A Path of Thorns and Hope: How Caño Martín Peña Communities Strive To Make Their Land a Better Place

Las Monjas Community Garden

The first stop of the tour was Las Monjas community garden, where we were welcomed by Doña Ana, the founder of this garden, and her frozen juice. The small yet plentiful garden was planted with tomatoes, figs, plantains and so many more plants. With a history of over a decade, the garden has been a beautiful and sustainable green space shared by the community in the midst of urban roads and houses. 

Yet as Doña Ana talked more about the history of the garden, we learned that it took her and the community a long time to get where they are now. After roads were built in this neighborhood in 2007, the government planned to turn this empty space into a parking lot for the community center they promised to build around the corner. However, four years went by and nothing happened. The place was left abandoned and filled with trash as a result of modernization. 

Witnessing the area's deterioration as a life-long resident, Doña Ana decided to rescue the space on her own. She started by first cleaning up the space and planting flowers. The police went past on motorcycles and never admonished her. One day they stopped, and they gave Doña Ana a thumbs-up.

As the community finally began to get organized in the ‘90s, the community president approached Doña Ana and asked her if she would like to make this place a community garden. He promised Doña Ana that as long as he was still the president, he would help her whenever she needed it.

That was how everything started. To get the skill of building a community garden, they visited the experts at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, a campus dedicated to agricultural experiments. In the early phases when there were scarce resources, they could only use bamboo to make beds for the plants.

Nowadays, the community garden has not only well-equipped facilities, but also student volunteers who come to help Doña Ana with maintenance regularly. On the second Sunday of every month, Doña Ana and the volunteers will sell their crops at the community market to raise funds and support the circular local economy. 

In retrospect, I’m most inspired by how the whole initiative helped restore hope and a sense of self-management within the community under the challenge of urban disinvestment. The transformation of this space from a vacant dumping ground to a community garden not only raises awareness about collective action, but also empowers local residents to defend ownership of their own neighborhood and environment.

Barbosa Avenue Bridge

After we said goodbye to Doña Ana and her community garden, we biked across the Buena Vista community and went all the way up to the Barbosa Avenue Bridge above Caño Martín Peña. The bridge is tall and wide, sending off a modern vibe with cars whizzing past.

However, we learned from Kathleen that the bridge used to be much lower and narrower. As the Golden Mile was being built, the Department of Transportation decided to make this community bridge bigger and taller to facilitate more vehicle transportation.

However, local residents protested against the construction. Its dimensions would physically separate the four neighborhoods that used to be intimately interconnected. 

Unfortunately, the communities lost the battle. Yet people found their way to re-establish the connection. In 2010, the mosaic group Cero inaugurated their artworks to humanize and redefine the bridge. On each of the eight pillars of the bridge, the artists created an aesthetic sketch of a prominent figure nominated by the residents of the neighborhood.

As we came down the bridge, we stopped by a mural just around the corner. It was a mural created by students from the University of Puerto Rico in Cayey. It says: “Esta comunidad no es invisible, y se respeta! (The community is not invisible. It’s respected!)”

La Colectora

As we biked to our next stop, I kept thinking about how people living in these communities strived to overcome one challenge after another. We then stopped at La Colectora, where we learned about the two most prominent challenges faced by the community nowadays: flood risk and housing displacement.

Over years, water contamination of the canal escalated due to continuous industrialization, mangrove removal and littering.  The debris deposits not only narrowed the canal significantly, but also created serious flood risk to the residents if a hurricane hits. 

The land of La Colectora was one of the most affected areas that required urgent dredging. The place used to be full of houses, but they were all demolished as a result of housing displacement. The residents in adjacent neighborhoods were asked to move into new housing areas under the assistance of Enlace Project, a public corporation that coordinates projects regarding restoration of the Caño Martín Peña. Since many residents near the canal were originally informal settlers who had no land ownership, Enlace may also help them obtain better access to sewer systems and surface rights.

Another project Enlace executes is mangrove planting. Over the past decades, mangroves had been formally and informally removed under government policies and residential settling. The planting project intends to rebuild the mangrove ecosystem to help mitigate the impact of hurricanes and restore ecological balance within the canal.

Nevertheless, Kathleen said the restoration process is still a long, ongoing education of consciousness for local residents. When we were on the Barbosa Avenue Bridge, Kathleen told us that this section of the canal used to be so much more polluted before the dredging that took place last May. When she first started guiding this tour a year ago, she recalled that the piles of sofas, cabinets and all different kinds of litter were at a much bigger scale.

At the end of the day, there will always be challenges that need to be dealt with. The communities are still in the process of figuring out solutions to make their home a cleaner, safer and more wholesome place.

At the end of the tour, I asked Kathleen how she liked her job at Bici-Caño, and what she considered to be the value of this bike tour.