Community Gardening Projects & Xinachtli Seed Library
It was in January of 2025 that we officially launched our community seed Library, the Xinachtli Seed Library. Xinachtli, is a nahuatl word meaning seed but is also a word connected to an intergenerational movement of Indigenous Peoples to reaffirm and revive Indigenous pedagogies and ancestral knowledge . After many years doing of seed and plant distributions through our community garden work and through our work with youth it naturally led us to this point.
For us seedkeeping and seed caretaking have been a part of our cultural practices since time immemorial. Through this work we share with our youth the teachings passed down to us on how to honor and care for our seed relatives and plants.
To celebrate the Xinachtli Seed Library’s one-year anniversary as an official seed library we hosted a community art night to create plant signage that honors Indigenous languages for use in our community garden spaces. We are thankful for the support of the SRPMIC Cultural Resources Department for sharing the Indigenous names of plants in O'Odham and Piipaash from their ancestral desert homelands. We are excited to incorporate these original plant names into our community garden spaces. We are also deeply grateful for the support of the many communities and our pueblo who have shown us so much love over the past year. Standing now with a year of experience as a seed library we are extremely grateful to continue this work and to care for our seed relatives. To learn more, please check out our new blog at www.xinachtliyouth.org , Tlazocamati!
To contact us about seed distributions please email us: xochitl@tonatierra.org
Centzonmilpan Community Heritage Garden
The Centzonmilpan Community Gardening Project is a grassroots community response to the systematic community displacement and marginalization of the MeXicano Barrios in the central core of Phoenix, Arizona brought about by decades of gentrification and corporate “market driven” development characterized by environmental racism, community displacement and colonization.
January of 2026 the City of Phoenix Parks and Recreation Board voted yes in support of the Centzonmilpan Community Heritage Garden expansion project! We extend our gratitude to all of the community members who signed our petition, wrote us letters of support, and sat in on various meetings to create and make this vision come to life. We are excited for what's to come in the garden!
The name Centzonmilpan is a tribute to the historical Barrio of Las Cuatro Milpas, where the garden is located within Barrios Unidos Park. Rooted in the deep history of the land and its people, the Centzonmilpan Garden serves as a space for community cultural and educational engagement. It provides a platform to share the area's history, culture, and preserve and revive Indigenous agricultural traditions. We extend our appreciation to the many people who made this possible. We would like to thank everyone near and far for all of the support we received.
We will be planning a community planting day for Fall of 2026. Future workshops at the garden include, seed saving, culturally relevant foods, Indigenous plants and their uses, water saving and climate adapted plants. We look forward to having the community come together to bring back the milpan into the community. Stay tuned for more information and if you would like to donate garden supplies or get involved in the garden please contact xochitl@tonatierra.org
Milpa Nahuacalli
The goals for our Nahuacalli milpa are to supplement the nutritional needs of our communities, to partner and strengthen long time relationships between communities crossing color lines, and to reintroduce the ceremonial relationship with the plants that are integral to our culture. The milpa as the center of the traditional lives of our Indigenous Communities allows us to reincorporate traditional songs, dances, ceremonies with the Cintli (corn), with Tlaloc (rain), and the Teotlacualli (sacred foods).
Centzonmilpan - Barrios Unidos
Milpa Nahuacalli