ABSTRACT
This chapter is an ethnographic account that explores the lived realities of a group of urban gardeners in San Jose, CA. It investigates how a low-income and recent immigrant community of urban home gardeners, those who are often more exposed and vulnerable to the uncertainty of life in the Anthropocene, cultivate new subjectivities that forge alternative pathways to justice. By reintegrating conviviality as a cultural practice into their home gardens, they confront uncertainty while restoring their relationships with their food, the land, and each other. The global changes and cognitive shifts associated with uncertainty in the Anthropocene have differential impacts, so for any just transition in the Anthropocene to occur, new and innovative forms of resistance and cooperation must surface. This chapter explores how gardeners deploy convivial labor, or labor as a form of celebration and opposition to the alienation aspects of capitalism, to encourage a just transition for life in the Anthropocene.
