“Tender” is a column about all of the beautiful, delicious, and liberating ways that LGBTQ+ people work with food. From production to preparation, local farms to reimaginings of the restaurant, our community is at the forefront of what it means to nourish and be nourished today. Read more from the series here.
Tara Rodríguez Besosa is standing on a rooftop in the middle of a tropical forest searching for signal. “The rain makes cell service weak,” they tell me over a crackling phone call. Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, they grew up with the lapping ocean as their backyard. Now, the 38-year-old food sovereignty activist lives on a queer collective homestead, OtraCosa, in the mountainous barrio of San Salvador in Caguas.
Looking down at the tropical vegetation, they rattle off the names of edible plants with the speed of a botanist: Sugarcane, banana, plantain, ñame (a local variety of yam), mango, avocado, guava, pineapple, papaya, soursop, pigeon peas, comfrey, and Ylang Ylang, “the first tree that we planted on this land,” they recall with excitement. “All of this is growing within fifty feet from me — I’m in such an incredible space.”
Squinting their deep-set brown eyes, Rodríguez Besosa scans the misty horizon and counts eight landslides that have cut through the landscape. A neighbor’s car is buried in mud, unlikely to be dug out. Rural roads have been washed away after days of torrential rain. Neighboring farmers are still without electricity, weeks after Hurricane Fiona whipped through Puerto Rico with heavy winds and mass flooding.
Down the hill from their homestead, El Departamento de la Comida, a collective food hub that Rodríguez Besosa co-founded, is building a support system for local farming beyond hurricane season. A walk-in cooler that runs on an air conditioner will soon ensure freshly-harvested produce grown by local farmers doesn't rot. Eventually El Depa’s cooler will function off the grid, powered by solar panels. There’s an outdoor washing station where crops are received and cleaned adjoining a commercial kitchen space used to process vegetables and prepare meals. El Depa, its nickname, also hosts a threefold library, which includes a collection of seeds from native plants, books about the plant history of Puerto Rico, Indigenous poetry, and agricultural fiction, along with a tool library stocked with equipment for farming, small-scale construction, volunteer projects, and emergency response. “When a storm hits, we have a chainsaw ready,” Rodríguez Besosa assures, because everyone in Puerto Rico knows that neighbors are the first responders. No one has faith in the government.
“Our disasters are not hurricanes,” says Rodríguez Besosa, who has weathered their share of storms. “It has to do with our control of our own resources, or lack thereof, and decision making around our infrastructure, whether it be education, health, or electricity.” Local government representatives offer too little too late, Rodríguez Besosa contends, sending caravans of bottled water bloated under the hot sun to folks without electricity or clean water. “I'm like, I need help with rainwater collecting and a water filtration system. Would you have funding to help us with that?” they tell me. “That would give us 1000 gallons instead of little bottles of water. What are we going to do with this trash? We have no empty landfills.”
Band-aid solutions can’t cover up the ongoing effects of U.S. colonialism, government corruption and neglect, and the privatization of public utilities that has resulted in a steadily-crumbling public infrastructure, worsened by the power monopoly of LUMA Energy, a private energy company that replaced the publicly-owned PREPA (Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority) in 2021. Distrust in the state is rooted in history, Rodríguez Besosa explains. Generations of Puerto Ricans have been subjected to experimentation, testing, and abuse without their knowledge or consent, for development of the birth control pill, surgical sterilization, and Agent Orange, to name a few. “Within the history of Puerto Rican bodies — including our lands and our people — we have been the guinea pigs of many things,” they sigh.
At the center of the struggle for Puerto Rican sovereignty is access to land and being able to grow food. Despite an optimal climate for biodiverse agriculture, Puerto Rico imports over 80% of its food at steep costs compared to the mainland. “We were force-fed the American dream,” explains Rodríguez Besosa. “We were told how to be civilized: It’s the can, it’s the microwave, it’s going into the supermarket and having money to treat yourself to packaged foods,” they continue. “We were told that these fruit trees growing in our backyards were worthless.”
Eating from what the land provides and what neighbors grow, instead of what U.S. ships bring to port, is central to establishing food sovereignty and keeping Boricua culture alive. Plants that grow abundantly like breadfruit are highly perishable and ill-suited for the industrial supermarket system. Açaí is imported to satiate food trends while the islands’ own ripe fruits, like guava, ketembilla, and jobillo, rot on the ground.
“Why are we not picking the fruit that is a part of where we come from and keep it from getting lost?” they contend. “The trees need to be eaten from. They need to be celebrated. They need to be protected.”
Rodríguez Besosa co-founded El Departamento de la Comida in 2010 as one of Puerto Rico’s first multi-farm community supported agriculture (CSA) programs. The name, which translates to the Department of Food, gestures to the state's failure and proposes an alternative way of farming, cooking, and eating. Within two years, El Depa had expanded into a bustling storefront, restaurant, and kitchen space located in San Juan. In 2017, it was destroyed by hurricane María.
Without a physical location, Rodríguez Besosa and fellow organizers pivoted to solidarity brigades on the islands. Volunteers traveled by van to help local farms, bringing their own hand tools, food, clean water, and construction materials. Building upon relationships with queer and trans-led grassroots collectives in the U.S., El Depa raised more than $400,000 in relief aid. The long-term goal is to rebuild a decimated food system under the guiding pillars of reforestation, rainwater catchment systems, renewable energy, seed sovereignty, and community wellness.
Now based in San Salvador with 2,000 square feet and a small yard, El Depa serves as a hub beyond food. It’s a model for using decentralized renewable energy to exist outside of a broken, costly power grid, and to preserve Boricua culture against incoming waves of crypto-colonialism; tax avoidance incentives for bitcoin billionaires invite crypto mining to the island, processes that use as much energy as entire countries. Meanwhile, the sustainable farming practices that El Depa participates in help mitigate climate change, curb greenhouse gas emissions, and bolster local supply chains.
“How does this space work as a food hub in a small community?” Rodríguez Besosa asks, then answers. “Equipping itself with the resources available to be of support in times like these and on a daily basis — because our electricity doesn't only go out with storms. We have blackouts when the skies are clear.”
Rodríguez Besosa hasn’t always carried a machete through the jungle to forage fruit and identify medicinal herbs. Everything changed in 2008 when their mom uprooted her life in San Juan to start organic farming in the mountain town of Aibonito. “I was working at an architecture firm in New York City when she called me. She’s like, ‘Have you heard about global warming?’” recalls Rodríguez Besosa. At first, it seemed like their mom was having a midlife crisis, following a tumultuous divorce from her third and final marriage. She wasn’t a farmer; she worked in retail. “She literally traded her Prada sandals for rubber boots and an old pick-up truck and started growing kale, mustard greens, French breakfast radishes, dill and tarragon,” they laugh. “My sister and I thought, ‘Shit, our mom's depressed.’”
Curious to see what life was like in the mountains, Rodríguez Besosa visited the farm and felt a deep connection with the land. Growing up, their family never owned a home, was often behind on rent, and moved more than 30 times. The land offered grounding, and in return, Rodríguez Besosa offered photoshop and graphic design skills to sell their mom’s produce. Eventually they started to wonder, “What the fuck am I doing in New York? I'm working my ass off and I can't even afford to live here.” Within a year, they had broken up with their partner, quit the architecture firm, and started working in restaurants, crashing on a friend’s couch instead of renting to save money for travel to and from Puerto Rico.
By 2009, Rodríguez Besosa moved home permanently, first landing in Santurce where they started a punk underground venue, El Local. There, they helped co-organizers Mariana Roca and Enityaset Rodríguez host DIY art exhibits, music shows, and garage sales, where Rodríguez Besosa sold sprouted salads and freshly-blended smoothies made with their mom’s produce. Cash-poor but vegetable-rich, they set up shop at the farmer's markets to sell their mom’s crops and bartered bags of arugula for loaves of bread at the end of the market day. Whatever was left, they resold by hitting up their friends over text. “I started literally dealing in food,” they chuckle.
Food offered more than a job and quick cash. The plants themselves unlocked a clearer understanding of queer identity. Rodríguez Besosa took local food medicine classes and learned about permaculture as Indigenous practice and the history of plant biodiversity in Puerto Rico. “I just started making connections and recognizing the nonbinary in all of these systems,” they explain. “We can recognize that ecosystems don't work in the binary, so why can’t we see that monoculture is something that happens within our family and community?” they ask. “Why am I having more in common with a fucking papaya plant than I'm having with some fellow human being?”
Plants, like people, have been marginalized, Rodríguez Besosa realized. Culturally significant species have been eradicated or stereotyped as dangerous like ruda, a medicinal herb that’s an abortifacient, and oregano brujo, which translates to witch’s oregano, a name that reinforces Christian taboos around herbal remedies.
Embracing forgotten or maligned plants goes hand-in-hand with building intergenerational connections. El Depa’s upcoming project, Ceiba, named after the largest flowering tree in the world, will help to fill generational gaps in cultural knowledge and strengthen bonds between elders and younger members who offer support through physical labor, accompaniment, and sometimes just listening.
“That's what agroecology in itself teaches. You learn by listening, by being present and practicing. It's about that process of doing this together,” says Rodríguez Besosa. “The rainwater catchment system is not just going to be hiring a company; we will go through the whole process. How does this work? What do we need? Where does this go? Who's going to build this?”
In 2011, Rodríguez Besosa’s mom passed away from cancer. Thanks to her legacy and years of soul-searching near the end of her life, the two siblings live on farms, grow food, and are involved in the agroecology movement in Puerto Rico. “We just look at each other and smile. Somehow she got us both to move into the mountain, and here we are,” Rodríguez Besosa declares.
Within and beyond the coasts of Puerto Rico, there is an extended network of collaborators, friends and comrades, like La Sombrilla Cuir, EspicyNipples, and Food Issues Group, that Rodríguez Besosa turns to for connection. It isn’t about any one person or any specific group but people working together, sharing skills as well as meals, and struggling in solidarity across borders, from Puerto Rico to Palestine.
“I myself am a part of a big queer community of fucking amazing farmers, activists, cooks, and healers,” they tell me. “Before and after María, at all protests and calls to action in support of our land and ecoststems, the queer and trans community really fucking showed up in support, and we have continued those relationships. This is our queer family, our chosen family.”
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.
