Papers by Antonio Roman-Alcalá
Journal of agriculture, food systems, and community development, May 28, 2024
Elementa, 2024
In this commentary, I consider the topic of “land reform” in the United States, addressing the st... more In this commentary, I consider the topic of “land reform” in the United States, addressing the status of land reform as a key concept and goal among agrifood scholars, food/farm movements, and government actors. I do so in order to encourage sustainable food advocates to consider land reform’s importance, its social basis, and its challenges. Informed by secondary literature and my own thinking and doing over 20 years of food systems activism and research, I ask: Why isn’t land reform more prominent as a central objective? What dynamics keep land reform off the agenda of U.S. agrarian and food movements? What can previous histories of land reform agitation teach us? How can the elements necessary to advance toward land reform in the United States be built? I explore land reform’s lack with an eye especially to those explanations that open up potential avenues for action, in order to spark conversation on potential barriers to land reform efforts, and to suggest potential ways to overcome them. I discuss political-economic, ideological, and organizational barriers and emphasize the role of anticommunism in shaping today’s land politics among food and farming movements. It is hoped that the commentary offers researchers and practitioners actionable insights into the need for a land reform agenda, potential strategies toward a land reform agenda, and an honest assessment of the impediments to that agenda’s advance.
Journal of agriculture, food systems, and community development, May 14, 2024
groecology-with its diverse, multifaceted, and liberatory principles, methods, and commitments-se... more groecology-with its diverse, multifaceted, and liberatory principles, methods, and commitments-seems incommensurate with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), with its settler colonial origins, imperial histories, racist legacies, neoliberal hegemonies, and contemporary reproduction of the unjust and ecocidal agricultural status quo. And yet, is it possible to make use of what the behemoth department has to offer, in its attempts, albeit paltry, at reform and restitution? More pressingly, can we engage and demand more from the non-monolithic ministry-call for it to stave off further corporate capture of markets, land, germplasm, data, and water? Can we pressure the USDA to protect farmworkers from exploitation, animals from abuse, cooperatives from corporate co-optation, and small-scale farmers from farmgate price degradation? Is abandoning the USDA tantamount to ceding its resources to agroindustries intent on dispossessing Black, Indigenous, and other essential agricultures? Shouldn't we at least attempt to obstruct the USDA's obstructionist international stance, as it thwarts the right to food, climate justice, labor rights, and redistributive reforms globally?
Using the case study of the 2012 illegal occupation of farmland owned by the University of Califo... more Using the case study of the 2012 illegal occupation of farmland owned by the University of California (“Occupy the Farm”), this paper investigates the promises and practical limits of constructing food sovereignty through direct action in the global North. Many grassroots activists find inspiration in the work of the Landless Peasant Movement (MST), La Via Campesina, and the concept(s) of Food Sovereignty (FS); many also express desires to transcend the market/state dichotomy through the creation of “commons”. Through interviews with Occupy the Farm activists, this investigation will show that despite the theoretical strength of the internationally-recognized “commons” framework for land ownership and management and the framework’s potential articulation with FS as a political movement, its weakly developed state within existing cultural, governance, and property institutions of market industrial societies limits implementation of that framework—even in a case concerning public reso...
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development
In 2021, I completed my Ph.D. dissertation research on Californian food movements (Roman-Alcalá, ... more In 2021, I completed my Ph.D. dissertation research on Californian food movements (Roman-Alcalá, 2021b).[1] That participatory research process deepened my preexisting engagement in these movements as an organizer, urban farmer, policy advocate, educator, and writer. You can find the 400 pages of details online, but the main thrust of the research concerned how various subsectors of food movements describe and manifest “emancipatory” politics, and how they do and do not work across various lines of difference. Secondarily, it concerned how food movements oppose—but also potentially intersect with—resurgent right-wing politics. Converging across differences is an essential challenge and task in order to fundamentally transform the food system, push back right-wing gains, and achieve a broader emancipatory political agenda. In this short commentary, I offer some insights on these topics from the research and my over 18 years of involvement in emancipatory (food) politics. . . .
Between Fault Lines and Front Lines, 2022
This dissertation is dedicated to the past, the present, and the future. It is dedicated in memor... more This dissertation is dedicated to the past, the present, and the future. It is dedicated in memory of my grandparents who recently joined the ancestors: Ruth Solmitz Alcalá and Jorge Humberto Alcalá. It is also dedicated a mi mamá, without whom this work simply would not have been possible to complete. And it is dedicated to all those who (do and will) struggle against dreadful realities and uninspiring possibilities, and spend their days building a more beautiful world regardless of the pains, the haters, or the challenges. vi Contents List of Tables, Images, and Appendices xi Acronyms xii Acknowledgements xiv Abstract xviii Samenvatting Error! Bookmark not defined.
The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020
This paper applies an anarchist lens to agrarian politics, seeking to expand and enhance inquiry ... more This paper applies an anarchist lens to agrarian politics, seeking to expand and enhance inquiry in critical agrarian studies. Anarchism's relevance to agrarian processes is found in three general areas: (1) explicitly anarchist movements, both historical and contemporary; (2) theories that emerge from and shape these movements; and (3) implicit anarchism found in values, ethics, everyday practices, and in forms of social organizationor 'anarchistic' elements of human social life. Insights from anarchism are then applied to the problematique of the contemporary rise of 'authoritarian populism' and its relation to rural people and agrarian processes, focusing on the United States. Looking via an anarchist lens at this case foregrounds the state powers and logics that underpin authoritarian populist political projects but are created and reproduced by varying political actors; emphasizes the complex political identities of nonelite people, and the ways these can be directed towards either emancipatory or authoritarian directions based on resentments towards state power and identifications with grassroots, lived moral economies; and indicates the strategic need to prioritize ideological development among diverse peoples, in ways that provide for material needs and bolster lived moral economies. The paper concludes with implications for the theory and practice of emancipatory politics.
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2019
The growing academic literature on 'food sovereignty' has elaborated a food producer-driven visio... more The growing academic literature on 'food sovereignty' has elaborated a food producer-driven vision of an alternative, more ecological food system rooted in greater democratic control over food production and distribution. Given that the food sovereignty developed with and within producer associations, a rural setting and production-side concerns have overshadowed issues of distribution and urban consumption. Yet, ideal types such as direct marketing, time-intensive food preparation and the 'family shared meal' are hard to transcribe into the life realities in many non-rural, non-farming households, and it is unclear, in turn, how such realities can fit into models of food sovereignty. A particular practical and research gap exists in how to engage the overwhelming need for food options served under time constraints and (often) outside of the home or a full-service restaurant. The over-generalized vilification of 'fast food' should be replaced by a framework that allows us to distinguish between unhealthy, corporate fast foods and both traditional and emerging alternatives that can serve to extend the tenets of food sovereignty further into food processing, distribution and consumption. This article analyzes existing conceptualizations of fast food, explores fast food historically, and studies how food sovereignty can operationalize its tenets and priorities in situations where fast food is an unquestionable necessity.
Third World Quarterly, 2016
Abstract This paper addresses the ambiguity of the term ‘sovereignty’ in food sovereignty (FS), i... more Abstract This paper addresses the ambiguity of the term ‘sovereignty’ in food sovereignty (FS), intending to clarify the ‘aspirational sovereignty’ that food sovereignty movements indicate as the ideal configuration of power that would allow FS to flourish, or which might help measure movement towards FS. Since aspirational sovereignty is conditioned by existing power relations, the paper elaborates components of ‘actually existing sovereignty’, based on readings of a variety of political and social science literatures. By critically assessing the difference between actually existing and aspirational sovereignty across three geographic–political levels, the paper offers strategic options for constructing FS, and suggests what such an elaborated definition of FS’s sovereignty might offer future research on FS.
Globalizations, 2015
Abstract Land access is an accepted corollary to food sovereignty, long promoted by the transnati... more Abstract Land access is an accepted corollary to food sovereignty, long promoted by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC). LVC's land access politics have evolved with increased incorporation of diverse perspectives, but remain largely focused on achieving ‘integral agrarian reform’ in the global South. Here, I take a case where food sovereignty activists (‘Occupy the Farm’ (OTF)) occupied land owned by a public university in California, the USA, in order to broaden food sovereignty's land access considerations beyond the South, and to analyze conditions where political actions (including occupations) can help achieve changes in land access regimes. The OTF action was successful in challenging cultural norms about property and achieving access, partly due to the occupation having foregrounded multiple appealing narratives that invited participation and wider support. These narratives included agroecology versus biotechnologies; community/public access versus privatization; participatory versus bureaucratic governance structure; and green space/food production versus urban development. The article tests the use of the ‘land sovereignty’ frame in expanding food sovereignty's land politics, to encompass land contestation contexts globally and deal with the particular conditions surrounding lands. The case indicates that land occupations in the North are potentially useful—but uncertain, and very context-dependent—tactics to promote land and food sovereignty.
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 2015
Based on the author's experience in urban agriculture projects and organizations in the United St... more Based on the author's experience in urban agriculture projects and organizations in the United States, this commentary offers some basic, initial, and practical suggestions for how activists who are white or otherwise of relative privilege can approach "food justice" activism in ways that avoid re-inscribing white supremacy, and can more likely achieve the potential of transformative and multiracial urban agriculture movements.
This paper analyzes ‘food sovereignty’ and the movements that work for it at local, national, and... more This paper analyzes ‘food sovereignty’ and the movements that work for it at local, national, and supranational levels and at the intersection of markets, governments, and civil society. The goal is to illuminate potential aspects of post-growth socio-ecological systems management regimes. These aspects include: (a) socially and ecologically embedded and politically engaged market activity, as evidenced by ‘peasant’ modes of food production and distribution; (b) deliberative and ‘agonistic’ democratic models for policy construction, as evidenced by internal organizational processes within the transnational food sovereignty network La Vía Campesina; and (c) multi-sited ‘relational’ forms of understanding and institutionalizing sovereignty, as evidenced by the complex of institutions engaged by food sovereignty movements and the ways that ‘power over’ aspects of classical sovereignty are combined with more ‘power with’ and ‘power to’ conceptions emergent in food sovereignty. Although ...
In the San Francisco Bay Area, during the last nine years advocates have made major inroads in sh... more In the San Francisco Bay Area, during the last nine years advocates have made major inroads in shifting local policies and approaches to urban agriculture. At the same time, the city’s landscape has undergone massive transformation. In this chapter, based on personal experiences as leaders in urban agriculture in the Bay Area and as researchers on the (transformational) politics of food systems, we propose that the justice-driven components of urban agriculture movements are subject to the influence of broader changes in political-economic context, and that urban agriculture is easily absorbed into existing neoliberal and pro-development political trajectories and projects. In this chapter, through the case of the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance, we analyze the movement’s composition, its genesis over time, and how the movement has confronted the tensions and limitations of neoliberal urbanization.
Scholar-activism is attractive to researchers who want not just to learn about the world, but abo... more Scholar-activism is attractive to researchers who want not just to learn about the world, but about how to change that world. Agri-food studies have experienced a surge in the past two decades in researchers who see closer ties to social movements as key to food systems change. Yet to date, much scholar-activism depends on individually negotiated researcher-movement relationships, which may or may not be sustained long term and where knowledge can remain siloed. The Agroecology Research-Action Collective (ARC) seeks something different. Born of a desire to subordinate scholarship for scholarship’s sake to the needs and exigencies of movements, ARC envisages collective processes, horizontal non-exploitative learning among ourselves and with movements, and mechanisms for multidirectional accountability. This reflective essay is the story of how ARC set out to “get our house in order”: to organize ourselves as scholars committed to systematizing more accountable and reciprocal rela...
Journal of Rural Studies
The 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president came as a surprise to many-but generally not to... more The 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president came as a surprise to many-but generally not to farmers and rural communities. We interrogate the politics of rural places in generating both support for and struggle against authoritarian populism. We ask: Why do the politics of the rural US seem so regressive today? What historical forces underlie the recent resurgence of reactionary politics? How does resistance emerge from and produce authoritarian power? Looking to histories of small farmer and farm labor organizing in two agricultural regions-California and the Midwest-we find some answers. California has been a principal site for honing the discourses, strategies, and tactics of consolidating right-wing power in the US. Though often considered a bastion of right-wing sentiment, the Midwest sheds light on a rich tradition of rural organizing that at times led Heartland politics in emancipatory directions. Synthesizing our cases offers the following lessons: First, capitalist growers and business allies in both regions developed new strategies to assert class power through authoritarian populist ideologies and tactics, paving the way for national right-wing successes. Second, socially conservative cultural norms and alliances have been central to organizing this incipient authoritarian populist hegemony. Third, radicalism, liberalism, and liberal policy changes have often fueled the rise of conservative populisms. Fourth, working towards emancipation among non-elites has required working across differences. These lessons provide a roadmap for intersectional and cross-sectoral organizing in contemporary times.
Agriculture and Human Values
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Papers by Antonio Roman-Alcalá