Harvesting Power From the Roots: Becoming and Building the Comunidades Enraizadas Community Land Trust
Master’s Thesis, Tufts University | 2018
In the Boston suburb of Chelsea a group of predominantly Spanish-speaking, Central American immigrant women has formed to organize around collective goals of community land control. This group, Comunidades Enraizadas, or Rooted Communities, is using the community land trust model as a tool to stabilize their rapidly gentrifying community and enact visions of cooperative living. This thesis tells the story of the process of collectivization of Comunidades Enraizadas by illuminating the wide range of personal experiences that have driven the members to come together. Starting with the roots, the narrative uses the metaphor of the growth of a tree to explore the evolution of Comunidades Enraizadas from a small idea into an established collective. The project was informed by my involvement as a student-researcher with Comunidades Enraizadas over the course of a year and includes direct quotes from interviews with members, coalition meeting notes and agendas, and personal observations. [Read more]