Discovering Community Resilience in Mexico City
Lessons and revelations
When you travel, inevitably you come across incredible places around the world that strike you with true wonder. And oftentimes, at least in my case, these are the places outside of the traditional travel itineraries and tourist hotspots — the ones that you happen to stumble upon.
I felt that sense of true wonder when I first came across Huerto Roma Verde back in 2023 while traveling through Mexico. Walking through the domed entrance made completely with recycled blue water cans, I emerged into a space filled with native plants and colorful walls aligning a corridor leading to a local farmers market. Simultaneously, talleres (workshops) were taking place where a group of people were learning how to create hand-made toys. And this just happened to be what was happening the day I visited — every day is different.
It’s difficult to describe what Huerto Roma Verde is in just a couple of words because I think it represents so many activities and ideas that need to be witnessed in person to understand, and the phrase “community center” just doesn’t cut it. At least on their website, they describe themselves as “Huerto Roma Verde is more than just a garden; its a laboratory of BioSocial resilience.” But to me, as a foreigner looking in, I even saw it as a hub of Mexican cultural pride and a platform to channel collaboration and learning.
I knew I had to come back and spend more time in this place and experience it more intimately. So a year later, I had the chance to come back to Mexico City for two months, and I decided to volunteer at Huerto Roma Verde every week.
As I was welcomed as a volunteer, I came to learn about the history of Huerto Roma Verde and that it was built upon the ruins of the infamous 1985 earthquake. Later in 2017, neighbors, activists, and the larger community got together to clean up the space and construct it into what is now an emblem of resilience itself. In a way I find it to be a beautiful tale of origin to execution — where a terrible natural disaster pulled in the community to gather and construct a space to remind us to consciously engage with environmentalism and social resilience.
I came every Saturday morning and helped out with sorting recycling materials that families would bring in — hundreds of bottles, cardboard boxes, tetra packs, papers, and miscellaneous plastic parts. I came to learn about the various categories involved in properly recycling. It still blows my mind that there aren’t just the two as I had grown up to think — blue for plastic and yellow for paper. Of course, processes and procedures vary since this is a different country — but it made me realize just how little I know about how our waste and recyclables are handled in the U.S.
Sidenote about one of my favorite procedural quirks of Mexico City: the trash is collected by these large trash trucks that don’t run on a schedule, instead they can show up at any time of the day and the only way you know that they are coming is they ring a bell and start shouting (almost singing), and when you hear the cue you gotta run down and hand them your garbage!
I also volunteered my efforts in the garden area of Huerto Roma Verde — helping with watering and trimming. What I was truly impressed to find is that the Huerto had various composting techniques that utilized traditional and indigenous knowledge — one being the chinampa method used by the Aztecs.
I think what touched me most about Huerto Roma Verde was that it was an amalgamation of what I loved, valued, and cared about. This little pocket of the world was doing everything in its power to help nurture community, nourish our planet, and restructure the destructive systems affecting the way we sustain humanity and life beyond. This place served as a reminder of what could be — what our planet could look like if we respected and took care of it, what our communities could look like if we looked out for one another, what human well-being could look like if we focused and elevated what truly matters.
It makes me think that we need more places like Huerto Roma Verde in the world — centers of resilience & community engagement. In our current reality as we are faced with the effects of climate change, our survival, or rather the survival of those already socially vulnerable, is dependent on access to resources and information on climate adaptation.
Now as I am back in Florida working on projects to increase climate resilience by developing “resilience hubs” in cities, Huerto Roma Verde has been a blueprint of success that I am attempting to translate into our framework.
And TRULY that is the beauty of travel — discovering an idea that you wouldn’t have found in your own backyard & carrying that idea back in its pieces, and attempting to rebuild it in said backyard. I’ve done that with food (cooking Thai meals), daily practices (having siesta hour mid-day), and rituals (Buddhist chanting) — but this time I am hoping to bring back a way of living and expand this mission of sustainability & resilience.
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