A South Bronx Garden Offers a Place for New York’s Immigrant Communities to Keep Traditions Alive

Last autumn, the outdoor kitchen at New York City’s Bruckner Mott Haven Garden—a community space in the South Bronx located between an elevated highway, industrial buildings, and a six-story apartment building—made its debut.

From a tall, column-like redbrick hearth, Natalia Méndez, a cofounder of the nearby Oaxacan restaurant La Morada, grilled fresh corn over an open fire and served steaming bowls of refried beans, freshly made guacamole, and crispy flautas. Families enjoyed their meals and lounged in hammocks suspended from a canopy roof surrounding the outdoor fireplace. Curious visitors roamed around the new raised beds, rainwater harvesting and purifying system, greenhouse, and solar-powered bathroom—features that the garden’s steward (and Méndez’s daughter), Carolina Saavedra, had dreamed of since she began helping to rehabilitate the 40-year-old green space in 2019 after it had fallen into disrepair.

The project, named H.earth, is a collaboration between La Morada, the Bronx Land Trust (an organization that manages 18 community gardens in the borough), and the nonprofit design collective Territorial Empathy. Together, the women-led team has transformed the garden into what it calls a sanctuary—a place for community care where people can get a meal, learn about sustainable gardening, or just rest. It’s also a space of cultural preservation where Méndez and Saavedra can teach children about plants and Indigenous medicine and the recipes that have sustained their family for generations. The plan is for the garden to become a resource for La Morada’s mutual aid kitchen, which began serving more than 500 free meals per day during the Covid pandemic and continues to do so.

Against the backdrop of the South Bronx’s relatively slow recovery since the start of the pandemic, as well as multigenerational disinvestment that has included redlining and forced displacement due to highway construction, H.earth demonstrates how community-led architecture can help heal a neighborhood. Last fall, Dwell spoke with Méndez, Saavedra, and Zarith Pineda, the founder of Territorial Empathy, about why this project was important for them to complete.