To Mai Nguyen, food is intertwined with culture.
“Foods were part of our traditions, our daily meals,” said Nguyen, who comes from a family of Vietnamese refugees. “It nourished our ancestors. They’re important building blocks for who we are.”
Growing up, Nguyen’s family and community grew traditional crops. These special varieties never failed to instill a sense of home in a new place, they said.
Since then, Nguyen has been invested in agriculture. Despite Asian Americans’ complicated past in the industry, Nguyen—amongst others—dedicate their lives to reclaiming culture through traditional farming practices and produce.
Today, about 96% of California farmworkers identify as Hispanic, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey.
In 2017, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s census found Asian producers accounted for 0.7% of the country’s 3.4 million producers. However, Asian American farmers played key historical roles in American and especially Californian agriculture.
“Asian American growers introduced asparagus, celery, strawberries, sugar, and beans, to the American palate,” Yvonne Lee, a member of the U.S. Department Of Agriculture Equity Commission, said in a USDA blog post.
Due to discrimination, there aren’t as many AAPIs in farming today, Nguyen said. But there is a rich, yet grim AAPI agricultural history that goes overlooked.
How we got here
When Chinese immigrants came to work on the railroad, they did not have equal rights.
Barred from obtaining citizenship, they were referred to as “Chinaman” or “Chinawoman" instead of their names. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 later prohibited further immigration. One farmworker, Ah Bing, was the first foreman to propagate the popular Bing Cherry. The cherry outlasted his time in the United States though. He was turned away from reentering the country after a trip to China due to the Exclusion Act. The industry carried on without him.
Japanese Americans also transformed California swamp lands into bountiful, lucrative farm sites.
“Before the second world war, two-thirds of Japanese Americans on the West Coast were working in agriculture, cultivating fruits and vegetables on coastal bluffs, arid ranches and defunct gold mines,” Claire Wang wrote in a 2023 article for The Guardian. In California, these farmers produced “more than 70% of greenhouse flowers and 40% of commercial vegetables, including nearly all strawberries, tomatoes, celery and peppers.”
Yet they lost all of their land when the U.S. government forcibly removed them to incarceration camps during World War II.
“It was a part of the motivation for their incarceration, which was that their land was so valuable and it was a means for white people to steal their land,” Nguyen added. “So, whatever progress that Asian Americans have made, it's been robbed from them.”
Moreover, alien land laws enacted in 1913 denied Japanese families “their foothold in America by denying them the right to own land,” according to the Equal Justice Initiative. The law tightened further to bar “Asian immigrants, their American-born children, and even corporations run by Asian immigrants from leasing and owning land.” The penalty was up to two years in prison and reflects the interwoven nature of citizenship and land—one that remains complicated.
Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders faced a similar pattern of discrimination. Hawaiian farmers largely stopped cultivating wetland kalo in the 1910s due to the influx of the sugar industry and the rise of Western influence.
“That really forced a lot of Native Hawaiians to either leave their land and no longer farm it or sell their land to the sugar plantations or even have their land adverse possessed by the sugar plantation, which was just one of the many forms of colonization, in detriment to our Native people here,” said Hōkūao Pellegrino, who owns a kalo farm in Maui.
Even when businesses flourish today, governments oftentimes withhold loans from AAPI farmers. During President Joe Biden’s first two years in office, Black and Asian American farmers who applied for direct loans through the USDA were rejected at higher rates than other racial groups, NPR’s Ximena Bustillo notes.
Farmworker advocacy groups have also “intentionally left out” the AAPI population despite their contributions, Nguyen said.
“In terms of land, capital, citizenship, all of those ways that we’ve been left out,” they said. “It just creates even more barriers to just being able to put a seed in the ground.”
Drawing from compassion
Nguyen is the sole employee of their farm nestled in a hotspot of agriculture—Sebastopol, California.
The small city an hour north of San Francisco houses Nguyen’s 50 acres of land, which has harvested heirloom grains as well as Southeast Asian vegetables and greens over the years.
Nguyen visited vegetable farms in Southeast Asia prior to starting their own farm. The practices they observed became seeds for Nguyen’s farming.
Originally set on pursuing climate research, they went to Southeast Asia with the intent to study waste governance. In the process, they worked on sewage and water sanitation projects for disaster relief and refugee camps.
The Buddhist farms Nguyen worked for in Southeast Asia prioritized compassion towards every living thing. The farms cast aside the sterile view of farming that attempts to eliminate all life besides the product being grown, they said.
“Drawing from that compassion from the scale of the insect, to the scale of deer, that we are a part of a whole world that we have largely shaped for our benefit,” they said. “But in that power that we hold, we need to use it to also help steward everything else that is there in this ecosystem.”
When asked about one crop that stands for Nguyen, they instantly responded with “chilies.”
The black, slender chili of central Vietnam painted the dishes of Nguyen’s childhood. Nguyen’s family utilized a variety of cuts and colors to create a “stunning image of beautiful food,” they said. It brought joy to their mom, aunts, and grandmother.
They added that society largely discounts people of color for having culture besides “getting by” and “working hard for basics.”
“We come from rich cultures that have these ideas of beauty and ways we merge our aesthetics and design with our food,” they said.
Ancestral palettes
An ocean away, in Waikapū, Maui, another farmer shares Nguyen’s philosophies.
A small community road snakes through rural and suburban landscapes to Pellegrino’s cherished farm. The neighboring former plantation fields were developed into homes, but Nohoʻana Farm remained untouched—an “oasis in a suburb,” as he refers to it.
Every day, Pellegrino meticulously watches the Waikapū Stream. It is the lifeline not only for his farm, but the farms below and above them. This water will feed the taro patches he has cultivated for decades now.
Pellegrino, the owner of Nohoʻana Farm, oversees the largest kalo farm in Waikapū, Maui.
According to their website, the two acres of wetland cultivates 45 varieties of kalo (taro). The family farm also grows other Hawaiian crops, such as ʻulu (breadfruit), maiʻa (banana), ʻuala (sweet potato) and niu (coconut).
The farm’s motto is “E ola mau ka mahiʻai kuʻuna,” which translates to “perpetuating traditional Hawaiian agriculture.” Yet, their mission extends beyond food production. The farm makes efforts to revitalize ancestral palettes through education.
“Because of this long period of colonization and demise of our language, culture practices, farming, food systems, a lot of our Hawaiian population along with locals that live here have become disconnected with these ancestral foods,” Pellegrino said.
He said Hawaiian staples, like poi, have been “bastardized” by outside influence, haphazardly presented at tourist lūʻaus in a way that betrays its origins.
“[Poi] really is the basis for which our ancestors were able not to just survive in Hawaiʻi for almost two centuries, but really thrive,” he said.
Due to discriminatory measures in place generations before Pellegrino was born, he did not grow up farming or speaking Hawaiian.
“We grew up eating poi—poi was my first food,” he said. “But, my connection to it, spiritually, physically, emotionally, socially, culturally, it really didn't start until [much later].”
Today, more than 10,000 students—ranging from kindergarten to college—have volunteered on Pellegrino’s farm and participated in their education program, which focuses on culture and traditional farming practices.
This work not only revitalizes the traditional practices for the next generation of Native Hawaiians and locals, but also cultural identity, he said.
Outsiders can sometimes label this as threatening, a notion Pellegrino rejects.
“Our practices are about sustainability. It’s about watershed protection. It’s about revitalizing indigenous food systems. All of these things are not just beneficial to us, as Indigenous people in this space, but it's beneficial to the health and well being of our entire population,” he said. “We can’t just work in silos, it needs to be collaborative.”
