledgeable can come in through personal or variety of experience…they come to collective experience, they come to cultural experience, they come to oral history,” said Campos, “It could come through you touching the earth. Still, you’re going to build your own relationship with the environment, and that’s what we want.”
Campos says his last name tells it all, “My last name is ‘Sierra Campos,’ so I am very much of the earth—Sierra, which means mountains, and Campos, which means field. Soy de la tierra del campo.”
Carlos Moran, the Executive Director of North East Trees, is an immigrant from Sonora, Mexico, and a Part Time Lecturer of Social Work at USC. One of his tasks at North East Trees is to plant trees, create parks, urban forests, and green streets for the community.
“Over our lifetime, we’ve planted hundreds and thousands of trees all over LA. We are currently working in the Northeast Los Angeles area, East Los Angeles and South Los Angeles,” said Moran. “We’re working in areas that need green spaces the most. If there are communities that are impacted by bad air quality, by no shade, we’re there.” In events like these they hire youth and young staff to be the ones who are contributing back to their community and making them green.
Campos says people from Mexico have a distinct relationship to the earth, and their relationship with society is different than other cultures. “What I like to do is just bring people together and share the fact that we as a Latinx community have a relationship to the earth… It’s in a different language than a different geography, but it’s still the same earth,” said Campos. “It’s still the same air, it’s still the same land, it’s still the same water, and that’s the diversity that connects different cultures.”
William Anthony Guerrero is the urban forestry manager for “Salvia Mi Tierra”, which has an emphasis on a special species. The Southern California Black Walnut is a tree species that’s endemic to this community, especially in the hillsides of Los Angeles.
“I take volunteers up to a specific area where we planted this species to create a juggling woodland, which is a Black walnut woodland,” said Guerrero, “We’re gonna just take them in and go more in-depth into the species itself, and then they’re gonna help us maintain the seedlings that we planted, whether that be watering, mulching, and also weeding around the season.”
Katie Vega is a fifth-generation Chicana of Indigenous descent and a Project Specialist for the Urban Trees Initiative at USC. The initiative is one of the many projects in the center that works with public and private entities to better connect with academic experts at USC.
Vega’s team partners with North East Trees for events like “Salvia Mi Tierra” to engage with the community. “I work with lots of different partners and work on projects that lead to some sort of social impact. So, with the Urban Trees Initiative, we’re trying to develop the research and the tools needed to help nonprofits like North East Trees and the city of L.A. to plant trees in the places where they need it the most. So our team has developed equity criteria and mapping to help those teams know where to plant trees,” said Vega.
“Salvia Mi Tierra” aims to share knowledge about green spaces in Latine communities while attempting to inform members of the community about climate change and nature in general.
If you’re interested in the next “Salvia Mi Tierra” event, it will be taking place on October 5th at Ascot Hills Park Nursery, Los Angeles, CA., at 9:00 a.m.