For several years, hundreds of students have been tour guests and interns at a community garden, the Beach Flats Garden, run by Mexican and Salvadorian farmers in Santa Cruz, California. This paper reflects upon engagement between the gardeners and local educational institutions and opportunities through three major themes: connection between practices of solidarity, urgency of action, and pedagogy; possibilities in engaging with the frameworks of critical food system pedagogy alongside the lessons of autonomia and activist ethnography; and the importance of teaching the history of agroecology and more broadly of social research in connection with resistance to capitalist-colonial domination. The article discusses what place the garden holds in expanding and deepening the scope of food system education through providing examples of noncapitalist exchanges and practices, a space of resistance to gentrification in a highly competitive land market, and decolonial foodways that emphasize gardeners’ traditional agroecological knowledge.
