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Accepted Paper:
(Up-)Rooting: How Latinx Migrants Create Slow Spheres Of Plant Care Within Barcelona's Neoliberal Labour Rhythms
Flora Hastings
(SOAS University of London)
Against the backdrop of the constant movement and precarity for many Latinx workers in Barcelona's gig-economy, this paper will explore how the creation of an urban garden (huerto) provides an alternative sphere of slowness and non-monetised reciprocity.
Paper Abstract:
This paper will explore how, for some Latinx migrants, the growth and exchange of plants creates an alternative sphere to urban neoliberal precarity. Barcelona is made up by populations placed in hierarchies, each with their own rhythms of movement and displacement in the city's labour markets. I will focus on physical movement and frequent change as core experiential vectors that shape everyday migrant experience in the city. Stress, tiredness and the over-determination of inter-person dynamics through negative reciprocity ensue. Yet alternative paces exist. During my doctoral fieldwork (2022), I explored how Latinx migrants crafted an urban garden in the heart of the city. Plants provided care relations outside of economic exchange, uprooted plants drew threads of continuity between accommodation fluctuations while inter-ethnic exchanges were equalised outside of a racialised capitalist labour system.
Yet the very ecological shape of the huerto and styles of care within it reflected its place within a wider neoliberal rhythm of movement and change: the frequent removal and entry of plants, the limited space to put plants directly in the ground and the impossibility of food growth. In less diverse urban huertos, more stable work-hours and higher payment allowed for distinctly different cultivation methods, whereby the focus was on building up symbiotic, long-term inter-species dynamics within a "mini-ecosystem". I will conclude by exploring how manifestations of green spaces in the city and the grassroots wellness potentialities within them have to be understood in relation to neoliberal markets and the hierarchical inscription of citizens within this.