A Mango Tree Grows in Virgil Village

A story of neighbors growing their own food to preserve their roots

The following dispatch was written by Ali Rachel Pearl and Samanta Helou Hernandez, with photos by Samanta. The story switches between our voices as we walk you through our neighborhood’s plants and introduce you to the people who grow them.

Ali: One day early in the pandemic, my neighbor Luis and I were standing under the shade of the huge avocado tree on our block. Luis is around my father’s age and lives in the apartment complex next to mine. He was born in the Mexican state of Jalisco and came to the U.S. when he was 18 where he eventually got married and had a kid. He has lived on our block for 35 years. At some point a few years ago, I started referring to him as my LA dad because he does a lot of dad-like things, like clean my forever-dirty car windshield and ask me to help him with technology stuff. We have spent many pandemic hours chatting outside together, hours filled with stories of his escapades as a young construction worker in Los Angeles. But on this particular hot day, under our shared avocado tree, instead of another story about building up some part of this city with his own two hands, Luis started telling me about the best mango he’d ever eaten. 

“You know, one day I ate this mango and it was the best mango I’d ever eaten,” he said. “And I thought, I want to have that mango again, so I planted its seed in my yard, and eventually it became a tree and it gave mangos! I’ll give you one,” he promised.

A few days later, we were gathered outside again, as we were almost every day that summer, and he handed me a small bag of very tiny red chilis and one very large greenish-yellow mango. 

“The tree only gave me five this year,” he told me, “but I want you to have one.”

Blessed with these chilis and this single mango, I went home to prepare a meal. I started telling Luis’ mango story to my friends. There was something so sweet to me about his desire to hold onto the best mango he’d ever had by growing it into a tree that would always give him mangos, mangos born from that first best mango, mangos with promise. 

Over a year later, I was cleaning up the area behind my apartment when, through the fence, I heard my neighbor Luis’s son, my friend Louie, cleaning up his yard, which is directly behind mine. We could see slivers of earth other through the bamboo and chain-link fences that separate us. He was sweeping up leaves from the mango tree, so I told him how much I loved his dad’s story about how the tree came to be. 

“What?!” he said. “I planted this tree when I was little! I asked my parents if a tree would grow if I planted the seed and they said yes so I planted it.”